IN the first moment of his loss he did not feel like retracing his steps.
When he reached the main road he turned his face westward once more and
set off walking as hard as the heat would allow him. He passed through a
land of almost monotonous green, stopping once or twice to drink a pint
of beer at a pub in one of the many half-timbered villages that straggled
along the road. In the afternoon he reached a crest crowned with a
plantation of smooth trunked beeches from which he could see the chimneys
of an industrial town. This, he decided, must be Kidderminster, or, as
the farmer’s man had called it, Kiddy. Once or twice in his life he had
played football there for Mawne United, but in these excursions he had
never noticed anything but the squalid streets between the station and
the football ground. There was a workhouse in Kidderminster, as he had
been told, but he was not yet in need of workhouses. The landlord of the
last inn had found out that he was going into Wales, and had pointed out
to him the rampart of the Malverns, dim-blue in the heat, as marking the
course of his road. The idea of finding employment in the country now
pleased him little. The sooner he reached the coal valleys, with the
remains of his money, the better. From his new point of vantage the
hills were still visible, floating like cragged islands in the haze. He
left the smoke of Kidderminster on his right hand and forsook the road
for a narrower lane that seemed to run in the direction that he wanted to
follow. When evening came he was still walking south-west. Now the
Malverns, whenever he saw them were etched black against a background of
flame. The air was cool and sweeter. It was such an evening as Tiger
would have loved, and his loneliness, which had been numbed by the heat,
returned to him.
He must by this time have walked more than twenty miles since daybreak,
and he was tired and hungry. Soon after sunset he turned in to an
inviting public-house that stood alone on a straight length of road
running between meagre oak-trees. The landlord was an aged man crippled
with rheumatism who sat grasping two sticks in a chair beside the hearth
of the taproom. He looked suspiciously at Abner and told his daughter,
an angular woman of forty who did all the housework, to attend to him.
This woman gave him clearly to understand that they didn’t like strangers
and said that they could give him nothing to eat but bread and cheese.
He accepted this gratefully and settled down to his supper under the
grudging eyes of the old man.
The inn seemed a lonely and neglected place, for the road on which it was
situate had fallen into disuse. Abner, however, was glad of a rest, and
sat on smoking and drinking beer for the good of the house when he had
finished his supper. The ale was good and put him in a happier frame of
mind, so that he no longer found the silence of the old man
uncomfortable. A little later a number of farm-labourers drifted in and
ordered their quarts: a solemn and gloomy company who spoke little and in
a language that Abner did not understand. He tried to put some life into
them by standing treat, but even this order did not arouse the least
enthusiasm in the landlord’s daughter, who might reasonably have felt
that things were looking up, or in the company. These people were silent
drinkers who sat in pairs, taking alternate swigs from the quart pot that
stood between them. They looked upon Abner, this stranger from beyond
the hills, as peaceful border farmers might have regarded a northern
marauder. They drank his beer; but that was all that they could do for
him. The light failed, but no lamp was lit in the taproom, and one by
one the customers bade the landlord good-night and stole away like
shadows. The woman put her head into the room from time to time as if
she hoped to find that he was gone, and the old man sat by the fireplace
saying nothing. Abner was sleepy and when she next appeared asked her if
she could find him a bed. ‘Anything’ll do for me,’ he said. ‘I can
shake down anywhere you like.’
For the first time since Abner had seen her she was really positive. ‘We
never do such a thing, do we, father?’ she cried. The old man did not
appear to have heard her.
‘I bain’t one to make trouble,’ Abner said.
She wagged her head violently. ‘We never do such a thing,’ she repeated.
She shook the old man’s shoulder. ‘Father, ’e says ’e wants to sleep
’ere!’
‘We don’t sleep no strangers,’ said he. ‘We don’t sleep no one. Not in
a solitary place like this. You’d best be goin’, young man. Time to
lock up . . . time to lock up.’
Abner asked him where he could go, but neither of them seemed inclined to
help him. They knew of no house that would take strangers, and the
nearest village, Harverton Priors, was more than three miles away. Even
if he went there, they said, it was unlikely that he would be taken in.
‘We’m not accustomed to strangers, these parts,’ the woman kept on
saying. She followed him like an anxious but impotent dog, edging him
away from the counter as if she thought he had designs on the till. He
bought an ounce of tobacco and departed. When she had got him out of the
door he heard a key turn in the lock and this taciturn person beginning
to talk fast in an excited whisper to the old man in the corner. Abner
laughed. Thanks to the excellence of their beer he was at peace with the
world.
By this time he was getting used to finding himself an object of
suspicion. He determined to give Harverton Priors a miss, for at this
time of night it was probable that the whole village would be asleep, and
to turn in for the night in the first isolated barn that he found.
Failing that there was no reason why he shouldn’t sleep in a dry ditch.
His father had often done so unintentionally and so far seemed none the
worse for it.
A mile or more from that inhospitable inn he saw the kind of building for
which he was looking standing in a field on the left of the road. It was
a red-brick barn, half-timbered like the houses of the neighbourhood. A
group of cows lay ruminating in their sleep on the far side of it and
Abner picked his way between their shadowy shapes to a doorway with an
oak beam for lintel. A rough door closed the aperture. At first he
thought that it was locked or bolted but it yielded to his pressure. He
half expected to find some animal inside, for when he first came to the
door he had heard a noise like a calf turning in straw. He struck a
match carefully. The place was clean and dry, half filled with hay of
the last season’s harvest that had evidently been placed there for winter
fodder. He decided that the rustling that he had heard must have been
made by rats. Well, rats wouldn’t worry him in his present degree of
tiredness. He closed the door and sank down easily into a soft,
sweet-smelling bed.
He lay still on his back with his eyes wide open staring into the
darkness above him, thinking of the extraordinary variety of adventures
that had filled the last twenty-four hours. This time last night, he
reflected, he must have been dozing in the corner of the tram-car between
Dulston and Mawne. Now he had nothing left to remind him of his old life
except the clothes he was wearing . . . not even Tiger. He wondered what
his father was feeling like now; wondered what had happened to Alice. He
had never before thought so tenderly of her. She had shown what she was
made of when she slipped the two sovereigns into his pocket. When he got
work in Wales, he decided, he would send her money . . . not that she
would really need it, for now sheer necessity would compel John Fellows
to go back to the pit, unless indeed he had any of the money left that he
had stolen from Abner. The thought of his savings suddenly reminded him
what a fool he had been not to search his father’s pockets before he left
the house. On the whole he wasn’t sorry that he had left him
undisturbed. He didn’t feel unkindly toward him, for he recognised that
no man is responsible for what he says or does when he is drunk. In the
black-country people who know the rougher side of life are always ready
to condone crimes of passion or liquor. ‘The old chap’s welcome to the
money,’ Abner thought, ‘leastwise if any of it comes our Alice’s way.’
His mind was still too crowded for sleep. He thought he would have a
smoke and began to fill his pipe with the tobacco he had bought earlier
in the evening. Again he heard a rustling noise in the hay. When he lit
his pipe he would try to see what caused it. He waited, listening, and
when next he heard it struck a match and peered in the direction from
which it came.
‘Douse that light, mate,’ said a voice, almost at his elbow, ‘and take
your bloody feet off my chest. You’ll be afther settin’ the place alight
and sending the both of us to hell before our time!’
Abner dropped his match with astonishment. The other, suddenly
materialising, put his foot on the glowing fragment.
‘I reckon you give me a bit of a start,’ said Abner, laughing.
‘Start, is it? It’s finished we’ll be if you go throwing match-sticks
that way into a heap of tinder.’ The turn of speech amused Abner.
‘It’s easy to see that you don’t know the way to travel, or you wouldn’t
be doing the like of that,’ said his unseen companion. ‘I may well be
stranded to the world, but it’s not burning I want this night of our
lord, I’m tellin’ you.’
He settled down into the hay again, this time at some distance from
Abner. Abner had never yet caught a glimpse of him. He could not tell
whether he was old or young, pleasant-looking or villainous, but he knew
that the stranger was the first person who had accepted him without
question since his wanderings began. He no longer felt sleepy and was
indeed glad of a chance to talk with another human being. In this at any
rate his shadowy companion was ready to oblige him, taking the
conversation into his own hands without the least hesitation. He asked
Abner where he had come from and how long he had been on the road.
‘God help me!’ he said, ‘you’re not born yet!’ Then he asked Abner if he
could spare him a gorm. Abner had not the least idea what a gorm was,
but the voice explained that it meant a little weeny dooney bit of
tobacco—‘for to chew,’ he explained, ‘we don’t want anny more fireworks.
“Anny more for Annimore,” as the guard says.’
Abner gave him his gorm, deciding that the owner of the voice, whatever
he looked like, was a cough-drop. They drifted into a discussion of
Abner’s adventures during the day.
The owner of the voice, who in the course of conversation proclaimed
himself to be a certain Mick Connor, usually known as Kerry Mick, had
apparently followed much the same track as Abner. He had been refused
refreshment at the Barley Mow and taken a dismal pint from the hands of
the landlord’s daughter at the second inn, whose nose, he said, would
poke a ragman over a double ditch. He listened more seriously to Abner’s
account of Tiger’s death. ‘You’re after losin’ a good friend,’ he said,
and after a moment of silence in which his jaws could be heard
masticating his gorm, embarked on a long story of his own youth. ‘I’ll
tell you something quare,’ he said.
It had happened more than twenty years ago in the county of Kerry—Abner
was none the wiser—in the very first situation that Mick Connor had ever
taken. ‘There was money in Ireland them days,’ he said. ‘The country’s
gone to the dogs ever sence the Boer War.’ He was engaged as pantry-boy,
at six pounds a year and a suit of clothes, and he earned it by cleaning
thirty lamps and a dozen pair of shoes every morning before breakfast and
waiting at meal-times in the servants’ hall. The rest of the day he
spent in dodging the butler, an ould devil with a lip would trip a duck,
who liked his pint more than most and used to threaten to take the skin
off of him with a twig whenever he saw him.
The story seemed to lead nowhere, but Mick Connor’s voice was low and
persuasive and he evidently liked talking. Abner lay and listened.
Even in those early days Mick Connor had been used to the open air. He
hated house-work, he said, and would often go off and hide himself under
the dining-room table, a place of concealment which the butler at last
discovered, to cry. He would stand at the pantry windows looking out
over the fields to the river where the third footman was already enjoying
himself catching eels and perch in the holes. The house was a prison to
him. The only friend that ever came to him from outside it was a
wolfhound who slept in the stables, but with whom he had made great
friends ever since he had been in the house by feeding it with scraps
from the pantry. The butler hated dogs, and this dog above all others
because it had once stolen a ham. Mick loved it and fed it regularly.
It used to jump up to the pantry window and lick his face through the
bars.
When he had been in this place for a year or more the family moved for
the summer to another house on the coast some thirty miles away. For
Mick it was a happy change. He and his friend the third footman were
chosen to go there and the savage butler was left behind. There were no
railways in that part of Ireland, and so they went to Coulagh by road.
The children were to follow with their nurse the next day, so the footman
and the cook preceded them in a wagonette loaded with luggage. They went
slowly, and behind them walked Mick, leading two pannier asses named
Haidee and Mokie, on which the children would go for rides by the shore.
They started late and the last part of their journey was made in the
dark. The cook, who had a drop taken, was telling ghost stories fitting
to that wild hour and place. There was one tale in particular of how she
had met the devil in the flesh sitting by a milestone near Coulagh three
years before that made Mick afraid to look on either side of him. He
walked with Haidee on his right and Mokie on his left and the tail of the
wagonette in front of him, and even then he didn’t feel safe.
When they came to Coulagh in the darkness they had a grand supper, but
even in the cheerful firelight Mick couldn’t forget the details of the
cook’s encounter with the devil. The house was small, and it had been
settled that he, as the least important member of the party, should sleep
in a little room above the stable in which the asses were housed. He was
thankful that the animals were there, for otherwise he would have gone
mad with the loneliness. When he reached the stable he went into the
stall and talked to them and got on the two of their backs, sitting first
on one and then on the other the way they wouldn’t be jealous. Then he
patted their necks, rubbed their noses, and went up the wooden stairs to
bed. He undressed, got into bed and put out his candle. But he couldn’t
sleep, partly because the room was so strange after the cook’s stories
and partly because a wind was blowing fit to bring the house down. All
of a sudden the wind fell, and in the quiet he could hear another sound
like a door banging and the rattle of chains. He supposed he had not
fastened the stable latch, but even if the asses got their ends of cold,
he didn’t dare to put his nose out of bed. But the noise of bumping and
chains continued. Even when he put his head under the clothes he could
still hear it. ‘I can hear it the way I am now,’ he told Abner, ‘a
great, rattlin’, t’udding noise. I commenced to get terrible afraid.
“Something’s surely coming now,” I thought. “God help me!” And it came
on bumping and rattling up the stairs. “This is the devil,” says I, “let
loose on me!” an’ when I put my head under the clothes what should I see
but all the things I’d ever done in this life; all the birds I’d took the
heads of off with a catapult, flittin’ about with no heads and the wings
broke on them, and all the bottles of whisky I’d ever stolen on the
butler. An’ the noise come bumping upstairs. “God, I’m gone!” I says,
getting down middleways in the bed, and with the same there was a great
t’ud and the door flew open on me and it come into the room. Bump, bump,
bump it went, an’ the chairs went over and the basin of water I’d never
washed in come down with a crash—and I lying there with the pespiration
running down me on to the sheets like a spout. “God, I’m gone!” I says
again, and that was the last word I spoke that night, for the sheets was
stuck to me back. Then it comes over to the bed, and I tries to get
under the mattress, but before I knew where I was I felt two great hands
on the both of my thighs. “Now I’m destroyed altogether,” says I, but
before I’d finished thinking it come on the top of me in a lump with the
chain draggin’ along the floor, and me lyin’ there not as thick as a
match. Then I commenced to feel the sheet being drew down over my face
and two hairy arms round my neck, and with that a great, big, hot tongue
licking me. “Ah, my beautiful,” says I, “I have you at last.” That dog
was so fond on me he’d smelt me out over thirty miles and pulled the log
he was tied to in the stable after him and broke down the door and come
upstairs into bed with me. I loved that dog. And that’s why I say
you’re after losin’ a good friend in yours. Give me the lend of another
gorm to go to sleep on.’
Abner gave him the tobacco, and after that the story-teller was silent.
Falling asleep, Abner heard only the regular noise of his companion’s
jaws as they chewed. In half an hour they were both asleep.
Early next morning Mick Connor woke him, telling him that unless they
cleared out the farmer’s men would find them. Abner was far too
comfortable for the moment to want to move, but as soon as he regained
full consciousness he realised that his skin was itching all over.
‘This place is alive with fleas,’ he said.
His companion only laughed. ‘That’s all you know about it,’ he said,
‘and the both of us eat with hayseeds. I’m after telling you somethin’.
Never choose hay to sleep in if you can fin’ straw. It’s worse than a
houseful of bugs.’
Abner was curious to see the owner of last night’s voice and the teller
of stories. He found it difficult to fit in the man with his narration.
It was impossible to guess his age, but his hair was slightly touched
with gray and stood up in a frizzy mass that made him look wilder than he
was. He was of middle height, thin and very wiry, with a small head,
bright eyes like a bird and a bony face in which the skin over the
cheekbones was netted with red veins. His eyes were blue, and humorous
or savage as the occasion took him. At this hour of the morning he did
not appear anxious to talk and his voice that had been soft and
persuasive in the darkness, was rough and short. They left the barn
together. The cows were still sleeping outside and a dew was on the
grass, but the moisture had not fallen on the road, which seemed as baked
and dusty as ever.
‘Which ways are you going?’ the Irishman asked.
‘Going to Wales,’ said Abner.
‘Then the two of us had better travel together,’ he said, and Abner
consented.
They walked for some miles in silence. Mick, at this hour of the morning
was not disposed to talk. He went on ahead with a long, loping gait,
very different from the tramp’s habitual shuffle. They came to a brick
bridge that proclaimed itself unsuitable for traction engines, and here
he suddenly climbed the hedge and started to wash himself in a bed of
cresses. He took out the broken end of a comb and smoothed his wet hair
close to his head like a picture of the Madonna. The water took the gray
out of it so that he looked almost young. Abner also washed, and when he
had picked the irritating hayseeds out of his shirt, he offered his
companion half of a piece of bread that remained in his pocket. Mick
took it without a word and dipped it in the water. Without this soaking
he could not have tackled it, for though his bristling moustache
concealed the fact, he had scarcely any teeth.
Eating this breakfast together they sprawled on the bank of the stream
among rushes, with which Abner amused himself by stripping the pith with
his nails. His silent and melancholy companion broke the silence by
asking him if he had any money. Immediately Abner was suspicious. His
second sovereign and all his silver were secreted in his waistcoat
pocket. He had placed them there in the night as soon as he realised
that he was not sleeping alone. In answer to his friend’s question he
produced a handful of coppers. ‘Tenpence ha’penny,’ he said. ‘That
won’t go far.’
‘Houly sufferings!’ said the other, ‘is it carry ten-pence halfpenny
three miles?’
He spoke no more, and they set off again. During the rest of the day
Mick Connor maintained his attitude of detachment, striding on ahead of
Abner as though he had nothing to do with him. They bought a stale loaf
in a small market town and the Irishman produced from the treacle tin
that he carried three eggs and some rashers of bacon. They lit a fire on
the edge of a wood and made a good meal. Toward evening they crossed a
wide river flowing silently between high banks. Mick, who appeared to
know the country, told Abner that this was the last bridge for twenty
miles. Beyond the stream a little town lay smoking under the hill-side.
They drank a pint of beer together and pushed on. The evening light
seemed to awaken Mick. He became talkative and profane at once,
disclosing to Abner the fact that he knew where good work was to be had.
He scoffed at the idea of Abner’s working underground while there was a
chance of earning his living in the open air. ‘I can put you in the way
of a job will make your teeth water,’ he said. At first he kept up an
atmosphere of mystery of the kind that particularly pleased him, but when
Abner pressed him he disclosed the fact that he had learned from a tramp
near Bromsgrove how the corporation of North Bromwich were engaged in
relaying a defective piece of piping ten miles long in their Welsh water
scheme, and that casual labour was hard to get in those parts. With the
combination of his own wit and Abner’s strength they should find a
comfortable job to last them for six months. He reckoned that three
days’ walking would bring them easily to the site of the work, and gave
Abner to understand that he was lucky to have met him. Abner was ready
to acknowledge this. ‘That’s all right then,’ said Mick, ‘and now about
that tenpence halfpenny. Do you think I’d be after sleeping wud you and
not know of the gold sovereign that’s in your waistcoat pocket this
moment? It’s on the table the cards should be if we’re travelling
together.’
At this Abner was really angry. He didn’t like the idea of any one,
friend or no, rummaging in his pockets at night. They stopped in the
road quarrelling, and Abner took off his coat, preparing to settle the
matter with blows before parting company. The Irishman seemed surprised
that he took it so roughly; pointed out that when he had the chance of
stealing Abner’s money he hadn’t taken it, said that he didn’t want a
penny of it. Little by little, with soft and humorous words he cooled
Abner’s anger. At the next inn they split the sovereign over two quarts
of beer, and by the time he had finished drinking Abner was ready to go
shares with the change, an offer that Mick was too generous to accept.
‘What for would I want money?’ he said, ‘as long as I’d have the price of
a naggin in my pockut?’ A man must be a fool, he added, if he couldn’t
travel in a fat country the likes of England without money. In Ireland,
it was true, one had to use one’s wits, for every one else was doing the
same thing. He searched in his pockets and laid out a yellow piece of
paper among the beer-spills on the inn table. An Irishman’s passport, he
called it. Actually it was an eviction order, which seemed to Abner an
unusual type of letter of credit. Not a bit of it, said Mick. In
Ireland all you had to do was to carry this along with you and tell a
tale about the little children was starving on you, and you could kick a
shillun out of every priest you come across. In the old days there was
many a toff that’d give you half a crown to be rid of you. They had
another drink, and Mick became rhapsodical on the subject of money. What
good had money ever done him? Money . . . in his day he’d had the money
would buy the two sides of Grafton Street. He recalled his great double
on Winkfield’s Pride and Manifesto for the Lincoln and National. Three
hundred pounds in his pocket . . . but it went away like wather. Porther
would have supplied a better simile. When once he began to talk about
horses there was no stopping him. The lust of the born gambler shone in
his small blue eyes. ‘Take away racing and I’m gone,’ he said. ‘It’s
the only thing that keeps the life in me!’ He went on talking until he
saw that Abner was nearly asleep over the table, then he plucked at his
arm. ‘Come along,’ he said, ‘let’s be getting a move on before we’re
threw out.’
That night, in a condition of sublime charity toward the world and each
other, they could find no barn to sleep in and rolled themselves up on a
bank of dry bracken under the misty moon. Counting his money next
morning Abner found that most of it had gone. He knew better than to
grumble about it, but suggested to Mick that they had better go easy.
‘Go aisy, is it? Not at all!’ said the Irishman.
At midday, leaving Abner in a small spinney of firs, he went off to the
nearest village with the price of a quart, and returned a couple of hours
later laden not only with the beer but with a good-sized fowl and pockets
full of potatoes. Displaying these spoils he winked, and Abner asked no
questions. They boiled water in Mick’s treacle tin, and having poured
this over the bird to make the plucking easy, roasted it with the
potatoes in the embers of their fire. It was a splendid meal. Beneath
its charred covering the flesh was sweet and juicy. Abner had never felt
fitter in his life or freer from every vestige of care. When the meal
was over Mick slept like a gorged boa-constrictor and woke in an
ill-temper, but by this time Abner was getting used to his alternations
of enthusiasm and melancholy and left him alone. It was a good life:
there was no denying that, and in another day or so they would arrive at
the scene of their new work.
That misty moon was no negligible portent, for at sunset great clouds
began to gather from the south, and, before night, fell a thunder shower
that drenched them. The dusty road drank up the rain and all the earth
smelt sweet, but the August weather had broken and the country of wooded
hills into which they had now come seemed to breed rain. They decided
that it would be impossible to dry their clothes, and pushed on through
the night, Mick loping ahead like some drowned bird and Abner stolidly
following. They passed through the wet streets of a country town at
midnight. Not a light could be seen in the solemn Georgian houses, but
from a belfry, almost lost in cloud, the sound of a plaintive carillon
floated down.
‘Ludlow,’ said Mick. ‘There do be races here.’
They crossed another noisy river. The road climbed endlessly, winding
over a steep hill-side. They entered a forest where the rain troubled
them no more, so tired that they decided to rest for a while. Here they
had the luck to find a hut thatched with heather that had been used by
woodcutters. At the risk of burning it over their heads they lit a fire
with some dry branches that they found inside it. Here they lay
half-blinded with wood-smoke stolidly chewing tobacco, for Abner, unused
to the road, had allowed his store to become soaked. Mick soon fell
asleep, but Abner could not do so. He lay there till dawn in his
steaming clothes, listening to the incessant dripping of the rain from
millions of leaves, a sound that was soothing in spite of its desolation.
Sometimes a wind that could not be felt would stir the tops of the trees
to a commotion and then the drops would fall like hail on the soaked
leaves of the forest. The fire died down; there was no more wood in the
hut, and drops of water began to fall from the roof into the hissing
embers. It was hellishly cold, but Mick still slept like a dog, though
his left leg twitched in his sleep. At dawn Abner woke him. He grumbled
because Abner in his vigil had finished the tobacco. It looked once more
as if they were going to fall out, but the sense of common misery was too
great to allow them to do so.
They tramped on through the woods in the rain. They could see nothing
ahead of them but misty trees and no sound came to them but that of
dripping moisture and sometimes the harsh call of a jay. The sun was so
completely veiled that dawn passed into day almost without their knowing
it. Only a whiter, colder light gleamed from the wet leaves. ‘We’ll
never get shut on these bleedin’ trees,’ said Abner; but his companion
did not answer. Suddenly Mick began to sing in a hoarse, unnatural
voice:—
Macarthy took the floor in Enniscorthy;
Macarthy took the floor in Enniscorthy;
For his eyes and ears and nose
Were like marbles on the floor
Of the fragments of the man they called Macarthy.
He sang the same verse over and over again, and at the end of the third
repetition, he stood stock still, for they had come to the edge of the
wood. ‘By the houly, we’re through wud it!’ he said.
The huge confusion of the Radnor march lay before them, vast and sombre
and wild with cloud. To north and south of the spot where they were
standing the woods rolled backward into England, upward to the sky. It
was difficult to believe that they had emerged a little below the crest
of the hills, for the precipitous wall behind them rose magnificently
black into the mist with fleeces of cloud entangled in its surface like
wisps of wool in a winter hedge. Beneath their feet a lake of white
vapour hid the trough of the Teme valley lapping the bases of other
wooded hills. Nothing could they see but dark masses of trees thrown
into fantastic folds and pinnacles by the shapes of the hills that
carried them: an amphitheatre of savage stone fleeced with unending
woods. ‘That’s Wales,’ said Mick. ‘God! I could do with a drop!’
In spite of the melancholy grandeur of the scene Abner felt that an end
was in sight. They scrambled down a steep bank, and Mick, still singing,
stampeded a flock of horned black-faced sheep that crowded with
glistening wool under the lee of a hedge. They crossed a zone of huge,
wind-writhen hawthorns and came to a road, or rather a rutted track of
wheels that cut the hill-side diagonally. In the middle of this track
stood a wooden sled with iron chains for carting timber and a pile of
tree-trunks that had been dumped at this stage of their descent from the
woods.
‘Plenty of work here,’ said Mick, ‘time they’ve finished clearing these.’
They followed the track to a gate that gave on to a metalled road. Even
this was heavily scarred with the cartage of timber. On every side the
vast debris of forestry was seen. Birds began to sing in the wet
hedgerows. The road was alive with yellow-hammers and linnets. The rain
ceased.
The scramble down the hill-side had warmed them and they now walked at a
good pace. Villages were few, the greatest of them no more than hamlets
clustered about red-brick farms, and as yet no labourers were seen in the
fields. For miles and miles they passed no public-house.
‘Ne’er a drop stirrin’,’ said Mick. ‘This is a grand country, right
enough!’
By eight o’clock the sun was through and the folding mist, sucked
upwards, revealed great stretches of arable land that would have been
melancholy in dull weather but now began to gleam in patches of warm
colour. Moisture clarified all the air; oat-fields ripening for harvest
were full of tawny lights, and the breasts of the linnets rosy. A
signpost told them that they were less than a mile from Aston by
Lesswardine, and in a few moments they saw a little church hedged in with
pagan yews and a dilapidated parsonage still dead asleep. Mick thanked
God for the sight of an inn, even though it were closed. A swinging sign
with a heraldic device battered by long conflict with rain and wind
proclaimed it the Delahay Arms. Tall hollyhocks stood sentinel on either
side of the door.
At the end of the village they took a cross-road to Lesswardine, moving
through water-meadows of brilliant emerald with placid dykes on either
side. Somewhere near them ran a river, its course marked by a black line
of brushwood. Sunlight becoming more generous warmed them through and
through. The road drew near to the river and to a spur of hills nursing
the valley of a tributary. In a sheltered coomb they saw an encampment
of white tents bleaching in the sun. A wood fire was lighted among them.
The smoke went straight upward. Round the fire they saw men lounging in
their shirt-sleeves among great stacks of alder-wood. There was a
tempting smell of bacon in the air which made their mouths water.
‘What are these chaps about, Mick?’ Abner asked.
‘Cloggers,’ Mick shouted back to him.