‘What you done to my dog?’ he cried.
‘And what the hell are you doing here, you poaching blackguard?’ He saw how ugly Abner looked. ‘Keep clear, or I’ll put the other barrel in you!’ A stupid-looking labourer slouched round the hedgeside and picked up the ferret, pinching it as if he were appraising its value as an article of food. Then, mumbling something, he thrust it into a sack that he carried and gave the dead body of Tiger a vicious kick. Abner would have flown at him for he needed something on which to vent his rage, but Mr Cookson again threatened to shoot. He had to content himself with cursing the farmer for his brutality. ‘The dog didn’t mean no harm,’ he said. ‘You’m a coward to shoot a dog like that.’
‘Not so fast, my friend,’ said the farmer. ‘I’ve notfinished with you yet. I want to know what the devil you were doing skulking along my hedge. Thought you’d pick up a rabbit, eh? I know that game . . . taking the dog a walk. What were you doing on my land, eh?’
‘I’m lookin’ for work,’ said Abner.
‘And you look like getting it. I don’t suppose it’s the first time you’ll have picked oakum.’
Abner did not hear these words. He thought only of the shattered heap of flesh that had once been Tiger. He would have gone blindly for the dog’s murderer if he had not suddenly realised that his own case was hopeless. The owner of the gun looked like business, and the labourer was now ready to tackle him from behind. He could do nothing. Mr Cookson, however, having caught a poacher red-handed, didn’t mean to let him go.
‘I’ve had enough of this game,’ he said. ‘You black-country chaps think you can slip over the hills and do what you like . . . you and your dogs. It’s no use turning ugly now. You’ll come along with me to the police station, and that’s all about it. That’s the best ferret I’ve got, worth a dozen of your damned dogs.’
Abner, who saw that it was not worth while arguing and whose anger had now become more subject to his reason, tried to explain once more that he was coming to the house to ask for work.
‘That’s an old tale,’ said Cookson. ‘We’ve had enough talk. Come along! That don’t explain what you were doing in this field.’
The farmer also was now becoming more reasonable. Abner explained that he had taken the field-path on the smith’s advice. ‘If you can’t credit it, you ask him,’ he said. ‘It was the lady at the Barley Mow sent me here and give me your name. That is if your name’s Cookson.’
‘That’s my name right enough,’ said the farmer, ‘and you won’t forget it!’ He began to grumble at the landlady as the prime cause of his losing the ferret. None the less, he now appeared to believe Abner. At the root he was a good-natured man, celebrated for the sudden violence and quick subsidence of his temper.
‘Want work, do you?’ he said. ‘Well, I’ve got no work for you nor no one else, and if you see Mrs Potter again you can tell her so. What that woman wants to do using my name I don’t know. I reckon I’m feeding half Chaddesbourne as it is. Still, I’m ready to believe you. If you take my advice you’ll clear quick before I change my mind. Go on, hook it!’ He put his hand in his pocket and jingled some money as if he were debating whether he should give Abner half a crown.
‘What about my dog?’ said Abner.
Mr Cookson took his hand out of his pocket and his neck flushed. ‘I’ve told you you’d best clear,’ he said. ‘George’ll bury the dog.’ He turned to the labourer. ‘George, you go up to the yard and get a spade.’ He ejected the unused cartridge from his gun and turned his back on Abner, and Abner, still sore with resentment, took his advice and returned to the road.
Inthe first moment of his loss he did not feel like retracing his steps. When he reached the main road he turned his face westward once more and set off walking as hard as the heat would allow him. He passed through a land of almost monotonous green, stopping once or twice to drink a pint of beer at a pub in one of the many half-timbered villages that straggled along the road. In the afternoon he reached a crest crowned with a plantation of smooth trunked beeches from which he could see the chimneys of an industrial town. This, he decided, must be Kidderminster, or, as the farmer’s man had called it, Kiddy. Once or twice in his life he had played football there for Mawne United, but in these excursions he had never noticed anything but the squalid streets between the station and the football ground. There was a workhouse in Kidderminster, as he had been told, but he was not yet in need of workhouses. The landlord of the last inn had found out that he was going into Wales, and had pointed out to him the rampart of the Malverns, dim-blue in the heat, as marking the course of his road. The idea of finding employment in the country now pleased him little. The sooner he reached the coal valleys, with the remains of his money, the better. From his new point of vantage the hills were still visible, floating like cragged islands in the haze. He left the smoke of Kidderminster on his right hand and forsook the road for a narrower lane that seemed to run in the direction that he wanted to follow. When evening came he was still walking south-west. Now the Malverns, whenever he saw them were etched black against a background of flame. The air was cool and sweeter. It was such an evening as Tiger would have loved, and his loneliness, which had been numbed by the heat, returned to him.
He must by this time have walked more than twenty miles since daybreak, and he was tired andhungry. Soon after sunset he turned in to an inviting public-house that stood alone on a straight length of road running between meagre oak-trees. The landlord was an aged man crippled with rheumatism who sat grasping two sticks in a chair beside the hearth of the taproom. He looked suspiciously at Abner and told his daughter, an angular woman of forty who did all the housework, to attend to him. This woman gave him clearly to understand that they didn’t like strangers and said that they could give him nothing to eat but bread and cheese. He accepted this gratefully and settled down to his supper under the grudging eyes of the old man.
The inn seemed a lonely and neglected place, for the road on which it was situate had fallen into disuse. Abner, however, was glad of a rest, and sat on smoking and drinking beer for the good of the house when he had finished his supper. The ale was good and put him in a happier frame of mind, so that he no longer found the silence of the old man uncomfortable. A little later a number of farm-labourers drifted in and ordered their quarts: a solemn and gloomy company who spoke little and in a language that Abner did not understand. He tried to put some life into them by standing treat, but even this order did not arouse the least enthusiasm in the landlord’s daughter, who might reasonably have felt that things were looking up, or in the company. These people were silent drinkers who sat in pairs, taking alternate swigs from the quart pot that stood between them. They looked upon Abner, this stranger from beyond the hills, as peaceful border farmers might have regarded a northern marauder. They drank his beer; but that was all that they could do for him. The light failed, but no lamp was lit in the taproom, and one by one the customers bade the landlord good-night and stole away like shadows. The woman put her head into the room from time to time as if she hoped to find that he was gone, and the old man sat by the fireplace saying nothing. Abner was sleepy and when she next appeared asked her if she could find him a bed. ‘Anything’ll do for me,’ he said. ‘I can shake down anywhere you like.’
For the first time since Abner had seen her she was really positive. ‘We never do such a thing, do we, father?’ she cried. The old man did not appear to have heard her.
‘I bain’t one to make trouble,’ Abner said.
She wagged her head violently. ‘We never do such a thing,’ she repeated. She shook the old man’s shoulder. ‘Father, ’e says ’e wants to sleep ’ere!’
‘We don’t sleep no strangers,’ said he. ‘We don’t sleep no one. Not in a solitary place like this. You’d best be goin’, young man. Time to lock up . . . time to lock up.’
Abner asked him where he could go, but neither of them seemed inclined to help him. They knew of no house that would take strangers, and the nearest village, Harverton Priors, was more than three miles away. Even if he went there, they said, it was unlikely that he would be taken in. ‘We’m not accustomed to strangers, these parts,’ the woman kept on saying. She followed him like an anxious but impotent dog, edging him away from the counter as if she thought he had designs on the till. He bought an ounce of tobacco and departed. When she had got him out of the door he heard a key turn in the lock and this taciturn person beginning to talk fast in an excited whisper to the old man in the corner. Abner laughed. Thanks to the excellence of their beer he was at peace with the world.
By this time he was getting used to finding himself an object of suspicion. He determined to give Harverton Priors a miss, for at this time of night it was probable that the whole village would be asleep, and to turn in for the night in the first isolated barn that he found. Failing that there was no reason why he shouldn’t sleep in a dry ditch. His father had often done so unintentionally and so far seemed none the worse for it.
A mile or more from that inhospitable inn he saw the kind of building for which he was looking standing in a field on the left of the road. It was a red-brick barn, half-timbered like the houses of the neighbourhood. A group of cows lay ruminating in their sleepon the far side of it and Abner picked his way between their shadowy shapes to a doorway with an oak beam for lintel. A rough door closed the aperture. At first he thought that it was locked or bolted but it yielded to his pressure. He half expected to find some animal inside, for when he first came to the door he had heard a noise like a calf turning in straw. He struck a match carefully. The place was clean and dry, half filled with hay of the last season’s harvest that had evidently been placed there for winter fodder. He decided that the rustling that he had heard must have been made by rats. Well, rats wouldn’t worry him in his present degree of tiredness. He closed the door and sank down easily into a soft, sweet-smelling bed.
He lay still on his back with his eyes wide open staring into the darkness above him, thinking of the extraordinary variety of adventures that had filled the last twenty-four hours. This time last night, he reflected, he must have been dozing in the corner of the tram-car between Dulston and Mawne. Now he had nothing left to remind him of his old life except the clothes he was wearing . . . not even Tiger. He wondered what his father was feeling like now; wondered what had happened to Alice. He had never before thought so tenderly of her. She had shown what she was made of when she slipped the two sovereigns into his pocket. When he got work in Wales, he decided, he would send her money . . . not that she would really need it, for now sheer necessity would compel John Fellows to go back to the pit, unless indeed he had any of the money left that he had stolen from Abner. The thought of his savings suddenly reminded him what a fool he had been not to search his father’s pockets before he left the house. On the whole he wasn’t sorry that he had left him undisturbed. He didn’t feel unkindly toward him, for he recognised that no man is responsible for what he says or does when he is drunk. In the black-country people who know the rougher side of life are always ready to condone crimes of passion or liquor. ‘The old chap’s welcome to the money,’ Abner thought, ‘leastwise if any of it comes our Alice’s way.’
His mind was still too crowded for sleep. He thought he would have a smoke and began to fill his pipe with the tobacco he had bought earlier in the evening. Again he heard a rustling noise in the hay. When he lit his pipe he would try to see what caused it. He waited, listening, and when next he heard it struck a match and peered in the direction from which it came.
‘Douse that light, mate,’ said a voice, almost at his elbow, ‘and take your bloody feet off my chest. You’ll be afther settin’ the place alight and sending the both of us to hell before our time!’
Abner dropped his match with astonishment. The other, suddenly materialising, put his foot on the glowing fragment.
‘I reckon you give me a bit of a start,’ said Abner, laughing.
‘Start, is it? It’s finished we’ll be if you go throwing match-sticks that way into a heap of tinder.’ The turn of speech amused Abner.
‘It’s easy to see that you don’t know the way to travel, or you wouldn’t be doing the like of that,’ said his unseen companion. ‘I may well be stranded to the world, but it’s not burning I want this night of our lord, I’m tellin’ you.’
He settled down into the hay again, this time at some distance from Abner. Abner had never yet caught a glimpse of him. He could not tell whether he was old or young, pleasant-looking or villainous, but he knew that the stranger was the first person who had accepted him without question since his wanderings began. He no longer felt sleepy and was indeed glad of a chance to talk with another human being. In this at any rate his shadowy companion was ready to oblige him, taking the conversation into his own hands without the least hesitation. He asked Abner where he had come from and how long he had been on the road.
‘God help me!’ he said, ‘you’re not born yet!’ Then he asked Abner if he could spare him a gorm. Abner had not the least idea what a gorm was, but the voice explained that it meant a little weeny dooney bit of tobacco—‘for to chew,’ he explained, ‘we don’twant anny more fireworks. “Anny more for Annimore,” as the guard says.’
Abner gave him his gorm, deciding that the owner of the voice, whatever he looked like, was a cough-drop. They drifted into a discussion of Abner’s adventures during the day.
The owner of the voice, who in the course of conversation proclaimed himself to be a certain Mick Connor, usually known as Kerry Mick, had apparently followed much the same track as Abner. He had been refused refreshment at the Barley Mow and taken a dismal pint from the hands of the landlord’s daughter at the second inn, whose nose, he said, would poke a ragman over a double ditch. He listened more seriously to Abner’s account of Tiger’s death. ‘You’re after losin’ a good friend,’ he said, and after a moment of silence in which his jaws could be heard masticating his gorm, embarked on a long story of his own youth. ‘I’ll tell you something quare,’ he said.
It had happened more than twenty years ago in the county of Kerry—Abner was none the wiser—in the very first situation that Mick Connor had ever taken. ‘There was money in Ireland them days,’ he said. ‘The country’s gone to the dogs ever sence the Boer War.’ He was engaged as pantry-boy, at six pounds a year and a suit of clothes, and he earned it by cleaning thirty lamps and a dozen pair of shoes every morning before breakfast and waiting at meal-times in the servants’ hall. The rest of the day he spent in dodging the butler, an ould devil with a lip would trip a duck, who liked his pint more than most and used to threaten to take the skin off of him with a twig whenever he saw him.
The story seemed to lead nowhere, but Mick Connor’s voice was low and persuasive and he evidently liked talking. Abner lay and listened.
Even in those early days Mick Connor had been used to the open air. He hated house-work, he said, and would often go off and hide himself under the dining-room table, a place of concealment which the butler at last discovered, to cry. He would stand at the pantry windows looking out over the fields to theriver where the third footman was already enjoying himself catching eels and perch in the holes. The house was a prison to him. The only friend that ever came to him from outside it was a wolfhound who slept in the stables, but with whom he had made great friends ever since he had been in the house by feeding it with scraps from the pantry. The butler hated dogs, and this dog above all others because it had once stolen a ham. Mick loved it and fed it regularly. It used to jump up to the pantry window and lick his face through the bars.
When he had been in this place for a year or more the family moved for the summer to another house on the coast some thirty miles away. For Mick it was a happy change. He and his friend the third footman were chosen to go there and the savage butler was left behind. There were no railways in that part of Ireland, and so they went to Coulagh by road. The children were to follow with their nurse the next day, so the footman and the cook preceded them in a wagonette loaded with luggage. They went slowly, and behind them walked Mick, leading two pannier asses named Haidee and Mokie, on which the children would go for rides by the shore. They started late and the last part of their journey was made in the dark. The cook, who had a drop taken, was telling ghost stories fitting to that wild hour and place. There was one tale in particular of how she had met the devil in the flesh sitting by a milestone near Coulagh three years before that made Mick afraid to look on either side of him. He walked with Haidee on his right and Mokie on his left and the tail of the wagonette in front of him, and even then he didn’t feel safe.
When they came to Coulagh in the darkness they had a grand supper, but even in the cheerful firelight Mick couldn’t forget the details of the cook’s encounter with the devil. The house was small, and it had been settled that he, as the least important member of the party, should sleep in a little room above the stable in which the asses were housed. He was thankful that the animals were there, for otherwise he would have gone mad with the loneliness. When he reached the stablehe went into the stall and talked to them and got on the two of their backs, sitting first on one and then on the other the way they wouldn’t be jealous. Then he patted their necks, rubbed their noses, and went up the wooden stairs to bed. He undressed, got into bed and put out his candle. But he couldn’t sleep, partly because the room was so strange after the cook’s stories and partly because a wind was blowing fit to bring the house down. All of a sudden the wind fell, and in the quiet he could hear another sound like a door banging and the rattle of chains. He supposed he had not fastened the stable latch, but even if the asses got their ends of cold, he didn’t dare to put his nose out of bed. But the noise of bumping and chains continued. Even when he put his head under the clothes he could still hear it. ‘I can hear it the way I am now,’ he told Abner, ‘a great, rattlin’, t’udding noise. I commenced to get terrible afraid. “Something’s surely coming now,” I thought. “God help me!” And it came on bumping and rattling up the stairs. “This is the devil,” says I, “let loose on me!” an’ when I put my head under the clothes what should I see but all the things I’d ever done in this life; all the birds I’d took the heads of off with a catapult, flittin’ about with no heads and the wings broke on them, and all the bottles of whisky I’d ever stolen on the butler. An’ the noise come bumping upstairs. “God, I’m gone!” I says, getting down middleways in the bed, and with the same there was a great t’ud and the door flew open on me and it come into the room. Bump, bump, bump it went, an’ the chairs went over and the basin of water I’d never washed in come down with a crash—and I lying there with the pespiration running down me on to the sheets like a spout. “God, I’m gone!” I says again, and that was the last word I spoke that night, for the sheets was stuck to me back. Then it comes over to the bed, and I tries to get under the mattress, but before I knew where I was I felt two great hands on the both of my thighs. “Now I’m destroyed altogether,” says I, but before I’d finished thinking it come on the top of me in a lump with the chain draggin’ along the floor, and me lyin’ there not as thick as a match. Then Icommenced to feel the sheet being drew down over my face and two hairy arms round my neck, and with that a great, big, hot tongue licking me. “Ah, my beautiful,” says I, “I have you at last.” That dog was so fond on me he’d smelt me out over thirty miles and pulled the log he was tied to in the stable after him and broke down the door and come upstairs into bed with me. I loved that dog. And that’s why I say you’re after losin’ a good friend in yours. Give me the lend of another gorm to go to sleep on.’
Abner gave him the tobacco, and after that the story-teller was silent. Falling asleep, Abner heard only the regular noise of his companion’s jaws as they chewed. In half an hour they were both asleep.
Early next morning Mick Connor woke him, telling him that unless they cleared out the farmer’s men would find them. Abner was far too comfortable for the moment to want to move, but as soon as he regained full consciousness he realised that his skin was itching all over.
‘This place is alive with fleas,’ he said.
His companion only laughed. ‘That’s all you know about it,’ he said, ‘and the both of us eat with hayseeds. I’m after telling you somethin’. Never choose hay to sleep in if you can fin’ straw. It’s worse than a houseful of bugs.’
Abner was curious to see the owner of last night’s voice and the teller of stories. He found it difficult to fit in the man with his narration. It was impossible to guess his age, but his hair was slightly touched with gray and stood up in a frizzy mass that made him look wilder than he was. He was of middle height, thin and very wiry, with a small head, bright eyes like a bird and a bony face in which the skin over the cheekbones was netted with red veins. His eyes were blue, and humorous or savage as the occasion took him. At this hour of the morning he did not appear anxious to talk and his voice that had been soft and persuasive in the darkness, was rough and short. They left the barn together. The cows were still sleeping outside and a dew was on the grass, but the moisture had not fallen on the road, which seemed as baked and dusty as ever.
‘Which ways are you going?’ the Irishman asked.
‘Going to Wales,’ said Abner.
‘Then the two of us had better travel together,’ he said, and Abner consented.
They walked for some miles in silence. Mick, at this hour of the morning was not disposed to talk. He went on ahead with a long, loping gait, very different from the tramp’s habitual shuffle. They came to a brick bridge that proclaimed itself unsuitable for traction engines, and here he suddenly climbed the hedge and started to wash himself in a bed of cresses. He took out the broken end of a comb and smoothed his wet hair close to his head like a picture of the Madonna. The water took the gray out of it so that he looked almost young. Abner also washed, and when he had picked the irritating hayseeds out of his shirt, he offered his companion half of a piece of bread that remained in his pocket. Mick took it without a word and dipped it in the water. Without this soaking he could not have tackled it, for though his bristling moustache concealed the fact, he had scarcely any teeth.
Eating this breakfast together they sprawled on the bank of the stream among rushes, with which Abner amused himself by stripping the pith with his nails. His silent and melancholy companion broke the silence by asking him if he had any money. Immediately Abner was suspicious. His second sovereign and all his silver were secreted in his waistcoat pocket. He had placed them there in the night as soon as he realised that he was not sleeping alone. In answer to his friend’s question he produced a handful of coppers. ‘Tenpence ha’penny,’ he said. ‘That won’t go far.’
‘Houly sufferings!’ said the other, ‘is it carry ten-pence halfpenny three miles?’
He spoke no more, and they set off again. During the rest of the day Mick Connor maintained his attitude of detachment, striding on ahead of Abner as though he had nothing to do with him. They bought a stale loaf in a small market town and the Irishman produced from the treacle tin that he carried three eggs and some rashers of bacon. They lit a fire on the edge ofa wood and made a good meal. Toward evening they crossed a wide river flowing silently between high banks. Mick, who appeared to know the country, told Abner that this was the last bridge for twenty miles. Beyond the stream a little town lay smoking under the hill-side. They drank a pint of beer together and pushed on. The evening light seemed to awaken Mick. He became talkative and profane at once, disclosing to Abner the fact that he knew where good work was to be had. He scoffed at the idea of Abner’s working underground while there was a chance of earning his living in the open air. ‘I can put you in the way of a job will make your teeth water,’ he said. At first he kept up an atmosphere of mystery of the kind that particularly pleased him, but when Abner pressed him he disclosed the fact that he had learned from a tramp near Bromsgrove how the corporation of North Bromwich were engaged in relaying a defective piece of piping ten miles long in their Welsh water scheme, and that casual labour was hard to get in those parts. With the combination of his own wit and Abner’s strength they should find a comfortable job to last them for six months. He reckoned that three days’ walking would bring them easily to the site of the work, and gave Abner to understand that he was lucky to have met him. Abner was ready to acknowledge this. ‘That’s all right then,’ said Mick, ‘and now about that tenpence halfpenny. Do you think I’d be after sleeping wud you and not know of the gold sovereign that’s in your waistcoat pocket this moment? It’s on the table the cards should be if we’re travelling together.’
At this Abner was really angry. He didn’t like the idea of any one, friend or no, rummaging in his pockets at night. They stopped in the road quarrelling, and Abner took off his coat, preparing to settle the matter with blows before parting company. The Irishman seemed surprised that he took it so roughly; pointed out that when he had the chance of stealing Abner’s money he hadn’t taken it, said that he didn’t want a penny of it. Little by little, with soft and humorous words he cooled Abner’s anger. At the next inn theysplit the sovereign over two quarts of beer, and by the time he had finished drinking Abner was ready to go shares with the change, an offer that Mick was too generous to accept. ‘What for would I want money?’ he said, ‘as long as I’d have the price of a naggin in my pockut?’ A man must be a fool, he added, if he couldn’t travel in a fat country the likes of England without money. In Ireland, it was true, one had to use one’s wits, for every one else was doing the same thing. He searched in his pockets and laid out a yellow piece of paper among the beer-spills on the inn table. An Irishman’s passport, he called it. Actually it was an eviction order, which seemed to Abner an unusual type of letter of credit. Not a bit of it, said Mick. In Ireland all you had to do was to carry this along with you and tell a tale about the little children was starving on you, and you could kick a shillun out of every priest you come across. In the old days there was many a toff that’d give you half a crown to be rid of you. They had another drink, and Mick became rhapsodical on the subject of money. What good had money ever done him? Money . . . in his day he’d had the money would buy the two sides of Grafton Street. He recalled his great double on Winkfield’s Pride and Manifesto for the Lincoln and National. Three hundred pounds in his pocket . . . but it went away like wather. Porther would have supplied a better simile. When once he began to talk about horses there was no stopping him. The lust of the born gambler shone in his small blue eyes. ‘Take away racing and I’m gone,’ he said. ‘It’s the only thing that keeps the life in me!’ He went on talking until he saw that Abner was nearly asleep over the table, then he plucked at his arm. ‘Come along,’ he said, ‘let’s be getting a move on before we’re threw out.’
That night, in a condition of sublime charity toward the world and each other, they could find no barn to sleep in and rolled themselves up on a bank of dry bracken under the misty moon. Counting his money next morning Abner found that most of it had gone. He knew better than to grumble about it, but suggested to Mick that they had better go easy.
‘Go aisy, is it? Not at all!’ said the Irishman.
At midday, leaving Abner in a small spinney of firs, he went off to the nearest village with the price of a quart, and returned a couple of hours later laden not only with the beer but with a good-sized fowl and pockets full of potatoes. Displaying these spoils he winked, and Abner asked no questions. They boiled water in Mick’s treacle tin, and having poured this over the bird to make the plucking easy, roasted it with the potatoes in the embers of their fire. It was a splendid meal. Beneath its charred covering the flesh was sweet and juicy. Abner had never felt fitter in his life or freer from every vestige of care. When the meal was over Mick slept like a gorged boa-constrictor and woke in an ill-temper, but by this time Abner was getting used to his alternations of enthusiasm and melancholy and left him alone. It was a good life: there was no denying that, and in another day or so they would arrive at the scene of their new work.
That misty moon was no negligible portent, for at sunset great clouds began to gather from the south, and, before night, fell a thunder shower that drenched them. The dusty road drank up the rain and all the earth smelt sweet, but the August weather had broken and the country of wooded hills into which they had now come seemed to breed rain. They decided that it would be impossible to dry their clothes, and pushed on through the night, Mick loping ahead like some drowned bird and Abner stolidly following. They passed through the wet streets of a country town at midnight. Not a light could be seen in the solemn Georgian houses, but from a belfry, almost lost in cloud, the sound of a plaintive carillon floated down.
‘Ludlow,’ said Mick. ‘There do be races here.’
They crossed another noisy river. The road climbed endlessly, winding over a steep hill-side. They entered a forest where the rain troubled them no more, so tired that they decided to rest for a while. Here they had the luck to find a hut thatched with heather that had been used by woodcutters. At the risk of burning it over their heads they lit a fire with some dry branches that they found inside it. Here they lay half-blindedwith wood-smoke stolidly chewing tobacco, for Abner, unused to the road, had allowed his store to become soaked. Mick soon fell asleep, but Abner could not do so. He lay there till dawn in his steaming clothes, listening to the incessant dripping of the rain from millions of leaves, a sound that was soothing in spite of its desolation. Sometimes a wind that could not be felt would stir the tops of the trees to a commotion and then the drops would fall like hail on the soaked leaves of the forest. The fire died down; there was no more wood in the hut, and drops of water began to fall from the roof into the hissing embers. It was hellishly cold, but Mick still slept like a dog, though his left leg twitched in his sleep. At dawn Abner woke him. He grumbled because Abner in his vigil had finished the tobacco. It looked once more as if they were going to fall out, but the sense of common misery was too great to allow them to do so.
They tramped on through the woods in the rain. They could see nothing ahead of them but misty trees and no sound came to them but that of dripping moisture and sometimes the harsh call of a jay. The sun was so completely veiled that dawn passed into day almost without their knowing it. Only a whiter, colder light gleamed from the wet leaves. ‘We’ll never get shut on these bleedin’ trees,’ said Abner; but his companion did not answer. Suddenly Mick began to sing in a hoarse, unnatural voice:—
Macarthy took the floor in Enniscorthy;Macarthy took the floor in Enniscorthy;For his eyes and ears and noseWere like marbles on the floorOf the fragments of the man they called Macarthy.
Macarthy took the floor in Enniscorthy;Macarthy took the floor in Enniscorthy;For his eyes and ears and noseWere like marbles on the floorOf the fragments of the man they called Macarthy.
He sang the same verse over and over again, and at the end of the third repetition, he stood stock still, for they had come to the edge of the wood. ‘By the houly, we’re through wud it!’ he said.
The huge confusion of the Radnor march lay before them, vast and sombre and wild with cloud. To north and south of the spot where they were standing the woods rolled backward into England, upward to thesky. It was difficult to believe that they had emerged a little below the crest of the hills, for the precipitous wall behind them rose magnificently black into the mist with fleeces of cloud entangled in its surface like wisps of wool in a winter hedge. Beneath their feet a lake of white vapour hid the trough of the Teme valley lapping the bases of other wooded hills. Nothing could they see but dark masses of trees thrown into fantastic folds and pinnacles by the shapes of the hills that carried them: an amphitheatre of savage stone fleeced with unending woods. ‘That’s Wales,’ said Mick. ‘God! I could do with a drop!’
In spite of the melancholy grandeur of the scene Abner felt that an end was in sight. They scrambled down a steep bank, and Mick, still singing, stampeded a flock of horned black-faced sheep that crowded with glistening wool under the lee of a hedge. They crossed a zone of huge, wind-writhen hawthorns and came to a road, or rather a rutted track of wheels that cut the hill-side diagonally. In the middle of this track stood a wooden sled with iron chains for carting timber and a pile of tree-trunks that had been dumped at this stage of their descent from the woods.
‘Plenty of work here,’ said Mick, ‘time they’ve finished clearing these.’
They followed the track to a gate that gave on to a metalled road. Even this was heavily scarred with the cartage of timber. On every side the vast debris of forestry was seen. Birds began to sing in the wet hedgerows. The road was alive with yellow-hammers and linnets. The rain ceased.
The scramble down the hill-side had warmed them and they now walked at a good pace. Villages were few, the greatest of them no more than hamlets clustered about red-brick farms, and as yet no labourers were seen in the fields. For miles and miles they passed no public-house.
‘Ne’er a drop stirrin’,’ said Mick. ‘This is a grand country, right enough!’
By eight o’clock the sun was through and the folding mist, sucked upwards, revealed great stretches of arable land that would have been melancholy in dullweather but now began to gleam in patches of warm colour. Moisture clarified all the air; oat-fields ripening for harvest were full of tawny lights, and the breasts of the linnets rosy. A signpost told them that they were less than a mile from Aston by Lesswardine, and in a few moments they saw a little church hedged in with pagan yews and a dilapidated parsonage still dead asleep. Mick thanked God for the sight of an inn, even though it were closed. A swinging sign with a heraldic device battered by long conflict with rain and wind proclaimed it the Delahay Arms. Tall hollyhocks stood sentinel on either side of the door.
At the end of the village they took a cross-road to Lesswardine, moving through water-meadows of brilliant emerald with placid dykes on either side. Somewhere near them ran a river, its course marked by a black line of brushwood. Sunlight becoming more generous warmed them through and through. The road drew near to the river and to a spur of hills nursing the valley of a tributary. In a sheltered coomb they saw an encampment of white tents bleaching in the sun. A wood fire was lighted among them. The smoke went straight upward. Round the fire they saw men lounging in their shirt-sleeves among great stacks of alder-wood. There was a tempting smell of bacon in the air which made their mouths water.
‘What are these chaps about, Mick?’ Abner asked.
‘Cloggers,’ Mick shouted back to him.
Abnerand Mick advanced to the edge of the bivouac. Its inhabitants did not seem to be disturbed by their presence. Mick, who was never at a loss for words, gave them good-morning. A tall man, with a large, unshaven face and a check handkerchief knotted round his neck, who was sitting on a log by the fire, turned and stared at him. He had wide, humorous eyes and when he spoke he gave the impression, by winking, that his words concealed some subtle joke. Meanwhile with each of his hands he sat fondling an immense and hairy forearm.
‘Well, lad, what is it?’ he asked, in a strong Lancashire accent.
Mick explained that Abner and he were looking for work on the Welsh water and asked if it were anywhere near by.
‘Eh, you’ve a good step yet,’ said the other. ‘They’re working up beyond Chapel Green, two miles from Lesswardine. Been long on the road?’
‘Four days,’ said Mick. ‘I hear there do be a good job goin’ there.’
‘Ay,’ said the north-countryman sardonically. ‘Work for them that likes it.’ His wink seemed to imply that Mick obviously didn’t.
Three other men lounged up to them. Another, who was holding a shovel over the fire, sang out: ‘Come on, Joe, the rasher’s done.’
The big man raised himself from his log. Before this it had been impossible to realise his hugeness. ‘Better have summat t’eat wi’ uz,’ he said.
His sudden hospitality, so little in keeping with his appearance, surprised Abner. In a few minutes they had settled down with the rest to the enjoyment of the frizzled bacon and large cans of tea. Mick was soon at home, contriving at the same time to eat enormously and to keep the conversation going.
The encampment, as he had first explained to Abner,was one of many such that may be found scattered up and down the length of the Radnor march in summertime. The men who inhabit them are known as cloggers. They come from the black industrial towns of Lancashire, and their business is the making of wooden clogs. All are skilled labourers, and in each of their communities there is a foreman on whom the commercial responsibilities of the venture falls. Early in spring he makes a visit to the border country and bargains with farmers and landowners for the right to cut the thickets of black alder that choke the bottom of every valley in this western brookland. In May the rest of the gang follow and there begins a nomadic life in which they wander from valley to valley, felling the thickets, stripping the black bark from wood of a milky whiteness and cutting billets of a size suitable for clog-making. On rainy days when their harvest is well in hand, they carry the process further, and set to making the clogs themselves. Sometimes they live under canvas on the site of their labours; sometimes they find lodgings in the nearest village; always, as strangers—or rather as migrants—they carry with them a reputation for boldness and extravagance in speech and behaviour; but, for all that, the border people make much of them, knowing that they earn plenty of money and spend it freely.
The valley on which Abner and his friend had lighted was by this time nearly stripped of its alders. Piles of clean white billets stood bleaching in the morning sun ready to be carted to the nearest point on the railway.
‘You’re not afther wanting a hand with the wood?’ Mick asked.
‘No, lad,’ said the big man, ‘this is a tradesman’s job. You’ll get work right enough up by Chapel Green. You tell the foreman that Wigan Joe sent you along. But happen you’ll find it hard to get a lodge there. Come Tuesday we’re makin’ a shift to Mainstone Bottom, and me and my mates are going to take a lodging in the Buffalo. Old Mr Malpas or his son George’ll see you right. Happen we’ll have a quart together then. Come on, lads. . .’
Abner and Mick took their dismissal and movedoff together. The sun was now high and not a shred of mist remained in all the river basin. Before this it had seemed confined on every side by high hills thickly wooded. Now, to westward, far greater hills arose, huge, bare, and dappled with shadows of the last retreating clouds. While they breakfasted Abner had laid out his tobacco to dry in the sun. They lighted their pipes and walked on cheerily, Mick singing fragments of a song about the Sultan of the Turks and the Irish Board of Works. They crossed the river Teme by a stone bridge above a glassy pool. ‘I’m telling you there’s a fine lot of salmon in there,’ said Mick.
‘Salmon?’ asked Abner, who had only been acquainted with the tinned variety of this fish.
‘Salmon right enough!’ said Mick, leaning on the parapet. ‘The times I’ve watched them coming up the river Barrow, before you was the height of a match!’
They left the roofs of Lesswardine on their right, turning in towards the bare hills. The river swept away from them to cut the village in two. From a perpendicular tower of reddish stone they heard a lazy peal of bells.
‘Sunday morning,’ said Mick. ‘God help us!’
From all that sun-drenched, silent countryside, from the towers of many hidden villages other bells were heard, melancholy, mellow voices, floating luxuriously in an air lightened by rain.
‘By the houly!’ Mick continued, ‘and the pubs shut on me! If it isn’t enough to make a man make dead childer!’
They passed three villages in which closed doors confirmed this gloomy reflection. The villages themselves were not gloomy. Leisure, prosperity and content radiated from their flowery gardens, from the clean pinafores and collars of the children loitering to church, from the faces of the men who gossiped at the gates of sunny gardens in their shirt-sleeves. In no part of England could villages more trimly English have been found than in this ultimate border of the Marches. It was as though the nearness of another and an alien civilisation compelled them to insist on their national character.
‘In Wales,’ said Mick, sourly, ‘there’s divil a one open Sunda’.’
They crossed another river, the noisy Barbel, a torrent of mountain water wherein no weeds could grow, swirling clear into black pools. A stone set in the middle of the bridge told them that they were now in Wales, and as though to emphasise the change of country the barren hill-sides rose abruptly to receive them; on their right a tremendous crag of gray stone crowned with a pointed earthwork, and in front of them fold on fold of softer contours pale in the sunlight from the intricate convolutions of which the brawling river issued.
A village of stone awaited them, blank house-walls fronting on the roadway with small windows and roofs of clumsy slate. In the midst an ugly chapel, with the word ‘Ebenezer’ carved above its doorway, from which the sound of a drawling hymn emerged, and at the end of the village a public-house with the painted head of a bison for sign and, as Mick had anticipated, closed doors. Even the windows were shuttered.
‘We’ll see if there’s annything stirrin’, said Mick, beating at the door.
For a time they could get no answer, but at last the door was cautiously opened and the head of an old man appeared. How old he was it would have been difficult to say, for though his eyes were rheumy and the irises ringed with the white circles of age, his hair was plentiful and scarcely streaked with gray. He leaned on a stick and did not seem pleased to see them, speaking in a tongue that Abner could scarcely understand. When they told him that Wigan Joe had sent them he became a little more hospitable, but the consciousness of a Wesleyan policeman in the village still prevented him from opening the door to them. The foreman of the water-works job, he said, whose name was Eve, could certainly be found at the Pound House at Mainstone, three miles away over the river. ‘That’s in England,’ he mumbled, as though he were speaking of a barbarous foreign country. As to lodgings he could not help them. On Tuesday the cloggers were coming over from Lesswardine and had arranged to take his two rooms. Mick pressed him, and he admittedthat, at a pinch, his wife might be able to put them up until then, provided that they were in a position to pay for a room and food. Abner assured him that that was all right, but he still refused to commit himself till Mrs Malpas returned from chapel. As a favour he allowed them at last to leave their bundles with him while they set off again to find the foreman. They promised to return to Chapel Green in the evening, and before they turned their backs he had closed the door again with evident relief.
They reached Mainstone just before the opening of the Pound House. The foreman Eve, whom his associates called Gunner, a little man who wore a shield over the socket from which one of his eyes was missing, told them that they need not want for a job if they meant business and told them to apply to the clerk of the works early on Monday morning. ‘You say Mr Eve sent you and it’ll be all right.’ At the end of this sentence he was snatched away by a power beyond his control, for the doors of the ale-house opened and the twenty or thirty men who had been lounging outside flowed into the bar like metal into a mould.
It was a clean and pleasant place surrounded by settles of black Welsh oak. The presence of the navvies from the waterworks had made it into a kind of recognised canteen, and behind the bar were ranged three great barrels of Astill’s ales. Even at a distance of eighty miles from North Bromwich the power of Astill’s influence was felt. Mick, without any difficulty, had already enrolled himself as a member of the company. He had paired off with a big lumbering fellow in corduroys with a red, stupid face and curly hair.
‘Who’s going to give the ball a kick?’ Abner heard him saying, and a moment later he was taking a quart pot of beer from a dark, strapping girl who served behind the counter. A medley of voices arose: the high-pitched accents of the Welsh, the soft Hereford burr, a smattering of audacious cockney, and then the harsher northern speech of a number of cloggers who had wandered in. The room was crowded to suffocation, and Abner found himself lucky to get a seat alongside the one-eyed foreman, Eve, on a benchnear to the window. Abner began to talk to him, but the Gunner was not inclined to keep it up. He was a little man with firm-set jaws from which speech seemed to escape with difficulty. His whole body was spare and dessicated and his skin so tanned with exposure to weather that the blue-black patterns tattooed on his forearms were scarcely distinguishable from his skin. He drank rum and water stolidly with a little cough between each gulp and scrutinised all the company with his one eye that was dark and keen like that of a bird of prey. He drank three or four rums, one after the other, but the process had no loosening effect on his taciturnity, nor did it dim the brightness of his eye. Abner asked him how long he had been on the waterworks job.
‘Fourteen year,’ he said.
‘Is it like to last long?’
‘It’s like to last as long as I do. I’m what you might call on the establishment, as they say in the service. Been with it since they made the resservoyer in the Dulas valley. They say it’s an unlucky job this here water. I was there when the dam was broke nine year ago. Always something up with it. . .’
Then, warming a little, he began to ask Abner if he were used to navvying work, snorted when he told him he was a miner, and told him that he’d have a job to get a bed to sleep in. ‘The cloggers is coming into the Buffalo Tuesday,’ he said, ‘and the folk round here is scared of us. They’re like children with strangers. They’re a lot of damned Welshmen, only don’t you tell ’em so or they’ll let you know about it.’ He waved to the dark girl behind the counter, who brought him another tot of spirit as though she understood his signal.
‘You’re looking up fine to-day, Susie,’ he said.
‘Get away with you, Mr Eve,’ she replied. She may have blushed, but the blood ran so richly under her brown cheeks that no blush could have been seen. Eve took hold of her arm and pulled her gently towards him. Evidently she was used to being handled, for she did not seem to resent it. With her dark hair almost brushing the foreman’s cheek she winked at Abner.
‘Mr Badger been down to-day,’ said Eve in a whisper.
‘Oh, youarea tease,’ she said, with a movement of petulance. ‘Now, do let me go! You’re not the only gentleman that wants serving.’
Eve gently pinched her arm. ‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘just you ask George Malpas to come and have a word with me, there’s a good girl!’
She left them, pushing her way familiarly through the crowd of men with a refined ‘Excuse me!’ and crossed the room towards a tall, dark young man, better dressed than most of the company, who stood holding a pot of ale in the opposite corner, and talking to Wigan Joe, who had just arrived. When the girl spoke to him he nodded, and a moment later came over to the bench on which Abner and the foreman were sitting. From the very first Abner liked his face, and indeed he was a handsome specimen of the border type, with an olive skin and dark eyes set rather wide apart under level brows. At the moment his cheeks were a little flushed with the liquor that he had been drinking.
He and the Gunner were evidently old friends.
‘Well, George,’ said Eve, ‘how goes it?’
‘Middling, Gunner, middling.’
‘Now, my son, hark to me. This young chap here is coming on to our job to-morrow . . . a mining chap from North Bromwich way . . . and he wants to find a lodge. Think you can do something for him?’
‘Well, now you’m asking!’ said George Malpas. ‘The cloggers are coming into the Buffalo Tuesday; but I reckon mother might find him a bed time they come. ‘T’is all accarding. . . . Not that her won’t be glad to oblige you, Gunner.’
‘I’ve a mate along of me,’ said Abner.
‘Your mate looks more like sleeping in a ditch,’ said the Gunner with a dour glance at Mick. ‘Irishmen are all alike. God, don’t I know ’em! I’ve been shipmates with one or two of them chaps in my time. Well, George?’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said George Malpas.
‘Your mother ought to be glad of a decent chap.’
‘All right, I’ll take him along with me when they close, don’t you fear.’
He moved off again towards the bar. At the samemoment there appeared in the doorway a man of middle height and sturdy build. He was dressed in a cord shooting coat and breeches. His face was swarthy and sanguine and he surveyed the company as though he had a grudge against every one of them. Indeed he had reason to be suspicious, for if black glances could have killed he would have been a dead man within a minute of entering the room. He stood there as if he were waiting for the hostility of the bar to take some more tangible form, and at last a young man emerging from a pint pot with an accession of Dutch courage, said mildly: ‘Well, Mr Badger, how be the young pheasants going?’
‘Don’t you ask him,’ said another. ‘This be a terrible place for foxes.’
The keeper took no notice of these remarks nor yet of the laughter that followed; he went straight up to the counter where Susie stood polishing glasses and shook hands with her formally.
‘Who’s he?’ asked Mick Connor, already considerably nourished, ‘A keeper? You leave go of him, darlin’. You’d as well be shaking hands with the divil!’
‘You’d best hold your tongue,’ said another. ‘He’m our Susie’s fancy.’
‘Gard be good to her then!’ said Mick with a sigh.
Neither Badger nor the girl seemed to be conscious of these reflections on their intimacy. Badger was leaning over the bar with his face close to hers and whispering. She still went on polishing her glasses mechanically, nodding with pursed lips, in response to whatever he was saying and glancing from time to time in a mirror, advertising Astill’s Bottled Ales, that hung on the wall at her right hand. Evidently all was not well, for she hurriedly rearranged a curl of dark hair that hung in front of her right ear and had become entangled in a garnet ear-ring. This process of preening attracted Abner’s attention to her sex. Suddenly he found himself comparing her rather maturer charms with those of Susan Wade. Perhaps her name had something to do with it. Both were of the dark beauty which had always attracted him, though Susan the first had been a pale city-dweller and littlemore than a girl, while the barmaid was a woman of his own age, generously yet perfectly formed, full of strength and health and physical splendour. She bent over to listen more carefully to the keeper’s whisper that was almost lost in the hubbub of the taproom, and Abner saw the smooth whiteness of her neck, faintly browned like an egg. The liquor that he had taken inflamed his imagination. For the moment she seemed definitely desirable.
Mick Connor, having kicked as many drinks out of his neighbours as they would give him, staggered over to Abner’s side. In this state he looked more than ever like a bird. His small eyes glistened and the arteries of his temples stood out like whipcord. He asked Abner for money, and when Abner said, quite truthfully, that he had none to spare, he began to round on him fiercely in a language that nobody could understand. It seemed as if a row were in the making, and this was the last thing that Abner wished for. He didn’t want to be involved with Mick in a dispute before the foreman, Eve, who stared critically at his friend, and particularly before the girl who stood behind the counter. He tried to lead Mick away before it was too late, but the Irishman wrenched himself free from his hands and began to take off his coat for a fight. The whole room was now listening and laughing at the scene. The girl behind the bar, seeing that things were getting serious, excused herself to the keeper and came down to ask Abner to take his friend away.
‘We can’t have this sort of thing in here, you know,’ she said.
She came so near to Abner that he was aware of the smell of her hair. Her nearness disturbed him so that he could scarcely answer her. Mick, however, found no difficulty in stating his case at the top of his voice.
‘I know,’ she said, with the air of one who was used to the settling of such complications. ‘You two boys had better go out and get a bit of fresh air. Go on now, be good chaps,’ she continued good-humouredly, ‘or I shall have to call father.’
Mick turned on her savagely. ‘Call your father, is it? Who said I was drunk?’
‘I never said you was drunk. Just you sit down and be quiet.’
By this time Badger had reached her side. ‘Best leave him alone, Susie,’ he said. ‘Half-past six, then?’
She nodded, and the keeper went out. At the same moment the landlord of the house, a short, wheezy man, with yellow pockets under his eyes that made him look like an owl, appeared behind the bar, and shouted to Susie in a high-pitched voice, asking what was the matter.
‘It’s all right, dad,’ she said, smiling back at Abner, who had by this time succeeded in pushing Mick Connor down into the seat next to the foreman and thrusting his own unfinished pot of beer into his hand.
‘Then what’s all the bloody noise about?’ Mr Hind inquired, with a violent wheeze at the end of the sentence. ‘Don’t forget we’ve got a new policeman here that’s a stranger to the ways of the place, and the justices lying in wait for me. I can’t have no rows here, or they’ll be saying the place isn’t properly conducted. You mind that, boys!’
But there was no further disturbance. Mick, having finished the rest of Abner’s beer, retired mechanically to the society of his first friend, the big navvy in corduroys, who was now too drunk to realise what money he was spending. The landlord walked to and fro behind the narrow bar, glancing anxiously at the minute hand of the clock that was gradually approaching the hour of two, and talked wheezily about his distrust of the new policeman. Through the little door of the kitchen behind the bar came the frizzle of a basted joint followed by the metallic clang of an oven door. Something savoury was doing for dinner. The clock gave a whirring noise which suggested that it was as asthmatic as its owner and struck two with a harsh, ringing note. The landlord stopped dead in his prowling. ‘Time . . .’ he shouted.
‘See you Monday,’ said the Gunner, winking at Abner, who was already preparing to rescue Mick Connor from his new friend. The bar emptied. In the space of two hours its atmosphere had become so thick with tobacco smoke and the fumes of liquor that it smeltstale and fetid. Mick was walking arm in arm with the navvy in a state of unstable equilibrium. Abner took his arm. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s see about the lodge.’
‘And who the hell are you?’ said the Irishman truculently. ‘You keep a civil distance!’
The big man rallied to his supporter, and Abner saw that for the present Mick was best left alone. The other two went off together, Mick singing a song in which the navvy joined though he did not know the tune. A tall policeman with mutton-chop whiskers watched them from the other side of the road. Abner turned and saw that the young man whom the Gunner had addressed as George Malpas was waiting for him.
‘Best come along of me to the Buffalo and have a bite,’ he said, and they set off together.
Abner found that from the first he liked George Malpas. His dark face and eyes were bright with the drink that he had taken, his speech rapid and vivacious. They walked quickly towards Chapel Green and the hills, talking all the way, and Abner felt that this was the first person whom he had met on his travels who really accepted him with naturalness and without suspicion. Malpas told him that he need not worry about his lodging. ‘Dad’s getting up in years,’ he said, ‘and a shadow’d frighten him, but mother’s all there and she don’t know how to say “no” to me.’
He spoke all the time quickly and with a certain restlessness that, on the surface, made him seem free and daring. He questioned Abner eagerly about life in the black-country. Once he had been in North Bromwich and this experience had made him discontented with a country life. ‘It’s proper dead here, that’s what it is!’ he said. ‘Time a man gets to my age he ought to see a bit of the world; but a chap gets nabbed with a wife and a couple of kids and then it’s kiss me good-bye to all that! You single chaps don’t know your luck!’ Evidently George Malpas had tried his hand at everything. He had been a wheelwright; a farm bailiff; for a year or two he had helped his mother in the management of the Buffalo, and lately, since the job on the pipe-line had begun, he had been doing labourer’s work: a thing that seemed unnatural to aman so handsomely and delicately made. ‘Anything for a change: that’s what I say,’ he maintained. ‘What a chap like me ought to do is go to sea, but these old hills are like a prison. Damn me if I wouldn’t as soon be in Shrewsbury jail as here!’
They crossed the bridge into Wales. By this time George Malpas’s mother had returned from chapel and the door of the Buffalo was unlocked. George opened it for Abner. In the bar, on the left, he saw the two bundles exposed prominently on the table. Beyond in the kitchen they found the old man sitting in the chimney-corner and Mrs Malpas dredging flour into the roasting-tin from which a joint of beef had been taken.
‘Just in time, mother!’ said George. ‘How’s the old legs, dad?’
‘Badly . . . badly, George,’ mumbled his father.
‘Can you give us a bite of dinner, mother?’
At first Mrs Malpas did not reply. She was a little woman, primly dressed in a constricted black dress. She had a mass of gray hair with a tinge of yellow in it; her features were finely shaped, like those of her son, but her mouth was hard as stone. When she had finished making her gravy she turned a pair of piercing black eyes on Abner and spoke in a low voice. It was level and expressionless, but one felt, all the time, that she meant exactly what she said and that nothing could turn her from a determination once expressed. Facing her, he found that her face was beautiful, but hardened by suffering, by the responsibility of an old and ailing husband and the anxiety of a wayward son.
‘Is this the young man who left his bundle here with dad?’ she asked.
‘Yes, this is the chap. All he wants is a bed.’
‘Well, I can’t do it, George, and you know I can’t,’ she cried; ‘what with the cloggers coming, and all! Your father told them so.’ The old man nodded.
‘Give us some dinner first, mother,’ said George persuasively. ‘Then we’ll talk about it.’
‘It’s no good talking,’ Mrs Malpas persisted. ‘I mean what I said, and so does your father.’
Although it was obvious that nothing that the old man might say would alter the course of events that she had ordained, his wife had acquired the habit of pretending that he shared the responsibility of her decisions. George, with a side glance of encouragement at Abner, tried to joke her out of her seriousness.
‘You can’t get over me that way, George,’ she said; but when he took her arm her eyes and mouth softened and she made no attempt to prevent Abner sharing the meal which her son helped her to put on the table. At the end of the process he kissed her, and she suddenly stiffened.
‘You’ve been to the Pound House, George! I can smell your breath.’
‘Well, can’t a chap go to the Pound House without a fuss being made?’ he laughed. ‘You’m jealous, mother, of that seven days’ licence!’
‘If it was to make my fortune this minute,’ she said intensely, ‘I wouldn’t sell one spot of drink on a Sunday. Nor would father,’ she added in a milder tone.
The flash subsided and she went on to ask about Mr Hind’s asthma; but she took no notice of George’s reply, for her inquiry had only been a preliminary to asking how Susie was. She watched him closely when he replied that Susie was all right. ‘Her new friend Badger was there,’ he added with a laugh.
‘I mind the time,’ said the old man dreamily, ‘when there was three badgers dug out one month up the Castel Ditches. Turrible teeth a badger has. Turrible . . .’
‘He means Mr Badger, the keeper, father,’ said Mrs Malpas.
‘All keepers is the same,’ said the old man. ‘Water or game-keepers, there’s not a pin between ’em.’
He relapsed into one of those fits of vacuity which often droused his normal, if senile, intelligence. Mrs Malpas dragged him back with the announcement that the dinner was ready.
‘I’ll go and draw some beer,’ said George.
‘You’ll do nothing of the sort, George,’ replied Mrs Malpas. ‘You’ve had all that’s good for you at thePound House. If your father can do without beer before evening, so can you!’
George passed the reproof off with a smile, but stayed where he was.
Meanwhile Mrs Malpas rescued four hot plates from the oven and thrust them into Abner’s hands with ‘Catch on, please!’ and the party settled down at the table, the old man occupying a shiny chair with a patchwork cushion; the mother, rigid as her own chair-back, facing him, Abner and George disposed on either side of them. The food was excellent and Abner was more than ready for it. It was the first square meal that he had got his teeth into for a week. Mrs Malpas’s appetite was in keeping with the ascetic character of her face, but the old man ate ravenously of beef, vegetables, and dumplings, and the two others were not far behind him. All through the meal Mrs Malpas cast anxious glances at her son’s plate. Abner could see that beneath her mask of severity she was really full of a fierce maternal concern for his comfort. The only tokens of tenderness that ever appeared in her were shown towards him. When she spoke of George’s wife and of the children there was an almost imperceptible hardening in her tone, and George answered her shortly, as if he knew that the subject had only been raised for politeness’ sake.
For all this they enjoyed their meal. The room was dim, for the hot sun from outside was caught in the folds of a lace curtain and a mass of lush geranium plants with which the window-sill was crowded. The scent of their leaves filled the room with an atmosphere of summer, languid and happy. One could almost have guessed that it was Sunday.
When the meal was over Abner began to fill his pipe.
‘No smoking in here, young man,’ said Mrs Malpas sternly. ‘If you want to smoke you’d best go into the tap.’
‘It’s mother’s fancy on a Sunday,’ George apologised.
‘You know your father can’t abear it,’ said Mrs Malpas, but the old man, who usually woke up when his name was mentioned, did not hear her, being busy with a paper packet of snuff.
When she began to clear the table, George returned gallantly to the subject of their visit. ‘What about this chap’s lodging?’ he asked.
‘It’s no good asking me, George. I’ve told you once.’
‘You can give him a bed till Tuesday while he’s looking round, mother.’
She shook her head positively. ‘I’ve got to clean things up between now and Tuesday. Besides, there’s two of them.’
‘Don’t you trouble yourself about the other,’ said George. ‘He’s gone off with one of our gang. This is a nice, steady chap. . .’
But Mrs Malpas did not budge. ‘Your father wouldn’t hear of it,’ she said finally. By this time she had cleared away the dinner things, taken off her apron and placed a family Bible with a blue silk marker on the table. Mr Malpas had settled back in his chair by the hearth with a snuffy handkerchief over his head.
‘Just for two days,’ said George.
‘George, ’tis no good.’
He knew better than to press her under the circumstances, and so they prepared to go. Abner took out his money to pay for the meal. Cupidity struggled with principle in Mrs Malpas’s eyes.
‘Not on a Sunday, young man,’ she said.
Abner thanked her clumsily. George kissed her, and for a moment she dropped her stiffness and clung to him.
‘Come on, then,’ he said to Abner. ‘Good-bye, dad.’
But Mr Malpas was already asleep, his mouth sagging beneath the edge of his handkerchief. Abner picked up his bundle in the taproom and he and George went out into the grilling sunshine.