CHAPTER XXXVI
BY THE ROADSIDE EVERYWHERE
His breakfast and the talk over it with Penzance seemed good
things. It suddenly had become worth while to discuss the
approaching hop harvest and the yearly influx 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 prolific source of agricultural
revenue and the boast and wonder of the hop-growing county.
The neglect and scant 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
appreciable 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 farmhouses, 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 tenants 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 depreciation 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
frustrate 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 tenant enough. He was in trouble
now because, though his hops 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
prospect of securing good workers was an unpromising one.
The hordes 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 holders are considered satisfactory
as masters, and those who are undesirable. 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 followers each season, manages them and looks after their
interests and their employers'. In some cases the same captain
brings his regiment 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 groves of tall garlanded poles, whose wreathings hang
thick with fresh and pungent-scented hop clusters. Children
play " 'oppin" in dingy rooms and alleys, 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 gentry 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 bins 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 smelt 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 "hopping" from his first
memories of it. He could recall his sensations of welcoming a
renewal 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 robust
or worn-out, slatternly women, who sat by the small roadside
fire stirring the battered 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 rumoured to be a Lee and therefore royal, and
who came and lived regally in a gaily painted caravan. During
the late summer weeks one began to see slouching figures
tramping along the high road at intervals. These were men who
were old, men who were middle-aged and some who were
young, all of them more or less dust-grimed, weather-beaten,
or ragged. Occasionally one was to be seen in heavy beery
slumber under the hedgerow, or lying on the grass smoking
lazily, or with painful thrift 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 forerunners
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 bustling 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 slung in a
dirty shawl at its mother's breast, an unhealthy looking slattern
mother, two ancient perambulators, one piled with dingy bundles
and cooking utensils, the seven-year-old eldest girl unpacking
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 illuminated by some temporary bliss.
Even the slouching father was grinning, as if good luck had
befallen him, and the two youngest were tumbling about with
squeals 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 spoke.
"Have you come for the hopping?" he asked.
The man touched his forehead, apparently 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 bridle to the groom 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 giggle, "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 coppers 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 silhouetted in her black
habit against the ancient whitewashed 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 wonderful day that I wanted to be out
under the sky for a long time--to ride a long way," she
explained. "I have been looking at hop gardens as I rode. I
have watched them all the summer--from the time when there
was only a little thing with two or three pale green leaves
looking imploringly all the way up to the top of each immensely
tall hop pole, from its place in the earth at the bottom of it--
as if it was saying over and over again, under its breath, `Can
I get up there? Can I get up? Can I do it in time? Can
I do it in time?' Yes, that was what they were saying, the
little bold things. I have watched them ever since, putting out
tendrils and taking hold of the poles and pulling and climbing
like little acrobats. And curling round and unfolding leaves
and more leaves, until at last they threw them out as if they
were beginning to boast that they could climb up into the blue
of the sky if the summer were long enough. And now, look
at them!" her hand waved towards the great gardens. "Forests
of them, cool green pathways and avenues with leaf canopies
over them."
"You have seen it all," he said. "You do see things, don't
you? A few hundred yards down the road I passed something
you had seen. I knew it was you who had seen it, though the
poor wretches had not heard your name."
She hesitated a moment, then stooped down and took up in
her hand a bit of pebbled earth from the pathway. There was
storm in the blue of her eyes as she held it out for him to
look at as it lay on the bare rose-flesh of her palm.
"See," she said, "see, it is like that--what we give. It is
like that." And she tossed the earth away.
"It does not seem like that to those others."
"No, thank God, it does not. But to one's self it is the mere
luxury of self-indulgence, and the realisation of it sometimes
tempts one to be even a trifle morbid. Don't you see," a
sudden thrill in her voice startled him, "they are on the
roadside everywhere all over the world."
"Yes. All over the world."
"Once when I was a child of ten I read a magazine article
about the suffering millions and the monstrously rich, who were
obviously to blame for every starved sob and cry. It almost
drove me out of my childish senses. I went to my father and
threw myself into his arms in a violent fit of crying. I clung
to him and sobbed out, `Let us give it all away; let us give
it all away and be like other people!' "
"What did he say?"
"He said we could never be quite like other people. We
had a certain load to carry along the highway. It was the
thing the whole world wanted and which we ourselves wanted
as much as the rest, and we could not sanely throw it away. It
was my first lesson in political economy and I abhorred it. I
was a passionate child and beat furiously against the stone walls
enclosing present suffering. It was horrible to know that they
could not be torn down. I cried out, `When I see anyone who
is miserable by the roadside I shall stop and give him everything
he wants--everything!' I was ten years old, and thought
it could be done."
"But you stop by the roadside even now."
"Yes. That one can do."
"You are two strong creatures and you draw each other,"
Penzance had said. "Perhaps you drew each other across seas.
Who knows?"
Coming to West Ways on a chance errand he had, as it
were, found her awaiting him on the threshold. On her part
she had certainly not anticipated seeing him there, but--when
one rides far afield in the sun there are roads towards which
one turns as if answering a summoning call, and as her horse
had obeyed a certain touch of the rein at a certain point her
cheek had felt momentarily hot.
Until later, when the "picking" had fairly begun, the kilns
would not be at work; but there was some interest even now
in going over the ground for the first time.
"I have never been inside an oast house," she said; "Bolter
is going to show me his, and explain technicalities."
"May I come with you?" he asked.
There was a change in him. Something had lighted in his
eyes since the day before, when he had told her his story of
Red Godwyn. She wondered what it was. They went together
over the place, escorted by Bolter. They looked into
the great circular ovens, on whose floors the hops would be
laid for drying, they mounted ladder-like steps to the upper
room where, when dried, the same hops would lie in soft, light
piles, until pushed with wooden shovels into the long "pokes"
to be pressed and packed into a solid marketable mass. Bolter
was allowed to explain the technicalities, but it was plain that
Mount Dunstan was familiar with all of them, and it was he
who, with a sentence here and there, gave her the colour of
things.
"When it is being done there is nearly always outside a
touch of the sharp sweetness of early autumn," he said "The
sun slanting through the little window falls on the pale yellow
heaps, and there is a pungent scent of hops in the air which is
rather intoxicating."
"I am coming later to see the entire process," she answered.
It was a mere matter of seeing common things together and
exchanging common speech concerning them, but each was so
strongly conscious of the other that no sentence could seem
wholly impersonal. There are times when the whole world is
personal to a mood whose intensity seems a reason for all
things. Words are of small moment when the mere sound
of a voice makes an unreasonable joy
"There was that touch of sharp autumn sweetness in the
air yesterday morning," she said. "And the chaplets of briony
berries that look as if they had been thrown over the hedges
are beginning to change to scarlet here and there. The wild
rose-haws are reddening, and so are the clusters of berries on
the thorn trees and bushes."
"There are millions of them," Mount Dunstan said, "and
in a few weeks' time they will look like bunches of crimson
coral. When the sun shines on them they will be wonderful
to see."
What was there in such speeches as these to draw any two
nearer and nearer to each other as they walked side by side--
to fill the morning air with an intensity of life, to seem to
cause the world to drop away and become as nothing? As
they had been isolated during their waltz in the crowded
ballroom at Dunholm Castle, so they were isolated now. When
they stood in the narrow green groves of the hop garden, talking
simply of the placing of the bins and the stripping and
measuring of the vines, there might have been no human thing
within a hundred miles--within a thousand. For the first
time his height and strength conveyed to her an impression of
physical beauty. His walk and bearing gave her pleasure.
When he turned his red-brown eyes upon her suddenly she
was conscious that she liked their colour, their shape, the power
of the look in them. On his part, he--for the twentieth time--
found himself newly moved by the dower nature had bestowed
on her. Had the world ever held before a woman creature so
much to be longed for?--abnormal wealth, New York and Fifth
Avenue notwithstanding, a man could only think of folding
arms round her and whispering in her lovely ear--follies, oaths,
prayers, gratitude.
And yet as they went about together there was growing in
Betty Vanderpoel's mind a certain realisation. It grew in
spite of the recognition of the change in him--the new thing
lighted in his eyes. Whatsoever he felt--if he felt anything--
he would never allow himself speech. How could he? In
his place she could not speak herself. Because he was the
strong thing which drew her thoughts, he would not come to
any woman only to cast at her feet a burden which, in the
nature of things, she must take up. And suddenly she
comprehended that the mere obstinate Briton in him--even apart
from greater things--had an immense attraction for her. As
she liked now the red-brown colour of his eyes and saw beauty
in his rugged features, so she liked his British stubbornness and
the pride which would not be beaten.
"It is the unconquerable thing, which leads them in their
battles and makes them bear any horror rather than give in.
They have taken half the world with it; they are like bulldogs
and lions," she thought. "And--and I am glorying in it."
"Do you know," said Mount Dunstan, "that sometimes you
suddenly fling out the most magnificent flag of colour--as if
some splendid flame of thought had sent up a blaze?"
"I hope it is not a habit," she answered. "When one has a
splendid flare of thought one should be modest about it."
What was there worth recording in the whole hour they spent
together? Outwardly there had only been a chance meeting and a
mere passing by. But each left something with the other and each
learned something; and the record made was deep.
At last she was on her horse again, on the road outside the
white gate.
"This morning has been so much to the good," he said. "I
had thought that perhaps we might scarcely meet again this
year. I shall become absorbed in hops and you will no doubt
go away. You will make visits or go to the Riviera--or to
New York for the winter?"
"I do not know yet. But at least I shall stay to watch the
thorn trees load themselves with coral." To herself she was
saying: "He means to keep away. I shall not see him."
As she rode off Mount Dunstan stood for a few moments,
not moving from his place. At a short distance from the
farmhouse gate a side lane opened upon the highway, and as
she cantered in its direction a horseman turned in from it--
a man who was young and well dressed and who sat well a
spirited animal. He came out upon the road almost face to
face with Miss Vanderpoel, and from where he stood Mount
Dunstan could see his delighted smile as he lifted his hat in
salute. It was Lord Westholt, and what more natural than
that after an exchange of greetings the two should ride
together on their way! For nearly three miles their homeward
road would be the same.
But in a breath's space Mount Dunstan realised a certain
truth--a simple, elemental thing. All the exaltation of the
morning swooped and fell as a bird seems to swoop and fall
through space. It was all over and done with, and he understood
it. His normal awakening in the morning, the physical
and mental elation of the first clear hours, the spring of his
foot as he had trod the road, had all had but one meaning.
In some occult way the hypnotic talk of the night before had
formed itself into a reality, fantastic and unreasoning as it had
been. Some insistent inner consciousness had seized upon and
believed it in spite of him and had set all his waking being in
tune to it. That was the explanation of his undue spirits and
hope. If Penzance had spoken a truth he would have had a
natural, sane right to feel all this and more. But the truth
was that he, in his guise--was one of those who are "on the
roadside everywhere--all over the world." Poetically figurative
as the thing sounded, it was prosaic fact.
So, still hearing the distant sounds of the hoofs beating in
cheerful diminuendo on the roadway, he turned about and went
back to talk to Bolter.
