Well-To-Do People Stopped Their Vehicles And Walked Out Into The
New Stubble.
Ladies came, farmers, men of low degree, everybody - all to
exchange a word or two with the workers.
These were so terribly in
earnest at the start they could scarcely acknowledge the presence even of
the squire. They felt themselves so important, and were so full, and so
intense and one-minded in their labour, that the great of the earth might
come and go as sparrows for aught they cared. More men and more men were
put on day by day, and women to bind the sheaves, till the vast field
held the village, yet they seemed but a handful buried in the tunnels of
the golden mine: they were lost in it like the hares, for as the wheat
fell, the shocks rose behind them, low tents of corn. Your skin or mine
could not have stood the scratching of the straw, which is stiff and
sharp, and the burning of the sun, which blisters like red-hot iron. No
one could stand the harvest-field as a reaper except he had been born and
cradled in a cottage, and passed his childhood bareheaded in July heats
and January snows. I was always fond of being out of doors, yet I used to
wonder how these men and women could stand it, for the summer day is
long, and they were there hours before I was up. The edge of the
reap-hook had to be driven by force through the stout stalks like a
sword, blow after blow, minute after minute, hour after hour; the back
stooping, and the broad sun throwing his fiery rays from a full disc on
the head and neck. I think some of them used to put handkerchiefs doubled
up in their hats as pads, as in the East they wind the long roll of the
turban about the head, and perhaps they would have done better if they
had adopted the custom of the South and wound a long scarf about the
middle of the body, for they were very liable to be struck down with such
internal complaints as come from great heat. Their necks grew black, much
like black oak in old houses. Their open chests were always bare, and
flat, and stark, and never rising with rounded bust-like muscle as the
Greek statues of athletes.
The breast-bone was burned black, and their arms, tough as ash, seemed
cased in leather. They grew visibly thinner in the harvest-field, and
shrunk together - all flesh disappearing, and nothing but sinew and muscle
remaining. Never was such work. The wages were low in those days, and it
is not long ago, either - I mean the all-year-round wages; the reaping was
piecework at so much per acre - like solid gold to men and women who had
lived on dry bones, as it were, through the winter. So they worked and
slaved, and tore at the wheat as if they were seized with a frenzy; the
heat, the aches, the illness, the sunstroke, always impending in the
air - the stomach hungry again before the meal was over, it was nothing.
No song, no laugh, no stay - on from morn till night, possessed with a
maddened desire to labour, for the more they could cut the larger the sum
they would receive; and what is man's heart and brain to money? So hard,
you see, is the pressure of human life that these miserables would have
prayed on their knees for permission to tear their arms from the socket,
and to scorch and shrivel themselves to charred human brands in the
furnace of the sun.
Does it not seem bitter that it should be so? Here was the wheat, the
beauty of which I strive in vain to tell you, in the midst of the flowery
summer, scourging them with the knot of necessity; that which should give
life pulling the life out of them, rendering their existence below that
of the cattle, so far as the pleasure of living goes. Without doubt many
a low mound in the churchyard - once visible, now level - was the sooner
raised over the nameless dead because of that terrible strain in the few
weeks of the gold fever. This is human life, real human life - no rest, no
calm enjoyment of the scene, no generous gift of food and wine lavishly
offered by the gods - the hard fist of necessity for ever battering man to
a shapeless and hopeless fall.
The whole village lived in the field; a corn-land village is always the
most populous, and every rood of land thereabouts, in a sense, maintains
its man. The reaping, and the binding up and stacking of the sheaves, and
the carting and building of the ricks, and the gleaning, there was
something to do for every one, from the 'olde, olde, very olde man,' the
Thomas Parr of the hamlet, down to the very youngest child whose little
eye could see, and whose little hand could hold a stalk of wheat. The
gleaners had a way of binding up the collected wheatstalks together so
that a very large quantity was held tightly in a very small compass. The
gleaner's sheaf looked like the knot of a girl's hair woven in and bound.
It was a tradition of the wheat field handed down from generation to
generation, a thing you could not possibly do unless you had been shown
the secret - like the knots the sailors tie, a kind of hand art. The
wheatstalk being thick at one end makes the sheaf heavier and more solid
there, and so in any manner of fastening it or stacking it, it takes a
rounded shape like a nine-pin; the round ricks are built thick in the
middle and lessen gradually toward the top and toward the ground. The
warm yellow of the straw is very pleasant to look at on a winter's day
under a grey sky; so, too, the straw looks nice and warm and comfortable,
thrown down thickly in the yards for the roan cattle.
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