The Black Diamond

by Francis Brett Young

He knew nothing of this. Through all that dead, wet season, when the baked hill-sides steamed with rain and morning skies were heavy with autumnal mist, he busied himself with odd jobs about the farm. It was important for him if he were to find work in the neighbourhood when the job at The Dyke was over, that he should learn as much as he could of the farm-labourer’s craft. He learned to milk, to brush the horses and to bed them down, helped with the lifting of the main-crop potatoes and dug them into the immense buries, shaped like the barrows of the stone-men on Castel Ditches, in which they were stored for winter.

Then, sudden, unheralded, came a September summer. The mists disappeared; the drowned crops stood up golden in a hot and level sunshine; the work of the fields began again. They laboured incessantly, for the sunshine and drought were now more precious than gold. They worked so hard from the light of dawn until the stunted sheaves threw gigantic shadows, that there was no room in his mind for the foibles of Marion or the growing jealousy of Harris. Prosser and his girls came down into the fields to aid them. The sheaves ripened against time, and Prosser watched the sky and tapped his glass all day long. He held on as long as he dared; but on the eighth day of the drought the glass began to fall, and the last sheaves were carted from the fields by moonlight.

At one o’clock in the morning they knocked off, exhausted, and strangely happy in the consciousness of a work well done; but the sense of happiness departed from Abner as he walked home through the owl-haunted twilight, for he knew that the job at The Dyke was over, and he had nothing else before him. At the end of the week, he supposed, he would draw his money and be faced with a new search for employment.

Next day, in accordance with the ancient custom of The Dyke, a harvest home was held in the long kitchen of the house. All morning Marion, her sister, and Agnes the maid were busy baking cakes and boiling hams for the festival. The wives and children of the labourers were asked to share in these rejoicings, and more than twenty usually sat down to the long table at night. Abner and the other extra hands were expected to come, but Mary Malpas was not invited.

Abner saw nothing strange or pointed in the omission, and indeed he had no time to spare for ceremonies of this kind, having been bred in a country where feudal customs had long since died away under the new and harder influence of capitalism. But to the labourers at The Dyke, and particularly to older men such as Daniel Avery, the harvest home was a feast as religious as any ancient mystery. To them it was the crown of the year and its labours, more vital and more significant than any convention of the calendar. Mr Prosser, as a member of the older generation, was himself attached to the custom. It reminded him of his boyhood, of the days when his father was master of The Dyke and his grandfather sat watching the dances from the chimney corner, and in this way it comforted him with a sense of continuity and flattered those vestiges of family pride which were the deepest elements in his nature. The day always found him in the best of spirits, and Marion, who loved to see her father made happy even by the simplest things, caught a little of his joyful infection. The house was in a stir; the servants laughed and sang about their work; the oaken dresser was spread with holiday fare. Marion caught old Avery in the yard and made him promise to sing his mole-catcher’s song.

‘If I do sing it, I mun sing it right through,’ said the old man, with a wink. ‘I can’t mind the verses without I sing them in arder.’

She laughed; for many of his verses were indecent. ‘You shall sing just what you like, Dan,’ she said. As well quarrel with the indecency of the Bible as that of Avery’s songs.

Mr Prosser had told the men to leave their work at five o’clock instead of at six, in order that they might go home to clean themselves and fetch their families. Only Hayes, the cowman, who slept on the premises, was to be left behind. Abner, old Avery, and Harris set off down the drive together. The others moved too slowly for Abner, for he had seven miles in front of him. All day long Harris had taken a malicious pleasure in letting Abner know that his time was up and that The Dyke would soon be shut of him. There had been one or two ugly moments, softened by the good humour of old Dan. Now they walked alongside in silence, Abner setting the pace.

‘Hey, you do go too fast for old bones, my son!’ said Avery.

‘Wants to get home to his missus,’ said Harris.