The Four Roads

by Sheila Kaye-Smith

Mr. Poullett-Smith looked more than ever like a Sienese candle now that his forehead and cheeks were dabbled with sweat, like wax that had melted and run. He wiped his face periodically with a white handkerchief, which annoyed Mr. Sumption, though it was a fact that the curate had done excellent work, and made up in conscientious energy what he lacked in muscle and experience.

“Take off your waistcoat, or your sweat ull spoil the lining,” called the minister, and Mr. Smith rather unexpectedly followed his advice, having, as it happened, quite lost sight of the pastor in that huge toiling figure, now almost bare of chest, with arms swinging like a flail. He saw only a labourer more experienced and a man more manly than himself, whose muscle he respected and whose commands he would obey.

From twelve o’clock onwards the problem for Harry had been to keep Mus’ Beatup away from the Rifle Volunteer. The field being near the Street, they could hear the pleasing jar of stopping wheels, the slam of the taproom door, even the creak of the Volunteer sign. As he swung out there over the Street, with his grey-green uniform and obsolete rifle, he seemed to say, “In my day yeomen never worked at noon, but came and drank good beer made of Sussex hops and talked of how we’d beat the French.... Now there is no good beer, and hardly any Sussex hops, and we talk of how we and the French together will beat the Germans. But come, good yeomen, all the same.”

Harry thought it advisable to detach Mus’ Beatup from the reaper, which trundled him up under the eaves of the Volunteer’s huge sprawling roof, so he suggested that old Juglery should take his place for a while, and that Mus’ Beatup should help with the binding. He also persuaded Mr. Sumption to give up his sickle and bind till closing-time. He felt that if his father worked between the two parsons he would not be so likely to scuffle an escape; for in spite of his rationalist enlightenment, Mus’ Beatup’s attitude in the presence of the clergy was very different from that which he took up in their absence—and his contempt of their doctrine was liable to be swallowed up in respect for their cloth.

Dinner was brought out soon after noon by Mrs. Beatup and the girl, a hard-breathing young person with a complexion like an over-ripe plum. There was beer, and there was tea, and bread and cheese—Mrs. Beatup’s idea of summat gentlemanly to put inside the clergyman materialised in several crumbly sandwiches of tinned curried rabbit. They all sat down under the hedge furthest from the Volunteer, and were all rather silent, except Mr. Sumption, who had scarcely tired himself with the morning’s work and thought this a good opportunity to enter into an argument, or “hold a conference,” as he put it, with Mr. Poullett-Smith on the doctrine of Efficacious Grace. Mr. Smith, besides the reluctance of his Anglican breeding to discuss theology with an outsider, and his feeling as a public-school man that it was bad form to talk shop in mixed company, was far from theologically minded. Though he would not have owned it for worlds, he was already tired out. The continual stooping with the hot sun on his back had made him feel sick and dizzy, and Mrs. Beatup’s curried sandwiches had finished the work of the sun and roused definite symptoms of an indelicate nature. He lay against the hedge, looking languid and curiously human in his open shirt, his hair hanging a little over his forehead. Nell sat on her heels, and her eyes played over him tenderly, almost maternally.

“Reckon you’re tired,” she said in a low, drawling voice that no one else could hear.

They did not go back to work till nearly two, and the danger for Mus’ Beatup was over for the time. The afternoon was, as usual, more tiring than the morning, for the earth, if not the sun, was hotter, limbs were tired and stomachs were full. Harry mounted the curate on the reaper, though he was not much of a success, as he failed to realise the power of old Tassell’s habit, and did vigorous rein-work at the corners, with the result that the old horse was thrown completely off his bearings, and on one occasion nearly charged down the hedge, on another knocked over Zacky, and once came wearily to a standstill with all four feet in the uncut corn.

Mr. Poullett-Smith decided that he preferred binding to reaping, and was glad to find himself back beside Nell with her delicate ways—it was wonderful, he thought, how far she was above her surroundings; he had not noticed it before, for he had hardly ever seen her against the background of Worge, but in the frame of church or school, where her shining was not so bright. She was tired, he could see, but she did not grow moist and blowsy like the rest—her pretty hair draggled a bit, her mouth drooped rather sweetly, but exertion heightened her anæmic tints, and there was a glow about her when she talked, in spite of her fatigue.

Suddenly, in the middle of the afternoon, she broke away from him, and came back with a glass of water.