THEY found the doctor just setting out on his morning round. His wife, a
forbidding woman, plainly dressed and flat-chested, caught him in the
stableyard and brought him back into the surgery.
‘It’s the first accident . . . a little girl,’ she said. ‘Did you ever
know the fair without one?’
He followed her in fussily, hoping that there was nothing to keep him,
for he had a long list of country visits to get through before the broken
heads should begin to roll up in the evening. Abner had laid the child
down on a high couch covered with American leather. In the road she had
screamed her breath away and now she lay shivering and whimpering softly,
almost quiet.
‘Well, what is it?’ said the doctor brusquely.
‘It’s her leg,’ Mary whispered. ‘I’m afraid it’s broken.’
‘A kick from a horse,’ said the doctor’s wife from the background.
‘Let’s see!’
Mary’s fingers fumbled with the tapes of the child’s drawers.
‘Scissors!’ said the doctor. The sudden touch of steel made Gladys cry
out loud, and the first cry of alarm was quickly changed to one of pain.
She struggled with the pain and by her movement increased it. The doctor
leaned his left arm above her body and held her still. Mary, clasping
Gladys’s hands in hers, put down her face to the child’s tear-dabbled
cheek. Her own tears were mingled with those of her child, but she made
no sound. Abner stood helpless, watching, and behind him also stood the
doctor’s wife, gaunt, flat, immobile. In a former state she had been a
sister at the North Bromwich Infirmary.
The doctor was leaning over Gladys and breathing heavily through his
nostrils. His hands, lean, brown, and slightly stained with iodine, were
placed firmly yet tenderly upon the pink and white of the child’s thigh.
His fingers moved like tentacles, searching, soothing the spastic muscles
under the skin. Gladys gave a sudden frightened, ‘Oh . . . _mam_!’—and
the fingers tightened like bands of steel. All the man’s mind was in his
fingers; his eyes gazed vaguely out of the window to the cascades of
fading laburnum blossom in his shrubbery, the billowy outline of lilac
against the white sky.
‘Yes . . .’ he said at last. ‘Separated epiphysis. Lower end of femur.
I shall want a small Liston splint and plenty of strapping. I expect
she’ll need a whiff of chloroform, too. If you’ll get it I won’t move.’
Then he addressed Mary. ‘I think it will be better if the small boy is
out of the room. They can look after him in the kitchen.’
Bribed by a sup of cocoa, Morgan allowed himself to be taken away from
his mother by the doctor’s wife, who soon returned with the splint, the
dressings, and the anæsthetic.
‘I’ll just get her under, if you’ll see that she doesn’t move. If she
kicks about there may be a lot more hæmorrhage.’
His wife took his place and he sprinkled a few drops of heavy liquid on
to a wire mask covered with lint. A sweetish odour mingled with that of
the lilac. It seemed to Abner that the room had suddenly become
oppressively hot.
‘Now breathe deeply. Smell it in! It’s ever so nice!’ said the doctor.
Gladys sniffed, then choked, and tried to push away the mask with her
hands.
‘Hold her fingers, mother!’ said the doctor. Mary closed her eyes and
took the child’s fingers in her own.
‘That’s better . . . that’s better.’ He sprinkled more chloroform on the
lint. In another minute he raised the mask. Gladys was now breathing
heavily; her face was suffused, and she puffed out her lips with each
breath. The doctor handed over the mask to his wife. ‘Give her a drop
now and then,’ he said, ‘and plenty of air as well. She’s just nicely
under.’ He pushed back an eyelid with his finger to see that the
pupillary reflex was active. ‘Nicely . . . nicely.’
He rose to his feet and changed places with his wife.
Again he placed his hands on the child’s thigh, but now the hands were no
longer gentle agents of perception, but strong and ruthless weapons. His
brown fingers grasped the limb firmly. The room swam before Abner’s
eyes. He went down like a stone. Mary gave a cry of alarm.
‘He’s all right,’ said the doctor, with a glance over his shoulder.
‘These big strong fellows are always the most liable to faint over a job
like this. Give me a woman, any day!’
When Abner came to his senses the limb was set. A long splint with a
serrated lower end had been strapped to the child’s body from armpit to
heel. Her face was still flushed, but she breathed as softly as though
she were lying in a natural sleep. The doctor was washing his hands and
preparing to set out again. He offered Abner a medicine glass full of
cold water with a dash of brandy in it.
‘What’s owing, gaffer?’ Abner asked.
The doctor looked him up and down. ‘A labourer,’ he thought, ‘with a
wife and two kids: a decent-looking young fellow.’ He hated asking those
people for money in the middle of a misfortune; but he had to live.
‘Oh, we’ll say five shillings,’ he said, ‘but don’t forget to send me the
splint back. Dr Davies, Brampton Bryan. That will find me!’
Abner gave him two half-crowns that were loose in his pocket.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You must be careful how you carry her. The
bone’s in a nice position if you don’t disturb it.’
‘How long will it take, doctor?’ Mary asked.
‘Five or six weeks with luck. Good-morning!’
For an hour or more they stayed in the surgery, visited from time to time
by the doctor’s wife. Gladys awoke as from a gentle sleep. The support
of the splint freed her from the spasm of the torn muscles. She rubbed
her eyes and cried softly in her mother’s arms.
‘We’d best go straight to the station,’ said Abner.
So, having torn the unwilling Morgan from the material attentions of the
cook, they set off along the hot road that they had travelled earlier in
the day. They walked slowly, for they had at least three hours to spare
before the afternoon train left Redlake station. They reached their goal
at three o’clock and laid the child down flat on a bench in the waiting
room, while Abner produced the sandwiches which he had cut earlier in the
morning at the inn. Morgan, having fed and cried a little because his
dinner did not include specimens of the famous Bron cakes, fell asleep
upon his mother’s knees. Mary and Abner talked together in undertones
for fear of waking the children, until the station-master entered the
waiting-room with a swagger and threw up the shutter of the
booking-office, peering at them with official eyes through the wire
grille.
‘I reckon I’d better get the tickets,’ said Abner. He went to the
window, asking for two third singles and two halves to Llandwlas. The
station-master whipped the tickets out and stamped them as smartly as
though a queue of a hundred trippers was waiting for him. ‘Five and four
pence ha’penny,’ he said.
Abner felt for his purse: he knew that the doctor’s fee had only left him
a few coppers loose in his pocket. A panic seized him. He could not
find it. He turned to Mary.
‘You got my purse?’
‘No, I’ve never seen it.’
‘There was a quid in it. I must have put it in my waistcoat. Wait a
moment, gaffer. . . . God! my watch is gone too!’
‘Don’t get moithered now,’ she urged.
But though he searched everywhere he could not find it. He appealed
again to Mary, but she had no money, not a single penny. Abner had
nothing but a handful of coppers left.
‘They must have took both of them . . . picked my pocket!’ he said.
She advised him to look again, but it was useless. ‘While we was
standing up again’ those railings,’ he muttered, ‘talking to that gipsy
woman. It’s gone right enough. Not a bloody cent except this!’ He
threw the coppers on the sill of the booking window.
‘Had your pocket picked?’ said the station-master with a laugh. ‘It’s
not the first time that’s happened at Bron Fair!’ A bell clanged in the
signal box, and a porter peered at them through the door with a stupid,
rustic face.
‘Can’t you let us have a ticket on strap?’ Abner asked.
‘Not likely!’ said the stationmaster. ‘I’ve heard that tale before.’
‘The little girl’s had an accident . . . broken her leg,’ Mary pleaded.
The station-master shook his head.
‘There’s not another train to-day,’ she said. ‘Have we time to try and
get some money in the village?’
The porter gave a stupid laugh.
‘Train’s two minutes overdue now,’ said the station-master blandly,
glancing at the clock on the booking-office wall.
‘But what can we do?’ she cried.
The train clanked in. A number of country people in their Sunday
clothes, coming from the villages under the Long Mynd, swarmed on to the
platform. They came laughing into the booking-office. ‘All tickets!’
shouted the porter at the door. Abner was still rummaging in his pockets
when the train went out. They were left quite alone.
‘What can we do?’ Mary repeated, in a voice full of trouble.
‘We’ve got to walk, that’s all,’ said Abner.
‘But you can’t carry her all that way!’
‘It’s only eight or nine miles over the hills. We can walk that easy
before dark if we take our time.’ She shook her head. ‘There’s Morgan,’
she said.
‘You’ll have to help Morgan on a bit.’
‘It’s too much. You can’t carry her all that way.’
He laughed at her and, in the end, persuaded her. By this time Morgan,
awake and refreshed, was again clamouring for food. In the post-office
at Redlake they bought him a packet of acid-drops and some biscuits.
‘Now that’s got to last you, my son,’ Mary told him, and for the present
he was satisfied.
They set out slowly on their journey home. For a mile or more the road
ran along the side of the little river, but soon the valley fell away
beneath them, a deep trough clogged with brushwood, and the road
degenerated into a stony track. It seemed that they had now penetrated a
country that was untouched by the excitements of Bron Fair, for whenever
they came near to a farm, and these grew fewer and fewer, being hidden
for the most part in folds of the hills and lost in sheltering trees,
they found men moving slowly about the fields or calling cattle to the
byre for the evening’s milking.
Soon the distances of the landscape had faded from them altogether. They
came to an upland scarred with stony lanes where they could see nothing
on either side of them but thistle pastures, poor and unkindly, huge
fields where many sheep were feeding in the mist. Morgan enjoyed
himself, running up the banks to a gap in the broken wall and scaring
them as he stood there like a phantom himself, waving his arms. At last,
when it seemed that they could climb no farther into the clouds, the road
began to fall.
Abner was glad of this, for, strong as he was, the weight of Gladys, made
more awkward by her long splint, was telling on him. The road gave him
no rest: it went on inflexibly between its walls of stone, and when his
breath failed him there was no clean air with which he might fill his
lungs: only this thin, clammy whiteness. They jolted down into a valley,
where they found a village of stone houses, so cold and mountainous in
character that it seemed to have been scoured with snow.
Above the door of the post-office Abner spelt out the word, _Newchurch_.
‘New church?’ said Mary, with a sinking heart. ‘But Newchurch is miles
and miles away from us! I drove here once with father. Are you sure
it’s the right road?’
‘It’s right by what I heard at the Pound House, when Mick talked of
walking over to Bron. It’s right enough . . . only the hills make it
seem longer.’
A little later she asked him anxiously what the time was.
‘Don’t you know my watch is gone?’ he replied irritably. ‘By what it was
in Newchurch I reckon we’ve a good four hour before dark. And then
there’s a moon.’
They crossed another ridge of hills. Half-way up the slope Morgan said
that he was tired, and asked his mother to carry him. She took him up in
her arms without a word and dragged along behind Abner. He looked back
at her, questioning, for the slowness of her pace impeded him. She knew
what he was thinking.
‘I can’t go faster,’ she said, trying to smile; but at the next brow she
had to stop to fetch her breath, putting Morgan down on the bank beside
her under a bush of green broom.
‘I want to walk again now, mam,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Are we nearly
there?’
He had pestered her so often with this question that for a moment her
strained temper gave way.
‘Don’t worry, Morgan!’ she said sharply. ‘I’ll tell you when we’re
there.’
Abner laughed, and she turned on him with annoyance. She thought he was
laughing at her irritability, but found that his eyes were kindly.
‘Lucky for them they don’t know,’ he said, shaming her with a smile.
She tried to cover her annoyance by asking if they were anywhere near the
top of the hills.
He knew no more than she did. Certainly by the time that they had rested
and moved on again the fog had thickened. The stone walls and the clumps
of hawthorn and furze with which the fields were scattered looked misty,
wild, gigantic.
‘Time we quickened up a bit,’ he said.
‘How can you be sure it’s the right road?’
‘Because there bain’t no other, missus,’ he replied. ‘Up you come, my
pretty!’ And he hoisted Gladys into his arms again.
They could no longer guess at the time of day. Mary supposed that it was
now getting on for six o’clock, but the sky that drooped upon them was of
a uniform, milky whiteness, and they could not guess the level of the
sun. The air, indeed, grew colder, but that was a relief in itself after
the oppression of the valleys.
They walked on, maybe for another hour. Mary’s arms ached with the
burden of Morgan, who told her from time to time that his legs hurt him
or that he wanted to go to bye-bye, and vexed her to the point of anger
with his cry of, ‘Are we nearly there?’ She herself was utterly fagged
and hungry. Her anxiety for Gladys had made it impossible for her even
to think of food in the earlier part of the day. Now her stomach ached
with emptiness, and the cold, moist air that she drew into her labouring
lungs did nothing to quench the drought in her throat. Morgan suddenly
began to whine for a drink of water. The sweets had made him thirsty.
‘They don’t lay on the water up here, my son,’ said Abner cheerfully.
‘But I _want_ some,’ Morgan insisted. ‘_Or_ tea,’ he added, as a slight
concession.
Mary quietened him as well as she could with promises. They had not
passed a farm or a shepherd’s cabin for miles. She could see no hope of
any building ahead short of the Wolfpits valley, not even as much as
would shelter them for the night if they lost their way or if the
strength of the weakest failed. They were wandering on and on, blindly,
as it seemed, into a desert of high, poor pastures. Now they no longer
saw large flocks of sheep. Those that they startled were solitary
creatures that sprang up in alarm from the wayside tangles of furze and
brier, horned mountain sheep, with shaggy fleeces and black faces.
She felt that the light was failing. Perhaps the sun had set. Surely it
had set, for they had walked endlessly. At sunset the birds began their
song in the thickets about Wolfpits, but here there was no shelter for
birds. Only the wheat-ears bobbed their white rumps in front of them and
the meadow-pipits flew before them in their endless game of waiting and
of flight, so tame that Morgan ran to catch one with his hands. Out of
the whiteness above them they heard the lost bubbling voices of curlews,
or the harsh cawing of the carrion crow.
She dragged on behind, and Abner walked ahead, never tiring. She would
have died rather than have complained, as long as he made no complaint.
A stone cottage rose up out of the mist.
‘Now you shall have your drink,’ she cried encouragingly to Morgan. The
sight brightened her, for she was parched dry herself. But the cottage
was only a ruin with a broken gate on either side of it that had made a
walled enclosure for sheep. Not very long ago sheep had been penned
there, for torn fleece had stuck to the splinters of the gates and the
road was strewn with dry dung. Abner went up to the door to see if by
any chance they were mistaken; but the place was quite deserted.
‘Let’s sit down a bit,’ he said, and lit his pipe. She sat down wearily
beside him. Morgan, smelling round the garden like a puppy, came back
with a bunch of wallflowers and gave them to her. Their scent was a poor
substitute for food, but she kissed his cold face.
‘I want a drink of water, mam,’ he said again.
She looked desperately at Abner.
‘Wait till we come on a bottle of pop, son,’ he said. Morgan stared at
him with big eyes. ‘Real pop?’ he asked.
‘You wait and see,’ said Abner cheerfully.
Gladys, who had just begun to cry quietly in his arms, said that she was
cold.
‘We’ll keep you warm, my pretty!’ he said, gathering her to his breast.
‘Are we nearly there, mam?’ came the voice of Morgan.
‘Yes . . . yes . . .’ She turned to Abner: ‘It can’t be much farther,
the time we’ve been walking.’
He did not answer. ‘Up she comes!’ he said, kissing Gladys and lifting
her gently.
‘Your ‘stache is all over water, Abner,’ the child whispered.
They passed through the second gate, but here a new perplexity faced
them. They had come to open moorland. The road that had hitherto been
enclosed by stone walls was now no more than outlined by wheel-ruts
bitten deep into the peaty soil. Mile upon mile of misty heather rolled
away before them. Then the track faded altogether, splitting into three
narrow lanes between the masses of ling. Abner stopped, and this, his
first hesitation, filled Mary with dread.
‘Which way is it?’ she called.
He could not answer. ‘We must be somewhere near the top,’ he said at
last. ‘Somewhere on the far side of the Ditches. If it wasn’t for this
stuff we could see all right.’
‘But you can’t see,’ she said. ‘You don’t know. You don’t know any more
than I do. We’re lost.’
‘Don’t you go on so quickly,’ he said. ‘If we keep to the middle we
can’t be far out.’
He pushed on a little. A hen grouse rose with a frightening flutter from
under his feet. She went whirring away low over the heather with a harsh
stuttering cry.
‘Where’s the cattypult, Morgan?’ Abner cried.
And then they found water.
‘Come along, here’s the pop-shop!’ he said. The child ran forward and
knelt above a tiny cup of peat fringed with yellow stars of butterwort.
He lapped up the precious stuff eagerly like a dog, so greedily that he
choked, spluttered, and soused his white lace collar. Mary wiped his
face for him. ‘Go on!’ said Abner, and she too stooped her aching back
and drank. Abner drank last, having laid Gladys down in the yielding
heather and scooped up water for her in his hands.
Now they were refreshed, almost joyful; but Mary could not help looking
anxiously at the hills in front of them, for every moment it seemed to
her that the heather grew blacker and the distance fainter in the mist.
A crest that had once seemed unattainable fell behind them. Reaching it
they had expected to find themselves looking down into the Wolfpits
valley. Instead of this they saw more broken walls and the outlines of
two huge trees. It puzzled them. It seemed that they had come to the
edge of a shallow basin scooped in the top of the hills. Perhaps they
might find a farm. The idea encouraged them.
They walked forward more quickly, for here the turf was smooth and the
heather no longer impeded them. The trees came up out of the mist, not
only two of them but a whole avenue of beeches planted by the hands of
men, stretching away before them in the line that they had followed.
‘There must be a house,’ said Mary. ‘They wouldn’t plant trees like this
for nothing.’
Abner nodded. In spite of his air of gaiety he had been anxious and was
now relieved. It was a noble avenue of more than a hundred trees. They
walked on midway between the two lines of them, expecting at every moment
to see the shadow of the house. But the avenue ended suddenly as it had
begun, and instead of a house they saw nothing but two gateposts of
stone, ancient and weathered, surmounted by immense round balls. The man
who had built them two hundred years before had planned a stately
approach to his mansion. It was easy to imagine the gates of wrought
iron that would have swung there. But of the house that he had dreamed
there remained not as much as a ghost.
‘There must be a house!’ Mary cried.
Abner shook his head. Nothing could now be seen but the desolate line of
the beech avenue stretching away behind them. A light wind rose on their
right, driving the mist in front of it. They seemed to hear the endless
volumes of it hurrying by, but it was only the long sighing of a waste of
heather. This sound made Mary really aware of the threatening silence
that surrounded them. Even the presence of Abner standing there as
stolid and unmoved as ever could not steady her.
‘We can’t stay here,’ she said. ‘It’s an awful place. It’s like a
churchyard. Do let us go on.’
She left the desolate gateposts with a shiver. She hurried, taxing her
strength to the last, to put them behind her. The wind rose; the mist
was whirled along the slopes before them in torn fleeces. She crossed
another ridge and then sank down in the heather, ready to cry herself.
The buffetings of the wind were fit to break her heart.
Then a miracle happened. A gust of wind tore an opening in the mist and
the vision of a heaped mountainous landscape grew before their eyes.
Southward the indented bow of Radnor Forest rose blue-black, the summit
of Black Mixen hugely threatening. Westward in molten clouds the sun
went down over Wales and fifty miles of thin air and solid mountain were
mingled in a fiery haze. The sky was a furnace in which the mountains
melted away. But Abner and Mary had no desire to see these splendours.
Their eyes were fixed, peering into the trough of the valley beneath
them. They saw green woods, blue in the evening light, the squares of
barns, the rich mosaic of fields, the gleam of a river. And their hearts
fell, for each was certain that the valley beneath them was not that of
the Folly Brook. It was far wilder and more strange. They looked at
each other.
‘Do you know where it is?’ he asked.
‘I can’t think, unless it’s somewhere near Clun.’
‘Better get down while the light lasts. There’s farms there,’ he said.
As he spoke the sun dipped down. White clouds swept across their window.
Only the memory of what they had seen told them that they were not
utterly lost.
They descended the slope carefully, for the grass was slippery and the
only tracks were scattered with stones. Abner could not help her; she
knew that he was far too busy saving Gladys from unnecessary jars. She
fell, and Morgan cried out that she had hurt his arm. She pulled her
strength together and tried to carry him. Somehow she must struggle on,
for the darkness was falling. Even with their sudden vision in her mind
she could not now feel certain that their direction was right. For a
time they followed a wheel-track skirting the mountain, but it ended by
turning upwards, and they knew that this could not help them. Downward
it was difficult to go, for the fields were small and irregular, and the
hedges often impassable, yet downward, somehow, they must go.
They beat through a zone of these entanglements in wood and stone. Night
was falling fast. Since the revealing moment of the last summit they had
sunk so deep that they must now surely be near the bottom of the valley,
whatever valley it might be. But when the barrier of irregular fields
lay behind them they found themselves on open, sloping ground again.
Abner stalked on ahead without pausing. She, at the end of her tether,
called out after him to stop for a moment, but he did not hear her. His
shape went on into the dusk, and she knew that if she did not follow she
must be left behind.
Suddenly the white air was full of the screaming of birds . . . a shrill,
high, sound that took her back into her childhood. Once, with her
father, she had been taken to Swansea on a business trip and had heard
gulls calling on the Gower Cliffs. She felt that she must be dreaming.
Even on a night of storm no gulls could be blown so far inland as this,
and yet she was sure that her childish memory could not have failed. The
cries that she heard now were the cries of gulls wheeling and screaming
in the mist above her head.
Abner turned and called her. ‘Did you ever hear the like of it?’ he
called. ‘I never heard such a chronic row!’
‘They’re gulls,’ she shouted. Her voice was thin in the mist.
‘Seagulls.’
‘That’s where they must have come from. Off of this water,’ he called.
And she saw, peering in front of her, a ghostly wood of pines and before
them a lake of dark water fringed with reeds. The wind swept across it,
bending the reeds, breaking the glassy surface into ripples, and rolling
milky mist before it. The wind came in gusts, roaring through the trees
with a noise that was like that of the sea, and the gulls screamed above
them, unseen, as they might have screamed over storm-bound cliffs. She
stood with her knees trembling at Abner’s side, and Morgan clutched her
hand. She herself felt like a child, lonely, frightened. They stood so
quietly together that some of the birds swooped down on to the water as
though driven by the wind.
‘Yes, they’re gulls,’ she said. ‘Seagulls. We’re more than fifty miles
away from the sea. I don’t understand.’
She laughed nervously. It came to her suddenly that she could go no
farther. Her legs could not make a single step. The gulls came dropping
down in twos and threes, and settled on the lake. They were smaller than
those that she remembered, she thought. They dropped down just like
pigeons when you scatter grain.
‘Come on,’ said Abner. ‘It’s near dark.’
But she could not move. The child tugged at her skirt. She felt the
tugging in a dream.
‘We can’t stand staring here all night,’ Abner was saying. She was aware
of him standing beside her in the dusk, holding Gladys to his breast.
She saw the child’s white hands clasped about his neck, as quietly as if
she were asleep. She heard him, but could not stir. Then Abner touched
her upper arm, and the pressure of his fingers went through her body like
fire along a fuse exploding some mine of passion that had lain hidden
beneath her long silence. It burned her like flame, burned her and rent
her. . . . She trembled and turned on him violently. Words of abuse
came tumbling out of her mouth. She did not know or care what she was
saying. She lashed him, wildly, desperately. It was he who was to blame
for all this trouble, he who had persuaded her to take the children to
Bron and allowed her to be insulted in the inn at Redlake; he who had
entangled them in the crowd where Gladys’s leg was broken; and now he’d
lost them, and brought them to a place where they might all die of cold
with his damned foolishness. Some devil inside her brain drove her on,
delighting in the vile things she said, raking up little grudges of the
past and throwing them in his face, revealing, against her will, such
petty miseries as her jealousy of Susie Hind. ‘It’s with her you ought
to be,’ she cried, ‘instead of troubling us! That’s where you ought to
be! You’d better go on and leave us, Gladys and Morgan and me. You
don’t know any more than I do where we are, with the night coming on. We
can’t go a step farther, neither me nor Morgan, poor little thing! Oh,
go! Go! I wish to God I’d never set eyes on you!’ She threw herself
down, exhausted, on the wet grass.
He had stood up to it utterly bewildered. He couldn’t protest, for all
her ravings were so childish, so disconnected, so passionately illogical.
He simply let her go on until she had finished with him. Then he
disengaged Gladys’s arms from his neck and laid her down gently.
‘You’re just about done in,’ he said. ‘It’s natural.’
Again he placed his hand on Mary’s arm, hoping to soothe her and to
persuade. She gave a strange shudder, as though his fingers had been
ice, and burst into tears, covering her face with her hands.
He comforted her clumsily, talking to her as he would have done to a
child, until she no longer shrank from him, being too weak to care. Then
she took hold of his coat and clung to him, still sobbing her heart away.
She was broken . . . quite broken.
The moment was terrible for Abner. He felt his heart leap so wildly that
he knew she must be conscious of its thudding. The movement of her body,
shaken with sobs, against his own, filled him not with pity but with
exultation. There was no woman like her in the world. He knew it.
Hadn’t he known it long enough? If he told himself the truth he must
admit that for months he had never wanted any other woman. The desires
that had hungered him the night before, walking beneath her window and in
the moonlit lane, returned to him in waves of greater force. He laughed
to think that, being so near to her, he should ever have given a thought
to Susie Hind. Now she was in his arms. His hands caressed her beauty.
How should he touch her body without passion? And why? Surely she could
feel the blood beating in his fingers, even if she told herself that he
was only trying to comfort her. No one could see them there . . . no one
except the two children, crying softly together because they heard their
mother crying. Why shouldn’t he gather her in his arms, overwhelming her
with kisses? He could see nothing but her lips. . . .
But when he strained her to him she stopped sobbing and pushed him away.
It was now dark but for the light of the moon hidden above the mist, and
he could only see the paleness of her face. Her ghost spoke to him.
‘I’ve lost my handkerchief,’ she said simply.
He gave her his own, and she thanked him.
‘I don’t know what I’ve been saying,’ she whispered. ‘I think I must
have been mad, Abner. Please forget it.’
He would have helped her to her feet, but her muscles would not respond
to the brain’s message. She gave a weak laugh. Now she did not mind
being weak. She looked at him helplessly.
‘I can’t go another step,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t. Perhaps,
if you left us here, you might find if there’s a house near. I’ll look
after these poor lambs. We can keep warm close together.’
No doubt she spoke wisely. He left them without a word, though Gladys
cried out with alarm to see him going. His shoulders loomed up in the
cloud, and as he skirted the lake the gulls rose screaming from its
surface to be lost in the sky.
Abner continued his course downhill. Relieved of the weight of Gladys he
now felt himself master of his limbs. The hedges and the roughness of
the road troubled him no longer, and when he had been walking no more
than ten minutes he saw in the growing brilliance of the moonlight a gate
that gave on to a metalled road. He strained his ears to listen for any
sound, and heard, at length, the noise of a dog howling at the hidden
moon. That meant a farm, or at least a shepherd’s cottage. A walk of
ten minutes in the direction of the sound brought him within sight of a
mass of outbuildings that made a courtyard in front of a low-roofed
house. Two long windows on the right of a central doorway were lighted.
He saw the shadows of geraniums in pots against the blinds. Another dog
came at him out of the darkness, snarling and sniffing him from a
distance. He knocked at the door and heard a chair pushed back over the
stone floor.
‘Come in . . . come in!’ some one cried.
The farm kitchen was bright, with a heavy brass lamp in the centre of the
table and a yellow shade that threw a mild radiance over the many hams
and sides of bacon that were slung from the smoky ceiling. The table was
laid for supper and a shrewish-looking woman was eating bread and cheese.
She stared at Abner with a piece of cheese stuck on the end of her knife,
looking neither astonished nor frightened.
‘Who is it, please. And what do you want at this time of night?’ she
said, without moving.
‘I’m sorry to put you out, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Me and three others, a
woman and two children, lost our way coming over the hills from the fair.
The little girl’s had an accident and we had to carry her. Proper done
in, they are, and I left them about a mile away over there.’ He pointed
in the direction of the hills.
‘Well, I don’t see how I can help you,’ said the woman, who went on
eating. ‘The master never has no dealings with gipsies. What’s more,
he’s gone to the fair himself in the trap and ban’t back yet.’
Abner explained to her that he was not a gipsy. ‘You can’t leave a woman
an’ two kids out there at night,’ he said.’
‘Where did you leave them?’ she asked.
‘Up by a pool. There’s a lot of birds on it. Seagulls, she said.’
‘Oh, ay, them’s the sea-crows. They comes here every year. But that’s
not ten minutes’ walk from here, that isn’t!’
‘There must be a man about the place as can give me a hand with them,’
said Abner, irritated by her unconcern.
‘All gone home an hour ago,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘There’s only
me and the master, and he’s not back yet.’
At that moment all the dogs began to bark together. She got up and
opened the door, and the lights of a gig turned the corner and dashed
into the yard. Another cob was tied to the cart tail. The woman ran to
meet the new-comer, and a big man threw the reins over the horse’s flanks
and got out of the trap. The dog yelped round him friendlily, and he
cursed it. ‘Get away!’ he said.
‘You’d best take out,’ he said to the woman. ‘I’m properly starved, I
am. What do you think of the new cob? Forty-eight pound! I never knew
such prices!’
‘There’s a chap here says he’s a woman and two children lost up by the
sea-crows’ pool,’ she said, disregarding his question. ‘You’d better go
and have a word with him.’
‘Gipsies?’ he said angrily; but without waiting for her reply he stalked
stiffly into the room, slapping his dank hands and blinking at the light.
He stared at Abner.
‘Hallo!’ he said. ‘I know you. You’m George Malpas’s lodger.’
Abner also recognised his host. It was Mr Williams of Pentre Higgin, the
farmer who had chosen himself foreman of the jury at Bastard’s inquest.
‘Well, what’s all this I hear about a woman and two kids?’ said the
fanner threateningly. ‘Is that Malpas’s wife?’
Abner told him what had happened. What bewildered him most was to
realise that after all they had hit the upper part of their own valley.
The Pentre was indeed the farm on which old Drew worked, and less than
five miles from Wolfpits itself. The farmer poured himself out a glass
of cider and stood smacking his lips while Abner told his story.
‘Well, this is a pretty turn-out!’ he said. ‘I heard some talk of an
accident to a little girl over there.’
He went to the door. ‘Hi!’ he shouted, ‘you’d better put to again,
missus! Shove the new cob in the stall and give ’en some hay. Mind he
don’t bite you.’
He chuckled to himself, being what people in those parts call
‘market-peart,’ then drank off another glass of cider, and motioned to
Abner to follow him. ‘We’d best find Badger to give us a hand,’ he said.
He tied the reins of the harnessed horse to a post in the yard, and threw
a blanket over its back. Abner followed him silently out of the yard and
up the road. They stopped in front of a small cottage, and Williams
knocked at the door. After some delay Badger in his shirt-sleeves opened
it, emitting a queer odour of naphthaline and the dried skins of animals
and birds.
‘Put your coat on, Bill,’ said the farmer. ‘Malpas’s wife and kids is up
by the sea-crows’ pool. Got lost in the fog.’
In a few moments, as it seemed, they had found the derelicts. By this
time Mary protested, she was quite able to walk. Abner again picked up
Gladys, Williams carried Morgan, and an easy path brought them down to
the farm again. Badger walked beside Abner, but never spoke a word.
‘Now I reckon I’ve got to drive you home,’ said Williams sourly. ‘You’d
better jump up quick.’
The lights of the house shone on Mary’s pale face. She did not look at
Abner, but the woman of the farm, who appeared to be Williams’s wife,
stared at her with hostile eyes. ‘Good-night, Bill!’ the farmer called,
as Badger slouched away.
‘Thank’ee, Mr Badger!’ Abner added. But Badger only mumbled something
that he could not hear.
The sweating horse jogged easily down the lane to Wolfpits.