“Do you feel as if you will?”
“Surelye—since I’ve left half myself behind.”
Her arms stole round him, and the beating of that far-away heart was drowned in the beating of his under her cheek.
A pale cowslip light was in the sky, creeping over the fields, putting yellower tints into Thyrza’s butter skin and a web of gold over her ashen hair. Gradually it seemed to flower in the dusk till all the field was lit up ... the mounds and molehills with hollows scooped darkly against the light, the pond like thick yellow glass, the willows like drooping flame. The picture became graven on Tom’s heart—the grey sky blooming with light and shedding it down on the field of the mounds and molehills, the pond, the willows, and the woman drowsing in his arms—so that when later in France he thought of England, he thought of it only as that willow-pond at the opening of Sunday Street, and Thyrza Honey lying heavy and warm and sweet against his breast.
“Hold me close, Tom, dearie—hold me close, so’s I doan’t hear the war. Aun’t it queer how our hearts beat louder than the guns!...”
PART III: THYRZA
1
THAT autumn and winter there was a lot of talk in the papers about food. Wedged into news of the Ancre and Beaumont Hamel, the crumpling-up of Roumania under von Mackensen, and President Wilson’s Peace Note, came paragraphs and letters and articles on food and the ways of economising and producing it. The latter most troubled Harry, as he thought of the modest spring-sowings of Worge. If it was indeed true that the German U-boats were threatening the country’s wheat supply, might it not be as well to reclaim the old tillage of the Sunk Field or even break up grass-land in the high meadows by Bucksteep?