Rye platforms, instead of being confined to arguments on herrings and sprats, rang unusually with matters of national import. The free education of the poor was then a vital question, which Reuben and his party opposed with all their might. Educated labourers meant higher wages and a loss of that submissive temper which resulted in so many hours' ill-paid work. Here the Bardons waxed eloquent, but Backfield, helped by Ditch of Totease, who could speak quite well if put through his paces beforehand, drew such a picture of the ruin which would attend an educated democracy, that the voice of Flightshot, always too carefully modulated to be effective, was silenced.
ONE:Caro shrank from the jibe as if from a blow, and Reuben laughed brutally. He had made one woman suffer anyway.Reuben drove slowly homewards through the brooding October dusk. The music of the Fair crept after him up the Foreign, and from the crest he could see the booths and stalls looking very small in the low fields by the Rother. "I wouldn't leave my little wooden hut for you," played the merry-go-round, and there was some mysterious quality in that distant tune which made Reuben whip the old horse over the hill, so as to be out of reach of it.
"I've been so wickedI daren't die. I've been the lowest scum. I'm lost. Pete, I'm damnedI shall go to hell.""It's unaccountable easy to put the blame on me, when it's your hemmed g?ate""We're no worser off than we wur before," Joseph Backfield had said a day or two ago to his complaining boy"we've our own meadows for the cows't?un't as if we were poor people.""Oh, how can you speak to me so!" she gulped.All the more reason, therefore, that Odiam should stand high in men's respect. Now, of all times, Reuben could not afford to be looked upon with contempt or pity. He must show everyone how little he cared about his family disgrace, and do everything he could to bring himself more prominently into the social and agricultural life of the district.
路见不平Eason吼
