His breakfast and the talk over it with Penzance seemed good things. It suddenly had become worth while to discuss the approaching hop1 harvest and the yearly influx2 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 prolific3 source of agricultural revenue and the boast and wonder of the hop-growing county. The neglect and scant4 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 appreciable5 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 farmhouses6, 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 tenants8 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 depreciation10 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 frustrate11 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 tenant9 enough. He was in trouble now because, though his hops12 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 prospect13 of securing good workers was an unpromising one.
The hordes14 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 holders15 are considered satisfactory as masters, and those who are undesirable16. 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 followers17 each season, manages them and looks after their interests and their employers'. In some cases the same captain brings his regiment18 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 groves19 of tall garlanded poles, whose wreathings hang thick with fresh and pungent20-scented hop clusters. Children play “'oppin” in dingy22 rooms and alleys23, 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 gentry24 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 bins25 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 smelt26 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 “hopping27” from his first memories of it. He could recall his sensations of welcoming a renewal28 of interesting things when, season after season, he had begun to mark the early stragglers on the road. The stragglers were not of the class 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 robust29 or worn-out, slatternly women, who sat by the small roadside fire stirring the battered30 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 grass. Now and then appeared a grand one, who was rumoured31 to be a Lee and therefore royal, and who came and lived regally in a gaily32 painted caravan33. During the late summer weeks one began to see slouching figures tramping along the high road at intervals34. These were men who were old, men who were middle-aged35 and some who were young, all of them more or less dust-grimed, weather-beaten, or ragged36. Occasionally one was to be seen in heavy beery slumber37 under the hedgerow, or lying on the grass smoking lazily, or with painful thrift38 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 forerunners39 of the regular army.
On his walk to West Ways, the farm Bolter lived on, Mount Dunstan passed 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 bustling40 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 slung41 in a dirty shawl at its mother's breast, an unhealthy looking slattern mother, two ancient perambulators, one piled with dingy bundles and cooking utensils42, the seven-year-old eldest43 girl unpacking44 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 grass nursing her baby and staring about her with an expression at once stupefied and illuminated45 by some temporary bliss46. Even the slouching father was grinning, as if good luck had befallen him, and the two youngest were tumbling about with squeals47 of good cheer. This was not the humour in which such a group usually dropped wearily on the grass 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 passed on, but, perhaps because of the human glow the morning had brought him, he stopped and spoke48.
“Have you come for the hopping?” he asked.
The man touched his forehead, apparently49 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 class 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 bridle50 to the groom51 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,” passing her hand over her forehead, “as if it wasn't for the basket,” with a nervous, half-hysteric giggle52, “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 coppers53 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 silhouetted54 in her black habit against the ancient whitewashed55 brick porch as she talked to Bolter.
“I have been drinking a glass 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 wonderf............