ABNER and Mick advanced to the edge of the bivouac. Its inhabitants did
not seem to be disturbed by their presence. Mick, who was never at a
loss for words, gave them good-morning. A tall man, with a large,
unshaven face and a check handkerchief knotted round his neck, who was
sitting on a log by the fire, turned and stared at him. He had wide,
humorous eyes and when he spoke he gave the impression, by winking, that
his words concealed some subtle joke. Meanwhile with each of his hands
he sat fondling an immense and hairy forearm.
‘Well, lad, what is it?’ he asked, in a strong Lancashire accent.
Mick explained that Abner and he were looking for work on the Welsh water
and asked if it were anywhere near by.
‘Eh, you’ve a good step yet,’ said the other. ‘They’re working up beyond
Chapel Green, two miles from Lesswardine. Been long on the road?’
‘Four days,’ said Mick. ‘I hear there do be a good job goin’ there.’
‘Ay,’ said the north-countryman sardonically. ‘Work for them that likes
it.’ His wink seemed to imply that Mick obviously didn’t.
Three other men lounged up to them. Another, who was holding a shovel
over the fire, sang out: ‘Come on, Joe, the rasher’s done.’
The big man raised himself from his log. Before this it had been
impossible to realise his hugeness. ‘Better have summat t’eat wi’ uz,’
he said.
His sudden hospitality, so little in keeping with his appearance,
surprised Abner. In a few minutes they had settled down with the rest to
the enjoyment of the frizzled bacon and large cans of tea. Mick was soon
at home, contriving at the same time to eat enormously and to keep the
conversation going.
The encampment, as he had first explained to Abner, was one of many such
that may be found scattered up and down the length of the Radnor march in
summertime. The men who inhabit them are known as cloggers. They come
from the black industrial towns of Lancashire, and their business is the
making of wooden clogs. All are skilled labourers, and in each of their
communities there is a foreman on whom the commercial responsibilities of
the venture falls. Early in spring he makes a visit to the border
country and bargains with farmers and landowners for the right to cut the
thickets of black alder that choke the bottom of every valley in this
western brookland. In May the rest of the gang follow and there begins a
nomadic life in which they wander from valley to valley, felling the
thickets, stripping the black bark from wood of a milky whiteness and
cutting billets of a size suitable for clog-making. On rainy days when
their harvest is well in hand, they carry the process further, and set to
making the clogs themselves. Sometimes they live under canvas on the
site of their labours; sometimes they find lodgings in the nearest
village; always, as strangers—or rather as migrants—they carry with them
a reputation for boldness and extravagance in speech and behaviour; but,
for all that, the border people make much of them, knowing that they earn
plenty of money and spend it freely.
The valley on which Abner and his friend had lighted was by this time
nearly stripped of its alders. Piles of clean white billets stood
bleaching in the morning sun ready to be carted to the nearest point on
the railway.
‘You’re not afther wanting a hand with the wood?’ Mick asked.
‘No, lad,’ said the big man, ‘this is a tradesman’s job. You’ll get work
right enough up by Chapel Green. You tell the foreman that Wigan Joe
sent you along. But happen you’ll find it hard to get a lodge there.
Come Tuesday we’re makin’ a shift to Mainstone Bottom, and me and my
mates are going to take a lodging in the Buffalo. Old Mr Malpas or his
son George’ll see you right. Happen we’ll have a quart together then.
Come on, lads. . .’
Abner and Mick took their dismissal and moved off together. The sun was
now high and not a shred of mist remained in all the river basin. Before
this it had seemed confined on every side by high hills thickly wooded.
Now, to westward, far greater hills arose, huge, bare, and dappled with
shadows of the last retreating clouds. While they breakfasted Abner had
laid out his tobacco to dry in the sun. They lighted their pipes and
walked on cheerily, Mick singing fragments of a song about the Sultan of
the Turks and the Irish Board of Works. They crossed the river Teme by a
stone bridge above a glassy pool. ‘I’m telling you there’s a fine lot of
salmon in there,’ said Mick.
‘Salmon?’ asked Abner, who had only been acquainted with the tinned
variety of this fish.
‘Salmon right enough!’ said Mick, leaning on the parapet. ‘The times
I’ve watched them coming up the river Barrow, before you was the height
of a match!’
They left the roofs of Lesswardine on their right, turning in towards the
bare hills. The river swept away from them to cut the village in two.
From a perpendicular tower of reddish stone they heard a lazy peal of
bells.
‘Sunday morning,’ said Mick. ‘God help us!’
From all that sun-drenched, silent countryside, from the towers of many
hidden villages other bells were heard, melancholy, mellow voices,
floating luxuriously in an air lightened by rain.
‘By the houly!’ Mick continued, ‘and the pubs shut on me! If it isn’t
enough to make a man make dead childer!’
They passed three villages in which closed doors confirmed this gloomy
reflection. The villages themselves were not gloomy. Leisure,
prosperity and content radiated from their flowery gardens, from the
clean pinafores and collars of the children loitering to church, from the
faces of the men who gossiped at the gates of sunny gardens in their
shirt-sleeves. In no part of England could villages more trimly English
have been found than in this ultimate border of the Marches. It was as
though the nearness of another and an alien civilisation compelled them
to insist on their national character.
‘In Wales,’ said Mick, sourly, ‘there’s divil a one open Sunda’.’
They crossed another river, the noisy Barbel, a torrent of mountain water
wherein no weeds could grow, swirling clear into black pools. A stone
set in the middle of the bridge told them that they were now in Wales,
and as though to emphasise the change of country the barren hill-sides
rose abruptly to receive them; on their right a tremendous crag of gray
stone crowned with a pointed earthwork, and in front of them fold on fold
of softer contours pale in the sunlight from the intricate convolutions
of which the brawling river issued.
A village of stone awaited them, blank house-walls fronting on the
roadway with small windows and roofs of clumsy slate. In the midst an
ugly chapel, with the word ‘Ebenezer’ carved above its doorway, from
which the sound of a drawling hymn emerged, and at the end of the village
a public-house with the painted head of a bison for sign and, as Mick had
anticipated, closed doors. Even the windows were shuttered.
‘We’ll see if there’s annything stirrin’, said Mick, beating at the door.
For a time they could get no answer, but at last the door was cautiously
opened and the head of an old man appeared. How old he was it would have
been difficult to say, for though his eyes were rheumy and the irises
ringed with the white circles of age, his hair was plentiful and scarcely
streaked with gray. He leaned on a stick and did not seem pleased to see
them, speaking in a tongue that Abner could scarcely understand. When
they told him that Wigan Joe had sent them he became a little more
hospitable, but the consciousness of a Wesleyan policeman in the village
still prevented him from opening the door to them. The foreman of the
water-works job, he said, whose name was Eve, could certainly be found at
the Pound House at Mainstone, three miles away over the river. ‘That’s
in England,’ he mumbled, as though he were speaking of a barbarous
foreign country. As to lodgings he could not help them. On Tuesday the
cloggers were coming over from Lesswardine and had arranged to take his
two rooms. Mick pressed him, and he admitted that, at a pinch, his wife
might be able to put them up until then, provided that they were in a
position to pay for a room and food. Abner assured him that that was all
right, but he still refused to commit himself till Mrs Malpas returned
from chapel. As a favour he allowed them at last to leave their bundles
with him while they set off again to find the foreman. They promised to
return to Chapel Green in the evening, and before they turned their backs
he had closed the door again with evident relief.
They reached Mainstone just before the opening of the Pound House. The
foreman Eve, whom his associates called Gunner, a little man who wore a
shield over the socket from which one of his eyes was missing, told them
that they need not want for a job if they meant business and told them to
apply to the clerk of the works early on Monday morning. ‘You say Mr Eve
sent you and it’ll be all right.’ At the end of this sentence he was
snatched away by a power beyond his control, for the doors of the
ale-house opened and the twenty or thirty men who had been lounging
outside flowed into the bar like metal into a mould.
It was a clean and pleasant place surrounded by settles of black Welsh
oak. The presence of the navvies from the waterworks had made it into a
kind of recognised canteen, and behind the bar were ranged three great
barrels of Astill’s ales. Even at a distance of eighty miles from North
Bromwich the power of Astill’s influence was felt. Mick, without any
difficulty, had already enrolled himself as a member of the company. He
had paired off with a big lumbering fellow in corduroys with a red,
stupid face and curly hair.
‘Who’s going to give the ball a kick?’ Abner heard him saying, and a
moment later he was taking a quart pot of beer from a dark, strapping
girl who served behind the counter. A medley of voices arose: the
high-pitched accents of the Welsh, the soft Hereford burr, a smattering
of audacious cockney, and then the harsher northern speech of a number of
cloggers who had wandered in. The room was crowded to suffocation, and
Abner found himself lucky to get a seat alongside the one-eyed foreman,
Eve, on a bench near to the window. Abner began to talk to him, but the
Gunner was not inclined to keep it up. He was a little man with firm-set
jaws from which speech seemed to escape with difficulty. His whole body
was spare and dessicated and his skin so tanned with exposure to weather
that the blue-black patterns tattooed on his forearms were scarcely
distinguishable from his skin. He drank rum and water stolidly with a
little cough between each gulp and scrutinised all the company with his
one eye that was dark and keen like that of a bird of prey. He drank
three or four rums, one after the other, but the process had no loosening
effect on his taciturnity, nor did it dim the brightness of his eye.
Abner asked him how long he had been on the waterworks job.
‘Fourteen year,’ he said.
‘Is it like to last long?’
‘It’s like to last as long as I do. I’m what you might call on the
establishment, as they say in the service. Been with it since they made
the resservoyer in the Dulas valley. They say it’s an unlucky job this
here water. I was there when the dam was broke nine year ago. Always
something up with it. . .’
Then, warming a little, he began to ask Abner if he were used to navvying
work, snorted when he told him he was a miner, and told him that he’d
have a job to get a bed to sleep in. ‘The cloggers is coming into the
Buffalo Tuesday,’ he said, ‘and the folk round here is scared of us.
They’re like children with strangers. They’re a lot of damned Welshmen,
only don’t you tell ’em so or they’ll let you know about it.’ He waved
to the dark girl behind the counter, who brought him another tot of
spirit as though she understood his signal.
‘You’re looking up fine to-day, Susie,’ he said.
‘Get away with you, Mr Eve,’ she replied. She may have blushed, but the
blood ran so richly under her brown cheeks that no blush could have been
seen. Eve took hold of her arm and pulled her gently towards him.
Evidently she was used to being handled, for she did not seem to resent
it. With her dark hair almost brushing the foreman’s cheek she winked at
Abner.
‘Mr Badger been down to-day,’ said Eve in a whisper.
‘Oh, you _are_ a tease,’ she said, with a movement of petulance. ‘Now,
do let me go! You’re not the only gentleman that wants serving.’
Eve gently pinched her arm. ‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘just you ask George
Malpas to come and have a word with me, there’s a good girl!’
She left them, pushing her way familiarly through the crowd of men with a
refined ‘Excuse me!’ and crossed the room towards a tall, dark young man,
better dressed than most of the company, who stood holding a pot of ale
in the opposite corner, and talking to Wigan Joe, who had just arrived.
When the girl spoke to him he nodded, and a moment later came over to the
bench on which Abner and the foreman were sitting. From the very first
Abner liked his face, and indeed he was a handsome specimen of the border
type, with an olive skin and dark eyes set rather wide apart under level
brows. At the moment his cheeks were a little flushed with the liquor
that he had been drinking.
He and the Gunner were evidently old friends.
‘Well, George,’ said Eve, ‘how goes it?’
‘Middling, Gunner, middling.’
‘Now, my son, hark to me. This young chap here is coming on to our job
to-morrow . . . a mining chap from North Bromwich way . . . and he wants
to find a lodge. Think you can do something for him?’
‘Well, now you’m asking!’ said George Malpas. ‘The cloggers are coming
into the Buffalo Tuesday; but I reckon mother might find him a bed time
they come. ‘T’is all accarding. . . . Not that her won’t be glad to
oblige you, Gunner.’
‘I’ve a mate along of me,’ said Abner.
‘Your mate looks more like sleeping in a ditch,’ said the Gunner with a
dour glance at Mick. ‘Irishmen are all alike. God, don’t I know ’em!
I’ve been shipmates with one or two of them chaps in my time. Well,
George?’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said George Malpas.
‘Your mother ought to be glad of a decent chap.’
‘All right, I’ll take him along with me when they close, don’t you fear.’
He moved off again towards the bar. At the same moment there appeared in
the doorway a man of middle height and sturdy build. He was dressed in a
cord shooting coat and breeches. His face was swarthy and sanguine and
he surveyed the company as though he had a grudge against every one of
them. Indeed he had reason to be suspicious, for if black glances could
have killed he would have been a dead man within a minute of entering the
room. He stood there as if he were waiting for the hostility of the bar
to take some more tangible form, and at last a young man emerging from a
pint pot with an accession of Dutch courage, said mildly: ‘Well, Mr
Badger, how be the young pheasants going?’
‘Don’t you ask him,’ said another. ‘This be a terrible place for foxes.’
The keeper took no notice of these remarks nor yet of the laughter that
followed; he went straight up to the counter where Susie stood polishing
glasses and shook hands with her formally.
‘Who’s he?’ asked Mick Connor, already considerably nourished, ‘A keeper?
You leave go of him, darlin’. You’d as well be shaking hands with the
divil!’
‘You’d best hold your tongue,’ said another. ‘He’m our Susie’s fancy.’
‘Gard be good to her then!’ said Mick with a sigh.
Neither Badger nor the girl seemed to be conscious of these reflections
on their intimacy. Badger was leaning over the bar with his face close
to hers and whispering. She still went on polishing her glasses
mechanically, nodding with pursed lips, in response to whatever he was
saying and glancing from time to time in a mirror, advertising Astill’s
Bottled Ales, that hung on the wall at her right hand. Evidently all was
not well, for she hurriedly rearranged a curl of dark hair that hung in
front of her right ear and had become entangled in a garnet ear-ring.
This process of preening attracted Abner’s attention to her sex.
Suddenly he found himself comparing her rather maturer charms with those
of Susan Wade. Perhaps her name had something to do with it. Both were
of the dark beauty which had always attracted him, though Susan the first
had been a pale city-dweller and little more than a girl, while the
barmaid was a woman of his own age, generously yet perfectly formed, full
of strength and health and physical splendour. She bent over to listen
more carefully to the keeper’s whisper that was almost lost in the hubbub
of the taproom, and Abner saw the smooth whiteness of her neck, faintly
browned like an egg. The liquor that he had taken inflamed his
imagination. For the moment she seemed definitely desirable.
Mick Connor, having kicked as many drinks out of his neighbours as they
would give him, staggered over to Abner’s side. In this state he looked
more than ever like a bird. His small eyes glistened and the arteries of
his temples stood out like whipcord. He asked Abner for money, and when
Abner said, quite truthfully, that he had none to spare, he began to
round on him fiercely in a language that nobody could understand. It
seemed as if a row were in the making, and this was the last thing that
Abner wished for. He didn’t want to be involved with Mick in a dispute
before the foreman, Eve, who stared critically at his friend, and
particularly before the girl who stood behind the counter. He tried to
lead Mick away before it was too late, but the Irishman wrenched himself
free from his hands and began to take off his coat for a fight. The
whole room was now listening and laughing at the scene. The girl behind
the bar, seeing that things were getting serious, excused herself to the
keeper and came down to ask Abner to take his friend away.
‘We can’t have this sort of thing in here, you know,’ she said.
She came so near to Abner that he was aware of the smell of her hair.
Her nearness disturbed him so that he could scarcely answer her. Mick,
however, found no difficulty in stating his case at the top of his voice.
‘I know,’ she said, with the air of one who was used to the settling of
such complications. ‘You two boys had better go out and get a bit of
fresh air. Go on now, be good chaps,’ she continued good-humouredly, ‘or
I shall have to call father.’
Mick turned on her savagely. ‘Call your father, is it? Who said I was
drunk?’
‘I never said you was drunk. Just you sit down and be quiet.’
By this time Badger had reached her side. ‘Best leave him alone, Susie,’
he said. ‘Half-past six, then?’
She nodded, and the keeper went out. At the same moment the landlord of
the house, a short, wheezy man, with yellow pockets under his eyes that
made him look like an owl, appeared behind the bar, and shouted to Susie
in a high-pitched voice, asking what was the matter.
‘It’s all right, dad,’ she said, smiling back at Abner, who had by this
time succeeded in pushing Mick Connor down into the seat next to the
foreman and thrusting his own unfinished pot of beer into his hand.
‘Then what’s all the bloody noise about?’ Mr Hind inquired, with a
violent wheeze at the end of the sentence. ‘Don’t forget we’ve got a new
policeman here that’s a stranger to the ways of the place, and the
justices lying in wait for me. I can’t have no rows here, or they’ll be
saying the place isn’t properly conducted. You mind that, boys!’
But there was no further disturbance. Mick, having finished the rest of
Abner’s beer, retired mechanically to the society of his first friend,
the big navvy in corduroys, who was now too drunk to realise what money
he was spending. The landlord walked to and fro behind the narrow bar,
glancing anxiously at the minute hand of the clock that was gradually
approaching the hour of two, and talked wheezily about his distrust of
the new policeman. Through the little door of the kitchen behind the bar
came the frizzle of a basted joint followed by the metallic clang of an
oven door. Something savoury was doing for dinner. The clock gave a
whirring noise which suggested that it was as asthmatic as its owner and
struck two with a harsh, ringing note. The landlord stopped dead in his
prowling. ‘Time . . .’ he shouted.
‘See you Monday,’ said the Gunner, winking at Abner, who was already
preparing to rescue Mick Connor from his new friend. The bar emptied.
In the space of two hours its atmosphere had become so thick with tobacco
smoke and the fumes of liquor that it smelt stale and fetid. Mick was
walking arm in arm with the navvy in a state of unstable equilibrium.
Abner took his arm. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s see about the lodge.’
‘And who the hell are you?’ said the Irishman truculently. ‘You keep a
civil distance!’
The big man rallied to his supporter, and Abner saw that for the present
Mick was best left alone. The other two went off together, Mick singing
a song in which the navvy joined though he did not know the tune. A tall
policeman with mutton-chop whiskers watched them from the other side of
the road. Abner turned and saw that the young man whom the Gunner had
addressed as George Malpas was waiting for him.
‘Best come along of me to the Buffalo and have a bite,’ he said, and they
set off together.
Abner found that from the first he liked George Malpas. His dark face
and eyes were bright with the drink that he had taken, his speech rapid
and vivacious. They walked quickly towards Chapel Green and the hills,
talking all the way, and Abner felt that this was the first person whom
he had met on his travels who really accepted him with naturalness and
without suspicion. Malpas told him that he need not worry about his
lodging. ‘Dad’s getting up in years,’ he said, ‘and a shadow’d frighten
him, but mother’s all there and she don’t know how to say “no” to me.’
He spoke all the time quickly and with a certain restlessness that, on
the surface, made him seem free and daring. He questioned Abner eagerly
about life in the black-country. Once he had been in North Bromwich and
this experience had made him discontented with a country life. ‘It’s
proper dead here, that’s what it is!’ he said. ‘Time a man gets to my
age he ought to see a bit of the world; but a chap gets nabbed with a
wife and a couple of kids and then it’s kiss me good-bye to all that!
You single chaps don’t know your luck!’ Evidently George Malpas had
tried his hand at everything. He had been a wheelwright; a farm bailiff;
for a year or two he had helped his mother in the management of the
Buffalo, and lately, since the job on the pipe-line had begun, he had
been doing labourer’s work: a thing that seemed unnatural to a man so
handsomely and delicately made. ‘Anything for a change: that’s what I
say,’ he maintained. ‘What a chap like me ought to do is go to sea, but
these old hills are like a prison. Damn me if I wouldn’t as soon be in
Shrewsbury jail as here!’
They crossed the bridge into Wales. By this time George Malpas’s mother
had returned from chapel and the door of the Buffalo was unlocked.
George opened it for Abner. In the bar, on the left, he saw the two
bundles exposed prominently on the table. Beyond in the kitchen they
found the old man sitting in the chimney-corner and Mrs Malpas dredging
flour into the roasting-tin from which a joint of beef had been taken.
‘Just in time, mother!’ said George. ‘How’s the old legs, dad?’
‘Badly . . . badly, George,’ mumbled his father.
‘Can you give us a bite of dinner, mother?’
At first Mrs Malpas did not reply. She was a little woman, primly
dressed in a constricted black dress. She had a mass of gray hair with a
tinge of yellow in it; her features were finely shaped, like those of her
son, but her mouth was hard as stone. When she had finished making her
gravy she turned a pair of piercing black eyes on Abner and spoke in a
low voice. It was level and expressionless, but one felt, all the time,
that she meant exactly what she said and that nothing could turn her from
a determination once expressed. Facing her, he found that her face was
beautiful, but hardened by suffering, by the responsibility of an old and
ailing husband and the anxiety of a wayward son.
‘Is this the young man who left his bundle here with dad?’ she asked.
‘Yes, this is the chap. All he wants is a bed.’
‘Well, I can’t do it, George, and you know I can’t,’ she cried; ‘what
with the cloggers coming, and all! Your father told them so.’ The old
man nodded.
‘Give us some dinner first, mother,’ said George persuasively. ‘Then
we’ll talk about it.’
‘It’s no good talking,’ Mrs Malpas persisted. ‘I mean what I said, and
so does your father.’
Although it was obvious that nothing that the old man might say would
alter the course of events that she had ordained, his wife had acquired
the habit of pretending that he shared the responsibility of her
decisions. George, with a side glance of encouragement at Abner, tried
to joke her out of her seriousness.
‘You can’t get over me that way, George,’ she said; but when he took her
arm her eyes and mouth softened and she made no attempt to prevent Abner
sharing the meal which her son helped her to put on the table. At the
end of the process he kissed her, and she suddenly stiffened.
‘You’ve been to the Pound House, George! I can smell your breath.’
‘Well, can’t a chap go to the Pound House without a fuss being made?’ he
laughed. ‘You’m jealous, mother, of that seven days’ licence!’
‘If it was to make my fortune this minute,’ she said intensely, ‘I
wouldn’t sell one spot of drink on a Sunday. Nor would father,’ she
added in a milder tone.
The flash subsided and she went on to ask about Mr Hind’s asthma; but she
took no notice of George’s reply, for her inquiry had only been a
preliminary to asking how Susie was. She watched him closely when he
replied that Susie was all right. ‘Her new friend Badger was there,’ he
added with a laugh.
‘I mind the time,’ said the old man dreamily, ‘when there was three
badgers dug out one month up the Castel Ditches. Turrible teeth a badger
has. Turrible . . .’
‘He means Mr Badger, the keeper, father,’ said Mrs Malpas.
‘All keepers is the same,’ said the old man. ‘Water or game-keepers,
there’s not a pin between ’em.’
He relapsed into one of those fits of vacuity which often droused his
normal, if senile, intelligence. Mrs Malpas dragged him back with the
announcement that the dinner was ready.
‘I’ll go and draw some beer,’ said George.
‘You’ll do nothing of the sort, George,’ replied Mrs Malpas. ‘You’ve had
all that’s good for you at the Pound House. If your father can do
without beer before evening, so can you!’
George passed the reproof off with a smile, but stayed where he was.
Meanwhile Mrs Malpas rescued four hot plates from the oven and thrust
them into Abner’s hands with ‘Catch on, please!’ and the party settled
down at the table, the old man occupying a shiny chair with a patchwork
cushion; the mother, rigid as her own chair-back, facing him, Abner and
George disposed on either side of them. The food was excellent and Abner
was more than ready for it. It was the first square meal that he had got
his teeth into for a week. Mrs Malpas’s appetite was in keeping with the
ascetic character of her face, but the old man ate ravenously of beef,
vegetables, and dumplings, and the two others were not far behind him.
All through the meal Mrs Malpas cast anxious glances at her son’s plate.
Abner could see that beneath her mask of severity she was really full of
a fierce maternal concern for his comfort. The only tokens of tenderness
that ever appeared in her were shown towards him. When she spoke of
George’s wife and of the children there was an almost imperceptible
hardening in her tone, and George answered her shortly, as if he knew
that the subject had only been raised for politeness’ sake.
For all this they enjoyed their meal. The room was dim, for the hot sun
from outside was caught in the folds of a lace curtain and a mass of lush
geranium plants with which the window-sill was crowded. The scent of
their leaves filled the room with an atmosphere of summer, languid and
happy. One could almost have guessed that it was Sunday.
When the meal was over Abner began to fill his pipe.
‘No smoking in here, young man,’ said Mrs Malpas sternly. ‘If you want
to smoke you’d best go into the tap.’
‘It’s mother’s fancy on a Sunday,’ George apologised.
‘You know your father can’t abear it,’ said Mrs Malpas, but the old man,
who usually woke up when his name was mentioned, did not hear her, being
busy with a paper packet of snuff.
When she began to clear the table, George returned gallantly to the
subject of their visit. ‘What about this chap’s lodging?’ he asked.
‘It’s no good asking me, George. I’ve told you once.’
‘You can give him a bed till Tuesday while he’s looking round, mother.’
She shook her head positively. ‘I’ve got to clean things up between now
and Tuesday. Besides, there’s two of them.’
‘Don’t you trouble yourself about the other,’ said George. ‘He’s gone
off with one of our gang. This is a nice, steady chap. . .’
But Mrs Malpas did not budge. ‘Your father wouldn’t hear of it,’ she
said finally. By this time she had cleared away the dinner things, taken
off her apron and placed a family Bible with a blue silk marker on the
table. Mr Malpas had settled back in his chair by the hearth with a
snuffy handkerchief over his head.
‘Just for two days,’ said George.
‘George, ’tis no good.’
He knew better than to press her under the circumstances, and so they
prepared to go. Abner took out his money to pay for the meal. Cupidity
struggled with principle in Mrs Malpas’s eyes.
‘Not on a Sunday, young man,’ she said.
Abner thanked her clumsily. George kissed her, and for a moment she
dropped her stiffness and clung to him.
‘Come on, then,’ he said to Abner. ‘Good-bye, dad.’
But Mr Malpas was already asleep, his mouth sagging beneath the edge of
his handkerchief. Abner picked up his bundle in the taproom and he and
George went out into the grilling sunshine.