So Worge muddled through its haymaking, and then the shearing; and Harry was sometimes idle and sometimes industrious, and Mus’ Beatup was sometimes drunk and sometimes sober. The oats in the Street Field and the field at the back of the Rifle Volunteer were slowly parching to the colour of dust, though thick green shadows rippled in them, and told how far off still the harvest was. They were spring-sown potato-oats, chosen by Tom on account of their vigorous constitution, though otherwise not very well suited to the clays of Sunday Street. He had manured them at their sowing with rape-cake, nursed their first sproutings, and now in every letter enquired after their progress. “Keep an eye on them, dear father, for the Lord’s sake, and do not let them stand after they’re ripe, or they will shed there seeds for certain sure, being potatos.”

Tom had been some weeks now at Waterheel in the Midlands, a private in the Sussex Regiment, with an elaborate and mystifying address, which his family found the greatest difficulty in cramming into the envelope. They did not write to him as often as he wrote to them, in spite of the fact that they were six to one. But then they were not far from home, dreaming of the old fields, longing for the old faces.

[75]

On the whole though, Tom was happy enough. He found his new life strange, but not totally uncongenial. A comfortable want of imagination made it possible for him to put Worge out of mind, now that it was also out of sight, and he was among lads of his own age, old acquaintances some of them—Kadwell of Stilliands Tower, and two Viners from Satanstown, Bill Putland, Jerry Sumption. There was Mus’ Archie, too, with a nod and a kind word now and then to intensify that “feeling of Sussex chaps” which was not quite such an uncommon one now; and there was Mus’ Dixon, Mus’ Archie’s elder brother, who had lived in London and written for the papers before the War, and now used his sword to cut the leaves of books—so his orderly said—yet was a brave man none the less, and a good officer, though he hated the life as much as his brother loved it.

The family at Worge were surprised to find that Tom’s best pal was Bill Putland. In Sunday Street he had had very little to do with the Squire’s cheeky chauffeur, and there had always been a gnawing rivalry between Egypt and Worge. But now that they had joined up together, and been drafted into the same company, sharing the same awkwardness and fumblings, a friendship sprang up between them, and thrived in the atmosphere of their common life. Putland was a much smarter recruit than Beatup, but this did not cause ill-feeling, for Bill did much to help Tom, passing on to him the tips he picked up so much more quickly than his friend, with the result that Tom got through the mangold-wurzel stage sooner than Mus’ Archie had expected. Tom on his side was humbly conscious of Bill’s superiority. “He’s been bred up different from us,” he wrote home to Worge. [76] “You can see that by the way he talks and everything, and he’s a sharper chap than me by a long chalk. But he’s unaccountable good-hearted, and he helps me with my leathers after he’s done his own, for he’s a sight quicker than me.”

Tom more often asked for news than he gave it. After all, life at Waterheel Camp did not consist of much besides drills and route-marchings, with relaxations at the Y.............