THAT night he went down to the public-house for the first time since the
day of Susan’s defection more than a year before. The crowd at the Royal
Oak were glad to see him, for they were still talking about nothing else
but the result of the cup-tie. Every one was anxious to treat him and to
condole with him on his black eye, and he was prepared to drink as much
as they would give him, standing his own share up to the limit of the
fifty shillings in his pocket, as long as he could forget the anger with
which he had left the works. If he didn’t, somehow, get the idea of his
injury out of his mind, he felt that he would probably go down to
Hudson’s private house and wring his neck.
In the Royal Oak, drinking nothing but hot whisky, he managed to lose
himself and the troubles of the day. He was conscious of nothing but the
warmth and comfort of the private bar, the dark varnished walls, the
polished beer engine, the shining rows of bottles, the crackle of the
bright fire. For a time the room was also full of jolly people who
laughed and spoke with loud, buoyant voices, the happiest company
imaginable. The spirituous air was exhilarating and endowed all the
contents of the bar, from the postage stamps on the ceiling to the brass
spittoons and sawdust of the floor, with a quality of unusual vividness.
At last this curious clarity faded and the details that had seemed for
some curious reason exciting, became blurred. Abner tucked up his feet
on a settle covered with American leather and tried to go to sleep. When
he awoke, his old friend Joe Hodgetts was piloting him home along the
Stourton Road under a sky of dancing stars.
Alice was waiting up for him. Supper was laid on the table and she rose
from her chair by the fire to welcome him as he entered. The new light
dazzled him, and as he stood uncertainly at the door he took hold of the
red curtain to steady himself, and, lurching, pulled it down from its
string. Alice gave a cry. Even though she knew the symptoms well enough
in her husband she couldn’t believe that Abner was drunk. She only saw
him standing there with the great discoloured bruise on his flushed face.
He held the curtain in his hand and looked at it stupidly, as if he
didn’t know what to do with it.
‘Abner . . . what’s up with you?’ she said, running to take it from him.
‘There’s nowt up with me,’ he said solemnly. ‘I’m drunk. That’s all.
If any one’s a right to be drunk it’s me.’
The equanimity with which she had trained herself to receive John Fellows
in such circumstances deserted her. She knew perfectly well that it was
no use arguing with a drunken man, but the case of Abner was so
exceptional that she began to do so. He took no notice of her, and then
she rated him violently, so that overcome by a sudden flush of anger he
took hold of her arms as if he were going to throw her down. He had
never taken hold of her like that before. She faced him, panting for
breath, and they stared into each other’s eyes. He felt the warmth of
her arms through the sleeve of her bodice and realised her for the first
time as a living, warm-blooded creature. She trembled under his gaze,
but did not try to free herself. He felt that something like this had
happened before; remembered Susan. Suddenly sobered, almost frightened,
he relaxed his grip on her arms. Still she did not move. She stood
dazed, with her breath coming and going. ‘I’m going to bed,’ he said.
He staggered to the foot of the stairs and left her standing there.
When he had gone she pulled herself together and put her hands to her
eyes as though she wanted to shut out what she had seen. She had
forgotten her first resentment and the emotion with which she trembled
now was one that frightened her and put her to shame. She felt that she
had just experienced the most thrilling moment of her life. After that
she could never pretend to herself that she was not in love with Abner.
In the morning he woke early. Before Alice knew that he was astir he
went downstairs in his stockinged feet and lit the kitchen fire. By the
time that she herself appeared he had made himself a cup of tea and laid
the table for breakfast. Neither of them spoke of his violent homecoming
the night before or of the stranger scene that followed it. She had half
expected that he would ask her pardon for what had happened, but such a
proceeding didn’t seem to him important. He had been drunk, now he was
sober, and that was the end of the matter. When breakfast was over he
went out into the dank washhouse and shaved. She was puzzled to see that
he was not going to work, for he had dressed in his Sunday clothes and
wore his watch-chain, decorated with a couple of silver football medals.
At last she plucked up courage to ask him if he was not going to Mawne.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I bain’t going there no more.’
‘What’s up then?’
‘Got the sack,’ he said laconically.
‘But the money . . .’ she said. ‘We’ve got to live.’
‘I picked up two weeks’ pay last night. You can have what’s left.’
He turned out his pockets and gave her a handful of small change.
‘That’s more than I reckoned there’d be,’ he said.
She threw down the money on the table and stared at him. ‘I owe more nor
this!’ she said. ‘What about the football money?’
‘Don’t talk to me about football,’ he said. ‘I’ve done with football as
long as that Hudson’s on the committee.’
The situation baffled her. Money they must have, and she was quick to
rack her brains for some way in which it could be got. An inspiration
came to her. ‘You didn’t ought to work with your eye in that state,’ she
said. ‘Better go down to the doctor’s and put yourself on the box.
You’ve been paying into that club long enough and not had a penny out of
it.’
‘Club?’ said Abner. ‘I don’t sponge on no clubs! I’m going down to the
pit to see the doggy. I reckon he’ll find me a job underground.’ He lit
his pipe and went out into the frosty morning. A delayed impulse made
her want to give him his knitted neck-scarf, but it came too late. She
didn’t know what to make of it. In a single night all the pleasant,
ordered happiness of the life that they had been leading since John
Fellows’s accident had been overwhelmed. She felt it unreasonable,
incredible, that this should have happened. She could not even solace
herself with the care of her baby, who was now beginning to babble and to
stagger with uncertain steps from chair to chair. She found herself
wishing, for a moment, that there wasn’t a kid to worry about, and was as
quickly bitten with remorse, for she knew that the baby was her most
precious possession on earth. She could settle down to nothing. The
foundations of her routine life had been dissolved. She had not even
money enough to meet the bills that she always paid on Mondays. But the
thought of money was nothing to her compared with her anxiety as to
Abner’s attitude toward herself. She found a little comfort in thinking
that he had not yet recovered from the effects of his debauch, and that
when he returned in the evening they might take up their relation at the
point where it had been so abruptly convulsed. On this her whole
happiness depended.
Abner’s visit to the pit was satisfactory in so far as it procured him
without the least difficulty a job underground. He was a trained miner,
and in those days, when the output of the mine had been diminished by a
series of accidents and a growing tendency to work short time, any new
hand was welcome at Mawne pit. When he came back in the evening he
reassured Alice that even if they had to go easy in the matter of
expenditure they need not starve in the interval before John Fellows
returned to double their income. To meet the present emergency he handed
her the sovereign that he had received from the football club. ‘If that
sod Hudson had had his way you’d have had ten,’ he said enigmatically.
‘You’d better send a nipper to the Oak with my boots and football gear,’
he told her. ‘I’ve done with Mawne United.’
She was thankful for his solution of her money difficulties, for pride
would not have allowed her to face the butcher and the grocer without the
money in her hand. In spite of the loss that it implied, she couldn’t
reasonably refuse to be glad that he had abandoned football since she had
so often begged him to do so. What troubled her far more than this was
the fact that his attitude toward her was changed. It was clear that he
had not been too drunk to realise the significance of the moment when he
had held her in his arms and they had looked into each other’s eyes. He
had seen the emotional precipice on the edge of which they were standing.
Well, so had she; but that seemed to her no reason why they should not
pretend that things were as they had always been. She was content to
play her part; even, for their common comfort, to forget what had
happened. The only thing that she could not bear was that he should
avoid her as though she were an evil thing to be feared and distrusted.
This, in effect, was what he did. To drink habitually was not in his
nature. When he drank he did so simply as a means to escape from himself
or from some harassing emotion; and so he did not seek a refuge, as she
had feared he would, in a public house. None the less it soon became
clear that the pleasant homely evenings at Hackett’s Cottages were now at
an end. The chair which Alice always arranged for him at the fireside
was never occupied. When he came home from the pit at night and had
washed himself in the scullery he now went out again to spend the
evenings with his friends, with old Mr Higgins, with George Harper, or
with Mrs Moseley. He hated his work at the colliery: the dark, cramped
labour in remote subterranean stalls was a terrible change from his free
and easy life at the furnaces. He hated the dirt no less than the
darkness and it scarcely mended matters to realise that he was wanted at
the pit.
Opportunities of escape soon presented themselves. The retirement of
their most promising player from the United team created a sensation not
only in Mawne but in the surrounding towns. Abner would give no
explanation for it. When people asked him why he was not playing for
Mawne he merely told them to go and ask Hudson. It was impossible for
him to change his team in the middle of the season without an official
transfer. The secretary of the Albion made a special journey to Halesby
to ask him to consent to this; but since this proceeding would have
presented the Mawne club with a handsome transfer fee, he refused. The
Albion offered him good and easy work in North Bromwich if he would sign
on for them next season. ‘You can have it for the asking,’ they said—but
he refused, for though he would have liked nothing better he felt that it
would be wrong to desert Alice in her present emergency. Until his
father returned it was his duty to stay with her.
The winter wore on, and John Fellows, whose alcoholic history made him a
bad subject for a fractured thigh-bone, still lay in hospital. Abner
stuck to his thankless labours at the pit. He worked longer underground
than he need have done, simply for the reason that he did not want to
spend his evenings in the dangerous company of Alice. After that night
he knew that he could not wholly trust himself. His earnings were now
sufficient to keep the household in comfort, and the money that he drew
from his overtime he put aside for an emergency, concealing them in an
old stocking underneath the mattress of his bed. He wanted to be sure of
his liberty as soon as his father returned.
At Christmas, Alice made a heroic attempt to recover her lost happiness.
A week before the festival she went down into the market at Halesby and
bought a branch of berried holly which she hung above the middle of the
table from a nail that had once supported a hanging lamp. She decorated
the branch with cheap trifles, flags, lustred balls and candles of
coloured wax in metal clips shaped like butterflies. Over the
mantelpiece she pinned a scroll of varnished paper with ‘God Bless Our
Home’ in gothic characters upon it, and in various inaccessible places
she put sprigs of mistletoe. Although she said nothing to Abner it was
evident that she was counting on him to celebrate the feast at home. A
few days before the event she showed him a present that she had bought
for the child, a wooden horse with red nostrils, a lambskin mane, and a
ridiculous dab of a tail. Even this failed to move him, and up to the
last moment she was in doubt as to whether he would forsake her. She
schemed her very hardest to keep him, using as a bait the child whose
curious ways and stumbling attempts at speech amused him. This creature
loved, above all things, to be caught up and perched on the dizzy height
of Abner’s shoulder, so high that he was able to examine the unexplored
country of the ceiling. He also loved to play with Tiger, who now came
and went in Hackett’s Cottages of his own accord. Tiger liked children,
and he and little John would roll over together on the kitchen floor.
Alice always made the dog welcome, tempting him with such bones as never
entered Mrs Moseley’s house. He was a link with Abner, and therefore to
be encouraged.
In the end Abner spent Christmas Day at Hackett’s Cottages, or, to be
exact, the morning and evening of it, for the afternoon he devoted to
watching the league match between Mawne United and Dulston on the Royal
Oak ground. He could not bring himself to forget football altogether
even though he persisted in his determination not to play. In spite of
all Alice’s pathetic efforts, the day was not a success. In the evening,
when they sat over the fire and Mr Higgins, who had brought in a basket
of oranges, had left them alone together, she made a direct attempt to
have the matter out with him.
‘Why are you so funny with me, Abner?’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I’ve
done that you should treat me distant like this. You didn’t use to do
it.’ But he would not answer. ‘You’ve took a turn against me,’ she
said. ‘I know you have. What is it I’ve done?’
‘_You_ ain’t done nothing,’ he said. ‘And _I_ ain’t took a turn again’
you neither. I’m all right if so be you’ll leave me alone.’
‘Yo’m different even with our John,’ she said.
‘Don’t yo’ bother,’ he said at last. ‘It’ll be different time ourn comes
back. He must be getting on a bit now.’
She had to leave it at that. It had been a difficult evening for Abner,
for in spite of her troubles the firelight and the excitement that the
baby’s pleasure in his presents had given her made her look very
attractive in her own fragile way. ‘When ourn comes back . . .’ She
sighed, for she felt that John Fellows’s return would put an end even to
the small measure of happiness that she managed to extract from the
present. When John Fellows came back she would be faced with all the old
desperate problems, the old terrible nights. As they sat over the fire
she turned her face aside to hide the tears that came into her eyes.
Abner puffed stolidly at his pipe. ‘When he comes back,’ he said, ‘I
reckon I’ll have a look round for another job.’
‘Where?’ she asked, in alarm.
‘Oh, anywhere out of this place,’ he said. ‘I’m sick of Halesby. I
reckon I’ll go to Coventry or Wales. There’s good money in Wales.’
‘Abner,’ she cried. ‘Oh, Abner, you’m not going to leave me? Not with
him. . . . I couldn’t abide it, Abner. Abner, if you leave me, I’ll
make a hole in the cut, God strike me if I won’t!’ She could contain
herself no longer and went sobbing upstairs. Abner found it difficult to
resist an impulse to follow her and comfort her. He was not used to a
woman’s tears. He got as far as the foot of the stairs, then slowly
turned back and sat on, smoking till midnight amid the pathetic
decorations of that poor room. His reflections determined him more than
ever to cut himself free from the embarrassments of life at Halesby.
Coventry was almost too near. Yes, he would go down into Wales. On his
way upstairs he listened for a moment outside her bedroom door. He
thought he heard her still sobbing under the sheets, but when he listened
the sound of sobbing stopped.
Next day she had quite regained her self-possession. They went together,
taking the baby with them, to visit John Fellows in the North Bromwich
Infirmary. They found him lying in a long, clean ward festooned with
Christmas decorations. The ominous erection of an apparatus of weights
and pulleys at the foot of his bed emphasised his helplessness. He did
not appear to be very pleased to see them, and his embraces so frightened
the baby that he set up a howl. The baby need not have been frightened,
for John Fellows was far less impressive than he had been in his former
state. The whole man seemed to have shrunk. He was newly shaved; his
rough hands had become clean and almost transparent; but though he now
looked as if he couldn’t hurt any one, the presence of the visitors set
him grumbling at once. From the first he appeared to be offended with
Abner because he had not thought to smuggle in any liquor for him.
‘You ain’t brought a spot,’ he said. ‘Well, you’re a b—y fine son!’
Even three months of abstinence had not diminished his craving. He told
them that he dreamed of liquor, but that there seemed to be no chance of
him getting any nearer to it than in dreams, for, as far as he could see,
his leg was exactly as it had been when he came into hospital. After
this outburst of discontent he softened a little, pinched Alice’s cheek,
played a little with the baby, who had by this time overcome his fears,
and even talked to Abner about football. In this way he heard the story
of the Albion match and Mawne committee’s attempt to square the players.
At first he was enthusiastic about George Harper’s resistance to the
corrupting influence; but on second thoughts he disapproved of it. ‘I
reckon you and George done your mates a bad turn. It ain’t every day you
can pick up ten pound for nothing.’ The only thing that modified his
opinion was the dislike that he shared with all the other men at Mawne of
Hudson. ‘Hudson . . .’ he said. ‘I wish you’d a’ finished him!’
While Abner and his father were talking football Alice had approached the
sister, a dark, capable-looking woman whose features and hair and eyes
were as rigid and sharp and metallic as the scissors hanging from her
starched belt, on the subject of John Fellows’s progress. This woman
stared at her for a moment. ‘Are you Fellows’s daughter?’ she asked.
‘No, sister, I’m his wife.’
‘He’s the worst grumbler we’ve ever had in this ward,’ said the sister;
‘but as a matter of fact he’s getting on finely. The doctor says the
bone is set nicely, and he should be out in a couple of weeks now. I
expect they’ll send him out on a Thomas’s splint. You don’t know what
that is,’ she added, with a rather scornful intonation, but then,
noticing that Alice looked tired, she took her into her bunk and gave her
a cup of tea.
‘I couldn’t imagine that you were Fellows’s wife,’ she said, ‘and this
his baby. I thought your husband was the young man who came with you.’
‘He and baby’s half-brothers,’ Alice explained, blushing. ‘By Mr
Fellows’s first wife, you know.’
‘Well, I hope you’ll be happy,’ replied the sister doubtfully. ‘It’s
time the visitors were going. Is Fellows a very heavy drinker?’
‘I’m afraid he is,’ said Alice mildly.
‘I thought so,’ said the sister. ‘We ought to keep him in here for your
sake. But there’s always a rush on surgical beds at Christmas time.
You’d better call your stepson.’