I
The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down
from Selston with seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with
loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the
gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon,
outdistanced it at a canter. A woman, walking up the railway line to
Underwood, drew back into the hedge, held her basket aside, and watched
the footplate of the engine advancing. The trucks thumped heavily past,
one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly
trapped between the jolting black waggons and the hedge; then they
curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped
noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the
track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney.
In the open, the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough
grass. The fields were dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip
that led to the whimsey, a reedy pit-pond, the fowls had already
abandoned their run among the alders, to roost in the tarred
fowl-house. The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red
sores licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon’s stagnant light. Just
beyond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black headstocks of
Brinsley Colliery. The two wheels were spinning fast up against the
sky, and the winding-engine rapped out its little spasms. The miners
were being turned up.
The engine whistled as it came into the wide bay of railway lines
beside the colliery, where rows of trucks stood in harbour.
Miners, single, trailing and in groups, passed like shadows diverging
home. At the edge of the ribbed level of sidings squat a low cottage,
three steps down from the cinder track. A large bony vine clutched at
the house, as if to claw down the tiled roof. Round the bricked yard
grew a few wintry primroses. Beyond, the long garden sloped down to a
bush-covered brook course. There were some twiggy apple trees,
winter-crack trees, and ragged cabbages. Beside the path hung
dishevelled pink chrysanthemums, like pink cloths hung on bushes. A
woman came stooping out of the felt-covered fowl-house, half-way down
the garden. She closed and padlocked the door, then drew herself erect,
having brushed some bits from her white apron.
She was a tall woman of imperious mien, handsome, with definite black
eyebrows. Her smooth black hair was parted exactly. For a few moments
she stood steadily watching the miners as they passed along the
railway: then she turned towards the brook course. Her face was calm
and set, her mouth was closed with disillusionment. After a moment she
called:
“John!” There was no answer. She waited, and then said distinctly:
“Where are you?”
“Here!” replied a child’s sulky voice from among the bushes. The woman
looked piercingly through the dusk.
“Are you at that brook?” she asked sternly.
For answer the child showed himself before the raspberry-canes that
rose like whips. He was a small, sturdy boy of five. He stood quite
still, defiantly.
“Oh!” said the mother, conciliated. “I thought you were down at that
wet brook—and you remember what I told you——”
The boy did not move or answer.
“Come, come on in,” she said more gently, “it’s getting dark. There’s
your grandfather’s engine coming down the line!”
The lad advanced slowly, with resentful, taciturn movement. He was
dressed in trousers and waistcoat of cloth that was too thick and hard
for the size of the garments. They were evidently cut down from a man’s
clothes.
As they went slowly towards the house he tore at the ragged wisps of
chrysanthemums and dropped the petals in handfuls along the path.
“Don’t do that—it does look nasty,” said his mother. He refrained, and
she, suddenly pitiful, broke off a twig with three or four wan flowers
and held them against her face. When mother and son reached the yard
her hand hesitated, and instead of laying the flower aside, she pushed
it in her apron-band. The mother and son stood at the foot of the three
steps looking across the bay of lines at the passing home of the
miners. The trundle of the small train was imminent. Suddenly the
engine loomed past the house and came to a stop opposite the gate.
The engine-driver, a short man with round grey beard, leaned out of the
cab high above the woman.
“Have you got a cup of tea?” he said in a cheery, hearty fashion.
It was her father. She went in, saying she would mash. Directly, she
returned.
“I didn’t come to see you on Sunday,” began the little grey-bearded
man.
“I didn’t expect you,” said his daughter.
The engine-driver winced; then, reassuming his cheery, airy manner, he
said:
“Oh, have you heard then? Well, and what do you think——?”
“I think it is soon enough,” she replied.
At her brief censure the little man made an impatient gesture, and said
coaxingly, yet with dangerous coldness:
“Well, what’s a man to do? It’s no sort of life for a man of my years,
to sit at my own hearth like a stranger. And if I’m going to marry
again it may as well be soon as late—what does it matter to anybody?”
The woman did not reply, but turned and went into the house. The man in
the engine-cab stood assertive, till she returned with a cup of tea and
a piece of bread and butter on a plate. She went up the steps and stood
near the footplate of the hissing engine.
“You needn’t ’a’ brought me bread an’ butter,” said her father. “But a
cup of tea”—he sipped appreciatively—“it’s very nice.” He sipped for a
moment or two, then: “I hear as Walter’s got another bout on,” he said.
“When hasn’t he?” said the woman bitterly.
“I heered tell of him in the ‘Lord Nelson’ braggin’ as he was going to
spend that b—— afore he went: half a sovereign that was.”
“When?” asked the woman.
“A’ Sat’day night—I know that’s true.”
“Very likely,” she laughed bitterly. “He gives me twenty-three
shillings.”
“Aye, it’s a nice thing, when a man can do nothing with his money but
make a beast of himself!” said the grey-whiskered man. The woman turned
her head away. Her father swallowed the last of his tea and handed her
the cup.
“Aye,” he sighed, wiping his mouth. “It’s a settler, it is——”
He put his hand on the lever. The little engine strained and groaned,
and the train rumbled towards the crossing. The woman again looked
across the metals. Darkness was settling over the spaces of the railway
and trucks: the miners, in grey sombre groups, were still passing home.
The winding-engine pulsed hurriedly, with brief pauses. Elizabeth Bates
looked at the dreary flow of men, then she went indoors. Her husband
did not come.
The kitchen was small and full of firelight; red coals piled glowing up
the chimney mouth. All the life of the room seemed in the white, warm
hearth and the steel fender reflecting the red fire. The cloth was laid
for tea; cups glinted in the shadows. At the back, where the lowest
stairs protruded into the room, the boy sat struggling with a knife and
a piece of whitewood. He was almost hidden in the shadow. It was
half-past four. They had but to await the father’s coming to begin tea.
As the mother watched her son’s sullen little struggle with the wood,
she saw herself in his silence and pertinacity; she saw the father in
her child’s indifference to all but himself. She seemed to be occupied
by her husband. He had probably gone past his home, slunk past his own
door, to drink before he came in, while his dinner spoiled and wasted
in waiting. She glanced at the clock, then took the potatoes to strain
them in the yard. The garden and fields beyond the brook were closed in
uncertain darkness. When she rose with the saucepan, leaving the drain
steaming into the night behind her, she saw the yellow lamps were lit
along the high road that went up the hill away beyond the space of the
railway lines and the field.
Then again she watched the men trooping home, fewer now and fewer.
Indoors the fire was sinking and the room was dark red. The woman put
her saucepan on the hob, and set a batter pudding near the mouth of the
oven. Then she stood unmoving. Directly, gratefully, came quick young
steps to the door. Someone hung on the latch a moment, then a little
girl entered and began pulling off her outdoor things, dragging a mass
of curls, just ripening from gold to brown, over her eyes with her hat.
Her mother chid her for coming late from school, and said she would
have to keep her at home the dark winter days.
“Why, mother, it’s hardly a bit dark yet. The lamp’s not lighted, and
my father’s not home.”
“No, he isn’t. But it’s a quarter to five! Did you see anything of
him?”
The child became serious. She looked at her mother with large, wistful
blue eyes.
“No, mother, I’ve never seen him. Why? Has he come up an’ gone past, to
Old Brinsley? He hasn’t, mother, ’cos I never saw him.”
“He’d watch that,” said the mother bitterly, “he’d take care as you
didn’t see him. But you may depend upon it, he’s seated in the ‘Prince
o’ Wales’. He wouldn’t be this late.”
The girl looked at her mother piteously.
“Let’s have our teas, mother, should we?” said she.
The mother called John to table. She opened the door once more and
looked out across the darkness of the lines. All was deserted: she
could not hear the winding-engines.
“Perhaps,” she said to herself, “he’s stopped to get some ripping
done.”
They sat down to tea. John, at the end of the table near the door, was
almost lost in the darkness. Their faces were hidden from each other.
The girl crouched against the fender slowly moving a thick piece of
bread before the fire. The lad, his face a dusky mark on the shadow,
sat watching her who was transfigured in the red glow.
“I do think it’s beautiful to look in the fire,” said the child.
“Do you?” said her mother. “Why?”
“It’s so red, and full of little caves—and it feels so nice, and you
can fair smell it.”
“It’ll want mending directly,” replied her mother, “and then if your
father comes he’ll carry on and say there never is a fire when a man
comes home sweating from the pit. A public-house is always warm
enough.”
There was silence till the boy said complainingly: “Make haste, our
Annie.”
“Well, I am doing! I can’t make the fire do it no faster, can I?”
“She keeps wafflin’ it about so’s to make ’er slow,” grumbled the boy.
“Don’t have such an evil imagination, child,” replied the mother.
Soon the room was busy in the darkness with the crisp sound of
crunching. The mother ate very little. She drank her tea determinedly,
and sat thinking. When she rose her anger was evident in the stern
unbending of her head. She looked at the pudding in the fender, and
broke out:
“It is a scandalous thing as a man can’t even come home to his dinner!
If it’s crozzled up to a cinder I don’t see why I should care. Past his
very door he goes to get to a public-house, and here I sit with his
dinner waiting for him——”
She went out. As she dropped piece after piece of coal on the red fire,
the shadows fell on the walls, till the room was almost in total
darkness.
“I canna see,” grumbled the invisible John. In spite of herself, the
mother laughed.
“You know the way to your mouth,” she said. She set the dustpan outside
the door. When she came again like a shadow on the hearth, the lad
repeated, complaining sulkily:
“I canna see.”
“Good gracious!” cried the mother irritably, “you’re as bad as your
father if it’s a bit dusk!”
Nevertheless she took a paper spill from a sheaf on the mantelpiece and
proceeded to light the lamp that hung from the ceiling in the middle of
the room. As she reached up, her figure displayed itself just rounding
with maternity.
“Oh, mother——!” exclaimed the girl.
“What?” said the woman, suspended in the act of putting the lamp glass
over the flame. The copper reflector shone handsomely on her, as she
stood with uplifted arm, turning to face her daughter.
“You’ve got a flower in your apron!” said the child, in a little
rapture at this unusual event.
“Goodness me!” exclaimed the woman, relieved. “One would think the
house was afire.” She replaced the glass and waited a moment before
turning up the wick. A pale shadow was seen floating vaguely on the
floor.
“Let me smell!” said the child, still rapturously, coming forward and
putting her face to her mother’s waist.
“Go along, silly!” said the mother, turning up the lamp. The light
revealed their suspense so that the woman felt it almost unbearable.
Annie was still bending at her waist. Irritably, the mother took the
flowers out from her apron-band.
“Oh, mother—don’t take them out!” Annie cried, catching her hand and
trying to replace the sprig.
“Such nonsense!” said the mother, turning away. The child put the pale
chrysanthemums to her lips, murmuring:
“Don’t they smell beautiful!”
Her mother gave a short laugh.
“No,” she said, “not to me. It was chrysanthemums when I married him,
and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever
brought him home drunk, he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his
button-hole.”
She looked at the children. Their eyes and their parted lips were
wondering. The mother sat rocking in silence for some time. Then she
looked at the clock.
“Twenty minutes to six!” In a tone of fine bitter carelessness she
continued: “Eh, he’ll not come now till they bring him. There he’ll
stick! But he needn’t come rolling in here in his pit-dirt, for _I_
won’t wash him. He can lie on the floor—— Eh, what a fool I’ve been,
what a fool! And this is what I came here for, to this dirty hole, rats
and all, for him to slink past his very door. Twice last week—he’s
begun now——”
She silenced herself, and rose to clear the table.
While for an hour or more the children played, subduedly intent,
fertile of imagination, united in fear of the mother’s wrath, and in
dread of their father’s home-coming, Mrs Bates sat in her rocking-chair
making a ‘singlet’ of thick cream-coloured flannel, which gave a dull
wounded sound as she tore off the grey edge. She worked at her sewing
with energy, listening to the children, and her anger wearied itself,
lay down to rest, opening its eyes from time to time and steadily
watching, its ears raised to listen. Sometimes even her anger quailed
and shrank, and the mother suspended her sewing, tracing the footsteps
that thudded along the sleepers outside; she would lift her head
sharply to bid the children ‘hush’, but she recovered herself in time,
and the footsteps went past the gate, and the children were not flung
out of their playing world.
But at last Annie sighed, and gave in. She glanced at her waggon of
slippers, and loathed the game. She turned plaintively to her mother.
“Mother!”—but she was inarticulate.
John crept out like a frog from under the sofa. His mother glanced up.
“Yes,” she said, “just look at those shirt-sleeves!”
The boy held them out to survey them, saying nothing. Then somebody
called in a hoarse voice away down the line, and suspense bristled in
the room, till two people had gone by outside, talking.
“It is time for bed,” said the mother.
“My father hasn’t come,” wailed Annie plaintively. But her mother was
primed with courage.
“Never mind. They’ll bring him when he does come—like a log.” She meant
there would be no scene. “And he may sleep on the floor till he wakes
himself. I know he’ll not go to work tomorrow after this!”
The children had their hands and faces wiped with a flannel. They were
very quiet. When they had put on their nightdresses, they said their
prayers, the boy mumbling. The mother looked down at them, at the brown
silken bush of intertwining curls in the nape of the girl’s neck, at
the little black head of the lad, and her heart burst with anger at
their father who caused all three such distress. The children hid their
faces in her skirts for comfort.
When Mrs Bates came down, the room was strangely empty, with a tension
of expectancy. She took up her sewing and stitched for some time
without raising her head. Meantime her anger was tinged with fear.