"I don't know. I don't think much, ever."
She was wondering what he would think if he knew.
She wondered what the farm would be like without him. Would it be what it was last autumn and winter and in the spring before he came? But she had been happy all that time without him, even in the hard, frost-biting winter. When you had gone through that you knew the worst of Barrow Farm. It made your face coarse, though.
Joan of Arc was a peasant. No wonder she was beginning to look like her. If John went-"John, shall you stay on here?"
"I don't know. I shall stick to farming if that's what you mean. Though it isn't what I wanted."
"What did you want?"
"To go into the Army."
"Why didn't you then?"
"They wouldn't have me. There's something wrong with my eyes.... So the land's got me instead."
"Me too. We ought to have been doing this all our lives."
"We'll jolly well have to. We shall never be any good indoors again."
"Has old Burton said anything?"
"I'm getting on. I can drive as straight a furrow as any man in Gloucestershire. I've told my father that. He detests me; but he'd say you ought to work up from the plough-tail, if you must farm. He turned all of us through his workshops before he took us into the business. He liked to see us soaked in dirt and oil, crawling on our stomachs under his engines. He'd simply love to see me here standing up to my knees in wet cow-dung."
"He won't mind your leaving him?"
"Not if I make a good thing out of this. Anyhow he knows he can't keep me off it. If I can't fight I'll farm. It's in my blood and nerves and memory. He sits there selling motor cars, but his people were fighting men. They fought to get land; they fought to keep it. My mother's people, the Rodens, were yeoman farmers. That's why my furrow's so straight."
"And that's why you came here?"
"No. That isn't why."
"Aren't you glad you came? Did you ever feel anything like the peace of it?"
"It's not the peace of it I want, Charlotte,--Jeanne, I mean. It's the fight. Fighting with things that would kill you if you didn't. Wounding the earth to sow in it and make it feed you. Ploughing, Charlotte--Jeanne. Feeling the thrust and the drive through, and the thing listing over on the slope. Seeing the steel blade shine, and the long wounds coming in rows, hundreds of wounds, wet and shining."