That is all. But precisely because there is nothing in it, because it is a piece of normal instead of exceptional talk, it has the accent of the season. Bettesworth's voice reaches me; the light falls warm through the vine-leaves; the lost summer seems to come back with all the accompanying scene, almost as distinctly as if I had but just written the words down.
August 28, 1902.—The harvest, of course, could not go by without remark from him. From the garden we could see, beyond the meadow in the bottom of the valley, a little two-acre cornfield, which had stood for several days half reaped—the upper side uncut, the lower side prosperous-looking with its rows of sheaves. Then there came a morning when it was all in sheaves, and Bettesworth said,
"Old Ben" (meaning Ben Turner) "done it for 'n" (the owner) "last night. Made a dark job of it."
I realized that in his cottage down by the lake, Bettesworth, going to bed, had been able to hear the reaping in the dark, across the meadow.
He proceeded, "Ben took his hoss and cart down into Sussex a week or two ago, to see if he could get a job harvestin'. Was only gone three days, though: him an' four or five more. But I reckon they only went off for a booze—I don't believe they made e'er a try to get a job...."
"Our Will" (his brother-in-law) "says down there at Cowhatch they had a wonderful crop of oats. But he reckons they've wasted enough with the machine to ha' paid for reapin' it by hand. Stands to reason—where them great things comes whoppin' into it over and over, it shatters out a lot. Will says where they've took up the sheaves you can see the ground half covered with what they've wasted."
Not knowing what to say, I hesitated, and at last muttered simultaneously with Bettesworth, "'T seems a pity."
"It's what I calls 'pound wise,'" added he, misquoting a proverb which possibly was not invented by his class, and was foreign to him.
September 20, 1902.—I turn over the page in my note-book, but come to a new date three weeks later. Quiet autumn sunshine, the entry says, had marked the last few days, breaking through with a limpid splash in the mornings, after the mist had gone. Amidst this, under the softened tree-shadows, Bettesworth was cutting grass with his fag-hook.
And "Ah," he said, "it's purty near all up with charcoal-burnin' now."