Harry had written to Tom and told him of his maturing plans, but either his marriage had breached him from Worge, or the fact that the disciple had gone so much further than his master had made his anxious ardour cool away. His latest communication had been a field postcard, which, as he had forgotten to put a cross against any of its various items, presented a bewildering and conflicting mass of information, which Harry flipped into the coals with a wry smile.
However, he was able to stand alone, for he dared the chances of his new deeds. Oafish as he looked in his Sunday suit and gasper collar, the adventure of harvest was upon him as he jolted the old trap home under the moon. “Behold, the fields stand white to harvest” ... the words drifted like a cloud over his brain. These fields that he had prepared, that his plough had torn and his harrow broken, were fields of battle like the fields in France. On them he had fought, for the same reason as Tom fought the Germans, all the treacheries and assaults of nature, her raiding winds, her storming rains, her undermining rottenness in the soil, her blasting of thunder and choking of heat.
“Reckon to-morrow’s our Big Push,” he said to his father, rather proud of the metaphor, and was careful that the old horse did not hurry stablewards too quickly, lest they should be home before the closing of the Rifle Volunteer, and lose a soldier thereby.
13
The next day broke out of a dandelion sky above Harebeating, but before the first pale colours had filtered into the white of the east, Harry was on his legs, pottering in the yard. All the little odds of farm-work must be done early, to leave him free for the day’s great doings. He anxiously snuffed the raw air—could its moisture, distilled in the globes that hung on thatch and ricks, be the warning of a day’s rain? The barometer stood high, but, like other Sussex farmers, he had learned to distrust his barometer, knowing the sudden tricks of turning winds, the local rains drunk out of the marshes, the chopping of the Channel tides. He disliked the flamy look of the sky, the glassiness of its reflection in the ponds ... he thought he felt a puff from the south-west. “O Lord,” he prayed, kneeling down behind the cowhouse door, “doan’t let it rain till we’ve got our harvest in. If faather loses money this fall, he’ll never let me breake up grass agaun. Please, Lord, kip it fine, wud a short east wind, and doan’t let anyone stay away or faather go to the Volunteer till we’ve adone. For Christ’s sake. Amen.”
Feeling soothed and reassured, he went in to breakfast.
The family was of mixed and uncertain mood. Mrs. Beatup was “vrothering” about what she could give the clergymen for dinner—“not as I care two oald straws about Mus’ Sumption, but Mus’ Smith he mun be guv summat gentlemanly to put inside.” Zacky was crossly scheming how best to carry through the conker plan which Harry had rather threateningly forbidden. Nell was in a nervous flutter, her colour coming and going, her little hands curling and twitching under the table. Mus’ Beatup was given over to an orgie of pessimism, and before breakfast was finished had traced Worge’s progress from a blundered harvest to the auctioneer’s.
“There’s too many fields gitting ripe together,” he said drearily. “You shudn’t ought to have maade your sowings so close. Wot you want now is a week’s fine weather on end, and all your wark done on a wunst. You’ll never git it, surelye—the rain ull be on you before it’s over. Reckon the Sunk Field ull have seeded itself before you’re at it. You shud ought to have sown it later.”
“It’s fine time to think of all that now.”
“I’ve thought of it afore and agaun, but you’d never hearken. You think you’ve got more know than your faather wot wur a yeoman afore you wur born and never bruk up grass in his life.”