‘_GEORGE MALPAS_,
‘_NO._ 157. _COUNTY JAIL_,
‘_SHREWSBURY_.’
Then she folded her spectacles, blew out the light, and went upstairs in
the dark to the room where her husband was already snoring. She crept
into bed beside him and soon fell asleep in the blessed consciousness of
innocence.
Williams, blabbing to old Mrs Malpas in the childish hope of irritating
her, was not the only person who found an interest in spreading the
story. Badger, pulled into the mist out of the stink of his
preservatives and walking sullenly up the slope toward the sea-crows’
pool, had slowly realised that here was an opportunity of discrediting
Abner in the eyes of Susie Hind once and for all. Although the lovers’
meetings had of late been fewer and secret, while Susie, reminded from
time to time of the keeper’s jealousy, had been clever enough to laugh
him off and to make him feel ridiculous, Badger had not forgotten his
suspicions. It was true that he never now saw Abner at the Pound House,
and never heard his name mentioned outside the tirades of Mr Hind, who
was still anxious for his licence, but the rearing of his young pheasants
was now keeping Badger busy, and since he had no time to waste in
watching, he could never be quite sure that Abner was not profiting by
his forced neglect. Sometimes he would threaten Susie as he had done
before, pretending that he knew more than he did; but experience had
taught her how to deal with this crude creature; she treated his violence
as though it amused her, and he always ended by accepting what she said
with certain dark reservations that only troubled him beneath the
threshold of consciousness, and set him strangely wondering at night.
In the middle of one of these doubting moods Williams had come knocking
at his door with Abner beside him, asking for his help in the search for
Mary, and next day he and his neighbour had talked together, Williams
delighted as a child in his discovery of such frailty in old Mrs Malpas’s
daughter-in-law. Badger cared nothing one way or the other for Mary’s
chastity, he had no particular grudge against Mrs Malpas or her son, but
he quickly saw that in Williams’s discovery he had hit on a rare
touchstone for Susie’s feelings toward Abner. He saw that he must make
use of it before the tale became common talk, so he cornered Susie at the
first opportunity that he found, and told her, as bluntly as was his
custom, what had happened.
‘He’s brazen-faced enough, that chap Fellows,’ he said, ‘seeing that he
told Mr Williams right out that he and George Malpas’s wife had slept at
the Harley Arms, over Redlake way. Took the two children with ’em and
all! That was the rum part of it!’
While he spoke he watched Susie with his small keen eyes, sharpened by
the habit of observing wild game, waiting for her face to betray to him
exactly what she felt toward Abner. But it was not for nothing that
Susie had learnt the art of being all things to all men. Badger’s eyes
were a little too eager, and she was quick to see it.
‘Why do you want to tell me this, Mr Badger?’ she said slowly.
‘He’s an old friend of yours. You don’t put me off as easy as that!’
‘Then you might have saved yourself the trouble,’ she said, turning her
back on him. ‘If you’ve any other dirty stories to tell, I’ll be obliged
if you’ll keep them to yourself.’
He flushed darkly, so that she felt she was overdoing it. She came back
to him and stood talking of other things, her hand on the table within an
inch of his own.
‘I hope you didn’t take any offence,’ she said softly. ‘Only I don’t
like to hear my name coupled with a chap of that kind.’
Badger swallowed his liquor with satisfaction. It seemed to him that he
had artfully secured his point. He looked Susie up and down, appraising
her, lazily satisfied. She had gained a new value in his eyes. He held
her in talk, and she loitered by his table, standing on one leg. In
taking away his glass she even touched his hand. They were alone in the
bar. He caught her and kissed her. Protesting, as a matter of form, she
smiled. In her heart she hated him like poison. Her mind was aflame
with vague jealousies, for any fool could see that Abner was worth two of
this man.
That night she heard the gang from the pipe-track discussing the accident
at Bron, winking at each other over the way in which the story had come
out. They laughed without condemning. To them it seemed no more than a
good joke. When her father’s back was turned the Gunner began to pull
her leg about it; but she laughed back at him, giving him coarseness for
coarseness, and went on wiping her glasses, humming to herself the
refrain of a pantomime tune. She heard herself singing. Her voice
sounded toneless and unreal. When she went to bed she could not sleep
for fretting. Abner had not been near her for more than a week, and she
did not dare to take the risk of sending him a message at his work. She
knew that she wanted him. She was not going to lose him without a fight.
Next afternoon she was free, and knowing that Abner would be safely at
work, she dressed herself elaborately in her best clothes and a pair of
new shoes and set off boldly for Wolfpits. Her hands trembled and her
frock was drenched with perspiration as she dressed.
‘Where are you off to, got up like that?’ her father called after her.
‘Can’t I dress as I like, dad?’ she said, with a toss of her head.
‘There’s tempest about. You’ll get soaked to the skin!’ he shouted.
She felt as if she were soaked to the skin already. The long spell of
rainless weather had reached its climax, and the delaine frock that she
had chosen had been cut for elegance rather than for comfort. The sun
went in, leaving a white and heavy sky. The leaves of elm and chestnut
drooped in the heat as with the weight of their own dust. Her new shoes
were too small for her, and by the time that she had toiled up to the
bridge over the Folly, she wished that she had not come. A yaffle mocked
her from the edge of the wood. Swallows were hawking low down over the
dust of the road. An awful, oppressive silence weighed on the land. She
hesitated, then turned painfully up the Wolfpits avenue, but when she had
almost decided to turn back, the thunder broke above her and big drops
spattered the dust. The thought of the new tulle in her hat made her run
for shelter. The trees of the avenue gave a long sigh and the rain
swished down in torrents. Round the corner she saw Mrs Mamble running
about, like a woman possessed, after the washing that she had spread on
the bushes to dry.
‘Slip into the porch, miss,’ she cried, catching sight of Susie, ‘or
you’ll be drownded.’ Then she called to Mary, who was ironing in the
kitchen: ‘There’s a young lady got caught in the storm, Mrs Malpas!’
‘Please come inside and wait till it’s over,’ Mary cried, glancing
through the window.
Susie entered. ‘Take a seat,’ Mary said, and went on with her ironing.
One side of her face was flushed with the heat of the iron that she had
tested by holding it to her cheek. It made her look as if she were angry
or embarrassed. The kitchen was full of the sweet, scorched smell of
linen. Susie, sitting nervously on the edge of the seat to which she had
been shown, felt that the falseness of her position must be made clear.
She was out to fight, and not without courage.
‘My name is Hind . . . Susan Hind,’ she said. ‘From the Pound House, you
know.’
Mary stopped ironing and looked at her. She began to wish that she had
not turned herself out so elegantly. She felt that she must look like a
street-woman.
‘Yes . . . I thought I knew you,’ Mary said.
‘I came over to speak to you.’ Susie hesitated: ‘About Mr Fellows . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘There’s a tale going round . . .’ She faltered. She wished that she
were not sitting on the edge of the chair, that Mary were not taller than
herself. There was something unfair and consciously superior in the
woman’s plain white apron. More than this, she had the subtle,
inexplicable advantage of being a married woman with children . . . even
if her husband had deserted her. Mary put down her iron on its stand and
looked her full in the eyes. Now her cheeks were equally flushed. Susie
wished that she would speak, even if she were only to repeat her
provocative ‘Yes?’ She took fright suddenly, stood up, and plunged.
‘It’s not fair!’ she cried. ‘You know it’s not fair! You, a married
woman, that have had your life and a couple of children! But as soon as
your husband’s well out of sight you must go running after another man.
Take his money—that’s one thing! But take him—that’s another! I suppose
you’re the kind that can’t make yourself happy unless you’re making some
man soft on you . . . so they can hang round you and you play the lady on
them! Don’t you imagine I don’t know the dog’s life you give George!
And now you’ve got hold of your lodger—lodger, I says!—and turned him
crazy. Call yourself a lady! Doesn’t every one know what your father
was? We all know about that. George himself told me. And I can tell
you what you are, straight. You’re nothing better than a whore on the
streets if the truth was known.’
Mary trembled. ‘Don’t shout so! Don’t shout so!’ she said. ‘I don’t
know what you mean.’
‘What I mean?’ cried Susie hysterically. ‘What I mean? Why, going about
the country in strange places and laying about with single men. That’s
what I mean. Call yourself a married woman . . .’
‘You’re wrong . . . you’re quite wrong!’
‘Am I wrong then? I know whose word I’d sooner take: Mr Williams’s and
Mr Badger’s or yourn! I know that was the first time it came out, but
that makes no difference to what every one in the district has known for
a fact these months. But I’ll tell you one thing—and don’t you forget
it!—you’re not going to take Abner off me. Not if I kill him first. And
I’m not talking wild, understand. I mean it. If I have to shame you to
your face I’m not going to let him go. Shame . . .’ she laughed.
‘That’s a fine word to use for the likes of you!’
She gave a gasp for breath, then, with a flash of hopeless hatred, as
though she were searching the room for something that her violence might
appropriately destroy, she went out blindly into the rain.
Mary stood rigidly at her ironing-table. A flash of lightning ripped the
sky in front of her window, nearly blinding her, and her lips uttered a
cry. Mrs Mamble ran in with her skirt thrown over her head, for she was
frightened of thunder.
‘My!’ she cried from under the skirt. ‘My, what a downpour!’ She looked
out timidly. ‘Well, I never! She’s gone!’
‘Yes,’ said Mary, with a helpless laugh. ‘She’s gone!’
‘Gone? Why, the girl must be mad!’
Again Mary laughed at the wide astonishment in Mrs Mamble’s eyes.
Another flash followed and the old woman wrapped up her head again,
waiting for the thunder. It came with a crash, right overhead, and the
house shook. Mary suddenly remembered the children, who were playing in
the parlour.
‘Do go and see to them, Mrs Mamble,’ she said. ‘There’s a dear.’
She herself could not move. She went on folding her linen. It seemed as
if she must find some mechanical task for her hands to do. In a moment
Mrs Mamble returned to say that the children were not in the least
frightened. She kept dodging in and out of the house all afternoon for
fear of the storm returning and catching her unawares, telling of the
damage that the rain might have done to the hay lying out in the meadows
or to the standing corn.
‘But there’s no denying that it’s wanted,’ she said inconsequently.
By the time that Abner left work that evening the storm had rolled away,
rumbling over the treetops of Bringewood Chase. All day he had worked
under the heavy sky, breathing an air that was dead and choked with dust.
Now the vault was clear and brilliant as that of an evening in spring.
The smell of dust rose from the road, blackbirds were singing, and from
the pale, steaming hayfields waves of sweetness drifted across his path.
His steps were light and his heart happy.
Mary received him as usual and gave him his tea. He laughed with her
over the violence of the storm and asked her gaily if the doctor had been
to take the splint off Gladys’s leg.
‘We must put by a shillin’ or two for that,’ he said. For the moment he
was so full of his own content that he had scarcely noticed her
preoccupation; but when he mentioned money she made a quick, instinctive
movement, as though she wanted to speak and to refuse it. Little by
little he began to realise that she was trying to avoid him and sometimes
leaving his questions unanswered.
‘What’s up with you, missus?’ he said.
‘Nothing,’ she replied. ‘Nothing at all that I know of.’
But her denial did not convince him. All the evening he tried to guess
what could have upset her, but she evaded him, pretending that she was
her normal self. He knew better. Even when she spoke to the children or
to Mrs Mamble, who came in to talk about the havoc of the storm and to
give them the news that a sheep had been struck by lightning on
Williams’s farm, Mary was listless and dull.
Abner used her gently. He knew that women must have their moods, and
that a man needed to be patient with them if he would be happy; but day
after day now passed without any change in her attitude. Since the
discovery of his own passion that he had made by the sea-crows’ pool, it
had been hard enough as it was for him to live with her on ordinary
terms; but now, even though he humoured her, she was distant with him.
He tried to make her explain herself. She only shook her head. It
seemed, indeed, as if a single day had thrown them back into all the
awkwardness of his early life at Wolfpits, and that she had suddenly
taken it into her head to upset the convention under which they had
agreed to live. Most of all, she avoided him whenever he spoke of money,
and when he brought her his wages at the end of the week she left them
lying on the table as though touching them would have burned her fingers.
If he had not loved the woman, and her children too, he would have broken
away in accordance with his nature. As it was, he hung on, sore and
bewildered, wondering what new coldness she could inflict upon him.
Another shock awaited her. One day, when Abner was away at work, the
postman bicycled up to Wolfpits and handed her a letter. This was so
rare an event at Wolfpits that the man waited, as country postmen, who
also act as interpreters, often do, to hear its contents.
‘You’ll see by the postmark it’s come from Shrewsbury,’ he said.
‘Yes, so I see,’ she replied, thrusting it into the pocket of her apron.
She had already recognised George’s freehand writing. He went away, but
she kept the letter in her pocket unopened. She dared not open it; and
when at last she did so, the words sent a chill over all her body.
‘_MY DEAR WIFE_,’—_she read, shivering_—‘_Although I may be doing
time I’m not yet dead that I know of_. _They say that love is
blind_, _but don’t you go imagining that other people haven’t got
eyes_.
‘_Your loving husband_,
‘_GEORGE_.’
She was seized with a pain that had scarcely abated when Abner came home
at night. She could not bring herself to speak to him. She desired,
passionately, to show him the letter, but shame would not let her do so.
He, in his turn, was sick of the wretchedness of their present relation,
and when the children had been put to bed, he told her so in words that
he had chosen for their roughness. She stared at him from the other side
of the supper table with grief and resentment in her eyes.
‘If it’s as bad as that, what makes you stay here?’ she said slowly.
‘I like that!’ he replied. ‘You know as well as I do.’
She took fright at this, for she wasn’t sure of his meaning, though she
knew in her heart what she wanted him to mean. She was afraid that he
would guess at her unspoken admission.
‘_I_ don’t keep you here,’ she said.
He got up and walked the room. A hay-moth hurled itself against the
shade of the lamp with a sharp ringing sound and fell crippled on the
tablecloth.
‘It’s hurt,’ she cried. ‘Kill it!’
Abner crushed the insect with his thumb and threw it in the fireplace.
The coppery bloom came off on his fingers. For a moment she was
hypnotised watching him. Then she recovered her senses.
‘I don’t keep you. There’s no need for you to stay in every night,’ she
said.
‘No. There bain’t. I’m damned if there be!’ he replied.
He picked up his cap and walked out of the room. She nearly ran after
him to thrust George’s letter into his hand. But she was too late. ‘So
much the better,’ she thought. She felt that she had been saved from
some calamity.
He set off, walking furiously through the mellow evening, trying to cool
his blood with violent exertion as instinctively as an animal eats grass.
By nightfall he had reached the remote valley, nine miles away in folds
of the Forest of Clun, whither his friends the cloggers had returned in
the spring. He found their canvas pitched in a coomb under high
sheepwalks, and Wigan Joe made him as welcome as ever. They sat out in
the soft, moonless night, talking and drinking beer. It was like old
times for Abner to hear Joe reeling off stories one after another in his
flat Lancashire dialect. He lolled there listening till the company grew
drowsy. There was no question of his returning to Wolfpits that night,
for the sky drooped like a pall of velvet on the earth and he could never
have found his way. He turned in with the others on a pile of dried
bracken, waking at dawn to set off again toward Chapel Green.
For a few hours he had shed his restlessness, but when he reached
Wolfpits in the evening the sense of restraint descended on him again.
He felt that Mary was watching him, wondering where he had been. Her
eyes were tragic, and, as he thought, reproachful.
This only irritated him. He couldn’t be bothered with her moods. When,
speaking to Mrs Mamble, he happened to mention that he had walked over in
the evening to the sloggers’ workings, she looked at him with such a
searching suspicion that he could not contain himself.
‘What’s up with you?’ he said. ‘Do you think I’m codding you?’
She looked away without answering.
‘There’s no need to believe me if you don’t want to,’ he said.
And what the hell did it matter to her where he went or what he did? If
he were to leave her to herself for a bit perhaps she’d begin to realise
that he was useful, and that it wouldn’t pay her to treat him like dirt.
It was time she had a lesson!
He spent the next evening with Mick Connor in a pub at Lesswardine,
mixing his drinks, standing treat recklessly. He had to borrow six
shillings from Mick to pay his score. It pleased him to think how Mary
would stare at his money next Saturday when she found it six bob short . . .
she, who was too proud to pick it up when he gave it her!
At the yellow turnpike house outside Lesswardine their paths diverged;
and this was unfortunate, for it was easier to walk arm in arm. Mick
left him; but as soon as he found himself alone the vision of Mary
returned to him: Mary, as he had seen her and desired her, sitting pale
on the border of the pool a fortnight ago. In his perverse and drunken
mind he hated her. It seemed to him that she had been making a fool of
him, alternately alluring and rejecting.
He walked along, sweating violently, in the direction of Mainstone,
wishing to God he’d never known the damned woman. Women . . . and yet a
lusty man of his age couldn’t live without women! It was against nature
to live without women, and a man was a fool if he did so. He went hot
and cold, thrilled with voluptuous sensations. He laughed at himself,
and staggered up to a gate at the side of the road to light his pipe. He
broke three matches and then discovered that they were damp and would not
strike. He remembered indefinitely that Mick had upset a pint of beer
into his pocket. He cursed the matches and Mick together.
A light breeze moved above him, and as in the distance he heard a sound
like that of a gentle shower falling on leaves in June: a sound that
meant something to his memory. He became suddenly aware that he was
standing at that moment on the outskirts of Mainstone village,
immediately beneath a big poplar tree. A dozen times he had stood there
in the shadow waiting for the light to go out in the windows of the Pound
House, for the steps of Bastard to pass him, for the moment when he might
safely steal across to Susie’s door.
His pulse quickened. Some hidden instinct must have made him stop there.
No light could be seen, but there, in the darkness, was a woman whom he
could have for the asking. He pulled himself together, and a moment
later was standing by the outhouse door. He threw a clod at her
window-pane. She had better not try putting him off to-night! If he had
to climb in at her window she must come to him. He fretted with
impatience.
But he had not long to wait. In a few minutes she had opened the back
door. He heard the door scrape, but it was so dark that he could not see
her. He put out his hands, groping in the darkness, and found her, warm
and breathing.
‘I thought you were never coming again,’ she whispered.
He took her in his arms and clothed her in kisses. She clung to him,
breathing softly, while his kisses enveloped her. His misery left him,
vanished miraculously in the darkness. In the black confusion of his
thoughts it seemed to him as if he were kissing Mary Malpas.