One of the New Voters 



winged brown berries as quickly as they had grown. 

 Starlings ran before the cows feeding in the aftermath, 

 so close to their mouths as to seem in danger of being 

 licked up by their broad tongues. All creatures, 

 from the tiniest insect upward, were in reality busy 

 under that curtain of white-heat haze. It looked 

 so still, so quiet, from afar; entering it and passing 

 among the fields, all that lived was found busy at its 

 long day's work. Roger did not interest himself in 

 these things, in the wasps that left the gate as he 

 approached they were making papier-mache from 

 the wood of the top bar, in the bright poppies 

 brushing against his drab unpolished boots, in the hue 

 of the wheat or the white convolvulus; they were 

 nothing to him. 



Why should they be? His life was work without 

 skill or thought, the work of the horse, of the crane 

 that lifts stones and timber. His food was rough, 

 his drink rougher, his lodging dry planks. His books 

 were none; his picture-gallery a coloured print at 

 the alehouse a dog, dead, by a barrel, " Trust is 

 dead! Bad Pay killed him. 5 ' Of thought he thought 

 nothing; of hope his idea was a shilling a week more 

 wages; of any future for himself of comfort such as 

 even a good cottage can give of any future whatever 

 he had no more conception than the horse in the 

 shafts of the waggon. A human animal simply in all 

 this, yet if you reckoned upon him as simply an 

 animal as has been done these centuries you would 

 now be mistaken. But why should he note the colour 

 of the butterfly, the bright light of the sun, the hue 

 of the wheat? This loveliness gave him no cheese 

 for breakfast; of beauty in itself, for itself, he had no 

 idea. How should he ? To many of us the harvest 

 the summer is a time of joy in light and colour; to 



97 G 



