Harvest, Mrs. Humphry Ward [best pdf reader for ebooks txt] 📗

view to the morrow, and she caught sight of her new bailiff, Hastings, who had waited to see everybody off, disappearing towards his own cottage, which stood on a lonely spur of the down. The light was fast going, but the deep glow of the western sky answered the paler gold of the new-made stubble and the ranged stooks, while between rose the dark and splendid masses of the woods.

Rachel stood looking at the scene, possessed by a pleasure which in her was always an ardour. She felt nothing by halves. The pulse of life beat in her still with an energy, a passion, that astonished herself. She was full of eagerness for her new work and for success in it, full of desires, too, for vague, half-seen things, things she had missed so Far--her own fault. But somewhere in the long, hidden years, they must, they should be waiting for her.

The harvest was magnificent. She had paid the Wellins a high price for the standing crops, but there was going to be a profit on her bargain. Her mind was full of schemes, if only she could get the labour to carry them out. Farming was now on the up-grade. She had come into it at the very best moment, and England would never let farming go down again, after the war, for her own safety's sake.

_The War_! She felt towards it as to some distant force, which, so far as she personally was concerned, was a force for good. Owing to the war, farming was booming all over England, and she was in the boom, taking advantage of it. Yet she was ashamed to think of the war only in that way. She tried to tame the strange ferment in her blood, and could only do it by reminding herself of Hastings's wounded son, whose letter he had showed her. And then--in imagination--she began to see thousands of others like him, in hospital beds, or lying dead in trampled fields. Her mood softened, the tears came into her eyes.

Suddenly--a slight whimper--a child's whimper--close beside her. She paused in amazement, looking round her, till the whimper was renewed; and there, almost at her feet, cradled in the fragrant hollow of a wheat stook, she saw a tiny child--a baby about a year old, a fair, plump thing, just waking from sleep.

At sight of the face bending over her, the child set up a louder cry, which was not angry, however, only forlorn. The tears welled fast into her blue eyes. She looked piteously at Rachel.

"Mummy, mummy!"

"You poor little thing!" said Rachel. "Whose are you?"

One of the village women who had been helping in the "shocking," she supposed, had brought the child. She had noticed a little girl playing about the reapers in the afternoon--no doubt an elder sister brought to look after the baby. Between the mother and the sister there must have been some confusion, and one or other would come running back directly.

But meanwhile she took up the child, who at first resisted passionately, fighting with all its chubby strength against the strange arms. But Rachel seemed to have a way with her--a spell, which worked. She bent over the little thing, soothing and cooing to her, and then finding a few crumbs of cake in the pocket of her overall, the remains of her own lunch in the field, she daintily fed the rosy mouth, till the sobs ceased and the child stared upwards in a sleep wonder, her blue eyes held by the brown ones above her.

"Mummy!" she repeated, still whimpering slightly.

"Mummy's coming," said Rachel tenderly. "What a duck it is!"

And bending, she kissed the soft, downy cheek greedily, with the same ardour she had just been throwing into her own dreams of success.

She carried the child, now quiet and comforted, towards the house. The warm weight upon her arms was delicious to her. Only as she neared the gate in the now moonlit dusk, her lips quivered suddenly, and two tears rolled down her cheeks.

"I haven't carried a child," she thought, "since--"

Suddenly there was a shout from the farther gate of the harvest field, and a girl came running at top speed. It was the little one's elder sister, and with a proper scolding, Rachel gave up her prize.

The two land-girls had finished giving food and water to the cattle and a special mush to new-born calves. Everything was now in order for the night, and Janet, standing on the steps of the farm-house, rang a bell, which meant that supper would be ready in a few minutes. The two partners and their employees were soon gathered round the table in the kitchen, which was also the dining-room. It was a cold meal of bacon, with lettuce, bread and jam, some tea made on a "Tommy's cooker," and potatoes which Janet, who was for the present housekeeper and cook, produced hot and steaming from the hay-box to which she had consigned them after the midday dinner. A small oil-lamp had been lit, and through the open windows afterglow and moonrise streamed in to mingle with its light. There was a pot of flowers on the table--purple scabious, and tall cow-parsley, gathered from the orchard, where no one had yet had time to cut the ragged hay beneath the trees.

The scene was typical of a new England. Women governing--and women serving--they were all alike making their way through new paths to new ends. It was no household in the ordinary sense. The man was wanting. The two elder women were bound to the two younger by a purely business tie, which might or might not develop into something more personal. The two land-lasses had come to supper in their tunics and breeches, while Rachel Henderson and Janet had now both put on the coloured overalls which disguised the masculine garb beneath, and gave them something of the usual feminine air. Rachel's overall, indeed, was both pretty and artistic, embroidered a little here and there, and showing a sunburnt throat beneath the rounded chin.

The talk turned on the day's work, the weather prospects, the vagaries of the cows at milking time, and those horrid little pests the "harvesters," which haunt the chalk soils. The two "hands" were clear by now that they liked Miss Leighton the best of the two ladies, they hardly knew why. Betty Rolfe, the younger of them, who came from Ralstone, was a taking creature, with deep black, or rather violet, eyes, small features framed in curly hair, and the bloom of ripe fruit. She was naturally full of laughter and talk, and only spoilt by her discoloured and uneven teeth, which showed the usual English neglect of such things in childhood.

Her companion, Jenny Harberton, was a much more ordinary type, with broad cheeks, sandy hair, and a perpetual friendly grin, which generally served her instead of speech, at least in her employer's presence. She was a capital milker, and a good honest child. Her people lived in the village, and her forebears had always lived there. They were absolutely indigenous and autochthonous--a far older Brookshire family than any of the dwellers in the big houses about.

Then in the midst of a loving report by Betty on the virtues and docility of a beautiful Jersey cow who was the pride of Miss Henderson's new herd, Janet Leighton remembered one of her letters of the evening and drew it out of her pocket.

"Who do you think is going to be--is already--the commandant of the timber girls in the new camp?"

Rachel couldn't guess.

"You remember Mrs. Fergusson--at College?"

Rachel raised her eyebrows.

"The Irish lady? Perfectly."

"Well, it's she. She writes to me to say she is quite settled, with thirty girls, that the work is fascinating, and they all love it, and you and I _must_ go over to see her."

Rachel looked irresponsive.

"It's a long way."

"Oh, Miss," said Jenny Harberton timidly, "it's not so very far. An' it's lovely when you get there. Father was there last week, drivin' some officers. He says it _is_ interestin'!"

Jenny's father, a plumber in the village, owned a humble open car which was in perpetual request.

"There are a hundred Canadians apparently," said Janet Leighton, looking at her letter, "and German prisoners, quite a good few, and these thirty girls. Mrs. Fergusson begs us to come. Sunday's no good because we couldn't see the work, but--after the harvest? We could get there with the pony quite well."

Rachel said nothing.

Janet Leighton dropped the subject for the moment, but after supper, with her writing-desk on her knee, she returned to it.

"Can't you go without me?" said Rachel, who was standing with her back to the room, looking out of the window.

"Well, I could," said Janet, feeling rather puzzled, "but I thought you were curious to see these new kinds of work for women?"

"So I am. It isn't the women."

"The German prisoners, then?" laughed Janet.

"Heavens, no!"

"The Canadians?" asked Janet--in wonder--after a moment. Rachel turned abruptly towards her.

"Well, I didn't have exactly a good time in Canada," she said, as though the admission was dragged out of her; adding immediately, "but of course I'll go--sometime--after the harvest."

On which she left the room, and presently Janet saw her wandering among the stooks in the gloaming, her hands behind her back. She seemed in her ripe and comely youth to be somehow the very spirit of the harvest.

A little later, just before ten o'clock, while the sunset glow was still brooding on the harvest fields, the two farm-girls, after a last visit to the cows, slipped into the little sitting-room. Janet, who was mending her Sunday dress, greeted them with a smile and a kind word. Then she moved to the table and took up a New Testament that was lying there. She was an ardent and mystically-minded Unitarian, and her mind was much set towards religion.

"Shall we have prayers at night?" she had said quite simply to the f arm-girls on their arrival. "Don't if you don't want to." And they had shyly said "yes"--not particularly attracted by the proposal, but willing to please Miss Leighton, who was always nice to them.

So Janet read some verses from the sixth chapter of St. John: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on Me hath everlasting life ... I am the Bread of Life ... I am the living Bread which came down from Heaven ... The words that I speak unto you they are spirit and they are life."

Closing the book, while her quiet eyes shone in the gleaming dusk, she said a few simple things about the Words of Christ, and how the human soul may feed on them--the Word of Love--the Word of Purity--the Word of Service. While she was still speaking, the door opened and Rachel came in. It had been agreed between her and Janet that although she had no objection to the prayers, she was not to be asked to take part in them. So that Janet's pulses fluttered a little when she appeared. But there was no outward sign of it. The speaker finished what she had to say, while the eyes of her three hearers were sometimes on her face and sometimes on the wide cornfield beyond the open window, where the harvest moon, as yet only a brilliant sickle, was rising. The Earth Bread without--the "Bread of Life" within; even in Jenny's primitive mind, there was a mingling of the two ideas, which brought a quiet joy. She