“Lord, Mus’ Sumption! You doan’t tell me as he’s left the factory?”
“Reckon he has. Thought he’d like to fight for his King and country. He was always a plucked ’un, and he couldn’t bear to see the lads going to the front without him.”
There was a gleam in the minister’s eyes, and he cracked his fingers loudly.
“I’m proud of him—I’m proud of my boy. He’s done a fine thing, for of course he need never have gone. He’s been three years in munitions now, and him only twenty. He went up to Erith when he was a mere lad, no call for him to go, and now he’s joined up as a soldier when there was no call for him to go, neither.”
Tom looked impressed.
“Maybe I ought to be feeling lik he does, but truth to tell it maakes me heavy-hearted to be leaving the farm just now.”
“The Lord will provide.”
“I’m none so sure o’ that, wud faather and his habits, and the boys so young and wild, and the girls wud their hearts in other things, and mother, poor soul, so unsensible.”
“Well, what does the farm matter? Beware lest it become Naboth’s vineyard unto you. Is this a time to buy cattle and vineyards and olive-yards? This is the day which the Prophet said should burn like an oven, and the proud, even the wicked, be as stubble. What’s your wretched farm? Think of the farms round Ypers and Dixmood, think of the farms round Rheims and Arrass—Stop!” and he seized Tom’s arm in his hard, restless fingers—“Listen to those guns over in France. Perhaps every thud you hear means the end of a little farm.”
Tom stood dejectedly beside him, the broken-backed cigarette, for which the minister had unfortunately been unable to provide a light, hanging drearily from his teeth. The soft mutter and thud pulsed on. The sun was slowly foundering behind the woods of Bird-in-Eye, sending up great shafts and spines of flowery light into the sky which was now green as a meadow after rain.