Читать книгу Susan Spray - Sheila Kaye-Smith - Страница 3

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§ 1

Susan Spray was born at Copthorne on the Surrey and Sussex borders, in the year 1834. Her father was a poor field labourer working on a farm known as Pickdick. He had married early, and at Susan's birth was only twenty-two. He and his wife Ruth were inordinately proud of their first child, who was a pretty little girl, small-boned and graceful, quite an elegant little lady compared with the roundabout red-faced children of the neighbours. Ruth Spray used to call her "My lady," and pretend she was very grand; she made her two little calico dresses, one pink and one blue, working them with feather-stitching, as she could not afford lace.

By the time Susan had grown out of them, which was not till she was three, there were two little sisters waiting to wear them, Tamar and Ruth. Tamar was dark and delicate like Susan, but Ruth was fat and pippin-faced, a great grabber and screamer and roller in the mud. Eighteen months later came Aaron the first boy, and the parents were trustful enough in God's providence to be proud and glad. They were still proud when Elis and William, the twins, were born in the spring of 1840, that hungry year, but not so glad, for life was already becoming difficult in the little cottage known as the Boot.

Adam Spray earned nine shillings a week on Pickdick, and had besides his cottage, a hundred faggots a year and free gleaning. It was not a bad wage for a man in his position, but it was scarcely enough to feed his family of eight in those hard times. Ruth Spray made puddings of flour and water for dinner, and on Sundays there might be a rabbit for them all. At first they had kept a pig, which they had fed on a swill made of scraps, also hens, which they fattened on the sharps and meal left over when their gleanings were ground at the mill. But now there were no scraps for pigs—every piece that was left over went to make the flour dumplings more nourishing; and as there was no money to pay the miller, they had to let him have the offal of the grain instead.

Those were hard days for field-labouring men. The Corn Laws drove up the price of flour to three shillings a stone, and other articles of food were dear in proportion. The Game Laws also were strictly enforced, and at Copthorne it was a crime even to snare a coney. None the less, Adam Spray put out his snare in the field down by the Spinney, for without it his family would have starved. Pickdick was not an over-prosperous farm, and the men did not receive those bounties of skim-milk, dung, and straw that would have made all the difference between the struggle of failure and the struggle of success. The Manor, besides, did not play its usual bountiful part in the neighbourhood. In some districts a whole village would be clothed by the Squire, while in others every inhabitant might expect two quarts a week of soup from his kitchen in winter. But at Copthorne the Squire was indifferent and much away from home. He was, moreover, a widower and a childless man; there was no "young ladies" to visit and report cases of poverty. The villagers and labourers on the farms must shift as best they could.

The Sprays were under a further disadvantage in that they did not belong to the Established Church. This would have secured them a certain amount of charity, but they could make no claim. They belonged to a small, obscure sect known as the Colgate Brethren, followers of one Hur Colgate who had established a new religion at Horsham towards the end of the eighteenth century, and whose disciples now amounted to some two or three hundred.

There was a little group of them at Copthorne, but they were miserably poor, being all men of the labouring class, and could do but little for one another. They met every Sunday in a barn at Horn Reed, and prayed together, breaking bread. A portion of Scripture was read aloud by young Backshell, the cowman at Horn Reed, who was the only one of the Brethren gifted with letters. The others could neither read nor write, and depended entirely on this weekly meeting for their knowledge of the Word of God. After this they thirsted exceedingly, and it was the hope and endeavour of the parents that their children should attend school, so that they should be able to comfort their families in due course with reading from the Sacred Word.

§ 2

It had been decided for some time that Susan Spray should go to school. There was a school in the village called Sarah's School, kept by an old maiden lady, who for a penny a week taught the children to read and write and reckon. The Colgate Brethren had a special fund for schooling, so that if one family found itself unable to pay the weekly fees, the children did not have to be taken away. But as children of three years old and upwards could earn sixpence a week scaring birds or picking stones off the fields, the problem of their schooling was not so simple as it appeared.

At first the Sprays had talked big.

"I'll have my lady trained as a scholard," said Ruth, "then she can read the Book to us in the evenings while there is light. I won't have her going out into the fields with the rough children. She shall be brought up seemly, and not go out to service till she is ten, and then only to such a place as we shall choose."

But after Tamar and Ruth were born she did not talk so big.

"Three liddle women, and two of them ladies, how am I to bring them up?"

Then when Aaron came, and she and her husband were proud and glad because a man was born into the world, she said:

"We'll have the lad taught his book, and the girl children shall work for us."

And when the twins came she said:

"We can't afford to keep so many idle mouths. The girls must go into the fields."

So the three idle mouths, aged respectively five, four and three, went out to earn between them eighteen pence a week. Tamar and Ruth were taken on at Pickdick, to weed and scare, and fetch and carry for the chicken girl. Susan, being older, went to a remoter farm known as Beggars Bush, to which she toddled on her slow fat legs alone every day at morning-light. She was given her dinner to take with her, the usual flour dumpling tied up in a handkerchief, because the fields where she worked were often too far from the farm-house for her to be fed at the master's table. She would be given a rattle, with which she would squat amidst the grain, suddenly starting up to shake it at the predatory birds; or she would be given a basket, which she must fill with stones, or a sack to fill with weeds. There were often other children with her, or women, stooping along the furrows; but when she scared birds she was quite alone.

She was a little frightened of the birds, of the soft stroke of their wings in the air, and the flocks in which they travelled, settling suddenly, to rise again when she sprang out with her rattle. Suppose, that, instead of flying away, they flew into her face! . . . Every day she thought they might. She did not know that it was different flocks of them that came. She thought it was always the same flock—the same sparrows, the same jackdaws, the same finches—and that they must soon come to know her well and be no longer afraid of her and her rattle. She did not like her job of scaring birds; she was happier stoning or weeding. But because she was so little, and slow at filling her sack or basket, she was given more scaring than stoning or weeding to do.

Day after day she went up to the big ten-acre field at Beggars Bush, and sat herself down with her rattle. She wore an old brown cotton frock, the colour of earth, for the gay pink and blue had long grown too small for her. She would play games and tell tales to herself, to pass the time, and drive away the fears that lurked in the field corners, and sometimes came rushing out to her on wings. The source of both her games and her tales was the same, the Book she heard read on Sundays by the cowman of Horn Reed.

It was her only contact with the bright world of imagination as apart from the hard world of everyday realities. Not that she believed for one moment that this world was not as hard and solid in its facts as the world in which she lived. To the Colgate Brethren every word of Holy Writ was a solemn, literal, uncontrovertible fact, whether it referred to dogma, religion, history or astronomy. Not one jot or tittle, capital or comma of the Authorized Version could fail. But somehow the stories she heard read on Sundays, in that slow voice, in the loft of Horn Reed's barn, had about them a glamour which was not of this world. Adam and Eve sat together naked in a garden like the garden of the Manor, with smooth green lawns and peaches on the wall; but the Lord walked with them there in the cool of the evening, big and shining and terrible, as he never walked at the Manor. And now an angel with a flaming sword, turning this way and that, stood at the gate of the garden, shutting it to poor Adam and to all the people on earth, who must earn their bread in the sweat of their brows. . . . She saw the red, shining foreheads, the gouts of sweat, every day at the Farm, and on her father when he came home in the evening. She had felt the sweat running down her own body, when she staggered and stooped at the weeding, and she had wondered if ever that garden gate could be found again, and perhaps found unguarded, so that they might all slip in for a little while and rest themselves in the shade.

But God had said, "You shall never return—cursed is the ground for your sakes." He had also said, "in sorrow ye shall bring forth," and Susan had seen the sorrow as well as the sweat. She was too young to remember the births of Tamar and Ruth; but when Aaron had been born, she had stood by the bedroom door watching, with her finger in her mouth, till the midwife had driven her out of the cottage. And though, when the twins Elis and William were born a neighbour had taken charge of her all day, at night she had been sent home, and her father and mother then had been like Adam and Eve, her father with the sweat running from his brow, and her mother crying out in sorrow.

Then God had said to the serpent: "I will put enmity between thy seed and the woman's seed; it shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel." Susan thought much about this as she sat in the high field corner at Beggars Bush, for she was always expecting a snake to run at her out of the grass. She had heard of adders being found on other parts of the farm, and once she had seen a little boy with a queer purple-mouthed wound on his foot, where it was said a viper had stung him . . . bruised his heel . . . he must be the woman's seed in the Book, and it had been explained to her that this seed was Christ the Lord. As she looked at little Dave, a great awe and reverence seized her, for she felt that this was the little Christ who should come again.

"And did you bruise his head?" she whispered.

"Surelye. I wallopped un wud a stick, so as all un's böans wur busted."

Sitting down among the grain with her rattle, Susan thought much about the little boy who was the coming Christ and had bruised the serpent's head. She thought beside of other good tales in the Book—of Jacob, who tied the furry skin over his hands, and of Esau crying out with a loud voice, "Bless me also, O my father," of the wrestling angel who with his finger put the Patriarch's thigh out of joint, of poor Joseph, at the bottom of a well, of Moses who saw God burning in a bush and David who played on the harp, and sang to his father's sheep, and threw stones at giants, just as Susan and the other children threw them at Christopher Kemp who was six and a half feet tall and wandering in his wits.

Of the New Testament she did not know so much, for the Brethren read chiefly in the Old and in the Book of Revelation. "And there fell a great star from heaven . . . and the name of the star is called Wormwood, and the third part of the waters . . . were made bitter." Susan herself had seen that star slide red and glowing down the still heavens one November night, and the next morning she had cried that the water tasted bitter, and it had been bitter for days, though no one would say so but herself. That was the terrible part of the Bible—bits of it were always coming true. It was read only on Sundays, and had all happened very long ago, but the fields round Copthorne rustled with the tread of Patriarchs, and the woods were worn in tunnels by angels' wings, and garden gates were closed with fire, and down the heavens travelled lost apocalyptic stars.

§ 3

One still and sultry day Susan sat in the ten-acre field, watching a big cloud swag up from Dellenden. The air was thick and smelled of oats, for the breath of the field could not rise more than a few feet into the heavy noon. Susan was very hot, and her dress stuck to her shoulders. She felt afraid, as she so often felt, alone in the field with the birds; and now the thunder was coming with the cloud—she could hear it muttering far away behind the woods. She had always been afraid of thunder, but there were few storms in that especial piece of country, and never once had one come upon her when she was alone in the field.

She watched it draw nearer, praying that it would pass aside and not shadow her there in the field. The cloud was black like a great wing, but under it were queer and horrible gleams like fire. It came rolling and muttering towards her, and as it came she thought of some words she had heard read in the meeting last Sunday: "Seven thunders uttered their voices." The Bible was full of thunder. She thought of Sinai towering up to heaven, and the thick darkness where God was.

Perhaps God was in this cloud coming up muttering towards her. Perhaps he was going to speak to her in the field with a voice of seven thunders. She remembered how he had gone before the children of Israel into the wilderness as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. This was very likely the pillar of cloud—and she could see the fire under it, its glowing night-side. She felt her skin crawl with terror as it came nearer. God was breathing all the air there was—He left none for her. She suffocated and screamed.

In answer to her cry a flock of starlings flew up out of the corn, but she forgot to sound her rattle. The air seemed full of evil wings. How she wished she was at home, in the crowded comfortable shelter of the Boot, able to hide her face under her mother's arm, even if her mother's other arm were lifted in chastisement over a runagate daughter. Never, never, she knew, must she leave the field where she was paid sixpence a week to sit and scare the birds in rain or shine, storm or calm. Her frock would soon dry on her, for it was her only garment. She had been wet through many times before. But she could not bear the thunder, and now the awful cloud was darkening all the sky, and a sudden wind rushed out from under it, more terrifying than the airless calm, screaming in the hedge and rustling in the corn like a thousand wings.

She cowered down by the ditch; the noon had become dark, and when a fork of lightning split it all the terror of her six years seemed to concentrate in one throe. She no longer feared consciously the visitation of God—she required no Bible memories to intensify the moment, for all the primitive fear of generations was alive in her, the little savage alone with a storm. She was just a child, frantically afraid of thunder, and yet also frantically afraid of the blows which she knew would greet her unauthorized return. Through a gap in the hedge, she could see rising from the valley the chimney of the Boot, with the smoke of it blown out in a low stream over the fields. She began to cry. She was a working woman, earning a weekly wage, but she was only six, and her whole being longed for home and her mother.

She had been threatened with the direst penalties if she came back before her day's work was over, but now all such considerations were swallowed up in a more instinctive fear. Her mother's and her father's blows were well known, but this storm was the unknown, something worse than mere pain and terror and violence.

As the rain began to fall, hissing upon the leaves and grass, while the wind screamed in gusts, and the lightning flared suddenly out of the noon's night, a little figure could be seen running along the hedge, along the field track and down the lane, its mouth opened in screams that the wind and the thunder swallowed into their din.

§ 4

Susan Spray was at that moment not so much a little girl as the battlefield of two fears. One fear, the fear of the storm, had triumphed to the extent of driving her home in the teeth of the other fear that waited for her there. Her parents were not unkind, but they had no time for any discipline other than blows, and there must be discipline in a family of eight, living on nine shillings a week with bread at two shillings a loaf. As the little straw-thatched shape of the Boot cottage came darkling through the rain, with its scurry of down-driven chimney smoke, the second fear, the fear of blows, began to predominate. She realized that as it was after twelve o'clock her father might be at home, and she trembled at the thought of his anger when he heard she had forsaken her post in the field at Beggars Bush. Perhaps she would be turned away for this, and her wages lost. . . . Most certainly her father would beat her.

She faltered, standing there in the lane with her soaked dress blowing against her body. Which was she afraid of more—her father, the storm, or God? The three seemed to become one in a terrible trinity. Whichever way she turned they waited for her. Then suddenly the lightning rent the sky in two, the heavens split with a crash like a falling city. That decided her. She ran into the Boot.

Her mother was stooping over the fire, stirring something in the pot. Her father sat by the table, mending the string of his boot. Baby Elis slept at one end of the cradle, his feet tucked into the side of Baby William who slept at the other. The little room was full of wood smoke. It smelled stuffy and safe and comfortable. Susan began to cry loudly.

At her entrance both her parents started round.

"Why, it's Susan!" cried her father. "Where do you come from, maid?"

"I'm scared! Oh, I'm scared!" wailed poor Susan.

"She's run in from the field," cried her mother. "She's run in from where she should ought to have stayed. A fine terrification there'll be about all this."

"I couldn't help it, Mam. I was scared. Oh, don't hit me."

"I shall hit you—a stout girl like you, running away like a babe from a bit of thunder. Mus' Relph ull turn you away fur this, and we'll be sixpence a week the poorer, and flour's gone up a penny . . . take that, and that."

Susan screamed with all her might.

"I couldn't help it. I'm scared—justabout scared."

"Out you go!" cried her father. "Git back before they find you're gone."

Susan threw herself upon the floor.

"I won't go—I won't—don't make me. Oh, I tell you I'm scared. The Lord is in that field."

"The Lord!"

Both her parents stared, and her father, who had lifted his hand to strike her, dropped his arm.

"Yes, the Lord. I saw Him. He spoke to me. Oh, I'm scared."

She remembered how the cloud coming up from Dellenden had been the cloudy pillar in which the Lord had gone before Israel out of Egypt. As she remembered, it seemed as if she had really seen the Lord.

"The child has seen the Lord," said her father.

"I don't believe it," said her mother, "'tis but an idle tale she tells to save her skin."

"'Tis true—'tis true," cried Susan. "I saw the Lord coming up to me on the cloud over the trees."

"What was He like?" asked her father.

"Oh, oh, cloudy—tur'ble—all red and fiery, with sarching eyes."

As she spoke she seemed to be telling of something she had really seen. She, little Susan Spray, had seen the Lord sitting upon His throne—a great, cloudy, fiery throne that had come riding up across the sky like a swing-boat at a fair, and in His hand He had held a bunch of lightnings, and He had spoken to her in a big voice—"Go home, Susan Spray."

Yes, that was it, the Lord had told her to go home. He did not hold with her sitting up there in the wet among all the wicked birds. Her father would not beat her now he knew that the Lord had sent her home. She saw him fastening up his belt that he had begun to loose. . . . Her mother looked at her still with doubtful eyes, and she suddenly felt a great anger against her mother for not believing her.

"'Tis true, 'tis true," she shouted. "The Lord came up the field, and sent me home."

"Why should He send you home?" asked Ruth Spray.

"Maybe He's other work for her to do," said Adam. "Maybe we should ought to send her to school to learn the Book."

"You know we can't afford it."

"The Brethren will help us. If this child has seen a holy vision, then it's their business to have her taught the Book."

"I don't believe she's seen no holy vision. 'Tis just a child's lies."

"Why shouldn't she have seen a holy vision? 'Tis well known among our Brethren as some of the saints are gifted with Sight. Hur Colgate saw an angel standing in the furnace at Huggett's oast, coming up through the drying floor, like smoke. And the Lord spoke to him, too, out of a tree by Orznash. 'Tis long since we've any of us dreamed dreams or seen visions, and if this little maid here has sight, 'twill powerfully refresh the Brethren."

So her parents argued about her, and questioned her a good deal more. But Susan stuck to her tale, which by now she entirely believed herself, and in the end her mother kissed her, and took off her damp dress, and rubbed her with a rag, and put her into a sack with holes for her arms and legs till her dress was dried out ready for her to wear again.

The rain had stopped, but they did not send her back into the field.

§ 5

On Sunday she was made to tell her story to the Brethren, assembled for worship in the barn at Horn Reed. There were nineteen of them all told, a poor little company, established by Hur Colgate when he founded the Church in Copthorne and then moved on in his proud mysterious way to other villages beyond. Only about four of those present remembered him, old grandfather Pitfold and his missus, and John and Susan Borrer, an old couple who according to rumour had once lived with the gipsies. To the rest his name was legend, and his teaching dogma, which they received on the authority of the elders, though for the matter of that it was all to be found in the Book by them as could read. In numbers the congregation had slightly decreased in the fifty years since its establishment, and it held no communication with other congregations of the same sect, though it was aware that such existed in Horsham (that Rome of the sects), in Shamley, in High Hurst Wood, in East Grinstead and elsewhere in the country of the Surrey and Sussex borders.

The special tenets of the Colgate Brethren were akin to High Calvinism, from which their founder had seceded. They stressed in addition their belief in the imminent end of the world, in the sinfulness of riches (which must have comforted them much), and in the need of begetting other Colgates, for it was a doctrine of the sect that, after the first converts, called apostles, birth into it must be literal as well as spiritual, and new members could be received only through natural processes of generation. It was therefore a great slur on a Colgate to be childless, as this showed the Almighty's unwillingness to accept him as a Gate of Salvation; though it must be said that few of the Brethren had incurred this mark of divine displeasure. The labouring race of the Surrey and Sussex borders was a fertile race, and the smallness of the company was due rather to lapses and migrations in later life than to any lack of births.

Susan was glad that her mother was not to be present on this great occasion. Ruth Spray could not leave her twin boys, who were still at the breast, so Adam brought the rest of the family, Susan in brown and Tamar in pink and Ruth in blue, with little Aaron toddling slowly, led by his father's hand. Susan knew that her father was proud of her and wanted her to tell her story and win him credit, but she felt that her mother still doubted her wonderful vision, though she no longer spoke of her doubts.

Before meeting began, the men always stood up and spoke together, while the women sat silent with the children. The order of worship was settled, who was to preach and who was to pray, for all the brethren were ministers, none being set apart to any special office, except Will Backshell the cowman, who was appointed reader because he alone could read. Today Susan knew that they were talking about her, for she saw many glances cast in her direction. She sat at the back of the big barn with Tamar and Ruth and little Aaron, watching, as she always watched every bright Sunday, the motes dance in the great slants of light that came from the high barn windows down to the floor.

The service began with prayer, a very long prayer offered by an old shepherd without many teeth, so it was difficult to understand the precise terms of his business with heaven. Then Will Backshell stood up and said:

"Brothers and sisters, before I open the Book to-day, I have wunnerful news to impart. 'Tis well known as the Lord has before this given to our Saints the gift of Sight. Hur Colgate himself saw his Angel, and I've been told as a Saint of Fairwarp, Ernest Weller, once beheld a throne set up in the heavens, and at another time saw a Flaming Book fly over the hedge while he wur tying hops at Lambpool. But this congregation of ourn has been uncommon blind till now when the Lord has opened the eyes of a liddle maid. Brother Adam Spray's first daughter Susan saw the Lord in a vision at Beggars Bush last Thursday, and we hold it seemly that she should stand up in our midst and tell us of it before I read God's Word and the Bread is broken."

"Stand up, Susan," said her father.

Susan stood up, but her head came scarcely above the shoulders of those sitting, so it did not make much difference.

Then a brawny carter took her in his arms, and lifted her up, and stood her on an empty bench in front of them all. There she stood, facing her first congregation, at the age of six.

"Now, tell them, Susan, what you saw."

Susan hung her head and put her finger in her mouth. She felt afraid and shy.

"Tell us, dearie, döan't be scared"—"Give us the light"—"Let us see wud your eyes, liddle maid."

Thus the Brethren encouraged her, and her father cried:

"Speak, Susan. What did you see?"

She stammered:

"I saw the Lord."

"The Lord! the Lord!"—"Hallelujah"—"Suffer little children"—"Aymen"—"And wot wur the manner of his appearance, liddle maid?"

"Gurt—fiery—cloudy," she faltered.

"'Twas the day of the thunderstorm."

The sceptic's voice broke loudly into the pious murmurs of the faithful. Joe Springett the blacksmith stood up against the wall, and she saw his eyes blazing out of the bush of black hair that grew all over his face.

"But the Lord was not in the thunder," piped old Maas' Bones.

"I'm not so sure as He wurn't," said Springett; "there in the field, as we all know, sat this little maid of six year old, scaring birds for Beggars Bush. Reckon she wur scared herself when the thunder came, and thought she saw all manner of sights, and maybe she wanted a word from the Lord to send her home out of the racket and save her a beating."

Susan quaked at this exposure of her inmost self. She felt her cheeks turn pale. How did Maas' Springett know? But it wasn't true. She had seen the Lord. She had seen Him, and nobody should make her say different.

"I—I saw Him. He wur gurt and tur'ble, riding on a cloud."

"Had He a face? Had He arms and legs?"

"Yus—of fire." An echo came to her, and she added—"lik fine brass."

There was an approving mutter: "That's the Scripture."

"She's heard it read in the Book, I reckon. Tell us, Susan Spray, did He speak?"

"Yus."

"Wot did He say?"

She trembled. How she wished this man would sit down and give over scaring her. His eyes seemed to blaze at her out of his hairy face like a charcoal burner's fire out of a black spinney.

"He said 'Go home.'"

"And home you went. 'Twas as I thought. Brethren, this child was frightened by the thunder, and mäade herself a tale to go home by. That's all."

"It ain't all! It ain't all!" cried Susan. "I tell you I saw the Lord plain as I see you."

She felt somehow that the spirit of the meeting had turned against her, that others besides the smith were questioning. If they disbelieved her now she would disbelieve herself—and she had seen the Lord—she had! she had! she had!

"I see Him now!" she cried, and pointed with her little hand at the wall against which stood the blacksmith. His eyes seemed to blaze into hers, flaming coals in a great fire that came searing over her, burning her up. She fell into the fire and was lost.

§ 6

She saw a building, with a stream issuing out of it. She had seen many things before that, but she could not remember them; it was the only thing she remembered as she opened her eyes. It was a big brick building, like a barn, and at each corner stood a tower which was like an oast-house. From the midst of the building came a stream, running under a little arch. At first its waters were narrow and swift, but as they flowed, they grew wider and deeper. They flowed over her, cooling and sweet. She opened her eyes, and looked around.

She was lying on the floor of the barn at Horn Reed, her head on some soft lap, while a hand sprinkled water on her brow.

"She's coming back," said a voice.

"She's come"—"Susan, look up"—"'Twas on account of us doubting"—"Maybe she's had another vision."

Susan looked round for the house with the water coming out of it, but it had gone. Somehow, she had a terrible sense of wonder and beauty lost, and she began to cry.

"What is it, what is it, my little maid, my little glory?"

She saw her father's face close to hers, wearing a new look of eagerness and tenderness. She put up her hand and touched it.

"Father, a house . . . a wunnerful house with water coming out from under."

"Is that where you've been?"

"Yus—I saw it. It had four towers, and the water came out of a liddle arch in the middle. Then it grew wider and wider and wider . . . and there were trees." Her tears fell.

"Ezekiel's temple!"

Will Backshell had opened his Book.

"Surelye, I was reading of it only last Sabbath. Let us refresh our minds." And he read out in his hoarse drawl:

"Afterward he brought me again unto the door of the house; and behold, waters issued out from under the threshold of the house eastward . . . and he brought me through the waters; the waters were to the ancles. Again he measured a thousand cubits, and brought me through the waters . . . the waters were to the loins. Afterward it was a river that I could not pass over: for the waters were risen, waters to swim in, a river that could not be passed over . . . at the bank of the river were very many trees."

It became plain now to all the brethren that Susan had been snatched away to visit Ezekiel's temple, and instead of her credit being impaired by Joe Springett's challenge it was tenfold restored. But the smith himself still mocked her.

"A child afraid of a thunderstorm; a child in a falling sickness; and you all say it is the Lord's work and drop on your knees. Reckon you're a poor set of sheep, asking to be led astray by somebody—and now you've gotten a babe to do it. Ha! ha!"

And he walked out of the meeting.

§ 7

After this, Susan Spray was highly exalted by the Colgate Brethren in Copthorne. They decided among themselves that so rare a childhood must not be wasted scaring birds or picking up stones at Beggars Bush. So she was taken away from the field, and sent to Sarah's School, the Brethren paying not only the penny a week required for her schooling, but the sixpence that her father lost when he lost her labour.

Susan must learn to read and study that Book with whose teachings she was already miraculously inspired. At Sarah's School, it was the only lesson-book. Those who read, read from it as soon as they had learned their letters; those who spelled, spelled from it, and those who wrote, copied it out.

Sarah Bull herself belonged to the Established Church—an institution which the Colgates regarded as synonymous with worldliness and decay—but in those days and in those parts the Bible was studied and venerated by all sects alike: Methodist, Baptist, Congregationalist, Independent, Established Church, all were united when it came to the love and honour due to the Book of Books. They might differ in their interpretations of certain texts, but not in their theories of inspiration. Every word was sanctified by the spirit, and the children who learned their letters from its pages learned more than mere scholars' lore. It became for them the fount of wisdom, earthly and heavenly—it familiarized them alike with Tudor English and the Mind of God.

Susan had always pondered these things as she sat in the field at Beggars Bush, though her acquaintance with them was limited to what she heard read at meeting. The Bible world had always seemed very close and clear, a luminous world shining out upon the concrete trials and joys of this. She did not actually confound the two, as some children might have done. A slice of Brown George turnover was a solid earthly blessing for which she did not trouble even to thank God. But the folk in the Bible were there—close at hand—not away in the past or beyond a gulf, and she felt that she might any day meet one of them: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or Moses with his ten commandments and his burning bush, or Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. . . .

Her schooling enriched the circle of acquaintances and possibilities. Besides Abraham, she met Nimrod the hunter, Melchisedeck the priest; besides Moses she met Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, whom the earth swallowed with her mouth. . . . Suppose the earth should open her mouth again. . . . In the New Testament, too, besides the Saviour and His apostles, were great men of renown—Stephen with his face like an angel, and Saul breathing threatenings and slaughter, and all the white lightning of the Apocalypse, burning strange pictures into her heart.

"Now, Susan Spray—you start copying from here, and mind what I told you about slanting your letters."

And Susan would write with eyes and tongue close to the page—

"I saw a mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire:—and he had in his hand a little book open: and he set his right foot upon the sea and his left foot on the earth, and cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth: and when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their voices."

Sometimes at night she would be frightened at the morning's task. She would dream of angels like flames, of shining hearts and moving mountains and falling stars, of old men with long beards, who wagged their heads at her. She would cry out, and ask to come into her parents' bed, where she would lie warm between them, and dream only of hens clucking in the barnyard, of cows being milked, of loaves being taken out of the oven.

At school she was accounted a good, quick child, and Miss Sarah was pleased with her obedience and application. But she held the tales that the Colgate Brethren spread about her as mere ranters' nonsense. Susan herself said nothing about her experiences. She soon realized that the other children—unconverted souls in stocky little bodies—would only mock her for them. So she kept silence, but in her heart she sometimes brooded with pride, and in meeting she always wore a devout, dreamy look. She did not stare about her or fidget, like the other children, though she never managed again to fall down in a fit and have a vision of Ezekiel's temple. Perhaps for that it was necessary that she should stare into a couple of glowing contemptuous eyes like Joe Springett's. . . .

Since that day, the smith had never been to meeting. He had said that he washed his hands of a set like the Colgates. He wasn't going to take his teaching from a babby. He would join the Methodists.

But as it happened he did not join the Methodists. For some reason or other he just took it into his head to go nowhere. On Sundays you would see him with his back against the door of the smithy, his arms folded across his chest, watching the people go by to Church and Chapel, and smiling as if he knew better. Then he started going down to the Horse and Cart during service time . . . and then, a few weeks later, it seemed as if he was never out of the Horse and Cart. Good folks were shocked at his downfall; but the Colgate Brethren understood. He had doubted the voice of the Lord, like Balaam, like Saul, like Ahab, like a dunnamany other wicked folk in the Scriptures, and the consequences were only natural.

Shortly after Christmas he must have been sadly the worse for drink as he walked home from the Horse and Cart late one dark night; for his body was found the next morning, frozen hard, at the bottom of the marl pit in Shovels Lane. The Brethren marvelled, and humbly gave thanks in the barn at Horn Reed, for it seemed as if the Lord had surely set His seal on Susan Spray by thus visiting with destruction the only one of them who had doubted her word.

§ 8

That winter was not a happy one in Susan's home. Those winters before the Repeal were dreaded in humble homes all over the country. Working folk saved what they could during the summer, but it was not much—faggots and dried duns for fire-wood, a sack of flour from their own gleanings, and maybe a side of bacon for Christmas fare. Adam Spray earned only ten and sixpence a week from the labour of himself and his two daughters and the bounty of the Colgates. It was impossible for Ruth to save on her weekly budget for a family of eight. And now she was expecting another mouth to feed. Susan knew, and Tamar knew, and little Ruth knew; only the three little boys were too young to know.

"Wot will our mother feed the new babby on when it comes?" asked Tamar one hungry morning in March, when they were all walking to the village—Tamar and Ruth to work, Susan on her way to school. All they had had for breakfast was a drink of hot water.

"She's given food for it," said Susan the eldest.

"Who gives it to her?"

"The Lord God. HE gives it to her till the babby gits teeth to bite with, and then it has to fend fur itself. The beasts are just the same."

"I wish He'd give summut to us older ones. I don't see why only the liddle 'uns should be fed."

"'Tis because they've got to grow. We're big."

In a time and a district when children went to work on the farms at three, and out to service at eight or nine, Susan, Tamar and Ruth were accounted big girls. Susan and Tamar were very much alike, tall and dark, with quick movements and dainty limbs. No doubt some strain of gipsy blood was in either Ruth or Adam Spray, and had come out in their two elder daughters. But little Ruth was Saxon all over, fair and chubby and slow. Both Susan and Tamar loved her—more than they loved each other.

"When I'm a bit older," said Tamar, "I'll run away and join a circus. I don't want to go out to service."

"You'd get plenty to eat if you went out to service, and I don't see what you'd do in a circus."

"I'd ride a horse. I'd wear a gown made of stars."

"You wouldn't. You'd wash up the pots and pans. Someone has to do that, even in a circus."

"It wouldn't be me. I tell you, Suke, when I'm grown up, I mean to be grand."

"'Tis sinful to be grand."

"I don't care about that. I don't mind how sinful I am, as long as I don't have to go hungry and wear dirty clothes, and live in a broken house, and have a husband and babies. I'd sooner be black wud sins."

Susan was appalled by such blasphemy, and also a little affronted. Tamar's confession seemed somehow a defiance of herself and her special religious privileges and revelations. She lifted her small arm, ending in a very capable fist, and smote the blasphemer on the nose.

There was immediate uproar. Tamar bled, screamed, and hit back. Susan hit again. There was a great whirl and scuffle of March dust as two little figures rolled over and over in it. Ruth stood by yelling, while her sisters fought, kicking and scratching and tearing at each other. They were nearly of an age and size, but Susan was by a year and a few pounds the better woman. She finally won her battle by seizing her victim's head and banging it repeatedly in the road.

"Stop! Oh stop! You're killing me, surelye!"

"Then say you're sorry for the wicked words you've spoken."

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

"Say you hate your sins."

"I hate my sins."

Susan was swelling with victory.

"Say you won't never go in a circus, but—but ull live hungry and wear dirty clothes, and—and have broken house, and—and a husband and a dunnamany babbies."

"I won't never go in a—oh, Susan, I can't—lemme go—I've disremembered the rest—but I say it, Suke, I say it."

Susan let her up. They faced each other uncertainly for a moment, then both burst into tears. For they saw that they were nearly naked, their faces and bodies plastered with blood and dirt. They could go neither to school nor to work as they were then, but must go home instead, to face a sick, exasperated mother with a need for scrubbing and new clothes. Sinner and saint alike would feel the weight of her arm, and their religious differences at once were lost in an alliance of fear and woe.

§ 9

Early in May a little sister was born, and her parents gave her a grand name—Selina. Why they called her so would be hard to say, unless they hoped to find in this lady's name, this Manor-house name, a change from their own excessive humbleness. They took her to Copthorne Church to be christened and to have her grand name entered in the parish register; for the sects all went to Church to be christened and to be married and to be buried, regarding these events indeed as social and human rather than as religious in character.

The Parson rebuked them for calling their youngest child out of her station. "Would not," said he, "a plain Mary or Eliza be more useful to her in later life when she went out to service?" But they refused to change, and the baby was christened Selina and given back to them.

On the following Sunday she was brought to meeting—not to be made a Colgate, since birth had made her one, but to be formally recognized by the Brethren. Ruth, looking thin and wan, with queer yellow tints in her face, stood up among them with the child wrapped in her shawl. The old men prayed, and Will Backshell read from the Book of Isaiah—"Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder," mocking in this way the poor little newcomer's sex and estate. Adam Spray was disappointed because their seventh child was not a boy. A boy would have been sure to be lucky; and might possibly have made their fortunes as well as his own. Anyway, a boy earned more money than a girl. He had three girls already, and this one made four, but he had only three boys. He hoped the next child would be a boy, and then things would at least be equal.

§ 10

The next child was born in the autumn of '43. By this time the Sprays were, if possible, hungrier than they had ever been before. Flour was four shillings a stone, tea five shillings a pound, sugar sixpence an ounce. By rights, Adam Spray ought to have had a free allowance of milk from Pickdick, but Pickdick was a skinny, close-fisted farm, and there were many bitter complaints from its people. Sometimes Spray talked of looking for work elsewhere, but he knew that he only talked. Labour was cheap and plentiful, and there was no reason at all to suppose that if he gave up his work on Pickdick he would find another place before he starved or "came on the parish." The country was full of labouring men tramping in search of work, and he dared not risk a future of vagabondage and the Poor Law.

He had, however, determined that if possible his older girls should go out to service. Susan could now read the Book quite prettily—she had been two years at school, and her labour was worth far more than sixpence. If he put her out to service on a farm, she would not receive more than five pounds a year, but she would be fed, and that would make a lot of difference—especially if she could contrive to bring home scraps now and again. Tamar, too, only fifteen months younger, ought to go. She was a denticle little thing, and neater handed than Susan. He could probably find her a good place.

Ruth's only objection to this plan was that she had no clothes for them.

"Housewives ull reckon on their having three gowns and six shifts apiece, and how are we to run to that, Master? and how am I to make them, all mussed up as I am wud young children and cooking and washing fur us all, and heavy besides, and this sickness that comes. . . ." Two tears rolled down her thin cheeks.

Adam was sorry. He put his clumsy, earth-smelling arms round her and tried to comfort her. It seemed scarcely possible that only eight or nine years ago she had been young and lovely, with a round dark mouth like a damson and hair as thick and sweet-scented as hay. He had not, of course, expected her never to change—in every cottage a woman changed from youth to middle-age in the first ten years of married life. But Ruth looked ill and old—she had suffered even more than was the common lot of women. He was sorry for her—in that one moment, achingly sorry. But he did not know what he could do. He had only nine shillings a week, with his fuel and his cottage; there were no friends more prosperous than himself to whom he could turn, and the common sources of village charity had run dry. The children had come in quick succession—would probably for some time go on coming; but he could do nothing about that. That was nature.

"I don't see how we can help ourselves save by sending the maids out to service. But don't you fret, lovey-duck. We can do no more than our best for them, and if they can't get placed without grand gowns and shifts, then they'll have to stop as they are, I reckon. But I mean to try."

He tried, and Ruth tried too. With a neighbour's help she made the little girls a new gown each, and three shifts. The neighbour, Mrs. Cheale, had recently lost a daughter in a decline, and these were her clothes, washed and cut up for Susan and Tamar. There was some stuff over to hem into two large handkerchiefs, in which their wardrobes were bestowed and carried to East Grinstead, where their father meant to dispose of them at the hiring.

There were two hiring fairs a year, one on Lady Day and one on Michaelmas Day, which in those parts was kept on October the eleventh. The market-place at East Grinstead would be full of men and maids waiting to be hired. You could get a stout maid of all work for six pounds a year, a chicken girl for seven, an outdoor girl for five. The men were paid weekly, from eight to twelve shillings, and expected, besides, their lodging in their master's house, or, if married, a cottage with fuel, milk, and sometimes flour. But year by year their demands grew less, as hunger pressed down on the 'forties. The market would be crowded, as it was this day, with little boys and girls, whose parents had come to regard them merely as so many extra bellies.

Perhaps that was why nobody hired Tamar or Susan Spray. They were less robust-looking than many of the other children, and they had only one gown and three shifts in their bundles. Housewives shook their heads, and said they would soon be ragged. They also said that their arms were too thin and that they looked chesty. Their father swore that they were stronger than they looked, and could lift heavy weights, and knew all about chicken and pigs, and could cook and sew and brew beer. For though he knew they could do none of these things, he also knew that if they were hired he would not have to feed them for six months.

However, at the end of the day, he brought them home from market like unsold calves. Their mother cried when she saw them, and said that all her trouble and stitching had been wasted. But Tamar and Susan were not unhappy, because they still had their new clothes. Susan, moreover, felt secretly relieved that she had not been taken away from her home and the Colgate people.

§ 11

One early morning about a week later Susan was lying in bed asleep with Tamar and little Ruth. She was dreaming one of her Bible dreams, and felt afraid, as big horses went by her with crowns on their heads, and she saw scrolls flying with writing upon them that she could not read. She woke, still feeling afraid, into a dim consciousness that someone was leaning over her and breathing on her face. She was just going to cry out when she realized it was her mother.

"Susan," her mother said, "I can't abide any longer to be wudout summut good and filling to eat. I want you to go out, and over into the Clayfield by Shovels, and git me one of them gurt rootses. It came over me only ten minnut ago that if I had one I cud make soup of it."

"Soup for us all?"

"Surelye—but two helpings for me. I've got to eat fur two, Susan, don't you know that?"

"Yes, Mam, I know it."

"I've got to eat fur two, Susan—and I don't eat for half. 'Tis pitiful. I can scarce abide to be so hungry. You seem happy and cheerful enough—but you're a young maid; you'll think different when you're wed and carrying a child. Here am I going both heavy and hungry—heavy and hungry—'tain't right, 'tain't natural, and if it goes on much longer I shall die of it."

Susan had never heard her mother speak like this. She had often spoken of common things in a whining, complaining voice, but never before had she so definitely stated her grief. Susan was lying on the outside of the bed, and she slipped down from it, into the cold damp air of an autumn morning that was oozing in like water through the cracks and rifts of the little room. She stood up in her shift, shivering with cold. Her mother said:

"Make haste, or he'll waken," meaning her father, who lay snoring in the other bed.

Susan pulled her gown on over her head, and her mother opened the door for her to go out.

There was a thick mist everywhere, and the trees and hedges showed through it like ghosts. It was damp, and it smelled of earth and turnips. Susan ran through it with her hands out before her, as if she were pushing it away. She ran to warm herself, because the cold was terrible, eating her. And yet it was not the dead cold of winter, that is hard and hollow, like an iron rod, but the living cold of an October dawn, which is moist and quickening, the womb of the morning. She could feel its moisture on her skin and hair, distilled in little pearls, the same pearls that quivered on the grass and nettles and the stripping hedges. She seemed to become a fellow of the grass and nettles and hedges, sharing their adornment of mist and dew, and suddenly she felt a deep contentment rising in her heart that she should be out here alone with the mist and the morning, before even the farm people were about. Surely now when the world was empty and washed like this, the Lord must walk in it, as He used to walk in Eden long ago. Then, He chose the cool of the evening, but she felt now that the cool of the morning was best.

Perhaps in just such cold and stillness she would see His great shape passing by, dim and monstrous in the mist, like the shape of a big haystack or a barn. Her heart quickened strangely. She seemed to stand on the edge of revelation—half awake, numb with cold, running through the fog on her way to steal a turnip. . . .

The sunrise was breaking into the mist; among the white layers of it scars appeared, spreading and dripping with light. Suddenly the expected marvel showed itself to her, not in a monstrous, frightening shape, but as a globe of fire that hung suspended in the bare, laced twigs of a thornbush on the crown of the field. She saw—she knew. It was the Burning Bush. Burning but not consumed, it stood there on the meadow slope above her, lighting the world with its radiance, so that she saw her parents' cottage, and the turnip field, and the roofs of Pickdick, and Copthorne Church, all lit as when the fire flares up mysteriously out of ashes, and lights a gloaming room.

The fogs swept down over the Sign, and the moment passed; but as it passed she seemed to know all that it had been. This time the Lord had truly passed and spoken, touching the earth at dawn. Once more the field was grey and dim, full of dark shapes. But Susan's little breast was a cage of light, in which her heart skipped and sang like a bird. The field of revelation had moved from Beggars Bush to this slope above Pickdick and to this tranquil, drifting hour of early morning. At meeting next Sunday she would tell the Brethren, and they would murmur and gaze, as they had done four years ago when she told them about the Lord riding on a cloud . . . and this time there would be no blacksmith to doubt, to stare at her and burn her with his doubting eyes.

Panting with delight, she slipped through the hedge into the next field where the turnips grew. She crawled on her hands and knees for fear that someone might be in the field and see her, for she knew that the sun had risen and the men would be at work. Close to the ground, the mist seemed a strong-smelling brew of earth and turnips. It smelled so strong that it almost seemed good to eat. She could taste it on her tongue. On a level with her eyes was a forest of grey-green leaves, and just below them the swelling curves of the roots, as they rose from the earth with earth upon them, the colour of earth.

She pulled up the nearest one, and suddenly her hunger, which had been half forgotten in the stresses of religious experience, rushed back, and she took a bite out of the swelling goodness. Her teeth went pleasantly through a hard, moist, fibrous texture, and she had a taste in her mouth as if she had swallowed the field. She chewed for some time, and felt better, then she bit again, and ate, chewing and spitting out fibre. The root looked ravaged and spoiled—she must pull up another. And suddenly she felt a huge delight and freedom, for she had all the field to choose from. This was far better than buying stuff at Mrs. Harmer's shop, where if you spoiled your purchase you could not make a second choice. It was all part of the glory and exaltation of the morning that Susan should feel herself mistress of a turnip field.

She threw away the root she had munched, and chose two others. She could not take more, because she must be prepared to hide her booty, which she had decided to do by slipping it into the front of her gown, where it would merely seem to supply those natural deficiencies of which she was already aware. As she ran back home she felt proudly that she had the shape of a grown woman to add to the triumphs of the day.

She ran quickly, close under the hedge, for all the world was awake now. When she reached the Boot, the door stood open, and her mother sat in her rocking-chair against the wall, her chin drooping, her body sagging, her arms dangling loose from her shoulders.

"Susan—Susan—where have you been all this gurt while?"

"Mam, I saw the Burning Bush."

Ruth's lips stretched pallidly in a sad, indifferent smile. "You needn't trouble to tell those tales to me. Tell 'um to the Brethren."

Susan laid the two big roots in her lap, and her mother burst into tears.

§ 12

That night she dreamed of Ezekiel's temple. It was but seemly that the return of her vision should complete that wonderful day. The Burning Bush and turnip soup. . . . At dawn, the Lord Almighty gazing at her with His floating fiery eye through the laced twigs of a thorn, at dusk the smell of cooking soup coming to meet her as she ran home. She would never forget how deliciously that smell had crept towards her through the other smells of evening, the low drift of wood-smoke and the settling fogs. Inside the Boot, a rushlight was burning, and her mother's great shadow heeled over the ceiling as she set down the soup on the table, so that it was as if some shadowy being from another world, an angel or a ghost, stooped from above to feed the hungry Sprays.

Ruth had thickened the soup with flour, and sippets of bread were floating in it, with the shredded leaves of nettle and dandelion. There was enough for two helpings all round, and afterwards Susan could feel her stomach curving out from her like a well-filled sack. Tamar, Ruthie, Aaron, Elis, William and Baby Selina were all alike—queer little pot-bellied shapes, standing up on their thin legs like barrels on sticks. They soon began to feel drowsy, and went to bed.

When Susan awoke, it seemed as if she had been walking a long time in her dream. There was the temple, built of brick and tiles, with the little stream issuing out from it, and the four oast-houses at the corners. This time she followed the stream a little way, into the marishes thereof, where the trees stood. The widening valley was full of sunshine, and from every tree hung great swelling globes, like the turnips she had taken out of the field that morning. She marvelled to see turnips growing on trees. Then she tried to cross the waters, which as she stepped into them came only to her ankles. But at the next step they were at her knees, and the next at her waist, and she was afraid of drowning till she remembered that these were the waters of life. At the realization a great joy and excitement filled her, and she awoke.

The room was quite dark, but somehow she knew that her father and mother were awake, and the next moment she heard them speaking.

Her father said:

"You go to sleep like a good girl. I tell you 'tis näun—you've ate unaccustomed, and have a pain in your stomach. That's all."

"I know wot I'm talking about, as I should ought to know by this time. Be a man, Spray, and git up and fetch Mrs. Ades."

"I tell you 'tis näun. You've had false tokens before this, and I'm heavy wud sleep."

Her mother groaned.

"Have done," said her father; "if you'll let me git two hours' rest, I'll send for Mrs. Ades in the marnun."

"That'll be too late. Spray, fur God's sake . . ."

Her father rose up, stretching and grumbling to himself. In the darkness she heard him pulling on his trousers and his boots. Then he clumped out, and Susan buried her head under the coverlet, striving for a wink more sleep before Mrs. Ades the midwife came and turned them all out into the cold.

§ 13

It was two nights before Susan slept in her warm bed again. That evening, when she came home from Horn Reed—where since her rejection at the hiring fair, she had been picking stones off the fields at a shilling a week—she found the door of the cottage shut against her; and when she lifted the latch, the midwife came running out, telling her to be off.

"The littl'uns are at Mrs. Coven's, and the big'uns at Mrs. Cudd's. I wöan't have you all catering about here—so you go either to Mrs. Coven's or to Mrs. Cudd's."

Susan was surprised at this order, for on earlier occasions nobody had been turned out. But she went off to Mrs. Cudd—the stockman's wife at Pickdick—where she found Tamar and Ruthie and Aaron settling down in the lean-to shed on a bed of heath and bracken which they had pulled themselves. That night they slept like cattle, and the next morning their father appeared, standing at the foot of their bed in the grey light like a ghost, his face as grey and empty as a ghost's. He told them in a hoarse rough voice that they could come home when they liked, for their mother was dead. Then he turned round and walked off without another word.

They were all far too frightened to go home, and that night they slept again among the bracken in Mrs. Cudd's little lean-to. She told them they could stay as long as they liked, but that she could not feed them, for she had barely enough to feed her own children; and in the end it was hunger that drove them home. They found their father sitting huddled over the kitchen fire, where the pot was cooking in the smoke. His employer, Mus' Cruttenden at Pickdick, had shown his compassion in substantial form and had given ten shillings towards the funeral expenses, a whole side of bacon and a peck of dried pease. Mrs. Ades, the midwife, had made some of the bacon and pease into a stew, and was coming round in half an hour to dish it out.

Naturally the children stayed. They crouched round the fire with their bowed and silent father, smelling the fat smoke, and longing for Mrs. Ades to come and spoon them out their portions. The rest of the bacon hung from a hook in the ceiling, and it was comfortable to think that when they had eaten all that was in the pot there was still plenty more, which one day would smell just as good. But it was strange to see that their father took no notice either of the stew or of the hanging bacon. They felt afraid of him as they watched him there, lounging over the fire, his face still grey among the stubble of his beard. They were afraid to question him about their mother. He did not speak or take any notice of them, except once when Tamar fell against his knees, when he started and swore, as if she had wakened him out of sleep.

At last Mrs. Ades came in, bustling them out of her way, and ordering Susan to set the table:

"A gurt maid lik you—you mun be useful in the house now you poor mother's gone."

"Where's our mother?" asked little Ruth.

"In there," and Mrs. Ades jerked her shoulder towards the bedroom door.

"Then where's she gone if she's back in there?"

"'Tis her sperrit that's gone—her body's in her bed, all laid out and decent and präaper, as I should like you all to see when you've eaten your supper."

"Is thur a new babby in thur?" whispered Tamar.

"Surelye, poor liddle soul; we laid it on her arm."

"Is it dead too?"

"It's dead, my dear—if you can call it dead wot never breathed."

The children were silent, but they thought of many things as they gobbled up the steaming, savoury stew. Susan felt glad that the baby was dead. If it had been alive, how should they have fed it? It would have been like one of those socklambs, which are brought up in farm-house kitchens, and are a great care and nuisance to everybody, because they have to be kept warm and fed out of a bottle. The baby would have been very troublesome to rear—besides, they already had enough . . . too many, in fact, when she thought of the three little ones at Mrs. Coven's. Suppose they had been here tonight, demanding their portions of stew. . . . Suppose their mother had been here to-night, with that hungry look in her eyes, shovelling bacon and pease into her wide, hungry mouth, which seemed as if it could fill itself twice as fast and twice as full as anybody else's. In a sudden pang Susan thought at once of the mercy of her mother's absence from the feast and of the pity of her having missed what she would have enjoyed so much.

§ 14

Ruth Spray was buried next morning. Burial must follow quickly on death when a little cottage has only the common bedroom in which to house the dead. Even as it was, there had been one night when they had all slept together—the living father and children, the dead mother and child. At first Susan had felt afraid, but soon fear passed into sleep, for once again she was heavy with an unaccustomed meal. This time she did not dream of Ezekiel's temple, nor even of her mother and the new baby, lying together waxen in the moonlight, as she had seen them when Mrs. Ades lifted the sheet; but simply of herself as a little girl, running to and fro on the grass outside the Boot, with her hands full of camomile daisies that she had picked. It was not till she awoke that she remembered she had picked them for her mother.

The burial was in the churchyard, and conducted by Mr. Diggle, the Parson, who had no objection—indeed, the reverse—to presiding thus over the ends of his schismatic parishioners. Somehow or other, it seemed to give him the last laugh. He would not, however, allow any of the Colgate Brethren to speak, which was not so much religious intolerance as a wish to get home in time for his dinner.

The Colgates had paid for the funeral, each man giving his utmost to the brother in distress. After the fees had been settled there was enough over for a funeral feast, with the help once more of Mus' Cruttenden's substantial pity, manifested this time in a leg of mutton and a cask of home-brewed beer.

It was hardly wonderful that the little Sprays should carry no sad memories out of that sad week. Their mother's death was associated with the three best meals they had eaten since the Hunger began. That evening they sat and stuffed themselves round the Boot's inadequate kitchen table, and with them sat the Brethren, silent and munching, renouncing their now unforbidden speech for more desperate necessities.

Only one of them did not eat, and that was the widower, unable to do more than pick at the good food his wife's death had brought him. His behaviour was considered right, though almost aggressively beyond the bounds of imitation. There was a mutter of approval when he suddenly rose from table and went out into the dusk. The rest sat on until the tallow dips had to be lighted, splashing dim gold into the white silver of the moon. It was not really necessary to light them, since her light was so much brighter than theirs. But they stood in the feasters' minds for light and cheerfulness, whereas she stood for night and lonely spaces and the wandering ghosts of the dead.

When supper was over, the company departed, going out together in a little group, and telling the children their father would soon be home.

"Has he gone to see Mother?" asked Ruth, a slow child, whose stolid mind seemed set against the abstractions of immortality.

"He's gone to weep on her grave," said old Maaster Borrer, "and 'tis seemly that he should."

They patted the little faces, lifted somewhat imploringly to theirs as they went out, and the children were left alone in the rushlight and moonlight, with the heels and nubs and ends of the funeral feast. They were all home now, for Mrs. Coven had brought back the three smallest ones. Selina was walking round the table, licking the plates, and Elis and William were asleep together on the rag mat. The fire was out, the dips were dying and smoking; only the light of the great moon seemed to grow, as she shone in at the little diamond-paned window, filling it with her orb, so that she was like a pale face looking in. Susan realized that she had all these children to put to bed, that her mother was no longer there to scold them in her thin, complaining voice, to drive them into their beds, and then to pull the bedclothes over them with a roughness that was half tender.

"Mother," she cried suddenly—"Mother, Mother." Then she threw herself down on the rag mat and burst into a storm of tears.

§ 15

They all wept in chorus, clinging together, and crying "Mother, Mother," till their throats were dry. They were like calves whose dam is taken from them, bleating till no more sound will come. The moon passed out of the window, the darkness settled on the room and the cold grew sharper. Susan struggled to her feet, and carried little Selina, now sound asleep, into the bedroom. She bundled her into bed, just as she was, even to the black ribbon Mrs. Coven had tied round her sleeve. Then she fetched William and Elis, and bundled them in too, in their clothes and their little shoes. Aaron, Tamar and Ruthie she had to wake, because they were too heavy to carry. They asked when their father would come home.

"How should I know when he's coming? I dunno where he's gone."

She felt lone and frightened, there in the darkness, without either father or mother. If her father never came back, how should she get food? Then she remembered the word of the Lord. With a great pang of thankfulness she remembered that the Lord gave food to all, to new-born babies, to new-born lambs, to the children of Israel wandering in the wilderness, to Elijah sitting by the brook—breasts, udders, the beaks of ravens, manna from the skies, all were to her equally miraculous sources of supply. The Lord God would not let her want. She experienced the same sensation as when in her dream she had known that the waters she feared would drown her were the waters of life.

The older children were soon in bed, drowsy with eating and weeping, and Susan, nearly asleep herself, was going to climb in when she heard a step outside the cottage. She hesitated, and went back into the kitchen, queerly afraid. The step came creeping round to the door, and a hand fumbled. . . . She guessed it was only her father, but she still had not the courage to go and lift the latch.

She saw it rise, and then a pale section of the starlight night moved forward into the room. A foot crossed the threshold, and a shape followed, blocking out the stars; then came more fumbling and shuffling, then darkness as the door was shut.

"Father!"

She knew it was he, though he had not spoken. She knew his smell, and the sound of his breathing. But she still felt afraid, as of something new and sinister about him. Her trembling hands groped for the tinder-box which she knew she had left on the table, and with some difficulty she struck a light.

Her father stood before her with a queer, glassy look in his eyes. He stared, as if he saw behind her a Presence that both enraptured and appalled him. He suddenly cried out:

"If I go up into heaven, thou art there—if I go down into hell, thou art there also. If I täake the wings of the marnun . . ."

He pitched forward and fell on his face, lying still as a stone.

The flame that had lit him up for one grotesque and horrible moment, failed as he fell, and once more the room was in darkness. Susan felt her dress sticking with sweat to her skin. She would have run out of the cottage had she not feared to fall over her father. But she was not afraid because she thought him dead. She was afraid because it had seemed to her that he had changed . . . some wonderful and terrible experience had passed over him. He had come in like a man in a dream, "being in a trance but having his eyes open," as it said of Balaam in the Book. . . . Her father had seen a vision, either hell or heaven had opened before him, and now he lay as she had lain on the floor of the barn at Horn Reed, and perhaps his mind walked where hers had walked—in the cool marishes below Ezekiel's temple. She was afraid, because she had never thought of him before in that way. He belonged to a different world, a world of clay-covered boots and mattocks and manure, of loud eating and snoring sleep; his presence at prayer-meeting was the mere external presence of a body, the pious words he used were only words, and his Bible was only a printed book that he could not read. Now here he was fouling the waters of her dream—that was hers, her own, her private particular glory.

He began to mutter at her out of the darkness. Words poured in a strange jumble—"cow" . . . "love . . . Ruthie" . . . "Lord God." Then suddenly came an unmistakable sound. What she had taken for spiritual exaltation was rather physical distress. She heard her father being sick, and at once she felt sorry for him and queerly comforted in her soul. The terror and repulsion that had kept her shuddering from him while she imagined him the vessel of supernatural revelations, passed as he became once more earthly and disgusting, the thing she knew. She knelt down beside him, and touched his head as he rolled and moaned. His breath fanned into her face, and then she understood all. He was drunk.

She had never seen him drunk before, but she had seen other men drunk—for those were the days of empty stomachs and light heads. His behaviour seemed to her a normal reaction to grief for anyone but a Colgate. Perhaps even a Colgate could be forgiven on a night like this—anyway, he had earned her forgiveness by not coming into her world of vision; it seemed now as if he had purposely refrained.

Suddenly practical, she struck another light, and set a tallow dip on the table. He asked for water and she gave it to him, wiping his forehead with an old rag dipped in the bowl. After that she fetched her mother's gown from the next room, and rolled it up under his head for a pillow. He seemed to fall asleep, muttering and rambling on to himself; she put out the light and crept away into the bedroom, weeping—for the old gown had made her think of her mother.

§ 16

But on Sunday she no longer wept for her mother, because she knew that her mother would have looked at her out of slits of mocking eyes as she set out for meeting, to tell the Brethren the tale of her latest vision. Even so, her mother's shadow a little dimmed the glory of that tale, for the meeting was full of the commoner, homelier tale of the young wife's death in childbed, and of the little babe who had failed to pass through the Gate of the Brethren. Tongues that had been silenced by authority and necessity at the funeral and the funeral feast now twisted slowly round sacred, mysterious words, as the men and women stood up one by one and spoke of the beloved soul in heaven, gazing across the crystal sea into the lightnings of the Great White Throne, singing the song of Moses the Servant of God, and the song of the Lamb—no longer a poor labourer's wife, exhausted with hunger and childbirth, but a King and a Priest . . . "Thou hast made us unto our God kings and priests" . . . the words burned in Susan's ears, though all the time she seemed to see her mother gazing at the Great White Throne out of slits of mocking eyes.

None the less, when her turn came, it was agreed that she had been marvellously blessed and was a blessing to them all. "She'll be a sure sweet comfort to you, Brother Spray. She's lik a young tree planted in the pläace of one that's gone."

Her father sat hunched among the swarm of his children, and his face was still pale and sweaty, though now he was in other ways himself again, sober and sound and hard at work.

"If only the liddle child had lived to pass through the Gëate of the Brethren. Another half-hour would have done it."

"Täake comfort, Brother. If the child couldn't come through 'twas that the Lord hadn't need of it."

Adam Spray appeared to find this comfort somewhat cold, but he did not argue, for the issues were involved, the theological being twisted with the material in a pattern that was not always clear. If the child had lived to be born it might have lived to grow up, and then there would have been another mouth to feed, another body to clothe—now when times were so bad that the Brethren could hardly spare bread to break at their meeting. . . . The Lord had perhaps been merciful in shutting the gate. Though what had He shut outside?—a human soul, doomed to darkness and torment, or just a little dream? . . . It made his head ache to wonder so much, and he clasped it with his hands.

§ 17

That winter the cowman at Horn Reed fell sick, and there was no one who could read the Word as well as Susan Spray. She was only twelve, but she could read with much more expression and fluency than Will Backshell. After all, she had been three years at Sarah's School, a good, quick pupil. It warmed the heart to hear her roll the holy names off her tongue—Hadedezer, Shiloh, Bashan, Jeshurun, Adonikam, Shephatiah, and many others that exhaled the very heart and spirit of the Book. She had about her no shadow of awkwardness. She would stand up there before them all and read and read, till almost they had to stop her.

She had grown a tall girl for her age, though somewhat lean, as was to be expected in those hungry times. Indeed it was remarkable that she had grown so fast. She was like a tall pale weed, and that it almost seemed as if she would outgrow her strength, for her small joints and bones told that she was not made to be tall. She was often tired, and had fainting fits.

Sometimes, coming out of these fits, she would have a wonderful sense of memories that just escaped her. She could never quite recapture what she had heard and seen, but she would feel sure of its blessedness. It was as if she had been given the answer to a question, and then had forgotten both the question and the answer. But an afterglow of glory and certainty remained, and in spite of the headache and sickness that followed these attacks, she would feel sweetly comforted.

That winter was no better than the last. Old folk would talk of green winters—green winters in years o£ plenty. But now when the times were hard the earth also was hard, the air was sharp, and the fields were white under snow. On all the ponds and brooks a greenish ice thickened through the months.

This was the winter in which Susan Spray, at the age of twelve, took over her father's housekeeping. They could ill afford to lose her shilling-a-week wages, but it was necessary that someone should keep house and look after the little ones. Besides, there was one mouth less to feed—a wide and hungry mouth. Susan did not care for housekeeping—she preferred being out of doors, even in the cold weather, for she was not used to being much in the house. But she did not manage badly. The neighbours took pity on her, and helped her with their experience.

Bread was two shillings a loaf, tea eight shillings a pound and sugar sevenpence an ounce. A side of pork cost fourteen shillings, with another five shillings far salting; and Susan had to feed eight people on less than ten shillings a week. Mrs. Cudd taught her to make bread out of sharps, and how to cook a dish called Taters and Shakeover, which involved one or two potatoes and a pennyworth of suet. She could no longer steal roots out of the fields, but now and then Tamar or Ruth would take one from the barn at Pickdick where they worked, or sometimes they would manage to pick up a few potatoes. Anyway, none of them starved, though the death of little Aaron which happened in January, may have had something to do with his diet.

He was ill only two or three days of a shaking fever that touched them all but took no one else away. He had never been a sturdy child, but they had not expected him to die. Susan screamed with shock when, taking a cup of turnip soup to his bedside, she found him lying queerly with his neck twisted and his mouth a little open. He had spoken to her ten minutes before, and then died while she was heating the soup.

When Adam Spray came home and found his son dead, he put down his head on the table and cried. But his grief did not last long. He was found of his children as a beast is found of them, in the mass rather than as individuals. In a few days he scarcely missed little Aaron more than a cat misses one of a litter of kittens. But he thought about him as a cat would not have thought, and he spoke his thoughts aloud to Susan, who had taken his wife's place as an occasional receiver of his confidences.

"He's gone to glory—he's gone to be wud the Lord God. He shall hunger no more nuther thirst any more. I wudn't kip him back—I wudn't kip anyone of you back that wanted to go out of this miserable world. There's too many of us here—we could do better wud less."

This, with an occasional resort to the Horse and Cart, was the philosophy that had comforted him not only for the loss of his son but for the loss of his wife. Ten shillings a week was a fixed sum, but there was another sum, the number of his family, which was not so straitly fixed. Up till his wife's death it had been liable to increase, and he sometimes felt a real comfort in the thought that this danger was now past. He had loved his Ruth, she had been part of himself and his life, but he could not forget that if she had lived there would have been two more to feed, and no doubt by this time the prospect of a third. Now that figure which weekly divided the figure of his wages was reduced still lower. Another penny all round for flour and suet . . . or seven pennies to go jingling in his pocket to the Horse and Cart. . . .

Susan accepted her father's occasional bouts of drunkenness. They did not happen at times which would have imperilled his job or scandalized the Brethren. Once or twice a month, when his field work was done, he would walk in to Copthorne instead of going home, and spend a few pence on beer, which went to his head because it was bad beer and his stomach was empty. He had always recovered enough to go to work the next morning, and the money spent was fully repaid by the fact that after an orgy he would eat no food for twenty-four hours. He was never violent or obscene; and now that she had grown accustomed to his strangeness, the whole thing was from her point of view quite unexceptionable.

She was happier that winter than she had been for years, in spite of household griefs and burdens. Her life, rough, meagre, limited as it was, in some curious way satisfied her, because it was free. Only five months after her mother's death she was complete mistress of her father's house and the ruler of his family. She could count on his authority to back her up if she ordered about Tamar and Ruth, while the younger children naturally looked up to her. At meeting, too, though she did not rule, she was looked up to, standing before the Brethren every Sunday to read the Word. Will Backshell was still away, and a voice within her whispered how good it would be if the rheumatism which had laid him low did not leave him in the spring.

She also revelled in her emancipation from farm-work. Her household duties, as she understood them, were soon done. There was no meal to prepare till the evening, and during the day she would often wander about the countryside with gangs of children and young people, who were unable to find work on the winter farms, and had been driven out of their homes by lack of food and fire. They were all very rough and rather wild, these gangs of hungry children, but they had their fun together, their adventures and games, roaming over the wintry fields, crashing through the wet, bare thickets of the woods, living together some vague, indefinite daydream of freedom and plenty, as their bumpkin imaginations spun a web of country superstitions and common things.

§ 18

Spring came at last to the land. The snow melted from the fields, leaving them brown with sodden grass. The ice went from the ponds and brooks, and the frost-bound roads dissolved into soil-smelling courses of mud, in which the farm-carts stuck and the horses went spattered to the croup. Then the first green fell like a veil over the snow-browned meadows, and hung like a strowing of gems on the hedgerow twigs. The heavy smell of soil lifted into something sweeter, as the primroses starred the ditches, and the tinkling April rains washed away the last of winter's cold hard scum and brown sterility. The days grew long, the evenings were green and rainy, with a watery light creeping from the sunset over the fields; the songs of birds, of nesting thrush and linnet, blackbird, starling and ring-dove, flowed out into the first and last light of the day.

This change and renewal was confined to the earth. The poor folk working on the farms of the Surrey borders reaped but a slender profit from the spring. The harvest was still five months ahead, and the price of bread crept slowly up towards it. There was also a sinister increase in the price of potatoes. It appeared that in a far-off savage country called Ireland there had been a potato famine last year, and in consequence the potatoes of Surrey and Sussex had not been left to nourish the inhabitants, but had been sent away to London and Brighton and other fine towns. By the end of February there was not a potato to be had in Copthorne. Susan could no longer cook her dish of Taters and Shakeover, but instead they must be content with flour dumplings and sometimes a little of the pigs' barley wash at Pickdick which her father was able to bring home.

It appeared that Copthorne was not the only place where men went hungry. In foreign parts they were hungry too, for the news came dimly and derivatively through folk who had met folk who had read a newspaper that there were riots all up and down England, that bakers' shops had been looted by angry mobs and that in a northern city loaves dipped in blood had been paraded on pikes through the streets. The folk of the Surrey borders were not given to riot—they suffered like beasts without much complaint beyond a little moaning and growling, and when they could bear no more lay down to die. But some of them were comforted by the thought of these riots, undertaken by more daring spirits than they—"Maybe 'twill all sarve to bring the prices down," would be said over and over again in the bar of the Horse and Cart. While some who were more knowledgeable than their neighbours said: "There's a tax on bread. If the Queen cud only täake off the tax on bread, we'd git a quarten loaf fur a shillun, maybe."

By this time the small farmer was nearly as hard-hit as the labourer. Rents were soaring, and the harvest was little but a huge gamble, crops being held back for a probable rise in prices. The big landlord and yeoman profited, but the small man withered with his fields. Mus' Cruttenden at Pickdick had never been prosperous, and for the last two years had been definitely failing. Now suddenly he failed. The blame was all his own, for in common with other farmers he had held back his wheat and barley, which being badly harvested and damply stacked, had sprouted and now could not be sold.

Instead it was Mus' Cruttenden who had to be sold. Bills were posted up on barn walls, telling those who could read that on the fifteenth of March, at the Dorset Arms, East Grinstead, the farm known as Pickdick would be put up for auction, with ten head of cattle, four cart-horses, two waggons, one quoiler, two braces and other implements of husbandry.

There was consternation in the parish, and especially at the Boot, for who could tell for certain that the new owner would take on all his predecessor's folk? If he did not, then the future was indeed threatening, for on all the highways labouring men could be found as thick as blackberries in September, tramping from farm to farm in search of work.

"If I lose this job 'tain't likely as I shall ever find another," said Adam Spray to Susan.

"I don't see why you should reckon to lose it. The new farmer must have men to do his work."

"But times are bad—he's bound to turn off somebody, and mark my word that'll be me."

Susan pondered. She knew by this time that her father had never been a first-class labourer, and lately had fallen off in his work under the combined influences of too little to eat and too much to drink. It was not usual to make changes on farms except for some very good reason, but she saw that very good reason in the bad times and need for reduced expenses.

"If you have to go," she said, "we mun do as I hear Mus' Cruttenden's doing and sail to Canada."

"There's a mad notion! Wotsumever should we do in Canada, whur I've bin told the fields are a thousand miles big? and howsumever shall we get there wudout a penny to pay the Captain of the ship?"

"Maybe he'd take us fur nothing if we did all the work of the ship."

"We'd never do that—and I'd be scared, hem scared, to cross the water. No, my maid, we stay säafe on dry land whur we be."

"I reckon we can't stay in the parish if Pickdick turns you away. There's no other place that's got work fur us."

Adam groaned.

"True, true. That's lamentäable true. We'll have to look aräound—go into the Shires maybe. Though how I'm going to tramp the roads wud all you childun goodness knows."

Susan's eyes glistened. The spring had roused her animal spirits, and her wild games and rambles with the children had given her a taste for wandering. Already once she had been beaten for sleeping out. She would never forget the strange wild stillness of the night, and the stars that hung so low that the tossed branches of the trees seemed to sweep and shake them. . . . She suddenly saw the chance of them all setting out to tramp the roads as a wonderful adventure. But her father was apprehensive.

"Besides," said he, "I mun never be leaving the Brethren. Wotsumever shall we do wudout our Sunday meeting and all our holy ways?"

Neither did Susan want to leave the Brethren. But she reminded him that there were Colgates in other parts.

"We might try the country over by Horsham, and there's Brethren at Cuckfield, I've heard say."

Her father shook his head.

"I know näun of 'em, and maybe they've died out or fallen into error. I'd sooner bide where we have the folk we know."

"But if we can't git work?"

"Why can't we git work? Why should we all of a suddint mäake so mortal sure as I'm going to be turned off? I tell you most likely I'll stay wud the new folk at Pickdick, and maybe I'll git mäade stockman in pläace of that bad old Cudd, who äun't no präaper use if the truth wur known. We're plaguing our heads wud fancies."

"Well, 'twas you who said——"

"I döan't say it no more. I never heard such stuff in my days as tramping the roads wud all you children. I'll bide whur I be, and döan't you start gainsaying me or I'll knock your head off."

§ 19

The farm was bought by john Botolph, a foreigner from Searford, who hitherto had kept sheep on the Downs. He turned none of the folk away, but with the common contrariness of human nature, combined with his own special streak of perversity, Adam Spray decided to leave Pickdick.

"Reckon that feller and I ull never agree," he said. "No more'n a butcher-grazier he is, and mark my words he'll be all fur raising fat stock, which we äun't used to here."

For some buried reason he hated the change, and resented the orders of a farmer who was not Mus' Cruttenden—though in his late employer's time he had never ceased to grumble at him and his methods, and certainly owed him no gratitude, except for a few provisions sent in after his wife had died of exhaustion and bad feeding.

A more specified reason was a certain coolness that had risen between him and the Colgate Brethren, who at last had heard the rumour of his drunken ways. Indeed, one Sunday at meeting he had not been quite sober, though Susan was puzzled to know how he had come by the stuff so early in the day. He had kept the Brethren on their legs for nearly half an hour while he testified; and though at first they were willing to believe—being well-disposed folk—that his rambling incoherencies were due to the Spirit, which as all know bloweth as he listeth, here and there through a man's discourse, blowing his words together in heaps, so that sometimes they are a bit mixed and disorderly—they were soon forced to observe certain physical symptoms which could not be put down to divine inspiration. Susan had been hot with shame, though once again she had felt relieved to know that her father offered her no serious rivalry as a prophet.

When she heard that he had told his new employer he would not stay on at Pickdick she was at first indignant.

"And wot are we to live upon? Wot are we to eat?"

"The Lord ull provide," he said solemnly. "Reckon we do His will if we clear out of this wicked pläace."

"And what's made it a wicked place all of a sudden? What but your own wickedness?" cried Susan, who as her mother's heir in household toils was also the heir of her sharp tongue. "Reckon you see that if you stop here much longer you'll finish the disgrace you've started to bring on us."

Her father fetched her up with a great crack on the head that made her stumble against the wall. But she would not give over; crouching there against the plaster she spat at him like a little cat, till he was frightened.

"A—done, do. I tell you I'm sensible to go. That man ull turn us off soon, if he döan't do it now, mark my wards."

"And where are you going?"

"I'm going to Horsham, where there's a gurt Church of the Colgates, as fine as the Church of England, and where the farms äun't tedious seedy scoapy pläaces lik Pickdick."

"And how are we to git as far as Horsham?"

"By the road, and I'll see as we döan't starve on it, neither."

Susan stopped to think about the road. She felt once more the pull of its adventure in her heart. Out from the common, familiar little street of Copthorne ran the roads to unknown places. She knew how each one started—one opposite the Horse and Cart, one behind the Church, another between Mrs. Borrer's cottage and the burnt house. She knew the first mile on each one, but little more. Except for that wasted visit to East Grinstead fair she had never been more than a mile or two from home. Her recent adventures had been all among the fields—the children avoided the roads because of the Cart People, that wandering population of gipsies, tinkers and pikers, of whom they were afraid. But now the Cart People seemed no longer terrifying but glorious fellow-travellers, moving on from day to day, from camp to camp, with no bounds but the ends of the world. She suddenly found herself sick of the Boot and its ways, of the farm and the village, even of the fields.

"Oh, father!" she cried, "let's go right away from here—away—away—a dunnamany miles."

"Well, I said let's go to Horsham."

"I want to go further than Horsham. I want to go to—to Canaan."

"And howsumever shall we go to Canaan?"

Susan did not know. She had learned no geography at Sarah's School save the geography of the Book. She had no idea even where Brighton was; she had never heard of Manchester or Birmingham, and for all she knew Jerusalem might lie seven miles beyond Horsham, or it might not.

"We'll go on till we git there, surelye."

"But how shall we cross the water? I tell you I'll never cross the water, to Canaan or Canada or anywhere else; and there's water all around this tedious country."

Susan was dashed for a minute, but she soon remembered the waters of the Red Sea.

"Reckon the Lord ull make a road for us through the waters."

"He döan't do that sort of thing nowadays. It's all finished."

"Wot's finished?"

"Signs and wonders. He döan't wark them any more now the Bible's written."

"But He's warked them for me."

Her eyes suddenly filled with tears as she thought of the Lord coming up on the clouds from Dellenden, of Ezekitl's temple and the Burning Bush.

"That's different," said her father. "The Lord appears to His Saints as He appeared to Hur Colgate; but He just appears, He döan't alter the course of nature any more, if He did thur'd have to be another Bible written about it, and that 'ud never do."

"Why wud it never do?"

"Well, you justabout know it wudn't. There's only one Bible, holy from cover to cover—aye, and the covers are holy too."

Susan said nothing, but she saw a picture of herself writing a new Bible, or at least another Book of the Bible—the Book of Susan . . . "The burden of Pickdick, which Susan the prophet did see . . ."

§ 20

During the whole of that week Adam Spray was very busy, so busy that he fortunately had no time to go to the Horse and Cart. As soon as his day's work was over he would come straight back to the Boot, generally carrying a full, mysterious sack. He brought too a great many pieces of sawed wood, some nails and bits of iron, and soon the children saw that he was doing his best to make a little cart on wheels.

He was not a skilful carpenter, but he managed in time to shape what he wanted. The cart had a single shaft with a crossbar at the end to pull it by; in it he put the full mysterious sacks, and when the time came, such household gear as he was able to take with him—a pot, a kettle and a wooden stool, plates and knives, also a little bedding and a warming-pan. The rest he managed to sell to his successor at the Boot, who paid him twelve shillings for the two beds, the kitchen table and dresser and bench, all of which were unfortunately too large and heavy to take with them.

They were to leave at midsummer. Normally Spray would have had to finish his six months' hire from Lady Day to Michaelmas, but as the farm had changed masters he was allowed to go at the end of June. This was favourable, since the days were long and the weather was likely to be dry. Neither April nor October was a good month for tramping, but in June they could all be very snug out of doors. Adam Spray's spirits went up, and he talked very loud of the work he was sure to find at Horsham, of the high wages he would he given, and of the high place he would hold in the councils of the Colgate Brethren—"All meeting in a gurt fine chapel and breaking white bread."

Susan, too, was elated and boastful. But her thoughts and boasting were fixed less on the journey's end—on Horsham, Rome of the sects, where Quakers, Cokelers, Beemanites, North-Chapellers, Bible-Christians and Colgates all dwell together in honor and safety—than on the journey itself, that yellow, powdery, rutted road that went down the hill between Mrs. Borrer's cottage and the burnt house, lost itself in Shovels Wood, and then appeared again far off on the hillside, winding she knew not where.

She told her friends, the children, how she and her family would eat by the wayside, how they would sleep under the hedge, how maybe they might take a chicken or two, how they would meet the Cart People as friends and equals, and learn to speak their language.

"Maybe the constable ull git you," said young Dave, who once she had thought was to be the Christ.

"And why shud he git us?"

"Fur stealin' chickun."

"Ho! he'll never git us fur that. We'll be like the gipsies. How often do you see them caught by the constable?"

"Reckon you wöan't be the same as they. You wöan't know how. You'll be caught and put in prison, the whole lot of you."

"We wöan't. You're talking envious. You're eaten up wud spited envy because it äun't you who's going mumping on the roads wud the Cart People."

"And nor are you, nuther. If you döan't git put in gaol fur stealing, you'll be in Horsham in a couple of days, and then your dad ull git wark on a farm, and you'll spend your time minding house säum as you do here. As fur the Cart People, you'll be too scared to speak to one of them."

Susan burst into angry tears. She could not bear to have her adventure shattered by spiteful mockery. Dave's words had much the same effect on her as Joe Springett's words when years ago he had mocked her heavenly vision. But this time she did not fall into a fit—though her whole soul felt outraged and exasperated. She bowed her head into her hands and her thin shoulders shook. Why shouldn't he believe her? She believed herself.

Then suddenly a strange thing happened. She felt two soil-smelling arms come round her, and a rough brown cheek was pressed to hers, and a voice said huskily:

"Döan't cry—I'm sorry I mäade you cry."

Susan was not used to caresses. It must have been years since anyone had hugged her, and she certainly had not expected to be hugged by Dave, who was one of the roughest of the boys.

"There now," he said, "I wur angry. I döan't like you going."

She rubbed her cheek against his sleeve. She found that it was pleasant to be hugged and made of, even by a boy whose coat smelt strongly of rabbit-skins. He held her close, and whispered again:

"I döan't like you going."

"Maybe I'll come back."

She saw herself returning, triumphant and glorious, to confound the folk of Copthorne; though at the moment she was uncertain whether her triumphs would be in religion or with the Cart People.

But he said:

"No. You'll never come back."

He seemed so sure of it that she believed him.

§ 21

The Colgate Brethren, when they found that the Spray family was leaving them, forgot their disapproval of Adam, and gave him and his children every token of friendship and regret. They collected among them seven shillings for his expenses on the way: they even thought of writing an Epistle to the Brethren at Horsham in the best Pauline manner—until it was found that none of them could write.

On the last Sunday in June they all met to break bread together for the last time. Will Backshell was now back again, but by common consent Susan was asked to stand up and read from the Book. Her choice was the twelfth chapter of Exodus, wherein is told how the children of Israel went out of Egypt. For the last week or so she had seen herself and her family as Israel, called to the Promised Land, and Copthorne as the Land of Egypt, which they were to leave behind them, dark, plague-stricken, storm-stricken, judged and despoiled. In her mind as she read she could see the cattle of Pickdick, Horn Reed and Beggars Bush dying in the fields of a murrain, she could see frogs leaping in at the windows of the Horse and Cart, and the houses of the village, while the waters of the Shovel Brook were turned to blood, and night came up at midday from behind Glashall Wood.

"And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the Land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle.

"And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead."

She saw them bringing out all their dead from the farms and the cottages. Mrs. Cudd had lost her Eliza, and Mrs. Potts her Boaz, and Mrs. Coven her Willie—and Dave was dead, the kind, rough Dave who had comforted her after their quarrel. But in the Land of Goschen, in the Boot, there was health and light. Susan, the firstborn of the Sprays, was alive, and it was she who would lead them out of Egypt.

"And Pharaoh called for Susan by night, and said, 'Rise up, and get you forth from among my people, both ye and all the Sprays; and go, serve the Lord as ye have said.

"'Also take your flocks and your herds, as ye have said, and be gone; and bless me also.'

"And the Egyptians were urgent upon the Sprays, that they might send them out of the Land in haste; for they said, We be all dead men . . .

"And the Lord gave the Sprays favour in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they lent unto them such things as they required: and they spoiled the Egyptians."

§ 22

Like many visionaries, Susan was able to accept remarkable discrepancies between her dream and its fulfilment. In plain fact the Sprays came out of Egypt at about six o'clock on a dull June morning, all feeling cold and still rather hungry, having breakfasted on a little flour and water. Their flocks and herds materialized in the home-made wooden cart with its loads of crocks and bedding, while their spoils amounted to no more than the seven shillings the Brethren had collected.

But Susan held her head up and walked proudly, even with Baby Selina pulling at her hand, for she knew that she was going out of the Land of Egypt to the Land of Canaan. She did not believe that they would stop at Horsham. They would go on and on and on and on . . . on and on to Canaan. This distant Brethren in the Land of Canaan would make much of her and treat her as a prophet. . . . So far she had not realized the disadvantages of her sex, for she ruled early in her little world, and was, moreover, at her present age as much a boy as a girl.

But Tamar, though a year younger, at once saw the hamper of petticoats. When Susan, as they tramped, told her of her ambitions, she mocked:

"How can you be a Prophet?—you're näun but a girl."

"Girls can be prophets, surelye."

"How can they be? Men will never listen to a woman."

"They will, indeed. I'll make them listen."

"You can't—a woman's nought, except to be a man's wife."

"I'll never be a man's wife."

"You'll have to be, and when you're like Mam, keeping house and cooking and minding children——"

"I'll never do none of these things."

She coloured angrily, for this was the second attempt to weigh down her dream with the burden of housekeeping.

"You'll have to do them," repeated Tamar. "All women have to marry and keep house and have children."

"Women such as you may have to, but not the woman I'll be."

She shrugged her shoulders, indignantly, and went to walk on the other side of the lane. She despised Tamar for some reason she could not quite understand, and she despised her all the more when, looking across at her, she saw that she was smiling secretly.

They were a queer little company, trailing down the hill to Rickmans Green. First marched Adam Spray, slouching along with his arms behind him, pulling the wooden cart. He seemed to move slowly, yet his pace was really fast, though broken into long, lounging strides. Elis and William both had to trot to keep up with him. Then came Susan, walking briskly and dragging Selina. Last of all Tamar trailed along the hedge, looking for wild strawberries—sometimes she would be left far behind, and her father would have to stop and shout: "Come on—yer!" Whereupon she would run, and overtake them with a stained, juicy mouth. Susan thought her silly and provoking.

§ 23

It was about twelve miles to Horsham, and Adam Spray, who had none of his daughter Susan's ideals about sleeping out of doors, had hoped to reach his journey's end by nightfall. But fate was on Susan's side, and night saw them still in the Forest of Worth, only a few miles beyond Peace Pottage.

The pilgrimage had gone well at first. They had reached Crawley at noon, and going through the village, they halted by the wayside for their midday meal. This consisted of stale bread, nearly black, with an apple apiece—the latter stolen by Adam from Pickdick's storing-room. Susan wished he had stolen anything but apples; she had no conscience about stealing turnips or pig-wash, but stealing an apple was a Bible sin. . . . She saw herself, or rather tried not to see herself, as Eve, eating forbidden fruit and sentenced to the double doom of toil and childbearing—just at this time when Tamar's smug prophecies had made her protest doubly urgent. "In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."

After dinner they all lay out under the hedge and slept a little, for their diet, barely satisfying their hunger, had made them heavy. Then they packed up again and went on another four miles, at the end of which the Lord smote Adam Spray for his Bible sin. A wheel bumped off his clumsy, home-made cart, and he had to sit down and mend it with no tools but some nails and a hammer. For nearly two hours he sat by the wayside, hammering and cursing. Then when at last it was put on again and the cart re-loaded, and they had gone another mile, it was found that they had left one of the sacks behind.

They went back for it at once, but some wayfarer had been before them and the sack was gone—a sad loss, for it contained flour and turnips. Also they had added two miles to their journey, which was a serious matter, considering the state of their boots. Adam blamed Susan for not keeping her eyes open, and Susan blamed the younger children, who should have looked after the sack, since she was busy helping her father, which, said he, was no help at all . . . and so on, and so on, till he boxed her ears, and she boxed Elis' and William's.

Horsham is cut off from East Surrey by two great forests, St. Leonard's and Worth. In both the shadows are made long before night, and the roads of those early nineteenth-century days were often mere tracks, roaming inconsequently from hamlet to hamlet and from farm to farm. It was not surprising that Adam Spray should lose his way more than once, and find himself going backwards and forwards over the same ground. He had not been more than five miles from Copthorne since his marriage thirteen years ago, and the strange country terrified and confused him—filling him with fears of robbers (for he pathetically imagined that he might be robbed) and of ghosts.

About six o'clock rain began to fall. At first it only pattered on the leaves overhead, but soon it was sousing through them, soaking the bracken and the path and the Sprays' ragged clothing. The heavy clouds made the dusk fall quickly, and as they went through Pease Pottage, the lamps were lit in the cottage windows and a flood of light streamed out through the open door of the inn. Adam Spray groaned as they went by, and when—a mile or so further on—they came to an empty barn, he suddenly dropped the shaft of his cart, and cried:

"Git in thur."

The children went in, cowed by his angry command, and found the place quite bare and leaking from the roof. But it was better than being out of doors, and they were glad enough of the shelter. He mumbled something, and, leaving them there, went out.

Susan knew that he had gone back to the public-house at Pease Pottage—he could not forget that cheerful, open door, streaming with light, calling him in from the cold and wet. But the other children were frightened at being left alone in a strange barn, and they all began to cry in varying modes and keys—William roaring angrily, Elis whimpering, Tamar sobbing and Selina screeching as if her throat was being cut. Susan tried to comfort and quiet them, but they would not listen, and in the end she had to open one of the sacks and dole out more crusts and apples.

This brought a certain appeasement, and as the darkness came down on them, filling the barn till you could not see your hand, their terror and grief subsided into sleep. They all lay on the hard earthen floor, huddling together for warmth, making Susan think of the words of the psalm: "Like sheep they are laid . . . and the righteous shall have dominion over them in the morning . . ." She repeated these words at intervals, finding a mysterious comfort in them, as the long night passed, and she woke again and again, to find that her father had not come back.

§ 24

Morning dawned, a pale and watery dayspring. Still the rain rushed down with a hissing sound upon the ferns and leaves. Susan's little company woke up and once more began to cry. They were bruised with the hard floor and wet with the seepings of the roof; moreover, experience told them that if they did not cry they might not get any breakfast, since food in that last year had not appeared so much as a matter of course as in response to tears and entreaties.

The store of bread and apples was exhausted, and Susan turned to the only remaining sack. It contained sharps and chicken-meal, more spoils of Pickdick, but bearing with them no echo of an ancient curse. There was a saucepan, and there was water in abundance, but there was no firewood, because Adam had recklessly depended on wayside supplies, and now all these were drenched and useless. If Susan had had a fire, and if her father had been there to go into the fields and milk a cow into one of their pannikins, she could have made porridge for them all—she had many times made it from worse stuff; but as things were, they had to eat their breakfast like fowls, pecking and gobbling at fowls' food till their throats were dry and pricked and sore with the husks.

"Whur's Dad?" asked little Elis. Susan shook her head.

"He'll come."

But she did not feel as confident as her words. Even if her father had drunk too much to find his way home in the dark, he would by now have had four hours of daylight in which to cover the few miles from Pease Pottage. Either he was so drunk that he had not been able to sleep it off as usual, or . . . She did not quite know what was the alternative, though a dim poignancy which was half fear, half thrill, slightly stirred her blood.

Another hour passed. Susan had packed their belongings into the cart, and they all sat there waiting for their father to come hack and lead them on their way to the happy land of Canaan. But he still did not come. The rain ceased, giving place to a wind that sighed among the trees, and blew the clouds over their tops with chasing spots of yellow light. Then suddenly a burst of sunshine filled the doorway of the barn. Susan stood up.

"You bide here—I'm going out to look for him."

"I'll come too," said little Elis, but she angrily bade him stay where he was.

The others began to whimper, and beg her to come back soon.

"Döan't you leave us too."

She saw herself as the Righteous who hath dominion in the morning, as she promised them soon to be back.

Her idea was to walk to Pease Pottage and inquire at the inn, if she did not meet her father on the way. Possibly he was still sleeping in some ditch, or under a bush, and her eyes roved from side to side of the lane as she walked along. She felt angry with him for his dereliction; hitherto his bouts of drunkenness had not stirred her moral sense, but now she was indignant. A middling lot of use he'd be to them if he went on behaving like this—he'd never get them to Horsham or Canaan or anywhere else; and as for finding work—it was hard enough to find work even if you were sober. He was a wicked man, her dad, stealing apples and getting drunk. Reckon the Lord 'ud never let him come to his journey's end unless he repented and behaved himself; and as for the Colgate Brethren, they'd be ashamed to touch him, and maybe the whole family 'ud get the splash of his wickedness and be put out of the Gate. . . .

She had come to a patch of long grass by the wayside, and she saw that in some places it was beaten down. There were tracks in it, as if something heavy had been dragged . . . or maybe had crawled that way. It was possible that her father had taken refuge in the scrub of bushes she could see just beyond the grass, and the possibility became more urgent as she followed the tracks. They led as far as the bushes and then vanished. She beat the bushes and lifted the branches, looking under them, and at first she saw nothing. Then she saw a leg in a corduroy trouser, and a mud-caked boot.

That must be her father. He had crept into the scrub for shelter, and was still asleep. Her indignation grew hotter.

"Dad!" she called. "Dad! Father! Come out—we mun be gitting on to Horsham."

But he did not answer. Perhaps he was not her father at all, but some strange tramp, exhausted, or—dead.

At the thought a sudden fear seized her and she nearly ran away. But she must make sure first. She lifted more branches and recognized unmistakably her father's worn old round-frock.

"Father!" she cried again.

She could not see his face, for he lay with it turned away from her, but she saw his thick brown hair, curling and matted. Then she put her hand through the branches and touched him. He felt queer—hard, somehow, as if not made of ordinary flesh and blood. Her fear returned and she began to tremble.

"Father!"

She tried to shake him out of his unnatural sleep, but he was like a log, and when her groping hand found his it was quite cold—and stiff. She could not bend the fingers.

Again she nearly ran away, but her fear itself held her back. She dared not leave an unsolved mystery to haunt and pursue her—she must somehow find out . . . make sure . . . She moved her hand from his cold hand to his face. That too was cold, and moist and sticky. She quickly drew away her hand, and saw that there was blood on it.

She was nearly sick. She wanted to run away and could not. She screamed:

"Father! Father!"

But now she knew that he was dead.

§ 25

She crouched with starting eyes like a hare in her form; then suddenly she was released from within, and sprang up, running with all her speed, running like a hare, panting and straining, till once more she saw the barn-roof among the trees, and felt reassured by the familiar signals of her world.

She slackened her pace, and recovered her breath as she walked; but she was still panting as she came into the barn.

"Here, you," she cried to the children, "hurry!"

"Whur's Dad?"

"He äun't coming."

"Not never?"

"No—never—I dunno. . . . Leastways, we're to go on to Horsham this wunst."

She seized the shaft of the loaded cart and managed to drag it through the doorway. Its weight had been diminished by loss and appetite, but it was still too heavy for her. She snatched things out, and loaded them on Tamar and William.

"You mun carry these—the cart's too heavy for me."

"I wöan't carry näun," Tamar flatly rebelled, flinging down her burden.

"Well, leave it then—I döan't care. But come quick."

"Wot's the hurry?" challenged Tarnar, but Susan would not answer. She must at all costs get away—away—away from this thing that had happened; she must put as many miles of lane, as many acres of fern and trees, as she possibly could between her and that dead man in the ditch. She had not been afraid—at least, not horribly afraid—of her mother's dead body; she had slept at night in the room where it lay. But for some unexplained reason her dead father filled her with maddening fear. She would not even walk by daylight in the forest that had hidden it in its secret places.

She marched off down the lane away from Pease Pottage, and after some wasted defiance from Tamar, the others came after her, trotting in her wake.

"Sukey, döan't go so fast."

"Sukey, you go as fast as Dad."

"Whur's Dad?"

"Whur's our father?"

"Did you meet him on the road?"

"Did he tell you to git on to Horsham?"

She would not answer. Their questions flew about her light as falling leaves. She trudged on and on, her arms aching as they dragged behind her at the shaft. She would mind nothing when she was out of the wood.

They came out towards noon, into great open heathery places, raking up steeply into fir-crowned hills, and dipping into gullies which the rain had dug in the yellow clay. The road was yellow clay, scarred with ruts, in which the cart bumped and stuck; and soon the sweat was pouring down Susan's face, which shone like burnished copper in the sun.

Her fear had abated now that she had left those fern-scented shadows far behind. The forest kept its secret—it did not stalk out after her into the heathery places. Her breath came evenly once more and her pace slackened. She seemed to see her past life, with her father and mother in it, rolling up like a scroll and flying away over the tree-tops behind her. She was alone in a free world, without father or mother. She seemed to be beginning life over again.

At about three o'clock they reached the village of Doomsday Green, and begged at a cottage for water. Their food was exhausted long ago, but they had too much sense to beg for that outside the town.

"Is it far to Horsham?" asked Susan.

"You'll see the spire in five minutes," said the woman at the cottage door.

"And wot's beyond Horsham?"

The woman stared listlessly.

"I dunno."

"Canaan, maybe?"

"No—that's in the High Street. Canaan Chapel you mean?"

"I—I dunno. No—I mean the Land of Canaan."

"Then I know nothing of it. There's Canaan Chapel and there's Bethel Chapel and there's Zion Chapel and a' dunnamany more. But I dunno wot's beyond in the country."

Susan did not feel discouraged by her lack of information. On the contrary, she was pleased. The names sounded promising—all Bible names, all names of the Happy Land. It struck her that in entering Horsham she would really be entering Jerusalem. The idea was confirmed when a few minutes later she saw the spire of Horsham Church tapering into the sunshine above the roofs, and at the same moment the bells began to ring.

§ 26

She pulled her cart up Horsham Street to the tune of Horsham bells. The sound flew jangling over the roofs and echoed from the cobbled way. Every passage and doorway rang with it. The sound was like a flock of noisy birds. They sang "Je—ru—sa—lem . . . Je—ru—sa—lem" up and down the street. "Je—ru—sa—lem ... Je—ru—sa—lem." The last two days seemed to stretch behind her into infinity. It was many months since they had left Copthorne; many weeks since her father had died. She had brought her brothers and sisters out of the Land of Egypt into the Land of Canaan.

The Red Sea and Jordan were both behind her. She was no longer Moses now, but Joshua, whom the Lord had raised up to bring his people into the Promised Land. Joshua son of Nun—son of None—that was herself. She had no father or mother. Her father had been Moses, who had disobeyed the word of the Lord, and had been doomed to die in the wilderness . . . in the wood—"but no man knoweth his sepulchre unto this day.' That was what had happened—the Lord had buried him, even as He had buried Moses. Susan did not know where he was, she had never seen his dead body.

"Je—ru—sa—lem . . . Je—ru—sa—lem." They passed Salem Chapel, and Bethel and Zion. The names of strange sects stared out at her from walls—"Friend's Meeting House"—"Disciples of Henry Coke"—"North Chapel Saints"—for thither the tribes go up even, the tribes of the Lord, to give thanks unto the Lord, unto the God of Jacob. "Je—ru—sa—lem . . . Je—ru—sa—lem," Oh, pray for the peace of Jerusalem; they shall prosper that love thee. Peace be within thy walls and plenteousness within thy palaces. The street was full of palaces—the palaces of Quakers, Cokelers, Ebenezers, Adventists. Where should she find the palace of the Colgates? Ah, here it was at the meeting of two streets, a palace indeed with its brick walls and tiled roof and high arched windows—"fine as the Church of England," which blessed them all from behind and above the Causeway trees, sending music down among them like a flock of birds—"Je—ru—sa—lem . . . Je—ru—sa—lem."

The little company halted opposite the chapel of the Colgate Brethren. It was market-day, and the streets were full of people, many of whom stared curiously at the group of dirty children with their poverty-stricken cart. Susan was wondering what she should do. She had decided that the first duty of the Brethren was to supply her and her brothers and sisters with food, and to receive kindly and honourably these who had come as Israel out of Egypt, who had been so singularly blessed with divine favours and wondrously led.

Unfortunately a chapel on a week-day is rather like a box, the key of which has been lost. There was no way of getting in, nor of finding out the names of those who worshipped there. She decided to ask one of the busy crowd on the pavements, and at the same time became conscious o£ a man standing close by and watching her and the children.

He was short and thick-set, well-dressed in broadcloth and leggings, apparently a farmer. His face was round and freshly coloured, clean-shaved except for a frill of gingery whiskers. She thought that he looked kind.

"Sir," she asked, "can you tell us the names of any Colgate Brethren around here."

It seemed like divine revelation when he answered:

"I'm one myself. That's why I was watching you. What are you doing?"

"We've come a gurt way, and we've no more food. I thought maybe the Brethren 'ud help us."

"Are you Colgates?"

"Surelye, sir—Colgates from Copthorne."

"I didn't know there was any thereabouts. What's your name?"

"Susan Spray, sir."

"And are these your brothers and sisters?"

"Yes, sir."

"Where are your parents?"

"They're both dead, sir."

As she said the words, she realized that her companions knew nothing of their father's death. She caught a sudden queer look from Tamar, and her heart failed, but Tamar was too practical not to support a lie that was obviously being told for the good of the community, and she said nothing. "Dad! Dad!" cried little Selina, but that only increased the effective pathos of the moment.

"And what's made you come to Horsham?"

"We want to live here, sir. I thought maybe the Brethren cud find us work."

The stranger stared at the little family, whose ages climbed from two to twelve.

"What kind of work can you do?"

"We've all of us worked on farms, sir—all except Selina, who ain't old enough yet, though she will be soon enough."

Here Tamar made an advance. She sidled towards the stranger and rubbed her head against his waistcoat, looking up at him with round, bright eyes through the tangle of her hair. The trick succeeded. He patted her shoulder.

"What do you want, little maid?"

"A bite of bread and a cup of real brown tea," whispered Tamar.

"Are you hungry?"

She nodded her head up and down against him.

"We äun't had nothing since yesterday night."

"That's a lie!" cried Susan, who felt this to be a criticism of her leadership. "You had a fine breakfast this morning."

"We had chicken-food," said Tamar—"chicken-food and water. I döan't call that breakfast at all."

"Nor do I," said the stranger, "leastways, not for Christians. Come along and I'll give you something better than that."

His heart was moved towards the little company. He had never seen such big eyes and thin faces and drum-stick arms and legs. His own home was some way out of the town, but he knew that any of the Colgate Brethren would take them in and feed them for the sake of Hur Colgate and his Master. So after they had disentangled Tamar's hair, which in the course of her blandishments had wound itself round his waistcoat buttons, they all set out for the house of one Elijah Marlott, a grocer in the town and pillar of the Colgates.

§ 27

The Brethren in Horsham were a much more prosperous community than the Brethren at Copthorne. There were several well-to-do farmers and tradesmen among them, and unlike the disciples at Horn Reed they had not been cut off by poverty and ignorance from other congregations of the same sect, but were in alliance with the Colgates at Brighton, Patcham, Cuckfield and High Hurst Wood.

Mr. Marlott the grocer very kindly received the little Sprays at the behest of his good friend Mr. Dennett of Warninglid. Mrs. Marlott seated them round her kitchen table and gave them a wonderful supper of soup and eggs and bread and butter and tea. Never in their lives had they eaten anything like it. At first they snatched and tore and gobbled like starving puppies, but when hunger was appeased they drew out the end of the meal into a delicious orgy of savour and satisfaction.

Afterwards there was some discussion between the Marlotts and Mr. Dennett. What was to be done with these poor little ones now that they were fed? It would be cruel and unbrotherly to turn them out into the street, now when evening had come and they had nowhere to go for the night. Would it be possible to find them shelter till the next morning, when a council of the Colgates could be assembled and their fate decided?

In the end Mrs. Marlott said she would keep them for the night. She could make up beds for them on the floor. But first—and she eyed them grimly—they must be made clean. Then, to their intense horror, she set about it.

First she placed a tub in the middle of the scullery floor, and filled it with apparently boiling water. Then she and her maid seized the reluctant Sprays and forcibly plunged them in it, scrubbing their bodies with soap and a very hard brush. Selina and the twins screamed as if they were being murdered, Ruthie fought, and Tamar wept. Susan, pledged to dignity as captain and leader, endured in silence, but felt as if she would die under the ordeal.

Meanwhile their clothes were boiling in the copper, so that they had nothing to put on when they came out of the tub, but were wrapped instead in quilts and coverlets, and set round the room on chairs, looking queer and unnatural to one another.

"I want my Dad!" shouted Elis.

"I want my Dad!" wept Ruth.

Mrs. Marlott was touched by the orphans' cry. She supposed that their father had died quite recently.

"Your Dad's in heaven," she soothed.

"How do you know?" asked William.

"Your Dad was one of the Brethren. He died trusting in his Saviour, and passed through the Gate from death into life."

"He went out and never came back," wailed Ruth.

"Don't fret, dearie. You shall go to him one day."

"I döan't want to," cried William. "I'd sooner stay here where it's warm, and anyways you've täaken away my boots."

That night when they were all rolled up on a couple of mattresses placed end to end in the middle of the kitchen floor, Susan told her brothers and sisters that their father truly was dead. Fortified by a good meal and comforted by the red glow of the firelight on the ceiling, increasingly conscious, moreover, of the miles between her and that bramble ditch in the Forest of Worth, she no longer felt afraid to speak of what she had seen. Besides, she was aware that the ignorance of her family might complicate the future if she did not dispel it.

"We're orphans," she told them, "and orphans are always taken care of. We're the same as the fatherless and the widow in the Bible. Maybe the folk here ull keep us for ever and look after us."

"And give us eggs?"

"And white bread?—and butter?"

"Surelye—and milk and honey, just as the Bible says. This is the land flowing with milk and honey, the Promised Land, and I've brought you into it, same as Joshua brought the children of Israel."

"I want my Dad"—from Ruthie, the only faithful heart.

"You'll be better off wud the folk here. And Dad's well enough—he's gone to heaven with Mam."

"Are they angels?" asked William.

"They're angels, wud crowns on their heads and harps in their hands, and their faces are lik coals of fire and their feet like brass, and they cease not day and night crying 'Holy, Holy.'"

This unexpected picture of their parents made the young Sprays thoughtful for a while.

"Wot have they got to eat?" asked Elis at last.

"Näun. Angels döan't want to eat näun."

"Then I'd sooner be where I am," said Elis, smacking his lips.

"They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more," said Susan dreamily, and had a sudden memory of her mother's hungry mouth.

§ 28

She had now quite made up her mind that Horsham was the Promised Land. She had forgotten all her dreams of a more distant Canaan, and was prepared to stay where she was for ever, feeding on milk and honey.

The next morning some dozen of the local Colgates assembled at Brother Marlott's, and Susan was brought before them to give account of herself and her family.

"How long ago did you leave Copthorne?" they asked her.

"A'dunnamany weeks ago."

"That seems a proper long time to take over fifteen miles."

She smiled with her superior knowledge. Hadn't they read in their Bibles that the children of Israel were forty years astray in the wilderness?

"We wandered aräound," she said. "Wunst we wur wud the Cart People—travelling about wud them and sleeping in their tents. We wur a gurt while on the road wud them, and I've learned to spik their language."

"That won't do you any good," she was admonished. Then they asked:

"Which of your parents died first?"

"My mam. She had a liddle baby and they both died."

"And when did your father die?"

"Just after we left home. He went out one night and never came back."

"Are you quite sure he's dead?"

Susan's mouth quivered.

"I—I saw him dead; and he was buried."

"Where was he buried, my poor little maid?"

"At Pease Pottage, sir"—and the tears rolled down her cheeks. In this fashion she won the sympathies of the meeting. She was patted on the head, comforted, and given a lollipop—the first she had tasted since far-off childhood's days. Then she was put out of the room, while the elders debated her future.

It was rather a shock to find afterwards that they had no intention of keeping her at Mrs. Marlott's, that gruel rather than milk and honey was to be her diet and the care of the fatherless handed over to the State rather than undertaken by private enterprise. The Colgate Brethren were comfortable and they were kind, but they were not rich nor were they Quixotic. They had neither the means nor the inclination to adopt six orphan children—they determined instead to send them to the workhouse. Brother Marlott and Brother Dennett were both on the Board of Guardians and would see that they were well taken care of and apprenticed out to godly people.

When first told of this, Susan was inclined to rebel—to protest that she would rather go back on the roads. But she was soon shown that she had no voice in the matter; she and the other children were rogues and vagabonds within the meaning of the act, and having no parents or visible means of support must be taken care of by the State.

"You've got no father or mother, so the Queen herself is going to look after you," said Mrs. Marlott, softening the blow.

"Shall we live in a palace?" asked Tamar.

"In a manner of speaking you will. It's a fine big house, anyway, with an avenue leading up to it, and trees planted round it. You'll be uncommon happy, all of you, my dears."

Susan was not so sure. She felt that she had not been treated with the respect due to a prophet. But in course of time her misgivings and resentments passed. The workhouse was a great fine place, a palace indeed; and she would still be living in Jerusalem, the golden city where the bells sang like birds in the streets. On Sundays Mr. and Mrs. Marlott would take her out—they had promised her—and she would go with them to Meeting, and maybe stand up before them all and read the Word, as she had done at Horn Reed. Then they would take her home, and she would eat white bread and drink green tea. Even at the workhouse there would be plenty to eat—no more meals of turnips and chicken-food. "They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more"—those words seemed now to apply to her and the children as well as to their parents.

§ 29

They might have been applied to the whole of England before that year was out. For that was the greater year of the Repeal, when to a starving countryside was brought the news that the dreadful wheat-tax had been taken off, that harvests would no longer be held back till labourers famished and small farmers failed, that bread no longer would cost two shillings a loaf and flour three shillings a stone, that snails and nettles would disappear from the diet of an Englishman, that honest fathers would not have to steal for their families, or pitiful mothers watch their infants starve at their breasts.

It was a great week throughout the land, as the news spread from those who read the newspapers to those who did not. In every tavern Sir Robert Peel's health was drunk, and the names of Cobden and Bright were blessed at the Plough and the Barley Mow. In Horsham fires were lit and the bells rang as on Gunpowder Night. From the high windows of the workhouse Susan saw the rejoicings in the street, and knew their meaning. "Repeal! Repeal!" was on everybody's lips.

"Thank God," said a woman at her elbow, "those tur'ble times are over."

"Aye, we shall soon be eating white bread now, even in the work'us."

"My husband and I used to be thankful if we could sit down to a penny bloater wud our liddle uns on a Sunday."

"Surelye, and a'dunnamany times when I wur at Towncreep I've täaken the pigs' food out of their trough because of the empty pain I had inside."

Another woman wept:

"My old man came in to me just before the end, and he said, 'Have you a bit of victual? I think I shall die.' I says, 'Thur's the bit of crust we left last night,' for my liddle maid and me hadn't touched a bit all day. So we got the crust out of the cupboard and crumpled it into a basin and poured hot water over it, and we sat down opposite one another. My old man and I had a gurt spoon each, and we gave the child a liddle spoon and set her betwixt us. But I reckon she wur too small to git hold of the spoon, so she threw it down and dashed her liddle hand into the hot water again and again and crammed the bread into her mouth as it wur a wild beast. Then my old man and I threw down our spoons and sat and cried at each other lik babies, and that's all we had that day. The child eat the bread and my old man and I drank the water."

"There, there, my dear," the women comforted her, "that won't never happen agäun."

"Wöan't nobody ever be hungry no more?" asked Susan.

"Well, I döan't say quite that—but anyways not so hungry as we used to be. There'll be white bread and white flour, and sugar, and tea and bacon. Bacon . . . my Lord! I've not disremembered the smell of it cooking, though reckon it's close on two years since I had a bite."

"There's good times coming for us poor folk. Praise God for it!"

"Aye, Praise God! Praise him indeed."

"Je—ru—sa—lem . . . Je—ru—sa—lem," sang the bells, ringing the hunger out of the land.