The Matchmaker

by Stella Gibbons

  When the reaper was fixed to the tractor and the machine was ready to start, they went back for breakfast. It was already seven o’clock, and all the others were seated round the table eating hastily and almost in silence. Sylvia’s pale face wore a sulky expression and she barely glanced at Fabrio, who ate a thick slice of cold fat bacon and drank off some tea with relish, after darting one loving but absent glance at her. He was eager to be out and at work. Emilio was not, and had to be ticked off for lingering.

  At eight the noise of the engine broke the stillness in the waiting field and, with revolving flails, the reaper moved forward. The first swathe fell, pulling down with it one cornflower and a purple vetch, and lay spread. The harvest had begun.

  Soon the harvesters were moving in, along the edge of the bronze wheat under the grey sky, stooping and gathering up the heavy sheaves. Down drooped the heads as they were lifted, a sure sign that the ears were fall of corn. Fabrio was skilled at the stacking, and deftly, swiftly set each shock in position, and Mary Parkes, who followed him, was almost as expert, but Sylvia, who came after, let the wheat slide apart and topple over. Emilio was instructing the unemployed men, who maintained their air of outraged surprise at everything that happened, and Mr. Hoadley drove the tractor.

  Presently Alda and the children came down by the hedge, all wearing trousers and slightly too ready to laugh and make a game of the occasion. Mr. Hoadley gave them a brief wave, Mary Parkes straightened herself for a moment with hands on hips to smile at Meg, and Alda, sobering her manner to meet the general feeling, crossed over to Fabrio to watch how he set the sheaves, with the stubble pricking through the soles of her soft shoes.

  “Hullo, Mrs. Lucie-Browne! This is quite like work! You wait!” called Sylvia. “Come on, Jenny. I’ll show you how to do it.”

  After a few failures Alda was setting the sheaves almost as neatly as Mary, but soon she began to wish that she had worn long sleeves like the others. The sharp straws pricked her inner arm as she lifted them and soon it showed a scraped expanse of skin. Then her back began to ache, and she was very thirsty, sweat ran down into her eyes, insects settled on her face, and the stubbly furrows were increasingly uneasy to tread. Nevertheless, she was enjoying the work. There was satisfaction in setting each sheaf correctly, in seeing the heavy notched heads loll over into position and settle; in hearing, as if from afar, the stutter of the tractor’s engine as it moved across the field, while all about her the pale gold shimmer coming up from the stubble merged into a dreamlike glare which lulled her senses.

  Suddenly the glare brightened, and a warmth caressed her bending back.

  “The sun!”

  “Oh goody!”

  “Now there will be no storm!”

  “Look, Mudder, the sun!”

  Everyone straightened their aching backs for a minute, standing upright and shading their eyes against the splendour rolling out between rapidly dissolving banks of cloud. Overhead the sky was already a dense blue.

  By noon the day was brilliant, and two-thirds of the Big Field was reaped, while about half the wheat was in stook. The unskilled workers had kept steadily to their task, the elderly men because they had to in order to earn their wages, and Alda as a point of honour, though she excused the children when they began to complain of weariness and heat. Meg did so after about twenty minutes and went off with Mrs. Hoadley. Louise was the next to wander away, leaving a scattered sheaf, and she went down to the little pool at the corner of the field to lie in the long grass and watch the moorhens amidst the bladderwort and water violets, but Jenny kept steadily on, and when the party broke off at noon for lunch Mr. Hoadley brought a smile of pleasure to her brown face by calling her a proper little Land Girl.

  They were seated in the spreading shade of the Big Meadow’s one tree, a majestic oak whose branches stretched out a considerable distance across the waving wheat, while the roots formed little seats for those who despised comfort and ignored insects. The shade was very grateful, for all the land now shimmered in sunny light and the distant hills were black blue in the haze. Everyone was aching, burning with the sun and scratched with the straw.

  Mr. Hoadley had gone back to the farm to have lunch with his wife, and Emilio, who was not so deft at the stooking as Fabrio, had been sent to bring down the jugs of lemonade and the basket of sandwiches. Now everybody was eating heartily or awaiting their turn with one of the two cups, while the girls had removed their knotted caps to let the damp hair blow loose on their brows. Alda had at one point in the morning’s work impatiently grasped her curls, screwed them up, and pinned them on top of her head. Everyone appeared hot and dishevelled except Fabrio, whose face only deepened in golden hue as the sun mounted higher and the heat increased, whose eyes looked blue and quiet under his straw hat’s ragged brim. He lay comfortably on his elbow, munching steadily at an enormous sandwich and staring at the far hills. Hours of heavy labour in the heat followed by spells of utter idleness were natural to the Italian, and he was happy. Now, too, that the threatened storm had rolled away and half the harvest was reaped, his attention could turn fully to Sylvia. Slowly turning his head, he looked away from the hills that reminded him of home, and towards his girl.

  Sylvia’s tongue had been going steadily since eight o’clock in a flow of wisecracks that had kept everybody laughing, even the two unemployed men, who were slightly inclined to disapprove of her exuberance; and her silence at this moment was only due to a mouth full of sandwich. Her eyes, shining with enjoyment, continued to rove about the circle of faces. Only on Fabrio’s face those eyes never lingered; their blue flash darted across him swiftly as a kingfisher over a pool, and he could not force her, by his own steady tender gaze, to meet his own.

  He was not deeply disturbed. He thought: the little one is shy, and loved her the more. Of all the group gathered there under the oak—the experienced young matron, the poor elderly men with a knowledge of human nature gained in the dreary back streets and humble shops of a small country town, the young woman whose nature brimmed with natural kindness, the Italian experienced in the ways of petty crime—Fabrio alone was fitted to understand Sylvia. All that he believed about her was true. A gentle girl did live within her hoydenish body, and love for him would have set the shy prisoner free. But he made one fatal mistake: he underestimated the power of the tomboy, the rude Audrey, who kept her silent and in chains.

  Soon all were at work again except Louise, who had come up from the pool to beg for her lunch and returned to share it with the moorhens. The last strip of wheat, with its population of cowering field mice, had now fallen to the reaper and Ruffler, who had been lying panting in the shade watching the workers, was encouraged by the elderly men and the Italian to go for ’em, boy, sic ’em, fetch ’em out, and so forth. He turned his large eyes upon the hunters as if to inquire, Do you really think I’m going after mice, as if I were a cat, in this heat? then shut them with a sigh and put his head down upon his paws.

  Mr. Hoadley now stopped the tractor and came over to the harvesters to express his satisfaction. Three-quarters of the Big Field was covered with stooks, and so well was the harvesting ahead that he wanted Mary Parkes and Fabrio to attend to various tasks which had been postponed. While they went off (Mary looking willing and Fabrio looking glum) he drove the tractor through the gate and down the road to start on the Small Meadow, and the elderly men were encouraged by the forward state of the work—and perhaps also by his absence—to ’ave a bit of a breather and a fag. Emilio joined them, but Alda and Jenny kept on with their stooking.

  Presently Alda became aware through the pleasant daze of fatigue in which she was working that a fourth person had joined the group under the tree, and she glanced up and saw that it was Mr. Waite. He happened to be looking in her direction, and ceremoniously lifted the bankrupt fishmonger hat. She replied with a cheerful wave, wondering whether he were telling the men that he Must Help, and in a moment it appeared that he was, for he rolled down his sleeves and came towards her.
He looked gloomier, yet handsomer, than she had ever seen him, for he had lost weight and the whiteness of his shirt was becoming to his tanned skin.

  Jenny stopped working for a minute to make him warmly welcome, for she continued to think of him as martyred by Jean’s unkindness, and then he set to work by Alda’s side, and for some time all three laboured in silence. Then Mr. Waite remarked abruptly that he couldn’t stay long because he had the battery birds to feed, and had only looked in to give a hand so that he could say that he had. (“Like stirring the Christmas pudding,” put in Jenny.)

  “Aren’t you coming to the Harvest Supper?” asked Alda.

  “Oh yes, do come!” Jenny hauled up a sheaf almost as large as herself and set it in place. “Do, Mr. Waite.”

  He muttered something about being busy or having letters to write and looked gloomier still. But Alda had caught one glance at her that was almost despairing, and felt truly sorry for him, amidst all the pleasant activity and bustle in such glorious weather. Could he be deeply in love with Jean, after all? and longing for some news of her though it might bring him fresh pain? She resolved to break the awful silence which had surrounded her friend’s name for the past six weeks.

  “Have you heard from Jean?” she inquired cheerfully, bending to set a sheaf in place in order not to look at him. “She hasn’t written to me once, the wretch.”

  “No. Er—no, I haven’t,” he answered, very stiffly indeed.

  At this moment Jean herself was creeping along behind the hedge not twenty yards from where Alda and Mr. Waite stood.

  There was no need for her to creep, as they certainly could not have heard her uncertain footsteps as she hobbled (she was wearing high heels) along the ridges or jumped awkwardly from one tussock of bleached grass to the next, but her whole manner expressed guilt, secrecy, haste and the desire to conceal herself, and every time she passed a thin place in the screen of thorn and wild roses, she bent herself almost double. If her friend and her former betrothed had glanced towards the hedge they would have seen her white coat gliding by, but they did not, and she was able to gain the safety of the first chicken house and dart behind it.

  Then she paused for a rest, feeling the warm wind blowing lazily against her flushed cheeks.

  It brought the scent of white clover but was too gentle even to stir the flowers themselves in the grass. There was not a cloud in the deep blue sky, and the only sounds were the voices of the harvesters behind the hedge, the distant throbbing of the tractor engine, and the low remarks of the chickens as they wandered and pecked about her feet. Jean looked all about her. She noticed the sheds that badly needed a fresh coat of creosote, the rusty broken wire enclosing the runs, and, in the grass, that tall yellow flower whose presence means that a field will one day be completely covered by it and the soil ruined. Clearly, Mr. Waite’s property had declined in value even since her absence; the field and sheds had never looked prosperous, but now they looked far gone towards decay.

  Nevertheless, something within her spirit gladly exclaimed “Oh yes!” to this ordinary meadow full of weeds and these shabby sheds under the blue sky. She breathed the scent of the warm clover and felt more at peace than she had felt for weeks. Presently she sat down upon a tuffet of wiry grass with two bell-flowers in it, and took off her shoes and smoked a cigarette. She could still hear the voices of Alda and Mr. Waite at intervals but she was unable to distinguish their actual words. Later, she heard congratulatory exclamations and gathered that the last sheaf had been stooked, and that the harvesters were about to move on to the Small Meadow. She hastily put on her shoes again and hurried away in the direction of Mr. Waite’s cottage.

  After replying briefly to Alda’s question, the latter had said no more for some time, and she simply had not had the courage—so strong was his expression of displeasure—to reopen the subject. She had given him the opportunity to ask questions if he had wanted to, and he had not taken it. If he chooses to make an asinine martyr of himself, thought Alda, he must get on with it, that’s all; he’s like some hero out of a Victorian novel, suffering in silence and proudly enduring and all the rest of it. Nobody does that nowadays, not even the very young. I give him up.

  She had been working steadily since eight o’clock with only half an hour’s rest, and now began to feel very tired. She was therefore not surprised—indeed, she was relieved, for the child’s deeply flushed face had been troubling her—when Jenny suddenly asked if her mother thought Mr. Hoadley would mind if she stopped work now. Alda emphatically assured her of Mr. Hoadley’s willing consent, and she strolled off to find Louise, but first she so earnestly begged Mr. Waite to attend the Harvest Supper that he promised he would. When she had gone, he told Alda that he must get back to the cottage to mix the battery birds’ food and then make himself a cup of tea; it was nearly four. “So late?” said Alda in surprise, and then there came exclamations of satisfaction from Emilio and the hired men: the last sheaf had been set in place.

  Alda decided to put some grease on her burning face and re-pin her hair before going on to the Small Meadow, so she returned to Pine Cottage. Tea had been promised about half-past four in the Small Meadow, and to her at least it would be exceedingly welcome, for she was as tired, hot and parched as if she had been rolling in stubble for weeks. She glanced out of the window while at her toilet, and was rewarded by a distant view of Mr. Waite, a lonely figure in white shirt and straw hat, walking slowly towards his cottage between the green grass and blue sky.

  On arriving at the Small Meadow she found it already reaped and almost half the wheat in stook, for Mary Parkes and Fabrio had joined the others there; six people could make light work of stooking the Small Meadow, which was less than an acre in extent. Sylvia was grumbling loudly about the heat, her tiredness and the flies, but working as hard as at the beginning of the day. Alda noticed that she was at the extreme end of the line from Fabrio, and it now occurred to her that the girl had been in this place all day. Had they quarrelled?

  Mr. Hoadley now appeared, carrying a pail filled with scalding tea and a garden trug packed with rock cakes baked on the previous day by Mrs. Hoadley. Behind him came Mrs. Hoadley herself, dressed in a blue smock and leading by the hand Meg, whose scanty hair was curled up at the ends and adorned by an enormous pink satin bow whose ends fell into her eyes. They approached with dignity, Mrs. Hoadley looking pityingly at the hot, silent, dusty group sprawling in the stubble under the shadow of a stook, and Meg strutting beside her wearing an expression of insufferable conceit.

  “You poor dears, you do look hot,” commented Mrs. Hoadley. “We were the lucky ones, weren’t we, Meg, having our dinner in the nice cool kitchen?”

  Meg trotted towards Alda, crying:

  “Don’t I look a lovely girl, Mudder?”

  Alda caught her up with a hearty kiss and told her she looked beautiful, while Mrs. Hoadley complacently observed that she did like to see the best made of a child’s looks. Louise and Jenny came up for their share of rock cakes and tea, and everyone drank thirstily and rested in the shade for nearly an hour, for they were all much wearier than at lunch time, and as the work in the Small Meadow was nearly completed they could afford to take a longer spell.

  Fabrio was now disturbed by the behaviour of Sylvia. Not once, all day, had she exchanged with him their smile, not once had she spoken to him apart, or even looked at him. She had kept as far away from him as she could. She would not answer properly when he had asked her what the matter was. She had only laughed and answered, “Nothing’s the matter, what do you mean?” without looking at him. He could not draw attention to himself by leaving his work to speak to her, and he had been able to make only two hurried attempts to find out what was the matter during the rests for lunch and tea. Both had been unsuccessful, and now he lay on the grass, as close to her as he could get (but Jenny and Emilio and Meg were between them) with his gaze fixed imploringly on her as he ate his fifth rock cake. And still she would not look at him! To-day was to be their day of
betrothal. What could be the matter?

  Mr. Hoadley was satisfied with the day’s work. Both fields would be harvested by seven o’clock (it was now five) and although it was annoying to have engaged two workers to get the wheat in quickly because of threatened storms that had not come, the extra men had worked well. To-morrow he would go into Brighton and sleep the night there. There was a two-day sale of the contents of a large house in Hove that he wanted to attend in order to buy bedroom furniture, and now he could do so with an easy mind.

  The weather continued glorious until the end of that day, and when at last they all gathered round the last sheaf in the Small Meadow, rubbing their aching arms and vowing to one another to eat and drink enormously at supper, the harvest moon was rising above the field set with rows of sheaves, and the stars promised to be of Southern size and brilliance.

  “What’s the matter with you and Fabrio? Had a quarrel?”

  Alda came into the shed where the trestles were laid, and, seeing Sylvia loitering, went up to her. They were alone. Soft dusk filled the long bare chamber, and on one wall the first moonlight faintly shone. Sylvia had twisted some large pink roses into a clumsy crown for herself and wore the pink and white dress which exposed her throat and bosom. She had been staring moodily at the table but now glanced up.

  “Nothing’s the matter. I don’t know what you mean,” she said irritably.

  “My dear child, I’ve got eyes. You haven’t been near him all day.”

  “There hasn’t been much time to-day for anything but harvesting, Mrs. Lucie-Browne. Oh, there’s Megsy—doesn’t she look sweet—I’m glad you’ve taken off that awful bow—some people haven’t any taste,” and she went off to meet the three children.

  If ever a girl longed to say to an older woman, “Mind your own business,” Sylvia had longed to say it to Alda then. She almost had said it. But her youth, her manners, her pride, had kept the words in check. She had forced them back, and they now worked within her, increasing her anger against Fabrio. If he hadn’t behaved like a fool all day, staring at her with sick-monkey eyes, people would not have noticed and made nosey remarks.