NEXT morning Abner went with George Malpas to interview the clerk of the
works, who engaged him as a labourer at twenty-two shillings a week
off-hand. This man had been as long on the waterworks job as Gunner Eve
himself. Year after year he had led a nomadic life moving from one point
to another of the great pipe line that stretches from the valley of the
Dulas Fechen to the reservoirs above Halesby.
The piece of work on which Abner and his friends were now engaged was no
more than the result of one of the last feeble struggles of the gods of
stone against their iron masters. In this part of its course the
pipeline, crossing the swollen head waters of the Teme, had been lodged
upon a deposit of old red sandstone, a rock that was easily worked and
lent itself to Barradale’s plans. A hidden leak, caused possibly by some
obscure subsidence, had distorted its bedding. Two unsuccessful attempts
had been made to deal with it, and now the engineers had decreed that the
whole track must be deflected northwards for half a mile on to a shelf of
harder Silurian stone. The scene of these new workings was placed at the
mouth of the valley, some three miles below Wolfpits and immediately
under the shadow of two hill bastions: the high peak which culminated in
the earthwork known as Castel Ditches and a wide hog’s back known as
Callow hill.
Hither, in the early morning, Abner and George Malpas would set out
together carrying the packets of fried bacon sandwiches with which Mary
supplied them overnight. Spider, eager to follow them, would watch them
go, quivering with anxiety; but George Malpas had lately taken a dislike
to the dog and would curse her if she moved a step in their direction,
throwing a stone that made her scamper back into the garden. These
morning walks were very pleasant to Abner, and pleasant too was the
sudden change from a green solitude to the sight of working men who
swarmed in the cutting beneath their feet. A trolley way, crowded with
iron trucks that were reddened by rust and by the sandstone of the Dulas
valley from which they had come, cut through the workings, and beside it
ran a deep trough cut ready to receive the black iron pipes that were
dumped along its edge. Most of the workers were old hands at the game,
but there remained a certain amount of rough digging labour for which
Abner’s strength and his experience in the colliery made him suitable.
This was allotted to him by the foreman on the first day of his
employment.
He looked eagerly for Mick Connor, who soon showed himself and appeared
none the worse for the debauch in which he and Curly Atwell, the huge
west-countryman, had engaged. He declared he was seven pounds better for
it, expressing himself as usual in terms of the race-course, but Abner
saw from the first that their travelling acquaintance was really at an
end.
During the day’s work he did not even see George Malpas, being paired, in
his new labours, with a youth named Joseph Munn, whose face was
disfigured by a hare-lip. These two were set to work at some distance
from the rest, clearing the sub-soil from a shelf of rock where a culvert
of stone would soon be built to carry storm water from the slopes of
Callow. Chance had been kind to Abner in the selection of his companion,
for it soon appeared that Joe Munn was a black-country boy who had been
born in Dulston, and in his early days had even seen Abner himself
playing football for Halesby Swifts. He spoke Abner’s own speech, he
knew the streets that were familiar to him, and a common knowledge of
distant places is a greater bond between men than a common knowledge of
their fellows. As far as actual work was concerned Abner might well have
had a more satisfactory partner, for, physically, Munn was a typical
product of the black-country at its worst, pale of face and lank of limb.
He seemed indeed altogether too puny for the work on which they were
engaged, and only a congenital consciousness of being born to labour
induced him to accept a state that made demands above his strength.
Abner would sometimes watch him as he stood panting with the sweat
breaking out in beads along the unhealthy skin of his bossed forehead and
matting the wisps of his neutral-coloured hair. In the end their
partnership resolved itself into one in which Abner did most of the work
when the foreman was not there. And he did not grudge this, for he had
strength enough for two and so much vigour that he enjoyed the using of
it. Munn would lie down in the sun with his chin in his hands, watching
Abner at work, talking of famous cup-ties that he had seen, or of the
excitements of Dulston Wakes.
‘I don’t know how you ever come to find yourself on a job like this,’
Abner said one day.
‘It was company I wanted,’ Munn explained. ‘Before I come here I was
driving a traction injin down in Gloucestershire . . . what they call the
Forest of Dean. That was a place, if you like! The other chaps used to
go off into Cinderford and leave me alone with the engine up in those
woods. Lonely . . .! I went half balmy, straight I did! Yo’d never
guess what it was like. I used to start talking to myself for company
like. Ever done that, Abner?’
Abner laughed. Of course he had never done that.
‘So I went up to the foreman and says: “Mister, I can’t stick it.” I
couldn’t say no more, I couldn’t . . . trembling like a bloody leaf.
“What’s up with you now?” he says. “I wants company,” says I. “What you
want is a nursemaid,” says he, and gives me my money on the Saturday.
Then I comes along here. Strike, if I wasn’t glad to get away from all
those trees! And Gunner Eve, he look after me a bit. He’s a good chap,
the Gunner, ain’t he, kid?’
Working with Abner, or, more exactly, watching Abner work, Joe Munn
recovered a little of his broken spirit; but the story of its destruction
was older than his experience in the silences of the Forest of Dean. His
earliest days had been spent in a double-back house in a Dulston slum,
where, half-fed by an aged grandmother, he had made the pallid growth of
a potato sprouting in a cellar. Thence he had passed to the children’s
ward of Dulston workhouse, being shot out at the age of fourteen to make
his best of the world. Even now he laboured, without knowing it, under
the shadows and suppressions of those early days. These summer mornings,
working with Abner, were the happiest that he had ever known. They
became sound friends in a partnership wherein Abner was canonised as a
hero and protector, a position which he sustained with an amused
tolerance.
His relation with George Malpas remained equally happy. They always
walked down to work together in the morning, but after that Abner rarely
saw his friend, for Wolfpits held no attraction for him, and he preferred
to take himself, when the day’s work was over, to the Pound House, or
sometimes to the old people at the Buffalo. In a few weeks Abner’s
temporary lodging had become a permanency. Mary Malpas, in consultation
with her husband, had settled the sum that he should pay for bed and
keep, and Wolfpits itself, that sinister and desolate mansion, had become
a pleasant and homely place.
At first he never accompanied George on his evening visits to the Pound
House. It pleased him better to walk home up the valley in the cool of
the evening and sluice his head and back beneath a pump of cold spring
water that stood in the deserted stable-yard. Then Mary would give him
his tea, always with the same air of watchful and remote reserve, and he
would smoke his pipe in the garden, talking to the children who, in the
confidence of their own secret alliance, were gradually becoming a little
more friendly. Or he would play with Spider, who had now learnt to take
a place near his chair at meal times in the hope of being fed with scraps
from Abner’s plate.
Sometimes, too, he would lean on the fence watching old Drew at work in
his garden. The old labourer was as hardy as the knotted oak that he
resembled. His day’s work began before dawn: he had more than three
miles to walk to the farm on which he was employed, but when he returned
in the evening after trudging the fields all day, he could never rest,
but must be putting his strip of garden in order so intently that he
scarcely had time to answer Abner’s questions, staring up at him with
those patient, over-burdened eyes. His wages, which were regulated by
his age rather than his capacity for labour, were only twelve shillings a
week, so that his garden produce was really essential to his life. When
he had finished his gardening, or when the light failed, he would retire
to his kitchen and drink a crude, sweet spirit that he distilled from
turnips. Sometimes at night they would hear him singing to himself the
innumerable obscene verses of Devonshire folk-songs. Then, when he could
sing no longer, he would drag his twisted limbs upstairs and sleep like a
log in the certainty of waking before dawn to set out on his labours
again. His life indeed had been so solitary that he distrusted any
intrusion, and Abner had known him and spoken with him for many weeks
before he felt that his presence was welcome.
The other tenant of Wolfpits he rarely saw, though her five years in the
old house had made her a confidante of Mary, and indeed her principal
refuge in domestic emergencies. Sometimes when he came home at night he
would find her talking to Mary in the kitchen, but at the sight of him
she scuttled away so that he saw no more of her than one sees of a
rabbit’s vanishing tail.
Mary Malpas did not evade him in this primitive fashion and yet, even
when he had been living at Wolfpits for more than a month, he felt that
he really knew her no better than the fugitive Mrs Mamble. He could find
no parallel to her in the history of his dealings with Alice at Mawne.
The thing for which Alice had been mostly concerned was her dignity as
mistress of John Fellows’s house, and this she had been active to assert.
Mary Malpas, on the other hand, had no need to stand upon her dignity.
It was instinct in the refinement of her speech and even more in her
silence. The fact that her father had been a swindler and a suicide
could never rob her of it. Abner fancied for a time that the awkwardness
between them was caused by the way in which he had been suddenly thrust
upon her household. He felt that he might stand to her as a symbol of a
new slight inflicted on her by her husband. Otherwise why should she
deny him the least suspicion of human contact? He even made an awkward
attempt to settle the matter by asking her if she would not be better
pleased if he tried to find another lodging.
‘If I’m in the way like,’ he told her, ‘just you say so, and I’ll be
off.’
‘Why should you think that?’ she said, without the least sign of emotion.
‘There’s no reason why you should go away . . . if you are comfortable.’
She didn’t say that they were glad to have him, though the fact remained
that his money was useful to them. She didn’t say that they would be
sorry to lose him. He simply felt that she had made him look foolish,
and as this was the usual result of his dealings with her in spite of her
politeness and her care for his comfort he gave up trying to find out
what she was made of, and settled down to his life at Wolfpits as though
she had nothing to do with it.
He had always been fond of dogs and children, and Gladys, Morgan, and
Spider soon became devoted to him. Morgan was evidently his mother’s
favourite, and the little girl soon took a shy but definite fancy to
Abner, wandering alone down the lane in the hope of meeting him on his
way home from work and riding back to Wolfpits perched on his shoulder.
She would watch him gravely while he stripped and swilled himself in the
stableyard, standing by with a towel ready to catch the beads of water
that sparkled on his eyebrows and his hair. Then hand in hand they would
wander round the farmstead, visiting the pigsties and the barn in which
the fowls were housed and searching for the nests of broody hens in the
hedgerows. She loved above all things to sit upon his shoulder when she
carried home the eggs in the small cup of her hands. She liked his
hugeness and his strength, and rather despised Morgan for the fact that
he was his mother’s boy.
In those hills autumn came early, and soon sunset brought with it a hint
of evening cold. The air of the mountains drooped upon the plain as soon
as the western summits hid the sun, and in a little while their evenings
were of lamplight. When Abner trudged home at night he could see the
linnets gathering together for their autumn flights, hear the whir of
their wings and their tender, reedy notes. Starlings, southward bound,
swept the air in wheeling cohorts, and swifts darted wildly round the
chimneys of Wolfpits. Wood fires were lighted in the kitchen grate at
night, and when Abner had finished his tea he would settle down on the
right hand of the fireplace with a pile of cut logs at his feet.
At first he looked forward to these evenings with some anxiety, feeling
that the presence of this silent and, as he thought, unsympathetic woman,
would make him uncomfortable; but strangely enough this did not happen.
The devotion of Gladys put him at his ease and occupied him so much that
he did not have to speak to her mother. When first the fire was lighted
Mary Malpas would move about the house on her own business. Abner would
hear her talking softly to Morgan in the scullery while Gladys chattered
to him in the flickering light that filled the room with moving shadows.
Later, like a shadow herself, Mary would return with the boy and settle
herself softly in the chair on the other side of the fire. Morgan would
struggle up on to her knee and cuddle into his mother’s breast, and
Gladys, not to be outdone, would climb on Abner’s knee and beg him to
tell her stories. He knew no stories for children, for he had never had
a mother to tell them to him, but he would talk to her about Mawne and
the blind pit-ponies, about the rabbits that lived in Dovehouse fields,
about Tiger and the excitements of the wakes with their galloping horses
and soaring swing-boats. Gladys had never seen a fair and these
descriptions fired her imagination most.
‘Why ain’t there no swing-boats here, mother?’ she would ask.
‘Because there aren’t enough children to go up in them. You’ll see them
some day.’
‘Abner’ll take me to see his; won’t you, Abner?’
By this time of the evening, Morgan, curled up on his mother’s lap, was
usually as sleepy as Spider who lay like a hedgehog on the hearth between
them. Mary sat there hugging the child in her arms and never speaking
for fear that she might disturb him, and Gladys, impressed by the silence
of the firelit room, would snuggle closer to Abner and talk to him in
whispers that her mother could not hear. They sat on either side of the
fire in these strangely divided camps, and Abner would become aware of
the beauty and placidity of this silent woman sitting still in the gloom
with firelight playing in her hair, listening all the time though she did
not move, unless it were to touch with her lips the forehead of her
sleeping child. He used to watch her and wonder what she was thinking.
He could not help watching her as she sat like a statue staring at the
fire. When she turned her eyes towards him he would look away. He
became so used to her silent company that he could not have been happy
without it.
The days shortened, the pollard elms turned gold and the rusty chestnut
leaves in the avenue fell of their own heaviness. The drowsiness of
summer had passed and a new restlessness seized him. He could not be
contented with this peaceful static existence into which he found himself
sinking. The silence of Mary Malpas lay on him like a heavy spell. He
had rested enough and could no longer be contented to drowse before the
fire with a child in his arms. The peace of Wolfpits could tempt him no
longer when the chill autumn air stimulated him to action and the natural
violence of youth. He felt that what he wanted was the society of men
and the pursuits of manliness.
Once or twice he walked down to Chapel Green in the evening and drank a
pint with the labourers who gathered in the Buffalo under the eye of old
Mrs Malpas, but he found that he couldn’t get on with her. She was
always restrained and severe, giving him the impression that she had
taken a dislike to him from the first, and when she talked to him he felt
that she was trying in her own superior way to find out exactly what her
daughter-in-law was doing at Wolfpits. Even her questions about the
children seemed to him to be dictated by malevolent curiosity rather than
by affection. He felt that he was like a child in her hands and that she
could get what she liked out of him. When he went to the Buffalo he had
expected to find the cloggers there, but they did little more than sleep
in that dismal house, going for their pleasures to the relative gaiety
and light of the Pound House, where they could do as they liked. With
the labourers at the Buffalo Abner had nothing in common. He understood
nothing of their talk of crops and beasts and weather even when he could
penetrate the meaning of their speech. He gave the Buffalo up as a bad
job and went to the Pound House himself.
He used to go along there with George Malpas as soon as the whistle
signalled that the day’s work was at an end, and there, in a brighter
light and in the stir of a roaring business he found an atmosphere more
suited to his restless spirit. Sometimes he sat with George Malpas; but
George was a gloomy drinker and better company when he was sober, so more
often he took his seat next to Gunner Eve, who drank nothing but spirits,
and sometimes, under their influence, would talk to him of his old days
of service in the navy, of blue Pacific havens, palm-huts with brown
women, or sometimes of that savage African river on which he had lost his
eye. That was the kind of life that Abner wanted. In the Gunner’s
stories a vista of adventure opened before him. The liquor made him
think that such was the only life for a man. The foreman’s tales of
amorous adventure enthralled him. Therein lay the proper use of women.
There was only one woman in the Pound House: Susie Hind, the fine,
strapping girl whose presence had disturbed him on his first visit to the
inn with George. Mrs Malpas’s hints had led him to believe that she was
an old flame of George’s. He found himself comparing her with George’s
wife and thinking of the silence and remoteness of Mary he felt it was
easy to understand why George had been led away. The freedom of Susie’s
manners had suggested that she was attainable. Abner, listening to the
gunner’s adventures, brooded on this, and the more he did so the more
desirable Susie became. There seemed to him no reason why he should not
possess her. Every night he sat in the Pound House looking at her. He
drank more than he need have done simply in order that he might remain in
her presence. This inflamed his imagination and magnified in his eyes
the physical elegance which she regarded as necessary to her calling, but
he hardly dared to speak to her openly in this concourse of men, and when
she came near him with her bold but beautiful eyes, his heart beat wildly
and he could say nothing. He usually stayed in the alehouse till closing
time and walked back to Wolfpits through the haunted night arm-in-arm
with George Malpas who was by this time a little sentimental. In one of
these walks he asked George about his relations with Susie.
‘Oh, she’s all right, you can take my word for that,’ said George with a
laugh.
‘Yo’ve seen a good bit of her,’ said Abner.
‘All I want to,’ George replied, with a wink that was invisible in the
darkness.
Abner was silent and he continued: ‘You’d best go easy for a bit, though.
For the time being she’s took up with that devil Badger. But that won’t
last. I know our Susie, bless her heart! Susie has her fancies.’
Abner knew already that there was something between Susie Hind and
Badger. He had watched their whispers jealously often enough. Now he
began to examine their intimacies more closely. The general unpopularity
of Badger’s occupation only helped to increase his jealousy. When he saw
their hands meet over the counter he felt that the natural thing to do
would be to rise from his seat, take Badger by the neck and throw him out
of the bar. He measured the thickset keeper with a fighter’s eye, and
felt confident that he was a match for him. Meanwhile he must bide his
time.
Every night he went regularly to the Pound House and sat there waiting
for his opportunity, never doubting but that he would get her when the
time came. By the mere habit of his presence a sort of relationship was
established between them, for Abner’s strength and his fairness pleased
her, and she would sometimes pause for a moment in her business, standing
close to him with a tray under her arm and one hand on her hip. The
Gunner used to chaff her as she stood there. He had done enough
lovemaking in his young days and now his only attitude towards women was
one of jovial cynicism. No doubt the foreman thought that Susie stayed
because she enjoyed his teasing; but Abner knew better. He knew it was
himself, not Eve, that Susie was watching. Between them, unseen by the
other, the air was charged with potential passion like the sky of a hot
night, placid and slumberous yet ready to burst into lightning. He could
laugh at Gunner Eve, this dry old man who vainly imagined that he was
pleasing her fancy. She smiled at Eve, but all the time her smouldering
eyes were fixed on Abner, and he knew that she heard nothing. Then
Badger would come in and handle her as if he were her master. Abner did
not even mind this, for he saw that she was beginning to treat the keeper
as a habit and her eyes did not caress him secretly. He began to feel
that he could afford to despise Badger, but he hated him none the less.
In those days he saw little of George Malpas at the Pound House. Soon
after Abner began to visit Mainstone regularly George had transferred his
custom to an inn in Lesswardine. Abner did not ask him why he had done
this, for to have done so might easily have compromised their friendship.
If George preferred to spend his evenings away from his lodger’s eyes,
well and good. On the other hand he did renew his travelling
acquaintance with Mick Connor, who remained one of the best customers of
the Pound House. Mick had always been a generous drinker. When he was
in low water he was not ashamed of sponging on his pals, but in these
days he seemed never to be short of money, and this, together with the
glibness of his tongue, made him a popular figure in the alehouse. Abner
wondered where the money came from, for Mick’s wages were the same as his
own, and though he knew that the Irishman was a born gambler he could
scarcely believe in the permanence of his friend’s luck.
Quite by chance he discovered the source of Mick’s income. One Sunday
morning he had walked down to the Pound House followed by the dog Spider
when Mick fell in with him by the way. He surveyed Spider with a
professional eye.
‘That’s a likely lookin’ dog,’ said Mick.
‘Ay, she’s all right,’ said Abner.
‘Give me a bitch every time for hunt’n . . . Ah, ye divil, get away wud
you!’
Spider had suddenly become wildly interested in the Irishman’s person and
was jumping up and smelling at the tails of his coat.
‘That’s a wise dog,’ said Mick. ‘I’d be glad of a dog the like of that
on a moonlight night.’
Abner had guessed what he meant, but Mick, who could never resist the
chance of producing a sensation, opened his coat and showed him the
contents of a game pocket that he had constructed by making a slit in the
lining. It was a fine cock-pheasant, splendid in its chestnut autumn
plumage. Mick displayed it sentimentally. ‘Doesn’t that make your teeth
water?’ he said. ‘God, you could ate it in your hand the way it is! And
that bird do be worth a good half-crown in Craven Arms.’
‘Where d’you get him?’ said Abner.
‘You ask Mr bloody Badger,’ Mick replied with a wink.
Abner pressed him, and he went on to explain that he and Curly Atwell and
one or two others had developed a plan of poaching on a commercial scale.
A man named Harford, a rabbit merchant in Craven Arms, the railway
junction and cattle-market over the hills, had arranged to deal with
their produce. Naturally, in such a dangerous business, he bought cheap
and sold dear; but the proceeds of their sport were enough to keep the
whole gang in unlimited liquor, the thing that they needed most.
‘It’s the only way to keep clear of the buttermilk cure,’ said Mick, ‘the
way they pay us in this cursed hole.’
He ended by pressing Abner to join them, pointing out that Spider would
be a useful ally, and Abner, without any hesitation, accepted. He was
glad of anything with a spice of adventure in it to give vent to his
energies. He didn’t care much about the money even though he remembered
that he had not yet been able to send Alice her two pounds, but it
pleased him to think that this was another way of getting even with
Badger, a feeling in which Mick, with no more definite reason than an
instinctive hatred of gamekeepers, concurred.
In this way there began a series of midnight adventures that were a great
joy to Abner and an even greater to George’s dog, who asked nothing
better in her sport than the help of human allies. On these nights of
misty moonlight the secret beauty of the country-side smote on Abner’s
heart though he knew nothing of it but that he was happy. In the daytime
the land was dead and nothing lived in it but he and his fellow men, but
when evening came the hills, the woodlands, the rivers and the upland
wastes of heather tingled with life. Something secret and timid that
sunlight numbed into a protective sleep, now stirred and wakened. The
voices of the rivers changed; they were no longer only torrents of swift
water but living things. Trees that in day were silent awoke and
whispered in the night. Amid miracles of nocturnal beauty Abner walked
unseeing. He only knew that he lived more fully, more intensely in the
night.
His senses quickened. His eyes were like the sharp eyes of a hunting owl
so that he felt that in daylight he had been blind. His ears were tuned
to an exquisite degree of sensitiveness. The cracking of a twig, a
distant step on leaves, the least tremor of a growing tree, sent a shock
of alert pleasure into his brain. And the impalpable cool mist of autumn
sharpened his scent to a keenness that delighted him. This state of
acute sensitiveness was the basis on which the more than physical thrill
of imminent danger was imposed. The labourers who worked on the farms of
Squire Delahay’s estate were naturally in league with Badger against the
depredations of these foreigners. Each of them was himself a poacher in
a quiet way; but they poached for the pot rather than for the market and
felt that the presence of Mick and his gang was a menace to their
privileges. These men, if less intelligent, were as skilled in woodcraft
as the Irishman himself, and Mick’s friends followed their craft in a
constant peril of discovery.
It was a profitable adventure. Abner soon found that his wages were
trebled. Grouse from the mountains, pheasants from the spinneys,
partridges from the stubbles, all found their way into Mick Connor’s bag
and were driven in a ragman’s cart to Craven Arms. Mick was content to
leave the rabbits to the labourers who spied upon him. He spent his
money wildly. It even pleased him to treat Badger to drinks in the Pound
House bar, knowing very well that the keeper guessed where the money came
from.
In November salmon began to run up the Barbel to meet the winter floods,
and Mick Connor was more than ever in his element, remembering desperate
days upon the Barrow when he was a boy. Salmon spearing was to Abner the
most exciting pastime of all: the stealthy approach to the riverside up
to his knees in the ditches of the water-meadows: the milky whiteness of
November fogs; the nearing clamour of the river roaring whitely over
stickles into the salmon pool where it lay dumb and black: Mick Connor’s
hoarse whispers, the lumbering shadow of Curly Atwell, and, in the
darkness, the swirl of an eddy black as ink.
‘Ready . . .’ Mick would whisper, and suddenly a flare of light,
reddening faces, casting grotesque shadows, lighting the yellow
tree-tops, making a beacon for miles of dreamy country, as though the
forest were aflame. The night sounds vanished from Abner’s ears. The
woods held their breath and listened. He could hear nothing of the
river’s tumult—only the harsh breathing of Atwell and the hiss of the
colza flare.
‘By the houly! Look at him! Fourteen pounds if he’s an ounce!’
The shadow of a lifted arm against the light. A violent descent, and
then a swirl in the black water and the great fish struggling on the
bank. For Mick Connor never missed his mark.
‘Out with the light!’ And then a sudden darkness in which the roar of
the stickle and the vague noises of the trees returned.
This curious insulation, the way in which light blinded their pickets of
alarm, was the great danger of salmon-spearing. The glare in the
tree-tops would always give them away if Badger and his men were on the
watch; and one frosty, owl-haunted night in the middle of November they
had a narrow shave. Mick Connor was leaning over the bank with lifted
spear when Abner heard the breaking of a stick. A man cursed as he
floundered in a ditch not twenty yards away. Abner, who doubted the
quickness of Atwell, smothered the flare with his hands. It scorched the
horny skin of his palms, but it gave the signal of alarm. On that side
of the pool the current had undercut the marly bank so that the poachers
could not be seen, but Abner’s ears recognised the sound of Badger’s
voice. The keeper’s party ran towards the bank. A single man, the
foremost, leapt down beside them, shouting that he had got them. Abner
let out from the shoulder in the dark. His fist met the flesh of a man’s
face. The man gave a cry. For all he knew it might have been the face
of Curly Atwell, but it gave him a good feeling in the dark, for he felt
instinctively that it was Badger’s. They left their spear on the bank,
plunging into the swift stickle above the pool, and found refuge in a
wood. Some one fired after them. He fired low, and the twigs snapped
about them. Abner plunged on through the wood. He knew that he was
running for his life. It was good to be running for his life. He went
on crashing through the undergrowth of the wood battling with
back-springing saplings, torn with briers, laughing, curiously, wildly
exultant. He did not stop to think that he had lost touch with the
others. In an affair of this kind each must look to himself. He only
knew that he had escaped out of the mouth of danger. His head spun with
the elation of his heart pumping blood into his brain. In that moment he
felt that he had courage for anything, and it pleased him particularly to
think that Badger had suffered this defeat.
He emerged from the woods into open fields, so calm under the peace of
night that it was hard to believe that any human violence had lately
invaded them. Westward the quiet hills stood folded for the night. A
gibbous moon rose languidly above the mists. He stood in the middle of
the field, tingling to his finger-tips. He forgot that his legs were
sodden with muddy water, so splendidly his body glowed. It was
ridiculous to think of crossing the hills to Wolfpits, for it was no more
than nine o’clock. This was not a time for sleep but for living. He
turned his steps in the direction of the Pound House.
Just before closing time he reached it. One end of the bar was full of
cloggers, to whom Wigan Joe was reeling off Lancashire stories. The
other was unusually empty, for the Gunner and most of his company had
left the house for want, perhaps, of Mick Connor, who was their principal
entertainer. Susie stood behind the counter at the deserted end of the
bar swilling dirty glasses, wiping them one after another, and listening
all the time to the clogger’s stories, many of which she had heard before
the same evening, since Wigan Joe had a way of running through his
repertoire and beginning again like an automatic musical-box when the
liquor was in him. As Abner entered the bar Mr Hind appeared in the door
of the kitchen.
‘I’m goin’ up, Susie,’ he said with a jerk of his head in the direction
of the staircase. ‘Two minutes to go, and then lock up.’
She said, ‘All right, dad,’ carelessly, never looking at him, for her
eyes were on Abner. ‘Night, all!’ Mr Hind muttered as he disappeared.
Abner went straight up to her. The mood of physical triumph and elation
was still on him, and she must have known that there was something
strange about him since, for the first time, she lowered her eyes.
‘I want a word with you, Susie,’ he said, addressing her thus for the
first time.
‘Best hurry up, then,’ she said, smiling. ‘It’s only two minutes afore
we close. What are you taking?’
‘Give us a double gin,’ he said, and while she poured the limpid spirit
into a clean glass he asked her what she was doing on Sunday afternoon.
She wouldn’t answer him. ‘Look what good measure I’ve given you,’ she
said, handing him his glass.
He put the drink down on the counter. ‘You’re not goin’ to put me off
like that,’ he said. She murmured something about Mr Badger.
‘Damn you and your Badgers,’ he said. ‘What about to-night, then?’
‘Oh, don’t be soft! Look at the time. It’s just on ten.’
‘Get on with you! The time don’t matter.’
‘No, I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘Of course I couldn’t. Father’s gone
upstairs.’ The clock struck ten. Susie called, ‘Time, please!’ and the
cloggers rose to go in the middle of one of Wigan Joe’s most complicated
stories. They moved toward the door in a bunch, bidding good-night to
Susie, who stood waiting with the key in her hand. Abner stayed by the
bar finishing his gin. The last good-nights echoed down the street.
Susie stood at the open door waiting for him.
‘Come on, do!’ she said. ‘It’s after time.’
‘Why shouldn’t I stay here?’ he said, with a laugh.
‘You know as well as I do why,’ she said, with a managing air. ‘That new
policeman, Bastard’s got eyes like a weasel.’
‘Is that all?’ he asked.
‘Yes, of course that’s all.’
He came to the door and quickly closed it, then took her in his arms and
kissed her. She returned his kisses.
‘Leave go of me now,’ she whispered. ‘Go out in the lane while I lock up
and then come round to the back door, but don’t make too much row about
it.’
‘Yo’m not codding me?’
‘Of course I’m not.’
She closed the door after him, saying ‘good-night’ in a clear voice for
the benefit of the problematical constable. He heard her lock the door
and slip an iron bar across into its sockets. The lighted windows went
black. He slipped round to the back of the house and stood waiting in
the angle that it made with an outhouse where dry bracken was stored.
For a long time, as it seemed, he stood there staring at the faint and
frosty stars. Then the door opened softly. She did not speak, but he
stole on tiptoe to the door and entered the kitchen. Inside it was quite
dark, for the shutters were closed and the fire banked down. He could
not see her, being only conscious of her warm and fragrant presence. He
groped in the dark, suddenly finding her face on his own.
‘My . . . how cold you are!’ she whispered.
Half an hour later she let him out into the yard, with more tender
whispers of farewell and warnings that her father slept lightly. For a
few minutes he stood away from the moonlight in the shadow of the house,
bewildered, stunned. He saw the white road stretching in the direction
of Chapel Green and Wolfpits, but it meant no more to him than if it had
led to the world’s end. He was no longer a part of the world. He
towered above it supreme and isolated in the flame of his own throbbing
exaltation. He had no need of friends or houses or rest, no memory of
the past, no thought for the future. He stood there self-sufficient and
unassailable.
A little later he became aware of the fact that his feet were carrying
him automatically over the moon-lit road toward the hills, but he was
almost unconscious of his progress, and it filled him with a sort of mild
surprise when he saw familiar landmarks of the road loom up before him,
grow clear, and fall away behind. His footsteps rang upon the iron road
as though he were shod with steel. From the brow of the hill above
Wolfpits he saw the basin of the Folly Brook brimmed with mist. The
gables of the house rose up into the moonlight, the hills stood black
behind. Under the heavy chestnuts of the avenue it was almost dark; the
water in the ruts had frozen to a thin crust so that the surface was
curiously splashed with moonlight and with ice. Fifty yards in front of
him he saw a figure moving with lurches from side to side of the lane.
At first he thought it was a stray bullock, but there was something human
in its movements and so he leapt to the conclusion that it was old man
Drew rolling home drunk with sweet turnip from the cottage of some
friend. The figure leaned for a moment against a stone wall, and Abner,
coming abreast of it, saw that the drunken man was George Malpas.
‘Hallo, George, what’s up?’ he called.
‘God, Abner, is that you?’ George murmured thickly. ‘I haven’t half got
a drop, I haven’t!’ The situation amused George so much that he shook
with weak laughter.
‘Come on, then, old son!’ said Abner, taking him by the arm. Strong as
he was he found it difficult to steer a straight course. George, having
once submitted to the direction of another will, now became somnolent.
Abner almost had to carry him up the garden path.
A light burned in the kitchen, and on the doorstep Mary stood waiting for
them. She looked very frail and beautiful in the light of candles. From
the first her eyes had taken in the situation, and she offered no spoken
comment on it though her mouth showed that she was suffering the shame of
the situation.
‘Give me a hand upstairs with him, please,’ she said.
The excuses that Abner was ready to offer for his friend died on his
lips. Between them they directed the steps of George upstairs. When he
reached the bedroom he stared about him as though he had never been there
before, and then, giving the problem up, lurched over on to the bed
covering his head with his hands.
‘We’d best get his boots off,’ said Abner.
He took the right and Mary the left. It was a strange thing how they had
to wrestle with the leather laces and how tightly the boots stuck to his
inanimate feet.
‘Now he’s all right,’ said Abner, when the job was finished. ‘He’ll come
up like a daisy in the morning, never fear!’
She did not reply to him but stood with the candlestick in her hand
staring at her husband’s body.
‘Will you come downstairs with me, please?’ she said.
Abner had not bargained for this. He could not think what she wanted of
him, but he could not very well refuse her, and so he followed her down
the creaking stairs into the kitchen. She put the candle on the table
and faced him silently from the other side. Then she said:—
‘Tell me all about it, please . . . everything.’
There was nothing to tell her. He said that he had found George leaning
up against a wall in the avenue and helped him over the last lap.
‘Were you at the Pound House to-night?’
‘Yes, I looked in just on closing time.’
‘Then I’m sure that you know. Please tell me!’
‘I’ve told you. I don’t know nothing.’
‘I don’t believe you . . . not if you was at the Pound House. That’s
where he gets it.’
‘Well, you know more about it nor me then,’ said Abner.
‘Don’t talk to me like that! I know . . . I’m not a child.’
‘It’s no good talkin’ like that. A chap must take a drop in and out.
It’s human nature.’
‘Oh, it isn’t the drink!’ she said. ‘He doesn’t go to that place only
for the drink. I should have thought you being with him would keep him
straight.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Yes, you do,’ she said, striking the table with her clenched fist. ‘You
know . . . you know. . . . It’s that woman!’
‘I don’t know naught of George’s women,’ said Abner obstinately.
‘Then you’ve no eyes,’ she said, with a gesture of scorn. ‘The woman at
the Pound House!’ She blazed with a white anger: ‘That dark-eyed devil
that’s been after him these months, that Susie Hind . . .’
‘Oh, her . . .’ said Abner, with a laugh.
‘Don’t you put me off!’ she cried. ‘Don’t put me off! It’s not for me,
it’s for his children. You see, I know, so you’d best tell me.’
‘I can tell you one thing,’ he said. ‘George ain’t been with Susie Hind
to-night.’
She clenched her hands furiously. ‘You’re only telling me lies . . .
lies. How do you know? How do you know?’
‘How do I know? I like that! I know because I’ve been with her myself.’
He thought it was a fine and brutal thing to say. With the same words he
had rescued his friend from an awkward suspicion and proclaimed the thing
that he had been wanting to shout to the stars on his way home. He had
been burning to share his triumph with some one. George would have heard
it if he hadn’t been so drunk. Now it was out; he had got it off his
chest; he stood there smiling and triumphant, wondering what she could
say next.
‘So you needn’t vex yourself about poor old George,’ he said.
For a second she stared at him. The white anger died out of her face.
She became suddenly red. Her clenched fingers opened and she clutched at
the table. Then she gave a sudden, choking gasp, and spoke:—
‘You . . .’ she said, ‘you . . . ! Oh, I shouldn’t have thought it of
you!’
‘What’s up with you now?’ he said, good-humouredly. Her body was shaken
with a fit of sobbing and she left him staring in the candlelight.