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 _cortège_, 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 _mêlée_ 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.