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The Time of Man

Elizabeth Madox Roberts
Contents ( 15)
  1. The Time of Man
  2. Contents
  3. CHAPTER ONE
  4. CHAPTER TWO
  5. CHAPTER THREE
  6. CHAPTER FOUR
  7. CHAPTER FIVE
  8. CHAPTER SIX
  9. CHAPTER SEVEN
  10. CHAPTER EIGHT
  11. CHAPTER NINE
  12. CHAPTER TEN
  13. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
  14. SELECTED TITLES FROM HESPERUS PRESS
  15. Copyright

The Time of Man

Elizabeth Madox Roberts

Contents

  1. Title Page
  2. CHAPTER ONE
  3. CHAPTER TWO
  4. CHAPTER THREE
  5. CHAPTER FOUR
  6. CHAPTER FIVE
  7. CHAPTER SIX
  8. CHAPTER SEVEN
  9. CHAPTER EIGHT
  10. CHAPTER NINE
  11. CHAPTER TEN
  12. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
  13. SELECTED TITLES FROM HESPERUS PRESS
  14. Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

Ellen wrote her name in the air with her finger, Ellen Chesser, leaning forward and writing on the horizontal plane. Beside her in the wagon her mother huddled under an old shawl to keep herself from the damp, complaining, ‘We ought to be a-goen on.’

‘If I had all the money there is in the world,’ Ellen said, slowly, ‘I’d go along in a big red wagon and I wouldn’t care if it taken twenty horses to pull it along. Such a wagon as would never break down.’ She wrote her name again in the horizontal of the air.

‘Here’s a Gipsy wagon broke down!’ Some little boys ran up to the blacksmith shop, coming out of the field across the road. ‘Oh, Alvin, come on, here’s horse-swappers broke down,’ one called.

Ellen’s father was talking with a farmer, and the boys were staring, while the blacksmith pecked from time to time with his tools, the sounds muffled in the wet air. A voice complained, ‘We ought to be a-goen on.’

The farmer said that he would pay three dollars a day for work that week. Henry Chesser stood with one foot on the hub of the wagon, thinking over the offer, drifting, his slow speech a little different from the farmer’s slow speech.

‘I look for rain again tonight,’ the farmer said, ‘and tomorrow will be a season. This is likely the last season we’ll have, and so, as I say, I’ll pay for help and I’ll pay right. But the man I hire has got to work. Three dollars a day you can have. You can take it or leave it. As I say you can have three dollars and that-there house over in the place to stay in. It’s a good tight house. Leaks a little, hardly to speak of.’

Ellen and her mother sat still on the wagon while Henry decided. Later they drove up the wet road, following the farmer, who rode a sleek horse.

As night came they brought the bedding in from the wagon and prepared to sleep on the floor. Henry tied his two horses to a locust tree off by the creek and these began at once to eat the grass about their feet, biting hurriedly. Ellen was told to lie beside her mother on the quilts, her father lying beyond. The strangeness of the house troubled her, the smell of rats and soot. When she lay on the floor in the dark beside her snoring parents, she thought of Tessie, gone on in the wagon with Jock, sleeping she could not think where that night but not far off, on the road to Rushfield, in some open space by a bridge, perhaps, with the Stikes wagon near, and Screw Brook and Connie a little way on down the pike, the horses grazing about wherever they could. She would have something to tell Tessie when her father’s wagon overtook the others. She recited in her mind the story of the adventure as she would tell it. Her thin, almost emaciated body fitted flat against the cabin floor, lying flatter and thinner than the tall bent woman stretched out beside her.