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 anæmic 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.