Of Human Bondage
get up as early as that. You see, we have to set to work at six.”
“Of course he must get up early,” cried Athelny, “and he must work like
the rest of us. He’s got to earn his board. No work, no dinner, my
lad.”
“The children go down to bathe before breakfast, and they can give you
a call on their way back. They pass The Jolly Sailor.”
“If they’ll wake me I’ll come and bathe with them,” said Philip.
Jane and Harold and Edward shouted with delight at the prospect, and
next morning Philip was awakened out of a sound sleep by their bursting
into his room. The boys jumped on his bed, and he had to chase them out
with his slippers. He put on a coat and a pair of trousers and went
down. The day had only just broken, and there was a nip in the air; but
the sky was cloudless, and the sun was shining yellow. Sally, holding
Connie’s hand, was standing in the middle of the road, with a towel and
a bathing-dress over her arm. He saw now that her sun-bonnet was of the
colour of lavender, and against it her face, red and brown, was like an
apple. She greeted him with her slow, sweet smile, and he noticed
suddenly that her teeth were small and regular and very white. He
wondered why they had never caught his attention before.
“I was for letting you sleep on,” she said, “but they would go up and
wake you. I said you didn’t really want to come.”
“Oh, yes, I did.”
They walked down the road and then cut across the marshes. That way it
was under a mile to the sea. The water looked cold and gray, and Philip
shivered at the sight of it; but the others tore off their clothes and
ran in shouting. Sally did everything a little slowly, and she did not
come into the water till all the rest were splashing round Philip.
Swimming was his only accomplishment; he felt at home in the water; and
soon he had them all imitating him as he played at being a porpoise,
and a drowning man, and a fat lady afraid of wetting her hair. The
bathe was uproarious, and it was necessary for Sally to be very severe
to induce them all to come out.
“You’re as bad as any of them,” she said to Philip, in her grave,
maternal way, which was at once comic and touching. “They’re not
anything like so naughty when you’re not here.”
They walked back, Sally with her bright hair streaming over one
shoulder and her sun-bonnet in her hand, but when they got to the huts
Mrs. Athelny had already started for the hop-garden. Athleny, in a pair
of the oldest trousers anyone had ever worn, his jacket buttoned up to
show he had no shirt on, and in a wide-brimmed soft hat, was frying
kippers over a fire of sticks. He was delighted with himself: he looked
every inch a brigand. As soon as he saw the party he began to shout the
witches’ chorus from Macbeth over the odorous kippers.
“You mustn’t dawdle over your breakfast or mother will be angry,” he
said, when they came up.
And in a few minutes, Harold and Jane with pieces of bread and butter
in their hands, they sauntered through the meadow into the hop-field.
They were the last to leave. A hop-garden was one of the sights
connected with Philip’s boyhood and the oast-houses to him the most
typical feature of the Kentish scene. It was with no sense of
strangeness, but as though he were at home, that Philip followed Sally
through the long lines of the hops. The sun was bright now and cast a
sharp shadow. Philip feasted his eyes on the richness of the green
leaves. The hops were yellowing, and to him they had the beauty and the
passion which poets in Sicily have found in the purple grape. As they
walked along Philip felt himself overwhelmed by the rich luxuriance. A
sweet scent arose from the fat Kentish soil, and the fitful September
breeze was heavy with the goodly perfume of the hops. Athelstan felt
the exhilaration instinctively, for he lifted up his voice and sang; it
was the cracked voice of the boy of fifteen, and Sally turned round.
“You be quiet, Athelstan, or we shall have a thunderstorm.”
In a moment they heard the hum of voices, and in a moment more came
upon the pickers. They were all hard at work, talking and laughing as
they picked. They sat on chairs, on stools, on boxes, with their
baskets by their sides, and some stood by the bin throwing the hops
they picked straight into it. There were a lot of children about and a
good many babies, some in makeshift cradles, some tucked up in a rug on
the soft brown dry earth. The children picked a little and played a
great deal. The women worked busily, they had been pickers from
childhood, and they could pick twice as fast as foreigners from London.
They boasted about the number of bushels they had picked in a day, but
they complained you could not make money now as in former times: then
they paid you a shilling for five bushels, but now the rate was eight
and even nine bushels to the shilling. In the old days a good picker
could earn enough in the season to keep her for the rest of the year,
but now there was nothing in it; you got a holiday for nothing, and
that was about all. Mrs. Hill had bought herself a pianner out of what
she made picking, so she said, but she was very near, one wouldn’t like
to be near like that, and most people thought it was only what she
said, if the truth was known perhaps it would be found that she had put
a bit of money from the savings bank towards it.
The hoppers were divided into bin companies of ten pickers, not
counting children, and Athelny loudly boasted of the day when he would
have a company consisting entirely of his own family. Each company had
a bin-man, whose duty it was to supply it with strings of hops at their
bins (the bin was a large sack on a wooden frame, about seven feet
high, and long rows of them were placed between the rows of hops;) and
it was to this position that Athelny aspired when his family was old
enough to form a company. Meanwhile he worked rather by encouraging
others than by exertions of his own. He sauntered up to Mrs. Athelny,
who had been busy for half an hour and had already emptied a basket
into the bin, and with his cigarette between his lips began to pick. He
asserted that he was going to pick more than anyone that day, but
mother; of course no one could pick so much as mother; that reminded
him of the trials which Aphrodite put upon the curious Psyche, and he
began to tell his children the story of her love for the unseen
bridegroom. He told it very well. It seemed to Philip, listening with a
smile on his lips, that the old tale fitted in with the scene. The sky
was very blue now, and he thought it could not be more lovely even in
Greece. The children with their fair hair and rosy cheeks, strong,
healthy, and vivacious; the delicate form of the hops; the challenging
emerald of the leaves, like a blare of trumpets; the magic of the green
alley, narrowing to a point as you looked down the row, with the
pickers in their sun-bonnets: perhaps there was more of the Greek
spirit there than you could find in the books of professors or in
museums. He was thankful for the beauty of England. He thought of the
winding white roads and the hedgerows, the green meadows with their
elm-trees, the delicate line of the hills and the copses that crowned
them, the flatness of the marshes, and the melancholy of the North Sea.
He was very glad that he felt its loveliness. But presently Athelny
grew restless and announced that he would go and ask how Robert Kemp’s
mother was. He knew everyone in the garden and called them all by their
Christian names; he knew their family histories and all that had
happened to them from birth. With harmless vanity he played the fine
gentleman among them, and there was a touch of condescension in his
familiarity. Philip would not go with him.
“I’m going to earn my dinner,” he said.
“Quite right, my boy,” answered Athelny, with a wave of the hand, as he
strolled away. “No work, no dinner.”
CXIX
Philip had not a basket of his own, but sat with Sally. Jane thought it
monstrous that he should help her elder sister rather than herself, and
he had to promise to pick for her when Sally’s basket was full. Sally
was almost as quick as her mother.
“Won’t it hurt your hands for sewing?” asked Philip.
“Oh, no, it wants soft hands. That’s why women pick better than men. If
your hands are hard and your fingers all stiff with a lot of rough work
you can’t pick near so well.”
He liked to see her deft movements, and she watched him too now and
then with that maternal spirit of hers which was so amusing and yet so
charming. He was clumsy at first, and she laughed at him. When she bent
over and showed him how best to deal with a whole line their hands met.
He was surprised to see her blush. He could not persuade himself that
she was a woman; because he had known her as a flapper, he could not
help looking upon her as a child still; yet the number of her admirers
showed that she was a child no longer; and though they had only been
down a few days one of Sally’s cousins was already so attentive that
she had to endure a lot of chaffing. His name was Peter Gann, and he
was the son of Mrs. Athelny’s sister, who had married a farmer near
Ferne. Everyone knew why he found it necessary to walk through the
hop-field every day.
A call-off by the sounding of a horn was made for breakfast at eight,
and though Mrs. Athelny told them they had not deserved it, they ate it
very heartily. They set to work again and worked till twelve, when the
horn sounded once more for dinner. At intervals the measurer went his
round from bin to bin, accompanied by the booker, who entered first in
his own book and then in the hopper’s the number of bushels picked. As
each bin was filled it was measured out in bushel baskets into a huge
bag called a poke; and this the measurer and the pole-puller carried
off between them and put on the waggon. Athelny came back now and then
with stories of how much Mrs. Heath or Mrs. Jones had picked, and he
conjured his family to beat her: he was always wanting to make records,
and sometimes in his enthusiasm picked steadily for an hour. His chief
amusement in it, however, was that it showed the beauty of his graceful
hands, of which he was excessively proud. He spent much time manicuring
them. He told Philip, as he stretched out his tapering fingers, that
the Spanish grandees had always slept in oiled gloves to preserve their
whiteness. The hand that wrung the throat of Europe, he remarked
dramatically, was as shapely and exquisite as a woman’s; and he looked
at his own, as he delicately picked the hops, and sighed with
self-satisfaction. When he grew tired of this he rolled himself a
cigarette and discoursed to Philip of art and literature. In the
afternoon it grew very hot. Work did not proceed so actively and
conversation halted. The incessant chatter of the morning dwindled now
to desultory remarks. Tiny beads of sweat stood on Sally’s upper lip,
and as she worked her lips were slightly parted. She was like a rosebud
bursting into flower.
Calling-off time depended on the state of the oast-house. Sometimes it
was filled early, and as many hops had been picked by three or four as
could be dried during the night. Then work was stopped. But generally
the last measuring of the day began at five. As each company had its
bin measured it gathered up its things and, chatting again now that
work was over, sauntered out of the garden. The women went back to the
huts to clean up and prepare the supper, while a good many of the men
strolled down the road to the public-house. A glass of beer was very
pleasant after the day’s work.
The Athelnys’ bin was the last to be dealt with. When the measurer came
Mrs. Athelny, with a sigh of relief, stood up and stretched her arms:
she had been sitting in the same position for many hours and was stiff.