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Black with sun and dust, staggering after a march of thirty-eight miles, gaunt and haggard, with their clothes in such a state that decency demanded that some of the men should be discreetly packed away in the heart of the dense column, they still swung into the town with the aspect of Kentish hop-pickers and the bearing of heroes.
'I took this corner seat for you, Mr. Rogers, he explained, both to prove his careful forethought and to let the strangers know that his master was a person of some importance. They were such an extraordinary couple too! Had there been hop-pickers about he could have understood it.
Here a giant mill-wheel, half immersed in a dark, still pool, stood idle and silent; there a hovel, but recently inhabited by hop-pickers, was now tenantless, its glassless windows boarded over, and a wealth of dead and rotting vegetable matter in thick profusion over the tiny path and the single stone doorstep. "Is it always as quiet and deserted as this?"
The two left London on their tricycle late in August, and had the finest weather in which to cross historic Blackheath and look up the picturesque wharves in Gravesend. Hop-pickers filled the roads and offered many a subject for the artist's pencil. "We rode on with light hearts," recounts the fair wheelwoman.
"In 1914 I was asked to investigate a riot among 2800 migratory hop-pickers in California which had resulted in five deaths, many-fold more wounded, hysteria, fear, and a strange orgy of irresponsible persecution by the county authorities and, on the side of the laborers, conspiracy, barn-burnings, sabotage, and open revolutionary propaganda.
"Indeed I'm glad I do strike you that way," Mark laughed. "After dreaming at Silchester I'd begun to wonder if I hadn't grown rather too much into a type of that sedate and sleepy city." "But there is plenty of work," Mr. Shuter insisted. "We have the hop-pickers at the end of the summer, and I've tried to run a mission for them. Out in the hop-gardens, you know. And then there's Oaktown."
They are in France what the Irish harvesters and the Kent hop-pickers are in England, although always preserving the peculiarities, that distinguish the former country, giving even her vagabondage a melodramatic look, just as if they were 'made up' for the occasion. 'The gendarmerie, says our author, 'have a busy time of it when these gentry are collected in numbers in the district.
The setting of the riot is best given in the article above referred to, "The California Casual and His Revolt." "The story of the Wheatland hop-pickers' riot is as simple as the facts of it are new and naïve in strike histories. Twenty-eight hundred pickers were camped on a treeless hill which was part of the ranch, the largest single employer of agricultural labor in the state.
Children who have suffered from whooping-cough are often sent out with the hop-pickers; they play about on the bare ground in the most careless manner, and yet recover. Air and hops are wonderful restoratives. After passing an afternoon with the drier in the kiln, seated close to a great heap of hops and inhaling the odour, I was in a condition of agreeable excitement all the evening.
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