AFTER nightfall on the same evening that train of old-fashioned coaches
came blundering back along the curves of the Llandwlas line. The
snorting of its engine was the only sound, as its yellow windows and
fire-belching funnel were the only light, in all those miles of woodland
and valley. The train ran late as usual, stuttering up the gradients as
though the weight it carried were too much for the power of its groaning
pistons.
Scattered through the various compartments of its three short coaches sat
all the witnesses of George’s condemnation. The jury, having no
alternative, had found him guilty of manslaughter, and the judge, who saw
in front of him a programme of cases more important than this flicker of
violence in a remote agricultural district, wasted no time on his
sentence. If Bastard had not been a policeman, and therefore a humble
symbol of the code which his lordship administered, if the witness Badger
had not been a gamekeeper, which was much the same thing, George might
easily have escaped with a few months’ imprisonment, or half a year’s at
most. The barrister whom Mrs Malpas had employed for the defence
realised this. The fact that he was most eager to establish seemed to be
that George was not, and had never been, a poacher, and that he was not
on bad terms with the man he had killed. Mrs Malpas, sitting in the
public gallery on the bench in front of Mary, listened eagerly. Her
heart sank as she listened to the evidence, the words that she had heard
before in the police-court at Lesswardine, for she had expected that the
little man in the gray wig who had shaken hands with her an hour before
in consideration of the thirty pounds that she had scraped together to
pay him, would throw some new and startling light upon the case, reducing
Badger to tears and confounding the Lesswardine police. She had expected
thunders and passionate appeals to the mercy of the jury. Instead of
this he spoke in a low voice, with a Jewish lisp, and even cracked a
joke, at which the jury smiled, with one of the witnesses for the
prosecution. The old woman felt that she had been betrayed. Seeking
ideal justice she had found something trivial and cynical. The whole
business was nearly over before she realised that it had begun. The
judge summed up lazily, only pitching his voice when he dwelt upon the
necessity of such men as Bastard to the public safety and the very
existence of property. The jury retired for less than two minutes. The
judge gave sentence of eighteen months’ hard labour, and the white face
of George, who had stood like a statue throughout the trial, disappeared
from the dock. When she looked again she saw that another man, who
looked like a tramp, had entered it. People around her began to talk,
for this was a case of real murder, and this mean-looking creature was to
fight for his life. Only then did the old woman realise that George’s
case was over. She passed Mary in the door of the gallery and hurried
downstairs, where the counsel whom she had briefed congratulated her on
the issue of the case. While she was engaged with him and with Harley,
the solicitor, Mary passed her and joined Abner on the steps of the
court. Mrs Malpas, in the middle of her conversation, gave them a queer
sidelong glance that filled Mary with uneasiness.
‘I don’t think we had better go home together,’ she whispered.
‘Come on and get a spot of tea,’ he said. ‘I reckon you must be clammed,
and there’s near an hour before the train goes.’
It made her flurried and impatient to think that Abner had not understood
her.
‘I don’t want you to be with me,’ she said. ‘She’s watching us. Don’t
you see?’
‘Let her watch!’ said Abner, looking round in a way that made Mrs Malpas
sure that they had been speaking of her. ‘Come on . . .’
But she slipped away from him in the crowd outside the steps so quickly
that he could not very well follow her with dignity. At the same moment
Connor and Atwell appeared and solved his perplexity by dragging him off
into a public-house. Mick gave the ball a kick, as he called it, with a
round of Irish whisky. None of them had tasted any food since they left
their homes before dawn, and the spirit soon went into Abner’s head.
They sat in a corner of the bar, laughing uproariously at Mick’s
ridiculous stories, and making outrageous plans for getting their own
back on Badger. Indeed, if the clock in the bar had not struck to warn
them of the time, they would have missed their train. They had to hurry
down the steep hill to Shrewsbury station. Lights were gleaming in the
muddy streets and in the windows of tall, half-timbered houses. Above
them hung the threatening mass of the castle.
‘That’s where poor old George will get his lodging,’ said Mick.
‘This time eighteen month . . .’ said Atwell solemnly.
‘Ah, not at all,’ said Mick. ‘Sure he’ll be out and about next winter,
if he plays his game.’
At the station they found they had still a few minutes to spare, and
Abner’s hazy intention of looking for Mary was lost in another rush to
the third-class refreshment-room. Just before the train started he ran
along the carriages to see if he could find her. In one carriage he saw
Mrs Malpas, in another three Lesswardine policemen, in a third Mr Hind
was sitting with Susie, who smiled at him. Mary was nowhere to be seen.
Mick pulled him into a smoker as the train was starting.
‘God help me!’ said he, ‘is it crazed you are that you can’t leave the
woman five minutes to herself. You’ll be seeing all you want of her time
her George comes out.’
Atwell laughed stupidly. Abner jumped up in a rage and was for throwing
Connor through the window.
‘Ah, be quiet now!’ Mick persuaded, ‘for I don’t mane a word of it!’
Abner settled down sulkily. Atwell had already forgotten the incident
and was snoring in his corner. Mick hummed quietly the song about
Macarthy, spitting through a chink in the window between the verses. The
train jolted on into the darkness, crossing the deep valley of Severn,
skirting the eastern foothills of the Long Mynd, sliding down with braked
engine into the basin of Teme. At Craven Arms a Welsh cattle dealer
joined them, a small, red-bearded man, who eyed them suspiciously and
would not be drawn into talk with Mick Connor. The train climbed
painfully, the air grew colder. Atwell’s snores joined with the clanking
of the wheels to set a spell of drowsiness on Abner’s fuddled brain. He
fell asleep.
At Llandwlas Mick woke him. They tumbled out on to the deserted
platform. Mary was nowhere to be seen. She had slipped him again, and
though he was inclined to be angry at this unreasonable conduct he
submitted to Mick’s suggestion that they should walk back to Chapel Green
together and get another drink. Two traps passed them on the road,
flinging an uncertain light upon the frosty hedges. From the first of
them Susie called good-night; in the second they could see the helmets of
the police, but no trace either of Mrs Malpas or Mary was to be seen on
the road.
The sleep had cleared Abner’s head. They walked quickly through the raw
air and in a little more than an hour they saw the poplars of Chapel
Green.
‘What about a drop at the Buffalo?’ said Mick.
Even from a distance they could see that this forbidding resort had
become unusually cheerful. It was now the time of evening at which the
labouring men who formed the greater part of Mrs Malpas’s customers
finished their quarts and went home to bed. As the three men approached,
many voices were heard.
‘Sounds as if there’s a drop stirrin’,’ said Mick. ‘By the houly, an’ so
there will be! There’s the Pound House, after being closed on them with
Mr Hind and Susan away!’
He opened the door and a mist of tobacco smoke met the colder air. At
the same moment a tall musical box, shaped like a grandfather clock and
worked by a penny-in-the-slot apparatus, struck up the tune of Champagne
Charlie. In front of it, beating time with a pint pot, dangerously full,
stood Wigan Joe. The man was three-parts drunk, as were most of the
other cloggers who crowded the bar. At his right hand, next the fire,
sat old Mr Malpas, following with anxious eyes the evolutions of the big
man’s tankard. The room was so full of smoke and occupied by the jingle
of the musical box that Abner and his friends entered without the clogger
realising that they were there. . . .
‘That’s a good rousing tune, lad,’ he cried, leaning over Mr Malpas and
beating out the rhythm with his free hand on the old man’s shoulder.
‘Eh, it’s a grand night is this. Makes you feel like you’re young again.
Let’s have another bloody penn’orth!’ Mr Malpas nodded, smiling feebly.
Fumbling in his pocket for the coin, he became aware of Abner, Mick, and
Atwell.
‘By gum, lads, is that you? Tell us quick what’s happened . . .’
‘They give him eighteen months,’ said Abner.
‘The b—s!’ said Joe under his breath. He took them aside and explained
that he and his mates had thought that old Mr Malpas would be lonely-like
with George in trouble and his missus away. ‘We thought we’d stay in and
brighten things up a bit to take his mind off it like. We’ve had a nice
bit of harmony,’ he said. ‘Eighteen months! Well, that’s a b— that is!’
At this moment the musical box, after one or two metallic protests,
inharmoniously stopped in the middle of its chorus. Joe threw a penny to
the man who sat nearest to it. ‘’Ere, put in another copper,’ he said,
‘an’ wind the blasted thing oop.’ The clockwork grated and the tune
began again. ‘Don’t say a word to the old ’un,’ he said. ‘Keep his mind
off it: that’s the ticket.’
With this end in view he left them and poked old Malpas, who had now
relapsed into a state of nodding imbecility, in the ribs. ‘Do you see
that there gun, dad?’ he shouted.
Malpas stared vaguely.
‘Gun,’ he repeated. ‘Don’t you go telling me you don’t know what a gun
is!’ He pointed to an old muzzle loader that hung above the hearth.
‘Oh, ay . . . gun!’ said Old Malpas blandly. Wigan Joe bent over him and
began to declaim in his ear an endless, and, as it seemed, pointless
story, of how he had once gone out with a friend to shoot crows; how he
had seen a crow on a haystack on the parish boundary, and how his friend,
after taking careful aim, had missed it. At this point he raised his
voice still louder. ‘By gum, lad,’ I says, ‘you’re the first ever I knew
that shot at a haystack and missed a parish!’ With the last words he
gave the old man a hearty slap on the back, and Malpas collapsed into a
feeble fit of laughter.
‘Shot at a haystack and missed a parish,’ the clogger repeated, roaring
at his own joke, and presenting it to the company, who were now in a
condition to laugh at anything.
At the same moment the door opened and Mrs Malpas entered. Joe steadied
himself, the others were silent at the sight of her small, tragic figure,
only the musical box continued to jangle out its tune and the old man to
be shaken with equally mechanical chuckles. She did not speak, but took
in the whole assembly with her eyes.
‘Evening, ma’am,’ said the clogger. ‘We’ve been giving the old gentleman
a bit of a tune to liven him up like, and make him forget his troubles.’
Without answering, she stepped straight over to the musical box and
pulled a lever that stopped it. Then she shook the shoulder of her
husband, who had not yet realised her coming.
‘What’s up with you, dad?’ she cried. ‘Are you stark mad?’
‘It’s all right, mother,’ he replied feebly.
‘Right?’ she cried. Then she turned on the others. ‘Out of this!’ she
said. ‘Out of this, every one of you. . . . As if there wasn’t enough
shame and sorrow in this house without your mocking it with your drink
and your music. Out of it, I say!’ And she waved her arms as though she
were driving cattle.
‘Now don’t take on so, ma’am,’ said Wigan Joe mildly. ‘It was all meant
for the best. Can’t you let the man forget his troubles? It’s a poor
heart that never rejoices!’
‘Don’t speak to me!’ she cried angrily. ‘To think that you have the face
to come here, you that led him astray with your drink and your bawdiness!
To come and make a mock of his own father!’
Her eyes fell on Abner, who had risen to go to the door.
‘And that man!’ she cried, whipping herself up into a white paroxysm of
rage. ‘That man who, if all had their rights, would be in the dock and
in the prison where my son is lying! That’s the man he’s suffering for!
That’s the serpent he took into his bosom!’ She stood before Abner
spitting like a snake herself. ‘Never let me see your face again!’ she
cried. ‘Never come nigh this door. It was the devil that sent you to
bring trouble on a good Christian house!’
Again Wigan Joe protested the innocence of his intentions, while the old
man sat nodding by the fire as if the storm had broken without him
knowing it.
‘Don’t talk to me,’ she said, ‘with the liquor in your breath. Go away
and leave us alone.’
Abner went out. The other men were standing on the pavement laughing.
Mick implored him to go on with them to the Pound House where Mr Hind and
Susie had by this time presumably arrived, but he shook his head and took
the road to Wolfpits, pondering, through the darkness of night, on the
curious turn which his fortune had taken.
He had now time to think about Mary, and the unreasonable obstinacy she
had shown in leaving him on the steps of the court and later avoiding him
both at Shrewsbury and Llandwlas. He felt a little concerned that she
should have chosen to walk so many miles cross-country through the dark
rather than submit to his company. After all it would have been only
natural for them to go home together; he had always treated her with
respect, and there was nothing in the history of their acquaintance that
should have made her shy of him, nothing—unless it were perhaps that one
curious moment on the night when they had carried George upstairs between
them and put him to bed. Then he had told her, in George’s defence, of
his own intimacy with Susie Hind, and this revelation, instead of putting
her at ease, as it should have done, had actually seemed to embarrass
her. This knowledge, however, gave her no reason for her present
behaviour. Indeed, if she knew him to be so thick with Susie, there was
surely less cause than ever for her to be shy with him herself. He gave
women up—you never knew where you were with them. He supposed that
nothing but fear of Mrs Malpas was at the bottom of Mary’s queer
behaviour. ‘I don’t want you to be with me: she’s watching us,’ she had
said when she gave him the slip at Shrewsbury. Another memory of Mrs
Malpas returned to him: the end of her outburst at Wolfpits when she had
come in search of her money. ‘You and your fancy lodger!’ she had
screamed. Abner laughed to himself. It was clear that Mary hadn’t much
of a fancy for him at present.
All the same he couldn’t entirely dismiss Mrs Malpas from his thoughts.
She had shown herself definitely hostile to him, and his last vision of
her clearing the bar of the Buffalo, a puny figure with white cheeks,
burning eyes, and nodding plume of jet, showed him her fanatical
strength, stronger for the fact that she regarded herself in her most
violent moments as a representative of the right and the rest of the
world as inspired by the devil. Yet he couldn’t get away from the
ludicrous side of her, and found himself chuckling in the dark, ‘Poor old
soul’ he thought. ‘She dain’t know what she wants, and that’s the
truth!’ But Mrs Malpas did know what she wanted.
Mary had gone to bed when he reached Wolfpits, but she had left his
supper ready on the kitchen table. He ate his bread and cheese and drank
his beer. That night, exhausted with the strain of the day, he slept
heavily.
So the new life began. If George Malpas, lying in Shrewsbury Jail,
returned, in one of the debauches of sentiment to which his nature was
subject, to the idea of his desolate wife and family, and dwelt on it
with pity or remorse, he might well have spared himself the luxury of
these emotions. There were few changes at Wolfpits. The children knew
that they need no longer expect the violent attentions which George gave
them when he felt like it; Spider, the bitch, settled down to a life
untroubled by George’s kicks and stones; while Mary, that strange and
secret creature, was spared at least the alternations of reproaches and
endearments which made up the greater part of her marriage. George had
vanished from her life. For three months at least no word, no sign from
him might reach her. It was true that the family had to live more
simply. Abner’s wages, which she now took without question every
Saturday night, could buy them nothing more than the absolute necessities
of life, and, even so, must be spent with care; but it pleased her to
think that she was managing on them and that not one penny went on
frivolous things.
Abner himself kept back no more than a couple of shillings for tobacco
every week. To drink was out of the question, and it now seemed to him
fortunate that Mr Hind, in a fit of temper, should have warned him off
the Pound House. He now spent most of his evenings at home sitting
before the fire, with Gladys on his knee, and making catapults or other
wooden weapons for Morgan with his knife. Even in so small a household
as theirs there was plenty of rough work that a man could do, not only in
the way of digging and dressing the garden and hewing wood for the fires,
but actually in patching up the crumbled fabric of Wolfpits which, left
to the mercies of rain and frost, would have fallen about their heads.
The sudden intimacy with their neighbours into which George’s arrest had
thrown them, continued, and the more Abner detached himself from the life
of the cloggers and of his own mates, the more sufficient did this
isolated communal life of Wolfpits become. It was the most peaceful and
natural that he had ever lived, and he grew to love it for its regularity
and calm.
The only force that tended to drag him out of this centripetal existence
was Susie. Whatever her father might think of Abner, and however little
he might come to the Pound House, she had no intention of giving up a man
to whom she had taken such a passionate fancy. Of all those with whom
she came in contact in Mainstone, Abner had pleased her best, being more
completely her opposite than any of the others. His fairness, his
strength, and a certain innocence in his composition, had made her choose
him for her own, and even though he found the relation exacting and
occasionally inconvenient, Abner was still under the spell of her
physical attraction. Indeed there seemed to be no fear of this being
exhausted, for their meetings were necessarily rarer and therefore more
enthralling.
In the regularity of his new life at Wolfpits lurked the obvious
disadvantage that Abner’s visits to Susie became conspicuous. Mary knew
better than to question him on his movements—pride, as well as the tact
which she had learned in her experience of George forbade her to do
so—but when Abner returned late at night from these assignations she
would look at him queerly, and a silence and restraint out of which she
could not school herself, made it evident that she resented the mystery.
He wished, indeed, that she would ask him where he had been, for then he
would have been able to put her off with some deliberate lie which she
could believe or reject as she pleased. Anything, he felt, was better
than this uncomfortable chill, this shy curiosity of gaze, this silence.
It was a condition of affairs that he could not stand and made him
anxious, beyond all considerations of prudence, to blurt out his
secret—if secret it were—and dissolve the grudging air of mystery with
which she received him.
One night when he had come home late and could stand her silence no
longer, he said suddenly:—
‘Where d’you reckon I’ve been to-night?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to know.’
He laughed, and she made a slight gesture of annoyance.
‘I never met a woman yet who didn’t want to know where a man had been,’
he said.
She turned her back on him. ‘Will you lock the door and put out the
lamp?’ she said coldly.
‘I’ve been to the Pound House,’ he volunteered, watching her all the
time.
‘I should have thought you’d had enough of the Pound House,’ she was
tempted to reply bitterly.
‘To see Susie Hind . . .’ he continued.
‘Yes?’
‘So now you know, missus.’
He wished, perversely, that she would turn on him and tell him what she
thought of him. It would have cleared the air. Instead of this she
spoke calmly and almost scornfully.
‘Why did you want to tell me this?’
‘Because a woman’s always itching to know.’
‘Do you think I didn’t know it already?’ Then she repeated her first
words: ‘Please lock the door and put the lamp out,’ and left him.
This made things no better. He had wanted to justify himself, or, at any
rate, to brazen the matter out. He wanted to pierce her armour of
reserve, to see her as she was. Whether she were jealous or merely
actively scornful didn’t matter as long as she showed herself to be alive
and tangible. He wanted to feel the shock of their two wills, their two
persons clashing without this irritating veil in which she hid herself
intervening. Whether it were love or hate he wanted to feel some
definite contact with her: something comparable with the moment when she
had spoken to him of George’s woman at Lesswardine. This she denied him.
It was unreasonable that she should behave in this way to the man on
whose charity, if he put it at the bluntest, she was now living. It
seemed as if she had made the maintenance of this spiritual remoteness
the condition of her dependence on him. He felt, vaguely, that she
wasn’t playing the game, and explained her attitude to himself as the
result of her unnatural fear of old Mrs Malpas’s tongue. He was tempted,
at times, to throw in his hand, to launch out again, to leave Chapel
Green and let her go her own way. He pretended to himself that his
promise to George, an obligation that went a good deal deeper than
friendship, restrained him; but he knew in his heart that even if he had
not undertaken the care of George’s wife he would never have left
Wolfpits. He only wished that her pride, or whatever it was, would let
her be reasonable.
Susie wasn’t like that. With Susie he knew exactly where he was. She
had even, once or twice, shown herself jealous of his devotion to Mary,
and tried to read into it an intimacy which was very far removed from
their real state. She had seen Mary in the police-court and in the
gallery at the assizes, had recognised her beauty and the dignity which
contrasted so deeply with her own abandon. She would ask Abner questions
about her, implying that Mary must be jealous of his visits to Mainstone,
in this way half convincing Abner that it was unnatural for her not to be
jealous, and aggravating his grievance.
‘I suppose she takes your money and then treats you like dirt,’ she said
scornfully. And Abner could not be sure that she hadn’t described the
situation exactly.
Christmas came and passed: a meagre Christmas such as their means imposed
upon them. The morning was bright, and Mary took the children to church.
In the evening Mrs Mamble and old Drew joined them, and in their company
the bearing of Mary curiously lightened. She became young and gay,
almost childish. There was laughter in her eyes and her cheeks were
flushed with firelight. The old labourer had brought with him a bottle
of cowslip wine that he had made in the spring, and they sat together
late into the night telling stories of forgotten people and distant
counties. About midnight the others left them, and though her attitude
sensibly changed, a little of the glow was left in Mary’s face.
‘Last Christmas,’ she said musingly, ‘we all went down to the Buffalo in
the evening—George and me and the children.’
Abner also remembered. He told her of his own Christmas at Hackett’s
Cottages, how John Fellows had been in hospital with his broken thigh and
he had been left alone with Alice and little John. Mary leaned forward
and listened to him in the firelight with her soft eyes fixed upon his
face.
‘Was it her you wrote that letter to?’ she asked.
‘The one you wanted to post?’
‘I thought I could save you the trouble.’
He laughed. ‘Yes . . . that was her.’
‘How old was she?’
‘Somewhere about the same as you, I reckon.’
‘And two children?’
‘No, only one kid.’
‘How long was he . . . I mean your father . . . in hospital?’
‘Pretty nigh six month.’
‘And you had to keep the house going?’
‘Of course I had. There wasn’t nought coming in except his club, and
that bain’t nothing to speak on.’
‘Six months . . .’ She stared into the fire, and there was a long
silence. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ she said at last, without raising her
eyes. ‘Funny how things turn out?’
‘Yes, it’s a rum go.’
Then she began slowly to question him about Alice: what was she like,
fair or dark, how tall, the kind of dress she wore—curious details that
he had to search his memory to answer. She seemed to be working out for
herself the obvious parallel, but never looked at him.
‘Why did you leave them?’ she said at last.
By this time is was no longer difficult to talk to her. He told her
continuously the story of his last days at Halesby. She listened
eagerly, putting in from time to time a short question for which he could
see no reason. He told her of John Fellows’s bouts of drink, of the way
in which he had set himself to work through his compensation money, of
the day of Dulston Wakes, the boxing booth, the brooch, the moment when
he had come blundering down into the kitchen at Alice’s cry for help, the
struggle—and the blow with which he had knocked his father out. He even
told her of the sovereigns that Alice had slipped into his pocket when he
left her.
‘That’s what I sent back to her in that letter,’ he said.
‘Was that all? It was good of you.’
He was silent, and she pressed him again.
‘Why didn’t you go before?’ she said. ‘Why did you stay on there till
that happened?’
‘I dunno’,’ he said. ‘I reckon I’d got to see it through. That football
business turned me up.’
‘You wanted to go before?’
‘Yes, I was pretty well sick of it. Any one would have been.’
She looked at him, and her eyes were now humble. She spoke almost with
diffidence.
‘Abner,’ she said, ‘if ever you want to go from here for any reason, no
matter what it is, promise me that you’ll tell me straight. Don’t you
keep it hidden like that, feeling that the children and me are a drag on
you! If you want to go to-morrow, you go. Don’t you think of what you
said to George. You don’t owe him anything. You don’t owe me anything
at all. If ever you feel for one minute you want to go, please tell me
straight. I can look after myself, and I shall understand. That’s what
I felt with George. Promise me. . .’ She leaned toward him with
clasped, beseeching hands.
‘I’ll tell you right enough,’ he said awkwardly. ‘Don’t you fret
yourself about that.’
She sighed, and pushed her hair back from her forehead.
‘Now I feel easier,’ she said. ‘How late it is!’
She wished him good-night, and left him; but he did not move till the
logs collapsed in the grate. He was thinking drowsily of the other
Christmas in Halesby, of the different way in which Alice had approached
him, how she had tried to draw him nearer to her and how he had resisted
her. He thought of the clinging dependence of Alice contrasted with the
strength and independence of this other woman. Poor Alice! She had
never answered his letter or acknowledged his postal order; but then, she
was never one for letter-writing. The suggestion of freedom, the open
way of escape which Mary, in her pride, had shown him, made him feel for
a moment curious about that other life that had seemed so far away. If
he wanted to do so, he reflected, he could throw up his job at a week’s
notice and take a train that would transport him in half a day back to
North Bromwich, back to the familiar smoke-pale sky, to the chimney
stacks, the furnaces and the smell of pit mounds. The odour of coal-dust
and slag-heaps was in his nostrils. He saw the packed amphitheatre of
the Albion ground and the white-lined turf within it. He heard the
rumour of a football crowd, the thud of the ball, the referee’s whistle.
So utterly remote. . . . He went to the door and opened it before he
turned the key in its wards. He saw nothing but the high blackness of
the winter night, not even a single star. The dank air chilled him; it
crept into the lighted room.
‘It’s a rum go . . . a bloody rum go!’ he said, yawning.
With the New Year, Abner’s work on the pipe-track became more strenuous,
for much time had been lost in the ten days of snow that fell about the
time of Bastard’s death and in the violent floods that followed on the
thaw. A mild January did little to dry the sodden workings, and the task
of shovelling earth was heavier to Abner than his old labours in Mawne
Pit. His mate, Munn, who lodged miserably in a leaky labourer’s cottage
on the river-bank at Mainstone, was taken ill with bronchitis, and Abner
worked alone. Up to his ankles in reddish clay he toiled, his hands were
rufous and his trousers caked with it. The burden of the wet earth
weighed on him. It was like a sullen enemy that made his feet leaden and
strained against the muscles of his arms. All the labourers felt it.
Their speech, which had been gay and good-humoured, became dogged and
irritable. Nor were they the only folk who suffered. In every farm of
the sodden Wolfpits valley men were making the same struggle under the
raw and steely sky. Brimming dykes that drained the meadows shone cold
beside the black hedgerows. The Folly Brook, a brown torrent, dammed
with broken branches that gathered leaves and creamy foam, filled the
whole valley with melancholy roaring. Waterfowl, snipe, and mallard and
even slow-winged herons, moved upward to the sodden springs. It was a
sad season in which the solitary workers on the farms, seen at evening in
the fields, looked as if they were stuck fast in mires from which they
could not escape: so slowly they moved, so huddled and pitiful they
seemed. Even on the drive at Wolfpits, where the gravel was reasonably
dry, it was painful to see the bowed figure of old Drew returning at
night, his boots so caked with mud that he could scarcely drag himself
along. It was no wonder that the man found consolation in the sweet,
fiery spirits that he distilled. He sang so loudly at night that Mrs
Mamble would come in and sit with Mary and Abner rather than listen to
his high, cracked voice.
Toward the end of January the vicar of the parish awoke to the fact that
George Malpas was in prison and his wife presumably destitute. Between
his vicarage and Wolfpits lay the vast bulk of Castel Ditches, so that he
rarely visited the valley in winter. George Malpas, too, was a member of
a dissenting family, his mother being known as a fanatic Methodist; but
the Condovers, in so far as they had ever professed religion, were church
people. Morgan and Gladys had both been baptized in the parish church,
and since scandal informed him that old Mrs Malpas, like the dissenter
that she was, had abandoned her son’s family, the vicar sent the parish
relieving officer on a special visit to Wolfpits to see if Mary were
starving.
It pained and astonished the vicar to learn that she was doing nothing of
the sort. She was not even humble, as a woman in her degrading position
should be. The relieving officer, who had made his long journey to
Wolfpits for nothing, reported that she was not in need of relief, and
for the most shameful of reasons. There was a lodger, a young man
employed on the water-works and known to the police as a desperate
character, who appeared to be filling the absent husband’s place.
Malpas’s wife had not even made any decent attempt to conceal this state
of affairs. She had confessed brazenly that she was living on this young
man’s earnings. To help her in any way would merely be putting a premium
on immorality. The vicar nodded his head gravely. Such cases were all
too frequent in rural districts, and yet it was a relief to feel that his
principles freed him from any further responsibility. He mentioned the
matter with satisfaction to his wife at supper on Sunday. At this meal,
his weekly labours being ended, he always felt that he could speak more
lightly of parish matters.
The vicar’s wife was shocked. ‘I always thought her such a superior
young woman, dear. Do have some more beef!’ she said. The idea of the
superior and desirable young woman, whom she remembered as the mother of
those two sweet children, living in open sin, obsessed her. It was a
terrible and fascinating picture, and since the usual supply of gossip
failed at the next Lesswardine working party, she dilated, in hushed
tones, on the latest enormity.
‘One feels a thing like that in one’s own parish,’ she said, speaking, as
usual, as if she, and not the vicar, were the incumbent. ‘But I am
afraid nothing can be done.’
Somebody made a suggestion. The sister of the vicar of
Aston-by-Lesswardine, Mr Cyril Malpas—the name was a curious
coincidence—was shortly to be married to a young engineer, and the vicar
would consequently be in need of a housekeeper. What a providential
escape it would be if this young woman could find a home in Mr Malpas’s
vicarage! ‘If only Mr Malpas would overlook this terrible state of
affairs and take her,’ they added.
‘The only difficulty that I see,’ said the vicar’s wife, ‘is that of the
children.’
‘But the matron at the workhouse is so motherly, and such a religious
woman. Poor little things! It would be a blessing in disguise.’
Mr Malpas readily consented. His sister Celia, to tell the truth, had
not been very successful as a housekeeper. Her individuality had been
too marked—not to say aggressive—for that position, and a woman who had
her reputation to regain would surely be anxious to please.
The new arrangement was proposed to Mary. The vicar’s wife put the
matter delicately, for she prided herself on her tact. More than ever
she was impressed with the young woman’s superiority and the sweetness of
the children.
‘Then I shall tell Mr Malpas that you will be glad to come, Mrs . . . er
. . . Malpas?’
‘I must talk it over with Mr Fellows,’ said Mary.
‘Mr Fellows?’
‘My lodger.’
‘Oh . . . yes, I see . . .’ said the vicar’s wife. That evening Abner
came in tired from a day’s work in the rain. His clothes were soaked;
they steamed as he stood before the fire and filled the room with a harsh
odour of wool and sweat. She told him calmly of her visitor and of the
proposal that she had made. She did not say a word of her own
inclinations.
‘What about the kids?’ he asked.
‘I couldn’t take them with me. They would go to the workhouse.’
‘To hell with the work’us!’ said Abner. ‘Not likely! What do they take
you for?’
Mary smiled. She told him what they took her for.
Abner was seized with rage. ‘They’re a dirty lot of swine, that’s what
they are!’ he said. ‘By God, I’d like to tell ’em of it!’
‘It’s natural,’ she said. ‘It looks like that.’
‘And what the hell does it matter what it looks like, so long as there
bain’t nothing wrong? Old George knows it’s all right, and he’m the only
one as matters.’
She did not answer.
‘An’ what’s the difference you being here with me or living alone with
that there parson?’
‘He’s a clergyman,’ she said.
‘A clergyman, is he?’ Abner cried. ‘A clergyman! I like that!’
It pleased her, in her heart, to see him so moved.
‘Well, what do you think of it?’ she said quietly. ‘If you want to go,
like you did before when you were at home, this is your chance.’
He stood scowling in front of the fire. He couldn’t make her out. When
he left the court at Shrewsbury he had set himself to a deliberate line
of conduct and determined to go through with it. When they had spoken of
it before it had seemed to him that he and Mary were agreed on it and
that nothing could change it until George’s return. Even now he couldn’t
bring himself to believe that she wanted to make a change. He knew her
quiet passion for the children too well to think that anything could
tempt her to abandon them to the care of strangers. Also he knew her
pride. He believed that her pride and nothing else was keeping her from
telling him exactly what she felt. It was useless for her to pretend to
him that she had no feelings. It struck him that she was not playing the
game. When a man and woman were placed in their position anything but
the most complete confidence in each other was unfair. He would force
her to say what she thought. Even if it humbled her he would force her
to speak.
‘It’s naught to do with me,’ he said. ‘If you want to go, you go, and
that’s all that matters.’
She was silent for a long time.
‘If you want to go, you go,’ he repeated.
At last she spoke, very quietly.
‘I don’t want to go,’ she said.
A feeling of joy swept over him, a curious, almost physical exultation.
He had brutally broken through the veil in which she hid herself. He had
seen herself at last. Now, with the blood tingling in his fingers, he
would assert himself triumphantly as the man by whose labour she lived.
She could despise him no longer. He wanted to tell her so, to make
himself strong before her, but when he looked at her and saw her
humility, he could do nothing. His words withered on his lips. He
scarcely knew what he was saying.
‘Give us a spot of tea, then,’ he said roughly, and she turned from him
without another word.