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Green Apple Harvest
Green Apple Harvest
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An excerpt from the beginning:
PART I
§1
The Fullers of Bodingmares had lived in the parish of High Tilt for nearly three hundred years. They had come into the neighbourhood as Forest Squires, impoverished by Royal Charles, to eat the bread of poverty and retreat during the days of the Commonwealth. They had sunk into the country of their seclusion—when their Cause revived they did not revive with it. The concerns of a Sussex village received their souls just as its churchyard soil received their bodies.
The Fullers mixed no more with prelates and nobles, but with country parsons and small squires. Then, as Bodingmares sank from manor to farmhouse, so their company sank to farmers and marsh-graziers; and, as time went on and the big farms of the Rother Valley grew and exalted themselves over Bodingmares, to the small men among these, the tenants, the copy-holders, the fifty-acre men. Slowly yet remorselessly the country of the Rother Levels was eating up the Fullers.
Bodingmares stood close to where the River Rother and the River Dudwell flow together in the flats beneath Haremere Hall. The dwelling-house, spiked about with Lombardy poplars, stood among its barns and oasts on the high ground by Bugshull Wood, but the Fullers' land—their fields of skinny oats, their sheep pastures, their acres of turnips and wurzels—sloped down to the brookside, and found shelter there for a loop-shaped hop garden, in summer a place of green twilight and scented, steaming air.
The Fuller in present occupation was James Fuller, lately from Bulverhythe, where he had managed a fairly prosperous market-garden till the death of a childless uncle put him in half-reluctant possession of two hundred acres. He was town bred, though not town born, and this may have been one reason why he broke the long tradition of the Fullers and worshipped at the Primitive Methodist Chapel instead of at the Parish Church. The Fullers had long forgotten that they owed their mean estate to their allegiance to the Church, but it was a convention in High Tilt, indeed in most agricultural parishes, that a yeoman farmer could never go to chapel, and by outraging this convention James earned a mean opinion from his neighbours.
Many a man on discovering his blunder would have rectified it, but not so James. To the Methodists he owed the wonder of his conversion, his place among the elect, the occasional raptures that broke the chill cloudiness of his experience. He even waxed bitter in his constancy, and spoke hard things to his children about the Church which had departed from Apostolic tradition and compromised with the severer dogmas of grace.
He had two children by his first wife Susan Sharman, who had been very like him in temperament, though she had always set more store than he on respectability and the neighbours. She died before he left Bulverhythe, and he had gone into the country as a widower with a boy and girl. Then one market day in High Tilt he had met Elizabeth Bourner, driving her father's trap behind his cattle; and her soft face, with deep dimples in the hearts of the roses on her cheeks, her round, sweet mouth like another rose, and her hair flying dustily golden like pollened anthers, had stirred in him feelings which he had thought would never stir again. They did not belong to his memories of Susan, whom he had married from practical motives, so much as to the memories of a past put away and wished forgotten, of the days before the Lord changed his heart. But he could not think them evil, linked as they were with the flower of Elizabeth's face, with her sweetness which seemed to hold the dew on it still. So he had yielded to them, after much prayer; and as she was sorry for him, with his eyes both sad and triumphant and his tongue both kind and sour, she had married him and become the humble successor of those Cavalier ladies who had submitted too well to their seclusion.
PART I
§1
The Fullers of Bodingmares had lived in the parish of High Tilt for nearly three hundred years. They had come into the neighbourhood as Forest Squires, impoverished by Royal Charles, to eat the bread of poverty and retreat during the days of the Commonwealth. They had sunk into the country of their seclusion—when their Cause revived they did not revive with it. The concerns of a Sussex village received their souls just as its churchyard soil received their bodies.
The Fullers mixed no more with prelates and nobles, but with country parsons and small squires. Then, as Bodingmares sank from manor to farmhouse, so their company sank to farmers and marsh-graziers; and, as time went on and the big farms of the Rother Valley grew and exalted themselves over Bodingmares, to the small men among these, the tenants, the copy-holders, the fifty-acre men. Slowly yet remorselessly the country of the Rother Levels was eating up the Fullers.
Bodingmares stood close to where the River Rother and the River Dudwell flow together in the flats beneath Haremere Hall. The dwelling-house, spiked about with Lombardy poplars, stood among its barns and oasts on the high ground by Bugshull Wood, but the Fullers' land—their fields of skinny oats, their sheep pastures, their acres of turnips and wurzels—sloped down to the brookside, and found shelter there for a loop-shaped hop garden, in summer a place of green twilight and scented, steaming air.
The Fuller in present occupation was James Fuller, lately from Bulverhythe, where he had managed a fairly prosperous market-garden till the death of a childless uncle put him in half-reluctant possession of two hundred acres. He was town bred, though not town born, and this may have been one reason why he broke the long tradition of the Fullers and worshipped at the Primitive Methodist Chapel instead of at the Parish Church. The Fullers had long forgotten that they owed their mean estate to their allegiance to the Church, but it was a convention in High Tilt, indeed in most agricultural parishes, that a yeoman farmer could never go to chapel, and by outraging this convention James earned a mean opinion from his neighbours.
Many a man on discovering his blunder would have rectified it, but not so James. To the Methodists he owed the wonder of his conversion, his place among the elect, the occasional raptures that broke the chill cloudiness of his experience. He even waxed bitter in his constancy, and spoke hard things to his children about the Church which had departed from Apostolic tradition and compromised with the severer dogmas of grace.
He had two children by his first wife Susan Sharman, who had been very like him in temperament, though she had always set more store than he on respectability and the neighbours. She died before he left Bulverhythe, and he had gone into the country as a widower with a boy and girl. Then one market day in High Tilt he had met Elizabeth Bourner, driving her father's trap behind his cattle; and her soft face, with deep dimples in the hearts of the roses on her cheeks, her round, sweet mouth like another rose, and her hair flying dustily golden like pollened anthers, had stirred in him feelings which he had thought would never stir again. They did not belong to his memories of Susan, whom he had married from practical motives, so much as to the memories of a past put away and wished forgotten, of the days before the Lord changed his heart. But he could not think them evil, linked as they were with the flower of Elizabeth's face, with her sweetness which seemed to hold the dew on it still. So he had yielded to them, after much prayer; and as she was sorry for him, with his eyes both sad and triumphant and his tongue both kind and sour, she had married him and become the humble successor of those Cavalier ladies who had submitted too well to their seclusion.
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