GEORGE MALPAS, having taken a fancy to Abner at first sight, had
determined to ask his own wife to give him a lodging. The relation
between the two young men had begun with a quick, spontaneous liking on
either side. Abner was only too glad to see a friendly face, not being
built, as was Mick Connor, for picaresque adventure, and feeling that it
would be well to settle down again. George Malpas, on the other hand,
liked him because he represented something new, because he had exhausted
the possibilities of the cloggers’ company, which led no farther than the
Pound House—a place which he could only visit with irritation since
Badger, the keeper, had cut him out with Susie Hind—and because the idea
of a presentable stranger living in his own house appealed to him on the
score of variety as well as from the financial point of view.
As they left the Buffalo, George expounded his project to Abner. It did
him good, he said, to talk, and particularly to talk to a man of his own
age who could understand him. If Abner had been married he would have
realised that it was useless talking to women who pretended to listen,
but never gave a thought to what a man was saying. The thought of his
marriage always roused him to bitterness. It had been imposed on him,
indeed, by the anxiousness of his mother, who adored him, her only son,
beyond words and, under the influence of chapel, had conceived it her
particular duty to save his soul from hell. Hell, in the eyes of Mrs
Malpas, meant neither more nor less than sexual promiscuity, and seeing
in the handsomeness of George a spiritual danger, she had followed the
advice of St Paul and married him safely, as she thought, before worse
happened.
She herself had chosen a wife for him. Indirectly, for she knew that he
was wilful and easily scared, she had contrived to make him fall in love
with the daughter of a local farm-bailiff, Morgan Condover, a steady,
and, as it seemed, a solid man, who managed the outlying members of the
Powys estate. Mary Condover, the daughter, was a little older than
George; a shy beauty, with whom the lad soon fell in love. George, as
the only son of the innkeeper at Chapel Green, was considered a good
match, and Mrs Malpas played her cards so well that within six months of
falling in love George found himself married and installed in a house of
his own. He was happy: Mrs Malpas could see that for herself, and she
thanked Heaven that she had been permitted to save her son alive.
Before a year was over George’s first child was born. There was a great
christening party at Wolfpits at which old Mr Condover, having drunk a
good deal more than Mrs Malpas approved, confided to her that his
newly-born grand-daughter, whom they had christened Gladys, would take
the first place in his will. This was exactly what Mrs Malpas had
intended from the first, and her satisfaction was so deep that she could
almost have forgiven the bailiff his lapse from sobriety in spite of the
unfortunate example that he had given to his son-in-law. The intense
thankfulness that flooded her heart when she saw George so happily and
satisfactorily bound in the chains of domesticity atoned for the troubles
that were crowding on her own life. Her husband, who had been ailing for
some years, was smitten with a stroke of paralysis from which he never
fully recovered. She knew that hard times were coming but faced them
cheerfully. For many years Mr Malpas had meant less to her as a husband
than as the father of her son. She would do her duty by him—nobody could
suggest that she had ever done less—on the surface she would acknowledge
him still as the head of her household, but his illness would give her
the opportunity of managing the business to her own liking and scraping
together, in the years that remained to them, a little money that, added
to the small fortune of which Mr Condover had boasted to her at the
christening, should make her son secure for life. She even hoped that he
might succeed Mr Condover in the care of the Powys estate.
Her _Nunc dimittis_ was premature. Just before the birth of George’s
second child, a healthy boy whom they had decided to name Morgan after
his grandfather, Mr Condover, at the very height of his prosperity,
hanged himself in an outhouse. His death revealed the fact that the
money of which he had boasted at the first christening did not exist. It
soon appeared that he had defrauded the Powys estate of more than eight
hundred pounds, and rumour said that he had been involved with some woman
in Ludlow. This was a terrible blow to Mrs Malpas, for in remote country
places the shames of the fathers are visited on the children to the third
generation, and never forgotten. When the baby was born she begged her
daughter-in-law not to give the child his grandfather’s name; but Mary,
who had loved her father, obstinately persisted, and Mrs Malpas could
never hear it without feeling that it carried with it a reproach. She
tried to persuade George to change it, but George did not care. He was
no longer in love with his wife, who now stood to him for a symbol of the
chains that his mother had imposed on him. He felt that she had cheated
him out of an enjoyment of life that was his due. At any cost he meant
to regain his freedom, and Mary and his mother were the sufferers. The
wife, indeed, had the care of her children to console her for George’s
neglect; but the mother, against whom he nursed a deep, indefinite grudge
as the author of all his misfortunes, found that she must bear the
responsibility of her own schemes.
The household at Wolfpits now missed the subsidies which Mr Condover had
generously distributed from his masters’ money. George had drifted into
an extravagant way of life that he had no intention of changing. Partly
because of his expansive nature, and partly because, in truth, he had
never had his fling, George found it difficult to settle to any steady
work. He became a drain upon the resources of the Buffalo, and Mrs
Malpas, who found it hard to refuse him anything, was forced to draw upon
her savings to support him. In her irritation and despair she blamed
Mary for all this, thinking of her as a feckless housewife who had been
brought up in the lavish ways of her father.
‘The bad blood’s in her and is bound to come out,’ she said, airing her
grievances on Mr Malpas who now cared for nothing but his food. George
did not mind who was to blame as long as he got the money that he wanted.
He was beginning to be interested in other women, particularly, for a
little while, in Susie Hind, the daughter of the proprietor of the Pound
House, an inn which Mrs Malpas had always regarded as the Buffalo’s
bitterest rival. It pained her beyond words to think that her
hard-earned savings should find their way into Mr Hind’s till.
‘George,’ she said, ‘if only you’ll keep away from that there place I’ll
see what I can do for you. Or if only you’d settle to regular work. . .’
‘Thank you kindly!’ said George. ‘Why don’t you let me take on the
licence of the Buffalo now that dad can’t do it justice? Then you and
dad could go and live somewhere quiet as you’ve a right to do at your
age.’
‘Never, George!’ she said intensely. ‘Never. . .’
He laughed at her. ‘Why not?’
‘I couldn’t trust you,’ she said. ‘The man that keeps a public ought to
be teetotal. I know what would happen to you.’
‘You’ve never give me a chance,’ he protested.
‘What’s more, I’m not going to,’ she maintained.
‘It’s a job I’m cut out for. I like company. I could double your
business in a month.’
‘And drink yourself dead in six,’ she said.
‘You’ve never seen me drunk, mother.’
‘But I know you, my son!’
‘I’m dead sick of this country,’ he said. ‘Town’s the place for me. If
I could get away out of this and make a fresh start. Damn me if I won’t
do it.’
‘Hush, George!’ she said. ‘I’ve never heard your father use a word like
that in his life.’
But the thing that she was really frightened of was that he should go.
He was the only thing left to her, and if he went all light would have
gone from her life. She controlled her tears and took him into the
little bedroom where, in an oak chest, she kept her savings. She gave
him money, and he left her, contented, kissing her with an affection that
was mingled faintly with pity. When she held him in her arms all her
tense anxiety for a moment disappeared. She could only think of him as
the son of her body in whose happiness and physical welfare she
delighted. It seemed to her that she could now only purchase these
precious moments with money, but for a little while she could forget this
in the joy that he gave her.
Time after time he begged her to let him take on the business, but she
always refused him, sheltering herself, as her habit now was, behind the
negligible personality of her husband. It would have shocked her beyond
words if George had pointed out to her that his father didn’t count, and
that her consideration for him was a pretence; but George knew better
than to vex her in this way, for the key of the chest upstairs was kept
in her pocket. What is more, even though their two wills were always in
conflict, he loved his mother. She meant a great deal more to him than
Mary had ever done except in the first blindness of his passion, and for
this reason, no less than for the other, he was tolerant.
‘Don’t you take no notice of mother,’ he told Abner as they walked along
together. ‘She’s got a funny way with her, but she’s all right at the
bottom. There’s not many women could have done what she has. The only
bad turn she ever done me was when she got me threw over the pulpit.’
It was the third time in their walk that George had spoken grudgingly of
his wife, but this did not strike Abner as strange, for it was exactly
the attitude not only of his father but of most of the men with whom he
had worked at Mawne. He grunted sympathetically in answer to George’s
complaints, and all the time, as Malpas eagerly expounded his own
aspirations towards freedom and adventure, they were climbing gradually,
passing by many gyrations of a narrow road into the curve of the hills in
which Wolfpits lay.
Within a mile of Chapel Green the character of the country changed.
Before that only a hint of mountainous severity had been visible in the
stone buildings of the village with their narrow windows and their cruel
roofs of slate. At Chapel Green the pastures that lay beside the river
were not greatly different from the water-meadows of Teme, which is an
English river, but the fields through which the road to Wolfpits passed
were poor and of a paler green. Their hedges were scanty, writhen and
knotted with hard life. The generous elms grew fewer, standing stunted,
forsaken and sparing of leaf. They seemed to shiver with poverty in this
alien soil. In their place the hardier mountain trees appeared: birches
that quivered even in this tranquil air: oak and holly and yew crouching
in the hedgerow sombrely but crowned with waxen honeysuckle. These poor
fields seemed to feel the pressure of the hills on either side from the
slopes of which blown spores of bracken and seeds of gorse had settled
and thriven like hill-men in a rich plain. In the midst of the fields
smooth water-worn boulders were scattered, and through the pit of the
valley a noisy tributary of the Barbel, that Abner came to know as the
Folly Brook, set up an unceasing murmur like that of a thunder-shower on
summer leaves behind a dense curtain of green.
Still the road climbed. It rose in bold curves, like a kestrel soaring,
into colder air. Sometimes the brook flowed near it, and Abner could see
through gaps in the arras of alders roaring stickles of bright water.
Sometimes it swept away from them, hugging the foot of the hills,
sounding no more than the evening breeze in a poplar tree. Gullies that
fed it scored the road with tracks of winter torrents. At that season of
the year no moving water could be seen, but once or twice in shadier
places slow moisture oozed and dripped from beds of mosses on the banks.
‘The cloggers is coming up the Folly when they’ve finished down
Lesswardine way,’ said George. ‘I reckon they’ll liven things up a bit.’
The road grew rougher; it seemed to falter in its purpose.
‘Where do you get to this way?’ Abner asked.
‘Right up into the Forest and on to Clun, but not many uses it,’ said
George. ‘The Clun men don’t come much over our way. ’Tis a stiffish bit
of collar-work. This here’s Wolfpits.’
The road swept up obliquely to a crest and then sank to the level of the
stream. Abner had a vision of the whole valley expanding into a kind of
amphitheatre through the middle of which the little river pursued a more
leisurely course, winding gently through the fields as though it rejoiced
to linger under the open sky. On either side the mountains rose to their
full height, no longer concealed by foothills: from lip to lip the cup
was roofed with dazzling blue. In the open space beneath, an avenue of
chestnuts led upwards from the river to a great red house fronted with
three pointed gables and crowned by clusters of fantastic chimney-stacks.
‘You don’t mean that one?’ said Abner.
‘Ay, that’s Wolfpits,’ George replied. ‘Looks all right, don’t it?’
As they descended the house was lost from sight and George began to
explain that Wolfpits had once been a great house, the most westerly
possession of the family whom Condover, his father-in-law, had served,
but that the pastures which surrounded it, for all their greenness were
poor and the mansion itself too remote and gloomy for gentlefolks to
inhabit in this age of comfort.
‘They say it’s ha’nted, too,’ he declared, with a laugh, ‘though I don’t
pay no heed to such stories. I reckon it stood here empty for close on a
hundred years till Mary’s father got Mr McKellar, the agent, to let it
off in pieces to them that wanted houses. There’s more than five farms
up this valley lying empty for the want of a bit of work putting into
them, but the old lord was so took up with his new model village down by
Lesswardine, he hadn’t the money to put into the old ones. Not that I
grumble at him. . . . ’Tis a good solid house to live in. There’s three
families in it now, and room for four more in my opinion. And I reckon
I’ve a kind of right to it,’ he went on; ‘the Malpases was big people in
these parts at one time. You’ll find their names on the vault in
Lesswardine church. _John Malpas_, _Gentleman_, that’s how it’s written.
There’s a Reverent Cyril Malpas rector of Aston to this day. Mary’s
father went into the family history at the time we was married. The
Condovers is an old family too.’
These claims to a faded aristocracy did not interest Abner, but he could
not help being impressed by the size of the house as they approached it
through the shade of the chestnut avenue. It was built of small red
bricks, strange to the country but now beautifully weathered by time.
The eastern end was covered with a gigantic growth of ivy, but from the
western side, which they were approaching, the parasite had been stripped
on Mr Condover’s advice and the red wall glowed as though it were exuding
the imprisoned sunshine of three centuries. In this generous light one
did not notice an air of desolation which the uncurtained upper windows
gave to it.
‘All that’s wrong with this old place,’ said George, ‘is the rats. But I
reckon you’ve been sleeping rough and won’t notice them. This is our
garden. Mary’s a great one for flowers.’
They had entered a drive that swept up in a spacious curve to the steps
of the front-door, an entrance which had been closed for many years. In
place of the lawns that had once been the pride of its inhabitants lay
three long strips of garden, each carefully tilled and separated from its
neighbour by a fence of wire netting, the remains of some dismantled
fowl-run. A path of bricks, salved from one of the dilapidated stables
of the mansion, ran down the middle of the nearest garden-patch, and in
the centre of it two children sat playing in the sun, a fair-haired girl,
some six years of age, and a boy, a little younger, in whose dark
features Abner could trace a resemblance to the handsome face of George
Malpas.
‘Them’s my youngsters,’ he said carelessly. He opened the gate and
tweaked the girl’s ear as he passed. ‘Well, Gladys?’ he said; but
neither of the children seemed much moved by his arrival, being more
interested in the strange figure of Abner, whose progress up the path
they watched with the vague suspicion of mountain sheep that stare before
they plunge away through heather.
‘I’ll see if the missis is in,’ said George. ‘Mary . . .’ he called.
‘Where’s the girl got to? Sit yourself down.’
The room had once been the kitchen of the great house. An enormous iron
range was built into the wall on one side, and on the other were racks
and shelves which must once have held many dozens of plates. The sun
slanted through a western window and showed Abner that the comfort of
this stone-paved room lay in its cleanliness. The iron range was almost
handsome in its massive, shining bulk above the whitened hearth, and in
the fender a bundle of green bracken was set in an attempt at decoration.
The fronds of this plant filled the room with a warm and drowsy odour.
In a corner a grandfather clock, with a solemn face on which the name of
_Carver_, _Hay_, was engraved, marked the passage of time with a slowly
swinging pendulum.
George Malpas called his wife again, and from a cool-smelling chamber on
a lower level that might well have been a dairy, a woman appeared and
stood in the doorway.
‘I’ve put the dinner away, George,’ she said. ‘It’s past three o’clock.’
‘Don’t you worry your head about the dinner,’ he replied. ‘I’ve brought
this chap back with me. He’s coming to work with us on the water job.
Mother has a fancy she can’t take any one in at the Buffalo, so I’ve
arranged to give him a lodge here. You’d better put him in the top room.
I reckon you won’t find him particular.’
At first she made no reply, but stood looking intently at Abner. It was
difficult for him to believe that she was George Malpas’s wife and the
mother of the two children whom he had seen playing in the garden: she
seemed too young, too slight, little more, indeed, than a young girl.
She wore a clean apron of white linen, still creased from the ironing,
and her straight chestnut hair was bound back plainly on either side of
her temples and braided in heavy plaits behind.
She was tall, and her slimness, together with the narrow apron, made her
appear taller. Her brow was wide and unwrinkled, her eyes were hazel,
her nose straight and slightly marked with golden freckles. One would
have said that her face represented the most untroubled calm if it had
not been that her mouth was a little sad. Only her lips betrayed the
fact that she had suffered. She stood in the shadow and looked at Abner
narrowly but did not speak, for she had known enough already of George’s
boon companions to be a little careful of them.
‘Don’t stare at the chap like that!’ said George irritably, ‘or he’ll
think you’re cracked.’
Then she spoke in a voice that showed more refinement than could have
been expected. Her speech was almost free from the pleasant burr of the
Marches.
‘I dare say we can manage,’ she said. ‘I’ll see about it.’ Then she
addressed Abner directly. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Damn me if I ever thought to ask him!’ muttered George.
Abner told her, and she repeated it after him: ‘Abner Fellows.’
‘Well, that’s a queer name,’ said Malpas. ‘I don’t mind ever having
heard it before.’
‘It’s out of the Bible, George,’ said his wife.
‘Out of the Bible, is it?’ he laughed. ‘Well, that’s more in your line
than mine.’
She left them quietly to attend to the details of Abner’s room. Malpas,
still a little restless, took him out again, talking incessantly and
showing him what remained of the ancient features of Wolfpits: the line
of damp stables with boxes for thirty horses, the yew-trees that had once
been clipped to the shape of peacocks but had now straggled into those of
monstrous antediluvian birds; the red-walled garden, now a wilderness of
nettles, whose fruit trees spilled their pulpy produce on the mossed
paths. From the farthest corner of the garden they could see the house
which, from this angle appeared tall and narrow like a tower, with
chimney-pots for battlements. In an upper window there appeared the
figure of a woman standing still and gazing out over the mountain.
‘That’s Mary putting your room to rights,’ said George, but he did not
call to her.
He spoke to Abner of the other inhabitants of Wolfpits. One was an old
woman, Mrs Mamble by name, the widow of a labourer who had worked on a
neighbouring farm. ‘She don’t properly belong to these parts,’ he said;
‘they came from down Tenbury way, but she’s took up with Morgan and
Gladys, and Mary likes her company. He must have been a good chap in his
time, for they give her the house rent-free.’
The other tenant, whom they saw working in his garden beneath the ivied
end of the house, was another solitary creature, an old man named Drew
who had worked as a farm-labourer in the district for more than thirty
years. He, too, was a foreigner, having first come to Wolfpits in charge
of a pedigree Devon bull. In the middle period of his life he had been
employed in a flour mill a few miles down the valley of the Folly Brook.
The new steam mills at Lesswardine had robbed him of this employment, but
not before the constant carrying of heavy sacks had twisted his back to a
curve in which rheumatism had fixed it. Now he could only walk with his
shoulders bent so that when he spoke he had to raise his eyes, staring up
at those who questioned him, as though his back still bore the burden of
a phantom load. All his joints were swollen and knotted with rheumatism;
his huge hands resembled the branches of an ancient tree and his whole
aspect, staring with pale blue eyes beneath a tangle of reddish hair as
yet untouched with gray, was that of a gnome, and proper to these
inaccessible mountains. His life was lonely, and for this reason he had
never lost the uncouth speech of the South Hams from which he had
originally come. When they passed his garden on their way back George
gave him good-afternoon and he raised himself, as with infinite labour,
from his work, gazing at them with the patient eyes of a yoked beast of
burden.
‘He’s a rum old chap,’ said George. ‘You wait till he’s on one of his
boozing fits, and then you’ll see.’
By this time Mary had finished Abner’s room and set the table. The
children, tired with play, had come in and were clamouring for their tea.
At the same time the fourth member of the Malpas family arrived, a yellow
lurcher bitch, named Spider, who had been absent on some dark business of
her own and now returned to gambol with little Morgan on the floor. The
children were never tired of teasing this animal, but George, who only
tolerated her when he himself went rabbiting in the evening, generally
treated her cruelly. The dog fawned on him, but there was more fear than
affection in her devotion. Abner told them the story of Tiger. The
children listened with wide eyes and the mother looked at him without
speaking. A fire of sticks crackled merrily down in the room that Abner
had taken for a dairy. At last Mary Malpas brought in tea and the
children ate stolidly and shyly, talking to each other in whispers as
though they were disturbed by the presence of the stranger.
Perhaps it was also the presence of Abner that made George Malpas take
unusual notice of his wife. He treated her very much as he would have
treated the children or the dog when the fancy took him, but his faintly
patronising tone only appeared to embarrass her. When she gave him his
tea he would have kissed her, but she stiffened slightly and even
blushed, so that Abner could see the colour rising in her white neck.
Later she softened a little from her seriousness and the children too,
realising that Abner was no more than an ordinary mortal, began to raise
their voices. They sat on with the door open in the mellow evening
light, and an atmosphere of homeliness and quiet descended on the room so
happily that Morgan cried when his mother told him that it was time for
bed. During all the afternoon she had scarcely spoken to Abner, and she
seemed relieved to find a chance of escape. She puzzled him. In his
life he had only known one woman intimately, and that was Alice. He
could not help comparing the two of them. The cleanliness and refinement
of Mary Malpas became exaggerated by this comparison. Instinctively, at
first, he had allowed himself to be influenced by George’s treatment of
her, but her aloofness and reserve now made him feel that she was in some
subtle way superior. He could not say that he liked her; but he
wondered, none the less, what she was made of.
She disappeared upstairs and he and George sat on smoking in the
twilight. The sun had fallen like a plummet behind the western hills;
the valley now lay in deep shadow and only the upper air was overspread
with films of light. Night fell. Down in the valley a night-jar began
his mechanical trilling. Over by Mawne, in Dovehouse Fields, a hundred
miles away, another night-jar was beginning. A sense of new and settled
happiness descended on Abner. He had come, it seemed, to another stage
in his pilgrimage. Wolfpits was not like one of the bivouacs in which he
had sheltered with Mick Connor during this crowded week, but a resting
place. He felt that the future need not trouble him, that his feet were
firmly planted on this new soil. The only tie that held him to the past
was the memory of Alice, so strangely awakened by the presence of this
other, and so different, woman. He feared that there could be no such
happiness for her. Lying in bed in that strange room he decided that as
soon as he had earned some money he would send it to her. At least it
was his duty to return her the two sovereigns that she had slipped into
his pocket when he left her. Yet, when he remembered the life at Mawne
against which he had fretted for so long, his heart was thankful for this
release. He fell asleep.