"There's no one gone from here as has ever come back."
For the first time they noticed something of the cracked falsetto of old age in his voice, generally so firm and ringing. Their hearts smote them, but the instinct of self-preservation was stronger than pity. They knew now for certain that if they stayed Odiam would devour them, or at best they would escape maimed and only half alive. Either they must go at once—in time, like Richard, or go in a few years—too late, like Caro. Besides, the war called to their young blood; they thought of guns and bayonets, camp-fires and battlefields, glory and victory. Their youth called them, and even their father's game and militant old age could not silence its bugles and fifes.
The next day they left Odiam for the recruiting station at Rye. Reuben and the farm-hands watched them as they marched off whistling "Good-bye, Dolly, I must leave you," shaking their shoulders in all the delight of their new freedom. They had gone—as Albert had gone, as Robert, as Richard, as Tilly, as Benjamin, as Caro, as Pete had gone. Reuben stood erect and stiff, his eyes following them as they turned out of the drive and disappeared down the Peasmarsh road.
When they were out of sight he walked slowly to the new ground near the crest of Boarzell, which was being prepared for the winter wheat. He made a sign to the man who was guiding the plough, and taking the handles himself, shouted to the team. The plough went forward, the red earth turned, sprinkled, creamed into long furrows, and soothed Reuben's aching fatherhood with its moist fertile smell. It was the faithful earth, which was his enemy and yet his comforter—which was always there, though his children forsook him—the good earth to which he would go at last.
§ 12.
Reuben was now alone at Odiam—for the first time. Of course Harry was with him still, but Harry did not count. There was an extraordinary vitality in him, none the less; it was as if the energies unused by his brain were diverted to keep together his crumbled body. He grew more shrivelled, more ape-like every day, and yet he persisted in life. He still scraped at his fiddle, and would often sit for hours at a time mumbling—"Only a poor old man—a poor old man—old man—old man," over and over again, sometimes with a sudden shrill cry of "Salvation's got me!" or "Another wedding!—we're always having weddings in this house." His brother avoided him, and did his best to ignore him—he was the scar of an old wound.
His loneliness seemed to drive Reuben closer to the earth. He still had that divine sense of the earth being at once his enemy and his only friend. Just as the gorse which murders the soil with its woody fibres sweetens all the air with its fragrance, so Reuben when he fought the harsh strangling powers of the ground also drank up its sweetness like honey. He did not work so hard as formerly, though he could still dig his furrow with the best of them—he knew that the days had come when he must spare himself. But he maintained his intercourse with the earth by means of long walks in the surrounding country.
Hitherto he had not gone much afield. If affairs had called him to Battle, Robertsbridge, or Cranbrook, he had driven or ridden there as a matter of business—he had seldom walked in the more distant bye-lanes, or followed the field-paths beyond the marshes. Now he tramped over nearly the whole country within a radius of ten miles—he was a tireless walker, and when he came home knew only the healthy fatigue which is more delight than pain and had rewarded his dripping exertions as a young man.
He would walk southwards to Eggs Hole and Dinglesden, then across the Tillingham marshes to Coldblow and Pound House, then over the Brede River to Snailham, and turning up by Guestling Thorn, look down on Hastings from the mill by Batchelor's Bump. Or he would go northwards to strange ways in Kent, down to the Rother Marshes by Methersham and Moon's Green, then over to Lambstand, and by side-tracks and bostals to Benenden—back by Scullsgate and Nineveh, and the lonely Furnace road.
He learned to love the moving shadows of clouds travelling over a sunlit view—to love ridged distances fading from dark bice, through blue, to misty grey. He used to watch for the sparkle of light on far cottage windows, the white sheen of farmhouse walls and the capped turrets of oasts. But he loved best of all to feel the earth under his cheek when he cast himself down, the smell of her teeming sap, the sensation that he lay on a kind breast, generous and faithful. It was strange that the result of all his battles should be this sense of perfect union, this comfort in his loneliness. Reuben was not ashamed at eighty years old to lie full length in some sun-hazed field, and stretch his body over the grass, the better to feel that fertile quietness and moist freshness which is the comfort of those who make the ground their bed.