For many years we’ve been sweethearts
And worked the fields along,
And sometimes even now
Mary will sing the old song—
‘Dig ’em up by the roots,’ etc.
“What is that to the song about ‘the swift and silly doe’ my old father used to sing to us, or about ‘Gentle Jenny’ the mare that threw the fellow that wasn’t going to pay for her hire. No, there is no room in England now for toe-rags like me and you; if you wanted to, you couldn’t sleep on Bearsted Green to-night.”
Later in the year, on August Bank holiday, I found him at an inn, where a farm bailiff was treating the labourers to much ale. The landlord had a young relative down from London, who sang a song in the bar about a skylark who was to take a message to his mother in heaven. At this the tramp melted a little: the pale face of the singer and the high shrill voice made an entrance somewhere, and he tried to join in the song. But towards evening he was to be found sticking pins through his cheek and ears and into his arms, and offering, for a small sum, to stick them into any part whatsoever; or, lying on his back and twisting his head back—the muscles in his throat croaking all the time like frogs—to pick up with his teeth a penny that lay on the floor. The bailiff had caught him. He did odd jobs about the farm, and lived in a forgotten cottage, too far away from anywhere to keep pigs in. But he slept in the cottage only on one or two nights in the seven. During the rest of the week he was to be found at night under the edge of a copse, beside a little fire, reminding himself of the old, roomy England which he used to know.
CHAPTER VI
MARCH DOUBTS
All day the winter seemed to have gone. The horses’ hoofs on the moist, firm road made a clear “cuck-oo” as they rose and fell; and far off, for the first time in the year, a ploughboy, who remembered spring and knew that it would come again, shouted “Cuckoo! cuckoo!”