Mr. Poullett-Smith looked more than ever like a Sienese candle now that his forehead and cheeks were dabbled with sweat, like wax that had melted and run. He wiped his face periodically with a white handkerchief, which annoyed Mr. Sumption, though it was a fact that the curate had done excellent work, and made up in conscientious energy what he lacked in muscle and experience. “Take off your waistcoat, or your sweat ull spoil the lining,” called the minister, and Mr. Smith rather unexpectedly followed his advice, having, as it happened, quite lost sight of the pastor in that huge toiling figure, now almost bare of chest, with arms swinging like a flail. He saw only a labourer more experienced and a man more manly than himself, whose muscle he respected and whose commands he would obey. From twelve o’clock onwards the problem for Harry had been to keep Mus’ Beatup away from the Rifle Volunteer. The field being near the Street, they could hear the pleasing jar of stopping wheels, the slam of the taproom door, even the creak of the Volunteer sign. As he swung out there over the Street, with his grey-green uniform and obsolete rifle, he seemed to say, “In my day yeomen never worked at noon, but came and drank good beer made of Sussex hops and talked of how we’d beat the French.... Now there is no good beer, and hardly any Sussex hops, and we talk of how we and the French together will beat the Germans. But come, good yeomen, all the same.” Harry thought it advisable to detach Mus’ Beatup from the reaper, which trundled him up under the eaves of the Volunteer’s huge sprawling roof, so he suggested that old Juglery should take his place for a while, and that Mus’ Beatup should help with the binding. He also persuaded Mr. Sumption to give up his sickle and bind till closing-time. He felt that if his father worked between the two parsons he would not be so likely to scuffle an escape; for in spite of his rationalist enlightenment, Mus’ Beatup’s attitude in the presence of the clergy was very different from that which he took up in their absence—and his contempt of their doctrine was liable to be swallowed up in respect for their cloth.