Fabrio’s dreamy mood had gone and he was very gay, tossing the mattresses about and peering into all the dark corners of their bedchamber in search of rats or overlooked apples. Somewhere, under the same roof with him, was Sylvia, and the day after to-morrow he would ask her! Emilio dryly inquired why was he so cheerful.
“I am happy to be out of that thrice-cursed place.”
“
This
is not much of a place,” glancing about him. “They might have given us a proper room with decent beds. For seven years I have not slept upon a proper bed.”
Emilio meant a soft bed, not a clean one.
“They have not enough rooms, as thou knowest well. We shall be very comfortable here. Look!” and he brought out, from the shadowy corner where he had concealed it earlier in the day, a two-pound pot of redcurrant jelly. “I will bring bread away from the supper-table and to-night thou and I will have a feast.”
“Ah-ha!” Emilio nodded. “It is made by the
padrona
and will taste good. She cooks well. And to-morrow thou wilt go to Mass with this upon thy soul?”
Fabrio’s expression became confused and sorrowful, and he shook his head.
“To-morrow I shall not go to Mass,” he muttered, and pushed the jar back into its place of concealment. He would go to confession and Mass no more until Sylvia had promised to be his wife, for he feared the keen eyes of Father Francesco upon his happy face, and searching questions as to his state of mind and heart. When once Sylvia was betrothed to him he would go to Mass again, for Father Francis could not command him to renounce a girl, even if she were a
protestante
, and thus break her heart.
As for Sylvia’s heresies, he, Fabrio, would deal with them all in good time. She must give them up and become of the Faith, even as her husband was. His joyful expression returned, and he finished the spreading of the beds with a song from
Cavalleria Rusticana
.
He gave a last glance over the expanse of dim leafy country, rejoicing in the absence of hateful barbed wire, and drew in a breath of night air before he felt his way down the black narrow stairs behind Emilio, who was grumbling at the darkness.
He hoped to see Sylvia at supper-time, but Mrs. Hoadley had instructed everyone to take bread and cheese and draw a cup of tea from the brown pot standing on the range (which had been lit for the Saturday night baths) without troubling her, and had gone up to bed. The two Italians, Mary Parkes and Mr. Hoadley passed an hour or so of gossip with the door open to the twilight, but Sylvia too was tired, and had retired.
And the next day she had left for London before Fabrio was even awake. Poor chaps, said Mrs. Hoadley to her husband, it must be years since they had a lay-in, and he had rather grudgingly conceded that they need not be roused until eight o’clock. In any case, the Italians did not understand fully how to perform any of the tasks connected with the early milking because their own work had always been with the crops and soil, and Mary and Sylvia did the work before the latter left for London.
At home among her family, she threw herself into the loud discussions and chatter and noisy gossip with an interest she had not shown for weeks; vowing that she was sick and tired of the country, and only dying to get back to London and begin looking for work on the stage. Her brothers and sisters applauded, sitting about the kitchen and scattering cigarette ash on their dirty dressing-gowns while they coughed and argued and waved their arms about. The brown houses loured against the pale hot sky, and the ice-cream man’s bell rang in the Sunday hush as he pedalled slowly down the drowsing streets. Once or
twice
the face of Fabrio came before Sylvia’s eyes with a sensation of pain, and she laughed the louder and argued more fiercely.
The day passed quietly at the farm and the threatened thunder kept off. Fabrio was disappointed that Sylvia was not there, but the morning passed pleasantly enough for him in gossiping and dozing and roaming about, and in the afternoon he helped Emilio and Mary Parkes to put finishing touches to the long shed where the Harvest Supper was to be held. Two unemployed men from Horsham had been engaged to help with the work, and Mrs. Hoadley flatly refused to entertain them in the farmhouse kitchen, fearing that they would stealthily take note of the house’s locks and bolts and bars while eating their Harvest Supper, with future burglarious visits in mind. Mr. Hoadley thought she was an ass but humoured her.
Mary Parkes was shyly taken by Fabrio’s looks, and once or twice tried to draw him into conversation, but he answered politely and without real interest and although he worked industriously his manner was absent, for all his thoughts were with Sylvia who, to-morrow, would be his.
About ten o’clock she came down the path between the snapdragons and marigolds in the twilight, swinging in one hand a new hat made for her by her mother, and whistling.
“Hullo, all! Poo, is it hot!”
“I hope you’ve had your supper, Sylvia, for there’s only two sandwiches left and Emilio’s just finished the last of the lemonade,” warned Mrs. Hoadley, peering desolately over plates and into jugs.
“Had some in town, but I could always find room for a bit more; you know me. Poo! I’m nothing but a grease-spot, I had to walk from the station,” and she sat down heavily upon the warm brick doorstep and sighed, pushing back her hair and arranging her dress over her knees. She smiled brilliantly upon the company (which had now started an earnest and most interesting discussion as to why the 9.10 bus from Horsham
did
not stop at the crossroads, conveniently for late returners to the farm) and offered to the party her cigarettes.
Fabrio was seated in the kitchen beyond the last faint light from the sky, and his eyes were fixed yearningly upon her, waiting for their own happy secret smile, but she did not look at him directly—or perhaps she did, but he could not see clearly in that dim light—and she only spoke to him amidst the general conversation, and when she took her candle and hurried upstairs at the end of the evening she gave him no more than the hasty “Good night” which she threw over her shoulder at everyone.
That sent him to bed with a slight heartache, and the night was so hot that even he, used to the heat of Mediterranean nights, could not sleep. He and Emilio lay for some time smoking and talking in whispers; then they ate a pound of redcurrant jam and became so ragingly thirsty that Emilio had to make a perilous journey down to the kitchen for water, and tripped over the cat with much uproar and reassuring shouts in Italian to Mr. Hoadley.
NO ONE HAD
slept well and everyone was irritable and pale as they assembled to begin the day’s work. The two unemployed men arrived and their outraged comments upon the earliness of the hour were silenced with a cup of tea, while Sylvia and Mary hurried out to get the cows in and milked, and Emilio and Fabrio were instructed by Mr. Hoadley to take the two new men down to the Big Field and lift the ground-sheet off the tractor attached to the harvester which he had borrowed from a large farm nearby.
The wheat stood up shadowy and still in the warm grey light. The sun was not yet risen, and the men’s boots, already black with dew from their walk across the meads, soon ran with
water
as they moved about. There was not a ripple of wind, and the night-scents of wet grasses and the faint strawy breath from the wheat lingered on the air.
“Going to be a storm,” said Spray, one of the unemployed men, pausing to wipe his forehead and look up at the louring sky.
“Do not say so!” retorted Emilio crossly. Fabrio said nothing. He was not very happy but now, for the first time for days, when he saw it spread before him waiting to be reaped, he was not thinking of Sylvia, but only of this harvest, and how to get it in. A harvest was the same everywhere, no matter whether it was olives or grapes or wheat, and a storm threatened it in Liguria exactly as it did in Sussex. He hauled the ground-sheet off the tractor in great folds and packed it into a square, with energy. There was no time to be lost.
“What’s your union, mate?” inquired the other elderly man with mild sarcasm, sitting down on the slip-gate and lighting a cigarette. “Where’s the ’urry?” Fabrio did not answer but his lip curled. This fool was born in a town, he thought.
When the reaper was fixed to the tractor and the machine was ready to start, they went back for breakfast. It was already seven o’clock, and all the others were seated round the table eating hastily and almost in silence. Sylvia’s pale face wore a sulky expression and she barely glanced at Fabrio, who ate a thick slice of cold fat bacon and drank off some tea with relish, after darting one loving but absent glance at her. He was eager to be out and at work. Emilio was not, and had to be ticked off for lingering.
At eight the noise of the engine broke the stillness in the waiting field and, with revolving flails, the reaper moved forward. The first swathe fell, pulling down with it one cornflower and a purple vetch, and lay spread. The harvest had begun.
Soon the harvesters were moving in, along the edge of the bronze wheat under the grey sky, stooping and gathering up the heavy sheaves. Down drooped the heads as they were lifted, a
sure
sign that the ears were fall of corn. Fabrio was skilled at the stacking, and deftly, swiftly set each shock in position, and Mary Parkes, who followed him, was almost as expert, but Sylvia, who came after, let the wheat slide apart and topple over. Emilio was instructing the unemployed men, who maintained their air of outraged surprise at everything that happened, and Mr. Hoadley drove the tractor.
Presently Alda and the children came down by the hedge, all wearing trousers and slightly too ready to laugh and make a game of the occasion. Mr. Hoadley gave them a brief wave, Mary Parkes straightened herself for a moment with hands on hips to smile at Meg, and Alda, sobering her manner to meet the general feeling, crossed over to Fabrio to watch how he set the sheaves, with the stubble pricking through the soles of her soft shoes.
“Hullo, Mrs. Lucie-Browne! This is quite like work! You wait!” called Sylvia. “Come on, Jenny. I’ll show you how to do it.”
After a few failures Alda was setting the sheaves almost as neatly as Mary, but soon she began to wish that she had worn long sleeves like the others. The sharp straws pricked her inner arm as she lifted them and soon it showed a scraped expanse of skin. Then her back began to ache, and she was very thirsty, sweat ran down into her eyes, insects settled on her face, and the stubbly furrows were increasingly uneasy to tread. Nevertheless, she was enjoying the work. There was satisfaction in setting each sheaf correctly, in seeing the heavy notched heads loll over into position and settle; in hearing, as if from afar, the stutter of the tractor’s engine as it moved across the field, while all about her the pale gold shimmer coming up from the stubble merged into a dreamlike glare which lulled her senses.
Suddenly the glare brightened, and a warmth caressed her bending back.
“The sun!”
“Oh goody!”
“Now there will be no storm!”
“Look, Mudder, the sun!”
Everyone straightened their aching backs for a minute, standing upright and shading their eyes against the splendour rolling out between rapidly dissolving banks of cloud. Overhead the sky was already a dense blue.
By noon the day was brilliant, and two-thirds of the Big Field was reaped, while about half the wheat was in stook. The unskilled workers had kept steadily to their task, the elderly men because they had to in order to earn their wages, and Alda as a point of honour, though she excused the children when they began to complain of weariness and heat. Meg did so after about twenty minutes and went off with Mrs. Hoadley. Louise was the next to wander away, leaving a scattered sheaf, and she went down to the little pool at the corner of the field to lie in the long grass and watch the moorhens amidst the bladderwort and water violets, but Jenny kept steadily on, and when the party broke off at noon for lunch Mr. Hoadley brought a smile of pleasure to her brown face by calling her a proper little Land Girl.
They were seated in the spreading shade of the Big Meadow’s one tree, a majestic oak whose branches stretched out a considerable distance across the waving wheat, while the roots formed little seats for those who despised comfort and ignored insects. The shade was very grateful, for all the land now shimmered in sunny light and the distant hills were black blue in the haze. Everyone was aching, burning with the sun and scratched with the straw.
Mr. Hoadley had gone back to the farm to have lunch with his wife, and Emilio, who was not so deft at the stooking as Fabrio, had been sent to bring down the jugs of lemonade and the basket of sandwiches. Now everybody was eating heartily or awaiting their turn with one of the two cups, while the girls had removed their knotted caps to let the damp hair blow loose on their brows. Alda had at one point in the morning’s work impatiently
grasped
her curls, screwed them up, and pinned them on top of her head. Everyone appeared hot and dishevelled except Fabrio, whose face only deepened in golden hue as the sun mounted higher and the heat increased, whose eyes looked blue and quiet under his straw hat’s ragged brim. He lay comfortably on his elbow, munching steadily at an enormous sandwich and staring at the far hills. Hours of heavy labour in the heat followed by spells of utter idleness were natural to the Italian, and he was happy. Now, too, that the threatened storm had rolled away and half the harvest was reaped, his attention could turn fully to Sylvia. Slowly turning his head, he looked away from the hills that reminded him of home, and towards his girl.