Part 13

Within a mile of Chapel Green the character of the country changed. Before that only a hint of mountainous severity had been visible in the stone buildings of the village with their narrow windows and their cruel roofs of slate. At Chapel Green the pastures that lay beside the river were not greatly different from the water-meadows of Teme, which is an English river, but the fields through which the road to Wolfpits passed were poor and of a paler green. Their hedges were scanty, writhen and knotted with hard life. The generous elms grew fewer, standing stunted, forsaken and sparing of leaf. They seemed to shiver with poverty in this alien soil. In their place the hardier mountain trees appeared: birches that quivered even in this tranquil air: oak and holly and yew crouching in the hedgerow sombrely but crowned with waxen honeysuckle. These poor fields seemed to feel the pressure of the hills on either side from the slopes of which blown spores of bracken and seeds of gorse had settled and thriven like hill-men in a rich plain. In the midst of the fields smooth water-worn boulders were scattered, and through the pit of the valley a noisy tributary of the Barbel, that Abner came to know as the Folly Brook, set up an unceasing murmur like that of a thunder-shower on summer leaves behind a dense curtain of green.

Still the road climbed. It rose in bold curves, like a kestrel soaring, into colder air. Sometimes the brook flowed near it, and Abner could see through gaps in the arras of alders roaring stickles of bright water. Sometimes it swept away from them, hugging the foot of the hills, sounding no more than the evening breeze in a poplar tree. Gullies that fed it scored the road with tracks of winter torrents. At that season of the year no moving water could be seen, but once or twice in shadier places slow moisture oozed and dripped from beds of mosses on the banks.

‘The cloggers is coming up the Folly when they’ve finished down Lesswardine way,’ said George. ‘I reckon they’ll liven things up a bit.’

The road grew rougher; it seemed to falter in its purpose.

‘Where do you get to this way?’ Abner asked.

‘Right up into the Forest and on to Clun, but not many uses it,’ said George. ‘The Clun men don’t come much over our way. ’Tis a stiffish bit of collar-work. This here’s Wolfpits.’

The road swept up obliquely to a crest and then sank to the level of the stream. Abner had a vision of the whole valley expanding into a kind of amphitheatre through the middle of which the little river pursued a more leisurely course, winding gently through the fields as though it rejoiced to linger under the open sky. On either side the mountains rose to their full height, no longer concealed by foothills: from lip to lip the cup was roofed with dazzling blue. In the open space beneath, an avenue of chestnuts led upwards from the river to a great red house fronted with three pointed gables and crowned by clusters of fantastic chimney-stacks.

‘You don’t mean that one?’ said Abner.

‘Ay, that’s Wolfpits,’ George replied. ‘Looks all right, don’t it?’

As they descended the house was lost from sight and George began to explain that Wolfpits had once been a great house, the most westerly possession of the family whom Condover, his father-in-law, had served, but that the pastures which surrounded it, for all their greenness were poor and the mansion itself too remote and gloomy for gentlefolks to inhabit in this age of comfort.

‘They say it’s ha’nted, too,’ he declared, with a laugh, ‘though I don’t pay no heed to such stories. I reckon it stood here empty for close on a hundred years till Mary’s father got Mr McKellar, the agent, to let it off in pieces to them that wanted houses. There’s more than five farms up this valley lying empty for the want of a bit of work putting into them, but the old lord was so took up with his new model village down by Lesswardine, he hadn’t the money to put into the old ones. Not that I grumble at him. . . . ’Tis a good solid house to live in. There’s three families in it now, and room for four more in my opinion. And I reckon I’ve a kind of right to it,’ he went on; ‘the Malpases was big people in these parts at one time. You’ll find their names on the vault in Lesswardine church. _John Malpas_, _Gentleman_, that’s how it’s written. There’s a Reverent Cyril Malpas rector of Aston to this day. Mary’s father went into the family history at the time we was married. The Condovers is an old family too.’

These claims to a faded aristocracy did not interest Abner, but he could not help being impressed by the size of the house as they approached it through the shade of the chestnut avenue. It was built of small red bricks, strange to the country but now beautifully weathered by time. The eastern end was covered with a gigantic growth of ivy, but from the western side, which they were approaching, the parasite had been stripped on Mr Condover’s advice and the red wall glowed as though it were exuding the imprisoned sunshine of three centuries. In this generous light one did not notice an air of desolation which the uncurtained upper windows gave to it.

‘All that’s wrong with this old place,’ said George, ‘is the rats. But I reckon you’ve been sleeping rough and won’t notice them. This is our garden. Mary’s a great one for flowers.’

They had entered a drive that swept up in a spacious curve to the steps of the front-door, an entrance which had been closed for many years. In place of the lawns that had once been the pride of its inhabitants lay three long strips of garden, each carefully tilled and separated from its neighbour by a fence of wire netting, the remains of some dismantled fowl-run. A path of bricks, salved from one of the dilapidated stables of the mansion, ran down the middle of the nearest garden-patch, and in the centre of it two children sat playing in the sun, a fair-haired girl, some six years of age, and a boy, a little younger, in whose dark features Abner could trace a resemblance to the handsome face of George Malpas.

‘Them’s my youngsters,’ he said carelessly. He opened the gate and tweaked the girl’s ear as he passed. ‘Well, Gladys?’ he said; but neither of the children seemed much moved by his arrival, being more interested in the strange figure of Abner, whose progress up the path they watched with the vague suspicion of mountain sheep that stare before they plunge away through heather.

‘I’ll see if the missis is in,’ said George. ‘Mary . . .’ he called. ‘Where’s the girl got to? Sit yourself down.’

The room had once been the kitchen of the great house. An enormous iron range was built into the wall on one side, and on the other were racks and shelves which must once have held many dozens of plates. The sun slanted through a western window and showed Abner that the comfort of this stone-paved room lay in its cleanliness. The iron range was almost handsome in its massive, shining bulk above the whitened hearth, and in the fender a bundle of green bracken was set in an attempt at decoration. The fronds of this plant filled the room with a warm and drowsy odour. In a corner a grandfather clock, with a solemn face on which the name of _Carver_, _Hay_, was engraved, marked the passage of time with a slowly swinging pendulum.

George Malpas called his wife again, and from a cool-smelling chamber on a lower level that might well have been a dairy, a woman appeared and stood in the doorway.

‘I’ve put the dinner away, George,’ she said. ‘It’s past three o’clock.’

‘Don’t you worry your head about the dinner,’ he replied. ‘I’ve brought this chap back with me. He’s coming to work with us on the water job. Mother has a fancy she can’t take any one in at the Buffalo, so I’ve arranged to give him a lodge here. You’d better put him in the top room. I reckon you won’t find him particular.’

At first she made no reply, but stood looking intently at Abner. It was difficult for him to believe that she was George Malpas’s wife and the mother of the two children whom he had seen playing in the garden: she seemed too young, too slight, little more, indeed, than a young girl. She wore a clean apron of white linen, still creased from the ironing, and her straight chestnut hair was bound back plainly on either side of her temples and braided in heavy plaits behind.

She was tall, and her slimness, together with the narrow apron, made her appear taller. Her brow was wide and unwrinkled, her eyes were hazel, her nose straight and slightly marked with golden freckles. One would have said that her face represented the most untroubled calm if it had not been that her mouth was a little sad. Only her lips betrayed the fact that she had suffered. She stood in the shadow and looked at Abner narrowly but did not speak, for she had known enough already of George’s boon companions to be a little careful of them.

‘Don’t stare at the chap like that!’ said George irritably, ‘or he’ll think you’re cracked.’

Then she spoke in a voice that showed more refinement than could have been expected. Her speech was almost free from the pleasant burr of the Marches.

‘I dare say we can manage,’ she said. ‘I’ll see about it.’ Then she addressed Abner directly. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Damn me if I ever thought to ask him!’ muttered George.

Abner told her, and she repeated it after him: ‘Abner Fellows.’

‘Well, that’s a queer name,’ said Malpas. ‘I don’t mind ever having heard it before.’

‘It’s out of the Bible, George,’ said his wife.

‘Out of the Bible, is it?’ he laughed. ‘Well, that’s more in your line than mine.’

She left them quietly to attend to the details of Abner’s room. Malpas, still a little restless, took him out again, talking incessantly and showing him what remained of the ancient features of Wolfpits: the line of damp stables with boxes for thirty horses, the yew-trees that had once been clipped to the shape of peacocks but had now straggled into those of monstrous antediluvian birds; the red-walled garden, now a wilderness of nettles, whose fruit trees spilled their pulpy produce on the mossed paths. From the farthest corner of the garden they could see the house which, from this angle appeared tall and narrow like a tower, with chimney-pots for battlements. In an upper window there appeared the figure of a woman standing still and gazing out over the mountain.

‘That’s Mary putting your room to rights,’ said George, but he did not call to her.

He spoke to Abner of the other inhabitants of Wolfpits. One was an old woman, Mrs Mamble by name, the widow of a labourer who had worked on a neighbouring farm. ‘She don’t properly belong to these parts,’ he said; ‘they came from down Tenbury way, but she’s took up with Morgan and Gladys, and Mary likes her company. He must have been a good chap in his time, for they give her the house rent-free.’

The other tenant, whom they saw working in his garden beneath the ivied end of the house, was another solitary creature, an old man named Drew who had worked as a farm-labourer in the district for more than thirty years. He, too, was a foreigner, having first come to Wolfpits in charge of a pedigree Devon bull. In the middle period of his life he had been employed in a flour mill a few miles down the valley of the Folly Brook. The new steam mills at Lesswardine had robbed him of this employment, but not before the constant carrying of heavy sacks had twisted his back to a curve in which rheumatism had fixed it. Now he could only walk with his shoulders bent so that when he spoke he had to raise his eyes, staring up at those who questioned him, as though his back still bore the burden of a phantom load. All his joints were swollen and knotted with rheumatism; his huge hands resembled the branches of an ancient tree and his whole aspect, staring with pale blue eyes beneath a tangle of reddish hair as yet untouched with gray, was that of a gnome, and proper to these inaccessible mountains. His life was lonely, and for this reason he had never lost the uncouth speech of the South Hams from which he had originally come. When they passed his garden on their way back George gave him good-afternoon and he raised himself, as with infinite labour, from his work, gazing at them with the patient eyes of a yoked beast of burden.

‘He’s a rum old chap,’ said George. ‘You wait till he’s on one of his boozing fits, and then you’ll see.’

By this time Mary had finished Abner’s room and set the table. The children, tired with play, had come in and were clamouring for their tea. At the same time the fourth member of the Malpas family arrived, a yellow lurcher bitch, named Spider, who had been absent on some dark business of her own and now returned to gambol with little Morgan on the floor. The children were never tired of teasing this animal, but George, who only tolerated her when he himself went rabbiting in the evening, generally treated her cruelly. The dog fawned on him, but there was more fear than affection in her devotion. Abner told them the story of Tiger. The children listened with wide eyes and the mother looked at him without speaking. A fire of sticks crackled merrily down in the room that Abner had taken for a dairy. At last Mary Malpas brought in tea and the children ate stolidly and shyly, talking to each other in whispers as though they were disturbed by the presence of the stranger.

Perhaps it was also the presence of Abner that made George Malpas take unusual notice of his wife. He treated her very much as he would have treated the children or the dog when the fancy took him, but his faintly patronising tone only appeared to embarrass her. When she gave him his tea he would have kissed her, but she stiffened slightly and even blushed, so that Abner could see the colour rising in her white neck. Later she softened a little from her seriousness and the children too, realising that Abner was no more than an ordinary mortal, began to raise their voices. They sat on with the door open in the mellow evening light, and an atmosphere of homeliness and quiet descended on the room so happily that Morgan cried when his mother told him that it was time for bed. During all the afternoon she had scarcely spoken to Abner, and she seemed relieved to find a chance of escape. She puzzled him. In his life he had only known one woman intimately, and that was Alice. He could not help comparing the two of them. The cleanliness and refinement of Mary Malpas became exaggerated by this comparison. Instinctively, at first, he had allowed himself to be influenced by George’s treatment of her, but her aloofness and reserve now made him feel that she was in some subtle way superior. He could not say that he liked her; but he wondered, none the less, what she was made of.

She disappeared upstairs and he and George sat on smoking in the twilight. The sun had fallen like a plummet behind the western hills; the valley now lay in deep shadow and only the upper air was overspread with films of light. Night fell. Down in the valley a night-jar began his mechanical trilling. Over by Mawne, in Dovehouse Fields, a hundred miles away, another night-jar was beginning. A sense of new and settled happiness descended on Abner. He had come, it seemed, to another stage in his pilgrimage. Wolfpits was not like one of the bivouacs in which he had sheltered with Mick Connor during this crowded week, but a resting place. He felt that the future need not trouble him, that his feet were firmly planted on this new soil. The only tie that held him to the past was the memory of Alice, so strangely awakened by the presence of this other, and so different, woman. He feared that there could be no such happiness for her. Lying in bed in that strange room he decided that as soon as he had earned some money he would send it to her. At least it was his duty to return her the two sovereigns that she had slipped into his pocket when he left her. Yet, when he remembered the life at Mawne against which he had fretted for so long, his heart was thankful for this release. He fell asleep.

The Twelfth Chapter

NEXT morning Abner went with George Malpas to interview the clerk of the works, who engaged him as a labourer at twenty-two shillings a week off-hand. This man had been as long on the waterworks job as Gunner Eve himself. Year after year he had led a nomadic life moving from one point to another of the great pipe line that stretches from the valley of the Dulas Fechen to the reservoirs above Halesby.

The piece of work on which Abner and his friends were now engaged was no more than the result of one of the last feeble struggles of the gods of stone against their iron masters. In this part of its course the pipeline, crossing the swollen head waters of the Teme, had been lodged upon a deposit of old red sandstone, a rock that was easily worked and lent itself to Barradale’s plans. A hidden leak, caused possibly by some obscure subsidence, had distorted its bedding. Two unsuccessful attempts had been made to deal with it, and now the engineers had decreed that the whole track must be deflected northwards for half a mile on to a shelf of harder Silurian stone. The scene of these new workings was placed at the mouth of the valley, some three miles below Wolfpits and immediately under the shadow of two hill bastions: the high peak which culminated in the earthwork known as Castel Ditches and a wide hog’s back known as Callow hill.

Hither, in the early morning, Abner and George Malpas would set out together carrying the packets of fried bacon sandwiches with which Mary supplied them overnight. Spider, eager to follow them, would watch them go, quivering with anxiety; but George Malpas had lately taken a dislike to the dog and would curse her if she moved a step in their direction, throwing a stone that made her scamper back into the garden. These morning walks were very pleasant to Abner, and pleasant too was the sudden change from a green solitude to the sight of working men who swarmed in the cutting beneath their feet. A trolley way, crowded with iron trucks that were reddened by rust and by the sandstone of the Dulas valley from which they had come, cut through the workings, and beside it ran a deep trough cut ready to receive the black iron pipes that were dumped along its edge. Most of the workers were old hands at the game, but there remained a certain amount of rough digging labour for which Abner’s strength and his experience in the colliery made him suitable. This was allotted to him by the foreman on the first day of his employment.

He looked eagerly for Mick Connor, who soon showed himself and appeared none the worse for the debauch in which he and Curly Atwell, the huge west-countryman, had engaged. He declared he was seven pounds better for it, expressing himself as usual in terms of the race-course, but Abner saw from the first that their travelling acquaintance was really at an end.

During the day’s work he did not even see George Malpas, being paired, in his new labours, with a youth named Joseph Munn, whose face was disfigured by a hare-lip. These two were set to work at some distance from the rest, clearing the sub-soil from a shelf of rock where a culvert of stone would soon be built to carry storm water from the slopes of Callow. Chance had been kind to Abner in the selection of his companion, for it soon appeared that Joe Munn was a black-country boy who had been born in Dulston, and in his early days had even seen Abner himself playing football for Halesby Swifts. He spoke Abner’s own speech, he knew the streets that were familiar to him, and a common knowledge of distant places is a greater bond between men than a common knowledge of their fellows. As far as actual work was concerned Abner might well have had a more satisfactory partner, for, physically, Munn was a typical product of the black-country at its worst, pale of face and lank of limb. He seemed indeed altogether too puny for the work on which they were engaged, and only a congenital consciousness of being born to labour induced him to accept a state that made demands above his strength. Abner would sometimes watch him as he stood panting with the sweat breaking out in beads along the unhealthy skin of his bossed forehead and matting the wisps of his neutral-coloured hair. In the end their partnership resolved itself into one in which Abner did most of the work when the foreman was not there. And he did not grudge this, for he had strength enough for two and so much vigour that he enjoyed the using of it. Munn would lie down in the sun with his chin in his hands, watching Abner at work, talking of famous cup-ties that he had seen, or of the excitements of Dulston Wakes.

‘I don’t know how you ever come to find yourself on a job like this,’ Abner said one day.

‘It was company I wanted,’ Munn explained. ‘Before I come here I was driving a traction injin down in Gloucestershire . . . what they call the Forest of Dean. That was a place, if you like! The other chaps used to go off into Cinderford and leave me alone with the engine up in those woods. Lonely . . .! I went half balmy, straight I did! Yo’d never guess what it was like. I used to start talking to myself for company like. Ever done that, Abner?’

Abner laughed. Of course he had never done that.

‘So I went up to the foreman and says: “Mister, I can’t stick it.” I couldn’t say no more, I couldn’t . . . trembling like a bloody leaf. “What’s up with you now?” he says. “I wants company,” says I. “What you want is a nursemaid,” says he, and gives me my money on the Saturday. Then I comes along here. Strike, if I wasn’t glad to get away from all those trees! And Gunner Eve, he look after me a bit. He’s a good chap, the Gunner, ain’t he, kid?’

Working with Abner, or, more exactly, watching Abner work, Joe Munn recovered a little of his broken spirit; but the story of its destruction was older than his experience in the silences of the Forest of Dean. His earliest days had been spent in a double-back house in a Dulston slum, where, half-fed by an aged grandmother, he had made the pallid growth of a potato sprouting in a cellar. Thence he had passed to the children’s ward of Dulston workhouse, being shot out at the age of fourteen to make his best of the world. Even now he laboured, without knowing it, under the shadows and suppressions of those early days. These summer mornings, working with Abner, were the happiest that he had ever known. They became sound friends in a partnership wherein Abner was canonised as a hero and protector, a position which he sustained with an amused tolerance.

His relation with George Malpas remained equally happy. They always walked down to work together in the morning, but after that Abner rarely saw his friend, for Wolfpits held no attraction for him, and he preferred to take himself, when the day’s work was over, to the Pound House, or sometimes to the old people at the Buffalo. In a few weeks Abner’s temporary lodging had become a permanency. Mary Malpas, in consultation with her husband, had settled the sum that he should pay for bed and keep, and Wolfpits itself, that sinister and desolate mansion, had become a pleasant and homely place.