Brought Forward

by R. B. Cunninghame Graham

A one-armed signboard, weathered, and with the lettering almost illegible, pointed out the bridle-path to Ditchley, now little used, except by lovers on a Sunday afternoon, but where the feet of horses for generations in the past had trampled it, still showing clearly as it wound through the fields.

In the standing corn the horses yoked to the reaping machine stood resting, now and again shaking the tassels on their little netted ear-covers. They, too, came of a breed long used to peace and plenty, good food and treatment, and short hours of work. The kindly landscape and the settled life of centuries had formed the kind of man of which the farmer was a prototype,—slow-footed and slow-tongued, and with his mind as bowed as were his shoulders with hard work, by the continual pressure of the hierarchy of wealth and station, that had left him as much adscript to them as any of his ancestors had been bound to their glebes. He held the Daily Mail, his gospel and his vade mecum, crumpled in his hand as if he feared to open it again to read more details of the war. A simple soul, most likely just as oppressive to his labourers as his superiors had always showed themselves to him, he could not bear to read of violence, as all the tyranny that he had bent under had been imposed so subtly that he could never see more than the shadow of the hand that had oppressed him.

It pained him, above all things, to read about the wounded and dead horses lying in the corn, especially as he had “’eard the ’arvest over there in Belgium was going to be good.” The whirr of the machines reaping the wheatfield sounded like the hum of some gigantic insect, and as the binder ranged the sheaves in rows it seemed as if the golden age had come upon the earth again, bringing with it peace and plenty, with perhaps slightly stouter nymphs than those who once followed the sickle-men in Arcady.

A man sat fishing in a punt just where the river broadened into a backwater edged with willow trees. At times he threw out ground-bait, and at times raised a stone bottle to his lips, keeping one eye the while watchfully turned upon his float. School children strayed along the road, as rosy and as flaxen-haired as those that Gregory the Great thought fitting to be angels, though they had never been baptized.

Now and again the farmer stepped into his field to watch the harvesting, and cast an eye of pride and of affection on his horses, and then, coming back to the gate, he drew the paper from his pocket and read its columns, much in the way an Arab reads a letter, murmuring the words aloud until their meaning penetrated to his brain.

Chewing a straw, and slowly rubbing off the grains of an ear of wheat into his hand, he gazed over his fields as if he feared to see in them some of the horrors that he read. Again he muttered, with a puzzled air, “’Orrible! ’undreds of men and ’orses lying in the corn. It seems a sad thing to believe, doesn’t it now?” he said; and as he spoke soldiers on motorcycles hurtled down the road, leaving a trail of dust that perhaps looked like smoke to him after his reading in the Daily Mail.

“They tell me,” he remarked, after a vigorous application of his blue handkerchief to his streaming face, “that these ’ere motorcycles ’ave a gun fastened to them, over there in Belgium, where they are a-goin’ on at it in such a way. The paper says, ‘Ranks upon ranks of ’em is just mowed down like wheat.’ . . . ’Orrid, I call it, if it’s true, for now and then I think those chaps only puts that kind of thing into their papers to ’ave a sale for them.” He looked about him as if, like Pilate, he was looking for an elusive truth not to be found on earth, and then walked down the road till he came to the backwater where the man was fishing in his punt. They looked at one another over a yard or two of muddy water, and asked for news about the war, in the way that people do from others who they must know are quite as ignorant as they are themselves. The fisherman “’ad given up readin’ the war noos; it’s all a pack of lies,” and pointing to the water, said in a cautious voice, “Some people says they ’ears. I ain’t so sure about it; but, anyhow, it’s always best to be on the safe side.” Then he addressed himself once more to the business of the day, and in the contemplation of his float no doubt became as much absorbed into the universal principle of nature as is an Indian sitting continually with his eyes turned on his diaphragm.

Men passing down the road, each with a paper in his hand, looked up and threw the farmer scraps of news, uncensored and spiced high with details which had never happened, so that in after years their children will most likely treasure as facts, which they have received from long-lost parents, the wildest fairy tales.

The slanting sun and lengthening shadows brought the farmer no relief of mind; and still men, coming home from work on shaky bicycles, plied him with horrors as they passed by the gate, their knee-joints stiff with the labours of the day, seeming in want of oil. A thin, white mist began to creep along the backwater. Unmooring his punt, the fisherman came unwillingly to shore, and as he threw the fragments of his lunch into the water and gathered up his tackle, looked back upon the scene of his unfruitful labours with an air as of a man who has been overthrown by circumstances, but has preserved his honour and his faith inviolate.

Slinging his basket on his back, he trudged off homewards, and instantly the fish began to rise. A line of cows was driven towards the farm, their udders all so full of milk that they swayed to and fro, just as a man sways wrapped in a Spanish cloak, and as majestically. The dragon-flies had gone, and in their place ghost-moths flew here and there across the meadows, and from the fields sounded the corncrake’s harsh, metallic note.