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.