THERE was no moon, but the sky, even at this early hour of the morning,
was full of a curious shimmer of light reflected mirage-like from the
upper air clothing Europe to eastward of the English lands. At that
season of the year sunlight was never distant. Now, every moment the
stars shone fainter, and the slate roofs of the houses seemed to gather
light. Abner stood looking up and down the Stourton Road. He did not
know which way to turn; he was dazed by the suddenness with which the
freedom so long and so patiently awaited had come to him. In the
bewilderment of the moment he could scarcely even realise that it was
sweet. He had planned it differently and anticipated the day so often
that its violent arrival took him off his feet. He had expected to leave
Mawne deliberately in his own time and carrying his savings in his
pocket. Events had cast him out violently and penniless . . . not quite
penniless, for he still had a little change left from the money he had
taken to the Wakes. He remembered with regret that he had been fool
enough to give Alice the two sovereigns he had won in the boxing-booth.
They would have come in handy; but reflection told him that Alice would
need them a great deal more than he.
A man began to cough in the front bedroom of the house before which he
was standing. People upstairs were beginning to wake. A cock crowed
dismally. He had better make up his mind, for day was beginning.
Eastward the Stourton Road led to Coventry, westward to Wales. Whichever
way he went his lack of money would compel him to walk. He wasn’t afraid
of walking or, for that matter, of sleeping rough; and yet he felt that
he was at sea and incapable in his present condition of making up his
mind. His head and body ached with Garside’s blows, for the bruised
muscles were beginning to stiffen. He was sleepy, as well as tired, and
couldn’t remember one thing that seemed to be calling for recognition in
the back of his mind. He went on walking aimlessly towards Halesby; the
motion set his mind working once more and he remembered the thing that
had baffled and escaped him. Tiger. . . . He couldn’t very well leave
the dog on Mrs Moseley’s hands. At the same time he didn’t want to
frighten the old woman by disturbing her before daylight. To do so would
entail explanations, possibly arguments on the subject of his filial
duties. It would mean another good-bye, and he wanted to get away
quietly without anything of that kind. Still, he meant to have Tiger as
much for his own comfort as for Mrs Moseley’s. He determined to see what
could be done.
The old woman’s house was the last on the right of a steep, cobble-paved
street climbing at right angles to the Stourton Road. He turned up it,
his hob-nails raising stinging echoes on the stones. He felt as if he
must surely wake every one that slept there. Mrs Moseley’s house was as
quiet as the rest. He surveyed it strategically. At the back of it lay
a little yard that in happier days had been used as a fowl-run. To
advertise the presence of these treasures within, her husband had
prevailed upon the landlord to top the wall with fragments of broken
bottles. This barrier now confronted Abner. Luckily he was tall enough
to reach the top of the wall with his hands, and he soon discovered that
time and weather had taken the nature out of Mr Moseley’s mortar so that
it crumbled easily and allowed him to remove the glass from a foot of the
coping. In two minutes he had done this, straddled the wall, and dropped
down softly on the other side. Tiger, bad watchdog that he was, still
slept. Abner came softly to the door of the washhouse and tried it.
There was no fear that Mrs Moseley would leave a door unlocked at night
even behind a glass-topped wall. The only other aperture in the scullery
was a window that was too small for him to get through and set very high
in the wall. With his pocket-knife thrust through a broken pane he
lifted the hasp and opened it. Tiger gave a sharp bark.
‘Ss . . .’ Abner whispered. ‘Tiger. . . . Good dog. . . Come on then.’
Tiger, with a snuffle of recognition, came out of his hole and yawned.
The next moment he was jumping up towards the window, anxious to get at
his master and whining like a baby because the window was too high for
him. Time after time he leapt and failed to reach the sill. The wall
was too smooth, and the space of the washhouse too cramped to give him a
run for his jump. He grew excited and inclined to be noisy, and at last
Abner, seeing no other way out of the difficulty, put his arm as far as
he could through the window, and when the dog jumped caught blindly at
the loose skin of his back and hauled him through. Tiger trembled with
gratitude and the anticipation of new joys. He licked Abner’s face as he
lifted him up and put him on the top of the coping. He jumped over into
the road and Abner followed him. A policeman, attracted by the strange
phenomenon of Tiger’s egress, watched him as he dropped over. He was a
young man, a football player, who knew Abner, and when he saw Tiger’s
master emerge he grinned.
‘Got him out without waking the old woman,’ said Abner.
‘Rabbits?’ said the other, with a wink. Abner laughed. Both of them
knew that the game-laws do not run in colliery districts. ‘Looks as if
’e knows all about it,’ said the constable at parting. Tiger was already
nearly out of sight, sniffing the grass as he went. Since Abner went
back to work at the pit he had been deprived of hunting at this ideal
hour.
It was extraordinary how Tiger’s company restored Abner’s confidence. He
felt no longer alone and worried by indecision. Tiger had gone so far
that it was useless to call him back. He had chosen his own direction,
and Abner was content to follow him. What he wanted most of all, he
decided, was a sleep.
Beyond the level of Mrs Moseley’s cottage the houses thinned away and the
ground fell steeply to the fields above the Stour, the scene of Abner’s
walks with Susan more than a year before. Dawn came, heralded by no
fierce splendours, white light stealing from the east over a cloudless
sky. The birds were already awake, but the hush of August held them, so
that the warblers were silent. Larks there were, lost in the sunlit
levels above the whiteness; thrushes made subdued domestic noises in the
hedgerows; linnets already flocking for the early harvest of seed,
rustled the hawthorn thickets, chaffinches sang boldly in a more vulgar
strain. A soft air bloomed the drowsy hedges. Elder blossoms and
slender umbels of parsley flower gleamed like dull ivory. Light, and
more light came welling over the world. When Abner had reached the plank
bridge over the Stour where Susan first had kissed him, the edge of the
woodland rose up black beyond the stream, the water gleamed beneath the
alders, and the hills, that had lain folded in night, lifted their heads.
Now the birds were silent. Only the larks still sang. Walking behind
the ecstatic Tiger through a green lane in Uffdown Wood, Abner saw the
peak of Pen Beacon before him smitten with fire. The sun was up.
Gigantic shadows dappled and barred the grass. Tiger, dancing from side
to side, pursued a phantom hound. They left the woods and dropped over a
stile into a winding road. As yet the sun had no real heat: colour it
warmed, but the air was cool, cool and clean as the surface of this rocky
road so often scoured by torrents. The heavy odours of the woods
belonged to night, but the smell of the road was one of morning.
Gradually the banks released the peculiar perfume of a hill-country in
sunshine, a lovely, healthy savour of thyme and bracken and dry heather.
A breeze swept the harebells. Still they climbed the path towards the
top of Uffdown where the sun came first. Even at this hour pods were
snapping amid the almond scent of late gorse blossom. In the shadow of a
hedge where prickles were few Abner threw himself down propping his head
on a tussock of thin grass. He closed his eyes, and was soon asleep, and
Tiger, having smelt and scared innumerable rabbits, came at last to lie
beside him, propping his slender lower jaw upon the smooth of Abner’s
thigh.
He did not sleep for long. His watch had stopped, and he could not tell
the time, but from the height of the sun he judged it to be between eight
and nine o’clock. The grass of that southern hedge-side was already warm
and fragrant, and the mistiness of the Severn plain beneath him promised
another day of broiling heat. He was horribly stiff and lay on with a
sense of lazy luxury, letting the sun warm his bones. Sprawling there
with his eyes closed he now began to consider where he should go.
The obvious goal of an out-of-work in the midlands at that time was
Coventry, an ancient city then rising on the third of its great
industrial booms, the manufacture of motor-cars. There was always work,
and well-paid work, to be had in Coventry. The journey was short, and
Abner had no money to waste on railway fares. Even so, the idea of
merely moving from one side of the black-country to another did not seem
to represent the kind of radical change that he had intended. He wanted
to make a clean start in a new country. It suddenly struck him that,
after all, there was no real reason why a man should spend the whole of
his life in the dust of coal and metal or the smell of fire. This joy of
sunlight and fresh air seemed too good to lose.
He knew nothing of the conditions of labour in the country beyond the
fact that many black-country families migrated every autumn into the
fields of Worcestershire for the gathering of hops. He remembered how he
had seen these sun-browned companies returning, men, women, and children
together, carrying their household goods in old perambulators, looking
happier and more healthy than the majority of Halesby people. He had no
very definite idea when the ‘hopping’ season began; but whether he were
too late for it or too early he knew, at any rate, that he had a store of
strength and health to sell. He wasn’t afraid of work. Why shouldn’t he
work in the open air? For the summer at least . . . after that he might
go down with the money he had earned into the Welsh valleys and take to
the pit again. He knew that between him and Wales lay a vast green
country in which a man might live as well as anywhere else. Even now the
sun was drinking up the mists that concealed it, revealing sombre
woodlands heavy in leaf, yellow cornfields, the smoke of hidden towns or
villages, and, here and there, a shining bend of river. From that high
post, indeed, he gazed upon the pastoral heart of England, the most
placid and homely of all her shires; but the national schools had taught
him nothing of these things, and, as the mists ascended, showing the
cliffs of Cotswold long and level, Bredon an island dome, May Hill and
Malvern, Abberley, Clee, and all the nearer hills of Wales, he only knew
that it was green and big and that it promised freedom.
He decided on Wales, and began to take stock of his possessions, counting
the change that remained in his trouser pocket—seven and ninepence
ha’penny in all—and untying the bundle into which he had put a change of
socks and underwear. He wished, now that he came to think of it, that he
had changed into his working clothes, for it did not seem right to him to
look for work in his Sunday best. He turned out the pockets of the coat,
wondering what tokens of his past life it would disclose. In the breast
pocket, to his great surprise, he found a small packet of paper that he
couldn’t account for. He opened it, and found that it contained two
sovereigns. He stared at them incredulously and laughed aloud. Alice
must have slipped them in when she said good-bye to him. He felt
suddenly tender toward her, and immensely pleased at this striking turn
in his fortunes. He scraped out of his side pocket some dry remnants of
tobacco, filled his pipe, tied up his bundle, whistled to Tiger and set
off down hill leaving the brow of the Uffdown between him and the
blackness of Mawne.
It was all new ground to him. The hills that he was leaving behind
formed a lip of the saucer in which the midland coal measures lay, and
their line had always marked the limit of Abner’s curiosity as boldly as
they defined his physical horizon. Now he was passing quickly to the
unknown plain. The path grew rough and precipitous. For a hundred yards
it cut into a plantation of larches fully grown. His feet and Tiger’s
made no sound on the drift of needles. The wood was dry, warm, fragrant,
and as quiet as a church. One would have thought that no living creature
was there, till Tiger scented a squirrel, and Abner heard above him the
thin alarm note of the wood-wren. From the wood they crossed a stone
stile into a sunless lane, steeper even than the path across the hill,
grass-grown for want of traffic and now possessed by a company of solemn
foxgloves. This lane, though unfrequented, was the favourite
picnic-place of Mr Willis of Mawne Hall, who always called it ‘our little
Switzerland.’ The only thing that struck Abner about it was its
steepness. A stone that he dislodged in his walking bounded on as though
it were falling over the roof of a house, and Tiger scuttled after it
full-pelt. Abner also found that it was easier to run than to walk.
At the bottom of the hill they came to a deserted watermill, fed by a
stream that here issued from the hills. Near it stood a large farm-house
that had fallen from its state of ease and comfort, and was now partly
inhabited by a labouring family. A small boy was sitting playing with
stones and eating a crust on the green in front of the house. Tiger ran
up and sniffed at him, and he dropped his crust and ran screaming up the
garden path. A pale woman with red hair rushed out to see what was the
matter and comforted him with her apron. Abner said good-day to her, but
she pulled the child inside the door as if she were frightened. He heard
her bolting herself in, and laughed, for he didn’t realise what a ruffian
he looked with his bruised, unshaven face and his swollen lip. Tiger,
however, had the crust of bread and was thankful. He was no less hungry
than his master.
Down the valley they passed. A hundred yards below the mill the trees
receded and the stream widened into a neglected fishpond half-covered
with water-lily leaves. The air was full of glittering blue
dragon-flies, and the roadside littered and scorched by the signs of an
abandoned gipsy encampment. The fishpond ended in a patch where the
stream gushed through narrow sluices into a pool of brown, clear water.
Sunlight, beating through the leaves above, lit the bottom with floating
patches of golden brown, showing the shadows of trout that lay there
gently swaying with their heads toward the sweet water. The coolness of
this bathing-place was so alluring that Abner stripped and washed the
slippery sweat from his body. Tiger, who was used to this kind of
performance but hated water, watched him from the bank. When Abner had
dried himself with his spare shirt they set off again down the sunny
road.
He hoped that they would soon come to a village, for the bathe had only
served to sharpen his appetite. As yet there were no signs of human
habitation, but from the fields that chequered the hills on either side
of the road came many country sounds: the creaking of invisible
cart-wheels, the crack of a whip, the lowing of cattle and voices of men
that echoed in the closed valley. A little lower down they met a man
riding bareback on a pony, driving a flock of sheep before him. His legs
hung straight down so that they nearly touched the ground. Tiger and the
sheep-dog exchanged inquiries, but the horseman took no notice of Abner,
who stood against the hedge while the flock stampeded past him with
frightened brown eyes, raising a dust that was laden with a hot smell of
wool and sheep-dip. The farmer’s man appeared to be riding in a dream,
mechanically switching the pony’s flanks with a branch of hazel. Abner
woke him by saying good-morning. He stopped the pony with a kick and
turned to look.
‘Any pub handy hereabout?’ Abner asked him.
‘Pub? . . . Ay, you’m close on it. Ten minute’ll bring you to the
Barley Mow.’ Abner had some difficulty in understanding him, for the
language that he spoke was not that of Mawne. He thanked him. Then,
after a long scrutiny, the horseman informed him that the nearest
workhouses were at Bromsgrove and Kiddy, five miles to the right or left
of the inn, said good-bye and kicked his pony into an amble again.
By that time the sheep had long since pattered out of sight; but this was
an easy country in which hurry had no place. It amused Abner, and did
not in the least offend him, to be taken for a tramp. In a few days, but
for Alice’s final bounty, he might easily have become one. The labourer
had made an estimate of the distance of the pub in accordance with his
own leisurely way of progress. In less than half the time that he had
predicted Abner found himself in front of an old red-brick inn shadowed
by an immense horse-chestnut whose leaves already drooped with heat. As
Abner reached the door, a man whom he took to be the landlord was
starting to drive off in a yellow dog-cart, probably to some market, for
a small pig was netted in the back of the trap. A big, blowsy woman whom
he called ‘mother,’ but who appeared to be of his own age and was no
doubt his wife, saw him off. ‘Don’t forget Emily’s stays, dad,’ she
called. He waved his whip in answer and went bowling down the road into
the sun. The woman returned with a sigh that sounded as if it betokened
relief, to the wide, semi-circular steps where Abner was standing waiting
for her. She had not seen him arrive, and appeared not to be pleased at
the prospect. When he began to speak she cut him short with: ‘No, the
master never gives anything. We have to make it a rule on this road.’
He had to explain that he wasn’t begging. ‘Can you give us a bit of
breakfast, missis,’ he said, ‘I can pay for it.’ He showed her one of
his sovereigns.
She looked him up and down incredulously, and then said: ‘Come on in and
set yourself in the tap. Better leave the dog outside, or my Betsy’ll
have his eyes out.’ Her Betsy, a big, black tom-cat, too rashly
christened in his first days of innocence, was already arching a back
more like that of a geometer caterpillar than a cat. ‘She can’t abear
them if she don’t know them,’ said the landlady. ‘Once she knows them
she’ll lie in their arms like a child.’
Abner left Tiger whining outside the door, and the landlady, now
satisfied that he wasn’t as rough as he looked, was heard shouting orders
to Emily in the kitchen. A smell of frizzling bacon came down the
passage.
Abner settled himself on an oak bench. This taproom was very different
from that of the Royal Oak. The floor was of big, uneven stone flags and
all the furniture was black and shiny with centuries of use. The place
did not smell, as did the Halesby pubs, of stale spirits and tobacco. It
was as sweet as they were sour. Agricultural almanacs and signed
photographs of memorable meets hung on the walls, and over the
mantelpiece a number of cards recorded the fees and procreative
achievements of shire stallions. Abner was nearly asleep when the
landlady herself appeared with a plate of bacon and eggs and a pot of
tea.
‘There now, how will that do you?’ she said.
Abner started to eat and she sat and watched him, apologising once more
for her first reception. ‘We have to be careful, you see. What with all
this unemployment there seems to be more tramps on the road summer-time
than ever there was. In winter they dies off like the flies. Dad says
they come and go with the swallers. That’s a lovely bit of bacon.’
It became evident from her conversation that she was curious to know what
Abner was doing. She could see that his clothes were decent and that he
wore a silver watch-chain, but hinted that she couldn’t understand the
battered state of his face. He told her that he had had an accident.
‘There now!’ she said. ‘They always go in threes, and bless me if yours
ain’t the third I’ve come across this week. Have a drop more tea?’—she
poured it—‘Which way are you going, then? If you’d been a bit earlier
dad could have give you a lift.’
Abner told her that he was looking for work, asked her if she could help
him to find it.
‘You’re not a farming man,’ she said, ‘and it’s all farmering
hereabouts.’
He told her that he was ready to turn his hand to anything, and she
confessed, a little dubiously, that he might possibly get some casual
employment with one of the farmers. ‘If I was you,’ she said, ‘I should
go on through Chaddesbourne and ask at Mr Cookson’s—he’s the biggest
employer round here—but you’re a bit too early for the harvest.
Everything’s backward in these parts after the bad spring.’
He thanked her, and while she went out to change his sovereign, put aside
a hunk of bread and a slice of bacon that he had not eaten for Tiger.
They parted cheerfully and Abner set his face towards Chaddesbourne.
The heat of midday now lay heavy on the land, but in this wooded
country-side one might always be certain of shade. In half an hour he
came to Chaddesbourne, a village of black and white half timber that was
already engaged in the midday coma with which it supplements its normal
sleep of centuries. In all the length of the street Abner saw no human
person stirring, nor any sign of life more violent than that of lazy
butterflies sunning their wings upon the yellow flowers in cottage
gardens. All the half-timbered houses had long strips in front of them
behind which it seemed to be intended that they should sleep for ever in
security. In a sandstone church some one was playing the organ. Abner
had no ear for music and so he did not stop to listen.
At the end of the village he heard a more welcome sound: the clinking of
a blacksmith’s hammer on his anvil and the hoarse wheezing of bellows.
It was very different from Mawne with its vast hydraulic presses, but it
showed the same process on a small scale, and the smith in his leather
apron, working through the heat of the day, with the sweat tracking
through his coal-dust, was more like a man of Abner’s own race than the
labourer in the lane. He seemed glad of an excuse to stop work and talk
to Abner. He offered him a drink of beer from a bottle, drank himself,
and wiped the froth from his red lips with the back of his hand.
‘Looking for work!’ he said. ‘Well, I can tell you straight
Chaddesbourne’s the wrong place for that. Not even at harvest time. You
see, this is a dairy country, properly speaking. All the milk’s drove to
the station and sent into Brum by train. Mr Cookson? Yes, Mr Cookson’s
a very nice gentleman as every one knows; but I reckon he won’t be
harvesting for another fortnight, being late-like. Still, there’s no
harm in trying.’ He pulled on his coat and put a padlock on the door of
the forge, for his home was a couple of hundred yards away in one of the
long-gardened cottages. He said good-bye to Abner cheerily, and gave him
directions for finding Mr Cookson. ‘If I was you,’ he said, ‘I should
cut across the fields behind the house. It’ll save you some sweating on
a day like this. Third gate on the right and follow along the hedge on
your left hand.’
Abner took his advice, and calling Tiger to follow him entered the field.
A quarter of a mile away on the hill-side he could see the red roof of
the building that the smith had pointed out to him as Cookson’s farm.
Tiger was in his element. He had never been in a field more rich in
rabbit smell. Abner, following the smith’s directions, kept to the hedge
on the left. It ran along the margin of a little wood that sheltered him
from the sun and intrigued Tiger with prospects of infinite sport. It
was impossible to keep the brute to heel, and though Abner cursed him
till he came out of the wood he could not resist the temptation of
running ahead of his master, sniffing the enchanted air. Suddenly, at
the corner where the spinney ended, he stood stock still. Abner also
stopped and watched him, for he too scented sport. There was a slight
rustle in the hedgerow and a white creature, a little bigger than a
stoat, put out its head. In a second Tiger had it by the neck and
silenced its squealing with a shake. The next moment the owner of the
ferret appeared round the corner of the hedge, a florid man of forty
dressed in a prosperous greenish cord, carrying a gun. He fired at
Tiger, who stood looking curiously at the ferret as though he still
expected it to get up and run away. Tiger rolled over without a yelp,
and Abner ran straight at the man who had shot him.
‘What you done to my dog?’ he cried.
‘And what the hell are you doing here, you poaching blackguard?’ He saw
how ugly Abner looked. ‘Keep clear, or I’ll put the other barrel in
you!’ A stupid-looking labourer slouched round the hedgeside and picked
up the ferret, pinching it as if he were appraising its value as an
article of food. Then, mumbling something, he thrust it into a sack that
he carried and gave the dead body of Tiger a vicious kick. Abner would
have flown at him for he needed something on which to vent his rage, but
Mr Cookson again threatened to shoot. He had to content himself with
cursing the farmer for his brutality. ‘The dog didn’t mean no harm,’ he
said. ‘You’m a coward to shoot a dog like that.’
‘Not so fast, my friend,’ said the farmer. ‘I’ve not finished with you
yet. I want to know what the devil you were doing skulking along my
hedge. Thought you’d pick up a rabbit, eh? I know that game . . .
taking the dog a walk. What were you doing on my land, eh?’
‘I’m lookin’ for work,’ said Abner.
‘And you look like getting it. I don’t suppose it’s the first time
you’ll have picked oakum.’
Abner did not hear these words. He thought only of the shattered heap of
flesh that had once been Tiger. He would have gone blindly for the dog’s
murderer if he had not suddenly realised that his own case was hopeless.
The owner of the gun looked like business, and the labourer was now ready
to tackle him from behind. He could do nothing. Mr Cookson, however,
having caught a poacher red-handed, didn’t mean to let him go.
‘I’ve had enough of this game,’ he said. ‘You black-country chaps think
you can slip over the hills and do what you like . . . you and your dogs.
It’s no use turning ugly now. You’ll come along with me to the police
station, and that’s all about it. That’s the best ferret I’ve got, worth
a dozen of your damned dogs.’
Abner, who saw that it was not worth while arguing and whose anger had
now become more subject to his reason, tried to explain once more that he
was coming to the house to ask for work.
‘That’s an old tale,’ said Cookson. ‘We’ve had enough talk. Come along!
That don’t explain what you were doing in this field.’
The farmer also was now becoming more reasonable. Abner explained that
he had taken the field-path on the smith’s advice. ‘If you can’t credit
it, you ask him,’ he said. ‘It was the lady at the Barley Mow sent me
here and give me your name. That is if your name’s Cookson.’
‘That’s my name right enough,’ said the farmer, ‘and you won’t forget
it!’ He began to grumble at the landlady as the prime cause of his
losing the ferret. None the less, he now appeared to believe Abner. At
the root he was a good-natured man, celebrated for the sudden violence
and quick subsidence of his temper.
‘Want work, do you?’ he said. ‘Well, I’ve got no work for you nor no one
else, and if you see Mrs Potter again you can tell her so. What that
woman wants to do using my name I don’t know. I reckon I’m feeding half
Chaddesbourne as it is. Still, I’m ready to believe you. If you take my
advice you’ll clear quick before I change my mind. Go on, hook it!’ He
put his hand in his pocket and jingled some money as if he were debating
whether he should give Abner half a crown.
‘What about my dog?’ said Abner.
Mr Cookson took his hand out of his pocket and his neck flushed. ‘I’ve
told you you’d best clear,’ he said. ‘George’ll bury the dog.’ He
turned to the labourer. ‘George, you go up to the yard and get a spade.’
He ejected the unused cartridge from his gun and turned his back on
Abner, and Abner, still sore with resentment, took his advice and
returned to the road.