Lucifer Before Sunrise Read Online Free Page B

courage, like a soldier who has been in too many battles, who has been asked to do too much, who has become afraid of fear.
    Sometimes with his land the farmer loses his life, or the best part of it, in the struggle which from one moment to another never lets up.
    *
    Phillip’s own seed-barley in the Corn Barn had been dressed during the rainy days of the past winter. Billy the Nelson turned the handle of the wooden machine which sifted the seed-corn fromone sieve to another, while a wooden fan winnowed the thistle-heads and other large seeds which had not been sifted by the threshing box. Thus they put the barley through the little old dressing machine, rocking and shaking it over the various wire sieves, so that dwarf and shrivelled kernels might drop through the meshes, together with other impurities. Small corn grew small corn; it was a false economy to use poor seed.
    Billy the Nelson turned the handle of the creaking machine, Luke poured bushel measures of barley into the top of the dresser; Steve shovelled the good seed which slid out of the end of the machine into a bushel measure.
    It had been made about 1895, that dresser. Phillip had bought it at auction before the war for twelve shillings, brought it home in the lorry, and repaired it. Whoo hoo, clockety clock , it cried in action, while the sweat stood on Billy the Nelson’s brow. Out came the good seed, to be tipped into an old butter churn—another of what Luke called Phillip’s ‘patents’—with a two-ounce measure of red mercuric compound. This was poison, and must be handled carefully.
    A baffle of crossed pieces of wood fitted in the churn threw the seed about when the lid was clamped on and the handle turned. The idea of the ‘patent’ was to impregnate the skin of each grain with the powder, to kill the spores of any fungus lodging on the skin.
    In boyhood Phillip had often seen ears of wheat in July decayed to a smutty brown powder. Farmers had different names for the fungus—rust, bunt, blackhead, blight. Once upon a time progressive farmers used to steep their seed-corn in a solution of copper sulphate. That must have been a slow business. The modern mercuric powders did the job of sterilisation quickly. Luke declared that it was a waste of money; while Matt didn’t believe Phillip when he told him that a million spores of fungus might be lodging on one single grain of corn.
    “Hev yew counted ’um, ’bor?”
    “Well, Matt, no. You see, I got tired of counting after the first hundred thousand.”
    “You would, an’ all,” said Matt, significantly. “I reckon thet’s how some folks get money in the bank.”
    Billy the Nelson turned the old churn slowly, to throw the seed about, and allow the vermilion powder to slither over and impregnate each grain. Phillip said it was advisable to wash the hands before eating dinner, but no one bothered to do this.
    Four bushels of seed-corn—two hundredweight—were poured into a sack, which was tied round the neck and set up with others in the middle of the barn. The window was left open for the white owl to fly in at night, to take small rats and mice which might gnaw the sacks. Good jute, those sacks, costing half-a-crown each. It had been a struggle to get them looked after properly. The men threw them down, after use, anywhere in cart-shed or barn. Cop off the bloody things and let’s get home to tea, that was the spirit on the farm. When the men had gone, Phillip and Boy Billy went into the Corn Barn and swept the asphalt floor. They shook out the sacks and hung them away from rats on the pole suspended by wires from the high roof, where loomed in cavernous space the great mast of a schooner, now the main beam holding the walls from spreading.
    Fortunately few of the sacks thrown on the floor were gnawed because there were not many rats about the premises. Once every six weeks the rat-man arrived in a motorcar containing loaves, a pile of newspapers, and a pot of paste, to give a party for