Harvest

"_I wish he knew_!" But this time it was no mere pa.s.sing qualm. It had grown into something intense and haunting.

On this same September afternoon, a dark-eyed, shabby woman, with a little girl, alighted at Millsborough Station. They were met by a man who had been lounging about the station for some time and whose appearance had attracted some attention. "See him at a distance, and you might take him for a lord; but get him close, my word!--" said the station-master to the booking-clerk, with a shrug, implying many things.

"Wouldn"t give a bob for his whole blessed turn-out," said the booking-clerk. "But right you are, when you sort of get the hang of him, far enough away on the other platform, might be a dook!"

Meanwhile, the man had shouldered some of the bags and parcels brought by the woman and the child, though hardly his fair share of them; and they finally reached the exit from the station.

"If you"re going into the town, the bus will be here in a few minutes,"

said a porter civilly to the woman. "It"ll help you with all those things."

The man gruffly answered for her that they preferred to walk, and they started, the woman and the child dragging wearily beside him.

"Now, you"ve got to be content with what I"ve found for you," he said to her roughly as they reached the first houses of the town. "There isn"t scarcely a lodging or a cottage to be had. Partly it"s the holidays still, and partly it"s silly folk like you--scared of raids."

"I couldn"t go through another winter like last, for Nina"s sake," said the woman plaintively.

"Why, you silly goose, there won"t be any raids this winter. I"ve told you so scores of times. We"ve got the upper hand now, and the Boche will keep his planes at home. But as you won"t listen to me, you"ve got to have your way, I suppose. Well, I"ve got you rooms of a sort. They"ll have to do. I haven"t got money enough for anything decent."

The woman made no reply, and to the porter idly looking after them they were soon lost from sight in the gathering dusk of the road.

V

The little town of Millsborough was _en fete_. There was a harvest festival going on, and the County Agricultural Committee had taken the opportunity to celebrate the successful gathering of the crops, and the part taken in it by the woman land-workers under their care. They had summoned the land la.s.ses from far and wide; in a field on the outskirts of the town compet.i.tions had been in full swing all the morning, and now there were to be speeches in the market-place, and a final march of land girls, boy scouts, and decorated wagons to the old Parish Church, where a service was to be held.

All Millsborough, indeed, was in the streets to look at the procession, and the crowd was swelled by scores of cadets from a neighbouring camp, who were good-heartedly keeping the route, and giving a military air to the show. But the flower-decked wagons were the centre of interest. The first in the line was really a brilliant performance. It was an old wagon of Napoleonic days, lent by a farmer, whose forebears had rented the same farm since William and Mary. Every spoke of the wheels blazed with red geraniums; there was a fringe of heather along the edge of the cart, while vegetables, huge marrows, turnips, carrots, and onions dangled from its sides, and the people inside sat under a nodding canopy of tall and splendid wheat, mixed with feathery barley. But the pa.s.sengers were perhaps the most attractive thing about it. They were four old women in lilac sunbonnets. They were all over seventy, and they had all worked bravely in the harvest. The crowd cheered them vociferously, and they sat, looking timidly out on the scene with smiling eyes and tremulous lips, their grey hair blowing about their wrinkled, wholesome faces.

Beside the wagon walked a detachment of land girls. One of them was the granddaughter of one of the old women, and occasionally a word would pa.s.s between them.

"Eh, Bessie, but I"d like to git down! They mun think us old fools, dizened up this way."

"No, gran; you must ride. You"re the very best bit of the show. Why, just listen how the folk cheer you!"

The old woman sighed.

"I"d like to look at it mysel"," she said with a childish plaintiveness.

But her tall granddaughter, in full uniform, with a rake over her shoulder, thought this a foolish remark, and made no reply.

In the second wagon, Rachel Henderson in full land-dress--tunic, knee-breeches, and leggings--stood in the front of the cart, guiding two white horses, their manes and tails gaily plaited with ribbons, and scarlet badges on their snowy heads.

"Eh, but yon"s a fine woman!" said an old farmer of the humbler sort to his neighbour. "Yo"ll not tell me she"s a land la.s.sie?"

"Noa, noa; she"s the new farmer at Great End--a proud body, they say, an"

a great hustler! The men say she"s allus at "em. But they don"t mind her neither. She treats "em well. Them"s her two land girls walking beside."

For Betty and Jenny mounted guard, their harvest rakes on their shoulders, beside their mistress, who attracted all eyes as she pa.s.sed, and knew it. Behind her in the cart sat Janet Leighton; and the two remaining seats were filled by the Vicar of Ips...o...b.. and Lady Alicia Shepherd, the wife of the owner of Great End Farm and of the middle-sized estate to which the farm belonged.

Lady Alicia was a thin woman, with an excitable temperament, to judge from her restless mouth and eyes, which were never still for a moment.

She was very fashionably dressed and held a lace parasol. The crowd scarcely recognized her, which annoyed her, for in her own estimation she was an important member of the Women"s Committee which looked after the land girls. The war had done a great deal for Lady Alicia. It had dragged her from a sofa, where she was rapidly becoming a neurasthenic invalid, and had gradually drilled her into something like a working day. She lived in a flurry of committees; but as committees must exist, and Lady Alicias must apparently be on them; she had found a sort of vocation, and with the help of other persons of more weight she had not done badly.

She did not quite understand how it was that she found herself in Miss Henderson"s wagon. The committee had refused to have a wagon of its own, and the good-natured vicar had arranged it for her. She did not herself much like Miss Henderson. Her husband had sent her to call upon the new tenants, and she had been much puzzled. They were ladies, she supposed.

They spoke quite nicely, and Miss Henderson seemed to be the daughter of a clergyman. But she was afraid they were dreadful Socialists! She had talked to Miss Henderson about the awful--the _wicked_--wages that the Brookshire board had just fixed for the labourer.

"My husband says they"ll simply crush the life out of farming. We shall all be ruined, and where will the labourer be then?"

And Miss Henderson had looked quite unpleasant. It was high time, she said, that the labourer should have enough to live on--_decently_; really thrown the word at you. And Colonel Shepherd had told his wife that he understood from Hastings Miss Henderson had raised her wages before the award of the Wages Board. Well, he only hoped the young woman had got some money behind her, otherwise she would be finding herself in Queer Street and he would be whistling for his rent.

The wagons drew up in the centre of the market-place, and the band which the cadets had brought with them struck up "G.o.d Save the King." Lady Alicia rose at once and nudged her little boy, whom she had brought with her, to take off his cap. She looked approvingly over the crowd, which was growing denser and denser every moment. It was so that she really enjoyed the populace--at a safe distance--and ready to lend itself to the blandishments of its natural leaders. Where was her husband, Colonel Shepherd? Of course they would want him to speak at some time in the proceedings. But she looked for him in vain.

Meanwhile, the speaking was beginning from the first cart. A land girl who had played a rousing part in the recruiting campaign of the early summer was speaking in a high voice, clearly heard by the crowd. She was tall and pretty, and spoke without a sign of hesitation or self-consciousness. She gloried in the harvest, in the splendid news from the war, in the growth of the Woman"s Land Army. "We"ve just been proud to do our bit at home while our boys have been fighting over there.

They"ll be home soon, perhaps, and won"t we give them a welcome! And we"ll show them the harvest that we"ve helped to reap--the biggest harvest that England"s ever known!--the harvest that"s going to beat the Boche." The young simple voice flowed on, with its simple story and its note of enthusiasm, and sometimes of humour. "It"s hard work, but we love it! It"s cold work often, but we love it! The horses and the cows and the pigs--they"re naughty often, but they"re nice!---yes, the pigs, too. It"s the beasts and the fields and the open air we love!"

Betty looked at Jenny with a grin.

"Jenny!--them pigsties yesterday; d"ye think she"s ever cleaned one out?"

"I know she has," said Jenny confidentially. "She"s Farmer Green"s girl, out Ralstone way. Ee says there ain"t nothing she can"t do. Ee don"t want no men while he"s got "er. They offered him soldiers, and ee wouldn"t have "em."

"Silly, sentimental young woman," said a tall man, with a pipe in his mouth, who had just lounged up to the outskirts of the crowd, from a side street. "Who"s she going to take in here? What"s the good of talking poetry about farming to a lot of country people? A London shop-girl, I guess. What does she know about it?"

"You bets she knows a lot," said a young man beside him, who, to judge from his uniform, was one of the Canadians employed at Ralstone camp.

He had been taken with the "sentimental young woman," and was annoyed by the uncivil remarks of his neighbour. "Wonder what farm she"s on?"

"Oh, you know these parts?" said the other, removing his pipe for a moment and looking down on his companion.

"Well, not exactly." The reply was hesitating. "My grandfather went out to Canada from a place near here sixty years ago. I used to hear him and my mother talk about Millsborough."

"Beastly hole!" said the other, replacing his pipe.

"I don"t agree with you at all," said the other angrily. "It"s as nice a little town of its size as you"d find anywhere."

The other shrugged his shoulders. A man a few yards off in the crowd happened at that moment to be looking in the direction of the two speakers. It was the ticket-collector at the station, enjoying an afternoon off. He recognized the taller of the two men as the "dook" he had seen at Millsborough station about a week ago. The man"s splendid carriage and iron-grey head were not to be mistaken--also his cadaverous and sickly look, and his shabby clothes. The ticket-collector saw that the man was holding the dark-eyed, "furrin-looking" child by the hand, which the woman he met had brought down with her. "Furriners," he supposed, all of them; part of that stream of fugitives from air raids that had been flowing out of London during the preceding winter, and was now flowing out again, as the next winter approached, though in less volume. Every house and lodging in Millsborough was full, prices had gone up badly, and life in Millsborough was becoming extremely uncomfortable for its normal inhabitants--"all along o" these panicky aliens!" thought the ticket-collector, resentfully, as he looked at the tall man.

The tall man, however, was behaving as though the market-place belonged to him, talking to his neighbours, who mostly looked at him askance, and every now and then breaking into a contemptuous laugh, provoked apparently by the eloquence of the young woman in the wagon. Meanwhile the little girl whose hand he held was trying to pull him into a better place for seeing the rest of the procession. For from the place where they stood on the outskirts of the crowd, the foremost wagon with its nodding wheat and sheaves, its speaker, its old women, and its bodyguard of girls entirely hid the cart behind it.

"Dis way, pappa, dis way," said the child, dragging him. He let her draw him, and suddenly from behind the speaker"s cart there emerged the second wagon with its white horses; Rachel Henderson, the observed of all beholders, standing flushed and smiling, with the reins in her hands, the vicar just behind her, and Lady Alicia"s lace parasol.

"My G.o.d!" said the man.

His sudden start, and clutch at the child"s hand made the child cry out.

He checked her with a savage word, and while she whimpered unheeded, he stood motionless, sheltering himself behind a girl with a large hat who stood in front of him, his eyes fixed on the Great End wagon. A ghastly white had replaced the patchy red on his cheeks, and had any careful observer chanced to notice him at the moment, he or she would have been struck by the expression of his face--as of some evil, startled beast aware of its enemy, and making ready to spring.