It was night before the dislocations of train and trap brought the Beatups back to Worge. A big yellow moon was swinging high, scattering a honey-coloured dust of light on the fields and copses and little lanes. The farms, hushed and shut, lay dark against their grain-fields drooping with harvest—in some fields the corn was already cut and shocked, each tasselled cone standing in the moonlight beside the black pool of its shadow.

The Beatups were silent—owing perhaps to their congestion in the trap. Nell was tired, and leaned against her mother. Life seemed a very sordid trip, in spite of the honey-coloured moon, which swung so high, the type of unfulfilled desire. Mrs. Beatup was thinking of Ivy and wondering if the soles of her boots were thick enough; and Zacky, wedged between them, planned a big hunt for conkers the next day. On the front seat, Mus’ Beatup sucked at his pipe and schemed a dash for the Rifle Volunteer before closing time. “If the War goes on much longer, there’ll be no more beer, so I mun git wot’s to be had. It’s those Russians, and be hemmed to them; reckon they’ll maake peace and never care if the War goes on a dunnamany year. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect of chaps wot went teetotal by Act of Parliament.”

Harry drove the old gelding, and as the trap lurched from farm to farm he marked those which had cut their grain, and which had not. They had reaped the Penny field at Cowlease, and the old bottoms of Slivericks stood [194] shocked beside the stream. Egypt Farm, with late hardy sowings, had not started—Worge started to-morrow.

That visit to Hastings had been a holiday before the solemn business of the year. For a long time he had planned his reaping—trudging the fields each day, fingering the awns, rubbing the straw. He must not cut too early or too late. Last year the oats had stood till they shed their seed, this year they must be caught in just the right moment of wind and sun.

On the whole the crops promised well. The old grounds of the Volunteer and the Street field had borne splendidly—the ploughed grass-lands not so well, except for Forges field, which, for some obscure reason, had brought forth a rich yield from its sour furrows. On the whole the wheat promised better than the oats, which in spite of the varieties he had chosen had thickened in the clays, and grown unwieldy with sedge leaves and tulip roots.

The problem of harvesting had worried him for a long time, for Mus’ Beatup absolutely refused to buy a steam reaper-and-binder; he wurn’t going to take no risks in war-time, and Harry must make what shift he could with the old horse machine, which had trundled slowly round the few ac............