A Solitary War Read Online Free Page B

another week the Nightcraft looked like a chessboard.
    The field must be ploughed. It was already October 11th, Old Michaelmas Day, the latest safe day for sowing wheat in the district. Soon those great flocks of starlings, ravagers of seed sprouting from milky berry, would be flying in from Scandinavia. And the rains were due.
    Time was short. Phillip asked Luke to meet him on the field the next day, a Sunday, to help mark out the field for ploughing.
    “I know it’s Sunday, Luke, but we’re late, also there’s a war on.”
    “Sunday work, I don’t hold with that. My grandfather told meas a boy that no good ever come of Sunday work, and I believe it. Mark you my words, no good will come of it. If you order me to, I’ll do it, of course.”
    “No, of course I won’t order you to come. I’ll have to do the best I can by myself that’s all.”
    The next morning, in neat new breeches and buskins, Luke appeared on the field, and showed Phillip how to mark out the field for ploughing on the ground. It involved pacing from the boundaries to find the middle of the field, and then setting up sticks to mark out the shape of the field in miniature. This rectangle was then ready to be ploughed, and the furrows turned inwards along the four sides until the hedges were reached.
    On Monday the three men under Luke began to spread from the centre of the field, helped by the beer-sweating sailor. They worked round four sides of the rectangle, so that while Luke opened-up with the single-furrow drawn by Beatrice and Toby, Phillip followed on the tractor. Having set the boss off, Luke took the olland plough away and left it by the gate; then hitching on a sugar-beet plough set to work to plough-out the beet on the adjacent field called Pewitts.
    *
    The following morning the muck-spreading was left to the sailor, while the others went to work in the sugar-beet field. Luke declared they were behind with this work. Moving down the rows ploughed out by the steward, the men knocked long yellow-white roots together two at a time, to remove soil clinging to them.
    Sugar-beet lifting was at first hard work; but when it had become a habit men wanted to continue at it. What they did not like was to have the rhythm of any job being broken: to be taken off this and put on that, then away again to something else. They liked it no more than Phillip liked having to go here and there by necessity, or having to write at night after a long day picking and shovelling chalk. But the weather had much to do with what jobs should be continued, or discontinued. Luke the steward said to Billy one morning, “Our boss be all wire.”
    “Ah,” replied Billy, “he’s our electric hare.”
    Phillip overheard this remark. “That isn’t so bad a simile for an imaginative worker, you know. The earth really belongs to the tortoise. Our farm is an illustration of Aesop’s fable of the Hare and the Tortoise. When we’re going properly, I’ll be a whole-time tortoise, my son. Now you know how the last tenant sucked this land. He took corn without muck for over twenty years. We’vegot to put back the fertility. I reckon over two thousand tons of spoil can be pulled from the grupps this autumn and winter with any luck. And it shall all go on ‘the Bad Lands’.”
    “Then your farm will be all nettles, I reckon. But you’re master.”
    *
    After one day ploughing-out beet on Pewitts, Luke returned to the Nightcraft to help spread the dung beyond the quadrilateral of the boss’s ploughing. He was also the teamsman, and didn’t consider that labouring was his job. This, on a larger farm, able economically to employ a dozen or more men, would have been the case. However, Luke was willing.
    When in the adjacent field the lines of exposed sugar-beet roots had lain a week to allow the green tops to wilt and their sugar to be withdrawn into the tap-roots—for a plant had its own feelings, Phillip knew, including that of conscious or unconscious panic—Luke said