The footpath had been ploughed up, its last traces had disappeared beneath the harrow and the roller, and she walked carefully among the young cabbage plants, withering and grey after the long day’s sun. They looked dead, but they would live.
“They would die in a garden unless they were shaded under flower-pots, but everything lives in the fields; perhaps the air is purer under the open sky,” thought Anne.
As she crossed into the next field a bird flew out of a poplar tree by the stream. “A hawk,” was her first thought, but it surprised her by calling “Cuckoo” as it flew.
“He ought to have changed his tune a month ago. ‘In July he gets ready to fly; in August, go he must.’ Go he must, go he must,” she repeated, and the sentence in her father’s letter came back into her mind in which he had compared her to a whitethroat.
“Indeed he was right, for I was under the same compulsion to go as the birds, but my going was harder. At least I fancy so, though the young swallows find it a difficult business to leave England, staying a week or two after the old birds have gone.” And Anne was surprised at herself for thinking of the birds with pleasure: in the past she had found her father’s love for them so irritating.
“I remember that I wished for a bird for my hat, yet in Paris where I could have worn it, the suggestion would have disgusted me. There, where I was going to the opera, I was always thinking of the birds, and the one beautiful thing that I shall never forget is the shout of the birds’ song with which one is woken on a March morning. And how they sing after the rain.” She laughed at the contradiction in herself which had made her love in Paris what had so much bored her in England.
“Yet within an hour of my meeting with my father I shall be wishing the cats good hunting,” she added smiling.
“How will he greet me, I wonder?”—a question which had been repeated so often that it made her ill with apprehension.
“What are the troubles that await me?” She was already at Dry Coulter; the elms rose up before her, and when she had crossed the last field the path would lead her through the churchyard and on to the green. The last field had been cut and the last of the hay was being carried, a little boy drove a clicking horse-rake across her path and, pulling a lever, dropped a thin roll of the last gleanings of hay at her feet; farther on two women were raking up the wisps of hay into heaps and a boy was pitching it into a red tumbril where another boy gathered it into his arms and trod it underfoot, after which the old mare was led on to the next heap.
Anne could see that the hard work was done, that they were enjoying themselves playing at hay-making, clearing up what the men had left behind. Soon she was out of the hay-field, slipping over the wall of the churchyard, a wall which had been worn smooth by the breeches of generations of labourers, for a short cut to the footpath ran among the graves beneath the limbs of the giant sycamore. She had never liked the tree, sharing her father’s jealousy for the little church so far overtopped by it and so overshadowed in summer. If it had not been part of the rookery he would have had it cut down. The nests were hidden now in the leaves, and as she looked up into the tree an old fancy came back into her mind and she said: “The sycamore is like Ely Cathedral, so cool and so airy; to hop from one branch to another must be like sitting first on one chair and then on another; the pigeons shorten wing and alight to rest a while before they continue their voyages, just as the tourists come in and sit for a few moments before they motor on to Cambridge or King’s Lynn.”