The days were warm and drowsy, and the fields lay in a muffle of sunshine, their distances all blurred with heat. Round every farm the orchards rolled in pink-stained clouds of bloom, and the young wheat was green as a rainy sunset. The wind that brought the mutter of the guns, brought also the bleating of lambs from the pastures; scents seemed to hang and brood on the air, or drift slowly from the woods—scents of standing water and budding thorn, of hazel leaves hot in the sun, and soft mixed fragrances of gorse and fern, of cows, of baking earth, of currant bushes in cottage gardens....
Towards evening Tom and Thyrza usually closed the shop, and came out—either for a stroll up to Worge to see his family, or for some more adventurous excursion to Brownbread Street, or Furnacefield, or up to the North Road and the straggle of old Dallington. They had one or two quite long walks, for a new enterprise had kindled in them both, and for the first time there was mystery and allure in some shaky signpost at the throws, or a little lane creeping off secretly. One day they walked as far as Brightling, past the obelisk, through the shuttling dimness of Pipers Wood and up Twelve Oaks Hill by strange farms to the sudden clump of Brightling among the trees. They went into the churchyard where the yews spread shadows nearly as dark as their own blackness and strange white peacocks perched on the tombstones, with shrill, unnatural cries. There was also a huge cone-shaped object, built of damp stones and thickly grown with moss, and Thyrza unaccountably took fright at this, and the peacocks, and the shadows and the trees, and walked for most of the way home with her head under Tom’s coat.
He did not often think of when this time should end, of the day that crept nearer and nearer to him over drowsing twilights and magical, green sunrises. He knew that a month hence all this delight would be a memory, that between him and the spurge-thickening fields of May would lie all the life of ugly adventure into which fate had pitched him—and Thyrza would come to him only on scraps of paper, in puffs of scent, in fugitive dreams, in a passing light in some other girl’s eyes.... But he was too simple and too happy to let thoughts of the future spoil the present, besides, his habit of disregarding the future now stood his friend. He would not see the clover in bloom, but saw it in the green—deep, rippling, gleaming, like the sea—he would miss the hay, but now he could see the buttercups under the moon, so yellow that they seemed to paint the sky and turn the moon to honey; Thyrza might in a month’s time be a memory, belong to phantasy, but now she was a woman solid and close, his woman, the maker of his home, the maker of himself anew.... Once his mother had borne him, and now it seemed as if this woman had borne him again, into a new experience, a new happiness, a new wonder—so perfect and complete that sometimes he almost felt as if it did not matter whether he held it for ever or for a day.
11
On his last evening, he went up to Worge to say good-bye. He felt already as if he did not belong to the place. Harry’s drastic dealings with the tilth seemed to have taken the fields away from him—he no longer felt even a distant guardianship of those brown-ribbed acres which had been green when he worked on them. He felt, too, with a sense of estrangement, the dirt and litter of the house, the muddling business which at six o’clock had Ivy swilling out the scullery and Mrs. Beatup still struggling with the washing. Thyrza never did a stroke of housework after dinner, and yet her morning’s tasks were never hurried; she never had Ivy’s flushed, red face and tousled hair, or Mrs. Beatup’s forehead shiny with sweat.
His family were conscious of this—conscious that he now had a standard of comparison by which to measure their short-comings, and it made them sulkily suspicious in their attitude. He was already the alien—the bird that has left the nest, the puppy that has grown up and gone a-hunting on his own. But this sense of estrangement only seemed to make his parting sadder, for he vaguely felt as if he had left them before he need, had already divided himself from them by an earlier good-bye, of which this was only the echo and the ghost.
Mrs. Beatup enquired politely after Thyrza, and sent Ivy out to fetch in the others. Zacky climbed on Tom’s knee and asked him to send him home a German helmet, and Harry—whose heart was really very warm and loving towards Tom—stood shyly behind his chair and could not speak a word. Mus’ Beatup gave Tom an account of the Battle of the Ancre, but failed to create the usual respectful impression.
“You see, faather, I was out there, and I know that it happened different. St. Quentin aun’t anywhere near the Rhine.”
“There’s more’n one St. Quentin, saum as there’s more’n one Mockbeggar, and more’n one Iden Green. How do you know as there’s no St. Quentin on the Rhine? You’ve never bin there, and you’ll never be there, nuther.”
“I reckon I’ll be there before I’m many months older.”