THREE:That year Reuben bought ten more acres of Boarzell, and limed them for oats. He felt that now he had strength to return to his first battle, and wring a grain crop out of that grudging soil. The new piece of ground abutted the Odiam lands on the Flightshot side, and he could see it from his window. Before going to bed at night, he would lean out and feast his eyes on it as it lay there softly covered in the dark, or glimmering in the faint star-dazzle of spring. Sometimes it seemed almost as if a breath came from it, a fragrance of sleep, and he would sit there inhaling it till Naomi peevishly begged him to shut the window and come to bed. Then in the mornings, when he woke according to healthy habit at five, he would sit up, and even from the bed he could see his land, waiting for him in the cold whiteness of dawn, silently calling him out to the freshness of its many dews.Opinion in Peasmarsh was divided. There was a general grudging admiration of the man who seemed able, in defiance of the Scriptures, to make Leviathan his servant. No one could deny that Backfield had performed a job which the neighbourhood from the first had declared to be impossible. He was dislikednot because anyone particularly envied him the land he bought so eagerly and so strenuously shaped, but because of his utter disregard of what other men prized and his willingness to sacrifice it for the sake of what they did not prize at all. He was a living insult to their[Pg 397] hearths, their homes, their wives, their children, their harmless recreations, the delights of their flesh, all those things which he had so readily set aside to win his great ambition. It was not for what he wanted that they hated him so much as for the things he did not want.
He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections
