Part 45 (2/2)
The last film of standing crop fell away from before the monolith, and it reared up grim and gaunt, but sparkling with a thousand little points of light as the bright flecks in the stone caught the sun. Nicky, who had grown rather tired of his freak, undertaken to please Jimmy, brought it, to an end with the successful negotiation of the monolith, and, getting down, went to lift Jimmy also from his perch.
”Dinner-time,” he told him, and let him sit upon his shoulder, big boy as he was, to ride to the gate.
”Come along, father,” said Nicky, slipping one hand upon Ishmael's arm, and keeping the other folded over the slim brown ankles crossed against his chest; ”I promised Lissa I wouldn't let you tire yourself.”
They set off towards the house, the three of them, but it was Nicky who answered Jim's eager talk as they went, and Ishmael who in silence tried to answer his own thoughts. To one thing only he clung just then, with a blind, almost superst.i.tious, clinging, and that to his determination to taste every moment of this harvesting, to see that everything was done in the way he liked, to watch the rhythmic procession of it while yet he could say that it was all his own. Physically also he had not been the same man these months since the death of Archelaus. With his uncertainty of mind as to the whole meaning of life went a feeling of insecurity about everything. Often he had to keep a firm hold on himself not to cry aloud that the world was slipping, slipping....
When the corn was all built into the great arishmows that stood bowing towards each other like the giant dancers in some stately minuet, he was there to watch. All day he went from field to field and watched the strong young labourers building; those on the ground tossing to those on the stooks, while the air was full of a deep rustling. One man would crawl about on the growing mow, arranging each sheaf as it was tossed up to him, so that its feathery crown lay towards the centre, away from chance of rain. At last it was all finished--all the precious grain tucked away out of possible harm in the heart of the arishmows, save for the feathery bunch at the crest that fastened all off with a flourish.
It had been a lovely task, the building of the arishmows, for, like all work to do with the land, it was the perfection of rhythm, and this, added to the unending flow of tossing and packing, held always that lovely rustling of stalk and ear as an accompaniment of music to the action.
Not many days later and the stately arishmows were destroyed and the sheaves brought in on waggons and built into great stacks in the field which lay next to the farmyard, where the thres.h.i.+ng would take place.
There was a pile of the dredge-corn, another of deeply-golden oats, a third of the greyer-tinted wheat, which was a little smaller than the other two, though that also was as high as the roof of the barn.
In the cleared s.p.a.ce between the stacks the great steam thresher would be brought; but now the men who would help in that work were still all part of the weaving pattern of stacking; one man tossed from the high-piled waggon, another, on the highest point of the growing stack, caught it with his pitchfork and threw it on, with a sideways twist, to the man on the lower end who got further and further along as he packed the sheaves, so that the thrower had to increase the tangent of his twist at every throw. Each of the men caught and tossed and placed, always to the moment, with the unending flow of machinery. And again --so often before, but never so keenly as now--was Ishmael struck with the pattern of it all.... This could not surely be the only thing that moved so rhythmically towards harvest; this inevitable flow, this deeply necessary procession of events, of sowing and ripening, of cutting and building and thres.h.i.+ng, must surely hold its counterpart in the garnering of men's lives ...; or did they alone reap the whirlwind, and when the swirl of that was past, subside into formless dust?
CHAPTER VI
THREs.h.i.+NG
That day had come to which the whole of the farming year leads up--the day of the thres.h.i.+ng, when the grain is at last released from danger and made ready to be stored in barns, to be ground in mills. ”Guldise,” as it is still called in West Cornwall, is an epic occasion, when all the months, from the first breaking of the land to the piling of the reaped sheaves, culminate at the apex of achievement.
In the field, between the waiting stacks, was the thresher; the traction-engine which had dragged it there stood beyond, only harnessed to it now by the long driving-belt that would, when the time came, make of the thresher a living creature. Presently all the men began to arrive, not only the labourers who always worked on the Manor farm, but the men from the neighbouring farms, from those owned by Ishmael and from others, for every thres.h.i.+ng is a festival with a great dinner and refreshments in the field and good cheer, even for the crowds of children and stray dogs that always turn up out of nowhere. In the kitchen the maids were busy with the preparations for the dinner, and in the breakfast-room even Lissa, always late, was hurrying through her breakfast so as to go out and start work on the series of quick sketches she meant to do of the thresher at work and the groups around it.
Lissa was a young-looking woman for her thirty-five years, no more pretty than she had ever been, but graceful, and with a strong charm in her lazy voice and long grey eyes and in the mouth that was so like Georgie's, only less regular. Her chin and jaw had the clear sharpness of Ishmael's; she was far more like him both in character and aspect than the sweet round Ruth, and Ishmael had grown to feel more and more that no matter how long a time elapsed between the occasions when he and Lissa saw each other, yet they could always pick up where they had left off, that there was never need for more than half-sentences between them. She, who was supposed to be the selfish one of the family because she lived in London most of the year and seldom wrote--she was still the only member of the household who had known something was wrong with Ishmael. She had found him uncommunicative on the subject, but she watched him with her clear understanding eyes that always made him think her so restful.
”Come on, do Auntie Lissa!” urged Jim. ”It's begun; I can hear it.”
”So can I,” said Lissa drily; for the great moaning hum of the thresher filled the air, went on and on as it would all day except at food-times, sounding like some vast wasp held captive and booming unceasingly--some great dragon of a wasp, as Jimmy put it.
They went out together, but Lissa insisted on going to find grandpa first and helping him on with his light coat; then they all three went out across the farmyard and through the open gate into the field.
The thresher stood humming and palpitant, its great bulk painted a dull pinkish colour like a locust, but faded and stained with rust. Upon its trembling roof the piles of oats, thrown by the men on the stack alongside, showed a pure golden; above the sky was dazzlingly blue, and in it the white c.u.muli rode brilliantly. The men working on the top of the thresher showed bronzed against the luminous blue, their s.h.i.+rts as brightly white as the clouds, the shadows under their slouched hats lying soft and blue across their clear eyes.
Poised on the stacks the men were busy feeding the sheaves to the men on the thresher, who in their turn tilted them into the great concave drum in its hidden heart. From one end poured out steady streams of golden grain, into the hanging sacks that boys took away as they filled, bringing in their place empty sacks that hung limply for a minute and then began to fill, swelling and puffing out to sudden solidity. The sieves beneath the thresher shook back and forth, back and forth, tirelessly, while chaff poured away from the open jaws at the side in a fine dusty column of pale gold, from which the topmost husks blew up into the air, so that it was always filled with a whirling cloud that danced and gleamed in the sunlight like a swarm of golden bees.
At the far end of the thresher, away from the traction-engine, the fumbling lips of the shakers, mouthing in and out beneath their little penthouse, pushed out the beaten straw into the maw of an automatic trusser, which Ishmael had only bought that year and which he was watching eagerly. For one moment the formless tumble of straw, pushed out by those waggling wooden lips above, was lost in the trusser, then it shot forth below in bound bundles that had been made and tied by the hidden hands of the machinery within, to the never-ceasing wonder of the gaping children, who stared at the solemnly revolving spools of string in the little pigeon-holes on either side and from them back to where the string was perpetually disappearing, sucked into the interstices of the trusser, as though, if only they stared hard enough, they must eventually see how the miracle was accomplished. And from the ground yet more men picked up the bundles on their pitchforks and tossed them to men who were building the straw-ricks at the same time as the corn-stacks were diminis.h.i.+ng. Little boys bore away the chaff gathered into sacks or swept it into a golden pile, feather-soft, from which smoke-like whirls wreathed in the little breezes.
In line with the thresher stood the engine, looped to it by trembling curves of driving-belt, that wavered like a great black ribbon from the driving-wheel of the traction-engine to that of the thresher, and that showed a line of quivering light along its edge. A trail of dark smoke blew ceaselessly from the traction-engine, staining the blue of the sky, against which it faded and died away. The engine rocked a little unceasingly upon its wheels as it stood, even as the thresher did, and its governor whirled round and round like a demented spirit, so fast that its short arms with the blobs on their ends made a little dark circle in the air. A pool of steamy water lying in the gra.s.s beneath the waste-pipe gave off white wreaths that wavered upwards and fell again, while from a huge black b.u.t.t upon wheels the greedy boiler sucked up more and more through a coiling tube that glittered like a serpent.
It was dark, ugly, smelly, the traction-engine, but it was what endowed the murmurous thresher with life. In spite of its dirt and oil and dripping secretions, it kept going that wonderful life which was filling the world, the rising and falling hum, the streams of pouring grain, the swelling sacks, the great glossy bundles of straw, the blown column of chaff, the cloud of dancing golden magic bees that made of the air an element trans.m.u.ted, glorified.
With all the thres.h.i.+ngs he had seen, it seemed to Ishmael that he had still never seen any quite so wonderful, so radiant, so rich to eye and ear and nostril, as this; and to little Jimmy, who had never been there for guldise before, it was a golden miracle. He stood, silent for once, transfixed, fronting the wondrous monster who did so many different things at once with such perfect ease, never making a mistake or getting out of time....
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