Part 11

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-blinded with 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 nose Were like marbles on the floor Of 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 the sky. 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 dull weather 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.

The Tenth Chapter

ABNER and 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 moved off 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 admitted that, 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 bench near 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, you _are_ a 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 same moment 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 little more 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.