AUTUMN came, and gradually the farm-work slackened. The Bucksteep acres were cut, not much the worse for the storm—the hops were picked, and showed a fair crop of fuggles, though the goldings had not done so well. Harry sowed catch crops of trifolium and Italian rye grass, and started his autumn ploughings. Certain reactions had seized him after the harvest, and he had gone off wandering in the fields, away to villages where he had not strayed for months except to market. But the lapse had been short, for the adventure of Worge’s acres was not dead—his imagination had now its headquarters and sanctuary in the fields where he worked; he had no need to seek dreams and beauty far away, for they grew at his barndoor, and he strawed them in the furrows with his grain.

Tom’s dwindling zeal was reawakened by the account of the harvest which Harry scrawled to France—“Nine quarters we got from the Volunteer Field and five from the Sunk and six from Forges. Hops and roots did middling. All the potash fields were valiant. Maybe next year Father will buy a reaper-and-binder. The Reverend Mr. Sumption was proper at the harvest.” His brother wrote back a letter of which “Well done, young ’un” was the refrain. “Queer,” he wrote, “but [212] there’s a Forges Wood out here—they say the 5th Sussex named it and it was called something French before. It is not like Forges, for it is narrow like a dibble and the trees have no branches, being knocked off by crumps and nothing grows there becos of the gas. There are dead horses in it.”

Tom had seen plenty of fighting that autumn in Paschendaele, but was so far well and unhurt. He sent Thyrza home a bit of shell which had knocked off his tin hat and “shocked him all of a swum.” Everyone, he wrote, had laughed fit to bust at it—Thyrza thought that they laughed at queer things in the trenches. She fretted a little during those autumn days, for her hope was now almost a torment ... suppose Tom should never see the child their love had made. Every day in the paper there were long casualty lists, every day telegraph boys and girls went peddling to happy homes and blasted them with a slip of paper. They had knocked at doors in the country of the Four Roads—the eldest Pix had been killed early in October; then there had been the butcher’s son at Bodle Street, and the lawyer’s son at Hailsham, and poor Mus’ Piper’s boy had lost both legs.... The world looked suddenly very grey and treacherous to Thyrza; she dared not hope, lest hope should betray her, and her few moments of peaceful mother-happiness were riddled with doubts. Oh, if only God would let her have Tom back somehow, no matter how maimed, how helpless, how dependent on her.... Then she would suddenly react from her desire, shrink back in horror at the thought of Tom wounded, his strong sweet body all sick and disfigured.... &ldqu............