“There’s Mus’ Sumption,” cried Mrs. Beatup, looking out of the window. “He’s middling early—reckon he wants some breakfast.”
She reckoned right. Mrs. Hubble of the Horselunges had refused to get breakfast for her lodger at such an ungodly hour, and he had prowled round fasting to the Beatups, eyeing their bacon and fried bread through the window.
“The labourer is worthy of his hire,” he remarked as he sat down to the table, “and thou shalt not muzzle the ox which treadeth the corn....”
After breakfast they all went out to the Volunteer field, which was to be cut first. Harry took charge of the reaper, with Zacky a scowling protestant at the horse’s head, while the others turned to the sickling and binding. Mr. Poullett-Smith had not arrived, having first to read Mattins and eat his breakfast, but he came about an hour after the start, a tall, bending, monkish figure, feeling just a little daring in his shirt-sleeves.
The meeting of the two parsons was friendliest on the Anglican side. Mr. Poullett-Smith was a good example of the Church of England’s vocation “to provide a resident gentleman for every parish”—besides, he pitied Sumption. The fellow was so obviously misfitted by his pastorate—a fanatical, ignorant Calvinism, blown about by eschatological winds, was his whole equipment; otherwise, thought the curate, he had neither dignity, knowledge nor education. He would have been far happier had he been left a blacksmith, had his half-crazy visions been allowed to burn themselves out like his forge fires, instead of being stoked by mistaken patronage and inadequate theological training. As things stood, he was absurd, even in no worthier setting than a forgotten village Bethel—a mere caricature of a minister, even in the pulpit of the Particular Baptists, an old-fashioned and fanatical sect with their heads full of doomsday. But here among the reapers he was splendid. His open shirt displayed a neck strong and supple and plump as a boy’s—the grey homespun was stuck with sweat to his shoulders, and the huge muscles of his back showed under it in long ovoid lumps. His years had taken nothing from his strength, merely added to his solidness and endurance. With his shock of brindled curls, his comely brown skin, his teeth white as barley-kernels, and eyes bright and deep as a hammer pond, and all the splendour of his body from shoulder to heel, he was as fine a specimen of a man as he was a poor specimen of a minister. Mr. Poullett-Smith paid him the honour due to his body, while seeing no honour due to his soul.
Mr. Sumption felt his physical superiority to the willowy, tallow-faced curate; indeed he had a double advantage over him, for he felt a spiritual towering too. He despised his doctrines of Universal Redemption and Sacramental Grace just as much as he despised his lean white arms and delicate features. He gave his hand a grip that made him wince—he could feel the bones cracking under the pressure.... “He keeps his hands white that he may hold the Lord’s body,” he thought to himself.
The day was hot and misty. The blue sky glowed with a thick, soft heat, and a yellowish haze blurred hedges and barns. Even the roofs of Worge seemed far away, and the sounds of the neighbouring farms were dim—but distant sounds came more clearly, a siren crooned on the far-off sea, and the mutter of guns came like a tread over the motionless air. Harry heard it as he drove the reaper, mingling with the swish of sickles and the rub of bones.
For greater quickness, he had split the field into two unequal parts—the bigger one he was cutting with the reaper, the smaller was being cut by hand. Mr. Sumption, Mus’ Beatup and Elphick reaped, while Nell, the curate, Juglery and the boy from Prospect Cottages bound the sheaves. The old horse went so slowly that the sickles worked nearly as fast as the machine. After a time Harry gave up his place to his father, who had been unfitted by illness and intemperance for much strenuous work.
At first there was some talking and joking among the harvesters, but soon this wore to silence in the heat. Only from where Mr. Smith and Nell stooped together over the reaped corn, gathering it into sheaves, came murmurs of sound. Nell’s pale cheeks and lips were flushed with her toil and stooping, and her eyes were bright with a pleasure which toil cannot give. Her cotton dress, the colour of the sky, set out the brightness of her hair, the colour of the corn. Her graceful, ineffectual hands, too, pleased the curate, for they were the only pair besides his in the field which were not coarse and burnt, with stubbed, black nails. Moreover, her pleasure and excitement at the day’s long promise made her more talkative than usual, and to a better purpose. He found that he liked her pleasant, blurry voice, which fled and fluttered over her words for fear that she should drawl them.
The sun climbed to the zenith, and the heat not only baked down from the sky, but scorched up out of the ground. The dust of the earth and of corn-stalks filled the air with a choking, chaffy thickness. The smell of dust came from the road, and from farmyards the smell of baking mud. The black oasts of Egypt across the way swam in a cloud of heat, and the red oasts of Worge were smeared to shadows in the steam of sunshine and dust. An aching of blue and yellow was in the harvesters’ eyes, and their bodies seemed to melt and drip. The reaper crawled even more slowly, with Mus’ Beatup sagging drowsily over the reins, and Zacky drooping against old Tassell, whose flanks ran with sweat, and from whose steaming hide came ammoniacal stable smells, whiffing over the harvesters every time he passed.