Passing through a village someone called:
“’Eard the nus? They beat the Germans up proper yest’day mornin’.”
Bowden nodded. News from the war was now nothing but a reminder of how that fellow Steer had deprived him of Ned’s help and company. The war would be over some day, he supposed, but they didn’t seem to get on with it, gaining ground one day and losing it the next, and all the time passing this law and that law interfering with the land. Didn’t they know the land couldn’t be interfered with—the cuckoos? Steer, of course, was all part of this interference with the land—the fellow grew wheat where anybody could have told him it couldn’t be grown!
The day was hot, the road dusty, and that chap Steer hanging about the market like the colley he was—so that Bowden imbibed freely at ‘The Drake’ before making a start for home.
When he entered his kitchen the newly christened baby was lying in a grocery box, padded with a pillow and shawl, just out of the sunlight in which old Mrs. Bowden sat moving her hands as if weaving a spell. Bowden’s sheepdog had lodged its nose on the edge of the box, and was sniffing as if to ascertain the difference in the baby. In the background the girl Pansy moved on her varying business; she looked strong again, but pale still, and ‘daverdy,’ Bowden thought. He stood beside the box contemplating the ‘monstrous’ baby. It wasn’t like Ned, nor anything, so far as he could see. It opened its large grey eyes while he stood there. That colley Steer would never have a grandchild, not even one born like this! The thought pleased him. He clucked to the baby with his tongue, and his sheepdog jealously thrust its head, with mass of brushed-back snowy hair, under his hand.
“Hullo!” said Bowden, “what’s matter wi’ yu?”
He went out presently, in the slanting sunlight, to look at some beasts he had on the rough ground below his fields, and the dog followed. Among the young bracken and the furze not yet in bloom again, he sat down on a stone. The afternoon was glorious beyond all words, now that the sun was low, and its glamour had motion, as it were, and flight across the ash-trees, the hawthorn, and the fern. One may-tree close beside him was still freakishly in delicate flower, with a sweet and heavy scent; in the hedge the round cream-coloured heads of the elder-flower flashed, flat against the glistening air, while the rowans up the gulley were passing already from blossom towards the brown unrounded berries.
There was all the magic of transition from season to season, even in the song of the cuckoo, which flighted arrow-like to a thorn-tree up the rocky dingle, and started a shrill calling. Bowden counted his beasts, and marked the fine sheen on their red coats. He was drowsy from his hot day, from the cider he had drunk, and the hum of the flies in the fern. Unconsciously he enjoyed a deep and sensuous peace of warmth and beauty. Ned had said there was no green out there. It was unimaginable! No green—not the keep of a rabbit; not a curling young caterpillar-frond of fern; no green tree for a bird to light on! And Steer had sent him out there! Through his drowsiness that thought came flapping its black wings. Steer! Who had no son to fight, who was making money hand over fist. It seemed to Bowden that a malevolent fortune protected that stingy chap, who couldn’t even take his glass.
There were little blue flowers, speedwell and milkwort, growing plentifully in the rough grass around; Bowden noted, perhaps for the first time, those small flower luxuries of which Steer had deprived his son by sending him to where no grass grew.
He rose at length, retracing his slow-lifted tread up the lane, deep-soiled with the dried dung of his cows, where innumerable gnats danced level with the elder-blossom and the ash leaves. The village postman was leaving the yard when Bowden entered it. The man stopped in the doorway, and turned his bearded face and dark eyes blinking in the level sunlight.