During the earlier years she had, in company with most people in the country of the Four Roads, passed lightly under its yoke. Even her widowhood had not brought it down upon her—Sam had so often left her, might so easily have come to grief in other ways. Except for those who were actually and poignantly bereaved, the War made little difference to a large multitude for whom it existed only in France and in the newspapers. For a big section of England it did not begin till 1916, for it was not till then that it actually set foot on English soil. In 1916 the Conscription Act, the food scarcity, and War Agricultural Committees dumped it down on the doorsteps of Sussex folk who up till then had ignored it as a furrin business. Thyrza had not thought about it much—she had read the newspapers, and given little bits of help to war charities that appealed to her; but now that it had taken the man she loved, it had taken her too. She was tied with him to its chariot-wheels, one of the nameless victims of the great woe. Her business, too, fretted her. She was not able for the exertions of the times, and was worried by the difficulties of getting supplies. To have no sweets for the little children who came in with their pennies, no tea for the old men and women who wanted it to warm and cheer their poor rheumatic bodies, no cheese and no bacon for the young men who worked in the fields ... all this grieved her gentle heart, and she brooded over it in a way she would not have done had she been in her usual health. She grew pale and nervous, found she had but little to say to lingering customers, sat huddled limply over her fire, rising slowly and heavily when the buzz of the little bell that used to be so gay forced her to exert herself and go to the door. In this state, Mrs. Beatup took pity on her, and forgot the tacit warfare of the mother on the wife. If Thyrza was going to give a child to Tom, she was also going to give a grandchild to Tom’s mother. She often waddled down to the shop with good advice, or asked Thyrza up for an evening at Worge, and developed a new and unexpected optimism for her comfort. “Reckon if Tom’s alive he’ll stick alive to the end—if he’d bin going to be killed he’d have bin killed afore now. Besides, he always wur the chap fur luck. I remember how when he wur a liddle feller he slid into the pond, and we all thought he’d be drownded, but Juglery pulled him out, and his faather hided him nigh out of his skin. So doan’t you vrother, my dear, but kip in good heart fur the saake of the liddle ’un wot’s coming. Tom ull live to see un, I can promise you. He sims unaccountable young to have a baby, but reckon he’d be younger still to die.” 2