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.