CHEDCOMBE
I will now finish telling you about the great hay-making day.
Toward
the end of the afternoon a lot of boys and girls began playing a game
which seemed to belong to the hayfield. Each one of the bigger boys
would twist up a rope of hay and run after a girl, and when he had
thrown it over her neck he could kiss her. Girls are girls the whole
world over, and it was funny to see how some of them would run like mad
to get away from the boys, and how dreadfully troubled they would be
when they was caught, and yet, after they had been kissed and the boys
had left them, they would walk innocently back to the players as if
they never dreamed that anybody would think of disturbing them.
At five o'clock everybody - farm hands, ladies, gentlemen,
school-children, and all - took tea together. Some were seated at long
tables made of planks, with benches at the sides, and others scattered
all over the grass. Miss Pondar and our maid Hannah helped to serve the
tea and sandwiches, and I was glad to see that Hannah wore her pointed
white cap and her black dress, for I had on my woollen travelling suit,
and I didn't want too much cart-before-the-horseness in my domestic
establishment.
After tea the work and the games began again, and as I think it is
always better for people to do what they can do best, I turned in and
helped clear away the tea-things, and after that I sat down by a female
person in black silk - and I am sure I didn't know whether she was the
lady of the manor or somebody else until I heard some h-words come out
in her talk, and then I knew she was the latter - and she told me ever
so much about the people in the village, and why the rector wasn't
there, on account of a dispute about the altar-cloths, and she was just
beginning to tell me about the doctor's wife sending her daughters to a
school that was much too high-priced for his practice, when I happened
to look across the field, and there, with the bar lady at the inn, with
her hat trimmed with pink, and the Marie Antoinette chambermaid, with
her hat trimmed with blue, was Jone, and they was all three raking
together, as comfortable and confiding as if they had been singing
hymns out of the same book.
Now, I thought I had been sitting still long enough, and so I snipped
off the rest of the doctor story and got myself across that field with
pretty long steps. When I reached the happy three I didn't say
anything, but went round in front of them and stood there, throwing a
sarcastic and disdainful glance upon their farming. Jone stopped
working, and wiped his face with his handkerchief, as if he was hot and
tired, but hadn't thought of it until just then, and the two girls they
stopped too.
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