SEPTEMBER CORNFIELDS.
TIATE harvests are more often than not gathered in doubt and anxiety, under cloudy skies between days of rain. But it happens sometimes, as it happened this year, that a late harvest can be gathered with a strong hope that is almost certainty, in continuous and unbroken stretches of sunshine, a week, or even half a week, of full and burning summer. To such a week belongs its own proper happiness ; for the farmer, no doubt, the happiness of banished fears, and for all others, who merely watch the harvest far off or near at hand, the happiness of the sights and sounds of ingathered grain, and, not least, the sight and sound of the reaping-machine, whirring its clean and ordered path through the rich edges of the standing corn. There are three happy sounds that belong peculiarly to harvest and sunshine : the hiss and the ring of whetstones on scythes in dewy grass, the resolute whirr of the reaping-machine, and the low, throbbing hum of the threshing-machine, drumming across empty fields a mile away. But the throb of the threshing-machine belongs, perhaps, rather to the lingering silences of late September than to the activity of earlier autumn ; the real sound of happy harvesting is the sound of the reaper.
To all but a few out of the millions who eat bread in England the ingathering of the coin harvest is a thing carried on afar off. The harvesting which they see, if they see harvesting at all, they look at from the roadway or the railway train. They do not know, unless they have come closer to the harvest than that, what a field of corn can be. For the real intimate life and colour and grace of a cornfield can only be known from among the corn itself, and never more fully than when it is falling before the knife and the sliding canvas of the reaping-machine. True, there are a hundred beauties in cornfields seen from far off,—a great slope of pale green barley, for instance, rippled like idle sea-water under a wind, or darkened by chasing cloud-shadows, or blazing scarlet with poppies against the white of • a chalk down. It is from a distance, too, that you can best judge the colour of a field as a whole, and can guess, as the summer heightens to the parching suns of July and August, which of the three, barley or oats or wheat, the farmer has chosen for any particular field. In the heat of July the fields begin to separate themselves, to be judged at a distance by their colour alone. That is when wheat turns apple-green and apple-yellow, and the green of oats and barley becomes chalky and pale. Later, under the hot blue of August, light and dark in the cornfields become lighter and darker still. Wheat burns to a ruddy copper ; oats pale to the faintest canary; barley truly " whitens unto harvest." Barley, indeed, bleaches more thoroughly than oats or wheat, is almost a "self," as the sweet-pea. growers put it, of sun- whitened straw. But the ears of wheat are a deeper and hotter bronze than the stem, and oats, for pure colour, are best of all. Far best from oats you can get a knowledge of the wonder of differing tints of straw and ear, knot and stem and husk and blade. Ripe oats glow and change with the colours of a seashell. Stemmed and pillared with the slenderest columns shading from pale madder by minor thirds through deep pink into thin chromes ; jointed and knotted with translucent emerald and amber ; arched and angled with dried and drooping breadths of straw-blade, those oaten palaces stretch front you into infinite distances and faintest echoes. For it is not only in the glory of changing colours that one cornfield differs from another. You could not mistake the sound of wind among oats for the sound of wind among wheat or barley. In wheat it is the crackle of stiff twigs and dried leaves ; among barley it is the slightest shiver of brushed satin; but wind among oats is the tinkle of millions of the tiniest and most delicate wooden bells. Unless it is the rustle of harebells or heather, there is nothing the wind stirs more lightly than an oatfield.
Those are small sounds and hardly heard, yet they are insistent enough not to be drowned by the resonant clack of the reaping-machine, except when the labouring horses that draw it are so close as to pass between you and the corn. And if the sound of the machine is one of the three happy sounds of summer and harvest, the sight of the machine and its horses is one of the most fascinating. Huge and patient, the two great creatures move quietly down the side of the corn, the shining blue sweeps flapping after them and bending the pliant ears to the proper angle for the knife that is work- ing below at the root of the straw. They pace leisurely enough, though one is a young horse and took a little time to get used to the rapping sweeps, and they are driven with admir- able ease by a dark-browed, silent man in corduroys, perched on a light iron seat, designed, surely, for more than all the dis- comforts of a horse artilleryman. His language is limited, consisting of mere guttural grunts, and he never seems to more his hands; but no unskilled driver could manage those towering beasts, or turn them so certainly and so straight at the corner. You may judge something of his mastery over his cattle when one of the animals, standing still for an interval when the string that binds the sheaves has broken and must be knotted and threaded again, begins stamping furiously. You look questioningly at the hedgerow, from which, out of a dark corner, sails a ceaseless stream of golden insects, meeting other gleaming voyagers bound for the same venomous haunt. The whole of that holly-shadowed bank is streaked and cross-streaked with yellow. But the horse has not been stung by a wasp. The driver raises his eyes from the round red cube of the string-box, takes his cap in his hand, quiets the ramping beast with a grunt, and with a dexterous pinch plucks from its hairy knee a great brown horsefly, crushes it between the folds of the cloth, and goes slowly back to his string.
So the tramping horses move off again round the field, and the bright sweeps whirr over the grain, and the niarvellous machinery shakes and binds and tosses out the neat sheaves, to be shocked up by silent labourers following the ceaseless round. All that is disciplined peace and orderliness. But there are a few minutes of the wildest and maddest riot for each field as it nears the end of its reaping. That is when the ever-narrowing patch of corn in the centre of the field has shrunk so small that the frightened creatures within it—the hares and pheasants and rabbits—can no longer seek in and in away from the terrible mystery of the machine, but must make up their minds to brave the bare, unfamiliar stretches of stubble—how hideous a breadth for so small a creature as a rabbit!—and to leave the sheltering corn that will soon be no shelter at all. And soon out they come, each in his own way.
There goes a hare, limping soft-footed front a patch of thistles, and cantering easily away down the hill, for all the world like a tiny brown donkey. She may escape unpursued ; she is privileged on this ground to wait till the partridge driving in October. Up clatter half-a-dozen pheasants, and then another dozen, with an amazing fuss and hullabaloo. "This is absolutely the most appalling experience of our whole lives," they are clearly explaining to each other as they sail away on level, rounded wings to the oakwoods beyond. But the rabbits, for the harvesters and their sticks and stones, tire the real thing. If you have brought your gun it is as good sport and as good practice as anything you can get in the South of England before partridge-shooting has begun in earnest, to stand on the side of the corn away from the reaper, and bowl over the furry, scurrying little beasts as they dash madly out for the burrowed bank under the hedge. You will not hit them all, for they jump and twist among the sheaves at all sorts of queer angles ; nor is shooting made the more convenient when a hulking carter's boy,. yelling like a lunatic, crosses the line of fire, crashing and smashing with his black, brass-bound whip at another rabbit, or possibly at the one at which you were about to fire. • The wonder is that nobody but the rabbits ever seems to get hit or hurt.
And so, in a chorus of shouts and laughter, the last line of standing corn falls. The harvesters, silent again, clear a path among the sheaves to the gate, and out over that broad via triumphalis the red, huge, insect-like machine goes, waving its questioning antennae and weaving its stringless knots, to do its duty in. another field. Behind it lies the evidence of its work ; most beautiful, perhaps, when the ordered lines of sheaves are of the same colour as their own background, yellow and pale ; but there is, too, its own charm in a carpet of springing clover, on which the shocks stand like so many golden " A's " against the green setting of a child's alphabet. The pageant of the year holds no richer sight than those abundant fields, either in the hot sunlight of midday, when the air is resonant with the hum of bees and machinery, and scented with all the luxuriance of summer woods; or when under the cold enchantment of starlight the shocked-up corn waits in almost frosty air for to-morrow's sweating horses and the promise of threshing.
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