Part 14

At first he never accompanied George on his evening visits to the Pound House. It pleased him better to walk home up the valley in the cool of the evening and sluice his head and back beneath a pump of cold spring water that stood in the deserted stable-yard. Then Mary would give him his tea, always with the same air of watchful and remote reserve, and he would smoke his pipe in the garden, talking to the children who, in the confidence of their own secret alliance, were gradually becoming a little more friendly. Or he would play with Spider, who had now learnt to take a place near his chair at meal times in the hope of being fed with scraps from Abner’s plate.

Sometimes, too, he would lean on the fence watching old Drew at work in his garden. The old labourer was as hardy as the knotted oak that he resembled. His day’s work began before dawn: he had more than three miles to walk to the farm on which he was employed, but when he returned in the evening after trudging the fields all day, he could never rest, but must be putting his strip of garden in order so intently that he scarcely had time to answer Abner’s questions, staring up at him with those patient, over-burdened eyes. His wages, which were regulated by his age rather than his capacity for labour, were only twelve shillings a week, so that his garden produce was really essential to his life. When he had finished his gardening, or when the light failed, he would retire to his kitchen and drink a crude, sweet spirit that he distilled from turnips. Sometimes at night they would hear him singing to himself the innumerable obscene verses of Devonshire folk-songs. Then, when he could sing no longer, he would drag his twisted limbs upstairs and sleep like a log in the certainty of waking before dawn to set out on his labours again. His life indeed had been so solitary that he distrusted any intrusion, and Abner had known him and spoken with him for many weeks before he felt that his presence was welcome.

The other tenant of Wolfpits he rarely saw, though her five years in the old house had made her a confidante of Mary, and indeed her principal refuge in domestic emergencies. Sometimes when he came home at night he would find her talking to Mary in the kitchen, but at the sight of him she scuttled away so that he saw no more of her than one sees of a rabbit’s vanishing tail.

Mary Malpas did not evade him in this primitive fashion and yet, even when he had been living at Wolfpits for more than a month, he felt that he really knew her no better than the fugitive Mrs Mamble. He could find no parallel to her in the history of his dealings with Alice at Mawne. The thing for which Alice had been mostly concerned was her dignity as mistress of John Fellows’s house, and this she had been active to assert. Mary Malpas, on the other hand, had no need to stand upon her dignity. It was instinct in the refinement of her speech and even more in her silence. The fact that her father had been a swindler and a suicide could never rob her of it. Abner fancied for a time that the awkwardness between them was caused by the way in which he had been suddenly thrust upon her household. He felt that he might stand to her as a symbol of a new slight inflicted on her by her husband. Otherwise why should she deny him the least suspicion of human contact? He even made an awkward attempt to settle the matter by asking her if she would not be better pleased if he tried to find another lodging.

‘If I’m in the way like,’ he told her, ‘just you say so, and I’ll be off.’

‘Why should you think that?’ she said, without the least sign of emotion. ‘There’s no reason why you should go away . . . if you are comfortable.’

She didn’t say that they were glad to have him, though the fact remained that his money was useful to them. She didn’t say that they would be sorry to lose him. He simply felt that she had made him look foolish, and as this was the usual result of his dealings with her in spite of her politeness and her care for his comfort he gave up trying to find out what she was made of, and settled down to his life at Wolfpits as though she had nothing to do with it.

He had always been fond of dogs and children, and Gladys, Morgan, and Spider soon became devoted to him. Morgan was evidently his mother’s favourite, and the little girl soon took a shy but definite fancy to Abner, wandering alone down the lane in the hope of meeting him on his way home from work and riding back to Wolfpits perched on his shoulder. She would watch him gravely while he stripped and swilled himself in the stableyard, standing by with a towel ready to catch the beads of water that sparkled on his eyebrows and his hair. Then hand in hand they would wander round the farmstead, visiting the pigsties and the barn in which the fowls were housed and searching for the nests of broody hens in the hedgerows. She loved above all things to sit upon his shoulder when she carried home the eggs in the small cup of her hands. She liked his hugeness and his strength, and rather despised Morgan for the fact that he was his mother’s boy.

In those hills autumn came early, and soon sunset brought with it a hint of evening cold. The air of the mountains drooped upon the plain as soon as the western summits hid the sun, and in a little while their evenings were of lamplight. When Abner trudged home at night he could see the linnets gathering together for their autumn flights, hear the whir of their wings and their tender, reedy notes. Starlings, southward bound, swept the air in wheeling cohorts, and swifts darted wildly round the chimneys of Wolfpits. Wood fires were lighted in the kitchen grate at night, and when Abner had finished his tea he would settle down on the right hand of the fireplace with a pile of cut logs at his feet.

At first he looked forward to these evenings with some anxiety, feeling that the presence of this silent and, as he thought, unsympathetic woman, would make him uncomfortable; but strangely enough this did not happen. The devotion of Gladys put him at his ease and occupied him so much that he did not have to speak to her mother. When first the fire was lighted Mary Malpas would move about the house on her own business. Abner would hear her talking softly to Morgan in the scullery while Gladys chattered to him in the flickering light that filled the room with moving shadows. Later, like a shadow herself, Mary would return with the boy and settle herself softly in the chair on the other side of the fire. Morgan would struggle up on to her knee and cuddle into his mother’s breast, and Gladys, not to be outdone, would climb on Abner’s knee and beg him to tell her stories. He knew no stories for children, for he had never had a mother to tell them to him, but he would talk to her about Mawne and the blind pit-ponies, about the rabbits that lived in Dovehouse fields, about Tiger and the excitements of the wakes with their galloping horses and soaring swing-boats. Gladys had never seen a fair and these descriptions fired her imagination most.

‘Why ain’t there no swing-boats here, mother?’ she would ask.

‘Because there aren’t enough children to go up in them. You’ll see them some day.’

‘Abner’ll take me to see his; won’t you, Abner?’

By this time of the evening, Morgan, curled up on his mother’s lap, was usually as sleepy as Spider who lay like a hedgehog on the hearth between them. Mary sat there hugging the child in her arms and never speaking for fear that she might disturb him, and Gladys, impressed by the silence of the firelit room, would snuggle closer to Abner and talk to him in whispers that her mother could not hear. They sat on either side of the fire in these strangely divided camps, and Abner would become aware of the beauty and placidity of this silent woman sitting still in the gloom with firelight playing in her hair, listening all the time though she did not move, unless it were to touch with her lips the forehead of her sleeping child. He used to watch her and wonder what she was thinking. He could not help watching her as she sat like a statue staring at the fire. When she turned her eyes towards him he would look away. He became so used to her silent company that he could not have been happy without it.

The days shortened, the pollard elms turned gold and the rusty chestnut leaves in the avenue fell of their own heaviness. The drowsiness of summer had passed and a new restlessness seized him. He could not be contented with this peaceful static existence into which he found himself sinking. The silence of Mary Malpas lay on him like a heavy spell. He had rested enough and could no longer be contented to drowse before the fire with a child in his arms. The peace of Wolfpits could tempt him no longer when the chill autumn air stimulated him to action and the natural violence of youth. He felt that what he wanted was the society of men and the pursuits of manliness.

Once or twice he walked down to Chapel Green in the evening and drank a pint with the labourers who gathered in the Buffalo under the eye of old Mrs Malpas, but he found that he couldn’t get on with her. She was always restrained and severe, giving him the impression that she had taken a dislike to him from the first, and when she talked to him he felt that she was trying in her own superior way to find out exactly what her daughter-in-law was doing at Wolfpits. Even her questions about the children seemed to him to be dictated by malevolent curiosity rather than by affection. He felt that he was like a child in her hands and that she could get what she liked out of him. When he went to the Buffalo he had expected to find the cloggers there, but they did little more than sleep in that dismal house, going for their pleasures to the relative gaiety and light of the Pound House, where they could do as they liked. With the labourers at the Buffalo Abner had nothing in common. He understood nothing of their talk of crops and beasts and weather even when he could penetrate the meaning of their speech. He gave the Buffalo up as a bad job and went to the Pound House himself.

He used to go along there with George Malpas as soon as the whistle signalled that the day’s work was at an end, and there, in a brighter light and in the stir of a roaring business he found an atmosphere more suited to his restless spirit. Sometimes he sat with George Malpas; but George was a gloomy drinker and better company when he was sober, so more often he took his seat next to Gunner Eve, who drank nothing but spirits, and sometimes, under their influence, would talk to him of his old days of service in the navy, of blue Pacific havens, palm-huts with brown women, or sometimes of that savage African river on which he had lost his eye. That was the kind of life that Abner wanted. In the Gunner’s stories a vista of adventure opened before him. The liquor made him think that such was the only life for a man. The foreman’s tales of amorous adventure enthralled him. Therein lay the proper use of women.

There was only one woman in the Pound House: Susie Hind, the fine, strapping girl whose presence had disturbed him on his first visit to the inn with George. Mrs Malpas’s hints had led him to believe that she was an old flame of George’s. He found himself comparing her with George’s wife and thinking of the silence and remoteness of Mary he felt it was easy to understand why George had been led away. The freedom of Susie’s manners had suggested that she was attainable. Abner, listening to the gunner’s adventures, brooded on this, and the more he did so the more desirable Susie became. There seemed to him no reason why he should not possess her. Every night he sat in the Pound House looking at her. He drank more than he need have done simply in order that he might remain in her presence. This inflamed his imagination and magnified in his eyes the physical elegance which she regarded as necessary to her calling, but he hardly dared to speak to her openly in this concourse of men, and when she came near him with her bold but beautiful eyes, his heart beat wildly and he could say nothing. He usually stayed in the alehouse till closing time and walked back to Wolfpits through the haunted night arm-in-arm with George Malpas who was by this time a little sentimental. In one of these walks he asked George about his relations with Susie.

‘Oh, she’s all right, you can take my word for that,’ said George with a laugh.

‘Yo’ve seen a good bit of her,’ said Abner.

‘All I want to,’ George replied, with a wink that was invisible in the darkness.

Abner was silent and he continued: ‘You’d best go easy for a bit, though. For the time being she’s took up with that devil Badger. But that won’t last. I know our Susie, bless her heart! Susie has her fancies.’

Abner knew already that there was something between Susie Hind and Badger. He had watched their whispers jealously often enough. Now he began to examine their intimacies more closely. The general unpopularity of Badger’s occupation only helped to increase his jealousy. When he saw their hands meet over the counter he felt that the natural thing to do would be to rise from his seat, take Badger by the neck and throw him out of the bar. He measured the thickset keeper with a fighter’s eye, and felt confident that he was a match for him. Meanwhile he must bide his time.

Every night he went regularly to the Pound House and sat there waiting for his opportunity, never doubting but that he would get her when the time came. By the mere habit of his presence a sort of relationship was established between them, for Abner’s strength and his fairness pleased her, and she would sometimes pause for a moment in her business, standing close to him with a tray under her arm and one hand on her hip. The Gunner used to chaff her as she stood there. He had done enough lovemaking in his young days and now his only attitude towards women was one of jovial cynicism. No doubt the foreman thought that Susie stayed because she enjoyed his teasing; but Abner knew better. He knew it was himself, not Eve, that Susie was watching. Between them, unseen by the other, the air was charged with potential passion like the sky of a hot night, placid and slumberous yet ready to burst into lightning. He could laugh at Gunner Eve, this dry old man who vainly imagined that he was pleasing her fancy. She smiled at Eve, but all the time her smouldering eyes were fixed on Abner, and he knew that she heard nothing. Then Badger would come in and handle her as if he were her master. Abner did not even mind this, for he saw that she was beginning to treat the keeper as a habit and her eyes did not caress him secretly. He began to feel that he could afford to despise Badger, but he hated him none the less.

In those days he saw little of George Malpas at the Pound House. Soon after Abner began to visit Mainstone regularly George had transferred his custom to an inn in Lesswardine. Abner did not ask him why he had done this, for to have done so might easily have compromised their friendship. If George preferred to spend his evenings away from his lodger’s eyes, well and good. On the other hand he did renew his travelling acquaintance with Mick Connor, who remained one of the best customers of the Pound House. Mick had always been a generous drinker. When he was in low water he was not ashamed of sponging on his pals, but in these days he seemed never to be short of money, and this, together with the glibness of his tongue, made him a popular figure in the alehouse. Abner wondered where the money came from, for Mick’s wages were the same as his own, and though he knew that the Irishman was a born gambler he could scarcely believe in the permanence of his friend’s luck.

Quite by chance he discovered the source of Mick’s income. One Sunday morning he had walked down to the Pound House followed by the dog Spider when Mick fell in with him by the way. He surveyed Spider with a professional eye.

‘That’s a likely lookin’ dog,’ said Mick.

‘Ay, she’s all right,’ said Abner.

‘Give me a bitch every time for hunt’n . . . Ah, ye divil, get away wud you!’

Spider had suddenly become wildly interested in the Irishman’s person and was jumping up and smelling at the tails of his coat.

‘That’s a wise dog,’ said Mick. ‘I’d be glad of a dog the like of that on a moonlight night.’

Abner had guessed what he meant, but Mick, who could never resist the chance of producing a sensation, opened his coat and showed him the contents of a game pocket that he had constructed by making a slit in the lining. It was a fine cock-pheasant, splendid in its chestnut autumn plumage. Mick displayed it sentimentally. ‘Doesn’t that make your teeth water?’ he said. ‘God, you could ate it in your hand the way it is! And that bird do be worth a good half-crown in Craven Arms.’

‘Where d’you get him?’ said Abner.

‘You ask Mr bloody Badger,’ Mick replied with a wink.

Abner pressed him, and he went on to explain that he and Curly Atwell and one or two others had developed a plan of poaching on a commercial scale. A man named Harford, a rabbit merchant in Craven Arms, the railway junction and cattle-market over the hills, had arranged to deal with their produce. Naturally, in such a dangerous business, he bought cheap and sold dear; but the proceeds of their sport were enough to keep the whole gang in unlimited liquor, the thing that they needed most.

‘It’s the only way to keep clear of the buttermilk cure,’ said Mick, ‘the way they pay us in this cursed hole.’

He ended by pressing Abner to join them, pointing out that Spider would be a useful ally, and Abner, without any hesitation, accepted. He was glad of anything with a spice of adventure in it to give vent to his energies. He didn’t care much about the money even though he remembered that he had not yet been able to send Alice her two pounds, but it pleased him to think that this was another way of getting even with Badger, a feeling in which Mick, with no more definite reason than an instinctive hatred of gamekeepers, concurred.

In this way there began a series of midnight adventures that were a great joy to Abner and an even greater to George’s dog, who asked nothing better in her sport than the help of human allies. On these nights of misty moonlight the secret beauty of the country-side smote on Abner’s heart though he knew nothing of it but that he was happy. In the daytime the land was dead and nothing lived in it but he and his fellow men, but when evening came the hills, the woodlands, the rivers and the upland wastes of heather tingled with life. Something secret and timid that sunlight numbed into a protective sleep, now stirred and wakened. The voices of the rivers changed; they were no longer only torrents of swift water but living things. Trees that in day were silent awoke and whispered in the night. Amid miracles of nocturnal beauty Abner walked unseeing. He only knew that he lived more fully, more intensely in the night.

His senses quickened. His eyes were like the sharp eyes of a hunting owl so that he felt that in daylight he had been blind. His ears were tuned to an exquisite degree of sensitiveness. The cracking of a twig, a distant step on leaves, the least tremor of a growing tree, sent a shock of alert pleasure into his brain. And the impalpable cool mist of autumn sharpened his scent to a keenness that delighted him. This state of acute sensitiveness was the basis on which the more than physical thrill of imminent danger was imposed. The labourers who worked on the farms of Squire Delahay’s estate were naturally in league with Badger against the depredations of these foreigners. Each of them was himself a poacher in a quiet way; but they poached for the pot rather than for the market and felt that the presence of Mick and his gang was a menace to their privileges. These men, if less intelligent, were as skilled in woodcraft as the Irishman himself, and Mick’s friends followed their craft in a constant peril of discovery.

It was a profitable adventure. Abner soon found that his wages were trebled. Grouse from the mountains, pheasants from the spinneys, partridges from the stubbles, all found their way into Mick Connor’s bag and were driven in a ragman’s cart to Craven Arms. Mick was content to leave the rabbits to the labourers who spied upon him. He spent his money wildly. It even pleased him to treat Badger to drinks in the Pound House bar, knowing very well that the keeper guessed where the money came from.

In November salmon began to run up the Barbel to meet the winter floods, and Mick Connor was more than ever in his element, remembering desperate days upon the Barrow when he was a boy. Salmon spearing was to Abner the most exciting pastime of all: the stealthy approach to the riverside up to his knees in the ditches of the water-meadows: the milky whiteness of November fogs; the nearing clamour of the river roaring whitely over stickles into the salmon pool where it lay dumb and black: Mick Connor’s hoarse whispers, the lumbering shadow of Curly Atwell, and, in the darkness, the swirl of an eddy black as ink.

‘Ready . . .’ Mick would whisper, and suddenly a flare of light, reddening faces, casting grotesque shadows, lighting the yellow tree-tops, making a beacon for miles of dreamy country, as though the forest were aflame. The night sounds vanished from Abner’s ears. The woods held their breath and listened. He could hear nothing of the river’s tumult—only the harsh breathing of Atwell and the hiss of the colza flare.

‘By the houly! Look at him! Fourteen pounds if he’s an ounce!’

The shadow of a lifted arm against the light. A violent descent, and then a swirl in the black water and the great fish struggling on the bank. For Mick Connor never missed his mark.

‘Out with the light!’ And then a sudden darkness in which the roar of the stickle and the vague noises of the trees returned.