The Shuttle Part 59

It had seemed so often to Mount Dunstan--oftener than not. Youth should not know such awakening, he was well aware; but he had known it sometimes even when he had been a child, and since his return from his ill-starred struggle in America, the dull and reluctant facing of the day had become a habit. Yet on the morning after his talk with his friend--the curious, uplifted, unpractical talk which had seemed to hypnotise him--he knew when he opened his eyes to the light that he had awakened as a man should awake--with an unreasoning sense of pleasure in the life and health of his own body, as he stretched mighty limbs, strong after the night's rest, and feeling that there was work to be done. It was all unreasoning--there was no more to be done than on those other days which he had wakened to with bitterness, because they seemed useless and empty of any worth--but this morning the mere light of the sun was of use, the rustle of the small breeze in the leaves, the soft floating past of the white clouds, the mere fact that the great blind-faced, stately house was his own, that he could tramp far over lands which were his heritage, unfed though they might be, and that the very rustics who would pa.s.s him in the lanes were, so to speak, his own people: that he had name, life, even the common thing of hunger for his morning food--it was all of use.

An alluring picture--of a certain deep, clear bathing pool in the park rose before him. It had not called to him for many a day, and now he saw its dark blueness gleam between flags and green rushes in its encircling thickness of shrubs and trees.

He sprang from his bed, and in a few minutes was striding across the gra.s.s of the park, his towels over his arm, his head thrown back as he drank in the freshness of the morning-scented air. It was scented with dew and gra.s.s and the breath of waking trees and growing things; early twitters and thrills were to be heard here and there, insisting on morning joyfulness; rabbits frisked about among the fine-gra.s.sed hummocks of their warren and, as he pa.s.sed, scuttled back into their holes, with a whisking of short white tails, at which he laughed with friendly amus.e.m.e.nt. Cropping stags lifted their antlered heads, and fawns with dappled sides and immense l.u.s.trous eyes gazed at him without actual fear, even while they sidled closer to their mothers. A skylark springing suddenly from the gra.s.s a few yards from his feet made him stop short once and stand looking upward and listening. Who could pa.s.s by a skylark at five o'clock on a summer's morning--the little, heavenly light-heart circling and wheeling, showering down diamonds, showering down pearls, from its tiny pulsating, trilling throat?

"Do you know why they sing like that? It is because all but the joy of things has been kept hidden from them. They knew nothing but life and flight and mating, and the gold of the sun. So they sing." That she had once said.

He listened until the jewelled rain seemed to have fallen into his soul.

Then he went on his way smiling as he knew he had never smiled in his life before. He knew it because he realised that he had never before felt the same vigorous, light normality of spirit, the same sense of being as other men. It was as though something had swept a great clear s.p.a.ce about him, and having room for air he breathed deep and was glad of the commonest gifts of being.

The bathing pool had been the greatest pleasure of his uncared-for boyhood. No one knew which long pa.s.sed away Mount Dunstan had made it.

The oldest villager had told him that it had "allus ben there," even in his father's time. Since he himself had known it he had seen that it was kept at its best.

Its dark blue depths reflected in their pellucid clearness the water plants growing at its edge and the enclosing shrubs and trees. The turf bordering it was velvet-thick and green, and a few flag-steps led down to the water. Birds came there to drink and bathe and preen and dress their feathers. He knew there were often nests in the bushes--sometimes the nests of nightingales who filled the soft darkness or moonlight of early June with the wonderfulness of nesting song. Sometimes a straying fawn poked in a tender nose, and after drinking delicately stole away, as if it knew itself a trespa.s.ser.

To undress and plunge headlong into the dark sapphire water was a rapturous thing. He swam swiftly and slowly by turns, he floated, looking upward at heaven's blue, listening to birds' song and inhaling all the fragrance of the early day. Strength grew in him and life pulsed as the water lapped his limbs. He found himself thinking with pleasure of a long walk he intended to take to see a farmer he must talk to about his hop gardens; he found himself thinking with pleasure of other things as simple and common to everyday life--such things as he ordinarily faced merely because he must, since he could not afford an experienced bailiff. He was his own bailiff, his own steward, merely, he had often thought, an unsuccessful farmer of half-starved lands. But this morning neither he nor they seemed so starved, and--for no reason--there was a future of some sort.

He emerged from his pool glowing, the turf feeling like velvet beneath his feet, a fine light in his eyes.

"Yes," he said, throwing out his arms in a lordly stretch of physical well-being, "it might be a magnificent thing--mere strong living. THIS is magnificent."

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

BY THE ROADSIDE EVERYWHERE

His breakfast and the talk over it with Penzance seemed good things. It suddenly had become worth while to discuss the approaching hop harvest and the yearly influx of the hop pickers from London. Yesterday the subject had appeared discouraging enough. The great hop gardens of the estate had been in times past its most prolific source of agricultural revenue and the boast and wonder of the hop-growing county. The neglect and scant food of the lean years had cost them their reputation. Each season they had needed smaller bands of "hoppers," and their standard had been lowered. It had been his habit to think of them gloomily, as of hopeless and irretrievable loss. Because this morning, for a remote reason, the pulse of life beat strong in him he was taking a new view.

Might not study of the subject, constant attention and the application of all available resource to one end produce appreciable results? The idea presented itself in the form of a thing worth thinking of.

"It would provide an outlook and give one work to do," he put it to his companion. "To have a roof over one's head, a sound body, and work to do, is not so bad. Such things form the whole of G. Selden's cheerful aim. His spirit is alight within me. I will walk over and talk to Bolter."

Bolter was a farmer whose struggle to make ends meet was almost too much for him. Holdings whose owners, either through neglect or lack of money, have failed to do their duty as landlords in the matter of repairs of farmhouses, outbuildings, fences, and other things, gradually fall into poor hands. Resourceful and prosperous farmers do not care to hold lands under unprosperous landlords. There were farms lying vacant on the Mount Dunstan estate, there were others whose tenants were uncertain rent payers or slipshod workers or dishonest in small ways. Waste or sale of the fertiliser which should have been given to the soil as its due, neglect in the case of things whose decay meant depreciation of property and expense to the landlord, were dishonesties. But Mount Dunstan knew that if he turned out Thorn and Fittle, whom no watching could wholly frustrate in their tricks, Under Mount Farm and Oakfield Rise would stand empty for many a year. But for his poverty Bolter would have been a good tenant enough. He was in trouble now because, though his hops promised well, he faced difficulties in the matter of "pickers." Last year he had not been able to pay satisfactory prices in return for labour, and as a result the prospect of securing good workers was an unpromising one.

The hordes of men, women, and children who flock year after year to the hop-growing districts know each other. They learn also which may be called the good neighbourhoods and which the bad; the gardens whose holders are considered satisfactory as masters, and those who are undesirable. They know by experience or report where the best "huts" are provided, where tents are supplied, and where one must get along as one can.

Generally the regular flocks are under a "captain," who gathers his followers each season, manages them and looks after their interests and their employers'. In some cases the same captain brings his regiment to the same gardens year after year, and ends by counting himself as of the soil and almost of the family of his employer. Each hard, thick-fogged winter they fight through in their East End courts and streets, they look forward to the open-air weeks spent between long, narrow green groves of tall garlanded poles, whose wreathings hang thick with fresh and pungent-scented hop cl.u.s.ters. Children play "'oppin" in dingy rooms and alleys, and talk to each other of days when the sun shone hot and birds were singing and flowers smelling sweet in the hedgerows; of others when the rain streamed down and made mud of the soft earth, and yet there was pleasure in the gipsying life, and high cheer in the fire of sticks built in the field by some bold spirit, who hung over it a tin kettle to boil for tea. They never forgot the gentry they had caught sight of riding or driving by on the road, the parson who came to talk, and the occasional groups of ladies from the "great house" who came into the gardens to walk about and look at the bins and ask queer questions in their gentry-sounding voices. They never knew anything, and they always seemed to be entertained. Sometimes there were enterprising, laughing ones, who asked to be shown how to strip the hops into the bins, and after being shown played at the work for a little while, taking off their gloves and showing white fingers with rings on. They always looked as if they had just been washed, and as if all of their clothes were fresh from the tub, and when anyone stood near them it was observable that they smelt nice. Generally they gave pennies to the children before they left the garden, and sometimes shillings to the women. The hop picking was, in fact, a wonderful blend of work and holiday combined.

Mount Dunstan had liked the "hopping" from his first memories of it. He could recall his sensations of welcoming a renewal of interesting things when, season after season, he had begun to mark the early stragglers on the road. The stragglers were not of the cla.s.s gathered under captains.

They were derelicts--tramps who spent their summers on the highways and their winters in such workhouses as would take them in; tinkers, who differ from the tramps only because sometimes they owned a rickety cart full of strange household goods and drunken tenth-hand perambulators piled with dirty bundles and babies, these last propelled by robust or worn-out, slatternly women, who sat by the small roadside fire stirring the battered pot or tending the battered kettle, when resting time had come and food must be cooked. Gipsies there were who had cooking fires also, and hobbled horses cropping the gra.s.s. Now and then appeared a grand one, who was rumoured to be a Lee and therefore royal, and who came and lived regally in a gaily painted caravan. During the late summer weeks one began to see slouching figures tramping along the high road at intervals. These were men who were old, men who were middle-aged and some who were young, all of them more or less dust-grimed, weather-beaten, or ragged. Occasionally one was to be seen in heavy beery slumber under the hedgerow, or lying on the gra.s.s smoking lazily, or with painful thrift cobbling up a hole in a garment. Such as these were drifting in early that they might be on the ground when pickers were wanted. They were the forerunners of the regular army.

On his walk to West Ways, the farm Bolter lived on, Mount Dunstan pa.s.sed two or three of these strays. They were the usual flotsam and jetsam, but on the roadside near a hop garden he came upon a group of an aspect so unusual that it attracted his attention. Its unusualness consisted in its air of exceeding bustling cheerfulness. It was a domestic group of the most luckless type, and ragged, dirty, and worn by an evidently long tramp, might well have been expected to look forlorn, discouraged, and out of spirits. A slouching father of five children, one plainly but a few weeks old, and slung in a dirty shawl at its mother's breast, an unhealthy looking slattern mother, two ancient perambulators, one piled with dingy bundles and cooking utensils, the seven-year-old eldest girl unpacking things and keeping an eye at the same time on the two youngest, who were neither of them old enough to be steady on their feet, the six-year-old gleefully aiding the slouching father to build the wayside fire. The mother sat upon the gra.s.s nursing her baby and staring about her with an expression at once stupefied and illuminated by some temporary bliss. Even the slouching father was grinning, as if good luck had befallen him, and the two youngest were tumbling about with squeals of good cheer. This was not the humour in which such a group usually dropped wearily on the gra.s.s at the wayside to eat its meagre and uninviting meal and rest its dragging limbs. As he drew near, Mount Dunstan saw that at the woman's side there stood a basket full of food and a can full of milk.

Ordinarily he would have pa.s.sed on, but, perhaps because of the human glow the morning had brought him, he stopped and spoke.

"Have you come for the hopping?" he asked.

The man touched his forehead, apparently not conscious that the grin was yet on his face.

"Yes, sir," he answered.

"How far have you walked?"

"A good fifty miles since we started, sir. It took us a good bit. We was pretty done up when we stopped here. But we've 'ad a wonderful piece of good luck." And his grin broadened immensely.

"I am glad to hear that," said Mount Dunstan. The good luck was plainly of a nature to have excited them greatly. Chance good luck did not happen to people like themselves. They were in the state of mind which in their cla.s.s can only be relieved by talk. The woman broke in, her weak mouth and chin quite unsteady.

"Seems like it can't be true, sir," she said. "I'd only just come out of the Union--after this one," signifying the new baby at her breast. "I wasn't fit to drag along day after day. We 'ad to stop 'ere 'cos I was near fainting away."

"She looked fair white when she sat down," put in the man. "Like she was goin' off."

"And that very minute," said the woman, "a young lady came by on 'orseback, an' the minute she sees me she stops her 'orse an' gets down."

"I never seen nothing like the quick way she done it," said the husband.

"Sharp, like she was a soldier under order. Down an' give the bridle to the groom an' comes over."

"And kneels down," the woman took him up, "right by me an' says, 'What's the matter? What can I do?' an' finds out in two minutes an' sends to the farm for some brandy an' all this basketful of stuff," jerking her head towards the treasure at her side. "An' gives 'IM," with another jerk towards her mate, "money enough to 'elp us along till I'm fair on my feet. That quick it was--that quick," pa.s.sing her hand over her forehead, "as if it wasn't for the basket," with a nervous, half-hysteric giggle, "I wouldn't believe but what it was a dream--I wouldn't."

"She was a very kind young lady," said Mount Dunstan, "and you were in luck."

He gave a few coppers to the children and strode on his way. The glow was hot in his heart, and he held his head high.

"She has gone by," he said. "She has gone by."

He knew he should find her at West Ways Farm, and he did so. Slim and straight as a young birch tree, and elate with her ride in the morning air, she stood silhouetted in her black habit against the ancient whitewashed brick porch as she talked to Bolter.

"I have been drinking a gla.s.s of milk and asking questions about hops,"

she said, giving him her hand bare of glove. "Until this year I have never seen a hop garden or a hop picker."

After the exchange of a few words Bolter respectfully melted away and left them together.

"It was such a wonderful day that I wanted to be out under the sky for a long time--to ride a long way," she explained. "I have been looking at hop gardens as I rode. I have watched them all the summer--from the time when there was only a little thing with two or three pale green leaves looking imploringly all the way up to the top of each immensely tall hop pole, from its place in the earth at the bottom of it--as if it was saying over and over again, under its breath, 'Can I get up there? Can I get up? Can I do it in time? Can I do it in time?' Yes, that was what they were saying, the little bold things. I have watched them ever since, putting out tendrils and taking hold of the poles and pulling and climbing like little acrobats. And curling round and unfolding leaves and more leaves, until at last they threw them out as if they were beginning to boast that they could climb up into the blue of the sky if the summer were long enough. And now, look at them!" her hand waved towards the great gardens. "Forests of them, cool green pathways and avenues with leaf canopies over them."

"You have seen it all," he said. "You do see things, don't you? A few hundred yards down the road I pa.s.sed something you had seen. I knew it was you who had seen it, though the poor wretches had not heard your name."

She hesitated a moment, then stooped down and took up in her hand a bit of pebbled earth from the pathway. There was storm in the blue of her eyes as she held it out for him to look at as it lay on the bare rose-flesh of her palm.

"See," she said, "see, it is like that--what we give. It is like that."

And she tossed the earth away.

"It does not seem like that to those others."

"No, thank G.o.d, it does not. But to one's self it is the mere luxury of self-indulgence, and the realisation of it sometimes tempts one to be even a trifle morbid. Don't you see," a sudden thrill in her voice startled him, "they are on the roadside everywhere all over the world."

"Yes. All over the world."

"Once when I was a child of ten I read a magazine article about the suffering millions and the monstrously rich, who were obviously to blame for every starved sob and cry. It almost drove me out of my childish senses. I went to my father and threw myself into his arms in a violent fit of crying. I clung to him and sobbed out, 'Let us give it all away; let us give it all away and be like other people!'"

"What did he say?"