Those were good days for Harry, behind his plough. Under the soft grey spring sky, rifted and stroked by wandering primrose lights, through the damp air that smelled of living mould, over the brown earth that rolled and sprayed like a wave from the driving coulter, he toiled sweating in the raw March cold. The smell of earth, the smell of his own sweat, the smell of the sweat of his horses hung thick over the plough, but every now and then soft damp puffs of air would blow into the miasma the fragrance of grass and primrose buds, of sticky, red, uncurling leaves, and the new moss in the woods. The share gleamed against the dun, and the brown twigs of the copses drew their spindled tracery against a sky which was the paler colour of earth—sometimes a shower would fall, slanting along the hedges, the thick drops tasting on Harry’s lips of the unfulfilled spring.
His work made him very tired. After all, he was barely seventeen, and though sturdy had only just begun to use his strength. The work of the farm was much increased by the new plan, yet it was impossible to bring extra hands to it, except occasionally by the conscription of Zacky. Harry milked and ploughed and scattered and dug, rising in the foggy blue darkness of the morning, and often sitting up late over calculations and accounts. Elphick and Juglery gave a pottering, rheumatic service, Mus’ Beatup could only be irregularly relied upon. So in time Harry learned what it was to doze off out of sheer weariness over his supper, or fall across the bed asleep before he had pulled his trousers off. But strangely enough, he found the life no hardship. Before the first thrill of enterprise had passed he was beginning to like the work for its own sake. There was a new keen pleasure in the wearing of his muscles, almost a physical luxury in his fatigue, and the lying with spread limbs before the fire of evenings. His life seemed good and full—everything was worth while, eating or sleeping or toiling or resting. For the earth sometimes makes of her servants lovers.
He was far too busy during his working hours and weary during his leisure to find much temptation in his old errant pleasures. Willie Sinden appealed in vain to a grimy, sweaty Harry asleep for an hour before the fire at night—he was too unaccountable wearied to vrother about ratting or Willie’s new ferret; and he went to Senlac and Heathfield and Hailsham Fairs to sell beasts, not to drink ginger-beer or pot into the German Kaiser’s mouth in the shooting-gallery. Even the distant woods had ceased to call, for Harry was now tasting their adventure in his daily work. The chocolate furrows of the Sunk Field were part of that same wonder which had teased him in the fluttering hazels of Molash Spinney or the wind in the gorse-thickets of Thunders Hill. The far-off village green of Bird-in-Eye was not more full of spells than the new-sown acres by Forges Wood. By his toil, and because he toiled as a man, from the spark of imagination within him, and not as a beast from the grind of circumstances without, he had brought the distant adventure home.
4
In February Tom’s letters became more rousing. The 18th Sussex took part in the big advance on the Ancre, and though Tom himself did not do anything very exciting, he was no longer in the humiliating position of having never seen a German. His descriptions of battle were rather fumbling—“Then we had some tea and a chap got in from the Glosters who had his tunick torn something terrible.”—“We come into a French village full of apple-trees and the walls were down so as you saw into the houses, and in one house there was a pot of ferns on the table.” He also confessed, in reply to a message from Zacky, that though he had seen several Germans, “with faces like roots,” he had not, to his knowledge, killed one.
Mus’ Beatup thought it necessary to improve on his son’s letters at the pub.
“Tom’s having valiant times,” he would say to the bar of the Rifle Volunteer or of the Crown at Woods Corner. “He killed a German officer wud his bayunite and took his machine-gun. Mus’ Archie Lamb is unaccountable proud of him, and says he’s sure to be a lieutenant of the Sussex before long. He’s a good lad is my lad, and it’s a tedious shaum as he was tuk away from his praaper personal wark and maade a soldier of. There’s none of my folk bin soldiers up till now—it’s yeomen we’re born and we doan’t taake wages.... When’s he think the war ull stop?—Well, it might be any time, if the Govunmunt doan’t starve us all fust.”
Sometimes Thyrza Honey brought Tom’s letters up to read to the family at Worge. She was rather shy of her future relations-in-law, who made no special effort to be agreeable to her. Mrs. Beatup persisted in looking on her as a designing woman who had forcibly captured the innocent Tom, Nell was too clever for her, and the males were grumpy and sidling. Only Ivy seemed to like her, but Ivy was on bad terms with her family at present, as ever since young Kadwell on leave had forsaken his sweetheart of the Foul Mile for her robuster charms, and the deserted one had turned up in rage and dishevelment to make a personal protest at Worge, the Beatups had chosen to resent her “goings on.” They also threw Jerry Sumption in her teeth and vaguely accused her of “things.” Now no young man ever came to Worge without her parents lamenting that they had a light daughter, and rows were frequent and undignified. So Ivy’s liking was no recommendation of Thyrza, who in consequence was suspected of goings on herself. However, she would not give up her visits, for she knew Tom liked her to pay them, and often—rather tactlessly—sent messages to his family through her.
Thyrza knew more about the British front and the Battle of the Ancre than did the Beatups. Not that Tom could be eloquent even to her, but her imagination, warmed by love, was quicker to piece together the fragments and fill in the gaps. Also he told her things that he would not have told the others. It was she who heard the details of the great occasion on which he first actually and personally killed a German.