If we stop the main body settling on our farm, that』s everything. If they get a ce to lay their eggs, we are going to have everythien flat with hoppers later on.」 He picked a stray locust off his shirt and split it down with his thumbnail; it was clotted ih eggs. 「Imagihat multiplied by millions. You ever seen a hopper swarm on the maro? Well, you』re lucky.」
Margaret thought an adult swarm was bad enough. Outside, the light on the earth was noale, thin yellow darkened with moving shadow; the clouds of moving is alterhied and lightened, like driving rain. Old Stephen said, 「They』ve got the wind behind them. That』s something.」
「Is it very bad?」 asked Margaret fearfully, and the old man said emphatically, 「We』re fihis swarm may pass over, but ohey』ve started, they』ll be ing down from the north oer another. And then there are the hoppers. It might go on for three or four years.」
Margaret sat down helplessly and thought, Well, if it』s the end, it』s the end. What now? We』ll all three have to go back to town. But at this she took a quick look at Stephen, the old man who had farmed forty years in this try and been bankrupt twice before, and she knew nothing would make him go and bee a clerk iy. Her heart ached for him; he looked so tired, the worry lines deep from o mouth. Poor old man. He lifted up a locust that had got itself somehow into his pocket, and held it in the air by one leg. 「You』ve got the strength of a steel spring in those legs of yours,」 he told the locust good-humoredly. Then, although for the last three hours he had been fighting locusts, squashing locusts, yelling at locusts, and sweeping them i mounds into the fires to burn, he heless took this oo the door and carefully threw it out to join its fellows, as if he would rather not harm a hair of its head. This forted Margaret; all at once, she felt irrationally cheered. She remembered it was not the first time in the past three years the men had annouheir final and irremediable ruin.
「Get me a drink, lass,」 Stephen then said, and she set a bottle of whiskey by him.
In the meahought Margaret, her husband was out in the pelting storm of is, banging the gong, feeding the fires with leaves, while the is g all over him. She shuddered. 「How you bear to let them touch you?」 she asked Stephen. He looked at her disapprovingly. She felt suitably humble, just as she had when Richard brought her to the farm after their marriage and Stephen first took a good look at her city self—hair waved and golden, nails red and pointed. Now she roper farmer』s wife, in sensible shoes and a solid skirt. She might eveo letting locusts settle on her, in time.
Having tossed down a couple of whiskeys, old Stephe bato the battle, wading now through glistening brown waves of locusts.
Five o』clock. The sun would set in an hour. Then the swarm would settle. It was as thick as ever overhead. The trees were ragged mounds of glistening brown.
Margaret began to cry. It was all so hopeless. If it wasn』t a bad season, it was locusts; if it wasn』t locusts, it was army worms or veldt fires. Always something. The rustling of the locust armies was like a big forest in a storm. The ground was invisible in a sleek brown surging tide; it was like being drowned in locusts, submerged by the loathsome brown flood. It seemed as if the roof might sink in uhe weight of them, as if the dht give in uheir pressure and these rooms fill with them—and it was getting so dark. Through