Part 12

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 smelt stale 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 a man 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 the Pound 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.

The Eleventh Chapter

GEORGE MALPAS, having taken a fancy to Abner at first sight, had determined to ask his own wife to give him a lodging. The relation between the two young men had begun with a quick, spontaneous liking on either side. Abner was only too glad to see a friendly face, not being built, as was Mick Connor, for picaresque adventure, and feeling that it would be well to settle down again. George Malpas, on the other hand, liked him because he represented something new, because he had exhausted the possibilities of the cloggers’ company, which led no farther than the Pound House—a place which he could only visit with irritation since Badger, the keeper, had cut him out with Susie Hind—and because the idea of a presentable stranger living in his own house appealed to him on the score of variety as well as from the financial point of view.

As they left the Buffalo, George expounded his project to Abner. It did him good, he said, to talk, and particularly to talk to a man of his own age who could understand him. If Abner had been married he would have realised that it was useless talking to women who pretended to listen, but never gave a thought to what a man was saying. The thought of his marriage always roused him to bitterness. It had been imposed on him, indeed, by the anxiousness of his mother, who adored him, her only son, beyond words and, under the influence of chapel, had conceived it her particular duty to save his soul from hell. Hell, in the eyes of Mrs Malpas, meant neither more nor less than sexual promiscuity, and seeing in the handsomeness of George a spiritual danger, she had followed the advice of St Paul and married him safely, as she thought, before worse happened.

She herself had chosen a wife for him. Indirectly, for she knew that he was wilful and easily scared, she had contrived to make him fall in love with the daughter of a local farm-bailiff, Morgan Condover, a steady, and, as it seemed, a solid man, who managed the outlying members of the Powys estate. Mary Condover, the daughter, was a little older than George; a shy beauty, with whom the lad soon fell in love. George, as the only son of the innkeeper at Chapel Green, was considered a good match, and Mrs Malpas played her cards so well that within six months of falling in love George found himself married and installed in a house of his own. He was happy: Mrs Malpas could see that for herself, and she thanked Heaven that she had been permitted to save her son alive.

Before a year was over George’s first child was born. There was a great christening party at Wolfpits at which old Mr Condover, having drunk a good deal more than Mrs Malpas approved, confided to her that his newly-born grand-daughter, whom they had christened Gladys, would take the first place in his will. This was exactly what Mrs Malpas had intended from the first, and her satisfaction was so deep that she could almost have forgiven the bailiff his lapse from sobriety in spite of the unfortunate example that he had given to his son-in-law. The intense thankfulness that flooded her heart when she saw George so happily and satisfactorily bound in the chains of domesticity atoned for the troubles that were crowding on her own life. Her husband, who had been ailing for some years, was smitten with a stroke of paralysis from which he never fully recovered. She knew that hard times were coming but faced them cheerfully. For many years Mr Malpas had meant less to her as a husband than as the father of her son. She would do her duty by him—nobody could suggest that she had ever done less—on the surface she would acknowledge him still as the head of her household, but his illness would give her the opportunity of managing the business to her own liking and scraping together, in the years that remained to them, a little money that, added to the small fortune of which Mr Condover had boasted to her at the christening, should make her son secure for life. She even hoped that he might succeed Mr Condover in the care of the Powys estate.

Her _Nunc dimittis_ was premature. Just before the birth of George’s second child, a healthy boy whom they had decided to name Morgan after his grandfather, Mr Condover, at the very height of his prosperity, hanged himself in an outhouse. His death revealed the fact that the money of which he had boasted at the first christening did not exist. It soon appeared that he had defrauded the Powys estate of more than eight hundred pounds, and rumour said that he had been involved with some woman in Ludlow. This was a terrible blow to Mrs Malpas, for in remote country places the shames of the fathers are visited on the children to the third generation, and never forgotten. When the baby was born she begged her daughter-in-law not to give the child his grandfather’s name; but Mary, who had loved her father, obstinately persisted, and Mrs Malpas could never hear it without feeling that it carried with it a reproach. She tried to persuade George to change it, but George did not care. He was no longer in love with his wife, who now stood to him for a symbol of the chains that his mother had imposed on him. He felt that she had cheated him out of an enjoyment of life that was his due. At any cost he meant to regain his freedom, and Mary and his mother were the sufferers. The wife, indeed, had the care of her children to console her for George’s neglect; but the mother, against whom he nursed a deep, indefinite grudge as the author of all his misfortunes, found that she must bear the responsibility of her own schemes.

The household at Wolfpits now missed the subsidies which Mr Condover had generously distributed from his masters’ money. George had drifted into an extravagant way of life that he had no intention of changing. Partly because of his expansive nature, and partly because, in truth, he had never had his fling, George found it difficult to settle to any steady work. He became a drain upon the resources of the Buffalo, and Mrs Malpas, who found it hard to refuse him anything, was forced to draw upon her savings to support him. In her irritation and despair she blamed Mary for all this, thinking of her as a feckless housewife who had been brought up in the lavish ways of her father.

‘The bad blood’s in her and is bound to come out,’ she said, airing her grievances on Mr Malpas who now cared for nothing but his food. George did not mind who was to blame as long as he got the money that he wanted. He was beginning to be interested in other women, particularly, for a little while, in Susie Hind, the daughter of the proprietor of the Pound House, an inn which Mrs Malpas had always regarded as the Buffalo’s bitterest rival. It pained her beyond words to think that her hard-earned savings should find their way into Mr Hind’s till.

‘George,’ she said, ‘if only you’ll keep away from that there place I’ll see what I can do for you. Or if only you’d settle to regular work. . .’

‘Thank you kindly!’ said George. ‘Why don’t you let me take on the licence of the Buffalo now that dad can’t do it justice? Then you and dad could go and live somewhere quiet as you’ve a right to do at your age.’

‘Never, George!’ she said intensely. ‘Never. . .’

He laughed at her. ‘Why not?’

‘I couldn’t trust you,’ she said. ‘The man that keeps a public ought to be teetotal. I know what would happen to you.’

‘You’ve never give me a chance,’ he protested.

‘What’s more, I’m not going to,’ she maintained.

‘It’s a job I’m cut out for. I like company. I could double your business in a month.’

‘And drink yourself dead in six,’ she said.

‘You’ve never seen me drunk, mother.’

‘But I know you, my son!’

‘I’m dead sick of this country,’ he said. ‘Town’s the place for me. If I could get away out of this and make a fresh start. Damn me if I won’t do it.’

‘Hush, George!’ she said. ‘I’ve never heard your father use a word like that in his life.’

But the thing that she was really frightened of was that he should go. He was the only thing left to her, and if he went all light would have gone from her life. She controlled her tears and took him into the little bedroom where, in an oak chest, she kept her savings. She gave him money, and he left her, contented, kissing her with an affection that was mingled faintly with pity. When she held him in her arms all her tense anxiety for a moment disappeared. She could only think of him as the son of her body in whose happiness and physical welfare she delighted. It seemed to her that she could now only purchase these precious moments with money, but for a little while she could forget this in the joy that he gave her.

Time after time he begged her to let him take on the business, but she always refused him, sheltering herself, as her habit now was, behind the negligible personality of her husband. It would have shocked her beyond words if George had pointed out to her that his father didn’t count, and that her consideration for him was a pretence; but George knew better than to vex her in this way, for the key of the chest upstairs was kept in her pocket. What is more, even though their two wills were always in conflict, he loved his mother. She meant a great deal more to him than Mary had ever done except in the first blindness of his passion, and for this reason, no less than for the other, he was tolerant.

‘Don’t you take no notice of mother,’ he told Abner as they walked along together. ‘She’s got a funny way with her, but she’s all right at the bottom. There’s not many women could have done what she has. The only bad turn she ever done me was when she got me threw over the pulpit.’

It was the third time in their walk that George had spoken grudgingly of his wife, but this did not strike Abner as strange, for it was exactly the attitude not only of his father but of most of the men with whom he had worked at Mawne. He grunted sympathetically in answer to George’s complaints, and all the time, as Malpas eagerly expounded his own aspirations towards freedom and adventure, they were climbing gradually, passing by many gyrations of a narrow road into the curve of the hills in which Wolfpits lay.