Asthe autumn hardened into an iron winter Abner had less time than ever to spend on these distractions. When the football season opened he began to play for the little club named Halesby Swifts, from which Mawne United usually drew its recruits. Technically it was a professional club, but the gate money that it drew from its adventures in pursuit of the local charity cups did no more than pay for the boots and clothes and footballs of the players. In the first round of the North Bromwich Hospital Cup competition the Swifts had the good luck to be drawn against their big neighbours, Mawne United, on the Mawne ground, and Abner, playing centre-half, repeated the exploit of his childhood by scoring a goal against the goalkeeper who had succeeded the celebrated Harper. It was an elevating moment. The captain and others of the Swifts came running up to Abner and wrung his hand. All Mawne and Halesby on the touchline waved black bowler hats under the flag of Mawne United languidly flying from its staff beside the Royal Oak. A great moment! Abner did not see his father standing in his old place behind the Mawne goal posts with his hands thrust into the pockets of his reefer coat and his eyes sparkling as he puffed away at his black clay pipe. That was how John Fellows showed his emotion. Later in the evening he showed it in another way.
This match, however, made a considerable difference in John Fellows’s attitude. It gave Abner a standing with his father that had never been granted to him before. Nor was this the only result of his success; for on the following Monday Mr Hudson, the chief clerk in Mr Willis’s works at Mawne, and secretary of the United, an irreproachable expert in a game that he had never played, sent up a message to the pit for Abner, and on Tuesday he had ‘signed on’ for the senior club.
‘A lad like you, growing and that,’ said Mr Hudson,‘didn’t ought to be working in the pit. I’ll speak to the manager, and if you’ll come down to the Furnaces next Monday we’ll see what sort of job we can find you.’
On Monday morning Abner walked over to the Stour valley in which the great works lay angrily seething, and picked his way through the gigantic debris of the iron age: huge discarded boilers, brown with rust; scrap-heaps of tangled metal that had served its day; stacks of rails; purple mountains of iron ore standing ready for the blast-furnaces that snored like dragons in their sleep and made the air around them quiver with hot breath. Over a network of rails on which an officious shunting-engine that the head of the firm had christened Lilian, in honour of his daughter, ran to and fro, whistling shrill warnings; over many steam pipes, snaky tentacles of the central power-house, that hissed steam from their leaky joints, he passed to the office that Mr Hudson inhabited. On the steps in the middle of his path stood a tall, pale young man who stared out over the works as though some vision entranced him. Abner, wondering what he was looking at, and following the direction of his eyes, saw nothing unusual. He knew that this was young Mr Willis, Mr Edward, as Hudson called him. He asked Abner what he wanted.
‘Mr Hudson, gaffer.’
‘You’ll find him inside.’
He moved out of the way, still, apparently in the toils of his dream, and Abner was shown into Mr Hudson, whom he found sitting at a desk with a pencil behind either ear. ‘Ah, here you are,’ said Mr Hudson. ‘There’s a good chap!’ and took him straightway to one of the foremen, an old butty of John Fellows, who gave him an indefinite labouring job that consisted of moving metallic rubbish from one part of the works to another as occasion demanded. At Mawne, it seemed, no fragment of iron was ever allowed to leave the works as long as there was a foot of space in which it could be stored. Abner also had to grease the wheels of a little line of trolley-trucks that blundered up and down the hill in front of the manager’s house, between the furnaces and the high colliery of Timbertree.
‘This is work for an old man, not for a strong lad like you,’ the foreman grumbled. He knew that there was always work above ground and good pay at Mawne for a promising footballer. ‘They’ll fause you up now! Wait till your footballing’s over,’ he said, ‘wait till you’ve broke your leg, and then you ask your Mr Hudson for a job like this and see what he’ll tell you!’
But Abner was seventeen and had no thoughts for age. The greatest delight of all was that he now breathed the air of the open sky all day instead of the darkness of the pit; and even if the ecstasy of his evening’s relief was now blunted, there seemed to be no end to his capacity for physical enjoyment. Beneath the caresses of air and light his physique began to expand. He took a delight in the strict training that the Mawne United directors enforced on their players. With skipping and rubbing and sprinting his muscles became hard and supple and his whole body marvellously fit. Football became his whole life. In his work at Mawne, even in his dreams, he pondered on its tactics. All his friends were players absorbed in the same game. He gained confidence and skill, and by the end of the season he had become one of the crowd’s idols, followed from the arena by a trail of small boys and patted on the back by strangers as he walked home after a match in his muddy clothes. The girls also used to turn and look at him with bold glances; but his life was far too full in those days for him to worry his head about women.
His relation with Alice had now passed its first emotional stage, and though she was more interested in him than she had ever been before, she had grown to understand him better, so that the storms which had made life at Hackett’s Cottages so intense no longer occurred. She washed his football clothes with care and fed him regularly and well, as indeed she should have done, for he was now earning good money. She had discovered that it paid her best not to worry him. Sometimes a fit of restlessness would make him say that he must change his lodging; but although he often grumbled, he still stayed on in the room that he had occupied since he was a child. In her anxietyto please him she even offered of her own accord to have the dog Tiger in the house; but Abner only stared at her, wondering what she was getting at, and laughed. ‘Still jealous of the poor old woman?’ he said.
Of course she was still jealous of Mrs Moseley. She couldn’t help being jealous; but though she denied this indignantly, and even tried to prove her goodwill by paying several awkward visits with the baby to Mrs Moseley’s bedroom, she knew very well that the old woman’s attractions for Abner were the very least that she had to fear. She was really and deeply jealous of the young women who stared at him on the football field or in the Stourton Road. She knew how handsome he was growing; realised, with an agony that was not wholly maternal, that sooner or later he was bound to fall in love, and that was a calamity which somehow she felt she could not bear. Little by little John Fellows was becoming less important to her. All her life seemed more and more centred in her baby and in Abner. Thinking the matter over she decided that it was her best policy to encourage him in his friendship for the old woman, and she did so gradually, insidiously, so that Abner should not guess what she was doing or wonder why she was doing it.
Abner needed no encouragement. He had never wavered from his loyalty, and now more than ever he felt that he owed some attention to his old friend. Since the day when she had taken to her bed after the fortnight’s work at Hackett’s Cottages, she had never recovered sufficiently to resume her former activities. Sometimes, indeed, it had seemed that her leg was on the point of healing; but as soon as she crawled downstairs and tried to go about her business it broke down again, which was not surprising seeing how much her lying in bed had weakened her. The doctor could do nothing but preach patience and leave her in the hands of the district nurse.
For a whole year she struggled along on the pittance that the relieving officer gave her; but at last the disorder of the cottage became so overwhelming that the nurse took the law into her own hands and, in spite of all Mrs Moseley’s protests, wrote a letter tothe nearest of the old woman’s relatives, a younger sister, the wife of a North Bromwich brass-worker named Wade.
In answer to the letter Mrs Wade came over to see her sister, dressed as for a funeral in closely-fitting black sateen. Being rather afraid that she might find it awkward to get out of taking Mrs Moseley home with her, the sight of the old woman’s helplessness gave her a distinct feeling of relief which showed itself in the warmth of her condolences.
‘Well, Eliza, this is a shame, isn’t it? And my! won’t George be shocked when I tell him? To think of your never ’aving let us know! Just to think of it!’
Mrs Moseley feebly protested that it wasn’t her fault that the Wades had been told even now. ‘I don’t want to be a trouble to people,’ she said. Mrs Wade assured her that she wasn’t anything of the kind.
‘George, he says to me: “Now, Florrie, you mind you bring Eliza hack with you.” But, of course, any one could see with half a glance that that’s impossible like you are. We could have made you that comfortable, too! We ’ave a lovely little ’ouse. What with the money George is picking up, and what we’ve saved.’
By the time of the evening train on which her sister had promised to return to North Bromwich, Mrs Moseley was heartily sick of George’s name and achievements. She hadn’t really ever known her sister Florrie, and now she felt that in spite of her suave manner and affectation of kindnesses that cost nothing she had really come to spy out the nakedness of the land, to check the value of her sister’s scanty effects, to reckon just how much lay between her and the workhouse. And all the time Mrs Moseley was in a fever wondering what the house was like downstairs; whether, in her absence, dirt had accumulated; whether Tiger had made the washhouse in a mess. Indeed, when Mrs Wade departed, she crept downstairs to see for herself. ‘Whatever they says’—this was always her cry—‘they can’t say I bain’t clean!’
The upshot of this visit was revealed to Abner a week or two later, when he arrived one evening to find the faithless Tiger playing at the knee of a stranger,a girl with the city’s matte complexion, hair that was almost black with a gleam of copper in it, and brown, long-lashed eyes.
‘That your dog?’ she said, smiling. Her voice was low. Abner was now used to the high-pitched voices of Alice and her neighbours. He had never heard a woman speak so quietly.
He said ‘Yes,’ and she, with the utmost self-possession, told him that Tiger was a beauty. It wasn’t strictly true, but it gave Abner a flush of pleasure, for he loved Tiger. Then she said: ‘I’m Susan Wade. Mother sent me here to look after Auntie Liza for a week or two.’
As a matter of fact mother, warned by a snuffy shilling-doctor in Lower Sparkdale that Susan was anæmic and needed country air, had suddenly felt more than usually generous toward her sister, and sent Susan to ‘help,’ with no more than the price of her keep.
‘Afford it?’ she said, when her husband questioned her about Mrs Moseley’s ability to feed another mouth, ‘Afford it? You don’t know our Liza! She was always the quiet one of the family. And a saving kind, too. I know well enough she’s got a stocking somewhere!’
Mr Wade was not in the habit of arguing with his wife, and Mrs Moseley, when Susan arrived at Halesby with a small wicker basket containing her best dress and a bag of apples with mother’s love, was so deeply touched that when she kissed her her eyes filled with tears.
‘You’ll be lonely,’ she said, ‘with an old woman like me.’
‘I shall go out into the lanes,’ said Susan. ‘Mother told me I must get all the fresh air I can. For the blood, you know.’ That put the matter quite plainly.
Mrs Moseley assured Abner that Susan was a dear, sweet child, and such a little woman; but he never met her in Mrs Moseley’s presence, for the old lady had decided against the impropriety of Susan and himself together beholding her in bed. Awkward, at first, he found in a little while that she wasn’t as formidable as he imagined, though all his triumphs in thefootball field could not have given him one half of her staggering self-possession. What impressed him most about her was, without doubt, the sense of personal cleanliness that she carried with her. Susan was on a holiday, and had time for such refinements. She wore clean print dresses, while Alice and her shrill-voiced neighbours in Hackett’s Cottages, by whose appearance Abner had regulated his ideas of feminine nicety, wore, as a rule, the livery of their toil. Susan, on the other hand, lived like a lady, having no better work for her fingers than the braiding of her dark hair. In the mornings she stayed with Mrs Moseley, listening, in a kind of dream, to her aunt’s recitation of the virtues of people whom, in the days before her marriage, she had served. It seemed as if that were the time in her life toward which her thoughts now returned most happily, and the mere scraping together of its unimportant details filled her with a mild afterglow of enjoyment.
‘I remember,’ she would begin, in a weak, contented voice that was soothing in its tiredness, ‘I remember one day Mrs Willis—the first Mrs Willis that is, old Mr Hackett’s daughter down the Holloway and Mr Edward’s mother—I remember her coming into the kitchen with a beautiful basketful of cherries. Fine, black fruit they was! And she says “Hannah”—that’s the Hannah that’s still there, but I expect she’s forgottenme—“Hannah,” she says, “look what the master’s sent from the cherry-orchard.” They always call it the cherry-orchard, you know, up above Mawne bank, and that was a wonderful year for cherries. “We’ll make them into jam, Hannah,” she says. “And Liza”—that’s me—“will help you stone them.”Stone them, she says! And how we laughed to be sure! I can see her standing there now, a bit red in the face, for she was new to housekeeping and never knew you don’t stone cherries. She had a couple of black-hearts in her lips, like the game you play. A dear lady, she was! I can see her again in Mr Edward. Time passes, doesn’t it? You’ll know that some day, Susan.’
Susan tossed her head. Perhaps some day she would know, but sufficient unto this were its quiet languorsand the breath of summer air drifting in at a chink in her aunt’s window from the fields towards the hills. She herself had grown up in the cramped quarter of Sparkdale, where, in summer-time the blue-brick pavements burn under a pale sky, where there is always a smell of dust and fire and rotting remnants of fruit dropped from the hawkers’ barrows into the gutter. At the back of their house in Sparkdale lay a little garden plot; but her father had always given it over to fowls that made it an arid, gritty patch littered with shed feathers. All the parks lay miles away over the streets, and the only green that Susan knew was the grass that grew within the railings of an ugly Georgian church standing in a square that had once been fashionable but was now neglected and unkempt. For this reason the sloping fields beyond Halesby were wonderful to her, and things that would have seemed common to a country child, enchanting. In the afternoon she went out walking with Tiger. There was no need for Abner to be jealous, for these walks bore no comparison in Tiger’s mind with his evening visits to rabbit-haunted banks.
Susan had come to Halesby thrilled by her first experience of romance. She had been initiated by a pale young clerk named Bagley who taught in the Sunday-school of the decayed Georgian church. It had happened at their annual ‘outing’ to Sutton Park. There, in a hot slade of larches, Mr Bagley had held her hand, a small and very sticky hand in a lace mitten. While he did so he had confided to her that his was an extremely passionate nature, and that nothing but his hold on the Anglican faith restrained him from exploiting it, and after this, immediately before tea, he had kissed her once. That had been all; for after tea Mr Bagley, weighed down no doubt by a sense of shame, had avoided her. All that remained to her of this adventure was the power of making Mr Bagley blush; and this was no very signal achievement, for Mr Bagley flushed easily and had already written privily to advertisers in the weekly papers who claimed to cure this weakness. It appeared indeed that there would never be any more between them than a bond of secretguilt; and since Susan had liked being kissed, even by Mr Bagley, she decided to continue her experiments whenever the chance came.
From the first sight of him Abner had pleased her. He was eighteen, just a year older than herself. His handsome head, his excellent teeth, his contrasting fairness, the size and strength of his body, all attracted her. She thought she would like to be alone with him and see what would happen. Therefore she began by inviting herself to accompany him on one of his evening excursions with Tiger. Abner resented the proposal, partly because he had never quite shaken off the convention of his boyhood that girls were soft and any dealings with them shameful, and partly because he was jealous of any stranger invading a world that was so particularly his own and so specially guarded from the feminine influence hitherto represented by Alice. But Susan, by her quiet determination, made it impossible for him to refuse. She had always been—after the poultry—her father’s principal pet, and when Abner put her off, she simply declined to believe that he meant it.
He grumbled and submitted. He supposed that he was doing a kindness to Mrs Moseley by taking her, and comforted himself with the thought that, after all, Susan wasn’t like other girls: a conclusion at which he arrived without difficulty, seeing that he had known no other girl but Alice. On his side, indeed, the relationship was as natural as it might be. It was Susan who found it rather a failure in the absence of sentimental developments. Abner treated her, she found, very much as if she had been a boy; and though this was the pose with which she had started their acquaintance, she didn’t want it to remain at that. Mrs Moseley’s looking-glass, in which she could see herself when she sat in her favourite place at the foot of the bed in the morning, assured her that she was much nicer to look at now than when she first came to Halesby from the city. She was plumper, her cheeks and lips were more brightly coloured and her eyes clearer. Mr Bagley would have noticed the difference. Abner, apparently, didn’t. She comforted herselfwith the reflection that he was too rough and rugged to realise her delicacy, that he was only a common labourer and no fit associate for a foreman’s daughter, but when she came to think of it, her social quality should really have made her more attractive to him.
She was a very direct young woman. One evening when they went out for their walk down the lane that leads to the woody basin known as Dovehouse Fields they came to a lonely stile at the end of a bridge over a tributary of the Stour, beyond which the red bank was tunnelled by many rabbits. Tiger ran forward eagerly over the bridge and began to sniff at the holes in the bank, and Abner would have followed him if Susan had not barred the way, sitting complacently on the top of the stile. She sat there in the low sunlight that warmed her cheeks, lighted gleams of copper in her hair, and made her brown eyes amber.
‘I want to stay here, Abner,’ she said.
‘Well, let us pass then,’ said Abner, thinking only of rabbits. ‘Wait till I come back.’
But she wouldn’t move from her perch. She sat there smiling and swinging her long legs. Tiger, who couldn’t realise why any scentless human should hesitate on the verge of such excitements, ran back and looked at them, making little quick noises of encouragement. Susan called him, and rather reluctantly he scuttled back over the bridge and jumped up to her knees licking her hands. She said:
‘Don’t you think I look nice, Abner?’
‘I don’t see nothing wrong with you,’ said Abner, without enthusiasm.
‘Don’t be soft!’ she said. ‘I mean, don’t you want to kiss me?’
He didn’t. He hadn’t thought about such a thing. It was she who was being soft now. And yet he couldn’t help wanting to try when he saw her smiling at him from the stile. He kissed her, very clumsily, on the cheek. He had never kissed any one before, and its softness and coolness bewildered him. But she wasn’t content with this. She took his face in both her hands and kissed his lips. He lost his head. He didn’t know what he was doing. He took her in hisarms in a way that was very different from Mr Bagley’s passionate embrace. It seemed as if he wanted to kiss the life out of her. She drew back, almost frightened of him, but he wouldn’t let her go. They left Tiger to his rabbits and wandered off into the woods. When Susan returned in the darkness Mrs Moseley could not help remarking how well she looked.
This was no more than the beginning of the adventure. There was nothing lukewarm about the passion that Susan had thus precipitated. Her education, which had brought her very nearly to the level of middle-class prudishness, had not prepared her for Abner’s love-making. Mr Bagley, she reflected, would have made her timid presents of sweets and, perhaps, occupied the pew behind hers in church. He would have taken her for walks in one of the decorous parks on the other side of the city. He would have held her hand on the tram and paid her spoony compliments. Abner paid her no compliments, gave her no presents. Nor did he hold her hand: he held her whole body till she felt that her will was failing and that her only duty was to obey him. She was terrified by his violence, ashamed of responding to its crudity. She was almost sorry that she had provoked him, for now it was she who fled from him and feared to be overtaken, and though the excitement of the chase thrilled her she could never escape from the vague threat of its inevitable end. Her mother, she knew, would have approved of Mr Bagley. What would she think of this handsome young labourer, this professional footballer? She knew that she was bound to resist him as long as she could.
This was no easy matter. Abner absorbed her, gave her no chance. Once having got her he would not let her go. Her calculations of the future didn’t trouble him. Every evening when he had knocked off work he came along to Mrs Moseley’s house and called for her, and in spite of any excuse that she might make, he took her off over the fields and into the woods. Mrs Moseley unconsciously abetted him.
‘Your mother’s anxious that you should get all the fresh air you can, dear,’ she used to say, ‘and it’s a beautiful evening. I wish I could go with you!’
The old woman was sure that she could trust them together, and for three weeks of brilliant summer weather they spent the evening and the twilight in each other’s arms. Susan tried a series of tactics that she invented for her own protection. She pretended to shrink from his coarseness and from the dirt of the works in contrast with her own clean fragility. She adopted another, distant attitude, proprietary and maternal. Abner laughed at both of them. She even, in an extremity, played her last card: the attentions of the elegant Bagley. ‘You give him five minutes alone with me, and I’ll settle that!’ said Abner. ‘You’re my wench, and don’t you forget it!’
Providence, in the shape of a calamity, saved her. Her mother sprained an ankle in the fowl-pen, and wired for Susan to return to North Bromwich at once. The telegram came while Abner was at work, and when he reached Mrs Moseley’s cottage in the evening, Susan was gone. She left a carefully written note behind her in which she addressed him as Mr Fellows and said that she hoped he would always think of her as kindly as she did of him. She said it would be nice to get back to North Bromwich after so long in the country, but carefully omitted to supply him with her address. At first Abner was stunned, then angry. He couldn’t put up with Mrs Moseley’s mild meanderings. He hadn’t the heart to go out into the desecrated woods. When Tiger leapt at him, in anticipation of a walk, he kicked the dog in the ribs. The football season would not begin for another month, and since he had nothing to do he returned to Hackett’s Cottages. Alice, who had kept an eye full of jealous suspicions on him for the last month, received him. She saw that something had bowled him over. It gave her a secret satisfaction.
‘Early to-night, Abner,’ she said.
He would not answer her.
‘Whatever’s up with you?’ she said. ‘You’m all moithered.’ And then, with a laugh, she answered her own question by another: ‘Too much sweethearting?’ in a tone that pretended to be merely bantering but in reality carried a sting. He knew that faint touch of malice in her so well that it made him flare up at oncewith: ‘I don’t want no bloody girls.’ It didn’t strike him that her malice might be taken as a compliment, and when she laughed at his reply he walked out of the house in a temper.
He didn’t know where to go; but taking his father’s example he wandered down to the Royal Oak, where he sat drinking pint after pint with one of his football friends and a couple of women. At closing time the whole party were turned out together and walked down into Halesby. It was nearly daybreak when he returned to Hackett’s Cottages, still the worse for liquor, and blundered upstairs to bed. He slept so heavily that he did not hear the Mawne bull in the morning. At ten o’clock a feeling that some one was in the room aroused him. He opened his eyes to a blinding light and saw that Alice had placed a cup of hot tea at his bedside. He drank it so eagerly that he scalded his mouth.
Thissudden outburst was sufficiently violent to satisfy Abner that for the present he could do without liquor or women. It wasn’t very difficult to forget Susan, for she had really been more trouble than she was worth. The affair would never have begun but for her provocation, and since she hadn’t the pluck to go through with it, Abner satisfied himself by exaggerating her insipidity in his own mind.
After the first sting of malice with which she had sent him off on the drink, Alice showed her repentance, first symbolised by the waiting cup of tea, in a hundred attentions and kindnesses. He never told her about his affair with Susan, but she appeared to understand more or less what had happened and even to sympathise with him in his violent methods of getting over it. She made him so comfortable at Hackett’s Cottages that there was no more talk of his finding other lodgings. In the early days of her married life the responsibilities of the house and its two male inhabitants had been too much for her inexperience, and the coming of the baby in the first year had made her abandon all attempts to keep pace with domestic demands. In the second year she regained her strength and a great deal of the physical charm that had originally attracted John Fellows. The baby, a normal, healthy child, had also prospered, and now that he was weaned slept away most of the day on his mother’s bed upstairs or in his cradle in the kitchen. Nothing marred the smoothness of domestic life at Number Eleven but the uncertainty of John Fellows’s temper and his periodical bouts of drinking; and even in these emergencies Alice’s increasing knowledge of life and her absorption in the care of Abner and her baby sustained her.
The strangest part of the whole business was that Abner and his father never fell foul of one another. Since that one dangerous moment on the morning of the baby’s birth there had never been any danger of this.It was as if they had agreed to go on their own ways. Abner kept clear of his father because his natural love of peace and increasing concern for the convenience of Alice made him anxious to avoid a quarrel; and John Fellows condoned his son’s unreasonable abstinence from liquor on the grounds of his success in the football field. Although he never said so he was proud of Abner’s prowess, gathering indeed a little reflected glory from it among his mates at the pit and his boon companions at the pub.
It was fortunate for Alice that her family was so small; for it meant not only that she was unburdened with housework, but also that the question of money never troubled her. John Fellows never did anything by halves. He worked as hard as he drank, and since all colliers are paid by piecework, he earned enough to keep the house going and himself in liquor. Abner also was well paid for the work he did at Mawne, and in addition to this received a pound a week from the United Football Club during the season. Out of these earnings he paid Alice eighteen shillings for his board and keep, and this, together with her husband’s weekly allowance, enabled her to make the house exactly what she wanted. There seemed to be no reason why this happy state of affairs should not go on for ever, or, at any rate, until Abner found some other wretched girl who took his fancy. This was the event that Alice dreaded most, and for the present Abner’s life was too full of work and training to make it probable.
They spent most of their evenings together while John Fellows was down at the Royal Oak and the baby placidly sleeping in its cradle. They were the happiest of Alice’s life, for they realised all her ideals of what domesticity should be. The little room was cheerful with firelight and always warm, for John Fellows had the privilege of buying coal for next to nothing at the pit. On the table she used to spread a cloth of bright red chequers. A lamp in the middle of it cast a mild and homely light. Alice would sit on one side of the fire, knitting woollen vests for the baby or mending the men’s clothes. She sat in her rocking chair, enthroned with content, glancing from time to time atthe sleeping baby, at the shining brass, on which she particularly prided herself, at all the tokens of comfort with which she was surrounded. The door of Number Eleven was ill-made or warped with age so that a draught blew in beneath it towards the fire; but Abner had arranged a curtain of red rep on a running string above it, so that the draught was not felt and the swaying of the curtain only emphasised the contrast between the winter without and that glowing cosiness within. All these things that surrounded her were her own, her world. She would not have changed one of them. The glances that she gave to them were proprietary and richly satisfied.
Sometimes, in the same way, she would let her eyes fall on Abner: a big, loose-limbed fellow, over six feet high, with the closely cropped hair of the footballer and a yellow moustache. In the evenings at home he wore no collar and the firelight played on his powerful neck and lit the fair down on his arm when he sat in his shirtsleeves. Even with him her glance was proprietary. He also belonged to her, and she mended his clothes with the same delight and devotion that she experienced in making the ridiculous garments of her son. She rejoiced in his beauty and in his strength. Perhaps, sometimes, the physical comparison that he suggested with John Fellows made her admiration more poignant.
Usually these long evenings were lonely. At times, however, Alice’s father, the timekeeper at Mawne, would come stumping up on his wooden leg and take a seat before the fire between them. He was very fond of Alice. He would pinch her cheek and hold her arm and make her blush by asking every time he came when she was going to give him another grandson. He was a poor old man. His pay, like most pensions, was inadequate, and the cottage on the edge of the works which the company allowed him rent-free was old and so damp that he suffered from rheumatism, particularly, as he always said with a chuckle, in the leg that he had lost. Here Alice’s younger sister, Elsie, kept house for him. She had never been a favourite of his and was a bad manager. She and her sister, who had always quarrelled before Alice’s marriage, were now, forreasons which Alice attributed to jealousy, no longer on speaking terms. Mr Higgins always tried to gloss this unfortunate circumstance with one of his little jokes.
‘When I come up here,’ he said, ‘Abner ought to go and keep our Elsie company.’
Abner would laugh, but Alice glanced sharply at him. She hated to hear any woman’s name mentioned in connection with his, and most of all her sister’s; but Mr Higgins, unaware of these fine shades of feeling, constantly pursued the project. ‘Now if Abner here went and married our Elsie what a queer kettle of fish it would be to be sure! Which would you be, his mother or his sister-in-law? Both on ’em. Likewise Elsie’d be your daughter-in-law and your sister. And if our Elsie was Abner’s aunt she’d be the great-aunt of her own babbies, surely!’
‘Oh, don’t go on so, dad!’ said Alice, sharply. ‘Do give over!’
‘You can say what you like, Alice,’ said Mr Higgins, ‘but that’s a knot it’d take more than a parson to get over.’
At half-past nine the old man would leave them with another of his little jokes. Abner would see him out, and then, yawning, stretch his legs and say that it was time he was turning in. He used to ask Alice, before he went upstairs, if there was anything he could do for her. It was only a formula, but the words always gave her a flush of pleasure. When he was gone upstairs she would busy herself with preparing his can of tea, and bacon sandwiches to take to the works next day. Then she would settle down again in her chair at the fireside and sit with her work in her lap dreaming and waiting for the unsteady, deliberate step of her husband on the path. This was the worst moment of her day.
John Fellows rarely returned home until half an hour after closing time, and for this reason it was seldom that he saw Abner off the football field. At home he never approached him except with the hope of extracting inside information as to the probable results of the league matches on which he proposed to bet, and in this he found Abner unsympathetic, foralthough league football had not sunk in those days to its present depths of unabashed commercialism, Abner knew that the result of a match was sometimes decided in accordance with the bookmaker’s instructions. John Fellows never backed horses, for he regarded the turf as a resort of crooks and sharks. He put his money on dogs and football teams, and even if he lost it he had at any rate the satisfaction of seeing it lost with his own eyes. He didn’t mind losing money as long as he had a run for it. According to his lights he was a sportsman.
The football season had opened with a flourish as far as Mawne United were concerned. In the North Bromwich league they had beaten all their principal rivals, Wolverbury, Dulston, and even the Albion Reserves. Now, in the semi-final of the Midland Cup they were to meet the Albion again. The members of the team became more than ever popular heroes, and Abner, down at the works, was conscious of his share in the distinction. The winter had set in early with a November of black frost that made the scrap-iron with which he was still engaged under the same grumbling foreman harder and more icy to the touch, and congealed the grease in the running guide-wheels of the trolley railway. It was some compensation that the blast furnaces, which were surrounded in summer by a zone of air undulant with intolerable heat, now gave a sense of neighbourly warmth to the centre of the works.
Abner, who knew that his position was more secure than ever, managed to spend most of his day near these black towers, talking football to the men who were engaged in making the moulds of sand into which the molten metal would flow when the furnaces were tapped. It was an idle and a pleasant life; but he enjoyed it, knowing, as did every one else in the works, that it was no more than a preparation for the sterner business of Saturdays.
One Wednesday, in the middle of the afternoon, he was at work loading some pigs of iron into a truck that stood waiting on the siding near the furnace. It was good warm work for a winter’s day, and Abner hadthrown off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and unfastened the neck of his shirt. He and his mate had just hoisted the last of the pigs into the truck when the furnace foreman gave the signal for the tapping of the nearest tower. Abner watched the proceeding as he put on his coat and wiped the sweat from his forehead. The men, stripped to the waist, approached the vent of the furnace carrying a heavy crowbar with which they loosened the plug of fireclay which kept the contents of the furnace from escaping. They leapt aside as the first stream of molten mineral gushed out. The foreman watched them, shading his eyes from the heat. The fluid that came first was the dross of the ore which had sunk to the bottom of the furnace, and this was diverted so that it flowed into a wide pan where it would cool into a cake of brittle, iridescent slag. A moment later pure iron began to flow. The puddlers closed the entrance to the pool of slag, and molten metal crept, with the slow persistence of a lava-flow, down the central channel and into the moulds of sand that were ready to receive it. The damp air above the beds first steamed, then swam with heat. Not molten gold could have seemed more beautiful than this harsh, intractable metal. It ran into the moulds sluggishly and with a soft, hissing sound.
Some one tapped Abner on the shoulder and drew him aside. It was Mr Hudson, who had walked down delicately from the office, so delicately that he had not even disturbed the two pencils wedged above his ears. He shivered slightly, for he had been shut up all day with a coke stove. Drawing Abner aside behind the line of trucks he began to talk to him about the cup-tie with the Albion. With the utmost friendliness he discussed the prospects of Mawne United in the match, which was now only ten days ahead. Abner answered him respectfully. Mr Hudson had not only given him his present comfortable job, but also carried in his pocket the future of every man employed in the works, for Mr Willis, whose eager mind was always set on expansions of the monster that he had created out of the fortune which his father-in-law had madein the Franco-Prussian war, was far too busy to worry his head about such details.
‘So you think we’ll win?’ said Mr Hudson, fingering the bronze cross on his watch-chain.
‘It bain’t no good playing any match if you don’t think you’ll win,’ said Abner.
Mr Hudson stroked his red moustache. ‘I may say that the Albion has offered us a hundred pounds to play the match at North Bromwich, on their ground. The club could do with the money.’
‘Don’t you take it,’ Abner replied. ‘Don’t you take it. The Mawne ground’s worth a couple of goals to our chaps in a match of that kind. That slope down by the Royal Oak puzzled the Albion last time. Our forwards know how to use it.’
‘The Albion’s particular anxious to win,’ said Hudson. ‘What’s more, the bookmakers are giving three to one against Mawne. That shows you which way the wind’s blowing.’
‘Well, I hope to God it busts them!’ said Abner. ‘I’m no friend to football bookmakers.’
Mr Hudson blenched at this loose employment of the deity’s name. He took Abner by the arm. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘speaking in the strictest confidence, I can tell you that the club will accept Albion’s offer to play at North Bromwich. What’s more, if Albion win, I can safely say it will be worth ten pounds to you personally.’
Abner shook himself free from Mr Hudson’s friendly arm. If he had followed the inclination of the moment he would have laid Mr Hudson flat there and then on the cinders. His feelings had passed beyond the stage of words. But while he stood glaring at Mr Hudson’s face, now weakly smiling and white with fear, he saw something else that stopped him: the figure of a woman running towards them as fast as she could over the cumbered ground of the works. She was hatless and had a shawl thrown round her shoulders. He knew, even at a distance, that it was Alice. She ran straight up to Abner, with her hair blown loose and with a flush of excitement that made her singularly beautiful.
Mr Hudson snatched at the opportunity for retreat. ‘This lady wants you,’ he said.
Abner, still under the influence of a divided emotion, took a step in his direction, but Alice pulled at his sleeve. The tears that she had been restraining as she ran overcame her and she could only cry ‘Abner . . . Abner . .’
‘What the hell’s up withyou?’ he said roughly.
‘Your father, Abner . . .’ she sobbed. ‘It’s your father.’
‘What’s that? What’s he done?’
‘It’s an accident at the pit. Father sent up Elsie with the message.’
‘You mean he’s dead?’ said Abner, suddenly sobered.
‘No . . . not dead. . . . I don’t think so. It’s an accident. Some kind of accident. Elsie was that moithered she couldn’t say proper. So I left her there and ran off for you. I couldn’t take him in myself. I couldn’t think of nowt but running for you.’
‘Nell, if he bain’t dead what the hell’s the matter?’ said Abner practically.
They left the works together. Alice, still out of breath, could scarcely keep pace with Abner’s long strides, but now her nervous sobbing had ceased and she even smiled. At the corner of Hackett’s Cottages they met the procession from the colliery. For some obscure reason Alice’s father had lost the key of the store in which the stretchers were kept, and so they carried John Fellows home on a door. In his progress from the pit they had fallen in with a stream of children suddenly disgorged from the Ragged Schools, and a train of these had swollen thecortège, curious to find out who, or what, lay under the brown blanket. All the women of Hackett’s Cottages gathered at the gateway of Number Eleven to receive him, many of them carrying babies and offering haphazard advice in the intervals of giving them refreshment. The doorway of the house was too small to admit the improvised stretcher, so they laid it down at the side of the garden.
‘Be careful of my bloody tomatters,’ John Fellows growled. It was the first sign of life he had given. Abner and two others lifted him from the door andcarried him through the kitchen and up the twisting stairs. The boards creaked under their weight as though they were on the point of splintering. It was his right thigh that had been broken; and once, on the journey upstairs, they jolted him so much that he unclenched his teeth and roared like a bull. The crowd in the roadway shuddered. This was their first considerable sensation.
They laid him on the bed. Alice, now very pale and composed, followed them upstairs with a cup of tea.
‘God! if I’m come to tea drinking it’s a gonner,’ said John Fellows. ‘Send out for a spot of brandy!’
A small boy was sent running to the Lyttleton Arms. Elsie had already gone for the doctor. The news had spread quickly in various forms, and all Halesby heard with sensation that John Fellows had had his skull smashed in Mawne pit. The brandy came. He wouldn’t have it spoiled with water and swallowed it neat, but even the brandy could not alter the ashen pallor of his face beneath its coating of coal dust.
John Fellows was a hard case and could bear pain or any other human calamity with fortitude. He lay on his back, gritting his teeth and squirting the floor with tobacco-juice. Whenever he spoke it was with a curious dry humour that seldom appeared in his ordinary conversation. He never complained of his own sufferings, though he cursed the criminal economy of the Mawne management in the matter of pit-props. ‘They might as well use match-sticks as this Norway stuff. They’ve put a stopper on my football!’ he said. ‘But I’ll see that they pay for it. I will, and no fear!’
Indeed they owed him something. The collapse of coal that had buried him had taken place in a remote gallery on one of the lower levels of the mine; and though Mr Willis, proud of his electric lighting and American coal-cutting machinery, was in the habit of describing Mawne as a drawing-room pit, the arrangements for salvage were by no means elegant. John Fellows had lain for three hours beneath a ton or more of coal; and though the weight of it saved him fromthe pain of movement, acting as a kind of ponderous splint to the broken limb, the suspense of waiting till he was dug out would have broken the nerve of a more sensitive man. From this purgatory he had been hauled to one of the trolley-lines that traverse the galleries of the pit: his only moment of relative smoothness between the scene of the accident and his home being his upward journey in the hoisting cage.
They waited anxiously for the doctor. The boy made three more journeys to the Lyttleton Arms for brandy. ‘It’s the only thing that keeps the life in me,’ John Fellows said.
In a couple of hours Dr Moorhouse arrived. ‘Sorry to see you like this, Fellows,’ he said.
‘You’d be sorrier if you was me!’ Fellows grunted.
With the help of Alice they split up his trouser leg, and the doctor manipulated the thigh until he felt the crepitus of the broken bone. Then he disturbed the patient no longer. ‘It’s a three months’ job,’ he said. ‘You can’t have it seen to properly here. You want X-rays. You’ll have to go into hospital.’
‘Hospital . . .’ John Fellows cried.
Then, at last, he became fluent. The brandy had stimulated his imagination even if it had dulled the pain, and he launched into an uncompromising statement of the opinions with which poor people regard the institutions that are erected for their care. He made it plain thathe, at any rate, wasn’t going to die in any hospital, or be pulled about by any students, and not a spot of drink.
‘I don’t want you to die in any hospital,’ the doctor said. He was painfully used to this kind of outburst. It was always a long and bitter controversy, and it always ended, as he knew well, in submission. While John Fellows was fuming he fixed him up on a temporary splint and then went home to telephone for the ambulance. At the foot of the stairs his eyes fell on the patient face of Mrs Moseley, who had driven up on the cart of a friendly baker as soon as she heard the news.
‘You here again!’ he cried. ‘Upon my word a lunatic asylum’s the place for you. Take your leg out of my sight. I never want to see it again. I wash my handsof you!’ He went off grumbling, and Mrs Moseley climbed the stairs.
It pleased John Fellows to see her. Indeed, from the moment of her arrival, he would not let any one else touch him. In the old days Alice would have been jealous; but hardship and difficulty had so changed her nature that she even concerned herself with Mrs Moseley’s comfort. The old woman moved about the room like a soothing influence, and when, an hour later, the ambulance arrived, she insisted on accompanying her old friend to the infirmary at North Bromwich. John Fellows went off cheerfully, with a quartern of brandy in his coat pocket. He was even bright enough to joke with Mr Higgins, who now arrived on the scene, having just discovered the key of the stretcher-store in his hip-pocket.
John Fellows’s removal to hospital made no great difference to any one but Alice. To her the relief was enormous, for it not only saved her the trouble of irregular meals, allowing her to devote her days to her baby, but freed her nights from, at the best, uncertainty, and, at the worst, terror. Now, when Abner had said good-night to her, she need no longer sit with her nerves on edge, waiting for Fellows to come home, wondering what would be the humour of his entrance. Instead of this she now sat over the fire for half an hour of luxurious drowsiness, then picked up the baby and went off placidly to bed.
Of course she had to go easy with her housekeeping expenditure, for all John Fellows’s club pay would be absorbed in paying for tobacco and other luxuries, such as butter, which the hospital did not provide for its patients, but Abner, as soon as he realised this, told her that she could count on the pound a week that he earned from the football club, and more, if necessary, for during the last year he had found it possible to put by a few sovereigns for himself. Alice did not find it necessary, however, to draw on his reserves. Her own tastes were simple and Abner was easily pleased. Indeed, John Fellows had always been the most expensive member of the household.
Abner was now in strict training for the cup-tie withthe Albion and went to bed early every night. The Mawne directors, as Mr Hudson had foretold, jumped at the big club’s offer to play the match at North Bromwich, tempted not only by the welcome hundred pounds but by the prospect of an even bigger share of gate-money. The team went through their training with the greatest earnestness. Every afternoon they turned out on the Mawne ground practising passing, shooting, and tactics, followed by the eyes of the trainer, an international long since retired, who walked about the field carrying always a black bag that contained lemons, elastic bandages, and a patent embrocation of his own that smelt like Elliman’s.
Nobody who saw these men at practice could possibly have suspected that they thought of anything but winning their match, though each of them must have known that all the others had been offered ten pounds a head to lose it. In the dressing-room, where they stood rubbing each other down with flesh-gloves in the clouds of steam that the cold air condensed from half a dozen tin baths of hot water, they talked of plans and prospects just as if no shadow of corruption had ever approached them. Nobody had mentioned the subject to Abner since Hudson had tackled him at the works. That, no doubt, was the policy of those who had put up the money: to let the thought of it sink in over a period of ten days and trust to the frailty of human nature on the eleventh. They knew their business, for the mere presence of such a disturbing problem was enough to demoralise the team.
On the day before the match the Mawne goalkeeper sprained his ankle at practice, and neither the bandages nor the embrocation of the trainer could restore him. In this emergency the committee called upon George Harper, who had retired four or five years before and was now a man of substance and landlord of a public-house, to take his place. Abner, who had always been on good terms with this idol of his boyhood, went up to him after the last practice game and told him of Hudson’s offer. Harper listened to him in silence, nodding his head, but when Abner asked him if he too had been approached by Hudson, he only laughed.‘Hudson?’ he said, ‘that red-whiskered b—? No fear of that! He dursen’t come near me. He knows what he’d get, does Mr Hudson.’
In spite of this, when the team were assembled in the dressing-room of the Albion ground on the day of the cup-tie, Abner saw the trainer take George Harper aside. He talked excitedly in a low voice, but Harper only went red in the face and said nothing. As they left the dressing-room Abner winked at George, and George, solemnly, winked back at him. The captain kicked the ball into the middle of the field, and the Mawne team ran out after him, amid a spreading uproar of cheers.
The turf of the Albion ground was incredibly smooth and level after the rough field in which they were accustomed to play at Mawne. The place was, indeed, a vast oval amphitheatre, with high stands rising above the dressing-rooms on the west and on every other side a sloping embankment so packed with people that the ground on which they stood could nowhere be seen. The vastness of this white-faced multitude was imposing in its ugliness. Its pale, restless masses, represented on a horrible scale the grimy flatness of the city complexion. From the crowd a low murmur arose like the noise of the sea breaking on distant shingles, and over all its surface floated a fume of tobacco smoke. A moment later the Albion team emerged; the crowd swayed, and the murmur swelled to a roar of welcome. The chocolate and yellow jerseys of Mawne so nearly resembled the Albion’s colours that the home team turned out in white shirts and knickers. It was partly the spotlessness of this attire that made them seem like a company of athletic giants, swifter, more flexible and stronger than their opponents. Even Abner’s six feet were dwarfed by the diverse colours of his clothes. It seemed a ridiculous thing to match this shabby team of stunted pitmen with eleven picked athletes.
The game began. Almost at once the white line of the Albion forwards was in motion. It was a lovely sight, a lesson in fleetness, elasticity and precision. The Albion, taking no risks, had included a number oftheir first league players in the team, and it looked as if Mawne must be nowhere. Abner, at centre half, the pivotal position of the whole field, felt that he could do no more than play a spoiling game against this perfect machine. In the back of his mind he knew also that a certain number, probably the majority of the Mawne players, were not anxious to win. It is not easy, however, to play deliberately a losing game, or indeed to play football with any degree of deliberation. The heat of the game seemed to inspire the Mawne team to a stubborn, almost desperate, defence. As a last barrier to the Albion attacks he knew that George Harper, even if he were an old stager, was incorruptible; and George Harper, in his prime, had never played a more marvellous game. Perhaps the feeling that he belonged to an older and more gifted generation of footballers helped him. Time after time, when the Albion forwards came swinging down the field in a perfect crescent, he saved the Mawne goal. His play was inspired, and when half-time came, no goal had been scored. The players stood sweating in the dressing-room. The trainer handed round cut lemons. Once again Abner saw him approach George Harper and take him by the sleeve; but this time the goalkeeper pushed him away. Mr Willis came down into the dressing-room to congratulate the players. He was smoking a big cigar, and evidently immensely pleased with himself. He, at any rate, was above suspicion. The referee called the players out again.
In the second half Abner worked as he had never worked before. The Mawne team was tiring; play grew scrappy and spiteful; but though the Albion players could do what they liked with the ball in midfield, they did not seem able to score. Even if Mawne were equally ineffective it seemed probable that the match would end in a draw. The Albion crowd grew restless, and began to think that the referee was favouring their opponents. The Albion players, now a little rattled, tried to effect by roughness what they could not achieve by skill. Several free-kicks were given against them for fouls, and the crowd began to boo the referee. It was like the hollow voice of some sullen ocean-monster.The Albion, encouraged by the support of the crowd, pursued these tactics. Two men were ordered off for fighting. A moment later the crowd regained its good humour stimulated by the sight of a shot from the Albion centre-forward that hit the cross-bar above George Harper’s head. If the shot had been three inches lower he could not possibly have saved it. The kick that followed transferred the play to the other end of the field. It was close on time and everybody was nervous. A centre from the Mawne outside right came to Abner’s feet in front of the Albion goal. One of the Albion backs tried to trip him, getting cleverly on the blind side of the referee. Abner stumbled free, and since the goal was now open, the player lashed out at his ear. Abner’s temper was up. He left the ball and closed with his opponent. The Mawne team held up their hands and called on the referee like one man. A violent fight had begun when the referee arrived, shaking himself free from a gesticulating escort of Mawne players. The Albion men separated the fighters, and though the referee warned both of them that if anything more happened he would send them off, he gave a free kick to Mawne. The crowd howled. It seemed for a moment as if they would burst their barriers and swarm on to the field. Very grimly, his face streaming with blood, Abner took the kick. The Albion goalkeeper, making a high save, tipped the ball over the cross-bar. A corner. The players lined up, panting, in front of the Albion goal. The young outside right, whose centre had been the beginning of the trouble, took the kick. The ball sailed high and fell slowly into themêléeof players. Abner, who had proved his dangerousness, was carefully marked and charged at as the ball fell, but he butted his opponent aside, and making full use of his superior height, managed to head it into the top left-hand corner of the net. A shout of ‘goal’ rose from the crowd, but there was no applause. The strange thing about the whole business was the attitude of the Mawne players. These men, who had been playing a half-hearted game all afternoon, appeared to be overwhelmed with joy. They ran up to Abner and shook both his hands as ifthere had been no matter of ten pounds depending on his achievement. Even George Harper came running down the field and patted him on the back. George had his work cut out, for in the last three minutes of the game the Albion made a desperate effort to equalise, and subjected him to an incessant bombardment. Luck aided his skill, and when the whistle went for time Mawne had won their match.
Abner went home that night with a thick ear and a slowly closing right eye. He was tired and sore but elated. He wanted to do nothing but sit in front of the fire and think over again the progress of the match. Alice, on the other hand, was terribly concerned with his injuries. She dressed his face with some ointment that Mrs Moseley had recommended her for the baby, and sat opposite to him burning with pain and indignation.
‘I wish you’d give it up, Abner,’ she said. ‘One of these days you’ll get killed. It’s downright brutal. It’s worse than prize-fighting.’
‘That’s what it was,’ Abner chuckled.
He pretended that he didn’t want her to fuss over him; but all the same this devotion was very pleasant. As for Alice, the pain of seeing him so battered was almost equalled by her pleasure in tending him. And they were alone. She was thankful that they were alone. Time after time she returned to her pleading that he would give up football. ‘You’ve never come home in a state like this,’ she said.
‘Give up football?’ said Abner. ‘And what would we live on then? You couldn’t manage, and that’s straight!’
‘I’d do it,’ she said. ‘I’d manage somehow.’
He laughed at her intensity. ‘Don’t you fret yourself about me,’ he said, ‘I’m all right.’ He went to bed and slept like a log. She brought him breakfast and clean dressings to his bedroom.
On Monday morning down at the works Mr Willis met him. ‘Good lad!’ he said. ‘Good lad!’ Later in the day Mr Hudson came down from the office to the place where he was working. He smiled to conceal his annoyance. ‘Well, I suppose we’ve got to thank you and Harper for the win,’ he said.
‘I reckon we’ve not got to thank you!’ Abner replied.
‘H’m, that’s it, is it?’ said Hudson. ‘You’d better go up to the pay-office for your money.’
‘Time enough when I’ve finished,’ said Abner. Football always prevented him from collecting his pay on a Saturday morning with the other men. At the end of the day he went to the pay clerk. Instead of twenty-five shillings as usual he was given fifty.
‘What’s this for?’ he asked.
‘Lieu of a week’s notice,’ said the clerk. ‘The gaffer says we have to cut down. Mr Hudson’s orders.’
‘B—r Hudson!’ said Abner angrily.
Thatnight he went down to the public-house for the first time since the day of Susan’s defection more than a year before. The crowd at the Royal Oak were glad to see him, for they were still talking about nothing else but the result of the cup-tie. Every one was anxious to treat him and to condole with him on his black eye, and he was prepared to drink as much as they would give him, standing his own share up to the limit of the fifty shillings in his pocket, as long as he could forget the anger with which he had left the works. If he didn’t, somehow, get the idea of his injury out of his mind, he felt that he would probably go down to Hudson’s private house and wring his neck.
In the Royal Oak, drinking nothing but hot whisky, he managed to lose himself and the troubles of the day. He was conscious of nothing but the warmth and comfort of the private bar, the dark varnished walls, the polished beer engine, the shining rows of bottles, the crackle of the bright fire. For a time the room was also full of jolly people who laughed and spoke with loud, buoyant voices, the happiest company imaginable. The spirituous air was exhilarating and endowed all the contents of the bar, from the postage stamps on the ceiling to the brass spittoons and sawdust of the floor, with a quality of unusual vividness. At last this curious clarity faded and the details that had seemed for some curious reason exciting, became blurred. Abner tucked up his feet on a settle covered with American leather and tried to go to sleep. When he awoke, his old friend Joe Hodgetts was piloting him home along the Stourton Road under a sky of dancing stars.
Alice was waiting up for him. Supper was laid on the table and she rose from her chair by the fire to welcome him as he entered. The new light dazzled him, and as he stood uncertainly at the door he took hold of the red curtain to steady himself, and, lurching,pulled it down from its string. Alice gave a cry. Even though she knew the symptoms well enough in her husband she couldn’t believe that Abner was drunk. She only saw him standing there with the great discoloured bruise on his flushed face. He held the curtain in his hand and looked at it stupidly, as if he didn’t know what to do with it.
‘Abner . . . what’s up with you?’ she said, running to take it from him.
‘There’s nowt up with me,’ he said solemnly. ‘I’m drunk. That’s all. If any one’s a right to be drunk it’s me.’
The equanimity with which she had trained herself to receive John Fellows in such circumstances deserted her. She knew perfectly well that it was no use arguing with a drunken man, but the case of Abner was so exceptional that she began to do so. He took no notice of her, and then she rated him violently, so that overcome by a sudden flush of anger he took hold of her arms as if he were going to throw her down. He had never taken hold of her like that before. She faced him, panting for breath, and they stared into each other’s eyes. He felt the warmth of her arms through the sleeve of her bodice and realised her for the first time as a living, warm-blooded creature. She trembled under his gaze, but did not try to free herself. He felt that something like this had happened before; remembered Susan. Suddenly sobered, almost frightened, he relaxed his grip on her arms. Still she did not move. She stood dazed, with her breath coming and going. ‘I’m going to bed,’ he said. He staggered to the foot of the stairs and left her standing there.
When he had gone she pulled herself together and put her hands to her eyes as though she wanted to shut out what she had seen. She had forgotten her first resentment and the emotion with which she trembled now was one that frightened her and put her to shame. She felt that she had just experienced the most thrilling moment of her life. After that she could never pretend to herself that she was not in love with Abner.
In the morning he woke early. Before Alice knew that he was astir he went downstairs in his stockingedfeet and lit the kitchen fire. By the time that she herself appeared he had made himself a cup of tea and laid the table for breakfast. Neither of them spoke of his violent homecoming the night before or of the stranger scene that followed it. She had half expected that he would ask her pardon for what had happened, but such a proceeding didn’t seem to him important. He had been drunk, now he was sober, and that was the end of the matter. When breakfast was over he went out into the dank washhouse and shaved. She was puzzled to see that he was not going to work, for he had dressed in his Sunday clothes and wore his watch-chain, decorated with a couple of silver football medals. At last she plucked up courage to ask him if he was not going to Mawne.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I bain’t going there no more.’
‘What’s up then?’
‘Got the sack,’ he said laconically.
‘But the money . . .’ she said. ‘We’ve got to live.’
‘I picked up two weeks’ pay last night. You can have what’s left.’
He turned out his pockets and gave her a handful of small change. ‘That’s more than I reckoned there’d be,’ he said.
She threw down the money on the table and stared at him. ‘I owe more nor this!’ she said. ‘What about the football money?’
‘Don’t talk to me about football,’ he said. ‘I’ve done with football as long as that Hudson’s on the committee.’
The situation baffled her. Money they must have, and she was quick to rack her brains for some way in which it could be got. An inspiration came to her. ‘You didn’t ought to work with your eye in that state,’ she said. ‘Better go down to the doctor’s and put yourself on the box. You’ve been paying into that club long enough and not had a penny out of it.’
‘Club?’ said Abner. ‘I don’t sponge on no clubs! I’m going down to the pit to see the doggy. I reckon he’ll find me a job underground.’ He lit his pipe and went out into the frosty morning. A delayed impulse made her want to give him his knittedneck-scarf, but it came too late. She didn’t know what to make of it. In a single night all the pleasant, ordered happiness of the life that they had been leading since John Fellows’s accident had been overwhelmed. She felt it unreasonable, incredible, that this should have happened. She could not even solace herself with the care of her baby, who was now beginning to babble and to stagger with uncertain steps from chair to chair. She found herself wishing, for a moment, that there wasn’t a kid to worry about, and was as quickly bitten with remorse, for she knew that the baby was her most precious possession on earth. She could settle down to nothing. The foundations of her routine life had been dissolved. She had not even money enough to meet the bills that she always paid on Mondays. But the thought of money was nothing to her compared with her anxiety as to Abner’s attitude toward herself. She found a little comfort in thinking that he had not yet recovered from the effects of his debauch, and that when he returned in the evening they might take up their relation at the point where it had been so abruptly convulsed. On this her whole happiness depended.
Abner’s visit to the pit was satisfactory in so far as it procured him without the least difficulty a job underground. He was a trained miner, and in those days, when the output of the mine had been diminished by a series of accidents and a growing tendency to work short time, any new hand was welcome at Mawne pit. When he came back in the evening he reassured Alice that even if they had to go easy in the matter of expenditure they need not starve in the interval before John Fellows returned to double their income. To meet the present emergency he handed her the sovereign that he had received from the football club. ‘If that sod Hudson had had his way you’d have had ten,’ he said enigmatically. ‘You’d better send a nipper to the Oak with my boots and football gear,’ he told her. ‘I’ve done with Mawne United.’
She was thankful for his solution of her money difficulties, for pride would not have allowed her to face the butcher and the grocer without the moneyin her hand. In spite of the loss that it implied, she couldn’t reasonably refuse to be glad that he had abandoned football since she had so often begged him to do so. What troubled her far more than this was the fact that his attitude toward her was changed. It was clear that he had not been too drunk to realise the significance of the moment when he had held her in his arms and they had looked into each other’s eyes. He had seen the emotional precipice on the edge of which they were standing. Well, so had she; but that seemed to her no reason why they should not pretend that things were as they had always been. She was content to play her part; even, for their common comfort, to forget what had happened. The only thing that she could not bear was that he should avoid her as though she were an evil thing to be feared and distrusted.
This, in effect, was what he did. To drink habitually was not in his nature. When he drank he did so simply as a means to escape from himself or from some harassing emotion; and so he did not seek a refuge, as she had feared he would, in a public house. None the less it soon became clear that the pleasant homely evenings at Hackett’s Cottages were now at an end. The chair which Alice always arranged for him at the fireside was never occupied. When he came home from the pit at night and had washed himself in the scullery he now went out again to spend the evenings with his friends, with old Mr Higgins, with George Harper, or with Mrs Moseley. He hated his work at the colliery: the dark, cramped labour in remote subterranean stalls was a terrible change from his free and easy life at the furnaces. He hated the dirt no less than the darkness and it scarcely mended matters to realise that he was wanted at the pit.