Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham [336]
“That’s the stuff to sleep on,” he cried. “None of your spring-mattresses and swansdown. I never sleep so soundly anywhere as here. You will sleep between sheets. My dear fellow, I pity you from the bottom of my soul.”
The beds consisted of a thick layer of hopbine, on the top of which was a coating of straw, and this was covered with a blanket. After a day in the open air, with the aromatic scent of the hops all round them, the happy pickers slept like tops. By nine o’clock all was quiet in the meadow and everyone in bed but one or two men who still lingered in the public-house and would not come back till it was closed at ten. Athelny walked there with Philip. But before he went Mrs. Athelny said to him:
“We breakfast about a quarter to six, but I daresay you won’t want to get up as early as that. You see, we have to set to work at six.”
“Of course he must get up early,” cried Athelny, “and he must work like the rest of us. He’s got to earn his board. No work, no dinner, my lad.”
“The children go down to bathe before breakfast, and they can give you a call on their way back. They pass ‘The Jolly Sailor.’ ”
“If they’ll wake me I’ll come and bathe with them,” said Philip.
Jane and Harold and Edward shouted with delight at the prospect, and next morning Philip was awakened out of a sound sleep by their bursting into his room. The boys jumped on his bed, and he had to chase them out with his slippers. He put on a coat and a pair of trousers and went down. The day had only just broken, and there was a nip in the air; but the sky was cloudless, and the sun was shining yellow. Sally, holding Connie’s hand, was standing in the middle of the road, with a towel and a bathing-dress over her arm. He saw now that her sunbonnet was of the color of lavender, and against it her face, red and brown, was like an apple. She greeted him with her slow, sweet smile, and he noticed suddenly that her teeth were small and regular and very white. He wondered why they had never caught his attention before.
“I was for letting you sleep on,” she said, “but they would go up and wake you. I said you didn’t really want to come.”
“Oh, yes, I did.”
They walked down the road and then cut across the marshes. That way it was under a mile to the sea. The water looked cold and gray, and Philip shivered at the sight of it; but the others tore off their clothes and ran in shouting. Sally did everything a little slowly, and she did not come into the water till all the rest were splashing round Philip. Swimming was his only accomplishment; he felt at home in the water; and soon he had them all imitating him as he played at being a porpoise, and a drowning man, and a fat lady afraid of wetting her hair. The bathe was uproarious, and it was necessary for Sally to be very severe to induce them all to come out.
“You’re as bad as any of them,” she said to Philip, in her grave, maternal way, which was at once comic and touching. “They’re not anything like so naughty when you’re not here.”
They walked back, Sally with her bright hair streaming over one shoulder and her sunbonnet in her hand, but when they got to the huts Mrs. Athelny had already started for the hop-garden. Athelny, in a pair of the oldest trousers anyone had ever worn, his jacket buttoned up to show he had no shirt on, and in a wide-brimmed soft hat, was frying kippers over a fire of sticks. He was delighted with himself: he looked every inch a brigand. As soon as he saw the party he began to shout the witches’ chorus from Macbeth over the odorous kippers.
“You mustn’t dawdle over your breakfast or mother will be angry,” he said, when they came up.
And in a few minutes, Harold and Jane with pieces of bread and butter in their hands, they sauntered through the meadow into the hop-field. They were the last to leave. A hop-garden was one of the sights connected with Philip’s boyhood