NEXT morning when Abner came downstairs in the dark he found George
making himself a cup of tea in the kitchen.
‘That you, Abner?’ he said, turning his neck gingerly as though it hurt
his head to speak. ‘God! It’s lifting the top of my skull off! This
dose’ll last me for a bit. Mind you, I wasn’t so boozed I can’t remember
what happened. I should have slept up against that old wall if you
hadn’t come along. You’m a good pal, Abner.’ At this point his voice
gave out. ‘Have a spot of tea?’ he said in a hoarse whisper.
As usual they walked down the valley together at dawn. The fields lay
hoary with rime, so that the light of dawn was like cloudy moonlight.
Their heels crunched into the brittle ice of the wheel-ruts. Before
them, on the white road, ran the wayward pattern of Spider’s dancing
feet. Not a bird sang. The cold air gripped their temples. It was as
though winter were closing on the world and those who dwelt in it like an
iron vice. Dawn whitened beyond Castel Ditches: light without heat—light
reflected from ice. But the steady walking thawed their limbs and George
was soon asking in a husky voice for details of what had happened the
night before. Something in Mary’s attitude when they woke that morning
had struck him as unusual. He guessed that she had found a new
grievance, and was anxious to know what she had said. He laughed when
Abner told him that she had questioned him on the subject of Susie:
laughed till the cold air choked him.
‘They’m all the same, the women,’ he said. ‘Jealous . . . that’s the top
and bottom of them. What did you tell her?’
‘Said I hadn’t seen you at the Pound House.’
‘God! You didn’t say I’d been to Lesswardine?’
‘I dain’t know naught about it.’
‘And the less you know the better, or you’ll be having these women buzz
round you like flies. You can tell our Mary what you like, but you’ll
need to keep your eyes skinned with mother. I’ve got to bide on the
right side of the old woman or it’s all up. She’ll have it out of you
before you know you’re there.’
By this time they had reached the lower end of the valley to which the
cloggers had lately transferred their work. The whole gang were now
housed in the Buffalo and the other scattered cottages of Chapel Green,
but a couple of tents were left standing on the banks of the Folly Brook
and the smoke of a wood-fire went up blue into the air.
‘I can’t make mother out,’ George grumbled. ‘Here she is with Wigan Joe
and the rest of them in the house: a mint of money for the asking, and
she goes scaring them over to Mainstone with her long face. If I had the
Buffalo I’d soon see they spent their money in the house. It’s as good
as robbing me the way she sends them away. She don’t want the money, but
I want it bad enough, God knows!’
They parted when they reached the workings. George whistled to Spider,
but the dog only wagged her tail and then dived into a trench, preferring
to stay with Abner. Munn appeared, rubbing his hands with cold. Abner
laughed at him.
‘Put your back into it, Joe, and you’ll soon feel right,’ he said.
The day’s work began. A red sun rose sluggishly, half frozen. The light
glinted on the long line of swinging picks and the sounds of the work
rose cheerily in the thin air. Very different was this from the subdued
activity of summer. The labourers did not work only for money but
because the exertion sent the blood tingling warm into their hands and
feet. Work was an ecstasy and to Abner a greater ecstasy than to the
rest of them. He thought of Susie and of the night before. He whistled
as he worked for sheer physical joy, rejoicing in his strength, for now
once more, after months of soft disuse, his body was finding its right
expression and coming splendidly to its own. He stretched his limbs in
the sunlight, recapturing the moments of physical exaltation that used to
come to him when the Mawne United team stepped out on to the smooth turf
of the Albion ground, a company of clean and splendid athletes. And all
the time, beneath the pleasant anodyne of work, his body glowed with a
rich contentment, knowing that in a few hours night would come and Susie
be clinging in his arms again.
He had no fear that she would forsake him. He felt, in every fibre of
his body that he was a match, and more than a match for Badger. Having
once attained her he knew that he could keep her; and in this he was not
deceived, for Susie, having looked on him and found that he was good, had
taken a fancy to him and now kept pace with his passion, asking as much
as he could give. Every evening, as was already his custom, he would go
to the Pound House and take his seat beside Gunner Eve; but now he no
longer needed to follow Susie with his eyes, was no longer tortured with
vague jealousies, for when she passed him he could feel her soften and
respond to his presence. Sometimes, when no one was looking, she would
turn her head in his direction and for a moment their eyes would meet.
He did not care when men spoke to her lightly or placed their hands upon
her arm, for now he knew that she belonged to him and could be his for
the asking. The events of the first night were repeated many times. Now
a single whisper was enough to ensure that when the alehouse was empty
and Mr Hind safely in bed, the kitchen door would be opened softly and
Susie waiting for him in the warm darkness. It amused Abner to see the
coldness that she now showed toward Badger. The keeper was puzzled, for
all their love-making was secret and nocturnal, and Susie and Abner never
appeared in public together. Badger knew that for some unknown reason he
had lost her, and this made him more persistent than ever in his
attentions, being far too important in his own estimation to be discarded
without good reason. Abner laughed to see his irritation. He and Susie
laughed together in the night. ‘I can’t imagine whatever I saw in him,’
she said.
At the end of November Susie went away for a week to stay with her
grandparents in Hereford. Without her the Pound House meant nothing to
Abner, and without considering that his absence might be noticed, he
drifted back into his old habit of returning to Wolfpits in the evening.
It was now more than a month since he had done this, and in the interval
he had scarcely spoken to Mary Malpas. Returning, and expecting to pick
up the threads of the old life exactly as he had left them, he was
surprised to find the atmosphere of Wolfpits curiously changed. The
attitude of Mary herself was cold and unfriendly. He found it difficult
to make headway against it, for she scarcely spoke to him, and even the
children seemed to have become infected with their mother’s distrust. It
was true that they had seen so little of him as almost to have forgotten
him, but it seemed strange that his old favourite, Gladys, no longer came
instinctively to his arms. He could not accept the change without a
protest. One evening, finding Mary alone, he tackled her.
‘What’s come over you?’ he said.
‘Nothing’s come over me. What do you mean?’ she replied coldly.
‘Yo’m different . . . like you was scared of me. What have I done?’
‘You know best. You know what you told me . . . that night,’ she said,
with tight lips.
‘That’s nothing to do with you,’ he said.
‘No . . . Nothing.’
‘Then what’s up with you?’
She laughed uneasily and went into the scullery. Abner was seized with
sudden rage. It didn’t surprise him that George couldn’t get on with
her. Mrs Malpas was right. She was trying to play the lady with him.
With a woman like that it was useless trying to be frank. He could read
suspicion into everything that she did. When Gladys, who was now
regaining her confidence, climbed on to his knee, she followed the child
with anxious eyes as though she feared that he would corrupt her. He
determined to have the matter out with her, but she never gave him a
chance, arranging carefully that they should never be alone. For this or
for some other obscure reason she always invited her neighbour, Mrs
Mamble, to come in and sit with her in the evening. This old woman,
innocent of the strange relation between them, would sit in front of the
fire talking incessantly of her dead husband and her distant relatives
down Tenbury way. She had a brother who kept a small shop in a hamlet
called Far Forest, and was never tired of talking of his importance as an
elder of the local Wesleyan synod and the achievements of her nephew
James, whom his father had destined for the ministry. The old woman
tried to entertain them both with these recitals, but Abner had little
patience with her, and tried to forget that she was there. He sat
reading the football news in the last Sunday’s _People_; but even this
could not shut out the sound of her slow, insistent voice. One night he
asked for pen and paper and wrote a short but laborious note to Alice,
enclosing a postal order for two pounds, which he had bought in Chapel
Green. Mary watched him all the time that he was writing.
‘Ah, yo’m curious, bain’t yo’?’ he thought. ‘Pretending to take no heed
of me, but yo’d give your eyes to see what I’ve written.’
Indeed she offered to post the letter for him; but he declined, putting
it in his pocket with a laugh.
In the end he found these evenings at Wolfpits so uncomfortable that he
was glad when Mick Connor inveigled him into a new expedition against
Badger’s preserves. By this time the keeper had looked about him and
made plans for defending his master’s property, so that the game was
getting more dangerous every day. Badger had made friends with Constable
Bastard, the new policeman, who had been drafted to Mainstone from
Shrewsbury and looked upon poaching with the uncharitable eye of a
townsman. To the great embarrassment of Mr Hind, who, not unreasonably,
lived in terror of the licensing justices, and had not yet determined in
what degree the new policeman was corruptible, Bastard began to take an
interest in the customers of the Pound House, poking his whiskered face
inside the taproom every evening and taking count of the company like a
shepherd numbering his sheep. Mr Hind’s heart sank when he found that
the constable was a teetotaller. The appearance of Bastard’s face in the
doorway made him tremble for his licence, though these visits only meant
that the keeper and the policeman were working together, hoping to
identify the authors of each poaching outrage by establishing their
absence from the Pound House.
The first expedition in which Abner took part during Susie’s visit to
Hereford gave them a big haul. Abner’s own share of it was fifteen
shillings, and, thus encouraged, they raided the keeper’s preserves on
three nights in succession. The constable, checking the tale of drinkers
at the Pound House, pointed out that Abner, Mick, Curly Atwell, and
another had been absent on each of the nights in question, and that Mick
had celebrated his return by recklessly standing treat to the whole
taproom.
‘That young Fellows,’ said Bastard, ‘he’s not been nigh the place for
more nor a week. For myself I’d say that he looks a quiet chap, but you
never know . . . upon my word you don’t.’
‘The simpler they looks,’ said Badger emphatically, ‘the more they wants
an eye kept on them. I’m pretty near certain I saw him that night they
was arter the salmon.’
‘Never you fear!’ said the constable, ‘I’ll keep an eye on the lot.’
It never occurred to Badger, whose energies were centred for the present
on one problem, to connect Abner’s absence from the Pound House with
Susie’s visit to Hereford. He was an obstinate and not very intelligent
man, thick-set in mind as in body, who had learnt his own craft
thoroughly and knew little else. He had become aware of Susie’s coldness
toward him before her departure, but he had not thought to explain it by
her fancying another man. In any case the matter might wait. He could
only do one thing at a time, and for the present he was too busy with
Mick and his friends to waste good time in dangling round the Pound
House. Perhaps it was only that Susie wanted more fuss made of her. All
in good time . . .
After ten days she returned, and Abner began to visit the Pound House
again. He found her imperious and exacting, she could not see too much
of him. Bastard reported him to Badger as a regular attendant at the
inn.
‘You needn’t trouble about that young Fellows,’ he said. ‘He’s after
other game.’
‘There’s no game here to speak on but ours,’ said Badger stupidly.
‘Ah, it’s a different kind I mean,’ said the constable. ‘That girl of
Hind’s is looking after him. Any night of the week if you want to see a
picture you can watch her take him in by the back door when the old man’s
asleep upstairs.’
Badger went livid and swore so violently as to shock the constable’s
principles.
‘I don’t believe it,’ he said, ‘not a word of it.’
‘Seeing’s believing,’ said Bastard. ‘At any rate seeing’s good enough
for me.’
All thought of the poachers vanished from Badger’s single mind. He left
the constable in the middle of their conversation and went straight to
the Pound House, where he found Susie alone, making a petticoat from a
pattern that she had bought in Hereford. She could see by his stormy
entrance that something had upset him and switched on her most
ingratiating manner.
‘Well, it is a time since I’ve seen you, Mr Badger,’ she said, laying
aside her work. ‘Will you have something?’
He wouldn’t drink; he refused to waste time in preliminary skirmishing.
‘You’re not going to get round me that way,’ he said. ‘What’s this about
you and that chap Fellows?’
‘Fellows?’ said Susie. ‘What Fellows is that?’
‘Now don’t start that game on me,’ said Badger angrily. ‘I’ve seen there
was something up with you for the last month. Now I know what it is.
You can’t go on like that with me. I’m not that kind of man.’
‘And I’m not that kind of girl, Mr Badger,’ said Susie. ‘I thought
better of you, indeed I did.’
‘You can drop all that,’ said Badger, with a laugh. ‘You can let on
you’re as innocent as a lamb, but I know better. Understand that!’
‘If that’s what you mean, I can tell you straight I’m not going to listen
to your dirty tongue. I’m not accustomed to be spoke to by my friends
like that.’ She rose indignantly and would have gone into the kitchen
but he caught hold of her arm.
‘You don’t deny it,’ he said.
‘I wouldn’t demean myself.’ She tried to wrench away from him, but he
would not let her go. The warmth of her arm on his fingers made him mad.
He wanted to use her roughly. She cried out with pain.
‘Don’t!’ she cried. ‘You’re hurting me!’
He wanted to hurt her. He only held her tighter. ‘Where’s your father?’
he said.
‘Father’s gone out,’ she said. ‘Oh, let me go!’
‘Gone out, is he? Well, I’ll have a talk to him about this when he comes
back. Then we’ll see . . .’
‘You can tell him all the dirty lies you like,’ she said defiantly.
But, in reality, his words had thrown her into a state of terror. That
squat owl-faced father of hers was the one person on earth whom she
dreaded. It came over her suddenly that somehow or other she must
prevent his knowing, for though he had no objection to his daughter being
free with men for the good of the house, she knew that he was anxious to
keep on good terms with Badger and would be furious to think that she had
taken up with a labouring man. Somehow she must flatter the keeper out
of his intention; but she knew that a sudden change of front would be a
manœuvre too transparent. It pleased her, therefore, to give vent to the
emotions which she had so far controlled and to break down in the most
natural tears. She put her handkerchief to her eyes and sobbed
violently.
Badger was bewildered by this but still determined.
‘You don’t get over me that way,’ he said. ‘Not if I know it!’
She went on sobbing, and the spectacle began to get on his nerves.
‘You can cry your eyes out, my girl, but I’m going to tell your father.’
She raised her eyes. ‘It’s not that!’ she said violently. ‘You can tell
him any lie you like and it won’t make no difference to me. What I can’t
stand is that you should think it of me . . . that you should think I’d
go with a common chap like that. It’s cruel, Mr Badger . . . cruel!
After the friends we’ve been. . .’
She put her hands on his shoulders and looked at him, pleading. His lust
got the better of him and he took her violently in his arms. She
submitted, and he began to forget his suspicions. She clung to him so
that he could think of nothing but that she was desirable. Then,
cunningly, gradually she became playful and childish, teasing him,
indignant that he should have thought so ill of her. By the time that he
left her she had convinced him that nothing could spoil their intimacy;
but whatever she pretended she could not shake herself free from the
fright he had given her. She felt that the time would never pass till
she could see Abner and warn him.
It was no easy matter, for when the evening came and she began her work
in the bar, moving among the drinkers with her usual smiling freedom,
Badger was also there following her with hungry eyes as she went about
her work. He sat in a corner, isolated, for none of the strangers would
have anything to do with him. While serving a tot of gin to Gunner Eve
she contrived to whisper to Abner, begging him to keep away from the
house that night.
‘Why? What’s up?’ he said.
‘I can’t tell you,’ she whispered. ‘Come to-morrow early, before it’s
light on your way to work. Just to please me!’
She spoke so urgently and with such evident distress that he obeyed her,
and Badger, who had seen her bending over to speak to Abner, spent a cold
night watching the back of the Pound House in vain. He might well have
been better employed, for while he stood there shivering Mick Connor made
free with half a dozen of his pheasants.
Next morning, in the half light of dawn, which made the cold kitchen look
unspeakably sordid, she received Abner. The meeting had none of the warm
glamour of their nightly love-making, and her anxiety made him impatient.
‘What the hell do I care for Badger?’ he said.
‘Oh, quiet . . . quiet! Don’t speak so loud!’ she implored him. She
submitted to his embraces, but her mind was not with him.
‘I can’t think what’s up with you,’ he said.
His unconcern irritated her. ‘Can’t you understand?’ she said. ‘It’s
better to do without me for a little than to lose me for good. That’s
what would happen if father knew. He’d send me away to Hereford, to
grandma’s. That’s what he’d do. Only for a week, Abner. After that,
when he’s forgotten about it, things ’ll be better.’
Her distress was so real and she seemed so little to belong to him in her
present state that he consented not to see her for a week.
‘Then I shan’t come a’nigh the place,’ he said. ‘I’m not goin’ to sit
there looking at you and nothing after.’
‘Yes . . . that would be best,’ she said gladly. It inflamed him to
think that she could take this complete divorce so calmly.
‘Better finish it off,’ he said.
Then she clung to him. ‘No, no, Abner. . . . I couldn’t bear that!
Only a week, my love, only a week. . .’
He kept to his side of the bargain, and Badger was relieved to see him no
more at the Pound House, although the suddenness of Abner’s abstention
coloured his suspicions. What with his pheasants and the woman the
keeper’s life was becoming too complicated for his intelligence, for Mick
profited by Badger’s new devotion to Susie by ravaging his coverts. In
this Abner, who had no other way of killing time, joined his friend, and
on the last night of the week came a sharp but bloodless encounter in
which the keeper was more than ever certain that he had seen Abner’s
face. After this it became fixed in Badger’s mind that Abner was his
principal enemy, the man who was obstinately working against him wherever
he went. Somehow or other, he determined, he must get the better of him.
On the night when Abner returned to the Pound House, Badger was already
there. Mick, as usual after a successful foray, was spending money
freely, and by nine o’clock the room was full of excited men. Abner was
ready to drink with the best of them, for his pockets were full of money
and he had not been inside a pub for a week. To add to this uproarious
assembly in came George Malpas, returning early from his own dark
business in Lesswardine.
‘Go easy, boys,’ he said, as he entered, ‘that damned copper’s outside.’
But Mick Connor had by now gone too far to go easy. The liquor which in
the early stages of intoxication merely rendered him funny now made him
boastful, and the sight of Badger, glowering in his corner over a hot
whisky, provided him with a subject for his wit. Atwell tried to keep
him within bounds, but Mick, once fairly nourished, could talk the cross
off an ass’s back. The laughter with which his sallies at the keeper’s
expense were greeted stimulated him. He plunged into wild excesses of
simile, while Badger sat sipping his whisky, going redder and redder as
he listened. He knew that the whole room was against him; felt that
before long he must do something to assert himself. If he went out into
the road he would only be laughed at, but no man could sit there
listening to Mick Connor without shame.
‘Wait while I’m tellin’ you,’ said Mick. ‘Over in Connemara there used
to be an old gent named Hewish, a proper old sportsman. It was he that
invented that game I’ve told you of . . . spider racing, spiders burning
the legs off of them on a hot plate. Cock-fightin’ too. And
badger-baitin’. I’m after tellin’ you that’s the sport for a man!’
A roar of laughter greeted him. ‘And so say all of us!’ said Mick
insolently, staring into Badger’s corner. Badger pushed aside the table
and rose to his feet. His glass went down with a crash.
‘Oh, Mr Badger!’ Susie cried.
‘Gard! The baste’s afther turning on me!’ cried Mick. ‘All together,
boys!’
Badger pushed his way through the crowd to Mick. The Irishman lowered
his head and butted him in the stomach like a ram. Badger, falling, saw
Abner’s smiling face and lashed out at it. The two men went down
together, fighting on the floor. Susie rushed into the kitchen, calling
for her father, and at the same moment the constable ran into the room.
He began to try and pinion Abner, who had Badger on the floor.
‘Leave them alone,’ cried George Malpas excitedly. ‘Badger hit him
first!’ He took hold of the policeman’s shoulder, and tried to pull him
back.
‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ Bastard shouted. ‘Obstructing my duty?’
But George would not let him go. The policeman left Abner and closed
with Malpas. He was the taller, but the older man. They swayed in each
other’s arms and then, tripping on the leg of an overturned chair, went
down together. The policeman was undermost and his head hit the stone
floor with a dull thud. George, who had fallen above him, freed himself
from his arms.
‘The b—’s stunned,’ said Atwell. ‘Serve him right!’
Mr Hind had appeared on the scene and was bending over the prostrate
policeman. George leaned panting against the bar.
‘There’s blood coming from his ears and nose,’ Mr Hind said hoarsely.
‘The b—’s stunned,’ Atwell repeated stolidly.
‘He’s not stunned,’ said the landlord, looking up. ‘He’s dead!’
By this time Abner had got the better of the keeper, whom he held beneath
him on the floor. He heard the crash as George Malpas and Constable
Bastard went over amid a hubbub of voices. Then, with the landlord’s
words, which Abner did not hear, fell a sudden silence. He wondered what
was up, released Badger, and pushed forward to the cluster of men that
surrounded the policeman’s body. He heard the word ‘dead’ passing from
one to another. ‘Lock at the blood coming out of his ear,’ they said.
And there was George Malpas leaning up against the bar with his hands
behind him gripping it, ghastly pale and panting with his mouth open, and
twitching at the corners. He didn’t see Abner or any one else. A
curious inertia had fallen on the group of men about Bastard’s body.
They simply stared at it as though it had fallen into the midst of them
from another planet. Mr Hind, by way of an experiment, lifted the
constable’s hand and let it fall again. It fell on the floor with a
wooden sound.
‘Somebody run to Lesswardine for the doctor,’ said Mr Hind.
‘I’ll go myself,’ said Abner.
‘That’s right. Tell ’im about the blood, and be’s quick as you can.’
‘It’s snowing,’ some one called.
Abner went hatless to the door. Looking back into the kitchen he saw the
face of Susie. It was white, like a mask. For the moment it meant
nothing to him. They looked at each other for that fraction of a second
unrecognising. Abner started running toward Lesswardine. The hard road
echoed. The night was deadly black and snow was falling.
He scarcely noticed the snow. He went on plodding over the road to
Lesswardine without realising, for the time, the importance of his
journey. He felt the snowflakes spatter his face, his neck, his chest,
for in the struggle with Badger his shirt had been torn open. He was
glad he had come to grips with Badger. He felt he could do what he liked
with the keeper now. The white-faced vision of Susie, till then
unrealised, came back to him out of the darkness. Scared, she must have
been!
In Lesswardine yellow lamps beamed through halos of cold air. Crossing
the bridge he saw that his clothes were as white as a miller’s. The
great flakes danced like moths in the lamplight, they flew into his mouth
and melted on the heat of his tongue. His feet did not echo in these new
streets, for the macadam was felted with an inch of snow. He had nearly
reached his goal. It was senseless to go on running, panting, and
swallowing mouthfuls of snow; but his legs would not obey these
half-formed thoughts and carried him onwards.
The doctor was smoking his after-supper pipe when Abner arrived. The
Hinds were good patients, and he did not hesitate to turn out. ‘Give me
a hand with the mare,’ he said, and they went out into the stable to put
to. The doctor’s wife had warmed his overcoat and wrapped a muffler
round his neck. He gave Abner a peg of whisky to keep him warm. When
they were clear of the Lesswardine lights he asked for details of the
affair. ‘By Gad, that’s serious,’ he said. ‘That means an inquest and a
P.M.’ He thought to himself: ‘Two guineas,’ and touched up the mare with
satisfaction.
‘You say Bastard and George Malpas went down together? He was struggling
with George?’
‘Yes—it was me and Badger he was after.’
‘That’s beside the point,’ said the doctor. ‘It’s a bad lookout for
Malpas—and for his mother, poor old lady! A bad lookout. . . . It’s
homicide—manslaughter.’