Nextmorning when Abner came downstairs in the dark he found George making himself a cup of tea in the kitchen.
‘That you, Abner?’ he said, turning his neck gingerly as though it hurt his head to speak. ‘God! It’s lifting the top of my skull off! This dose’ll last me for a bit. Mind you, I wasn’t so boozed I can’t remember what happened. I should have slept up against that old wall if you hadn’t come along. You’m a good pal, Abner.’ At this point his voice gave out. ‘Have a spot of tea?’ he said in a hoarse whisper.
As usual they walked down the valley together at dawn. The fields lay hoary with rime, so that the light of dawn was like cloudy moonlight. Their heels crunched into the brittle ice of the wheel-ruts. Before them, on the white road, ran the wayward pattern of Spider’s dancing feet. Not a bird sang. The cold air gripped their temples. It was as though winter were closing on the world and those who dwelt in it like an iron vice. Dawn whitened beyond Castel Ditches: light without heat—light reflected from ice. But the steady walking thawed their limbs and George was soon asking in a husky voice for details of what had happened the night before. Something in Mary’s attitude when they woke that morning had struck him as unusual. He guessed that she had found a new grievance, and was anxious to know what she had said. He laughed when Abner told him that she had questioned him on the subject of Susie: laughed till the cold air choked him.
‘They’m all the same, the women,’ he said. ‘Jealous . . . that’s the top and bottom of them. What did you tell her?’
‘Said I hadn’t seen you at the Pound House.’
‘God! You didn’t say I’d been to Lesswardine?’
‘I dain’t know naught about it.’
‘And the less you know the better, or you’ll be havingthese women buzz round you like flies. You can tell our Mary what you like, but you’ll need to keep your eyes skinned with mother. I’ve got to bide on the right side of the old woman or it’s all up. She’ll have it out of you before you know you’re there.’
By this time they had reached the lower end of the valley to which the cloggers had lately transferred their work. The whole gang were now housed in the Buffalo and the other scattered cottages of Chapel Green, but a couple of tents were left standing on the banks of the Folly Brook and the smoke of a wood-fire went up blue into the air.
‘I can’t make mother out,’ George grumbled. ‘Here she is with Wigan Joe and the rest of them in the house: a mint of money for the asking, and she goes scaring them over to Mainstone with her long face. If I had the Buffalo I’d soon see they spent their money in the house. It’s as good as robbing me the way she sends them away. She don’t want the money, but I want it bad enough, God knows!’
They parted when they reached the workings. George whistled to Spider, but the dog only wagged her tail and then dived into a trench, preferring to stay with Abner. Munn appeared, rubbing his hands with cold. Abner laughed at him.
‘Put your back into it, Joe, and you’ll soon feel right,’ he said.
The day’s work began. A red sun rose sluggishly, half frozen. The light glinted on the long line of swinging picks and the sounds of the work rose cheerily in the thin air. Very different was this from the subdued activity of summer. The labourers did not work only for money but because the exertion sent the blood tingling warm into their hands and feet. Work was an ecstasy and to Abner a greater ecstasy than to the rest of them. He thought of Susie and of the night before. He whistled as he worked for sheer physical joy, rejoicing in his strength, for now once more, after months of soft disuse, his body was finding its right expression and coming splendidly to its own. He stretched his limbs in the sunlight, recapturing the moments of physical exaltation that used to come to him when the MawneUnited team stepped out on to the smooth turf of the Albion ground, a company of clean and splendid athletes. And all the time, beneath the pleasant anodyne of work, his body glowed with a rich contentment, knowing that in a few hours night would come and Susie be clinging in his arms again.
He had no fear that she would forsake him. He felt, in every fibre of his body that he was a match, and more than a match for Badger. Having once attained her he knew that he could keep her; and in this he was not deceived, for Susie, having looked on him and found that he was good, had taken a fancy to him and now kept pace with his passion, asking as much as he could give. Every evening, as was already his custom, he would go to the Pound House and take his seat beside Gunner Eve; but now he no longer needed to follow Susie with his eyes, was no longer tortured with vague jealousies, for when she passed him he could feel her soften and respond to his presence. Sometimes, when no one was looking, she would turn her head in his direction and for a moment their eyes would meet. He did not care when men spoke to her lightly or placed their hands upon her arm, for now he knew that she belonged to him and could be his for the asking. The events of the first night were repeated many times. Now a single whisper was enough to ensure that when the alehouse was empty and Mr Hind safely in bed, the kitchen door would be opened softly and Susie waiting for him in the warm darkness. It amused Abner to see the coldness that she now showed toward Badger. The keeper was puzzled, for all their love-making was secret and nocturnal, and Susie and Abner never appeared in public together. Badger knew that for some unknown reason he had lost her, and this made him more persistent than ever in his attentions, being far too important in his own estimation to be discarded without good reason. Abner laughed to see his irritation. He and Susie laughed together in the night. ‘I can’t imagine whatever I saw in him,’ she said.
At the end of November Susie went away for a week to stay with her grandparents in Hereford. Without her the Pound House meant nothing to Abner, andwithout considering that his absence might be noticed, he drifted back into his old habit of returning to Wolfpits in the evening. It was now more than a month since he had done this, and in the interval he had scarcely spoken to Mary Malpas. Returning, and expecting to pick up the threads of the old life exactly as he had left them, he was surprised to find the atmosphere of Wolfpits curiously changed. The attitude of Mary herself was cold and unfriendly. He found it difficult to make headway against it, for she scarcely spoke to him, and even the children seemed to have become infected with their mother’s distrust. It was true that they had seen so little of him as almost to have forgotten him, but it seemed strange that his old favourite, Gladys, no longer came instinctively to his arms. He could not accept the change without a protest. One evening, finding Mary alone, he tackled her.
‘What’s come over you?’ he said.
‘Nothing’s come over me. What do you mean?’ she replied coldly.
‘Yo’m different . . . like you was scared of me. What have I done?’
‘You know best. You know what you told me . . . that night,’ she said, with tight lips.
‘That’s nothing to do with you,’ he said.
‘No . . . Nothing.’
‘Then what’s up with you?’
She laughed uneasily and went into the scullery. Abner was seized with sudden rage. It didn’t surprise him that George couldn’t get on with her. Mrs Malpas was right. She was trying to play the lady with him. With a woman like that it was useless trying to be frank. He could read suspicion into everything that she did. When Gladys, who was now regaining her confidence, climbed on to his knee, she followed the child with anxious eyes as though she feared that he would corrupt her. He determined to have the matter out with her, but she never gave him a chance, arranging carefully that they should never be alone. For this or for some other obscure reason she always invited her neighbour, Mrs Mamble, to come in and sit with her in the evening. This old woman, innocent of thestrange relation between them, would sit in front of the fire talking incessantly of her dead husband and her distant relatives down Tenbury way. She had a brother who kept a small shop in a hamlet called Far Forest, and was never tired of talking of his importance as an elder of the local Wesleyan synod and the achievements of her nephew James, whom his father had destined for the ministry. The old woman tried to entertain them both with these recitals, but Abner had little patience with her, and tried to forget that she was there. He sat reading the football news in the last Sunday’sPeople; but even this could not shut out the sound of her slow, insistent voice. One night he asked for pen and paper and wrote a short but laborious note to Alice, enclosing a postal order for two pounds, which he had bought in Chapel Green. Mary watched him all the time that he was writing.
‘Ah, yo’m curious, bain’t yo’?’ he thought. ‘Pretending to take no heed of me, but yo’d give your eyes to see what I’ve written.’
Indeed she offered to post the letter for him; but he declined, putting it in his pocket with a laugh.
In the end he found these evenings at Wolfpits so uncomfortable that he was glad when Mick Connor inveigled him into a new expedition against Badger’s preserves. By this time the keeper had looked about him and made plans for defending his master’s property, so that the game was getting more dangerous every day. Badger had made friends with Constable Bastard, the new policeman, who had been drafted to Mainstone from Shrewsbury and looked upon poaching with the uncharitable eye of a townsman. To the great embarrassment of Mr Hind, who, not unreasonably, lived in terror of the licensing justices, and had not yet determined in what degree the new policeman was corruptible, Bastard began to take an interest in the customers of the Pound House, poking his whiskered face inside the taproom every evening and taking count of the company like a shepherd numbering his sheep. Mr Hind’s heart sank when he found that the constable was a teetotaller. The appearance of Bastard’s face in the doorway made him tremble for his licence, though these visits onlymeant that the keeper and the policeman were working together, hoping to identify the authors of each poaching outrage by establishing their absence from the Pound House.
The first expedition in which Abner took part during Susie’s visit to Hereford gave them a big haul. Abner’s own share of it was fifteen shillings, and, thus encouraged, they raided the keeper’s preserves on three nights in succession. The constable, checking the tale of drinkers at the Pound House, pointed out that Abner, Mick, Curly Atwell, and another had been absent on each of the nights in question, and that Mick had celebrated his return by recklessly standing treat to the whole taproom.
‘That young Fellows,’ said Bastard, ‘he’s not been nigh the place for more nor a week. For myself I’d say that he looks a quiet chap, but you never know . . . upon my word you don’t.’
‘The simpler they looks,’ said Badger emphatically, ‘the more they wants an eye kept on them. I’m pretty near certain I saw him that night they was arter the salmon.’
‘Never you fear!’ said the constable, ‘I’ll keep an eye on the lot.’
It never occurred to Badger, whose energies were centred for the present on one problem, to connect Abner’s absence from the Pound House with Susie’s visit to Hereford. He was an obstinate and not very intelligent man, thick-set in mind as in body, who had learnt his own craft thoroughly and knew little else. He had become aware of Susie’s coldness toward him before her departure, but he had not thought to explain it by her fancying another man. In any case the matter might wait. He could only do one thing at a time, and for the present he was too busy with Mick and his friends to waste good time in dangling round the Pound House. Perhaps it was only that Susie wanted more fuss made of her. All in good time . . .
After ten days she returned, and Abner began to visit the Pound House again. He found her imperious and exacting, she could not see too much of him. Bastard reported him to Badger as a regular attendant at the inn.
‘You needn’t trouble about that young Fellows,’ he said. ‘He’s after other game.’
‘There’s no game here to speak on but ours,’ said Badger stupidly.
‘Ah, it’s a different kind I mean,’ said the constable. ‘That girl of Hind’s is looking after him. Any night of the week if you want to see a picture you can watch her take him in by the back door when the old man’s asleep upstairs.’
Badger went livid and swore so violently as to shock the constable’s principles.
‘I don’t believe it,’ he said, ‘not a word of it.’
‘Seeing’s believing,’ said Bastard. ‘At any rate seeing’s good enough for me.’
All thought of the poachers vanished from Badger’s single mind. He left the constable in the middle of their conversation and went straight to the Pound House, where he found Susie alone, making a petticoat from a pattern that she had bought in Hereford. She could see by his stormy entrance that something had upset him and switched on her most ingratiating manner.
‘Well, it is a time since I’ve seen you, Mr Badger,’ she said, laying aside her work. ‘Will you have something?’
He wouldn’t drink; he refused to waste time in preliminary skirmishing.
‘You’re not going to get round me that way,’ he said. ‘What’s this about you and that chap Fellows?’
‘Fellows?’ said Susie. ‘What Fellows is that?’
‘Now don’t start that game on me,’ said Badger angrily. ‘I’ve seen there was something up with you for the last month. Now I know what it is. You can’t go on like that with me. I’m not that kind of man.’
‘And I’m not that kind of girl, Mr Badger,’ said Susie. ‘I thought better of you, indeed I did.’
‘You can drop all that,’ said Badger, with a laugh. ‘You can let on you’re as innocent as a lamb, but I know better. Understand that!’
‘If that’s what you mean, I can tell you straight I’m not going to listen to your dirty tongue. I’m not accustomed to be spoke to by my friends like that.’ She rose indignantly and would have gone into the kitchen but he caught hold of her arm.
‘You don’t deny it,’ he said.
‘I wouldn’t demean myself.’ She tried to wrench away from him, but he would not let her go. The warmth of her arm on his fingers made him mad. He wanted to use her roughly. She cried out with pain.
‘Don’t!’ she cried. ‘You’re hurting me!’
He wanted to hurt her. He only held her tighter. ‘Where’s your father?’ he said.
‘Father’s gone out,’ she said. ‘Oh, let me go!’
‘Gone out, is he? Well, I’ll have a talk to him about this when he comes back. Then we’ll see . . .’
‘You can tell him all the dirty lies you like,’ she said defiantly.
But, in reality, his words had thrown her into a state of terror. That squat owl-faced father of hers was the one person on earth whom she dreaded. It came over her suddenly that somehow or other she must prevent his knowing, for though he had no objection to his daughter being free with men for the good of the house, she knew that he was anxious to keep on good terms with Badger and would be furious to think that she had taken up with a labouring man. Somehow she must flatter the keeper out of his intention; but she knew that a sudden change of front would be a manœuvre too transparent. It pleased her, therefore, to give vent to the emotions which she had so far controlled and to break down in the most natural tears. She put her handkerchief to her eyes and sobbed violently.
Badger was bewildered by this but still determined.
‘You don’t get over me that way,’ he said. ‘Not if I know it!’
She went on sobbing, and the spectacle began to get on his nerves.
‘You can cry your eyes out, my girl, but I’m going to tell your father.’
She raised her eyes. ‘It’s not that!’ she said violently. ‘You can tell him any lie you like and it won’t make no difference to me. What I can’t stand is that you should think it of me . . . that you should think I’d go with a common chap like that. It’s cruel, Mr Badger . . . cruel! After the friends we’ve been. . .’
She put her hands on his shoulders and looked athim, pleading. His lust got the better of him and he took her violently in his arms. She submitted, and he began to forget his suspicions. She clung to him so that he could think of nothing but that she was desirable. Then, cunningly, gradually she became playful and childish, teasing him, indignant that he should have thought so ill of her. By the time that he left her she had convinced him that nothing could spoil their intimacy; but whatever she pretended she could not shake herself free from the fright he had given her. She felt that the time would never pass till she could see Abner and warn him.
It was no easy matter, for when the evening came and she began her work in the bar, moving among the drinkers with her usual smiling freedom, Badger was also there following her with hungry eyes as she went about her work. He sat in a corner, isolated, for none of the strangers would have anything to do with him. While serving a tot of gin to Gunner Eve she contrived to whisper to Abner, begging him to keep away from the house that night.
‘Why? What’s up?’ he said.
‘I can’t tell you,’ she whispered. ‘Come to-morrow early, before it’s light on your way to work. Just to please me!’
She spoke so urgently and with such evident distress that he obeyed her, and Badger, who had seen her bending over to speak to Abner, spent a cold night watching the back of the Pound House in vain. He might well have been better employed, for while he stood there shivering Mick Connor made free with half a dozen of his pheasants.
Next morning, in the half light of dawn, which made the cold kitchen look unspeakably sordid, she received Abner. The meeting had none of the warm glamour of their nightly love-making, and her anxiety made him impatient.
‘What the hell do I care for Badger?’ he said.
‘Oh, quiet . . . quiet! Don’t speak so loud!’ she implored him. She submitted to his embraces, but her mind was not with him.
‘I can’t think what’s up with you,’ he said.
His unconcern irritated her. ‘Can’t you understand?’ she said. ‘It’s better to do without me for a little than to lose me for good. That’s what would happen if fatherknew. He’d send me away to Hereford, to grandma’s. That’s what he’d do. Only for a week, Abner. After that, when he’s forgotten about it, things ’ll be better.’
Her distress was so real and she seemed so little to belong to him in her present state that he consented not to see her for a week.
‘Then I shan’t come a’nigh the place,’ he said. ‘I’m not goin’ to sit there looking at you and nothing after.’
‘Yes . . . that would be best,’ she said gladly. It inflamed him to think that she could take this complete divorce so calmly.
‘Better finish it off,’ he said.
Then she clung to him. ‘No, no, Abner. . . . I couldn’t bear that! Only a week, my love, only a week. . .’
He kept to his side of the bargain, and Badger was relieved to see him no more at the Pound House, although the suddenness of Abner’s abstention coloured his suspicions. What with his pheasants and the woman the keeper’s life was becoming too complicated for his intelligence, for Mick profited by Badger’s new devotion to Susie by ravaging his coverts. In this Abner, who had no other way of killing time, joined his friend, and on the last night of the week came a sharp but bloodless encounter in which the keeper was more than ever certain that he had seen Abner’s face. After this it became fixed in Badger’s mind that Abner was his principal enemy, the man who was obstinately working against him wherever he went. Somehow or other, he determined, he must get the better of him.
On the night when Abner returned to the Pound House, Badger was already there. Mick, as usual after a successful foray, was spending money freely, and by nine o’clock the room was full of excited men. Abner was ready to drink with the best of them, for his pockets were full of money and he had not been inside a pub for a week. To add to this uproarious assembly in came George Malpas, returning early from his own dark business in Lesswardine.
‘Go easy, boys,’ he said, as he entered, ‘that damned copper’s outside.’
But Mick Connor had by now gone too far to go easy. The liquor which in the early stages of intoxicationmerely rendered him funny now made him boastful, and the sight of Badger, glowering in his corner over a hot whisky, provided him with a subject for his wit. Atwell tried to keep him within bounds, but Mick, once fairly nourished, could talk the cross off an ass’s back. The laughter with which his sallies at the keeper’s expense were greeted stimulated him. He plunged into wild excesses of simile, while Badger sat sipping his whisky, going redder and redder as he listened. He knew that the whole room was against him; felt that before long he must do something to assert himself. If he went out into the road he would only be laughed at, but no man could sit there listening to Mick Connor without shame.
‘Wait while I’m tellin’ you,’ said Mick. ‘Over in Connemara there used to be an old gent named Hewish, a proper old sportsman. It was he that invented that game I’ve told you of . . . spider racing, spiders burning the legs off of them on a hot plate. Cock-fightin’ too. And badger-baitin’. I’m after tellin’ you that’s the sport for a man!’
A roar of laughter greeted him. ‘And so say all of us!’ said Mick insolently, staring into Badger’s corner. Badger pushed aside the table and rose to his feet. His glass went down with a crash.
‘Oh, Mr Badger!’ Susie cried.
‘Gard! The baste’s afther turning on me!’ cried Mick. ‘All together, boys!’
Badger pushed his way through the crowd to Mick. The Irishman lowered his head and butted him in the stomach like a ram. Badger, falling, saw Abner’s smiling face and lashed out at it. The two men went down together, fighting on the floor. Susie rushed into the kitchen, calling for her father, and at the same moment the constable ran into the room. He began to try and pinion Abner, who had Badger on the floor.
‘Leave them alone,’ cried George Malpas excitedly. ‘Badger hit him first!’ He took hold of the policeman’s shoulder, and tried to pull him back.
‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ Bastard shouted. ‘Obstructing my duty?’
But George would not let him go. The policeman leftAbner and closed with Malpas. He was the taller, but the older man. They swayed in each other’s arms and then, tripping on the leg of an overturned chair, went down together. The policeman was undermost and his head hit the stone floor with a dull thud. George, who had fallen above him, freed himself from his arms.
‘The b—’s stunned,’ said Atwell. ‘Serve him right!’
Mr Hind had appeared on the scene and was bending over the prostrate policeman. George leaned panting against the bar.
‘There’s blood coming from his ears and nose,’ Mr Hind said hoarsely.
‘The b—’s stunned,’ Atwell repeated stolidly.
‘He’s not stunned,’ said the landlord, looking up. ‘He’s dead!’
By this time Abner had got the better of the keeper, whom he held beneath him on the floor. He heard the crash as George Malpas and Constable Bastard went over amid a hubbub of voices. Then, with the landlord’s words, which Abner did not hear, fell a sudden silence. He wondered what was up, released Badger, and pushed forward to the cluster of men that surrounded the policeman’s body. He heard the word ‘dead’ passing from one to another. ‘Lock at the blood coming out of his ear,’ they said. And there was George Malpas leaning up against the bar with his hands behind him gripping it, ghastly pale and panting with his mouth open, and twitching at the corners. He didn’t see Abner or any one else. A curious inertia had fallen on the group of men about Bastard’s body. They simply stared at it as though it had fallen into the midst of them from another planet. Mr Hind, by way of an experiment, lifted the constable’s hand and let it fall again. It fell on the floor with a wooden sound.
‘Somebody run to Lesswardine for the doctor,’ said Mr Hind.
‘I’ll go myself,’ said Abner.
‘That’s right. Tell ’im about the blood, and be’s quick as you can.’
‘It’s snowing,’ some one called.
Abner went hatless to the door. Looking back into the kitchen he saw the face of Susie. It was white,like a mask. For the moment it meant nothing to him. They looked at each other for that fraction of a second unrecognising. Abner started running toward Lesswardine. The hard road echoed. The night was deadly black and snow was falling.
He scarcely noticed the snow. He went on plodding over the road to Lesswardine without realising, for the time, the importance of his journey. He felt the snowflakes spatter his face, his neck, his chest, for in the struggle with Badger his shirt had been torn open. He was glad he had come to grips with Badger. He felt he could do what he liked with the keeper now. The white-faced vision of Susie, till then unrealised, came back to him out of the darkness. Scared, she must have been!
In Lesswardine yellow lamps beamed through halos of cold air. Crossing the bridge he saw that his clothes were as white as a miller’s. The great flakes danced like moths in the lamplight, they flew into his mouth and melted on the heat of his tongue. His feet did not echo in these new streets, for the macadam was felted with an inch of snow. He had nearly reached his goal. It was senseless to go on running, panting, and swallowing mouthfuls of snow; but his legs would not obey these half-formed thoughts and carried him onwards.
The doctor was smoking his after-supper pipe when Abner arrived. The Hinds were good patients, and he did not hesitate to turn out. ‘Give me a hand with the mare,’ he said, and they went out into the stable to put to. The doctor’s wife had warmed his overcoat and wrapped a muffler round his neck. He gave Abner a peg of whisky to keep him warm. When they were clear of the Lesswardine lights he asked for details of the affair. ‘By Gad, that’s serious,’ he said. ‘That means an inquest and a P.M.’ He thought to himself: ‘Two guineas,’ and touched up the mare with satisfaction.
‘You say Bastard and George Malpas went down together? He was struggling with George?’
‘Yes—it was me and Badger he was after.’
‘That’s beside the point,’ said the doctor. ‘It’s a bad lookout for Malpas—and for his mother, poor old lady! A bad lookout. . . . It’s homicide—manslaughter.’
Bythe time that Abner and the doctor reached Mainstone, Bastard’s body was growing cold, and the last hope that his unconsciousness was any less than that of death had vanished. The Pound House was still full of those who waited for the verdict, a silent, sober company. Mr Hind, who had not seen the beginning of the struggle, tried vainly to find out what had happened. All accounts of it were confused and contradictory, and in any case it mattered little to the landlord, for he knew that his house was already in the black books of the police, and felt sure that this catastrophe would mean the loss of his licence. The doctor scarcely needed to look at Bastard’s body.
‘Yes, fractured base,’ he said. ‘He must have died at once. An elderly man with brittle bones. There’s nothing to be done, Hind. I’ll knock up the sergeant when I get back to Lesswardine and telephone the coroner.’
‘I wouldn’t have had this happen for nothing, doctor!’ moaned Mr Hind.
‘Of course you wouldn’t. It’s not your fault.’
‘He must have tripped over that chair.’ And everybody, including the doctor, stared at the offending piece of furniture with interest.
‘Come on, Abner,’ said George Malpas. ‘Good-night, Mr Hind.’
Mr Hind did not reply.
All through that night the snow fell slowly, incessantly. The soft, frozen sky drifted downward idly on the land, and George and Abner had to pick their way back to Wolfpits blindly in the small hours, guided through the plain by the presence of ghostly trees and in the Wolfpits valley by the snow-muffled tumult of the Folly Brook. The hills were desolate and savage. They lay dead, and the sky covered them. Wolfpits itself rose before the travellers’ eyes sudden and black through the falling snow. There was no light in any of the windows, for Mary had given them up long agoand gone to bed. Wood embers smouldered in the kitchen grate. George poked them into a blaze. They took off their snow-plastered coats and sat in front of the fire.
‘Well, this is a bloody fine thing!’ said George. ‘Old Bastard gone and me a murderer. I’ve looked for some queer things but never for this.’
‘I reckon it’s my fault,’ said Abner. ‘That’s bound to come out.’
‘That’s not going to help me,’ said George, with a laugh. ‘Not it! . . . It’s mother I’m thinking of. There’s no luck in our family. It’s no good talking about it. It’s my last fling, and I’d do it again for a pal. If it hadn’t happened to-night, it wouldn’t never have happened at all.’
Abner could say nothing. Even now he didn’t realise the seriousness of his friend’s position.
‘Just my blasted luck!’ said George. ‘Better turn in unless you want to get frozen.’
He went upstairs with his candle, and Abner followed.
When daylight returned the snow had ceased, but the night’s fall had obliterated the track of their returning feet. Wolfpits had become a black island in the surrounding whiteness. From the drift upon the doorstep the snow lay smooth to the tops of the hills which dawn illumined with a rosy light. Never had the mountains seemed so near to the house, so beautiful, and so little threatening.
Abner woke early and looked out on this transfigured world. In all the house no one was astir. Even old Drew, who worked in all weathers, had not yet emerged from his snowbound door. George and Mary still slept. It was very cold, and Abner threw his coat over his bedclothes. It was no good getting up, for he knew that with so deep a fall there could be no work on the pipe-track that day. He lay in bed, smoking, watching the clustered chimneys of Wolfpits against the sky. The rosy hue faded from the mountains. The sky cleared to a thin, dazzling blue. A thread of smoke issued from old Drew’s chimney, rising, straight as a larch, into the clear air. In the room beneath him, where George and Mary slept, he heard voices. No doubt George Malpaswas telling his wife what had happened. Sometimes the talk was rapid; sometimes there were long silences. Abner was thankful that the sad business of telling Mary had not been left to him. He heard the children’s voices on the stair. The time had come when he would have to face them all.
They were all in the kitchen when he came downstairs. He could see from Mary’s eyes that she had been crying; she scarcely dared to look at him lest she should cry again. George was pretending to be cheerful. He was playing with the children, telling them how they must make a snow man in the drive. He said good-morning to Abner as though nothing had happened overnight, and Abner’s heart went out to him for his courage. Mary did not speak to him, but it seemed to him that her red eyes were reproachful. He felt that she probably considered him responsible for the tragedy, was conscious of his indirect share of guilt, and wished there were some way in which he could atone for it. He admired the manly way in which George took his trouble. Indeed he never felt so wholly friendly to George in his life.
The elders breakfasted in silence, but the children talked incessantly, being excited by the snow. An overwhelming impulse to put himself right with Mary made Abner stop her when she was carrying the breakfast things into the scullery.
‘George has told you?’ he said.
‘Yes, he’s told me. I suppose there’s nothing to be done?’
‘Naught that I know on,’ he replied. And she left him quickly, for she did not want him to see her crying again.
George lit his pipe at the fire. ‘Funny to hear them kids,’ he said, with a half smile. ‘I mind it just the same once before. It was at Mary’s father’s funeral when his sister, her Aunt Rachel, brought her youngsters over from Bromyard.’
They were spared more of these harrowing contrasts, for the air was warm, and the children, carefully wrapped up by Mary, ran out to play in the glistening stuff. Mary did not reappear, and the two men sat on over the fire. Only George spoke from time to time.
‘It’s all of a piece with my luck,’ he said. ‘I reckon I was born unlucky. One thing and another. . . I don’t mind as long as it don’t come out what I was after in Lesswardine. She’s a decent woman and I wouldn’t have her damaged by it. I wish to God I’d stayed like she wanted me.’
He seemed to be waiting for Abner to speak, so that he felt bound to ask who the woman in Lesswardine was.
‘A young woman, a widow . . .’ said George. ‘I wouldn’t have her name mentioned if I could help it. She’s got enough to put up with. Probably I shan’t see her, so I’ll give you a note for her.’
He relapsed into silence. ‘The odds is,’ he went on, after a long pause, ‘this is the last time I shall see Wolfpits at night. Well, I’m not sorry for that, though there’s no denying that Mary’s been a good wife to me.’
He spoke more excitedly. ‘There’s one thing: try as they will, they can’t make it murder. Accidental manslaughter, that’s the most they can make of it. That means a couple of years hard labour. You can’t tell. . . . It depends on the damned jury. Only mention the word “poaching” and the judges are again’ you. Yes . . . you can’t deny she’s been a good wife, if I hadn’t married her too young. I’ve got mother to thank for that. But I don’t know what’ll happen to her. She’s too proud for charity, and she’d starve herself and the children rather than take a penny piece from mother.’
‘She won’t want while I’m here,’ said Abner.
George looked at him steadily without replying.
‘You mean you’ll stay here and keep the home together?’
‘If you want me to,’ said Abner.
‘You’re a good pal, Abner,’ he replied. ‘I’ve said that before. And I wouldn’t have her suffer. There’s something in what her dad used to say . . . about good blood and that. If I hadn’t took a fancy against her this wouldn’t never have happened. I wouldn’t have the home broke up.’
‘I’ll look to that,’ said Abner. ‘That is, if she don’t turn against me.’
George’s handsome face was working, against hiswill. He grasped Abner’s hand in his. It seemed a natural gesture. ‘You’re a proper pal,’ he said, and then, in a debauch of self-pity, ‘By God, you’re the only pal I’ve got that I can trust!’
Morgan came running into the room ahead of Gladys, anxious to be the bearer of exciting news. He ran straight to his father.
‘Well, son?’ said George.
‘Dad . . . dad. . . . There’s a pleeceman comin’ up the drive with a bicycle,’ he cried.
‘A strange one we don’t know,’ Gladys added.
‘Go into the back to your mother,’ said George.
The constable from Lesswardine knocked at the door and handed two summonses to George and Abner. ‘Inquest at the Pound House at two o’clock. You understand it’s important.’
‘Have a drink of beer before you go?’ said George.
‘I don’t mind,’ said the constable, becoming less official.
George went down into the cellar with a jug.
‘This is a bad job,’ said the constable. ‘A bad job, sure enough.’
Abner asked him which way he thought it would go. ‘There’s no saying,’ he replied. ‘As long as they don’t bring it in “murder.”’
He was a fair young man, newly recruited to the force from some Herefordshire village. The ride in the snow had freshened his complexion and made him look healthy and jolly.
‘There’s a nasty drift at the bottom of the hill by the bridge,’ he said. ‘A good six foot of it! Well, here’s luck!’ he said, as he drank off George’s beer.
‘Luck’s the word!’ said George, ‘and God knows I need some!’
Mary came into the room with a set face. ‘Warrants for the inquest,’ said George.
‘Oh, is that all?’ she answered, with relief.
They set off early for the Pound House, fearing that the driven snow might delay them. George was almost gay, and Abner wondered at his friend’s courage. They avoided Chapel Green, being anxious not to pass the Buffalo. In Mainstone a few women came to theirdoors and stared at them. The Pound House door was open. A number of jurors had already arrived. They were mostly farmers or shopkeepers from Lesswardine and had agreed that the day was a fine one in spite of the snow and that it was lucky that the tragedy had happened at a time when they were not busy on their farms. Susie was nowhere to be seen, but Mr Hind, worried and paler than usual, was doing an excellent trade in hot whisky and water. He was sorry, he told them, that there was no lemon in the house. Indeed he was feverishly anxious to put himself on good terms with the jurors.
When George and Abner entered an awkward silence fell upon the company. Several of those who knew Malpas said good-day to him. The fact that he was greeted by these men who were shortly to sit in judgment on him encouraged him. He took a seat on one of the benches in the corner of the room. Abner went to the bar and asked for a drink. Mr Hind, with hatred shining in his pale eyes, served him.
‘Hope you’re all right to-day, Mr Hind,’ said Abner friendlily.
The landlord trembled with rage. He pushed Abner’s glass at him, spilling a quarter of the whisky. ‘I hope I’ve seen the last of you,’ he said.
The jurymen now congregated in the other corner of the room as though they realised that it was not fitting that they should mix with such important figures in the affair as George and his friend. They talked together in low voices. Abner and George sat quietly listening, but only instinctive glances in their direction told them when George’s name was mentioned. At the end of the bar was another door, leading into the club-room, generally used for the meetings of friendly societies, in which the inquest would be held. Abner wondered if the body of Bastard lay inside it; for heavy steps were heard from time to time through the closed door. At last the door was opened and the sergeant of police from Lesswardine appeared in it.
He stood there very erect and official, bending stiffly to recognise the more important of the group of jurymen. Then his eyes fell on George and Abner. Hebeckoned to them and called them into the second room. Abner had expected that Bastard’s bony carcass would be revealed lying in state, but instead of this he saw a long deal table with an arm-chair at the head of it and six other ordinary chairs on either side. In front of the coroner’s seat were spread a pile of official papers, ink, blotting-paper, and a selection of equally impossible pens. On the wall above it hung a trophy, the horns of a North American bison with a boss of black hair between them, which, in a more savage age might well have symbolised the official’s power of life and death, but, in fact, represented those that were vested in the master of the local branch of the Ancient Order of Buffaloes. The sergeant looked at his watch. It was already past two o’clock. He went out to look down the road to see if the coroner was in sight. The young constable who had delivered the warrants earlier in the day was busy placing a copy of the New Testament in front of each of the jurymen’s seats. When the sergeant’s back was turned he winked at George and Abner. Then he closed the door and left them alone.
‘They’ve summonsed fourteen for the jury,’ said George. ‘I’ve counted ’em. There’s three good friends to me: Mr Prosser of The Dyke, Jones of Pensilva, and Watkins the tailor. The one I’m frightened of is the big chap with the red face. Williams, his name is. He fell out with mother over a hogshead of cider five years ago and haven’t spoken to me nor her since. He’d be glad enough to see me swing! Well . . . what’s coming’s bound to come. ’Tis no good thinking on it.’
He said no more, but began to beat out the rhythm of a music-hall song on the floor with the end of his stick, staring straight in front of him at the bison’s head. Abner wished that something would happen. He hated this mechanical tapping.
A loud voice was heard in the bar and with it the scraping of feet. The coroner had arrived. The sergeant threw open the doors with a flourish and Mr Mortimer entered. He was a big man, with a handsome, rather heavy face, bushy white eyebrows over pale blue eyes, and a pointed beard in which a yellow, like that of tobacco stains, was mingled with white. He walkedquickly to the head of the table, his coat-tails flapping behind. Under his arm he carried a sheaf of papers that he spread out flat in front of him. Then he patted the table on either side of them with his hands and took up a pen. The sergeant stood stiffly at his elbow, and the jury shuffled into their places. Mr Williams, as by common consent, planted himself at the coroner’s right hand.
‘I declare this court open in the King’s name,’ said Mr Mortimer in a deep, impressive voice. The sergeant stood as though hypnotised by the formula. The coroner turned on him suddenly. ‘Now, sergeant,’ he boomed, ‘look alive! We don’t want to stay here all day. Get the jury sworn!’
He dived once more into his papers, yawned, rubbed his hands, glanced behind him at the symbolical buffalo, and then suddenly decided to clean his nails with a pen-knife. Meanwhile, with Testaments lifted in their right hands, the jurymen, one by one in different inflections of the border tongue, repeated the oath which the sergeant administered to them. ‘I swear by Almighty God.’ . . . I swear by Almighty God.’ ‘That I will well and duly inquire.’ . . . ‘That I will well and duly inquire.’ It was like the chorus that one may hear any morning of the week outside the windows of a country board-school. From time to time the coroner looked up impatiently from his manicure, and the sergeant increased his pace.
‘Finished?’ said Mr Mortimer at last.
‘Yes, sir. All correct,’ said the sergeant.
‘Now, gentlemen, you must choose a foreman. Only be quick about it. We’re late.’
In point of fact the jury had been waiting for him for more than an hour, but the question of choosing a foreman did not detain them for long, since Mrs Malpas’s enemy, Williams of the Pentre, had already virtually chosen himself.
‘Very good . . . very good!’ said the coroner. ‘Take them to view the body, sergeant.’
They filed out behind the policeman, opening their ranks at the door to admit the doctor from Lesswardine, who apologised for his lateness and shook hands with the coroner.
‘You’ve done the post-mortem?’ said the latter.
‘Yes, that’s what kept me.’
‘And found what you expected?’
‘Yes . . . fractured base. I had no doubt about it.’
‘Cheap two-guineas’ worth. You’d better take your money now to save time. Sign for it here.’
The doctor pocketed the sovereigns and placed the florin aside, according to the unwritten law that obtains in such cases, for the sergeant.
‘Sad affair,’ said the coroner, with a yawn. ‘Good man, Bastard. One of the old sort. Conscientious. No brains. Ideal policeman. What the devil are those fellers doing? I’ve promised to call for tea at the Delahays.’
‘I was hoping,’ said the doctor, ‘that you’d come back with me. My wife . . .’
‘No, thanks. . . Very kind of you all the same.’
‘We don’t often see you this way.’
‘No. Not since Condover’s suicide. I believe his son-in-law’s mixed up in this affair?’
‘Yes. . . . He’s over there in the corner. It’s the usual thing, I think. A brawl in an alehouse. Alcohol.’
The coroner nodded his head dolefully. His cellar was the best in Ludlow.
The jurors returned, and with a final glance at the buffalo’s head, as though he expected it to tell him the time, Mr Mortimer began business. First the sergeant identified the body of his subordinate. Standing rigidly at attention he rattled off the oath at a terrific speed, running his evidence on to the end of it without a stop. He could soon show the coroner how to do it. Mr Mortimer never raised his eyes from his papers.
‘I may say, sir . . .’ began the sergeant impressively.
‘You may say what you like, sergeant, when you’re asked for it,’ snapped the coroner. ‘That’s enough.’
The sergeant stepped back, full of offended dignity. The jury were impressed. Mr Mortimer was behaving in accordance with his reputation.
Other evidence followed rapidly. George and Abner leaned forward, listening. George with his head in his hands and his eyes staring out under the arch of his fingers. The second finger of his right hand still beatout the rhythm of the music-hall song that was running in the back of his mind.
‘Dr Hendrie!’
‘I swear by Almighty God that the evidence I shall give to this court shall be the truth,the whole truth,and nothing but the truth. Arthur Cuthbert Hendrie. Thirty-eight. M.R.C.S. and L.R.C.P. I am a physician and surgeon practising in Lesswardine. I had seen deceased but did not know him. Yesterday evening before ten o’clock I was called to the Pound House. I arrived there between ten and eleven . . . nearer eleven, and found deceased lying on the floor of the bar with blood and serum flowing from ears and nose. Both ears. He was quite dead.’
‘Quite dead. . . . Can you say how long he had been dead?’
‘No.’
‘Very well. Go on.’
‘I immediately formed the opinion . . . they told me that he had had a violent fall . . . that death was due to a fractured base of the skull. There was a bruise over the left temporal region.’
‘You performed a post-mortem examination.’
‘Yes. This morning. I found the fracture that I had suspected in the middle fossa.’
‘Will your honour ask’n what that there means?’
‘The witness means the middle part of the base of the skull. FOSSA,’ the coroner explained loftily.
‘Death, no doubt, was instantaneous. The condition was consistent with the story of a violent fall on a stone floor. The same condition might have been caused by a blunt instrument. Deceased was old for his years, as shown by the atheromatous condition of the cerebral arteries.’
‘Very good. Have you any questions to ask the witness?’
The jury all shook their heads.
‘If you are in a hurry, Dr Hendrie, I think we can spare you.’
‘Thank you, sir. Good day.’
‘Daniel Prosser Hind!’
Daniel Prosser Hind, forty-nine, was a licensedvictualler and the lessee of the Pound House. The owners were Messrs Astill of North Bromwich. He knew the deceased: couldn’t say that they were friends, as deceased had only lately come to Mainstone. He remembered last night. The bar was middling full. He himself was in the parlour working over accounts, his daughter being in charge of the bar. About nine-thirty he heard a row and ran into the bar. The first thing he saw was Mr Badger on the floor and young Fellows on the top of him. Behind them he saw Bastard lying on his back, with blood coming from his ears and nose. Some one said Bastard was stunned. He felt Bastard’s heart and said: ‘No, he’s dead.’ He did not see deceased fall. He was told. . . . He quite understood and begged his worship’s pardon. If he might say so, nothing of this kind had ever occurred in a house under his management before. What with the cloggers and the navvies it was no easy matter to keep an orderly house. He wished to express regret for what had happened. He could not say if Badger and Fellows had been drinking. Mr Badger was usually a temperate man. A man named Connor had the appearance of being the worse for liquor.
‘Were you not aware of this before?’
No. As he had explained, he was busy with the October accounts.
‘You consider your daughter a fit person to be in charge of a crowded bar?’
Yes. His daughter was quite competent and used to keeping order.
‘How old is she?’
She was twenty years of age. Messrs Astill, he persisted, always expected the accounts to be ready by the end of the month, and he had happened to be a little behind with them. Messrs Astill would speak for him.
‘You consider that you performed your duty as licensee of this inn?’
Yes. Certainly he considered he had done his duty. He had sent for the doctor at once.
‘You really expect me and the jury to believe that a girl of twenty is a fit person to be left in charge of abar full of those rough men? Very well. . . . You can stand down.’
Susan Hind, twenty, said she was daughter of the previous witness. She did not know deceased, though he was in the habit of looking in of nights. She had never served him in the bar. On the night in question there was nothing unusual. There were near about twenty men in the bar. Mr Badger was sitting alone over in the corner. He was not drunk. Fellows was not drunk. She didn’t think that Connor was drunk. She ought to know when a fellow was drunk! There was no special rule as to when they should be served or not. Yes, that was it, she used her discretion. Certainly Connor was excitable. He had had two or three quarts. No, that was nothing for Connor. He was always quick with his tongue, and the others were laughing at him. She agreed with her father that she could manage men if any one could. She had been used to it for years . . . ever since she was sixteen. She hadn’t noticed anything until Badger dropped his glass on the floor and came over to Connor. She supposed Connor had riled him, but she hadn’t been listening. Connor always went on at people. She saw Badger give Fellows a hit in the face and then the two of them went down. She called her father, and while her back was turned Bastard must have come in. She saw him try to pull Fellows off Badger. She saw Malpas take Bastard by the arm. He didn’t use no violence that she saw. Bastard tried to fix Malpas’s arms. She saw the two of them swaying about together. They must have tripped over something, they went down so sudden. Bastard did not cry out. She remembered nothing more, she was that scared. Malpas had not been drinking. He had had one drink: a small whisky. Of course she couldn’t say if he had got drink anywhere else. In her opinion he was sober. The only man in the room that was drunk was Atwell. She had gone on serving him because she knew by experience that he could behave decent with it. He was like that most nights.
Atwell, who had smiled at this tribute to his powers, was called next. He didn’t remember nothing. Hecouldn’t say if he was drunk because he didn’t remember. Asked if he wasn’t ashamed of himself, he had nothing to say.
Michael Connor corroborated the evidence of the witness Susan Hind. Anything he had said to Badger was not out of the way. He was only letting on. He admitted having a drop taken. He was nourished, not drunk. Atwell was drunk, more luck to him! That was making the court no impertinent answer. He said it by the way of no harm.
‘Abner Fellows!’
He had been sitting half hypnotised by the progress of the evidence. Each of the witnesses had seemed to him strange and unfamiliar. This subdued, tight-lipped Susan was not the girl who came passionately to his arms. Mr Hind was pale, shabby, shrunken. Even Mick was not the radiant companion that he knew. He heard his own name in a dream. George Malpas pushed him forward as the sergeant took an officious step in his direction. He stood at the foot of the long table, staring at the top of the coroner’s head and the buffalo horns above it. The foreman of the jury was examining him closely, much as on market days he would have examined a likely bullock. The man with the white beard went on writing in a large, fluent hand, while the sergeant thrust the Testament into Abner’s fingers and dictated the oath to him. He had to clear his throat, for his voice had left him. The coroner blotted his notes methodically and looked up.
‘Yes. . . . Abner Fellows. Age?’
‘Twenty.’
‘Occupation?’
‘Labourer.’
‘Tell me all you know of what happened last night . . . not too fast, I have to write it down.’
Slowly Abner told his own story.
‘Very good! You say that Badger hit you in the face. Are you on bad terms with Badger?’
‘I never spoke to him before.’
‘When he struck you you lost your temper?’
‘Any one would.’
‘You say Malpas is a friend of yours?’
‘I lodge with him.’
‘And Malpas was not drunk?’
‘Not that I could see.’
‘Do you know where Malpas had been that evening?’
Abner hesitated. He felt that George’s eyes were on him from behind. ‘No.’
‘Very well.’
Abner went back to his seat. He saw Mr Hind rubbing his hands together nervously, saw the white face of Susie. He flopped down heavily into the seat beside George. Malpas never stirred. He still sat with his hands to his head, drumming with his finger on his temple.
‘William Badger!’
William Badger, gamekeeper in the employment of Sir George Delahay, said he had been to the Pound House on business. His business was to try and pick up information about poaching on his master’s land. Nothing was safe in Lesswardine since the navvies had been working there. He was watching three men.
‘Name them.’
Connor, Fellows, and Atwell. He believed Connor was the ringleader. He had not come there to watch Malpas. Constable Bastard knew that he was there on that business. He had told Bastard that he thought he had recognised Connor in an affray three nights before. He had sat in the corner quietly listening. Connor had been talking ‘at him’ all evening, and at last he had lost his temper. He was a quick-tempered man and couldn’t abide poachers. He had meant to shut Connor’s mouth. He couldn’t say if he had meant to hit him. When he came up to Connor he saw Fellows looking ugly. They were all the same gang. He didn’t remember hitting Fellows in the face, but if he hadn’t done so Fellows would have hit him. The next moment Fellows was on the top of him. He didn’t see Bastard come in. Bastard was a friend of his. He did not see Malpas and Bastard fighting. He could not have seen Bastard fall, as Fellows was on the top of him. In his opinion Bastard had died in the performance of his duty. Bastard had been a great help to him.
‘George Malpas!’
George walked straight to the foot of the table, haggard, tall, handsome as ever. While he gave his evidence he still drummed with his fingers on the board. The tone of Mr Mortimer’s voice sharpened as he questioned him, but George’s account of the affair agreed in every detail with that of the other witnesses.
‘You do not suggest that you attacked Bastard when under the influence of drink?’
‘No. I had not been drinking.’
‘Where had you spent the earlier part of the evening?’
‘At Lesswardine.’
‘In a public-house?’
‘No. With a friend.’
‘Were you and Bastard on good terms?’
‘I had never spoken to him before in my life.’
‘Then why did you suddenly attack him?’
‘I never attacked him. Badger had hit out at Fellows and Fellows had a right to get his own back. I wanted to see fair play. I put my hand on Bastard’s arm.’
‘That’s all very well, you know. It is a serious offence to interfere with a constable in the discharge of his duty.’
‘Fellows was my pal. I never did nothing to Bastard. When I touched his arm he turned on me. He was trying to take me in charge. We must have tripped on something. We fell down together. I had nothing against Bastard.’
‘Very well, you may sit down.’
The sergeant cleared his throat: ‘If I may say a few words, sir . . .’
The coroner finished his notes, then sat back to listen.
‘I may say, sir, that we have been dissatisfied for some time with the conduct of this house. Neither Mr Hind nor his daughter bear a good character with us, and Bastard has had occasion to speak to me about the goings-on here from time to time. He has also said that Mr Badger was a great help to him. Connor, Atwell, and Fellows all have the name of rough characters. We have only been waiting for the necessary evidence . . .’
‘That will do, sergeant.’
‘Very good, sir. On inquiries in Lesswardine, I find that Malpas spent the evening in the house of a young widow woman named . . .’
George rose to his feet and took a step forward.
‘Sit down!’ shouted the coroner.
‘Named . . .’
‘That will do, sergeant.’
‘As you wish, sir.’
Mr Mortimer adjusted his glasses and sat for a moment in silence, turning over his paper:.
‘Now, gentlemen,’ he said at last, ‘you have heard this . . . er . . . very distressing evidence. In this type of case—and I am glad to say they are rare in the district—it is usual to find a great conflict of evidence. Here the . . . ah . . testimony is unusually clear. In the first place you have a public-house. A public-house which, I am bound to say, appears to me to have been managed with a considerable degree of laxness. In this part of the country we . . . ah . . . suffer from the presence of a floating population, gipsies, cloggers, and at the present moment the men engaged on the North Bromwich Waterworks. These men have to spend their evenings somewhere, and it appears that the Pound House . . . ah . . . found favour with them. They were in the habit of drinking here every night, sometimes under the supervision of a girl of twenty. The sergeant has said that he considers this young woman . . . ah . . . advanced for her years. That may well be; but none the less I think Hind has been lacking in responsibility. Very good. . . . Among the men who frequent this house are three notorious poachers: Connor, Atwell, and Fellows. Poaching is another of the pests that this floating population brings in its train. Badger, the keeper, who gave his evidence very clearly and straightforwardly, was in the habit of visiting the Pound House to keep an eye on this . . . ah . . . disorderly trio. As he had a right to do, he enlisted the help of the deceased. The affair began in the usual way of a public-house brawl. What Connor said to Badger; whether Badger assaulted Fellows: these are matters that do not concern you. Only, in passing, I say that the whole business could not have occurred in a properly managed house. There was a struggle. The deceased constable, in the plain performance of his duty, entered the barand . . . ah . . . commenced to separate Badger and Fellows. If his desire was to protect Badger, well and good . . . but even that is immaterial. Now comes the important part. Malpas says that he . . ah . . . says that he put his hand on the arm of the deceased and that thereupon Bastard turned on him and tried to take him in charge. He then, by his own admission, resisted arrest. He and Bastard struggled together and fell in each other’s arms. The medical evidence tells us that Bastard died from a fractured base of the skull, the result of this fall. You may ask yourselves the question: “Was Bastard within his rights in arresting, or trying to arrest Malpas?” You need not find an answer to it. Legally the answer is “Yes;” but all that is expected of you is to determine how the deceased met his death. He met his death in a struggle with Malpas. Malpas, by his own admission, first laid hands on him, thus obstructing an officer in the performance of his duty. Next, again by his own admission, he resisted arrest. As a result of this resistance Bastard fell. As a result of the fall he fractured his skull and died . . . ah . . . instantaneously. You may trace, if you like, the responsibility for his death backward through Connor, Badger, and Fellows to Hind; but the immediate cause of it was Malpas.’
The coroner took off his glasses and pushed his notes aside. He spoke slowly, waving the pince-nez to mark his points.
‘Very well. . . . Now it is your duty to determine the degree of Malpas’s responsibility. Did Malpas intend to kill the deceased? The sergeant of the police has tried, very improperly, to make a statement as to Malpas’s general character.’
The sergeant shuffled his feet and swallowed, but succumbed to a sense of discipline and was silent.
‘I am bound to say that there is no evidence pointing to Malpas having killed Bastard of malice aforethought. There is no reason to suppose that he lied when he told you that he had never spoken to Bastard before. Did he, then, desire to attack Bastard on the spur of the moment with intent to kill. He has told you that he wanted to see fair play between Fellows, whom he describes as his “pal,” and Badger, and I am inclinedto believe him. Another question presents itself: “Did he become murderous under the influence of drink?” This is negatived by all the evidence. Now you must be careful. If Malpas laid hands on Bastard with intent to kill, either under the influence of an old grudge or in a sudden fit of passion, whether drunk or sober, he is guilty of murder, and it is your duty to say so. If, on the other hand, he laid hands on Bastard without intending to offer him any violence, and if, in the course of a struggle in which he was resisting arrest, he caused Bastard to fall and thus brought about Bastard’s end, his crime lies on the borderland between murder and homicide . . . ah . . . manslaughter. If Malpas had no part in the death of the deceased, you may say that the constable died by misadventure. I think this is a case in which you may be left to decide for yourselves. Nothing that you know of Malpas’s private life, and I presume that you all know something of it, must influence your verdict. The death of a policeman, a man whom the law provides for your protection and the protection of your property, is a very serious matter. If policemen are to be obstructed in their duty with impunity the whole fabric of life in these remote districts becomes . . . ah . . insecure. You may now consider your verdict. You had better retire.’
Mr Mortimer put on his glasses. The jury, led by Williams, shuffled out like a group of sidesmen collecting in church. The sergeant bent over the coroner, whispered and handed him a paper which he put aside. ‘You’re in too great a hurry, sergeant,’ he said. The witnesses sat motionless in the back of the court: Susie, as before, staring straight in front of her as pale and tragic as a young widow; Mr Hind with his hands clasped in front of him, bunched up like a sack, and his pouched, owl-like eyes paler than ever, waiting for a rider to the verdict; Badger, obstinate, with his head thrust forward; Mick and Atwell stolidly masticating tobacco. Abner saw them all petrified by the gloom of suspense. George’s finger had ceased from its mechanical tattoo. All through the coroner’s summing up he had listened intensely; once or twice his lips had moved and hismuscles stiffened as though he wanted to say something. Now he sat quite still with his hands on his knees, staring, as it seemed, at the buffalo’s head.
One after another the witnesses were called up to sign their evidence. The coroner looked at his watch and sighed. It seemed as if he would not have time to take tea with the Delahays, and this annoyed him, for Lady Delahay was a very attractive woman and a visit to Lesswardine Court always left him with a pleasant afterglow and made him feel that but for his wife he might have become an ornament of county society. The sergeant stood like a waxen policeman in Madame Tussaud’s. By a combination of frowns, winks, and rollings of the eyes, he indicated to his bewildered subordinate that the Testaments on the table might now be collected. The young constable stumped round the table on noisy tiptoes. No other sound was heard but the settling of thawed snow on the roof, the tinkle of a distant anvil, and the noise of a blob of nicotined saliva which Atwell privily dropped upon the floor and then obliterated with a sideways motion of his foot.
The jury re-entered and took their seats at the table. The sergeant insensibly stiffened. Mr Williams held a paper in his hand.