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Ebook has 1979 lines and 96573 words, and 40 pages

PAGE

PART I TOM 9

PART II JERRY 66

PART V NELL 211

PART VI BABY 241

THE FOUR ROADS

THE FOUR ROADS

PART I: TOM

Four roads in Sussex mark out a patch of country that from the wooded, sea-viewing hills behind Dallington slips down over fields and ponds and spinneys to the marshes of Hailsham and Horse Eye. The North Road, slatting the heights with its pale, hard streak, runs from far Rye to further Lewes, a road of adventures and distances, passing Woods Corner and Three Cups Corner, Punnetts Town and Cade Street, till it joins the London Road at Cross-in-Hand. The South Road borders the marsh, sometimes dry on the shelving ground above it, sometimes soggy on the marsh level, or perhaps sheeted with the overflow of the Hurst Haven. It comes from Senlac and Hastings, and after skirting the flats, crosses the River Cuckmere, and runs tamely into Lewes, where all roads meet. The East Road is short and shaggy, running through many woods, from the North Road, which it joins at Woods Corner, to the throws at Boreham Street. Along this road is a string of farms--Cowlease, and Padgham, and Slivericks, mangy holdings for the most part, with copses running wild and fields of thistles, doors agape and walls atumble, and gable-ends stooping towards the ponds. The West Road is grass-grown, and in July St. John's wort and rest-harrow straggle in the ruts and make the dust smell sickly-sweet. It forks from the North Road at Punnetts Town, and runs through Rushlake Green and the Foul Mile to Hailsham in the south.

In the swale of the day, towards Easter-time, the Reverend Mr. Sumption was walking along the North Road from Dallington to Woods Corner. Dallington is the mother-parish of the country bounded by the Four Roads, though there is also a church at Brownbread Street, in charge of a curate. Mr. Sumption had no truck with either Rector or curate, for he was a minister of the Particular Baptists, who had a Bethel in Sunday Street, as the lane was called which linked the East Road with one that trailed in and out of farms and woods to the throws at Bucksteep Manor. Not that the sect of the Particular Baptists flourished in the parish of Dallington, but the Bethel being midway between the church and the chapel, a fair congregation could be raked in on wet Sundays from the middle district, where doctrine, like most things in that land of farms, was swung by the weather.

The Reverend Mr. Sumption was a big, handsome man of forty-five, and wore a semi-clerical suit of greenish-black, with a shabby hat and a dirty collar. His face was brown, darkening round the jaw with a beard that wanted the razor twice a day, but did not get it. His eyes were dark and sunk deep in his head, gleaming like deep ditch-water under eyebrows as smooth and black as broom-pods. His teeth were very white, and his hair was grey and curly like a fleece.

As he walked he muttered to himself, and from time to time cracked the joints of his fingers with a loud rapping sound. These two habits helped form the local opinion that he was "queer," an opinion bolstered by more evidence than is usual in such cases. Women standing in their cottage doors noticed him twice halt and stoop--once to pick up a beetle which was laboriously crawling from ditch to ditch, another time to pick up a swede dropped from some farm-cart. He carefully put the beetle on the opposite bank--"Near squashed you, my dear, I did. But He Who created the creeping things upon the earth has preserved you from the boot of man." The swede he dusted and crammed in his pocket. It was known throughout the hamlets--the "Streets" and "Greens"--of Dallington Parish that the minister was as poor as he was unblushing about his poverty.

The evening was very still. Eddies and swells of golden, watery light drifted over the hills round Dallington. In the north the sharp, wooded hill where Brightling stood was like a golden cone, and the kiln-shaped obelisk by Lobden's House which marked the highest point of South-east Sussex was also burnished to rare metal. The scent of water, stagnant on fallen leaves, crept from the little woods where the primroses and windflowers smothered old stumps in their pale froth, or spattered with milky stars the young moss of the year. At Woods Corner the smoke of a turf fire was rising from the inn, and there was a smell of beer, too, as the minister passed the door, and turned down the East Road towards Slivericks. The fire and the beer both tempted him, for there was neither at the Horselunges, the tumble-down old cottage where he lodged in Sunday Street. But the former he looked on as an unmanly weakness, the latter as a snare of the devil, so he swung on, humming a metrical psalm.

About a hundred yards below Woods Corner, just where the road, washed stony by the rains, runs under the webbing of Slivericks oaks, he turned into a field, across which a footpath led a pale stripe towards Sunday Street. From the top of the field he could look down over the whole sweep of country within the Four Roads, to the marshes and the sea, or rather the saffron and purple mists where the marshes and the sea lay together in enchantment. The yellow light wavered up to him from the sunset, over the woods of Forges and Harebeating; there was a sob of wind from Stilliands Tower, and a gleam of half-hidden ponds in the spinneys by Puddledock. Mr. Sumption stood still and listened.

The air was full of sunset sounds--the lowing of cows came up with a mingled cuckoo's cry, there was a tinkle of water behind him in the ditch, and the soft swish of wind in the trees and in the hedge, nodding ashes and sallows and oaks to and fro against the light-filled sky. On the wind was a mutter and pulse, a throb which seemed to be in it yet not of it, like the beating of a great heart, strangely remote from all the gleam and softness of spring sunset, pale fluttering cuckoo-flowers, and leaf-sweet pools of rain. A blackbird called from the copse by Cowlease Farm, and his song was as the voice of sunset and April and pooled rain ... still the great distant heart throbbed on, its dim beats pulsing on the wind, aching on the sunset, over the fields of peaceful England dropping asleep in April.

The Reverend Mr. Sumption cracked his fingers loudly once or twice:

"You hear 'em pretty plain to-night ... the guns in France."

He walked slowly on towards the stile, then stopped again and pulled a letter out of his pocket. It was a dirty letter, written on cheap note-paper with a smudged in indelible pencil.

"Dear Father," it ran, "I reckon you'll be wild when you get this. I have left the Fackory and have enlisted in the R. Sussex Regement. I could not stand that dirty tyke of Hubbard our forman any more. So I've gone, for I'm sick of this, and there's no fear of my being fetched back, as I'm not satisfackory nor skilled in particular, and should have been fetched out anyhow all in good time, I reckon. So don't go taking on about this, but please send me some fags, and I should like some chockolate, and get some of those kokernut buns at the shop with the crinkly paper round. It is a week since I did it, but I have been to the Y.M.C.A., and bought some Cherry-blossom boot-pollish and a packet of Players, and have no more money, and they said on a board 'Write home to-night.' Well, dear Father, I hope you will not take this too badly. Some good may come of it, for I am a soldier now and going to fight the Germans. Good-bye and don't forget to send the things I said.

"Your loving son,

"JERRY.

The minister crushed the letter back into the pocket already bulging with the swede. "O Lord," he groaned, "why doth it please Thee to afflict Thy servant again? I reckon I've stood a lot on account of that boy, and there seems no end to it. He's the prodigal son that never comes home, he's the lost sheep that never gets into the fold, and yet he's my child and the woman from Ihornden's...." His mutterings died down, for he heard footsteps behind him.

A young man was crossing the field from Slivericks, a sturdy, stocky fellow, about five-and-a-half feet high, with leggings and corduroy riding-breeches, and a black coat which was a little too small for him and as he drew near sent out an odour of moth-killer--evidently some young farmer, unaccountably Sundified on a week-day evening.

"Hullo, Tom," said the minister.

"Hullo, Mus' Sumption."

The boy stood aside for the older man to cross the stile. His head hung a little over the unaccustomed stiffness of his collar, and his eyes seemed full of rather painful thought. Mr. Sumption fumbled in his pockets, drew out the letter, the swede, a pencil without a point, a Testament, a squashed mass of chickweed, a tract, and finally a broken-backed cigarette, which he handed to Tom.

"Bad news, I reckon?"

Tom nodded.

"They woan't let me off. I wur afeard they wouldn't. You see, there's faather and the boys left, and I couldn't explain as how faather had bad habits. You can't bite back lik that on your own kin."

"Lord, Mus' Sumption! You doan't tell me as he's left the factory?"

"Reckon he has. Thought he'd like to fight for his King and country. He was always a plucked 'un, and he couldn't bear to see the lads going to the front without him."

There was a gleam in the minister's eyes, and he cracked his fingers loudly.

"I'm proud of him--I'm proud of my boy. He's done a fine thing, for of course he need never have gone. He's been three years in munitions now, and him only twenty. He went up to Erith when he was a mere lad, no call for him to go, and now he's joined up as a soldier when there was no call for him to go, neither."

Tom looked impressed.

"Maybe I ought to be feeling lik he does, but truth to tell it maakes me heavy-hearted to be leaving the farm just now."

"The Lord will provide."

"I'm none so sure o' that, wud faather and his habits, and the boys so young and wild, and the girls wud their hearts in other things, and mother, poor soul, so unsensible."

"Well, what does the farm matter? Beware lest it become Naboth's vineyard unto you. Is this a time to buy cattle and vineyards and olive-yards? This is the day which the Prophet said should burn like an oven, and the proud, even the wicked, be as stubble. What's your wretched farm? Think of the farms round Ypers and Dixmood, think of the farms round Rheims and Arrass--Stop!" and he seized Tom's arm in his hard, restless fingers--"Listen to those guns over in France. Perhaps every thud you hear means the end of a little farm."

Tom stood dejectedly beside him, the broken-backed cigarette, for which the minister had unfortunately been unable to provide a light, hanging drearily from his teeth. The soft mutter and thud pulsed on. The sun was slowly foundering behind the woods of Bird-in-Eye, sending up great shafts and spines of flowery light into the sky which was now green as a meadow after rain.

"This war queers me," he said, and his voice, low and thick as it was, like any Sussex countryman's, yet was enough to drown the beating of that alien heart. "I doan't understand it. I can't git the hang od it nohow."

"A lot of it queers me," said Mr. Sumption, "and I reckon that in many ways we're all as godless as the Hun. It's not only the Germans that shall burn like stubble--it's us. The oven's prepared for us as well as for them."

They were walking together down steep fields, the ground dreamy with grey light, while before them, beyond the sea, burned the great oven of the sunset, full of horns of flame.

"I'm thinking of the farm," continued Tom, his mind sticking to its first idea. "I'm willing enough to go and fight for the farms in France and Belgium, but seems to me a Sussex farm's worth two furrin' ones. Worge aun't a fine place, but it's done well since I wur old enough to help faather--help him wud my head as well as my arms, I mean. Faather's an unaccountable clever chap--you should just about hear him talk at the pub, and the books he's read you'd never believe. But he's got ways wot aun't good for farming, and he needs somebody there to see as things doan't slide when he can't look after them himself."

"Can't your brother Harry do anything? He must be nearly sixteen."

"Harry's unaccountable wild-like. He's more lik to git us into trouble than help us at all."

"Maybe your father will pull-to a bit when you're gone and he sees things depend on him."

"Maybe he will, and maybe he woan't. But you doan't understand, Mus' Sumption. You doan't know wot it feels like to be took away from your work to help along a war as you didn't ask for and don't see the hang of. Maybe you'd think different of the war if you had to fight in it, but being a minister of religion you aun't ever likely to have to join up. I'm ready to go and do my share in putting chaps into the oven, as you say, but it's no use or sense your telling me as it doan't matter about the farm, for matter it does, and I'm unaccountable vrothered wud it all."

He grunted, and spat out the fag. Mr. Sumption, taking offence at once, waved his arms like a black windmill.

"Ho! I don't understand, don't I? with my only son just gone for a soldier. D'you think you care for your dirty farm more than I care for my Jerry. D'you think I wouldn't rather a hundred times go myself than that he should go? O Lord, that this boy should mock me! You'll be safe enough, young Tom. You've only the Germans to fear, but my lad has to fear his own countrymen too. The army was not made for gipsy-women's sons. My poor Jerry! ... there in the ranks like a colt in harness. He'll be sorry he's done it to-morrow, and then they'll kill him.... Oh, hold your tongue, Tom Beatup! Here we are in Sunday Street."

Sunday Street was the lane that linked up Pont's Green on the East Road with Bucksteep Manor at Four Throws. From the southern distance it looked like the street of a town, oddly flung across the hill--a streak of red houses, with the squat steeples of oasts, an illusion of shops and spires, crumbling on near approach into a few tumble-down cottages and the oasts of Egypt Farm. From the north you saw the chimneys first, high above the roofs like rabbits' ears above their heads; then you tumbled suddenly upon the hamlet: the Bethel, the Horselunges, the shop, the inn whose sign was the Rifle Volunteer, the forge, the pond, the two farms--Worge and Egypt--with their cottages, and the farmstead of Little Worge sidling away towards Pont's Green.

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