She walked on, and turned down Bridge Street, rejoicing to see the signs over the shops and the faces of the shopmen who were standing in their doorways looking out for the last customers before closing—all familiar things and persons. On the crest of the bridge she paused and looked back, thinking that on the morrow she would have met Grandison at the station and would be walking with him through the streets of the old town. A lorry coming towards her filled the bridge, and she took shelter in one of the angles of the parapet. Looking down over the side, she watched the waters of the Ouse slipping away from the masonry of the piers, and hoped that she would see a fish, but no fish showed itself, and when she lifted her eyes she was startled by the sight of an addition to the landscape, the beginnings, surely, of Mr. Sotheby’s hotel. There was a huge hole excavated by the edge of the river, filled with muddy water, a mound of blue clay, an ordered pile of white glazed bricks, a few wheelbarrows upside down, a lot of drain-pipes and nothing else.
“So perish all innovations!” Anne exclaimed, and recollecting how the old grocer had talked to her three months before, and seeing his tragedy before her, she began to laugh.
“I wonder if Richard laughed when he saw that hole full of water? Yes, to be sure he did, for we all laugh at our parents, we understand them so well,” but, her thoughts turning suddenly to her own father, she sighed in despair and walked on.
She had scarcely left the bridge when she caught sight of the grocer himself. He was sitting bolt upright, driving his flea-bitten white pony, his head thrown back, and his white beard sticking out in front of him. “Like a billy-goat looking up to Heaven,” thought Anne. “Yet he is like Richard too, he has the same foxy nose.”
“Good evening, Mr. Sotheby,” she called out. The pony had dropped to a walk as she spoke, but the old man’s eye fell stonily on her and he made no answer to her greeting. When he had passed, Anne looked after him in doubt whether she had been deliberately ignored or had not been recognized, or perhaps not even heard, and she saw that the old dog-cart had been lately repainted and newly varnished; on the back was written in scarlet letters:
“International Tea Trust.”
“He looks ill,” she thought. “And his illness is that his pride has been wounded. He has been so virtuous and so successful all his life, it is too bad that Grandison and Ginette, and excavating a hole in a river bank, should have combined to ruin him.” She smiled as she said this, but her thought was broken suddenly by the reflection that her own father was waiting for her and that in less than an hour they would be speaking together. Trouble would be sure to arise between them at once, and each of them would behave with falsity. And reluctant to come to her journey’s end, unconsciously she dropped into a slower walk.
The road was long and dusty, and she was glad to turn aside into the footpath by the cross-roads, a footpath that was little frequented, for it was half a mile longer than the road. The first field was so huge that it seemed she would never cross it; there was not a tree on which she could rest her eyes and nothing in it except the tussocky grass underfoot and a dozen thirsty bullocks clustering round an empty cistern by the gate, waiting for the water-cart. A field of ripening wheat lay next, and she pushed her way down the narrow lane between the ears, unable to resist snatching at some of them. The grains were still full of milk, yet there was something dry even in their juiciness which made her clear her throat and wish for a cup of tea. Already she could see the elms of Dry Coulter, and she pushed on, getting at last into the next field, where there were men at work with teams of horses harrowing and rolling the dusty earth.
“It is likely enough that these are the men and the horses that came to our doorstep in the snow,” she said, and soon she had crossed to the far side, where a line of men, bent up double, were strung out across the field. But so big was the expanse that rollers and harrows, men and teams of horses and this string of men dibbling, were so far away that she could not see their faces, and felt as though she were alone.
“They are planting cabbages,” she guessed. “Each man leans forward to make a hole with the dibber in his right hand, sticks in a young plant and treads it firm with his left heel as he passes in his stride forward to strike the next hole. So they work all day, and this will be a vast expanse of cabbages before the winter. The life of these men is to labour all day in the sun, or in the rain, in these immense fields, alone for hour after hour, with nothing to speak with but horse, and to go back at night to sleep in a tiny room with a candle burning in the closed window, then to rise again with the first colour of the dawn. That is the life that the greater number have always led, yet it has hardly touched our thoughts and we live on their labour, drinking the milk and swallowing the buttered toast, thinking of anything rather than of how the cows are kept fat and the thistles and docks are spudded out to make room for the wheat, for there is nothing in all that labour, or in all those lives, to interest us. The labourers themselves are silent about it; there are few songs which take mangels or potatoes as their subject, and when we look for poetry in the fields we turn south to Italy or Greece and the goats nibbling at the vines.”