The Black Diamond
by Francis Brett Young · English · Gutenberg #48813 · 812,085 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Black Diamond
Author: Francis Brett Young
Release date: April 27, 2015 [eBook #48813]
Most recently updated: August 27, 2017
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48813
Credits: This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BLACK DIAMOND ***
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This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler
THE
BLACK DIAMOND
_by_
FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG
* * * * *
[Picture: Logo]
LONDON AND GLASGOW
COLLINS' CLEAR-TYPE PRESS
* * * * *
Copyright
First Impression February, 1921
Second ,, March, 1921
Third ,, March, 1922
Fourth ,, April, 1922
Fifth ,, May, 1922
Sixth ,, September, 1922
* * * * *
_Manufactured in Great Britain_
* * * * *
TO
M. COMPTON MACKENZIE
GRATEFULLY : AFFECTIONATELY
* * * * *
The First Chapter
ABNER FELLOWS was born in the front bedroom of Number Eleven Hackett's
Cottages, a four-roomed house of old brickwork that stood in the middle
of a row of twenty-one, set diagonally across a patch of waste land on
the outskirts of Halesby. The terrace was fifty years old, and looked
older, for the smoke and coal dust of the neighbouring pits had corroded
the surface of the bricks, while the 'crowning in' of the earth's crust
above the gigantic burrowings of the Great Mawne Colliery had loosened
the mortar between them and even produced a series of long cracks that
clove the house-walls from top to bottom like conventional forked
lightning. One of these lines of cleavage split the face of Number
Eleven and ran through the middle of a plaster plaque on which the pious
owner of the cottages had carved the words:--
_ISAIAH HACKETT_:
_GLORY BE TO GOD_, _1839_.
This plaque, together with the metal medallion of a fire insurance
corporation and two iron bosses connected with the system of stays by
which Mr Hackett's descendants had tried to save their property from
collapsing, made the Fellows's house the most decorative feature of the
row, and gave Abner a feeling of enviable distinction in his childhood
long before he knew what they meant.
His father, John Fellows, like the rest of the tenants, was a miner. He
had chosen to live in Hackett's Cottages because they lay nearer to the
colliery than any other buildings in Halesby and were within a reasonable
distance of the cross-roads where stood his favourite public-house, the
Lyttleton Arms. Hackett's Cottages, in fact, hung poised, as it were,
between two magnetic poles: the pit where the money was earned and the
pub where it was spent. To remain there contented would have implied a
nice equilibrium, had it not been that eastward of the cross-roads and
the Lyttleton Arms ran the Stourton Road, with houses on both sides of
it, and amongst them the Lord Nelson, the Greyhound, and the Royal Oak.
Next to the Royal Oak came the entrance of the Mawne United football
ground, and since John Fellows's passion for football was only exceeded
by his devotion to 'four-penny,' the pull of the colliery was hopelessly
overbalanced by these delights.
At the side of the Royal Oak, on Saturday afternoons, the entrance to the
football ground swarmed with black coats; and the crowd of small boys, of
whom Abner made one, peering through cracks in the match-board palings
could see nothing but the backs of other black coats, or perhaps, above
the tilted heads of the spectators, the sphere of a football leaping
gaily into the dreary gray that passes for heaven in a black-country
winter. It cost threepence (ladies and children half-price) to enter the
football ground, and since John Fellows never wasted the price of a pint
on any one but himself, Abner had to be content with an occasional sight
of the football soaring above this or that quarter of the field of play
and with the hoarse waves of encouragement or derision that went up from
the crowd inside.
Later, in the happy days before his father's second marriage and the
second family, John Fellows used to take the boy along with him to the
football field on Saturday afternoons, or rather Abner would trail behind
him as far as the gate and then pass through the turnstile in front of
him, wedged between his father's trousers and those of the man in front,
breathing perpetually the acrid smell of oily coal-dust which he accepted
as the natural odour of humanity. Whenever he could get himself washed
in time John Fellows made a point of going early to the ground so that he
might place himself in his favourite position, immediately behind the
nearer goal-posts, so close to the net that he could talk with George
Harper, the Mawne United goalkeeper, who, before this translation, had
been a collier working in the same shift as himself, or under-mine the
self-possession of the visiting 'custodian' with jeers and abuse.
Even at these close quarters, where Abner felt the pressure of his
father's protecting legs and heard him spitting into the net over his
head, there was no conversation between them. John Fellows kept his
speech for his mates, for George Harper, or, on occasion, for the
referee; but at half-time, when most of the players ran in to the
pavilion and the ball was free, he would give Abner a poke in the back
and his neighbours a wink, and the lad would slip under the wire roping
and plunge into the _melee_ of boys who were scrambling for its
possession. Once Abner had dribbled the ball away from the others and
sent a shot at the goal which George Harper, who had stayed behind
talking, moved mechanically to stop, and missed; a ripple of laughter had
spread round the field, and when Abner ran back under the ropes with his
face flaming, his father pulled him in by the ear and said with his clay
pipe between his teeth: 'Damn' little blood-worm yo' are! Bain't he,
George?' And George Harper, staring down at him with his big, melancholy
eyes, said, 'Ah . . .'
Next day, as a reward for his prowess, John Fellows took Abner with him
on his afternoon walk, past the cherry orchard, past the stationary cages
at the pithead and the silent engine-house of the Great Mawne Colliery,
down between the smoking spoil-banks to the bridge over the Stour which
separates the two counties of Worcester and Stafford, in either of which
the police of the other are providentially powerless. Here, on a cinder
pathway shaded by the sooty chestnuts of Mawne Hall, there was racing
between the limber fawn-skinned whippets that the miners fancy: timid,
quivering creatures, with their slim waists bound in flannel jackets like
frail women in their stays. It was thrilling to watch them slip from the
leash, race with their pointed heads converging, and roll over at the
finish in a cloud of cinder-dust.
On that Sunday the police of Staffordshire were quiescent. George Harper
was there, his massive thighs bulging striped cashmere trousers. There
was joking between George and Abner's father about the goal that the boy
had kicked. John Fellows won five shillings on a dog called Daisy, and
Abner trailed home behind him at six o'clock, when the steam in the
engine-house was beginning to hiss from its exhaust in preparation for
Monday's work. John Fellows retired to the Lyttleton Arms with his five
shillings and spent a dozen more, while Abner went home, too tired to
play and clammed for his tea. It surprised him to find number eleven
locked up, though he ought to have remembered that before they went out
dog-racing his father had left the key with Mrs Moseley, who did the
housework, and cooked their dinner; but when he walked round to Mrs
Moseley's he found that she had gone to church and forgotten to take the
key out of her pocket. He tramped back home again and fell asleep on the
doorstep.
In later years, when the conflict with his father began, he always
remembered these untroubled days with regrets: the Saturday football
matches; the Sunday whippet-racing and terrier-fighting, together with
certain afternoon walks along the tow-path of the canal, where the bodies
of puppies that were old enough to be taxed floated into beds of
loose-strife and willow-weed, and jack-bannocks hung swimming in shoals
through the yellow water. In all these memories John Fellows was a
benignant figure; and this one would hardly have guessed, for John
Fellows was not prepossessing. He was a short man with a low-set head
and an immense shoulder-girdle. His eyes were small and lost in deep
orbits, so that when his face was ingrained with carbon the white of the
sclerotics was intensified in a way that made them seem grudging and
malignant. Walking home in his pit clothes, bow-legged and with the
dazed and hampered gait which is the mark of men who labour underground,
he always looked as if he had been drinking. Generally he _had_ been
drinking, but at his soberest he was an ugly customer, and the blue
enamelled tin pot in which he carried his tea struck one as a dangerous
weapon.
Poverty their household never knew. John Fellows could reckon on picking
up his three pounds a week, and spent every penny of it. There was
always meat in the house, and Mrs Moseley knew better than to serve him
with food that was not freshly cooked. In his way he was an epicure.
Although the Lyttleton Arms was the nearest public-house, Abner would
often be sent out with a jug to fetch his father's supper beer from the
Greyhound, or even from the Royal Oak, next the football ground, where
they kept Astill's Guaranteed Old Stingo. John Fellows had no use for
bottled beer. Bottled belly-ache, he called it. He rarely smoked a
pipe, for lights were forbidden in the pit, and the habit of chewing
plug-tobacco had made him prefer his nicotine neat.
He was shaved once a week, on Saturday nights, and upon this function
depended another of Abner's special joys: the privilege of going with him
to the barber's shop, a low, boarded room heated by gas-jets and the
breath of expectant, expectorant men. Here, wedged upon a bench at his
father's side, he would read the comic papers that Mr Evans provided for
his customers. Some were printed on pink paper and some on green; and
while Abner absorbed the adventures of two alliterative tramps, he would
hear the sing-song of Mr Evans, a Welshman from some remote Radnorshire
village, as he talked to the victim of his razor and the other waiting
customers. Mr Evans was a great authority on local football, and
subscribed to a news-agency that sent him a sheet of half-time and final
scores long before the evening edition of the _North Bromwich Argus_
arrived. His knowledge of football politics and personalities was all
the more remarkable because Saturday was his busiest day, and for that
reason he could never see a game of football played. Abner envied him
this abstract knowledge of the game; but more than Mr Evans he envied a
small boy with pink face and plastered hair who, wearing a long white
jacket, lathered the customers' chins, and when Mr Evans had scraped
them, sprayed their faces with bay-rum. At last, with dramatic
suddenness, this entertainment was withdrawn. John Fellows developed a
rash on his chin which Mr Ingleby, the chemist, declared to be barber's
itch, and Mr Evans became the object of his most particular hatred.
'That bloody Welshman!' said John Fellows. 'I reckon shaving's a dirty
business.'
And so he grew a beard . . . but he wouldn't let that Evans trim it, not
he!
All Abner's early pleasures were in some way or other related to his
father. It was natural that John Fellows should take a pride in his only
child. He didn't talk to him much--a man who chews tobacco has better
work for his jaws than talking--but he was sometimes amused by his
company and proud of his sturdiness and capacity for mischief. He
rejoiced that his son was a 'bloodworm' much in the same way as his mates
rejoiced that their terriers were good fighters. He liked him to be
hard, and boasted that Abner could take the strap (as he called it)
without yelling. Indeed there was something to boast about in this, for
the miner chastened his son with a brown leather belt which, as the
buckle witnessed, had once belonged to a member of the South
Staffordshire Regiment. This belt, he sometimes affirmed, had been all
round the world before it came into his possession; but Abner was too
well acquainted with its other qualities to pursue the history of this.
In spite of his weekly lickings Abner's life was generally happy. He had
no cares for the future. He knew that when his schooling was over he
would be sent to work at the pit. He wouldn't be sorry for that, for it
seemed to him quite natural to work underground, to earn big money and
spend it freely. When that day came he felt that he and his father would
be able to drink together on equal terms. By the time that he was
fourteen he was already taller than John Fellows, and meant to grow a lot
taller still. He was going to be strong and to learn boxing: perhaps, in
a few years' time, he would be able to strip and fight in one of the
boxing-booths at the wakes: perhaps, in stripes of chocolate and yellow,
he might even play football for Mawne United and talk like a brother with
the great George Harper.
In this manly, indefinite future, women had no place. He had never had a
sister; as far as he remembered he had never had a mother; and so he
followed the example of his father whose domineering attitude towards the
widow, Mrs Moseley, was beyond any doubt correct, while Mrs Moseley, who
had her living to make, accepted it without protest, as a woman should
do. Towards girls themselves Abner felt no positive hostility, though he
passed them in the street as a well-mannered dog passes cats, with a
solid appreciation of their potential evil; but for members of his own
sex who dallied with emasculating tendernesses he and the boys with whom
he played were full of scorn and even of active malice. The worst libel
that any of his companions could suffer was a chalk inscription on his
own back door of the words: 'Tommy So-and-so goes with Cissy
Something-else.'
Abner and his friends even went so far as to pester these votaries of
passion in their own most sheltered haunts. Above the pithead of the
Great Mawne Colliery runs a lane skirting the ancient cherry orchard of
Old Mawne Hall. It is short: at the end of it the pit-mound stands up
black, and over beyond the Stour valley a desert of blackness stretches
westward, with smoke-stacks thronging thick as masts of shipping in a
harbour. Over its hedges, in the dusk, light clouds of cherry-blossom
may be seen, but even before the wind has tumbled the petals down they
are blackened by smuts from the colliery chimney. This lane, indeed, was
a decorous walking place where one might hear a patter of moving feet and
low laughter on any evening in May; but lower down the slope, past the
colliery, it turned into another, shadowed with hot-smelling elder,
stunted hawthorns and oak-apple trees, which had a darker reputation.
Dipping down over the hillside this lane climbs back upon itself and
opens out again into the orchard road. This loop, which is called in
Halesby the 'Dark Half-hour,' was the favourite hunting ground for Abner
and his friends. Carrying the smelly dark-lanterns that are sold on Guy
Fawkes' day, they would creep as quietly as possible under the shadows of
the trees, selecting at a signalled moment some unfortunate couple locked
in each other's arms whom they might shame with their lights. Often they
got their heads smacked, but this only served to reinforce their opinion
that lovemaking which shrank from publicity was discreditable.
One evening in summer when Abner was fourteen he took part in one of
these expeditions. The day had been hot. His father had promised him
that he would make him a kite in the evening. The split lath lay ready
on the table with a roll of blue paper. Mrs Moseley had boiled some
paste, and Abner had borrowed enough string and folded newspaper to make
a tail. As the heat of the afternoon declined a gusty wind began to blow
from the west, filling the street with dust and scraps of paper. At six
o'clock John Fellows came back from the pit. The dust had blown into his
eyes, that were never very strong. Tears and sweat together were
tracking down through the grime on his cheeks. He seemed to have
forgotten all about Abner's kite.
'What's that?' he cried, irritably. 'Can't yo' give us a moment's peace?
Wait till I've swilled!'
He had his swill in the brewhouse, filling a tin bath with black
soap-suds. The kite had become a grievance. 'Nattering away . . .' he
muttered, with his head in a roller towel, 'werriting about kites on a
day that would make a pig sweat blood!'
Abner, who knew his father, got away without any further discussion,
leaving Mrs Moseley to soothe him. He went out and played cricket in the
sloping field above the pit where the ponies that have worked so long
underground that they are blind are put out to green grass and to a white
mockery that they get to know as daylight. When the boys came down to
play, these shaggy creatures stood huddled in a corner and edged against
one another, rubbing the coal-dust out of their matted coats. If they
strayed over the field of play Abner and his friends pelted them with
pieces of slag from the cinder heap behind the wickets. They also threw
slag at a group of little girls who dared to look at them over the broken
hedge. When the light faded so much that they could no longer see to
play, and the beam-engine in the power-house ceased to grunt, the boys
all lay down talking in the hedgerow, and the ponies wandered back to
pull at the grass on either side of the pitch. At last Abner, who was
the leader of the set, because he was the strongest, said: 'Let's go down
the Dark Half-hour and scare some of 'em.'
On such a clammy evening there were certain to be many lovers. One of
the boys produced a halfpenny packet of red Bengal-lights. Abner
snatched them from him, left him crying, and with three others ran down
to the mouth of the lane. In the hedge-side couples stirred uneasily.
The tunnel under the elders was full of a hot odour of dust and nettles
and some kind of mint. They crept forward through the darkness in Indian
file. 'Let's try this one, kid,' whispered a boy named Hodgetts, 'him
over there up agen' the tree. 'Ere, where's the bloody box?'
'There's somebody coming,' whispered a woman's voice.
They struck three lights together. The tunnel glowed like a furnace.
Against the trunk of a tree a short man was leaning with a pale young
woman clutched in his arms. Abner saw that it was his father. He
dropped his match and ran.
The boy Hodgetts came panting behind him. He was shouting: 'Kid . . .
kid . . . did yo' see who he were? It were your gaffer!' Abner turned
and swiped at him viciously as he ran. Joe Hodgetts crumpled up in the
hedge howling. Abner went on blindly into the Cherry Orchard Road. His
heart thudded in his throat like a water-hammer. He didn't know where he
was. He only knew that he was crying and that he had broken his knuckles
on Joe Hodgett's skull. He rubbed them in the black dust of the roadway,
and that stopped the bleeding. But nothing, it seemed, could stop his
tears.
The Second Chapter
WHEN he reached home, half an hour later, he was ashamed of himself. It
didn't matter to him what his father did. He only hoped that John
Fellows hadn't recognised him, for that would make him sure of a belting.
Still, he was glad that he had given Joe Hodgetts what for. He wasn't
going to have a fellow of his own age laughing at his father even if his
father had let him down by making a fool of himself.
A year later John Fellows was married. In spite of Abner's scorn the
proceeding was natural enough. The man was under forty, and had been a
widower for more than fourteen years. The new wife, the woman of the
tunnel, was a girl named Alice Higgins, the elder daughter of an old
friend of Fellows, the timekeeper at the colliery, who had lost his left
leg many years ago in a crushing fall of coal. She was tall, slight,
with a fair complexion and honey-coloured hair: in every physical
particular the opposite of her swart and stubby husband. If such a thing
had to be, Abner would have preferred the maturer charms of Mrs Moseley,
whom he knew so well and liked, to those of any stranger. Indeed, from
the day of his father's marriage onward his life became more complicated.
The very presence in the house of this new inmate, a woman wielding
authority, whom he remembered only a little time ago as a girl with a
pigtail down her back, made him awkward. His father had never even
mentioned their meeting in the lane--probably he had not recognised
Abner, but the boy was certain that Alice had seen him and remembered.
The consciousness of this mystery that they shared only aggravated the
distrust and shyness that separated them: a shyness which Alice herself
honestly tried to overcome by little overtures of affection. She was
quite determined, in her quiet way, that she wasn't going to be like the
stepmothers of tradition. She would try to be a real mother to Abner.
But how did real mothers feel?
'Why don't you call me mother, like other boys would, Abner?' she said
one day, coaxingly. Abner only laughed. She hated him for laughing at
her. A boy of his age!
But the real trouble did not begin till a year later when the first baby
of the new family was coming. It was a bad time for all of them. John
Fellows, after fifteen years of a widower's life, had forgotten anything
that he had ever learnt in the way of matrimonial tactics. He wasn't any
longer a young man, and his nature had inevitably stiffened. Besides,
the coming of this child was not like the adventure of Abner's birth,
when he and his first wife had been two tender young people rather
overwhelmed by the responsibilities of marriage. Alice became more
conscious than ever of the gap of years that separated them, the distance
which had always been implicit in her idea of her father's friend, 'Mr
Fellows.' With her it could never be naturally 'John.' And now that she
wanted somebody to take hold of her and share her fears she found herself
face to face with an elderly stranger. She was frightened at the thought
of being so utterly alone. Abner, a member of her own generation, and
the son of her baby's father, was a symbol of the whole disastrous
circumstance.
In spite of all her good resolutions she couldn't help letting off a
little of her unhappiness on him. It was against her will that she did
so. Sometimes she cried with vexation at her own irritability and
resolved to overcome it. Then, as the months dragged on, she began to
wonder if it were worth while tiring herself out with good resolutions or
anything else in the world. She found herself becoming wilfully vixenish
with her husband. That didn't matter, for she seldom saw him; but a
little later a new emotion, stronger and more positively devastating than
any that she had known before, seized her. It was a thing that she
couldn't understand. She felt as if some strange, dark spirit had
invaded and perverted her consciousness, making her think madly and not
in the least as she wanted to think, filling her with a mixture of hate
and jealousy towards Abner. This passion would not let her be. However
tired and jaded she were the fiend was ready to tear her. She could not
see the boy without hating him. She felt just like a cat with kittens,
who spits at the kittens of another cat.
She had plenty of opportunities for showing her hatred. Abner was now
fifteen. His schooling was finished, and he had begun to work at the
colliery, leading the ponies that drag trollies of coal along the
galleries of the pit. He found it quite good fun. The pony of which he
had charge was very old and quite blind, for it had worked in Mawne pit
since before Abner was born. He found it slower than a pony should be
and spent the first Sunday after he had started work in searching Uffdown
Wood for an ash-plant with which he might induce the pony to go faster.
When he had found one he fitted a pin in the end of it.
A few minutes after six every evening the cage would come clanking up to
the pit-head, and before it settled with a jerk, Abner, black with
coal-grime, would shoot out like a hare and go whistling home to his tea.
He whistled because there was always a curious lightening of his heart at
the change from the murk of the pit to daylight. It was spring when he
started work. Every evening as he passed the cherry orchard he heard the
whistle of a blackbird poised on the topmost bough of one of the foamy
trees. He wondered exuberantly if he could find its nest some day. He
even collected a couple of pebbles to put in the place of eggs. But when
he got home there was no Mrs Moseley, waiting with a 'piece' ready
buttered and a cup of steaming tea--only Alice, dragging about the
kitchen, greeting him with jealous eyes.
'Abner, you dirty little beast,' she would say, 'don't you dare soil that
table now. Mind your filthy hands! It's summat to have your father, let
alone yo'. Here, that's your father's towel. Loose it quick!'
None of this was very serious, but it made a great difference to Abner.
He was continually being shocked to find that small details in the
arrangement of the house, such as the position of a chair which had
always been his favourite, were being altered from day to day. Alice had
a fever for making freakish variations in the kitchen furniture. She
couldn't be happy to see things in the same place for two days running.
She was never satisfied, making alterations, as it seemed, simply for the
sake of finding fresh work to do, yet always working under protest. Her
presence became dragged and unhappy, and the only results of her
unnatural labours were untidiness and confusion.
Even John Fellows could not help being irritated by these fruitless
activities. His first wife, and later Mrs Moseley, had known that it was
as much as their lives were worth not to have the house swept and
speckless by evening ready to receive the pit dirt of the master. Now,
when he came home to find Alice crouching over the fireplace in her
bulged apron smearing red raddle on the hearth without as much as a
kettle boiling, he would stand still in the doorway, a short, aggressive
figure, and ask the wench what she thought she was doing croodled down
there in the grate and him waiting for his tea. Then Alice, with her
pale face averted, would snarl back at him and his dirt in the
high-pitched voice in which she used to gossip with Mrs Hobbs, three
doors down. All the women in Hackett's Cottages eventually developed the
same sort of voice.
John Fellows really behaved rather well. He knew that it wasn't worth
while grumbling, reflected that all women were more than usually
unreasonable at these times, and so he would sometimes start his washing
in the scullery with cold water, knowing well that in a moment the little
vixen would be at his elbow with a boiling saucepan. Then he would catch
hold of her in his grimy arms, and she would cry out shrilly that he was
a great mucky beast and tell him to 'give over.' A little sparring of
this kind often put him in a good humour, and Alice, quick to recognise
the peculiar power which her physical presence still exercised on her
husband, sometimes presumed on it so far that these passages of arms
ended in tears. At such times it frightened her to see him suddenly
revealed to her as a strange, hard man, nearly double her own age, with
whom she was unaccountably living. Even maternity couldn't make her feel
anything but a little girl in the face of his strange maturity. She felt
that John Fellows knew, as well as she did, that she was only making
believe to be a grown-up married woman; he had shown it more than once by
his roughness to her; but that didn't really matter as long as the
neighbours never guessed her secret--the neighbours, and more
particularly Abner. For if Abner once knew the truth she could never
again be mistress in her own house (that was how she put it) and she was
so jealous of this imaginary dignity, and at the same time so conscious
of its artificiality, that she could never cease trying to put Abner in
his place.
It was bad enough for Alice that her husband should laugh at her.
Certainly, she determined, she wasn't going to stand anything of that
kind from Abner; and though Abner himself had not yet shown her any signs
of disrespect she took great pains to give him no opportunity of doing so
by repressing him whenever she had the chance. Just as John Fellows had
once approved in Abner the aggressive tendencies that went to the making
of a 'bloodworm,' he now approved in Alice, so little and so desperately
game, the temper that made things so uncomfortable for Abner. As long as
she kept her temper for the boy and didn't try any of her tricks on him
it didn't matter. And since it pleased John Fellows, who loved nothing
better than a dog-fight, to see his little Alice bare her teeth, the girl
played up to him, knowing that her husband would keep Abner from hitting
back as long as the game pleased him.
Abner suffered her sullenly. He soon found out that it wasn't worth
while disputing with her, and indeed, sometimes her violence, wasting
itself against his unconcern, recoiled on her, so that he had the
satisfaction of seeing her in tears. This vexed her, partly for shame
and partly because she saw that crying, which she had always regarded as
her last and most telling weapon, had no effect on him. They were both
of them little more than children.
In the end it came to this: Abner, realising that Hackett's Cottages
could never again be a real home to him, decided, with the philosophy
which is learned early among people who have to fight for themselves,
that he must cut his losses and strike out for himself as soon as he
could manage to do so. He knew that for the present he could not afford
to find another lodging, but already he was doing a man's work at the
colliery and soon he would be earning a man's wages. When she realised
this Alice was sorry that she had helped to drive him away, for she had
dreamed pleasantly of all the money that she would soon be able to
handle, and had decided to buy a piano for the parlour and a
marble-topped washhand-stand, with a pink toilet set, for the front
bedroom. It would be a pity, she reflected, to get rid of a full
wage-earner in exchange for a little personal dignity.
So, suddenly relenting, she became towards Abner the incarnation of
sweetness. Abner, however, wasn't having any. Even though he didn't see
through her, he felt that her attitude was rather too good to be true.
For the present he went on his way, paying regularly his weekly 'lodge'
and the subscription to an industrial death-policy that had been taken
out in the year of his birth to provide for his burial. But with the
fulfilment of these obligations, his dealings with Hackett's Cottages
ceased. He became a lodger pure and simple, only appearing at night,
when the others had gone to bed, tired, and ready to tumble into the nest
of blankets which Alice had not disturbed since he left them in the
morning.
She wasn't going to put herself out for him, she said. In those days she
didn't feel inclined to put herself out for anybody. Unfortunately she
couldn't have it both ways; for by frightening Abner away with her temper
she had lost the use of his strength in the heavier work of the house.
She knew that she couldn't ask her husband to help her. He hadn't
married her for that. Her weary, and palpably interested attempts to
coax Abner back to her were a failure. Without showing a vestige of
bitterness he went stolidly on his way, and so she resigned herself, with
a sort of tired pride, to the heaviness of her lot.
In a way this desertion of Hackett's Cottages was a good thing for Abner,
for it drove him out into the open air and rid his lungs of the coal-dust
that he breathed in the galleries of the pit. Joe Hodgetts, now more
than ever his friend and admirer, shared these joys. Together they
roamed over all the sweet country-side that ponders above the smoke of
Mawne. They did not know that it was beautiful. They only knew that
there were banks of hazel under which one might play pitch and toss or
nap without the fear of a policeman; that there were cool streams with
bottoms of red sand in which it was good to bathe; that there were
rabbits that came out timidly in the evening to be shot with catapults,
and wood-pigeons that rustled the trees on the edge of Uffdown Wood and
then emerged with clapping wings.
Both boys had the instincts of poachers, and in the spring another
partner joined them: an equivocal terrier with a sandy coat, a long, thin
tail and a guttersnipe's intelligence which Abner got for the asking from
a miner at Mawne who didn't think the beast worth the cost of a licence.
He couldn't house the animal in Hackett's Cottages, for Alice couldn't
abear dogs . . . the dirty beasts! Abner's old friend, Mrs Moseley, came
to his help. The dog, now christened Tiger, found a home in her
washhouse, living among his hoarded bones on a strip of sacking in the
ash-hole beneath the copper. Here he would lie in the evening waiting
for his master, his thin snout pressed to the ground between extended
paws, motionless, pretending to be asleep. When he heard Abner's step
approaching he would lie still, with gleaming open eyes, and wait for his
name to be called. Then he would leap out and lick the pit-dust from
Abner's face with his tongue. Even Mrs Moseley, who fed him, was nothing
to Tiger if Abner were there.
Together they would go out into the golden evening hunting rabbits which
Abner would sometimes bring home to Mrs Moseley, who had a way of cooking
them with onions soused in milk. They were a great treat to her, for
being a widow and no longer employed in John Fellows's house, she rarely
tasted meat. Sharing the proceeds of their hunting Abner and Mrs Moseley
would sit late over their tea next day, and Tiger, under the table, would
crack the rabbit's head and lick out the brains with his pointed tongue.
Later in the week Mrs Moseley would sell the rabbit-skin to a
rag-and-bones man for twopence. She was really very fond of Abner, and
even if he hadn't brought food to the house she would have been glad of
his visits, 'for company' as she called it.
Because he kept the dog there, and because he was happy in Mrs Moseley's
society, Abner made her cottage his real home. It stood last in one of a
series of parallel streets that climbed desperately out of the dust of
the Stourton Road towards a low crest facing Uffdown and the other hills
of its chain. The lower story looked out on a wall of the local blue
brick; but the windows of the bedroom, a stuffy chamber in which the
widow spent the greater part of her day, and which the district nurse
penetrated every morning in a whiff of iodoform for the purpose of
dressing Mrs Moseley's bad leg, commanded, beyond a foreground of
cinder-waste, blue distances from which the hill air could have blown in
cleanly. The doctor had told Mrs Moseley that her leg would never heal
unless she gave it rest, and since all her relatives were now married and
too prosperous to give the old woman a thought, she was left to herself,
hobbling from the bedroom to the kitchen whenever it was necessary to
bank up the fire. On the hob stood a teapot, brewing a decoction of
tannin which had long since ruined her digestion but was the thing for
which she cared most in life. She called it her 'cup of tea.'
Abner rarely noticed what an effort she made to receive him cheerfully
when he came for his dog. He didn't see how slow and painful her
movements were becoming. She never seemed to him any different from the
Mrs Moseley whom he had always known and taken for granted, until, one
day, she was put to bed and forbidden to move at all. She had spent the
whole morning crying to herself, for it seemed to her that the day was
not distant when she would have to be moved to Stourton workhouse, to be
carried downstairs and placed in the black van before a crowd of gaping
neighbours, dirty women with babies in their arms. She had always been
shy of the people who lived near her. A country woman, she felt out of
place with these industrial folk. She wished very much that she might
die.
When Abner came into the house that evening he found the grate cold and
full of ashes. He ran into the washhouse to fetch Tiger, but the dog was
not there. Then he heard the voice of Mrs Moseley, distressed and
quavering, calling him from above, and a minute later Tiger came
scampering downstairs, thoroughly ashamed of himself, from his nest on
Mrs Moseley's bed. Abner, standing at the bottom of the stairs, listened
to the story of her troubles. She wouldn't tell him much about them, and
nothing at all about the deeper fears that haunted her. She told him to
get a cup of tea for himself, but when he suggested bringing another
upstairs to her she was scandalised. Even though she was old enough to
be his grandmother she thought that this would be indelicate; besides,
she couldn't be quite certain that the cleanliness of her bedroom was
beyond reproach, and had determined that before any one visited her, leg
or no leg, she must spend a day putting things straight. And of course
the floor must be scrubbed with carbolic soap. She begged Abner to get
her some from Mr Ingleby's shop.
Later, as the days of her imprisonment lengthened, she found that she
couldn't be so independent after all. At an immense sacrifice she
consented to the presence of Abner in her room, that narrow, ill-lighted
chamber which the bulging four-poster nearly filled, where, in fact, it
was the only piece of furniture. Here Abner would sit in the hot
evenings of summer, staring through the closed windows at the distant
hills, while Mrs Moseley, in a tired, unhurried voice, talked of things
that had happened in his childhood and other days, more remote, when his
mother had been alive. The old woman had always been fond of Abner,
always a little frightened of his father; and now that this tall youth
was repaying her in some degree for the care that she had given him in
his childhood, she became very tender toward him. At times his coming
made her vaguely emotional, her tenderness helping her to realise how
very lonely she was. Sometimes, when she heard his step in the room
beneath her, she would very nearly cry, and the dog Tiger, lying on the
patchwork quilt, would lick her outstretched arm. She began to count on
his visits. Indeed, rather than lose him, she would even have consented
to have the bedroom windows opened.
He never spoke of his own accord about Alice, but Mrs Moseley compelled
him to do so, inquiring every day how she was getting on. She had
promised John Fellows, to whom she was always grateful for her old
employment, that she would be in the house during the confinement, and to
lend the doctor a hand. John Fellows remembered well what a tower of
strength she had been at the time when Abner was born. In those days she
had possessed a comfortable figure and a jolly laugh.
'I don't want her there!' Alice had protested. 'I'd rather have _anyone_
with me nor her!'
She didn't object to Mrs Moseley in herself, but she was suspicious of
any one who had known the house before she came there, convinced that the
old woman would sniff at her improvements and perhaps make mischief,
poking her nose into all the drawers and cupboards while she, the
mistress, was in bed. And perhaps John Fellows would compare Mrs
Moseley's cooking with her own! But her husband wasn't having any
nonsense of that kind. 'Silly wench, yo' don't know what's good for
you!' he said, considering the matter settled. Alice cried; but he
didn't take any notice of that sort of thing.
As the time drew nearer it distressed Mrs Moseley to think that she might
still be in bed when she was wanted. She wished to be there not only for
the sake of the husband but also because she couldn't afford to miss the
ten shillings that her fortnight's work would bring her, to say nothing
of the fortnight's keep. Abner was impatient with her questions.
'Oh, don't yo' worry about _her_,' he said. 'She's not worth it. Got a
temper like a cat.'
'You shouldn't say that, dear,' said Mrs Moseley. 'She's the mother that
the Lord's given you. And it's hard days for women when they're like
that. I've been through it myself, so I know what they feels like.
It'll be different when the baby comes along.'
But Abner was sure it wouldn't be different. It would take more than a
baby to change Alice. 'Besides, she bain't my mother,' he said. 'A
regular cat . . . that's what she bin! You'm the nearest I've ever had
to a mother.'
Mrs Moseley smiled. Secretly, when he wasn't looking, she wiped her left
eye on the patchwork counterpane.
The Third Chapter
IN the middle of a summer night Abner's father came blundering into his
son's bedroom. 'Come along, get a shift on you!' he said. 'Go and
holler to Mrs Moseley, and then run on to the doctor's.'
In his hand he carried a candle which lit up his surly face and threw the
folds on either side of the grimy wrinkles into relief. His eyes were
bleared and angry, for he had been sleeping like a log and resented any
disturbance at night.
'It bain't no good my going for her,' said Abner sleepily. 'She's got a
bad leg.'
'Bad leg be bosted!' shouted John Fellows. 'She'll have to come if I
send for her. Tak' your hook now!'
While Abner dressed, his father was prowling from room to room letting
the tallow from the candle drip down the front of his trousers, and
shouting at the boy to hurry up from time to time. In a few minutes
Abner was ready and had crossed the patch of waste ground that lay
between the terrace and the Stourton Road. This highway was more
desolate than he had ever seen it before. In some of the upper windows
subdued gas-jets were burning, but most of them took on the gray light of
a moon that could not be seen. He was halfway into Halesby before he
really woke. Then, in the cool night air, he forgot his grudge against
his father for waking him. Even the foul dust of the Stourton Road smelt
sweet. He had never felt fitter nor more awake in his life.
As he reached Mrs Moseley's door Tiger began to bark. He heard the voice
of Mrs Moseley trying to soothe the beast. Then he picked up some
pebbles and threw them against the window panes, and a moment later the
old woman looked out, Tiger scrambling into the window beside her.
'Our father wants you,' he called. 'And I've got to go for the doctor.'
'Dear, dear,' said Mrs Moseley, 'I knew it would happen like this. I
wouldn't disappoint your father for anything . . . that I wouldn't!'
'Don't you take no notice of it!' Abner urged. 'Don't you come! I'll
tell 'em the doctor won't let you.'
She shook her head solemnly and disappeared from the window.
Abner, exhilarated with the night air, ran on to the doctor's house.
This gentleman appeared to resent his call. Abner was told to wait below
so that he might carry the bag. He stood there in a garden heavy with
the perfume of stocks. In the meadows along the Stour a corncrake was
calling. He wondered what kind of bird it was, and whether it was easy
to kill. He didn't mind how long the doctor kept him waiting.
On the way back to Hackett's Cottages Dr Moorhouse spoke very little. He
asked Abner the kind of questions he usually put to young people, and
grunted in reply, as if he hadn't heard what Abner said.
'Are you John Fellows's son?' he asked. And then: 'How old are you?'
When Abner said that he was going in seventeen, he grunted. It scarcely
seemed possible that more than sixteen years had passed since, in the
same small house of Hackett's Cottages, he had ushered this tall youth
into the world. It filled him with a kind of discontent to realise that
for all these years he had been moving in the same groove, in a vicious
circle that had brought him back once more to this identical point. Only
it hadn't been so hard to turn out at night sixteen years ago. A dog's
life! People didn't realise it. There was Ingleby, the chemist, a
sensible man in most things, fool enough to make his only son a doctor!
When they reached Hackett's Cottages they found the door of number eleven
open and a light shining in it. John Fellows came out to meet them and
insisted on shaking hands with the doctor. It was obvious that he had
been sampling the bottle of brandy that is always in evidence on these
occasions.
'She's all right,' he said. 'She's all right, doctor. A tough wench she
is! Tougher than the other one.'
He turned on Abner. 'Get the fire lit. Sharp, now! Else I'll drap thee
one. Fill the big kettle. Plenty of hot water. That's it, isn't it,
doctor? I know . . . don't I, doctor? . . . I know.'
Somebody came limping downstairs. It was Mrs Moseley.
'What . . .?' shouted the doctor. 'What's the meaning of this? What do
you mean by it, woman? Didn't I tell you to stay in bed till I let you
out? Of all the damned pig-headed foolishness . . '
Mrs Moseley smiled her tired, patient smile; but the doctor knew she was
in pain. He couldn't help admiring her.
'You'll forgive me all right, doctor,' she said. 'Now, what could I do
with the poor young thing lying here like that . . . and after all I'd
promised Mr Fellows here? Don't you remember the last time?'
'No, I'm hanged if I'll forgive you,' he smiled. 'You're an obstinate
old fool. Now run along upstairs. If you lose your leg it's not my
fault.'
Abner was left alone in the kitchen with his father. While the boy raked
out the ashes from the grate and lit the fire John Fellows took the
brandy from the cupboard and had another swig, putting the neck of the
bottle in his mouth. He said 'Ah!' and smacked his lips. Then he went
out into the strip of garden at the back and walked violently up and
down. It was almost light when he returned. He was sweating and
quarrelsome. Abner had a bad time of it. Now that his poor mother was
suffering like this John Fellows hoped he'd be sorry for the way he'd
used her. If anything went wrong--he implied gloomily that something
probably would--Abner would be to blame for it. To give his fuddled
brain the chance for indignation that it wanted there entered the dog
Tiger, fawning, ingratiating. He had escaped from Mrs Moseley's house
and followed the scent of her or of Abner. He jumped up at Abner,
yelping with joy.
For a second John Fellow's stared at him stupidly. Then he burst out
with: 'And here's that bloody dog again! Your mother's told you she
can't a-bear it, but she's no sooner upstairs . . .' He slipped the belt
from his waist and lashed at the wretched Tiger's quarters. The dog
squealed piteously. For a moment Abner saw red. He didn't see his
father any longer, only a stubby man, shorter than himself, staring at
him with bloodshot eyes, and sweat trickling down two grimy wrinkles. He
would have knocked his father down if Mrs Moseley hadn't suddenly
appeared at the foot of the stairs asking what the noise was about. The
sound of her voice steadied both of them as they stood staring hatred at
one another, and Abner's anger passed as quickly as it had come. Mrs
Moseley, standing between them, brought with her a pungent odour of some
antiseptic. The smell impressed Abner with the moment's seriousness. He
was suddenly sorry for Alice. He even wished that he had been more
patient with her. Then the whole sky was shaken with the vibrations of
the great bull at Mawne Colliery. Five-thirty. He slipped into his pit
clothes, left his father staring, and hurried from the house.
When he came back from his turn at night the sense of stress that he had
quite forgotten in the work of the day returned. On the doorstep of
Number Eleven he felt intensely nervous. Something was going to happen,
perhaps something had happened already. The house was quiet. In the
kitchen a fire was burning that made for cheerfulness in spite of the
heat. All this was attributable to Mrs Moseley, who now appeared with an
encouraging smile. She told him that Alice's baby had been born at ten
o'clock. 'And when I got her clean and comfortable and washed the baby,
I thought, "Well, now, while I'm on my legs I may as well have a bit of a
tidy round." A lovely boy!' she said. 'Oh, what a beautiful babby--just
like his father!'
Abner didn't want to hear about the baby. He stuck to his obstinate
determination not to countenance the affair at all, and Mrs Moseley
laughed at him for behaving like a baby himself. He asked her what had
happened to his father.
'I haven't seen him, not since you went to work. But men's best out of
the way at these times.'
Abner guessed that, once having started to drink, his father had probably
been drinking all day and might well by this time be lying drunk in some
hedge at the back of the Royal Oak. Mrs Moseley rebuked him.
'You're hard on your father, Abner,' she said. 'It's a bad time for a
man when he feels he can't do nothing. You don't love and honour your
father the way you ought.'
All through the fortnight of Alice's lying-in Mrs Moseley did her best to
keep the peace of the house and to reconcile Abner to the new state of
things. She made him feel almost as much at home as he had been in the
old days, limping downstairs in the evening to talk to him. Alice was
very jealous when she heard them talking below. On most evenings they
sat alone in the kitchen together, but sometimes they went out into the
strip of garden at the back of the house to a wooden bench screened by a
straggling hedge of scarlet runners. They sat there, often in silence,
till the sky darkened, reflecting above the western horizon all the
furnaces of Mawne; and no one disturbed them, for John Fellows, having
once yielded to the bottle, had continued his celebrations of the event.
After all, such things didn't happen very often.
One evening Mrs Moseley brought down the baby for Abner to see. 'Look at
him, Abner,' she said, 'bain't he a pretty dear? bain't he a little
lovee?'
Whatever the baby may have been he certainly wasn't pretty; but there was
something in his helplessness that appealed to Abner's generosity. In
spite of his prejudices he couldn't see himself being vindictive toward
this comical creature. He touched the baby's downy, wrinkled face with
his hand. The creature made a sucking noise, seeking Abner's fingers
with his lips, and at the same moment Tiger, with a snarl, took Abner's
calf between his teeth, and, with the gentlest pressure, threatened to
bite him.
'There you are,' said Mrs Moseley. 'Look at jealousy! You and Tiger are
a pair, and that's the truth!'
He laughed, but for all that he didn't look forward happily to Mrs
Moseley's departure. He felt that the baby would only serve to make
Alice more intolerably important. When, on the thirteenth night, a
dead-white, incredibly diminished Alice came down to sit for a couple of
hours on the sofa, he decided to ask Mrs Moseley to take him into her
house as a lodger. 'The money will come in handy,' he urged. 'I could
sleep in the washhouse with old Tiger.'
But she wouldn't think of it. 'I couldn't do it,' she said. 'I wouldn't
like to put your father out, not if it was ever so! John's been a good
friend to me. I don't know how I could have lived all these years
without him.'
'He's got a sight more out of yo' than ever yo' got out of him!' Abner
grumbled.
But again she said 'No'--partly, it is true, because she felt that Alice
might make it the occasion for a quarrel, and partly because, much as she
loved Abner she knew that her strength would not allow her to look after
him properly. On many days of late she hadn't really been fit to do her
own housework, and so she fought shy, for Abner's sake as much as her
own, of the arrangement that he suggested. The money, alas! was very
tempting.
Abner, who didn't generally notice things particularly and had always
taken people like Mrs Moseley for granted, had not appreciated the
changes that were slowly overtaking her. He didn't see the slight
contraction of her brows that had lately become a fixed expression of the
pain that wouldn't let her be. Neither he nor Alice nor John Fellows
were aware of Mrs Moseley's suffering; but the doctor, on his daily
visits, saw how gamely she was fighting, and said nothing; for he knew
that to abstain from obvious advice was the highest tribute that he could
pay to her fortitude. He knew that there was trouble ahead, but he still
joked with Mrs Moseley, and she, in answer, returned him a smile that
struck him as particularly sweet in this plain old woman, making excuse
for the reproach that remained unspoken. In the end, Abner, piqued at
her refusal, quarrelled with her.
'Any one 'd think I was likely to be a nuisance,' he said.
Mrs Moseley shook her head. She nearly told him all her reasons against
his plan, but when she came to speak of them her lips trembled. She knew
that she couldn't keep up much longer. On the fifteenth day she left
Hackett's Cottages. Alice, who paid her the agreed ten shillings from a
leather purse that she kept wrapped up in a handkerchief under her
pillow, thought it rather shabby of her not to offer to stay longer.
'You'd think it 'd be the least she could do after all your kindness,'
she said to her husband. John Fellows, not to be buttered with flattery,
merely grunted.
It took Mrs Moseley more than an hour to walk the mile home. The doctor
passing in his trap, saw her resting on a doorstep in the Stourton Road.
He pretended not to recognise her, but scribbled a note on his list that
she was to be visited in the afternoon. Toward evening he stumped up the
crooked stairs and stood at the bottom of her bed looking at her with a
curious smile on his lips. She knew it was no good making excuses.
'Let's have a look at it,' he said. And then: 'Well, my dear, this means
six weeks in bed. You know that, don't you? Ten shillings' worth, eh?'
Mrs Moseley, conscious of the fact that it was worth a good deal more
than ten shillings, said nothing. If he only realised what a blessed
relief it was to her to be off her feet again!
When Alice 'came downstairs' again, butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.
Abner had never known her so studiously charming. From the first it was
as if she smiled: 'For goodness' sake let us forget what has happened and
make a new start!' and he couldn't very well refuse to meet her. At the
same time he found it difficult to conceal his suspicions that she was
getting at him in some covert, female way. The situation would have been
easier to handle if Alice hadn't been a trifle pale and interesting. She
didn't pick up very quickly, and now, of course, in addition to the
ordinary housework she had to look after the baby, who was already
suffering from its mother's dietetic indiscretions. Like many thin young
women Alice could never conquer her inclination for sweets and for
vinegar, and as a consequence the child was noisy and irritable. Her
housework went to the wall, and in despair she turned to Abner to help
her out. Nothing could have been sweeter than her temper, and though he
didn't believe in it he couldn't help being sorry for her, and did what
she asked him. As a matter of fact, he was already a little interested
in the baby. The smallness of its limbs and the timid uncertainty of its
movements fascinated him. He regarded it with a certain benignant
curiosity, much as he might have looked at a nestling taken from a hedge
in April.
Of course Alice was feeding her child at the breast. If Abner came into
the kitchen in the middle of this performance she would turn round
quickly and take the baby upstairs or out into the washhouse, blushing.
Abner wondered why she did this. Other women weren't so sensitive.
Sometimes he would pass a couple of them standing at their garden gates
gossiping and feeding their babies at the same time. He had never taken
any notice of them. Nobody else took any notice of them. There was
something in Alice's blushes that embarrassed him unreasonably.
Afterward he asked himself why this should be; but when next he saw Alice
hiding her white breast he blushed himself.
The new relation was very curious. If it hadn't been for Abner's
profound distrust of her they might even have become intimate. It was no
good for Alice to pretend that she wasn't lonely. In spite of all her
pride in being a married woman and the mother of a family's beginning,
she couldn't conceal the fact that since the baby's birth her husband
took very little notice of her. It was as if he had said: 'Now that I've
done my duty by the nation and given you something to play with you can
just attend to my comforts without bothering me.' He had lately
transferred his custom from the Greyhound to the Lyttleton Arms. A
shorter walk at closing time. So far he had never maltreated Alice, but
she knew very well that she couldn't now play him the tricks that had
pleased him in their courting days.
So, from being with her husband like a little girl in school, with Abner
she behaved like a schoolgirl released, chattering, eager and friendly.
It puzzled him, for he had never had a sister and didn't understand the
creature in the least. Her flatteries and sudden kindnesses surprised
him every bit as much as her spurts of temper. In each case she seemed
equally childish, particularly on days when she had been too busy to do
her hair and wore it in a honey-coloured pigtail at the back. Then,
there was another Alice who could assert with something very near to
dignity the fact that she was mistress of the house; and another,
blushing Alice, before whom he too had blushed.
On the whole, however, her most obvious feature was her kindness. In the
evening, when Abner came home dirty from the pit, he would find the
soap-suds waiting for him and tea laid ready on the kitchen table.
Alice, as likely as not, would be bathing the baby, who already showed a
native sturdiness in spite of his mother's indiscretions. While Abner
ate his tea she would talk to the baby in a low, cooing voice, which she
was evidently convinced would fetch him. From time to time in the middle
of these whispers, she would look up sideways to where Abner sat munching
bread and butter with the sunlight in his hair. Abner, who knew that he
was good-looking, and was now a little conscious of his manly
superiority, took no notice of her.
And yet, in the end, he couldn't help being dragged into the atmosphere
of intimacy which her small attentions created. Grudgingly he was forced
to admit that she had changed for the better. He was now old enough to
be flattered too. They became almost good friends, and only Abner's
native cautiousness prevented a complete reconciliation. Alice knew
this. She knew the shy spirit with which she had to deal, but was happy
to feel that she had accomplished so much already. Somewhere in the back
of her mind she suspected that a time might come in which she would rely
on Abner's strength to protect her and her baby. Some day she might need
his help. It was of John Fellows, her husband, that she was afraid.
This new relation, Abner thought, was all very well. Still, just because
they had patched up their old quarrel, they needn't necessarily be always
together. He wasn't going to abandon his friend, Joe Hodgetts, and Tiger
for the sake of feminine small talk. Nor did he mean to forsake Mrs
Moseley, at whose house the dog still slept. Those early autumn evenings
were great times for Tiger. Abner knew of a dozen fields in which he
could be certain of putting up a hare.
It annoyed Alice to see him so eager to get away just when she wanted him
most. She knew that he went in to see Mrs Moseley. She told herself
that she had always hated the old woman, even before she had been forced
on her by her husband. One evening when Abner was hurrying away after
tea she called him back.
'Where are you going, Abner?'
'Down town.'
'You'm going to Mrs Moseley's.'
'And why shouldn't I go to Mrs Moseley's? You can't stop me!'
'Stay with us to-night, Abner,' she coaxed.
Abner only laughed at her. Then she flew into a passion, standing up
white and trembling at the side of the table.
'How can you go to Mrs Moseley's?' she cried. 'Who's Mrs Moseley, I
should like to know? You're all cracked on your Mrs Moseley, you and
your father! That fat old woman in her nasty smelly house! And you
didn't ought to leave me when I want you. You didn't ought to! I'm your
mother . . '
'Oh, you'm my mother, are you?' Abner burst into a laugh. 'That's
bloody funny, that is!'
'Oh, you and your swearing . . .' she cried.
He didn't wait to hear any more. When he was gone she fell down on her
knees beside the table and sobbed with her head in her hands: a frail,
pathetic figure with her hair in curling rags. Her sobs woke the baby,
whose cradle had been carefully placed in a draught between the open door
and the fireplace.
'Oh, you now!' she cried, rocking the cradle roughly. She might easily
have upset it. Then, suddenly repenting, she picked up her son tenderly,
and hugging him to her breast, buried her sobs in his downy face.
The Fourth Chapter
AS the autumn hardened into an iron winter Abner had less time than ever
to spend on these distractions. When the football season opened he began
to play for the little club named Halesby Swifts, from which Mawne United
usually drew its recruits. Technically it was a professional club, but
the gate money that it drew from its adventures in pursuit of the local
charity cups did no more than pay for the boots and clothes and footballs
of the players. In the first round of the North Bromwich Hospital Cup
competition the Swifts had the good luck to be drawn against their big
neighbours, Mawne United, on the Mawne ground, and Abner, playing
centre-half, repeated the exploit of his childhood by scoring a goal
against the goalkeeper who had succeeded the celebrated Harper. It was
an elevating moment. The captain and others of the Swifts came running
up to Abner and wrung his hand. All Mawne and Halesby on the touchline
waved black bowler hats under the flag of Mawne United languidly flying
from its staff beside the Royal Oak. A great moment! Abner did not see
his father standing in his old place behind the Mawne goal posts with his
hands thrust into the pockets of his reefer coat and his eyes sparkling
as he puffed away at his black clay pipe. That was how John Fellows
showed his emotion. Later in the evening he showed it in another way.
This match, however, made a considerable difference in John Fellows's
attitude. It gave Abner a standing with his father that had never been
granted to him before. Nor was this the only result of his success; for
on the following Monday Mr Hudson, the chief clerk in Mr Willis's works
at Mawne, and secretary of the United, an irreproachable expert in a game
that he had never played, sent up a message to the pit for Abner, and on
Tuesday he had 'signed on' for the senior club.
'A lad like you, growing and that,' said Mr Hudson, 'didn't ought to be
working in the pit. I'll speak to the manager, and if you'll come down
to the Furnaces next Monday we'll see what sort of job we can find you.'
On Monday morning Abner walked over to the Stour valley in which the
great works lay angrily seething, and picked his way through the gigantic
debris of the iron age: huge discarded boilers, brown with rust;
scrap-heaps of tangled metal that had served its day; stacks of rails;
purple mountains of iron ore standing ready for the blast-furnaces that
snored like dragons in their sleep and made the air around them quiver
with hot breath. Over a network of rails on which an officious
shunting-engine that the head of the firm had christened Lilian, in
honour of his daughter, ran to and fro, whistling shrill warnings; over
many steam pipes, snaky tentacles of the central power-house, that hissed
steam from their leaky joints, he passed to the office that Mr Hudson
inhabited. On the steps in the middle of his path stood a tall, pale
young man who stared out over the works as though some vision entranced
him. Abner, wondering what he was looking at, and following the
direction of his eyes, saw nothing unusual. He knew that this was young
Mr Willis, Mr Edward, as Hudson called him. He asked Abner what he
wanted.
'Mr Hudson, gaffer.'
'You'll find him inside.'
He moved out of the way, still, apparently in the toils of his dream, and
Abner was shown into Mr Hudson, whom he found sitting at a desk with a
pencil behind either ear. 'Ah, here you are,' said Mr Hudson. 'There's
a good chap!' and took him straightway to one of the foremen, an old
butty of John Fellows, who gave him an indefinite labouring job that
consisted of moving metallic rubbish from one part of the works to
another as occasion demanded. At Mawne, it seemed, no fragment of iron
was ever allowed to leave the works as long as there was a foot of space
in which it could be stored. Abner also had to grease the wheels of a
little line of trolley-trucks that blundered up and down the hill in
front of the manager's house, between the furnaces and the high colliery
of Timbertree.
'This is work for an old man, not for a strong lad like you,' the foreman
grumbled. He knew that there was always work above ground and good pay
at Mawne for a promising footballer. 'They'll fause you up now! Wait
till your footballing's over,' he said, 'wait till you've broke your leg,
and then you ask your Mr Hudson for a job like this and see what he'll
tell you!'
But Abner was seventeen and had no thoughts for age. The greatest
delight of all was that he now breathed the air of the open sky all day
instead of the darkness of the pit; and even if the ecstasy of his
evening's relief was now blunted, there seemed to be no end to his
capacity for physical enjoyment. Beneath the caresses of air and light
his physique began to expand. He took a delight in the strict training
that the Mawne United directors enforced on their players. With skipping
and rubbing and sprinting his muscles became hard and supple and his
whole body marvellously fit. Football became his whole life. In his
work at Mawne, even in his dreams, he pondered on its tactics. All his
friends were players absorbed in the same game. He gained confidence and
skill, and by the end of the season he had become one of the crowd's
idols, followed from the arena by a trail of small boys and patted on the
back by strangers as he walked home after a match in his muddy clothes.
The girls also used to turn and look at him with bold glances; but his
life was far too full in those days for him to worry his head about
women.
His relation with Alice had now passed its first emotional stage, and
though she was more interested in him than she had ever been before, she
had grown to understand him better, so that the storms which had made
life at Hackett's Cottages so intense no longer occurred. She washed his
football clothes with care and fed him regularly and well, as indeed she
should have done, for he was now earning good money. She had discovered
that it paid her best not to worry him. Sometimes a fit of restlessness
would make him say that he must change his lodging; but although he often
grumbled, he still stayed on in the room that he had occupied since he
was a child. In her anxiety to please him she even offered of her own
accord to have the dog Tiger in the house; but Abner only stared at her,
wondering what she was getting at, and laughed. 'Still jealous of the
poor old woman?' he said.
Of course she was still jealous of Mrs Moseley. She couldn't help being
jealous; but though she denied this indignantly, and even tried to prove
her goodwill by paying several awkward visits with the baby to Mrs
Moseley's bedroom, she knew very well that the old woman's attractions
for Abner were the very least that she had to fear. She was really and
deeply jealous of the young women who stared at him on the football field
or in the Stourton Road. She knew how handsome he was growing; realised,
with an agony that was not wholly maternal, that sooner or later he was
bound to fall in love, and that was a calamity which somehow she felt she
could not bear. Little by little John Fellows was becoming less
important to her. All her life seemed more and more centred in her baby
and in Abner. Thinking the matter over she decided that it was her best
policy to encourage him in his friendship for the old woman, and she did
so gradually, insidiously, so that Abner should not guess what she was
doing or wonder why she was doing it.
Abner needed no encouragement. He had never wavered from his loyalty,
and now more than ever he felt that he owed some attention to his old
friend. Since the day when she had taken to her bed after the
fortnight's work at Hackett's Cottages, she had never recovered
sufficiently to resume her former activities. Sometimes, indeed, it had
seemed that her leg was on the point of healing; but as soon as she
crawled downstairs and tried to go about her business it broke down
again, which was not surprising seeing how much her lying in bed had
weakened her. The doctor could do nothing but preach patience and leave
her in the hands of the district nurse.
For a whole year she struggled along on the pittance that the relieving
officer gave her; but at last the disorder of the cottage became so
overwhelming that the nurse took the law into her own hands and, in spite
of all Mrs Moseley's protests, wrote a letter to the nearest of the old
woman's relatives, a younger sister, the wife of a North Bromwich
brass-worker named Wade.
In answer to the letter Mrs Wade came over to see her sister, dressed as
for a funeral in closely-fitting black sateen. Being rather afraid that
she might find it awkward to get out of taking Mrs Moseley home with her,
the sight of the old woman's helplessness gave her a distinct feeling of
relief which showed itself in the warmth of her condolences.
'Well, Eliza, this is a shame, isn't it? And my! won't George be shocked
when I tell him? To think of your never 'aving let us know! Just to
think of it!'
Mrs Moseley feebly protested that it wasn't her fault that the Wades had
been told even now. 'I don't want to be a trouble to people,' she said.
Mrs Wade assured her that she wasn't anything of the kind.
'George, he says to me: "Now, Florrie, you mind you bring Eliza hack with
you." But, of course, any one could see with half a glance that that's
impossible like you are. We could have made you that comfortable, too!
We 'ave a lovely little 'ouse. What with the money George is picking up,
and what we've saved.'
By the time of the evening train on which her sister had promised to
return to North Bromwich, Mrs Moseley was heartily sick of George's name
and achievements. She hadn't really ever known her sister Florrie, and
now she felt that in spite of her suave manner and affectation of
kindnesses that cost nothing she had really come to spy out the nakedness
of the land, to check the value of her sister's scanty effects, to reckon
just how much lay between her and the workhouse. And all the time Mrs
Moseley was in a fever wondering what the house was like downstairs;
whether, in her absence, dirt had accumulated; whether Tiger had made the
washhouse in a mess. Indeed, when Mrs Wade departed, she crept
downstairs to see for herself. 'Whatever they says'--this was always her
cry--'they can't say I bain't clean!'
The upshot of this visit was revealed to Abner a week or two later, when
he arrived one evening to find the faithless Tiger playing at the knee of
a stranger, a girl with the city's matte complexion, hair that was almost
black with a gleam of copper in it, and brown, long-lashed eyes.
'That your dog?' she said, smiling. Her voice was low. Abner was now
used to the high-pitched voices of Alice and her neighbours. He had
never heard a woman speak so quietly.
He said 'Yes,' and she, with the utmost self-possession, told him that
Tiger was a beauty. It wasn't strictly true, but it gave Abner a flush
of pleasure, for he loved Tiger. Then she said: 'I'm Susan Wade. Mother
sent me here to look after Auntie Liza for a week or two.'
As a matter of fact mother, warned by a snuffy shilling-doctor in Lower
Sparkdale that Susan was anaemic and needed country air, had suddenly
felt more than usually generous toward her sister, and sent Susan to
'help,' with no more than the price of her keep.
'Afford it?' she said, when her husband questioned her about Mrs
Moseley's ability to feed another mouth, 'Afford it? You don't know our
Liza! She was always the quiet one of the family. And a saving kind,
too. I know well enough she's got a stocking somewhere!'
Mr Wade was not in the habit of arguing with his wife, and Mrs Moseley,
when Susan arrived at Halesby with a small wicker basket containing her
best dress and a bag of apples with mother's love, was so deeply touched
that when she kissed her her eyes filled with tears.
'You'll be lonely,' she said, 'with an old woman like me.'
'I shall go out into the lanes,' said Susan. 'Mother told me I must get
all the fresh air I can. For the blood, you know.' That put the matter
quite plainly.
Mrs Moseley assured Abner that Susan was a dear, sweet child, and such a
little woman; but he never met her in Mrs Moseley's presence, for the old
lady had decided against the impropriety of Susan and himself together
beholding her in bed. Awkward, at first, he found in a little while that
she wasn't as formidable as he imagined, though all his triumphs in the
football field could not have given him one half of her staggering
self-possession. What impressed him most about her was, without doubt,
the sense of personal cleanliness that she carried with her. Susan was
on a holiday, and had time for such refinements. She wore clean print
dresses, while Alice and her shrill-voiced neighbours in Hackett's
Cottages, by whose appearance Abner had regulated his ideas of feminine
nicety, wore, as a rule, the livery of their toil. Susan, on the other
hand, lived like a lady, having no better work for her fingers than the
braiding of her dark hair. In the mornings she stayed with Mrs Moseley,
listening, in a kind of dream, to her aunt's recitation of the virtues of
people whom, in the days before her marriage, she had served. It seemed
as if that were the time in her life toward which her thoughts now
returned most happily, and the mere scraping together of its unimportant
details filled her with a mild afterglow of enjoyment.
'I remember,' she would begin, in a weak, contented voice that was
soothing in its tiredness, 'I remember one day Mrs Willis--the first Mrs
Willis that is, old Mr Hackett's daughter down the Holloway and Mr
Edward's mother--I remember her coming into the kitchen with a beautiful
basketful of cherries. Fine, black fruit they was! And she says
"Hannah"--that's the Hannah that's still there, but I expect she's
forgotten _me_--"Hannah," she says, "look what the master's sent from the
cherry-orchard." They always call it the cherry-orchard, you know, up
above Mawne bank, and that was a wonderful year for cherries. "We'll
make them into jam, Hannah," she says. "And Liza"--that's me--"will help
you stone them." _Stone them_, she says! And how we laughed to be sure!
I can see her standing there now, a bit red in the face, for she was new
to housekeeping and never knew you don't stone cherries. She had a
couple of black-hearts in her lips, like the game you play. A dear lady,
she was! I can see her again in Mr Edward. Time passes, doesn't it?
You'll know that some day, Susan.'
Susan tossed her head. Perhaps some day she would know, but sufficient
unto this were its quiet languors and the breath of summer air drifting
in at a chink in her aunt's window from the fields towards the hills.
She herself had grown up in the cramped quarter of Sparkdale, where, in
summer-time the blue-brick pavements burn under a pale sky, where there
is always a smell of dust and fire and rotting remnants of fruit dropped
from the hawkers' barrows into the gutter. At the back of their house in
Sparkdale lay a little garden plot; but her father had always given it
over to fowls that made it an arid, gritty patch littered with shed
feathers. All the parks lay miles away over the streets, and the only
green that Susan knew was the grass that grew within the railings of an
ugly Georgian church standing in a square that had once been fashionable
but was now neglected and unkempt. For this reason the sloping fields
beyond Halesby were wonderful to her, and things that would have seemed
common to a country child, enchanting. In the afternoon she went out
walking with Tiger. There was no need for Abner to be jealous, for these
walks bore no comparison in Tiger's mind with his evening visits to
rabbit-haunted banks.
Susan had come to Halesby thrilled by her first experience of romance.
She had been initiated by a pale young clerk named Bagley who taught in
the Sunday-school of the decayed Georgian church. It had happened at
their annual 'outing' to Sutton Park. There, in a hot slade of larches,
Mr Bagley had held her hand, a small and very sticky hand in a lace
mitten. While he did so he had confided to her that his was an extremely
passionate nature, and that nothing but his hold on the Anglican faith
restrained him from exploiting it, and after this, immediately before
tea, he had kissed her once. That had been all; for after tea Mr Bagley,
weighed down no doubt by a sense of shame, had avoided her. All that
remained to her of this adventure was the power of making Mr Bagley
blush; and this was no very signal achievement, for Mr Bagley flushed
easily and had already written privily to advertisers in the weekly
papers who claimed to cure this weakness. It appeared indeed that there
would never be any more between them than a bond of secret guilt; and
since Susan had liked being kissed, even by Mr Bagley, she decided to
continue her experiments whenever the chance came.
From the first sight of him Abner had pleased her. He was eighteen, just
a year older than herself. His handsome head, his excellent teeth, his
contrasting fairness, the size and strength of his body, all attracted
her. She thought she would like to be alone with him and see what would
happen. Therefore she began by inviting herself to accompany him on one
of his evening excursions with Tiger. Abner resented the proposal,
partly because he had never quite shaken off the convention of his
boyhood that girls were soft and any dealings with them shameful, and
partly because he was jealous of any stranger invading a world that was
so particularly his own and so specially guarded from the feminine
influence hitherto represented by Alice. But Susan, by her quiet
determination, made it impossible for him to refuse. She had always
been--after the poultry--her father's principal pet, and when Abner put
her off, she simply declined to believe that he meant it.
He grumbled and submitted. He supposed that he was doing a kindness to
Mrs Moseley by taking her, and comforted himself with the thought that,
after all, Susan wasn't like other girls: a conclusion at which he
arrived without difficulty, seeing that he had known no other girl but
Alice. On his side, indeed, the relationship was as natural as it might
be. It was Susan who found it rather a failure in the absence of
sentimental developments. Abner treated her, she found, very much as if
she had been a boy; and though this was the pose with which she had
started their acquaintance, she didn't want it to remain at that. Mrs
Moseley's looking-glass, in which she could see herself when she sat in
her favourite place at the foot of the bed in the morning, assured her
that she was much nicer to look at now than when she first came to
Halesby from the city. She was plumper, her cheeks and lips were more
brightly coloured and her eyes clearer. Mr Bagley would have noticed the
difference. Abner, apparently, didn't. She comforted herself with the
reflection that he was too rough and rugged to realise her delicacy, that
he was only a common labourer and no fit associate for a foreman's
daughter, but when she came to think of it, her social quality should
really have made her more attractive to him.
She was a very direct young woman. One evening when they went out for
their walk down the lane that leads to the woody basin known as Dovehouse
Fields they came to a lonely stile at the end of a bridge over a
tributary of the Stour, beyond which the red bank was tunnelled by many
rabbits. Tiger ran forward eagerly over the bridge and began to sniff at
the holes in the bank, and Abner would have followed him if Susan had not
barred the way, sitting complacently on the top of the stile. She sat
there in the low sunlight that warmed her cheeks, lighted gleams of
copper in her hair, and made her brown eyes amber.
'I want to stay here, Abner,' she said.
'Well, let us pass then,' said Abner, thinking only of rabbits. 'Wait
till I come back.'
But she wouldn't move from her perch. She sat there smiling and swinging
her long legs. Tiger, who couldn't realise why any scentless human
should hesitate on the verge of such excitements, ran back and looked at
them, making little quick noises of encouragement. Susan called him, and
rather reluctantly he scuttled back over the bridge and jumped up to her
knees licking her hands. She said:
'Don't you think I look nice, Abner?'
'I don't see nothing wrong with you,' said Abner, without enthusiasm.
'Don't be soft!' she said. 'I mean, don't you want to kiss me?'
He didn't. He hadn't thought about such a thing. It was she who was
being soft now. And yet he couldn't help wanting to try when he saw her
smiling at him from the stile. He kissed her, very clumsily, on the
cheek. He had never kissed any one before, and its softness and coolness
bewildered him. But she wasn't content with this. She took his face in
both her hands and kissed his lips. He lost his head. He didn't know
what he was doing. He took her in his arms in a way that was very
different from Mr Bagley's passionate embrace. It seemed as if he wanted
to kiss the life out of her. She drew back, almost frightened of him,
but he wouldn't let her go. They left Tiger to his rabbits and wandered
off into the woods. When Susan returned in the darkness Mrs Moseley
could not help remarking how well she looked.
This was no more than the beginning of the adventure. There was nothing
lukewarm about the passion that Susan had thus precipitated. Her
education, which had brought her very nearly to the level of middle-class
prudishness, had not prepared her for Abner's love-making. Mr Bagley,
she reflected, would have made her timid presents of sweets and, perhaps,
occupied the pew behind hers in church. He would have taken her for
walks in one of the decorous parks on the other side of the city. He
would have held her hand on the tram and paid her spoony compliments.
Abner paid her no compliments, gave her no presents. Nor did he hold her
hand: he held her whole body till she felt that her will was failing and
that her only duty was to obey him. She was terrified by his violence,
ashamed of responding to its crudity. She was almost sorry that she had
provoked him, for now it was she who fled from him and feared to be
overtaken, and though the excitement of the chase thrilled her she could
never escape from the vague threat of its inevitable end. Her mother,
she knew, would have approved of Mr Bagley. What would she think of this
handsome young labourer, this professional footballer? She knew that she
was bound to resist him as long as she could.
This was no easy matter. Abner absorbed her, gave her no chance. Once
having got her he would not let her go. Her calculations of the future
didn't trouble him. Every evening when he had knocked off work he came
along to Mrs Moseley's house and called for her, and in spite of any
excuse that she might make, he took her off over the fields and into the
woods. Mrs Moseley unconsciously abetted him.
'Your mother's anxious that you should get all the fresh air you can,
dear,' she used to say, 'and it's a beautiful evening. I wish I could go
with you!'
The old woman was sure that she could trust them together, and for three
weeks of brilliant summer weather they spent the evening and the twilight
in each other's arms. Susan tried a series of tactics that she invented
for her own protection. She pretended to shrink from his coarseness and
from the dirt of the works in contrast with her own clean fragility. She
adopted another, distant attitude, proprietary and maternal. Abner
laughed at both of them. She even, in an extremity, played her last
card: the attentions of the elegant Bagley. 'You give him five minutes
alone with me, and I'll settle that!' said Abner. 'You're my wench, and
don't you forget it!'
Providence, in the shape of a calamity, saved her. Her mother sprained
an ankle in the fowl-pen, and wired for Susan to return to North Bromwich
at once. The telegram came while Abner was at work, and when he reached
Mrs Moseley's cottage in the evening, Susan was gone. She left a
carefully written note behind her in which she addressed him as Mr
Fellows and said that she hoped he would always think of her as kindly as
she did of him. She said it would be nice to get back to North Bromwich
after so long in the country, but carefully omitted to supply him with
her address. At first Abner was stunned, then angry. He couldn't put up
with Mrs Moseley's mild meanderings. He hadn't the heart to go out into
the desecrated woods. When Tiger leapt at him, in anticipation of a
walk, he kicked the dog in the ribs. The football season would not begin
for another month, and since he had nothing to do he returned to
Hackett's Cottages. Alice, who had kept an eye full of jealous
suspicions on him for the last month, received him. She saw that
something had bowled him over. It gave her a secret satisfaction.
'Early to-night, Abner,' she said.
He would not answer her.
'Whatever's up with you?' she said. 'You'm all moithered.' And then,
with a laugh, she answered her own question by another: 'Too much
sweethearting?' in a tone that pretended to be merely bantering but in
reality carried a sting. He knew that faint touch of malice in her so
well that it made him flare up at once with: 'I don't want no bloody
girls.' It didn't strike him that her malice might be taken as a
compliment, and when she laughed at his reply he walked out of the house
in a temper.
He didn't know where to go; but taking his father's example he wandered
down to the Royal Oak, where he sat drinking pint after pint with one of
his football friends and a couple of women. At closing time the whole
party were turned out together and walked down into Halesby. It was
nearly daybreak when he returned to Hackett's Cottages, still the worse
for liquor, and blundered upstairs to bed. He slept so heavily that he
did not hear the Mawne bull in the morning. At ten o'clock a feeling
that some one was in the room aroused him. He opened his eyes to a
blinding light and saw that Alice had placed a cup of hot tea at his
bedside. He drank it so eagerly that he scalded his mouth.
The Fifth Chapter
THIS sudden outburst was sufficiently violent to satisfy Abner that for
the present he could do without liquor or women. It wasn't very
difficult to forget Susan, for she had really been more trouble than she
was worth. The affair would never have begun but for her provocation,
and since she hadn't the pluck to go through with it, Abner satisfied
himself by exaggerating her insipidity in his own mind.
After the first sting of malice with which she had sent him off on the
drink, Alice showed her repentance, first symbolised by the waiting cup
of tea, in a hundred attentions and kindnesses. He never told her about
his affair with Susan, but she appeared to understand more or less what
had happened and even to sympathise with him in his violent methods of
getting over it. She made him so comfortable at Hackett's Cottages that
there was no more talk of his finding other lodgings. In the early days
of her married life the responsibilities of the house and its two male
inhabitants had been too much for her inexperience, and the coming of the
baby in the first year had made her abandon all attempts to keep pace
with domestic demands. In the second year she regained her strength and
a great deal of the physical charm that had originally attracted John
Fellows. The baby, a normal, healthy child, had also prospered, and now
that he was weaned slept away most of the day on his mother's bed
upstairs or in his cradle in the kitchen. Nothing marred the smoothness
of domestic life at Number Eleven but the uncertainty of John Fellows's
temper and his periodical bouts of drinking; and even in these
emergencies Alice's increasing knowledge of life and her absorption in
the care of Abner and her baby sustained her.
The strangest part of the whole business was that Abner and his father
never fell foul of one another. Since that one dangerous moment on the
morning of the baby's birth there had never been any danger of this. It
was as if they had agreed to go on their own ways. Abner kept clear of
his father because his natural love of peace and increasing concern for
the convenience of Alice made him anxious to avoid a quarrel; and John
Fellows condoned his son's unreasonable abstinence from liquor on the
grounds of his success in the football field. Although he never said so
he was proud of Abner's prowess, gathering indeed a little reflected
glory from it among his mates at the pit and his boon companions at the
pub.
It was fortunate for Alice that her family was so small; for it meant not
only that she was unburdened with housework, but also that the question
of money never troubled her. John Fellows never did anything by halves.
He worked as hard as he drank, and since all colliers are paid by
piecework, he earned enough to keep the house going and himself in
liquor. Abner also was well paid for the work he did at Mawne, and in
addition to this received a pound a week from the United Football Club
during the season. Out of these earnings he paid Alice eighteen
shillings for his board and keep, and this, together with her husband's
weekly allowance, enabled her to make the house exactly what she wanted.
There seemed to be no reason why this happy state of affairs should not
go on for ever, or, at any rate, until Abner found some other wretched
girl who took his fancy. This was the event that Alice dreaded most, and
for the present Abner's life was too full of work and training to make it
probable.
They spent most of their evenings together while John Fellows was down at
the Royal Oak and the baby placidly sleeping in its cradle. They were
the happiest of Alice's life, for they realised all her ideals of what
domesticity should be. The little room was cheerful with firelight and
always warm, for John Fellows had the privilege of buying coal for next
to nothing at the pit. On the table she used to spread a cloth of bright
red chequers. A lamp in the middle of it cast a mild and homely light.
Alice would sit on one side of the fire, knitting woollen vests for the
baby or mending the men's clothes. She sat in her rocking chair,
enthroned with content, glancing from time to time at the sleeping baby,
at the shining brass, on which she particularly prided herself, at all
the tokens of comfort with which she was surrounded. The door of Number
Eleven was ill-made or warped with age so that a draught blew in beneath
it towards the fire; but Abner had arranged a curtain of red rep on a
running string above it, so that the draught was not felt and the swaying
of the curtain only emphasised the contrast between the winter without
and that glowing cosiness within. All these things that surrounded her
were her own, her world. She would not have changed one of them. The
glances that she gave to them were proprietary and richly satisfied.
Sometimes, in the same way, she would let her eyes fall on Abner: a big,
loose-limbed fellow, over six feet high, with the closely cropped hair of
the footballer and a yellow moustache. In the evenings at home he wore
no collar and the firelight played on his powerful neck and lit the fair
down on his arm when he sat in his shirtsleeves. Even with him her
glance was proprietary. He also belonged to her, and she mended his
clothes with the same delight and devotion that she experienced in making
the ridiculous garments of her son. She rejoiced in his beauty and in
his strength. Perhaps, sometimes, the physical comparison that he
suggested with John Fellows made her admiration more poignant.
Usually these long evenings were lonely. At times, however, Alice's
father, the timekeeper at Mawne, would come stumping up on his wooden leg
and take a seat before the fire between them. He was very fond of Alice.
He would pinch her cheek and hold her arm and make her blush by asking
every time he came when she was going to give him another grandson. He
was a poor old man. His pay, like most pensions, was inadequate, and the
cottage on the edge of the works which the company allowed him rent-free
was old and so damp that he suffered from rheumatism, particularly, as he
always said with a chuckle, in the leg that he had lost. Here Alice's
younger sister, Elsie, kept house for him. She had never been a
favourite of his and was a bad manager. She and her sister, who had
always quarrelled before Alice's marriage, were now, for reasons which
Alice attributed to jealousy, no longer on speaking terms. Mr Higgins
always tried to gloss this unfortunate circumstance with one of his
little jokes.
'When I come up here,' he said, 'Abner ought to go and keep our Elsie
company.'
Abner would laugh, but Alice glanced sharply at him. She hated to hear
any woman's name mentioned in connection with his, and most of all her
sister's; but Mr Higgins, unaware of these fine shades of feeling,
constantly pursued the project. 'Now if Abner here went and married our
Elsie what a queer kettle of fish it would be to be sure! Which would
you be, his mother or his sister-in-law? Both on 'em. Likewise Elsie'd
be your daughter-in-law and your sister. And if our Elsie was Abner's
aunt she'd be the great-aunt of her own babbies, surely!'
'Oh, don't go on so, dad!' said Alice, sharply. 'Do give over!'
'You can say what you like, Alice,' said Mr Higgins, 'but that's a knot
it'd take more than a parson to get over.'
At half-past nine the old man would leave them with another of his little
jokes. Abner would see him out, and then, yawning, stretch his legs and
say that it was time he was turning in. He used to ask Alice, before he
went upstairs, if there was anything he could do for her. It was only a
formula, but the words always gave her a flush of pleasure. When he was
gone upstairs she would busy herself with preparing his can of tea, and
bacon sandwiches to take to the works next day. Then she would settle
down again in her chair at the fireside and sit with her work in her lap
dreaming and waiting for the unsteady, deliberate step of her husband on
the path. This was the worst moment of her day.
John Fellows rarely returned home until half an hour after closing time,
and for this reason it was seldom that he saw Abner off the football
field. At home he never approached him except with the hope of
extracting inside information as to the probable results of the league
matches on which he proposed to bet, and in this he found Abner
unsympathetic, for although league football had not sunk in those days to
its present depths of unabashed commercialism, Abner knew that the result
of a match was sometimes decided in accordance with the bookmaker's
instructions. John Fellows never backed horses, for he regarded the turf
as a resort of crooks and sharks. He put his money on dogs and football
teams, and even if he lost it he had at any rate the satisfaction of
seeing it lost with his own eyes. He didn't mind losing money as long as
he had a run for it. According to his lights he was a sportsman.
The football season had opened with a flourish as far as Mawne United
were concerned. In the North Bromwich league they had beaten all their
principal rivals, Wolverbury, Dulston, and even the Albion Reserves.
Now, in the semi-final of the Midland Cup they were to meet the Albion
again. The members of the team became more than ever popular heroes, and
Abner, down at the works, was conscious of his share in the distinction.
The winter had set in early with a November of black frost that made the
scrap-iron with which he was still engaged under the same grumbling
foreman harder and more icy to the touch, and congealed the grease in the
running guide-wheels of the trolley railway. It was some compensation
that the blast furnaces, which were surrounded in summer by a zone of air
undulant with intolerable heat, now gave a sense of neighbourly warmth to
the centre of the works.
Abner, who knew that his position was more secure than ever, managed to
spend most of his day near these black towers, talking football to the
men who were engaged in making the moulds of sand into which the molten
metal would flow when the furnaces were tapped. It was an idle and a
pleasant life; but he enjoyed it, knowing, as did every one else in the
works, that it was no more than a preparation for the sterner business of
Saturdays.
One Wednesday, in the middle of the afternoon, he was at work loading
some pigs of iron into a truck that stood waiting on the siding near the
furnace. It was good warm work for a winter's day, and Abner had thrown
off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and unfastened the neck of his
shirt. He and his mate had just hoisted the last of the pigs into the
truck when the furnace foreman gave the signal for the tapping of the
nearest tower. Abner watched the proceeding as he put on his coat and
wiped the sweat from his forehead. The men, stripped to the waist,
approached the vent of the furnace carrying a heavy crowbar with which
they loosened the plug of fireclay which kept the contents of the furnace
from escaping. They leapt aside as the first stream of molten mineral
gushed out. The foreman watched them, shading his eyes from the heat.
The fluid that came first was the dross of the ore which had sunk to the
bottom of the furnace, and this was diverted so that it flowed into a
wide pan where it would cool into a cake of brittle, iridescent slag. A
moment later pure iron began to flow. The puddlers closed the entrance
to the pool of slag, and molten metal crept, with the slow persistence of
a lava-flow, down the central channel and into the moulds of sand that
were ready to receive it. The damp air above the beds first steamed,
then swam with heat. Not molten gold could have seemed more beautiful
than this harsh, intractable metal. It ran into the moulds sluggishly
and with a soft, hissing sound.
Some one tapped Abner on the shoulder and drew him aside. It was Mr
Hudson, who had walked down delicately from the office, so delicately
that he had not even disturbed the two pencils wedged above his ears. He
shivered slightly, for he had been shut up all day with a coke stove.
Drawing Abner aside behind the line of trucks he began to talk to him
about the cup-tie with the Albion. With the utmost friendliness he
discussed the prospects of Mawne United in the match, which was now only
ten days ahead. Abner answered him respectfully. Mr Hudson had not only
given him his present comfortable job, but also carried in his pocket the
future of every man employed in the works, for Mr Willis, whose eager
mind was always set on expansions of the monster that he had created out
of the fortune which his father-in-law had made in the Franco-Prussian
war, was far too busy to worry his head about such details.
'So you think we'll win?' said Mr Hudson, fingering the bronze cross on
his watch-chain.
'It bain't no good playing any match if you don't think you'll win,' said
Abner.
Mr Hudson stroked his red moustache. 'I may say that the Albion has
offered us a hundred pounds to play the match at North Bromwich, on their
ground. The club could do with the money.'
'Don't you take it,' Abner replied. 'Don't you take it. The Mawne
ground's worth a couple of goals to our chaps in a match of that kind.
That slope down by the Royal Oak puzzled the Albion last time. Our
forwards know how to use it.'
'The Albion's particular anxious to win,' said Hudson. 'What's more, the
bookmakers are giving three to one against Mawne. That shows you which
way the wind's blowing.'
'Well, I hope to God it busts them!' said Abner. 'I'm no friend to
football bookmakers.'
Mr Hudson blenched at this loose employment of the deity's name. He took
Abner by the arm. 'Look here,' he said, 'speaking in the strictest
confidence, I can tell you that the club will accept Albion's offer to
play at North Bromwich. What's more, if Albion win, I can safely say it
will be worth ten pounds to you personally.'
Abner shook himself free from Mr Hudson's friendly arm. If he had
followed the inclination of the moment he would have laid Mr Hudson flat
there and then on the cinders. His feelings had passed beyond the stage
of words. But while he stood glaring at Mr Hudson's face, now weakly
smiling and white with fear, he saw something else that stopped him: the
figure of a woman running towards them as fast as she could over the
cumbered ground of the works. She was hatless and had a shawl thrown
round her shoulders. He knew, even at a distance, that it was Alice.
She ran straight up to Abner, with her hair blown loose and with a flush
of excitement that made her singularly beautiful.
Mr Hudson snatched at the opportunity for retreat. 'This lady wants
you,' he said.
Abner, still under the influence of a divided emotion, took a step in his
direction, but Alice pulled at his sleeve. The tears that she had been
restraining as she ran overcame her and she could only cry 'Abner . . .
Abner . .'
'What the hell's up with _you_?' he said roughly.
'Your father, Abner . . .' she sobbed. 'It's your father.'
'What's that? What's he done?'
'It's an accident at the pit. Father sent up Elsie with the message.'
'You mean he's dead?' said Abner, suddenly sobered.
'No . . . not dead. . . . I don't think so. It's an accident. Some
kind of accident. Elsie was that moithered she couldn't say proper. So
I left her there and ran off for you. I couldn't take him in myself. I
couldn't think of nowt but running for you.'
'Nell, if he bain't dead what the hell's the matter?' said Abner
practically.
They left the works together. Alice, still out of breath, could scarcely
keep pace with Abner's long strides, but now her nervous sobbing had
ceased and she even smiled. At the corner of Hackett's Cottages they met
the procession from the colliery. For some obscure reason Alice's father
had lost the key of the store in which the stretchers were kept, and so
they carried John Fellows home on a door. In his progress from the pit
they had fallen in with a stream of children suddenly disgorged from the
Ragged Schools, and a train of these had swollen the _cortege_, curious
to find out who, or what, lay under the brown blanket. All the women of
Hackett's Cottages gathered at the gateway of Number Eleven to receive
him, many of them carrying babies and offering haphazard advice in the
intervals of giving them refreshment. The doorway of the house was too
small to admit the improvised stretcher, so they laid it down at the side
of the garden.
'Be careful of my bloody tomatters,' John Fellows growled. It was the
first sign of life he had given. Abner and two others lifted him from
the door and carried him through the kitchen and up the twisting stairs.
The boards creaked under their weight as though they were on the point of
splintering. It was his right thigh that had been broken; and once, on
the journey upstairs, they jolted him so much that he unclenched his
teeth and roared like a bull. The crowd in the roadway shuddered. This
was their first considerable sensation.
They laid him on the bed. Alice, now very pale and composed, followed
them upstairs with a cup of tea.
'God! if I'm come to tea drinking it's a gonner,' said John Fellows.
'Send out for a spot of brandy!'
A small boy was sent running to the Lyttleton Arms. Elsie had already
gone for the doctor. The news had spread quickly in various forms, and
all Halesby heard with sensation that John Fellows had had his skull
smashed in Mawne pit. The brandy came. He wouldn't have it spoiled with
water and swallowed it neat, but even the brandy could not alter the
ashen pallor of his face beneath its coating of coal dust.
John Fellows was a hard case and could bear pain or any other human
calamity with fortitude. He lay on his back, gritting his teeth and
squirting the floor with tobacco-juice. Whenever he spoke it was with a
curious dry humour that seldom appeared in his ordinary conversation. He
never complained of his own sufferings, though he cursed the criminal
economy of the Mawne management in the matter of pit-props. 'They might
as well use match-sticks as this Norway stuff. They've put a stopper on
my football!' he said. 'But I'll see that they pay for it. I will, and
no fear!'
Indeed they owed him something. The collapse of coal that had buried him
had taken place in a remote gallery on one of the lower levels of the
mine; and though Mr Willis, proud of his electric lighting and American
coal-cutting machinery, was in the habit of describing Mawne as a
drawing-room pit, the arrangements for salvage were by no means elegant.
John Fellows had lain for three hours beneath a ton or more of coal; and
though the weight of it saved him from the pain of movement, acting as a
kind of ponderous splint to the broken limb, the suspense of waiting till
he was dug out would have broken the nerve of a more sensitive man. From
this purgatory he had been hauled to one of the trolley-lines that
traverse the galleries of the pit: his only moment of relative smoothness
between the scene of the accident and his home being his upward journey
in the hoisting cage.
They waited anxiously for the doctor. The boy made three more journeys
to the Lyttleton Arms for brandy. 'It's the only thing that keeps the
life in me,' John Fellows said.
In a couple of hours Dr Moorhouse arrived. 'Sorry to see you like this,
Fellows,' he said.
'You'd be sorrier if you was me!' Fellows grunted.
With the help of Alice they split up his trouser leg, and the doctor
manipulated the thigh until he felt the crepitus of the broken bone.
Then he disturbed the patient no longer. 'It's a three months' job,' he
said. 'You can't have it seen to properly here. You want X-rays.
You'll have to go into hospital.'
'Hospital . . .' John Fellows cried.
Then, at last, he became fluent. The brandy had stimulated his
imagination even if it had dulled the pain, and he launched into an
uncompromising statement of the opinions with which poor people regard
the institutions that are erected for their care. He made it plain that
_he_, at any rate, wasn't going to die in any hospital, or be pulled
about by any students, and not a spot of drink.
'I don't want you to die in any hospital,' the doctor said. He was
painfully used to this kind of outburst. It was always a long and bitter
controversy, and it always ended, as he knew well, in submission. While
John Fellows was fuming he fixed him up on a temporary splint and then
went home to telephone for the ambulance. At the foot of the stairs his
eyes fell on the patient face of Mrs Moseley, who had driven up on the
cart of a friendly baker as soon as she heard the news.
'You here again!' he cried. 'Upon my word a lunatic asylum's the place
for you. Take your leg out of my sight. I never want to see it again.
I wash my hands of you!' He went off grumbling, and Mrs Moseley climbed
the stairs.
It pleased John Fellows to see her. Indeed, from the moment of her
arrival, he would not let any one else touch him. In the old days Alice
would have been jealous; but hardship and difficulty had so changed her
nature that she even concerned herself with Mrs Moseley's comfort. The
old woman moved about the room like a soothing influence, and when, an
hour later, the ambulance arrived, she insisted on accompanying her old
friend to the infirmary at North Bromwich. John Fellows went off
cheerfully, with a quartern of brandy in his coat pocket. He was even
bright enough to joke with Mr Higgins, who now arrived on the scene,
having just discovered the key of the stretcher-store in his hip-pocket.
John Fellows's removal to hospital made no great difference to any one
but Alice. To her the relief was enormous, for it not only saved her the
trouble of irregular meals, allowing her to devote her days to her baby,
but freed her nights from, at the best, uncertainty, and, at the worst,
terror. Now, when Abner had said good-night to her, she need no longer
sit with her nerves on edge, waiting for Fellows to come home, wondering
what would be the humour of his entrance. Instead of this she now sat
over the fire for half an hour of luxurious drowsiness, then picked up
the baby and went off placidly to bed.
Of course she had to go easy with her housekeeping expenditure, for all
John Fellows's club pay would be absorbed in paying for tobacco and other
luxuries, such as butter, which the hospital did not provide for its
patients, but Abner, as soon as he realised this, told her that she could
count on the pound a week that he earned from the football club, and
more, if necessary, for during the last year he had found it possible to
put by a few sovereigns for himself. Alice did not find it necessary,
however, to draw on his reserves. Her own tastes were simple and Abner
was easily pleased. Indeed, John Fellows had always been the most
expensive member of the household.
Abner was now in strict training for the cup-tie with the Albion and went
to bed early every night. The Mawne directors, as Mr Hudson had
foretold, jumped at the big club's offer to play the match at North
Bromwich, tempted not only by the welcome hundred pounds but by the
prospect of an even bigger share of gate-money. The team went through
their training with the greatest earnestness. Every afternoon they
turned out on the Mawne ground practising passing, shooting, and tactics,
followed by the eyes of the trainer, an international long since retired,
who walked about the field carrying always a black bag that contained
lemons, elastic bandages, and a patent embrocation of his own that smelt
like Elliman's.
Nobody who saw these men at practice could possibly have suspected that
they thought of anything but winning their match, though each of them
must have known that all the others had been offered ten pounds a head to
lose it. In the dressing-room, where they stood rubbing each other down
with flesh-gloves in the clouds of steam that the cold air condensed from
half a dozen tin baths of hot water, they talked of plans and prospects
just as if no shadow of corruption had ever approached them. Nobody had
mentioned the subject to Abner since Hudson had tackled him at the works.
That, no doubt, was the policy of those who had put up the money: to let
the thought of it sink in over a period of ten days and trust to the
frailty of human nature on the eleventh. They knew their business, for
the mere presence of such a disturbing problem was enough to demoralise
the team.
On the day before the match the Mawne goalkeeper sprained his ankle at
practice, and neither the bandages nor the embrocation of the trainer
could restore him. In this emergency the committee called upon George
Harper, who had retired four or five years before and was now a man of
substance and landlord of a public-house, to take his place. Abner, who
had always been on good terms with this idol of his boyhood, went up to
him after the last practice game and told him of Hudson's offer. Harper
listened to him in silence, nodding his head, but when Abner asked him if
he too had been approached by Hudson, he only laughed. 'Hudson?' he
said, 'that red-whiskered b--? No fear of that! He dursen't come near
me. He knows what he'd get, does Mr Hudson.'
In spite of this, when the team were assembled in the dressing-room of
the Albion ground on the day of the cup-tie, Abner saw the trainer take
George Harper aside. He talked excitedly in a low voice, but Harper only
went red in the face and said nothing. As they left the dressing-room
Abner winked at George, and George, solemnly, winked back at him. The
captain kicked the ball into the middle of the field, and the Mawne team
ran out after him, amid a spreading uproar of cheers.
The turf of the Albion ground was incredibly smooth and level after the
rough field in which they were accustomed to play at Mawne. The place
was, indeed, a vast oval amphitheatre, with high stands rising above the
dressing-rooms on the west and on every other side a sloping embankment
so packed with people that the ground on which they stood could nowhere
be seen. The vastness of this white-faced multitude was imposing in its
ugliness. Its pale, restless masses, represented on a horrible scale the
grimy flatness of the city complexion. From the crowd a low murmur arose
like the noise of the sea breaking on distant shingles, and over all its
surface floated a fume of tobacco smoke. A moment later the Albion team
emerged; the crowd swayed, and the murmur swelled to a roar of welcome.
The chocolate and yellow jerseys of Mawne so nearly resembled the
Albion's colours that the home team turned out in white shirts and
knickers. It was partly the spotlessness of this attire that made them
seem like a company of athletic giants, swifter, more flexible and
stronger than their opponents. Even Abner's six feet were dwarfed by the
diverse colours of his clothes. It seemed a ridiculous thing to match
this shabby team of stunted pitmen with eleven picked athletes.
The game began. Almost at once the white line of the Albion forwards was
in motion. It was a lovely sight, a lesson in fleetness, elasticity and
precision. The Albion, taking no risks, had included a number of their
first league players in the team, and it looked as if Mawne must be
nowhere. Abner, at centre half, the pivotal position of the whole field,
felt that he could do no more than play a spoiling game against this
perfect machine. In the back of his mind he knew also that a certain
number, probably the majority of the Mawne players, were not anxious to
win. It is not easy, however, to play deliberately a losing game, or
indeed to play football with any degree of deliberation. The heat of the
game seemed to inspire the Mawne team to a stubborn, almost desperate,
defence. As a last barrier to the Albion attacks he knew that George
Harper, even if he were an old stager, was incorruptible; and George
Harper, in his prime, had never played a more marvellous game. Perhaps
the feeling that he belonged to an older and more gifted generation of
footballers helped him. Time after time, when the Albion forwards came
swinging down the field in a perfect crescent, he saved the Mawne goal.
His play was inspired, and when half-time came, no goal had been scored.
The players stood sweating in the dressing-room. The trainer handed
round cut lemons. Once again Abner saw him approach George Harper and
take him by the sleeve; but this time the goalkeeper pushed him away. Mr
Willis came down into the dressing-room to congratulate the players. He
was smoking a big cigar, and evidently immensely pleased with himself.
He, at any rate, was above suspicion. The referee called the players out
again.
In the second half Abner worked as he had never worked before. The Mawne
team was tiring; play grew scrappy and spiteful; but though the Albion
players could do what they liked with the ball in midfield, they did not
seem able to score. Even if Mawne were equally ineffective it seemed
probable that the match would end in a draw. The Albion crowd grew
restless, and began to think that the referee was favouring their
opponents. The Albion players, now a little rattled, tried to effect by
roughness what they could not achieve by skill. Several free-kicks were
given against them for fouls, and the crowd began to boo the referee. It
was like the hollow voice of some sullen ocean-monster. The Albion,
encouraged by the support of the crowd, pursued these tactics. Two men
were ordered off for fighting. A moment later the crowd regained its
good humour stimulated by the sight of a shot from the Albion
centre-forward that hit the cross-bar above George Harper's head. If the
shot had been three inches lower he could not possibly have saved it.
The kick that followed transferred the play to the other end of the
field. It was close on time and everybody was nervous. A centre from
the Mawne outside right came to Abner's feet in front of the Albion goal.
One of the Albion backs tried to trip him, getting cleverly on the blind
side of the referee. Abner stumbled free, and since the goal was now
open, the player lashed out at his ear. Abner's temper was up. He left
the ball and closed with his opponent. The Mawne team held up their
hands and called on the referee like one man. A violent fight had begun
when the referee arrived, shaking himself free from a gesticulating
escort of Mawne players. The Albion men separated the fighters, and
though the referee warned both of them that if anything more happened he
would send them off, he gave a free kick to Mawne. The crowd howled. It
seemed for a moment as if they would burst their barriers and swarm on to
the field. Very grimly, his face streaming with blood, Abner took the
kick. The Albion goalkeeper, making a high save, tipped the ball over
the cross-bar. A corner. The players lined up, panting, in front of the
Albion goal. The young outside right, whose centre had been the
beginning of the trouble, took the kick. The ball sailed high and fell
slowly into the _melee_ of players. Abner, who had proved his
dangerousness, was carefully marked and charged at as the ball fell, but
he butted his opponent aside, and making full use of his superior height,
managed to head it into the top left-hand corner of the net. A shout of
'goal' rose from the crowd, but there was no applause. The strange thing
about the whole business was the attitude of the Mawne players. These
men, who had been playing a half-hearted game all afternoon, appeared to
be overwhelmed with joy. They ran up to Abner and shook both his hands
as if there had been no matter of ten pounds depending on his
achievement. Even George Harper came running down the field and patted
him on the back. George had his work cut out, for in the last three
minutes of the game the Albion made a desperate effort to equalise, and
subjected him to an incessant bombardment. Luck aided his skill, and
when the whistle went for time Mawne had won their match.
Abner went home that night with a thick ear and a slowly closing right
eye. He was tired and sore but elated. He wanted to do nothing but sit
in front of the fire and think over again the progress of the match.
Alice, on the other hand, was terribly concerned with his injuries. She
dressed his face with some ointment that Mrs Moseley had recommended her
for the baby, and sat opposite to him burning with pain and indignation.
'I wish you'd give it up, Abner,' she said. 'One of these days you'll
get killed. It's downright brutal. It's worse than prize-fighting.'
'That's what it was,' Abner chuckled.
He pretended that he didn't want her to fuss over him; but all the same
this devotion was very pleasant. As for Alice, the pain of seeing him so
battered was almost equalled by her pleasure in tending him. And they
were alone. She was thankful that they were alone. Time after time she
returned to her pleading that he would give up football. 'You've never
come home in a state like this,' she said.
'Give up football?' said Abner. 'And what would we live on then? You
couldn't manage, and that's straight!'
'I'd do it,' she said. 'I'd manage somehow.'
He laughed at her intensity. 'Don't you fret yourself about me,' he
said, 'I'm all right.' He went to bed and slept like a log. She brought
him breakfast and clean dressings to his bedroom.
On Monday morning down at the works Mr Willis met him. 'Good lad!' he
said. 'Good lad!' Later in the day Mr Hudson came down from the office
to the place where he was working. He smiled to conceal his annoyance.
'Well, I suppose we've got to thank you and Harper for the win,' he said.
'I reckon we've not got to thank you!' Abner replied.
'H'm, that's it, is it?' said Hudson. 'You'd better go up to the
pay-office for your money.'
'Time enough when I've finished,' said Abner. Football always prevented
him from collecting his pay on a Saturday morning with the other men. At
the end of the day he went to the pay clerk. Instead of twenty-five
shillings as usual he was given fifty.
'What's this for?' he asked.
'Lieu of a week's notice,' said the clerk. 'The gaffer says we have to
cut down. Mr Hudson's orders.'
'B--r Hudson!' said Abner angrily.
The Sixth Chapter
THAT night he went down to the public-house for the first time since the
day of Susan's defection more than a year before. The crowd at the Royal
Oak were glad to see him, for they were still talking about nothing else
but the result of the cup-tie. Every one was anxious to treat him and to
condole with him on his black eye, and he was prepared to drink as much
as they would give him, standing his own share up to the limit of the
fifty shillings in his pocket, as long as he could forget the anger with
which he had left the works. If he didn't, somehow, get the idea of his
injury out of his mind, he felt that he would probably go down to
Hudson's private house and wring his neck.
In the Royal Oak, drinking nothing but hot whisky, he managed to lose
himself and the troubles of the day. He was conscious of nothing but the
warmth and comfort of the private bar, the dark varnished walls, the
polished beer engine, the shining rows of bottles, the crackle of the
bright fire. For a time the room was also full of jolly people who
laughed and spoke with loud, buoyant voices, the happiest company
imaginable. The spirituous air was exhilarating and endowed all the
contents of the bar, from the postage stamps on the ceiling to the brass
spittoons and sawdust of the floor, with a quality of unusual vividness.
At last this curious clarity faded and the details that had seemed for
some curious reason exciting, became blurred. Abner tucked up his feet
on a settle covered with American leather and tried to go to sleep. When
he awoke, his old friend Joe Hodgetts was piloting him home along the
Stourton Road under a sky of dancing stars.
Alice was waiting up for him. Supper was laid on the table and she rose
from her chair by the fire to welcome him as he entered. The new light
dazzled him, and as he stood uncertainly at the door he took hold of the
red curtain to steady himself, and, lurching, pulled it down from its
string. Alice gave a cry. Even though she knew the symptoms well enough
in her husband she couldn't believe that Abner was drunk. She only saw
him standing there with the great discoloured bruise on his flushed face.
He held the curtain in his hand and looked at it stupidly, as if he
didn't know what to do with it.
'Abner . . . what's up with you?' she said, running to take it from him.
'There's nowt up with me,' he said solemnly. 'I'm drunk. That's all.
If any one's a right to be drunk it's me.'
The equanimity with which she had trained herself to receive John Fellows
in such circumstances deserted her. She knew perfectly well that it was
no use arguing with a drunken man, but the case of Abner was so
exceptional that she began to do so. He took no notice of her, and then
she rated him violently, so that overcome by a sudden flush of anger he
took hold of her arms as if he were going to throw her down. He had
never taken hold of her like that before. She faced him, panting for
breath, and they stared into each other's eyes. He felt the warmth of
her arms through the sleeve of her bodice and realised her for the first
time as a living, warm-blooded creature. She trembled under his gaze,
but did not try to free herself. He felt that something like this had
happened before; remembered Susan. Suddenly sobered, almost frightened,
he relaxed his grip on her arms. Still she did not move. She stood
dazed, with her breath coming and going. 'I'm going to bed,' he said.
He staggered to the foot of the stairs and left her standing there.
When he had gone she pulled herself together and put her hands to her
eyes as though she wanted to shut out what she had seen. She had
forgotten her first resentment and the emotion with which she trembled
now was one that frightened her and put her to shame. She felt that she
had just experienced the most thrilling moment of her life. After that
she could never pretend to herself that she was not in love with Abner.
In the morning he woke early. Before Alice knew that he was astir he
went downstairs in his stockinged feet and lit the kitchen fire. By the
time that she herself appeared he had made himself a cup of tea and laid
the table for breakfast. Neither of them spoke of his violent homecoming
the night before or of the stranger scene that followed it. She had half
expected that he would ask her pardon for what had happened, but such a
proceeding didn't seem to him important. He had been drunk, now he was
sober, and that was the end of the matter. When breakfast was over he
went out into the dank washhouse and shaved. She was puzzled to see that
he was not going to work, for he had dressed in his Sunday clothes and
wore his watch-chain, decorated with a couple of silver football medals.
At last she plucked up courage to ask him if he was not going to Mawne.
'No,' he said. 'I bain't going there no more.'
'What's up then?'
'Got the sack,' he said laconically.
'But the money . . .' she said. 'We've got to live.'
'I picked up two weeks' pay last night. You can have what's left.'
He turned out his pockets and gave her a handful of small change.
'That's more than I reckoned there'd be,' he said.
She threw down the money on the table and stared at him. 'I owe more nor
this!' she said. 'What about the football money?'
'Don't talk to me about football,' he said. 'I've done with football as
long as that Hudson's on the committee.'
The situation baffled her. Money they must have, and she was quick to
rack her brains for some way in which it could be got. An inspiration
came to her. 'You didn't ought to work with your eye in that state,' she
said. 'Better go down to the doctor's and put yourself on the box.
You've been paying into that club long enough and not had a penny out of
it.'
'Club?' said Abner. 'I don't sponge on no clubs! I'm going down to the
pit to see the doggy. I reckon he'll find me a job underground.' He lit
his pipe and went out into the frosty morning. A delayed impulse made
her want to give him his knitted neck-scarf, but it came too late. She
didn't know what to make of it. In a single night all the pleasant,
ordered happiness of the life that they had been leading since John
Fellows's accident had been overwhelmed. She felt it unreasonable,
incredible, that this should have happened. She could not even solace
herself with the care of her baby, who was now beginning to babble and to
stagger with uncertain steps from chair to chair. She found herself
wishing, for a moment, that there wasn't a kid to worry about, and was as
quickly bitten with remorse, for she knew that the baby was her most
precious possession on earth. She could settle down to nothing. The
foundations of her routine life had been dissolved. She had not even
money enough to meet the bills that she always paid on Mondays. But the
thought of money was nothing to her compared with her anxiety as to
Abner's attitude toward herself. She found a little comfort in thinking
that he had not yet recovered from the effects of his debauch, and that
when he returned in the evening they might take up their relation at the
point where it had been so abruptly convulsed. On this her whole
happiness depended.
Abner's visit to the pit was satisfactory in so far as it procured him
without the least difficulty a job underground. He was a trained miner,
and in those days, when the output of the mine had been diminished by a
series of accidents and a growing tendency to work short time, any new
hand was welcome at Mawne pit. When he came back in the evening he
reassured Alice that even if they had to go easy in the matter of
expenditure they need not starve in the interval before John Fellows
returned to double their income. To meet the present emergency he handed
her the sovereign that he had received from the football club. 'If that
sod Hudson had had his way you'd have had ten,' he said enigmatically.
'You'd better send a nipper to the Oak with my boots and football gear,'
he told her. 'I've done with Mawne United.'
She was thankful for his solution of her money difficulties, for pride
would not have allowed her to face the butcher and the grocer without the
money in her hand. In spite of the loss that it implied, she couldn't
reasonably refuse to be glad that he had abandoned football since she had
so often begged him to do so. What troubled her far more than this was
the fact that his attitude toward her was changed. It was clear that he
had not been too drunk to realise the significance of the moment when he
had held her in his arms and they had looked into each other's eyes. He
had seen the emotional precipice on the edge of which they were standing.
Well, so had she; but that seemed to her no reason why they should not
pretend that things were as they had always been. She was content to
play her part; even, for their common comfort, to forget what had
happened. The only thing that she could not bear was that he should
avoid her as though she were an evil thing to be feared and distrusted.
This, in effect, was what he did. To drink habitually was not in his
nature. When he drank he did so simply as a means to escape from himself
or from some harassing emotion; and so he did not seek a refuge, as she
had feared he would, in a public house. None the less it soon became
clear that the pleasant homely evenings at Hackett's Cottages were now at
an end. The chair which Alice always arranged for him at the fireside
was never occupied. When he came home from the pit at night and had
washed himself in the scullery he now went out again to spend the
evenings with his friends, with old Mr Higgins, with George Harper, or
with Mrs Moseley. He hated his work at the colliery: the dark, cramped
labour in remote subterranean stalls was a terrible change from his free
and easy life at the furnaces. He hated the dirt no less than the
darkness and it scarcely mended matters to realise that he was wanted at
the pit.
Opportunities of escape soon presented themselves. The retirement of
their most promising player from the United team created a sensation not
only in Mawne but in the surrounding towns. Abner would give no
explanation for it. When people asked him why he was not playing for
Mawne he merely told them to go and ask Hudson. It was impossible for
him to change his team in the middle of the season without an official
transfer. The secretary of the Albion made a special journey to Halesby
to ask him to consent to this; but since this proceeding would have
presented the Mawne club with a handsome transfer fee, he refused. The
Albion offered him good and easy work in North Bromwich if he would sign
on for them next season. 'You can have it for the asking,' they
said--but he refused, for though he would have liked nothing better he
felt that it would be wrong to desert Alice in her present emergency.
Until his father returned it was his duty to stay with her.
The winter wore on, and John Fellows, whose alcoholic history made him a
bad subject for a fractured thigh-bone, still lay in hospital. Abner
stuck to his thankless labours at the pit. He worked longer underground
than he need have done, simply for the reason that he did not want to
spend his evenings in the dangerous company of Alice. After that night
he knew that he could not wholly trust himself. His earnings were now
sufficient to keep the household in comfort, and the money that he drew
from his overtime he put aside for an emergency, concealing them in an
old stocking underneath the mattress of his bed. He wanted to be sure of
his liberty as soon as his father returned.
At Christmas, Alice made a heroic attempt to recover her lost happiness.
A week before the festival she went down into the market at Halesby and
bought a branch of berried holly which she hung above the middle of the
table from a nail that had once supported a hanging lamp. She decorated
the branch with cheap trifles, flags, lustred balls and candles of
coloured wax in metal clips shaped like butterflies. Over the
mantelpiece she pinned a scroll of varnished paper with 'God Bless Our
Home' in gothic characters upon it, and in various inaccessible places
she put sprigs of mistletoe. Although she said nothing to Abner it was
evident that she was counting on him to celebrate the feast at home. A
few days before the event she showed him a present that she had bought
for the child, a wooden horse with red nostrils, a lambskin mane, and a
ridiculous dab of a tail. Even this failed to move him, and up to the
last moment she was in doubt as to whether he would forsake her. She
schemed her very hardest to keep him, using as a bait the child whose
curious ways and stumbling attempts at speech amused him. This creature
loved, above all things, to be caught up and perched on the dizzy height
of Abner's shoulder, so high that he was able to examine the unexplored
country of the ceiling. He also loved to play with Tiger, who now came
and went in Hackett's Cottages of his own accord. Tiger liked children,
and he and little John would roll over together on the kitchen floor.
Alice always made the dog welcome, tempting him with such bones as never
entered Mrs Moseley's house. He was a link with Abner, and therefore to
be encouraged.
In the end Abner spent Christmas Day at Hackett's Cottages, or, to be
exact, the morning and evening of it, for the afternoon he devoted to
watching the league match between Mawne United and Dulston on the Royal
Oak ground. He could not bring himself to forget football altogether
even though he persisted in his determination not to play. In spite of
all Alice's pathetic efforts, the day was not a success. In the evening,
when they sat over the fire and Mr Higgins, who had brought in a basket
of oranges, had left them alone together, she made a direct attempt to
have the matter out with him.
'Why are you so funny with me, Abner?' she said. 'I don't know what I've
done that you should treat me distant like this. You didn't use to do
it.' But he would not answer. 'You've took a turn against me,' she
said. 'I know you have. What is it I've done?'
'_You_ ain't done nothing,' he said. 'And _I_ ain't took a turn again'
you neither. I'm all right if so be you'll leave me alone.'
'Yo'm different even with our John,' she said.
'Don't yo' bother,' he said at last. 'It'll be different time ourn comes
back. He must be getting on a bit now.'
She had to leave it at that. It had been a difficult evening for Abner,
for in spite of her troubles the firelight and the excitement that the
baby's pleasure in his presents had given her made her look very
attractive in her own fragile way. 'When ourn comes back . . .' She
sighed, for she felt that John Fellows's return would put an end even to
the small measure of happiness that she managed to extract from the
present. When John Fellows came back she would be faced with all the old
desperate problems, the old terrible nights. As they sat over the fire
she turned her face aside to hide the tears that came into her eyes.
Abner puffed stolidly at his pipe. 'When he comes back,' he said, 'I
reckon I'll have a look round for another job.'
'Where?' she asked, in alarm.
'Oh, anywhere out of this place,' he said. 'I'm sick of Halesby. I
reckon I'll go to Coventry or Wales. There's good money in Wales.'
'Abner,' she cried. 'Oh, Abner, you'm not going to leave me? Not with
him. . . . I couldn't abide it, Abner. Abner, if you leave me, I'll
make a hole in the cut, God strike me if I won't!' She could contain
herself no longer and went sobbing upstairs. Abner found it difficult to
resist an impulse to follow her and comfort her. He was not used to a
woman's tears. He got as far as the foot of the stairs, then slowly
turned back and sat on, smoking till midnight amid the pathetic
decorations of that poor room. His reflections determined him more than
ever to cut himself free from the embarrassments of life at Halesby.
Coventry was almost too near. Yes, he would go down into Wales. On his
way upstairs he listened for a moment outside her bedroom door. He
thought he heard her still sobbing under the sheets, but when he listened
the sound of sobbing stopped.
Next day she had quite regained her self-possession. They went together,
taking the baby with them, to visit John Fellows in the North Bromwich
Infirmary. They found him lying in a long, clean ward festooned with
Christmas decorations. The ominous erection of an apparatus of weights
and pulleys at the foot of his bed emphasised his helplessness. He did
not appear to be very pleased to see them, and his embraces so frightened
the baby that he set up a howl. The baby need not have been frightened,
for John Fellows was far less impressive than he had been in his former
state. The whole man seemed to have shrunk. He was newly shaved; his
rough hands had become clean and almost transparent; but though he now
looked as if he couldn't hurt any one, the presence of the visitors set
him grumbling at once. From the first he appeared to be offended with
Abner because he had not thought to smuggle in any liquor for him.
'You ain't brought a spot,' he said. 'Well, you're a b--y fine son!'
Even three months of abstinence had not diminished his craving. He told
them that he dreamed of liquor, but that there seemed to be no chance of
him getting any nearer to it than in dreams, for, as far as he could see,
his leg was exactly as it had been when he came into hospital. After
this outburst of discontent he softened a little, pinched Alice's cheek,
played a little with the baby, who had by this time overcome his fears,
and even talked to Abner about football. In this way he heard the story
of the Albion match and Mawne committee's attempt to square the players.
At first he was enthusiastic about George Harper's resistance to the
corrupting influence; but on second thoughts he disapproved of it. 'I
reckon you and George done your mates a bad turn. It ain't every day you
can pick up ten pound for nothing.' The only thing that modified his
opinion was the dislike that he shared with all the other men at Mawne of
Hudson. 'Hudson . . .' he said. 'I wish you'd a' finished him!'
While Abner and his father were talking football Alice had approached the
sister, a dark, capable-looking woman whose features and hair and eyes
were as rigid and sharp and metallic as the scissors hanging from her
starched belt, on the subject of John Fellows's progress. This woman
stared at her for a moment. 'Are you Fellows's daughter?' she asked.
'No, sister, I'm his wife.'
'He's the worst grumbler we've ever had in this ward,' said the sister;
'but as a matter of fact he's getting on finely. The doctor says the
bone is set nicely, and he should be out in a couple of weeks now. I
expect they'll send him out on a Thomas's splint. You don't know what
that is,' she added, with a rather scornful intonation, but then,
noticing that Alice looked tired, she took her into her bunk and gave her
a cup of tea.
'I couldn't imagine that you were Fellows's wife,' she said, 'and this
his baby. I thought your husband was the young man who came with you.'
'He and baby's half-brothers,' Alice explained, blushing. 'By Mr
Fellows's first wife, you know.'
'Well, I hope you'll be happy,' replied the sister doubtfully. 'It's
time the visitors were going. Is Fellows a very heavy drinker?'
'I'm afraid he is,' said Alice mildly.
'I thought so,' said the sister. 'We ought to keep him in here for your
sake. But there's always a rush on surgical beds at Christmas time.
You'd better call your stepson.'
The Seventh Chapter
ABNER was genuinely relieved when Alice told him the good report that the
sister had given her on his father's condition, for it promised him a
speedy release from the discomfort of the situation. Alice, who had
accustomed herself to examine every shade of expression that he showed,
knew that he was rejoicing at the prospect of leaving her. The thought
piqued her, for she had forced herself always to behave toward him
exactly as if there had never been a moment of embarrassment between
them. Her pride would not let the matter rest.
'You'm glad he's coming back,' she said. 'I know you be.'
'I'm glad his leg's joined, if that's what you mean,' he replied.
'That's only human-like. Besides, it's best for everybody.'
'And what about me?' she asked, passionately.
He would not answer, and she flowed on with a stream of reproaches,
telling him that she knew he hated her and couldn't bear the sight of
her, in the hope that he would be driven to say that he did nothing of
the sort. Abner remained passive. He knew very well that if he were to
lose his temper with her the situation might easily become just as
dangerous as if he were tender. The main thing to be avoided with her
was emotion of any kind. Life had been made difficult enough for him
already simply because he knew that their relation was capable of
passionate developments. He knew what passion was, and in spite of
himself he could not always banish the thought of Alice from his mind.
Admitting this, he had mapped out a course of conduct for himself, and he
meant to stick to it until the happy day of his relief.
It was not a fortnight but a month before John Fellows left the hospital.
He came back, as the sister had anticipated, with a Thomas's splint on
his thigh and instructions to attend the infirmary as an out-patient in
another month's time. The splint was an embarrassment that he resented,
for it compelled him to sit in an uncomfortable position with the right
leg extended, but it did not prevent him walking or drinking, and as soon
as he had mastered the first of these processes he lost no time in making
up for his long abstinence from the second. The rules of the friendly
society to which he belonged forbade its members to visit public-houses
as long as they were receiving sick pay, so that the invalid was forced
to enter the Lyttleton Arms by a back door which he reached by crossing
the garden of a friend, and having once solved this problem Fellows
managed to put in the day without any difficulty.
Every Friday morning he hobbled down on his crutches to the doctor's
surgery and obtained a certificate by means of which he drew his weekly
pay. It was only twelve shillings a week, and he never parted with a
penny of it to Alice, so that the household now depended entirely on
Abner's earnings. It puzzled both of them to imagine how he managed to
live in a state of fuddled alcoholism on this small sum. They supposed
that his old friend the landlord, trusting him, put it on the slate in
the hope of being paid when Fellows went back to work. He had always
been free with his money, and no doubt his boon companions of the past
were ready to treat him as often as they could afford it.
At the end of February he went in to North Bromwich in accordance with
the hospital orders and returned without his splint. The doctors had
told him that it would now be wise to use the leg as much as possible and
suggested that the colliery authorities, who were partly responsible for
the accident, should now give him a light job at the pit-head. John
Fellows, however, didn't see the point of this. He had paid into the
Loyal United Free Gardeners for more than thirty years and now that he
had the chance he meant to get some of his money back by staying on the
box as long as they would let him. He could get quite enough exercise
for his leg in his clandestine approaches to the Lyttleton Arms. What
was more, he would not do a stroke of work until his claim against the
colliery was settled. He had consulted a solicitor, and a claim under
the Workmen's Compensation Act was pending.
Abner meanwhile waited impatiently for his release. The presence of his
father in the house had eased the awkwardness of his relation with Alice
by abolishing the sense of lonely isolation that surrounded it. Alice
herself was almost complacent. She did not mind how long John Fellows
abstained from work as long as Abner was left to her. At the end of May
the doctor refused to continue the farce of signing the miner's
certificates. John Fellows grumbled, but had to admit that he had done
fairly well out of the club. He pushed on his claim for compensation,
which was settled for fifty pounds. Alice was overjoyed at this
windfall, for the strain of her straitened housekeeping had forced her to
run up a few small debts with tradesmen. She took the opportunity of
asking her husband for money when Abner was in the room.
'Money . . .?' said John Fellows. 'Money . . .? What do yo' want with
money? What's money to do with me when I've a son at work earning a
man's wages? If yo' want money better ask our Abner. Didn't I keep him
all through his schooling in food and clothes? working day and night? I
reckon it's his turn now.'
'I bain't goin' to keep you in pub-crawling any longer,' said Abner.
'You'd best give her some, while you've got it. I'm going off to work in
Wales.'
'Work in Wales!' cried John Fellows. 'I'll teach you to talk to your
father like that,' he cried, coming over to him with his head low between
his shoulders like an angry bull. When he reached his son he stopped,
for Abner had thrown back his elbow. Alice ran to separate them. There
was no need for her to have done so, for Fellows knew better than to
appeal to force.
'You're a fine pair, the two on you!' he said. 'And don't you go
thinking I can't see.'
He went out of the room with the limp that he now cultivated, and it was
well that he did so, for by this time Abner was white with rage. He
would have followed his father if Alice had not withheld him.
'Abner, don't!' she cried. 'What did he mean?'
'You know what he meant as well as I do,' said Abner with a laugh.
'Still, that don't matter. I'm off to-morrow.'
But he did not go. Thinking the matter over he could not bring himself
to abandon Alice and her child to the desolation that he knew must follow
his departure. It even seemed to him that his going might suggest to his
father that he had hit the right nail on the head. The fact that, this
time, Alice knew better than beg him to stay, also influenced him. By
this token she accepted his independence and appealed only to his
generosity. She never had a penny of her husband's fifty pounds. Some
of it, no doubt, he owed to the landlord of the Lyttleton Arms: but in
any case it became clear that as long as it lasted he could not be
expected to return to work. In the meantime he took great pains to avoid
crossing Abner, feeling less obligation towards the housekeeping expenses
from the fact that his nourishment in these days was mainly liquid and
taken elsewhere.
It was difficult to say how long the money would last him. For the
present he was managing extraordinarily well and there seemed no reason
why he should ever take up work again, although there was now no physical
reason why he should not begin. The summer passed without any change in
their arrangements. Abner still disliked his work. The prolonged strain
of working in cramped positions was beginning to tell on his eyes; but in
the lower levels of the pit he suffered little from the extremity of heat
which made work above ground almost impossible in the July of that year,
and made his father thirstier than ever. Under the new conditions he
found it impossible to save money for the needs of the day when he should
be free. All his earnings but a few shillings went to Alice every
Saturday night, and it was with difficulty that he refrained from
breaking into the small store that he had kept intact in his stocking.
On August bank-holiday the men at the pit stopped work. This was the day
of Dulston Wake, the principal festival of the black-country year. Each
of the small towns that lie like knots on the network of tramways that
has its centre in North Bromwich has its own minor fair of swing-boats,
roundabouts, and cocoa-nut shies, but none of these have half the
significance of Dulston Wake, which is prominent not only by its
magnitude but also by the weight of tradition that belongs to it and by
the magnificence of its setting. In all his life Abner had never missed
it, nor, for that matter, had his father; and when the day drew near it
was taken as a matter of course that the whole family should put on its
Sunday clothes and go to the Wake together. They left soon after midday,
John Fellows already mildly intoxicated, Abner in his blue suit with a
white silk neckerchief, and Alice, carrying the baby breeched for the
occasion, in her best black costume.
They had to walk more than a mile from Hackett's Cottages to the terminus
of the electric tramway system that had not yet come to Mawne. John
Fellows, who had forgotten his limp, led the way at a great pace down
Mawne bank, so fast indeed that Alice grew tired by the weight of the
child. The day was one of sweltering heat, of the kind in which the
people of the black-country prefer to take their pleasures. John Fellows
carried a bottle of draught beer in each pocket of his coat and a red
pocket-handkerchief escaped from under the brim of his bowler hat. He
turned to swear at Alice for delaying the progress of the party, and
then, mumbling something under his breath, put on a spurt of ridiculous
energy and left them behind.
Abner relieved the panting Alice of her burden, and carried the child on
his shoulder. Soon they had crossed the Stour at the bridge by the
gun-barrel works and had gained the relative coolness of shade under the
chestnuts of Mr Willis's hanging gardens. They arrived at the tramway
terminus ten minutes later than John Fellows to find that he had not
profited by his exertions since the trams were overcrowded and a
breakdown had disorganised the service. He had taken the opportunity of
sitting down on the cinder path and emptying one of his beer bottles, and
as fast as he drank beer sweat oozed from every pore of his body. When
the tram appeared in the distance he pulled himself up with a grunt and
prepared to fight for a seat in it. It was quite impossible for Alice to
compete in this kind of scrimmage. John Fellows pushed his way in first
and sat fanning himself with his hat while Abner, Alice and the baby were
left behind. They did not see him again during the day.
They waited for twenty minutes in the sun before they found a place in
one of those reckless tramway-cars that go roaring like spent shells
through all the wastes of the black country. They could not speak for
the jolt and jangle of its progress, for the clanging of its bell and the
alarming sputter of electric sparks when it swayed on its springs and
threatened to jump the rails. In all their four miles of journey they
could see no green. They passed through endless streets of grimy brick,
baked culverts from which a blast of acrid and lifeless air rushed
through the front of the car like a sirocco. Even though the fires of
the furnaces and factories had been banked down for the holidays they
could still smell the heat which had scorched and blackened this volcanic
country on every side.
At last they were jolted through the narrow streets of Dulston, happily
without catastrophe, and ejected at the foot of the hill on which its
medieval castle stands. Here the crowd was at its thickest. Noisy
hawkers sold ticklers and leaden water-squirts and programmes of the
fete. Tram after tram disgorged its sweaty contents to mix with the
cooler occupants of brakes and char-a-bancs. Through the dense foliage
of the castle woods that hung limp in the heat like painted leafage in a
theatre, the discordant music of competing roundabouts floated down, and
beneath it one could hear the low, exciting rumour of the fair, toward
which the steady stream of new arrivals was setting. It was a stiff pull
up the slope of the castle hill and every one who climbed it seemed
bitten with an infectious speed. At the top of it the crowd thickened
beneath the constriction of a narrow Norman arch and then burst and
scattered into the huge central courtyard where gray ruins looked down
upon this modern substitute for the tourneys of the middle ages.
Abner and Alice were caught up in the excitements of the fair. He soon
added to his burdens by knocking down three cocoa-nuts. At a
shooting-gallery to the admiration of Alice he smashed thin globes of
glass spinning above a jet of water. For his prize he chose a brooch of
imitation gold: a heart pierced by an arrow and surmounted by the word
'Alice.' She laughed and pinned it in the neck of her black bodice. She
marvelled at the sureness of his hand and eye. There was no one in all
that crowd whom she would have chosen for her escort rather than him.
She rejoiced, for the first time in many months, to find him a happy and
natural companion, only wishing that she could forget the fact that John
Fellows also was there, drinking, no doubt, in one of the canvas marquees
that the firm of Astill had erected in each corner of the courtyard.
Once, and only once, she spoke her thoughts. 'I wonder where he is,
Abner. . . .' she said. He only laughed at her.
'I'll find him if you like.'
'Oh, don't be soft, Abner,' she said. 'I was only wondering. . .'
They spent their coppers at a dozen booths, seeing the fattest lady and
the smallest horse in the world, the riders of bucking bronchos with
woolly trousers and slouch hats, who were even better shots than Abner;
and the lady of mystery, who divined the name and age of Alice and the
dates on Abner's football medals and told them that their married
happiness was threatened by a dark woman. To this seeress Alice
protested blushing Abner was not her husband. 'Well, my love,' said that
lady, pointing to the baby, 'that bain't nothing to boast about.' The
crowd in the tent laughed, and Alice was annoyed with Abner for laughing
with them. 'You ought to have told 'er,' she said crossly as they
emerged. 'It's enough to take my character for life!'
By this time the cause of the mystery lady's speculations was getting
tired and peevish. Abner took him for a ride on one of the galloping
roundabout horses, but the motion only made him sick, and so they left
the courtyard and sat resting in the tepid air under the shadow of the
castle beeches, undisturbed by any but casual lovers who had sought the
same kind of privacy.
'I think it's awful the way they be'ave!' said Alice, hugging the baby to
her breast as though she thought he might be corrupted by the sight of so
much unbridled passion. It came natural to her to adopt this pose of
modesty in Abner's company. She expected him to agree with her; but he
only laughed, and this set her thinking of the dark episode of Susan Wade
and wishing she knew what actually had happened. 'You didn't ought to
laugh,' she said, 'it bain't decent.'
But Abner was too contented to pursue the argument.
The child slept for an hour, and Abner sat smoking beside them. He went
back to the fair-ground and brought her a cup of tea. Thus refreshed
they returned to the castle courtyard. The sun was setting; the
uppermost storeys of the ruins were tinged with warm and mellow light,
but the crowded space beneath them had grown cooler. Hissing flares of
naphtha were lighted. Swing-boats soared out of the pit of the ruins
into the glowing sky. The crowd, released from the burden of heat under
which it had laboured, began to pluck up spirits. There was a good deal
of friendly horse-play, from which Alice shrank into the protection of
Abner's bulk. Little John did not seem much the better for his sleep.
He was tired and irritable, and frightened by the squirts of water and
the feathered teasers. It seemed as if they would have to take him home.
'But I did want him to see the fireworks!' Alice said regretfully.
Already two monstrous fire-balloons had ascended and drifted away till
they showed no bigger than the moon.
'Come on then,' said Abner. 'I've had enough of it if yo' have. Let's
get back before the trams is crowded.'
He took the baby from her arms and she, almost unwillingly, followed him.
At the end of the courtyard, near the Norman archway by which they had
entered, stood a boxing-booth, inside which the show was just on the
point of beginning. The proprietor, a heavy-jowled ruffian in a sweater,
whose board proclaimed him to be an ex-welter-weight champion of
Bermondsey, had collected a crowd round his platform by inveighing, in
the intervals between ringing his bell, against the sporting reputation
of the black-country. At the back of the platform two of his staff, a
nigger and a Hebrew, were sparring gently like kittens at play. It
seemed that the reason for his resentment was his failure to get the
Dulston audience to do anything but watch him and his pets. What he
wanted, he said, was sport . . . just to see what the local talent was
made of.
'Sport?' he said, 'you don't know the meaning of the word in this
gord-forsaken 'ole. When I puts up this tent in Durham or Middlesborough
or Wales, they flock into it, flock in . . . ready to take a turn with
the boys and give a little exhibition. Frightened to use your fists,
that's what you are here. What the hell's England coming to? That's
what I want to know. It's enough to make me sick, you people! It's
enough to make me want to take down the saloon and burn the whole
bleedin' bag of tricks, damme if it isn't, an' the boys waiting here for
a bit of sport.' The nigger had stopped sparring and was grinning
insolently at the crowd, among the younger women of which his strangeness
exercised an attraction. Nobody, however, seemed inclined to enter the
booth.
'Come along, Abner,' Alice whispered, tugging at his arm.
The proprietor rang his bell again. 'Now, for the last time,' he said.
'Just commencing! If you haven't the spunk to put on the gloves
yourselves, come and see a pretty exhibition of scientific boxing. And I
give you my word this is the last time I ever bring my entertainment into
the bleedin' black-country!'
'Good job, gaffer,' said somebody.
The laughter of the crowd made the big man lose his temper. 'Good job,
is it?' he cried. 'I'd ask the gentleman that made that remark to come
up here and say it to my face. Ever hear the name of Budge Garside?
That's mine! 'Ere, I'll give five pounds'--he pulled out a leather bag
of money and jingled it--'I'll give two pounds to any of you chaps
that'll stand up to me for six rounds. That's what I think of the bloody
lot of you. Men! There's not one of you black-country chaps worth the
name. All you're fit for, as far as I can see, is to carry the babby
about and 'old the missis's 'and. Yes, sir, it's you I'm talkin' to!'
Everybody looked at Abner. Alice again tried to pull him away. 'That's
right, my dear,' said Garside, encouraged, 'take 'im 'ome before 'e gets
'is pretty face spoiled!'
Abner shook himself free from her hand and shoved the baby into her arms.
'Come on, gaffer,' he said, 'I'm game.' He moved forward through the
crowd. Alice, clinging to him desperately, tried to hold him back, but
the people made way for him, and even helped him forward, swarming up on
to the platform after him. Garside, pleased with the result of his
stratagem, shook hands with him. 'That's the spirit I like,' he said
thickly. 'Come on in and strip. Let's have a drink to start with.'
They disappeared together into the tent. Sixpences rattled into the
wooden bowl that the negro held to receive them. Men and women poured
into the booth anxious to see what kind of battering the representative
of the district would get. The little Jew pushed back the crowd and held
up a piece of boarding with the words 'House Full' painted on it, while
the negro fastened the strings of the tent door.
Alice was left alone in the crowd outside clutching the baby nervously in
her arms. She could not have borne to see Abner fight. All she could do
was to wait patiently outside and listen in agony for any sounds within.
She could hear very little but the buzz of conversation. Even when she
crept round to the side of the tent and put her ear to the canvas the
sounds that came to her were indistinct, unreal, and blurred by the
nearer rumour of the multitude, the hiss of naphtha flares, the creaking
of swing-boats, cracks of rifles, and above all the raucous blaring of
the steam organs and the shriek of their whistles. If only she could
have heard something she would have been happier. She could not bear to
think of Abner's white flesh being bruised, and yet, curiously enough,
she was thrilled and proud of him. Her distaste for violence couldn't
get the better of her exultation in her man's virility. She stood at the
side of the tent tensely listening. A rocket screamed into the sky;
there was a moment of relative silence from the crowd in which she
thought she heard a sound of dull thuds mingled with another pattering
noise. The rocket burst into a shower of gold amid a salvo of 'Oh's!'
The crowd, noisily streaming towards the ramparts, from which they could
see the fireworks against a blacker sky, jostled her, passing between the
boxing-booth and the next tent. Six rounds! It could not last much
longer. Why had he left her so roughly? Why hadn't he taken her with
him? Of course you couldn't take a baby into a boxing-booth--not even a
black-country baby--but there was no reason why he should have pushed her
aside like that. She wouldn't forgive him that roughness in a hurry!
But she knew that she would: she would forgive Abner anything as long as
he did not disregard her. The crowd still streamed past her. Showers of
starred rockets and tadpoles of fire were bursting above her in the
velvet sky. A whole battery of maroons shook the ruins. He would be
sorry to have missed the fireworks! If he were badly knocked about she
still had some of Mrs Moseley's ointment left--a fine thing for bruises
or broken skin. That was the night, she remembered, when he had come
home drunk: the night when, for a moment they had gazed into each other's
eyes. She knew how dangerous the emotion of pity was. A set-piece
suddenly sputtered out of the darkness. Letters of fire began to form
themselves. What would they say? GOD SAVE . . . 'The king,' of course.
Little John began to cry, saying that he wanted to go to bed. 'Yes, my
precious!' she crooned, 'mammy'll take you home.' Six rounds. . . . She
suddenly remembered how a young pitman at Mawne had once been killed in a
boxing-booth by a knock-out blow on the chin. A knock-out blow . . . she
remembered old Mr Higgins talking of it. But Abner was strong. Nothing
of that kind could possibly happen to him. Even so, she couldn't get the
sinister picture of Budge Garside with his heavy jowl out of her head.
He was such a deadly-looking customer! Suppose . . .
A sound of cheering came from inside the tent. She ran round to the
front, wishing to goodness that John would hold his noise. The curtains
opened. The negro came out with another signboard: 'Just Commencing.'
People surged out of the tent laughing and talking together. A bold girl
burst out laughing in the nigger's face. Alice took hold of the sleeve
of one of the men who came out alone and looked as if he were sober.
'Tell us what's happened?' she gasped; but he only stared at her and
shook his head and went on straight forward as if he had mistaken her
motive for accosting him. The tent emptied. After a moment she saw
Abner shaking hands with the giant in the door. He didn't seem to notice
her, and when he came down the wooden steps and she called his name he
did not look pleased to see her. His lip was cut and his forehead still
damp from a vigorous sponging. She took his arm; she wanted to show him
how glad she was. He was too dazed to resent this familiarity, simply
saying: 'Come on out of this!' In the gate of the courtyard he stopped.
'Wait a jiff,' he said, 'You'd better take the two quid.' He gave her
the coins and then, suddenly realising the tiredness of her face in the
lamplight, asked her to give him the kid. 'I reckon this is a man's
job,' he said with a deep laugh.
This time they caught their tram without difficulty. They spoke very
little, and in whispers, for John had fallen asleep in his mother's arms,
and even if he had wanted to talk, Abner would have known better than to
risk waking him. As a matter of fact he had taken a good deal of
punishment from Garside's left. On points he would have been thoroughly
outmatched and nothing but his stubborn will had kept him on his feet
until the end of the sixth round. The mild elation that had sustained
him when he left the booth had now faded, and in its place he began to
feel the effects of the terrific hammering that he had undergone. His
lip was beginning to swell and his body felt cold in spite of the sultry
weather. He dozed in the corner of the tram-car, and when they came to
the terminus and Alice roused him by a touch on his sleeve, he felt it an
unreasonable effort to pull himself together and carry the child up Mawne
bank. The creature was still asleep and hung a dead weight on his
shoulder. Rather than wake him when they reached Hackett's Cottages
Alice carried him upstairs and laid him still asleep in his cot.
When she came downstairs again she found Abner in the washhouse bathing
his face in cold water. 'Don't do that, Abner,' she said, 'let me see to
it proper.' She took Mrs Moseley's ointment and some strips of linen
from the cupboard, but he wouldn't let her touch him, saying that he was
tired as a dog and would rather turn in. She gazed at him sorrowfully,
knowing that she could not drive him and fearing to persuade. He rallied
her weakly: 'If you stand lookin' at me like that yo'll be late for the
funeral,' he said, and then, softening, 'You look dead tired yourself.
Put the light out and leave the door open.'
'No,' she said. 'I've never done that. I shall wait up for him.'
'Well, you women takes the biscuit!' said Abner.
He left her there, and rolling up in his blankets soon fell asleep. It
was not often that he dreamed, but on that night his dreams would not let
him be. From the very moment that he first slept he seemed to be
fighting, fighting with Budge Garside on a platform of creaking boards
with a rope barrier round it, lit by hissing naphtha flares. Every
moment he grew more exhausted; but he had to go on fighting in spite of
the violent jabs of Garside's fist over his heart. The crowd in the
booth, whose faces could not be seen for tobacco smoke, were laughing at
him, and this filled him with an angry determination to go through with
it. The round seemed endless. He waited for the umpire's bell to save
him, but the umpire had vanished. And now he was fighting all three:
Garside with his broad, shaggy chest, the small-headed negro, and the
little Jew who skipped about like a flea. He hadn't bargained to take on
all three at once, but there was nobody to whom he could appeal, and so
he had to go on boxing as well as he could in this hurricane of six
fists. He thought of Alice and the baby whom he had left outside. If he
were knocked out, as he surely must be in a moment, she would have to
look to herself. That couldn't be helped. Suddenly he heard her calling
from outside the tent: 'Abner . . . Abner!' He tried to call back to
her, just to show her that he was still keeping up, but no voice would
come through his cut lips. Garside landed a terrific blow on the point
of his chin. He woke. . . . He supposed he was awake. But the voice
that he had heard in his dream still followed him. She was calling
'Abner . . Abner!' He tumbled out of bed, pulled on his trousers, and
ran downstairs. The mild light of the kitchen dazzled him.
In the corner, beyond a pile of overturned furniture, he saw Alice
cowering, and above her John Fellows. In the struggle which he had not
heard his father had ripped her bodice and torn away the gilt brooch that
Abner had given her. Now he had her at his mercy, holding her by the
hair, shaking her from time to time like a terrier with a rat and making
her scream with pain. Abner had never seen such terror in a human
creature's eyes. When she saw him she cried for his help. 'Abner . . .
Abner . . . make him give over. Tell him I done nothing!'
'Abner,' said John Fellows savagely. 'Abner . . . there's a bleedin'
side too much Abner in this 'ouse! You'll get out of it quick, the pair
of you.'
'Loose her!' Abner shouted.
'Loose her?' John Fellows laughed. 'I reckon I've let her go too much
as it is. Give me the slip, the two of you. Took her off into the
woods, tickin' and tannin', you dirty devil! Give her joolry! Give your
own mother joolry! An' what happened when I was on my back in the
hospital?'
'Leave go of her!' said Abner, coming nearer.
'In the very bed you was born in,' cried John Fellows. 'Yo're a fine
bloody fossack! Out you go, the both of you! Joolry! Give me the slip,
would you? No -- fear! Gerrup, I say!'
He pulled Alice up from her knees. Her sobs rose to a scream. 'John,
you'm killing me!'
Abner took him by the arm.
'Lay hands on your own father, would you? Take that, you . . . !' He
hit Abner full on his bruised mouth with all his strength. Alice,
released, ran to the other side of the room and stood panting, her hands
clutching at her torn bodice. The baby started crying upstairs.
Abner put his hand to his mouth. His lip was bleeding again. He pulled
himself together. 'You're boozed,' he said. 'Get on upstairs!' He
tried to lead his father to the door, but John Fellows was not to be put
off. 'Boozed!' he said, 'and what would drive a man to booze worse nor a
bad wife? No, yo' don't get out of it like that. What've you done to
'er?'
'I never touched her,' said Abner.
'Never touch 'er, an' give her joolry!' Fellows scoffed. 'Maybe I'm
boozed, but I'm not too boozed to put you to rights.' He launched a
savage blow at Abner's face, and encouraged by the fact that Abner did
not return it, followed it up with another. Alice, crying 'Oh!' ran to
the door. 'Stay where yo' are!' Abner shouted. John Fellows closed with
him, lashing out viciously. He had been something of a boxer in his day,
and his attack was so violent that Abner found it difficult to defend
himself. Fellows fought like a tiger cat, with boots and finger-nails
and teeth. His bloodshot eyes were fixed on Abner's throat. It was as
if all the suppressed malice of seven years had been suddenly released.
Then, suddenly, he dropped Abner and flew at the frightened Alice. Abner
stopped him with a blow under the right ear. He crumpled up and fell on
the floor like a sack.
'Abner . . . you've done him in!' Alice cried.
He fell to his knees and listened for his father's heart. The impulse
still fluttered there. 'No . . . he's only stunned. I reckon he'll wake
up sober,' he said. Alice stood trembling and sobbing in short gasps: a
strange, mechanical noise. Abner remained bent over his father's body in
silence.
'Johnnie's crying . . . bless his little 'eart!' she said. He took no
notice of her. 'Put the rug over 'im. Leave him here till 'e comes to.'
'Abner, 'e spoke something awful! 'E said you'n me had been going
together while he was away. 'E took up this brooch. . . . A thing like
that!'
'I don't want to 'ear what he said.'
''E said our John wasn't his child . . . said I'd always been rotten bad.
. .'
John Fellows gave a groan.
'Hark, 'e's coming round,' said Abner.
'An' I never done nothing! . . . nothing!'
'You'd better look to the babby.'
'Poor lamb! Nothing, I never done, Abner . . .'
'I know you done nothing. You don't take no notice what a man says when
'e's boozed. You look to the kid, while I get my clothes on.'
'Yo' bain't goin' to dress?' She picked up the alarm clock that Fellows
had knocked down from the mantelpiece. It was still going, with a harsh
metallic click. 'It's not two o'clock yet.'
But he had gone. Left alone she glanced fearfully at the form of her
husband. For a moment he lay quite still. Then he shuddered, rolled
over and began to snore. The baby was still wailing upstairs. If only
John Fellows had been dead! But that would have been murder. What was
Abner doing? She could not live without Abner. She went upstairs to his
room and tapped at the door. Candlelight glinted through cracks in the
boards. He answered angrily, she thought, but she came in.
'What are you doing now?' she whispered.
'Putting two-three things together.'
'What's up now?'
'I'm off out of this.'
'Going?' she cried. 'Abner . . . you can't go and leave me like this.
Not with him!'
He laughed. 'I can't take you along with me. Not likely!' He went on
pulling out clothes from his wooden box. She broke down altogether.
'Abner . . . Abner, don't go and leave me. I can't . . . I can't . . .'
He put on his scarf. 'Abner, only stay along with us for a bit. . .'
'I've stayed too long as it is.'
She tried to put her arms round his neck, but he pushed her away. 'It's
lucky I've got a bit of money put by for a start,' he said, fumbling in
the mattress for his stocking. 'I'll give you what I can spare.'
Then suddenly he swore violently. He had found the stocking, but it was
empty. He turned furiously on Alice: 'You devil, you took it!'
She fell at his feet, imploring him to believe that she knew nothing
about it. 'I've never told you a lie, Abner,' she said.
His rage made him unreasonable. 'You're like the rest on 'em! Twenty
pounds! What have you done with it?'
'I swear I never seen a penny of it, Abner. It must be there. Look
again.'
He had ripped the bed to pieces, but there was no money. Suddenly light
dawned on them both. They had found the explanation of John Fellows'
continued affluence. Thinking of this, they could not doubt where the
money had gone.
'That's the worst turn he ever done me,' he said, pulling on his cap.
Even now she could not believe that he was going. 'Not till the
morning,' she said. 'Don't leave me with him like that in the dark.'
In the kitchen Abner again examined his father, who now appeared to be
sleeping peacefully. 'He won't remember a word of it when he wakes,' he
said.
Again she implored him not to leave her, but now she could see that
entreaties were useless and that his mind was made up. It was the most
awful parting in her life: as final and annihilating as death. For more
than three years she had lived for him and very little else. He opened
the door. It was a bland summer night, the sky full of soft stars and
the country of a breathing sweetness.
'So long, then, Alice,' he said.
She could not speak. She put up her arms and kissed him for the first
time in her life. He did not then push her away; but she felt that he
was only compelling himself to tolerate her embrace. 'I never touched
that money,' she said hastily.
'I know you never did,' he replied. 'So long . . .'
His shadow disappeared into the darkness. She shut the door of the
kitchen. John Fellows lay on the floor snoring, and upstairs the baby
still cried.
The Eighth Chapter
THERE was no moon, but the sky, even at this early hour of the morning,
was full of a curious shimmer of light reflected mirage-like from the
upper air clothing Europe to eastward of the English lands. At that
season of the year sunlight was never distant. Now, every moment the
stars shone fainter, and the slate roofs of the houses seemed to gather
light. Abner stood looking up and down the Stourton Road. He did not
know which way to turn; he was dazed by the suddenness with which the
freedom so long and so patiently awaited had come to him. In the
bewilderment of the moment he could scarcely even realise that it was
sweet. He had planned it differently and anticipated the day so often
that its violent arrival took him off his feet. He had expected to leave
Mawne deliberately in his own time and carrying his savings in his
pocket. Events had cast him out violently and penniless . . . not quite
penniless, for he still had a little change left from the money he had
taken to the Wakes. He remembered with regret that he had been fool
enough to give Alice the two sovereigns he had won in the boxing-booth.
They would have come in handy; but reflection told him that Alice would
need them a great deal more than he.
A man began to cough in the front bedroom of the house before which he
was standing. People upstairs were beginning to wake. A cock crowed
dismally. He had better make up his mind, for day was beginning.
Eastward the Stourton Road led to Coventry, westward to Wales. Whichever
way he went his lack of money would compel him to walk. He wasn't afraid
of walking or, for that matter, of sleeping rough; and yet he felt that
he was at sea and incapable in his present condition of making up his
mind. His head and body ached with Garside's blows, for the bruised
muscles were beginning to stiffen. He was sleepy, as well as tired, and
couldn't remember one thing that seemed to be calling for recognition in
the back of his mind. He went on walking aimlessly towards Halesby; the
motion set his mind working once more and he remembered the thing that
had baffled and escaped him. Tiger. . . . He couldn't very well leave
the dog on Mrs Moseley's hands. At the same time he didn't want to
frighten the old woman by disturbing her before daylight. To do so would
entail explanations, possibly arguments on the subject of his filial
duties. It would mean another good-bye, and he wanted to get away
quietly without anything of that kind. Still, he meant to have Tiger as
much for his own comfort as for Mrs Moseley's. He determined to see what
could be done.
The old woman's house was the last on the right of a steep, cobble-paved
street climbing at right angles to the Stourton Road. He turned up it,
his hob-nails raising stinging echoes on the stones. He felt as if he
must surely wake every one that slept there. Mrs Moseley's house was as
quiet as the rest. He surveyed it strategically. At the back of it lay
a little yard that in happier days had been used as a fowl-run. To
advertise the presence of these treasures within, her husband had
prevailed upon the landlord to top the wall with fragments of broken
bottles. This barrier now confronted Abner. Luckily he was tall enough
to reach the top of the wall with his hands, and he soon discovered that
time and weather had taken the nature out of Mr Moseley's mortar so that
it crumbled easily and allowed him to remove the glass from a foot of the
coping. In two minutes he had done this, straddled the wall, and dropped
down softly on the other side. Tiger, bad watchdog that he was, still
slept. Abner came softly to the door of the washhouse and tried it.
There was no fear that Mrs Moseley would leave a door unlocked at night
even behind a glass-topped wall. The only other aperture in the scullery
was a window that was too small for him to get through and set very high
in the wall. With his pocket-knife thrust through a broken pane he
lifted the hasp and opened it. Tiger gave a sharp bark.
'Ss . . .' Abner whispered. 'Tiger. . . . Good dog. . . Come on then.'
Tiger, with a snuffle of recognition, came out of his hole and yawned.
The next moment he was jumping up towards the window, anxious to get at
his master and whining like a baby because the window was too high for
him. Time after time he leapt and failed to reach the sill. The wall
was too smooth, and the space of the washhouse too cramped to give him a
run for his jump. He grew excited and inclined to be noisy, and at last
Abner, seeing no other way out of the difficulty, put his arm as far as
he could through the window, and when the dog jumped caught blindly at
the loose skin of his back and hauled him through. Tiger trembled with
gratitude and the anticipation of new joys. He licked Abner's face as he
lifted him up and put him on the top of the coping. He jumped over into
the road and Abner followed him. A policeman, attracted by the strange
phenomenon of Tiger's egress, watched him as he dropped over. He was a
young man, a football player, who knew Abner, and when he saw Tiger's
master emerge he grinned.
'Got him out without waking the old woman,' said Abner.
'Rabbits?' said the other, with a wink. Abner laughed. Both of them
knew that the game-laws do not run in colliery districts. 'Looks as if
'e knows all about it,' said the constable at parting. Tiger was already
nearly out of sight, sniffing the grass as he went. Since Abner went
back to work at the pit he had been deprived of hunting at this ideal
hour.
It was extraordinary how Tiger's company restored Abner's confidence. He
felt no longer alone and worried by indecision. Tiger had gone so far
that it was useless to call him back. He had chosen his own direction,
and Abner was content to follow him. What he wanted most of all, he
decided, was a sleep.
Beyond the level of Mrs Moseley's cottage the houses thinned away and the
ground fell steeply to the fields above the Stour, the scene of Abner's
walks with Susan more than a year before. Dawn came, heralded by no
fierce splendours, white light stealing from the east over a cloudless
sky. The birds were already awake, but the hush of August held them, so
that the warblers were silent. Larks there were, lost in the sunlit
levels above the whiteness; thrushes made subdued domestic noises in the
hedgerows; linnets already flocking for the early harvest of seed,
rustled the hawthorn thickets, chaffinches sang boldly in a more vulgar
strain. A soft air bloomed the drowsy hedges. Elder blossoms and
slender umbels of parsley flower gleamed like dull ivory. Light, and
more light came welling over the world. When Abner had reached the plank
bridge over the Stour where Susan first had kissed him, the edge of the
woodland rose up black beyond the stream, the water gleamed beneath the
alders, and the hills, that had lain folded in night, lifted their heads.
Now the birds were silent. Only the larks still sang. Walking behind
the ecstatic Tiger through a green lane in Uffdown Wood, Abner saw the
peak of Pen Beacon before him smitten with fire. The sun was up.
Gigantic shadows dappled and barred the grass. Tiger, dancing from side
to side, pursued a phantom hound. They left the woods and dropped over a
stile into a winding road. As yet the sun had no real heat: colour it
warmed, but the air was cool, cool and clean as the surface of this rocky
road so often scoured by torrents. The heavy odours of the woods
belonged to night, but the smell of the road was one of morning.
Gradually the banks released the peculiar perfume of a hill-country in
sunshine, a lovely, healthy savour of thyme and bracken and dry heather.
A breeze swept the harebells. Still they climbed the path towards the
top of Uffdown where the sun came first. Even at this hour pods were
snapping amid the almond scent of late gorse blossom. In the shadow of a
hedge where prickles were few Abner threw himself down propping his head
on a tussock of thin grass. He closed his eyes, and was soon asleep, and
Tiger, having smelt and scared innumerable rabbits, came at last to lie
beside him, propping his slender lower jaw upon the smooth of Abner's
thigh.
He did not sleep for long. His watch had stopped, and he could not tell
the time, but from the height of the sun he judged it to be between eight
and nine o'clock. The grass of that southern hedge-side was already warm
and fragrant, and the mistiness of the Severn plain beneath him promised
another day of broiling heat. He was horribly stiff and lay on with a
sense of lazy luxury, letting the sun warm his bones. Sprawling there
with his eyes closed he now began to consider where he should go.
The obvious goal of an out-of-work in the midlands at that time was
Coventry, an ancient city then rising on the third of its great
industrial booms, the manufacture of motor-cars. There was always work,
and well-paid work, to be had in Coventry. The journey was short, and
Abner had no money to waste on railway fares. Even so, the idea of
merely moving from one side of the black-country to another did not seem
to represent the kind of radical change that he had intended. He wanted
to make a clean start in a new country. It suddenly struck him that,
after all, there was no real reason why a man should spend the whole of
his life in the dust of coal and metal or the smell of fire. This joy of
sunlight and fresh air seemed too good to lose.
He knew nothing of the conditions of labour in the country beyond the
fact that many black-country families migrated every autumn into the
fields of Worcestershire for the gathering of hops. He remembered how he
had seen these sun-browned companies returning, men, women, and children
together, carrying their household goods in old perambulators, looking
happier and more healthy than the majority of Halesby people. He had no
very definite idea when the 'hopping' season began; but whether he were
too late for it or too early he knew, at any rate, that he had a store of
strength and health to sell. He wasn't afraid of work. Why shouldn't he
work in the open air? For the summer at least . . . after that he might
go down with the money he had earned into the Welsh valleys and take to
the pit again. He knew that between him and Wales lay a vast green
country in which a man might live as well as anywhere else. Even now the
sun was drinking up the mists that concealed it, revealing sombre
woodlands heavy in leaf, yellow cornfields, the smoke of hidden towns or
villages, and, here and there, a shining bend of river. From that high
post, indeed, he gazed upon the pastoral heart of England, the most
placid and homely of all her shires; but the national schools had taught
him nothing of these things, and, as the mists ascended, showing the
cliffs of Cotswold long and level, Bredon an island dome, May Hill and
Malvern, Abberley, Clee, and all the nearer hills of Wales, he only knew
that it was green and big and that it promised freedom.
He decided on Wales, and began to take stock of his possessions, counting
the change that remained in his trouser pocket--seven and ninepence
ha'penny in all--and untying the bundle into which he had put a change of
socks and underwear. He wished, now that he came to think of it, that he
had changed into his working clothes, for it did not seem right to him to
look for work in his Sunday best. He turned out the pockets of the coat,
wondering what tokens of his past life it would disclose. In the breast
pocket, to his great surprise, he found a small packet of paper that he
couldn't account for. He opened it, and found that it contained two
sovereigns. He stared at them incredulously and laughed aloud. Alice
must have slipped them in when she said good-bye to him. He felt
suddenly tender toward her, and immensely pleased at this striking turn
in his fortunes. He scraped out of his side pocket some dry remnants of
tobacco, filled his pipe, tied up his bundle, whistled to Tiger and set
off down hill leaving the brow of the Uffdown between him and the
blackness of Mawne.
It was all new ground to him. The hills that he was leaving behind
formed a lip of the saucer in which the midland coal measures lay, and
their line had always marked the limit of Abner's curiosity as boldly as
they defined his physical horizon. Now he was passing quickly to the
unknown plain. The path grew rough and precipitous. For a hundred yards
it cut into a plantation of larches fully grown. His feet and Tiger's
made no sound on the drift of needles. The wood was dry, warm, fragrant,
and as quiet as a church. One would have thought that no living creature
was there, till Tiger scented a squirrel, and Abner heard above him the
thin alarm note of the wood-wren. From the wood they crossed a stone
stile into a sunless lane, steeper even than the path across the hill,
grass-grown for want of traffic and now possessed by a company of solemn
foxgloves. This lane, though unfrequented, was the favourite
picnic-place of Mr Willis of Mawne Hall, who always called it 'our little
Switzerland.' The only thing that struck Abner about it was its
steepness. A stone that he dislodged in his walking bounded on as though
it were falling over the roof of a house, and Tiger scuttled after it
full-pelt. Abner also found that it was easier to run than to walk.
At the bottom of the hill they came to a deserted watermill, fed by a
stream that here issued from the hills. Near it stood a large farm-house
that had fallen from its state of ease and comfort, and was now partly
inhabited by a labouring family. A small boy was sitting playing with
stones and eating a crust on the green in front of the house. Tiger ran
up and sniffed at him, and he dropped his crust and ran screaming up the
garden path. A pale woman with red hair rushed out to see what was the
matter and comforted him with her apron. Abner said good-day to her, but
she pulled the child inside the door as if she were frightened. He heard
her bolting herself in, and laughed, for he didn't realise what a ruffian
he looked with his bruised, unshaven face and his swollen lip. Tiger,
however, had the crust of bread and was thankful. He was no less hungry
than his master.
Down the valley they passed. A hundred yards below the mill the trees
receded and the stream widened into a neglected fishpond half-covered
with water-lily leaves. The air was full of glittering blue
dragon-flies, and the roadside littered and scorched by the signs of an
abandoned gipsy encampment. The fishpond ended in a patch where the
stream gushed through narrow sluices into a pool of brown, clear water.
Sunlight, beating through the leaves above, lit the bottom with floating
patches of golden brown, showing the shadows of trout that lay there
gently swaying with their heads toward the sweet water. The coolness of
this bathing-place was so alluring that Abner stripped and washed the
slippery sweat from his body. Tiger, who was used to this kind of
performance but hated water, watched him from the bank. When Abner had
dried himself with his spare shirt they set off again down the sunny
road.
He hoped that they would soon come to a village, for the bathe had only
served to sharpen his appetite. As yet there were no signs of human
habitation, but from the fields that chequered the hills on either side
of the road came many country sounds: the creaking of invisible
cart-wheels, the crack of a whip, the lowing of cattle and voices of men
that echoed in the closed valley. A little lower down they met a man
riding bareback on a pony, driving a flock of sheep before him. His legs
hung straight down so that they nearly touched the ground. Tiger and the
sheep-dog exchanged inquiries, but the horseman took no notice of Abner,
who stood against the hedge while the flock stampeded past him with
frightened brown eyes, raising a dust that was laden with a hot smell of
wool and sheep-dip. The farmer's man appeared to be riding in a dream,
mechanically switching the pony's flanks with a branch of hazel. Abner
woke him by saying good-morning. He stopped the pony with a kick and
turned to look.
'Any pub handy hereabout?' Abner asked him.
'Pub? . . . Ay, you'm close on it. Ten minute'll bring you to the
Barley Mow.' Abner had some difficulty in understanding him, for the
language that he spoke was not that of Mawne. He thanked him. Then,
after a long scrutiny, the horseman informed him that the nearest
workhouses were at Bromsgrove and Kiddy, five miles to the right or left
of the inn, said good-bye and kicked his pony into an amble again.
By that time the sheep had long since pattered out of sight; but this was
an easy country in which hurry had no place. It amused Abner, and did
not in the least offend him, to be taken for a tramp. In a few days, but
for Alice's final bounty, he might easily have become one. The labourer
had made an estimate of the distance of the pub in accordance with his
own leisurely way of progress. In less than half the time that he had
predicted Abner found himself in front of an old red-brick inn shadowed
by an immense horse-chestnut whose leaves already drooped with heat. As
Abner reached the door, a man whom he took to be the landlord was
starting to drive off in a yellow dog-cart, probably to some market, for
a small pig was netted in the back of the trap. A big, blowsy woman whom
he called 'mother,' but who appeared to be of his own age and was no
doubt his wife, saw him off. 'Don't forget Emily's stays, dad,' she
called. He waved his whip in answer and went bowling down the road into
the sun. The woman returned with a sigh that sounded as if it betokened
relief, to the wide, semi-circular steps where Abner was standing waiting
for her. She had not seen him arrive, and appeared not to be pleased at
the prospect. When he began to speak she cut him short with: 'No, the
master never gives anything. We have to make it a rule on this road.'
He had to explain that he wasn't begging. 'Can you give us a bit of
breakfast, missis,' he said, 'I can pay for it.' He showed her one of
his sovereigns.
She looked him up and down incredulously, and then said: 'Come on in and
set yourself in the tap. Better leave the dog outside, or my Betsy'll
have his eyes out.' Her Betsy, a big, black tom-cat, too rashly
christened in his first days of innocence, was already arching a back
more like that of a geometer caterpillar than a cat. 'She can't abear
them if she don't know them,' said the landlady. 'Once she knows them
she'll lie in their arms like a child.'
Abner left Tiger whining outside the door, and the landlady, now
satisfied that he wasn't as rough as he looked, was heard shouting orders
to Emily in the kitchen. A smell of frizzling bacon came down the
passage.
Abner settled himself on an oak bench. This taproom was very different
from that of the Royal Oak. The floor was of big, uneven stone flags and
all the furniture was black and shiny with centuries of use. The place
did not smell, as did the Halesby pubs, of stale spirits and tobacco. It
was as sweet as they were sour. Agricultural almanacs and signed
photographs of memorable meets hung on the walls, and over the
mantelpiece a number of cards recorded the fees and procreative
achievements of shire stallions. Abner was nearly asleep when the
landlady herself appeared with a plate of bacon and eggs and a pot of
tea.
'There now, how will that do you?' she said.
Abner started to eat and she sat and watched him, apologising once more
for her first reception. 'We have to be careful, you see. What with all
this unemployment there seems to be more tramps on the road summer-time
than ever there was. In winter they dies off like the flies. Dad says
they come and go with the swallers. That's a lovely bit of bacon.'
It became evident from her conversation that she was curious to know what
Abner was doing. She could see that his clothes were decent and that he
wore a silver watch-chain, but hinted that she couldn't understand the
battered state of his face. He told her that he had had an accident.
'There now!' she said. 'They always go in threes, and bless me if yours
ain't the third I've come across this week. Have a drop more tea?'--she
poured it--'Which way are you going, then? If you'd been a bit earlier
dad could have give you a lift.'
Abner told her that he was looking for work, asked her if she could help
him to find it.
'You're not a farming man,' she said, 'and it's all farmering
hereabouts.'
He told her that he was ready to turn his hand to anything, and she
confessed, a little dubiously, that he might possibly get some casual
employment with one of the farmers. 'If I was you,' she said, 'I should
go on through Chaddesbourne and ask at Mr Cookson's--he's the biggest
employer round here--but you're a bit too early for the harvest.
Everything's backward in these parts after the bad spring.'
He thanked her, and while she went out to change
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