Part 15

This curious insulation, the way in which light blinded their pickets of alarm, was the great danger of salmon-spearing. The glare in the tree-tops would always give them away if Badger and his men were on the watch; and one frosty, owl-haunted night in the middle of November they had a narrow shave. Mick Connor was leaning over the bank with lifted spear when Abner heard the breaking of a stick. A man cursed as he floundered in a ditch not twenty yards away. Abner, who doubted the quickness of Atwell, smothered the flare with his hands. It scorched the horny skin of his palms, but it gave the signal of alarm. On that side of the pool the current had undercut the marly bank so that the poachers could not be seen, but Abner’s ears recognised the sound of Badger’s voice. The keeper’s party ran towards the bank. A single man, the foremost, leapt down beside them, shouting that he had got them. Abner let out from the shoulder in the dark. His fist met the flesh of a man’s face. The man gave a cry. For all he knew it might have been the face of Curly Atwell, but it gave him a good feeling in the dark, for he felt instinctively that it was Badger’s. They left their spear on the bank, plunging into the swift stickle above the pool, and found refuge in a wood. Some one fired after them. He fired low, and the twigs snapped about them. Abner plunged on through the wood. He knew that he was running for his life. It was good to be running for his life. He went on crashing through the undergrowth of the wood battling with back-springing saplings, torn with briers, laughing, curiously, wildly exultant. He did not stop to think that he had lost touch with the others. In an affair of this kind each must look to himself. He only knew that he had escaped out of the mouth of danger. His head spun with the elation of his heart pumping blood into his brain. In that moment he felt that he had courage for anything, and it pleased him particularly to think that Badger had suffered this defeat.

He emerged from the woods into open fields, so calm under the peace of night that it was hard to believe that any human violence had lately invaded them. Westward the quiet hills stood folded for the night. A gibbous moon rose languidly above the mists. He stood in the middle of the field, tingling to his finger-tips. He forgot that his legs were sodden with muddy water, so splendidly his body glowed. It was ridiculous to think of crossing the hills to Wolfpits, for it was no more than nine o’clock. This was not a time for sleep but for living. He turned his steps in the direction of the Pound House.

Just before closing time he reached it. One end of the bar was full of cloggers, to whom Wigan Joe was reeling off Lancashire stories. The other was unusually empty, for the Gunner and most of his company had left the house for want, perhaps, of Mick Connor, who was their principal entertainer. Susie stood behind the counter at the deserted end of the bar swilling dirty glasses, wiping them one after another, and listening all the time to the clogger’s stories, many of which she had heard before the same evening, since Wigan Joe had a way of running through his repertoire and beginning again like an automatic musical-box when the liquor was in him. As Abner entered the bar Mr Hind appeared in the door of the kitchen.

‘I’m goin’ up, Susie,’ he said with a jerk of his head in the direction of the staircase. ‘Two minutes to go, and then lock up.’

She said, ‘All right, dad,’ carelessly, never looking at him, for her eyes were on Abner. ‘Night, all!’ Mr Hind muttered as he disappeared.

Abner went straight up to her. The mood of physical triumph and elation was still on him, and she must have known that there was something strange about him since, for the first time, she lowered her eyes.

‘I want a word with you, Susie,’ he said, addressing her thus for the first time.

‘Best hurry up, then,’ she said, smiling. ‘It’s only two minutes afore we close. What are you taking?’

‘Give us a double gin,’ he said, and while she poured the limpid spirit into a clean glass he asked her what she was doing on Sunday afternoon.

She wouldn’t answer him. ‘Look what good measure I’ve given you,’ she said, handing him his glass.

He put the drink down on the counter. ‘You’re not goin’ to put me off like that,’ he said. She murmured something about Mr Badger.

‘Damn you and your Badgers,’ he said. ‘What about to-night, then?’

‘Oh, don’t be soft! Look at the time. It’s just on ten.’

‘Get on with you! The time don’t matter.’

‘No, I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘Of course I couldn’t. Father’s gone upstairs.’ The clock struck ten. Susie called, ‘Time, please!’ and the cloggers rose to go in the middle of one of Wigan Joe’s most complicated stories. They moved toward the door in a bunch, bidding good-night to Susie, who stood waiting with the key in her hand. Abner stayed by the bar finishing his gin. The last good-nights echoed down the street. Susie stood at the open door waiting for him.

‘Come on, do!’ she said. ‘It’s after time.’

‘Why shouldn’t I stay here?’ he said, with a laugh.

‘You know as well as I do why,’ she said, with a managing air. ‘That new policeman, Bastard’s got eyes like a weasel.’

‘Is that all?’ he asked.

‘Yes, of course that’s all.’

He came to the door and quickly closed it, then took her in his arms and kissed her. She returned his kisses.

‘Leave go of me now,’ she whispered. ‘Go out in the lane while I lock up and then come round to the back door, but don’t make too much row about it.’

‘Yo’m not codding me?’

‘Of course I’m not.’

She closed the door after him, saying ‘good-night’ in a clear voice for the benefit of the problematical constable. He heard her lock the door and slip an iron bar across into its sockets. The lighted windows went black. He slipped round to the back of the house and stood waiting in the angle that it made with an outhouse where dry bracken was stored. For a long time, as it seemed, he stood there staring at the faint and frosty stars. Then the door opened softly. She did not speak, but he stole on tiptoe to the door and entered the kitchen. Inside it was quite dark, for the shutters were closed and the fire banked down. He could not see her, being only conscious of her warm and fragrant presence. He groped in the dark, suddenly finding her face on his own.

‘My . . . how cold you are!’ she whispered.

Half an hour later she let him out into the yard, with more tender whispers of farewell and warnings that her father slept lightly. For a few minutes he stood away from the moonlight in the shadow of the house, bewildered, stunned. He saw the white road stretching in the direction of Chapel Green and Wolfpits, but it meant no more to him than if it had led to the world’s end. He was no longer a part of the world. He towered above it supreme and isolated in the flame of his own throbbing exaltation. He had no need of friends or houses or rest, no memory of the past, no thought for the future. He stood there self-sufficient and unassailable.

A little later he became aware of the fact that his feet were carrying him automatically over the moon-lit road toward the hills, but he was almost unconscious of his progress, and it filled him with a sort of mild surprise when he saw familiar landmarks of the road loom up before him, grow clear, and fall away behind. His footsteps rang upon the iron road as though he were shod with steel. From the brow of the hill above Wolfpits he saw the basin of the Folly Brook brimmed with mist. The gables of the house rose up into the moonlight, the hills stood black behind. Under the heavy chestnuts of the avenue it was almost dark; the water in the ruts had frozen to a thin crust so that the surface was curiously splashed with moonlight and with ice. Fifty yards in front of him he saw a figure moving with lurches from side to side of the lane. At first he thought it was a stray bullock, but there was something human in its movements and so he leapt to the conclusion that it was old man Drew rolling home drunk with sweet turnip from the cottage of some friend. The figure leaned for a moment against a stone wall, and Abner, coming abreast of it, saw that the drunken man was George Malpas.

‘Hallo, George, what’s up?’ he called.

‘God, Abner, is that you?’ George murmured thickly. ‘I haven’t half got a drop, I haven’t!’ The situation amused George so much that he shook with weak laughter.

‘Come on, then, old son!’ said Abner, taking him by the arm. Strong as he was he found it difficult to steer a straight course. George, having once submitted to the direction of another will, now became somnolent. Abner almost had to carry him up the garden path.

A light burned in the kitchen, and on the doorstep Mary stood waiting for them. She looked very frail and beautiful in the light of candles. From the first her eyes had taken in the situation, and she offered no spoken comment on it though her mouth showed that she was suffering the shame of the situation.

‘Give me a hand upstairs with him, please,’ she said.

The excuses that Abner was ready to offer for his friend died on his lips. Between them they directed the steps of George upstairs. When he reached the bedroom he stared about him as though he had never been there before, and then, giving the problem up, lurched over on to the bed covering his head with his hands.

‘We’d best get his boots off,’ said Abner.

He took the right and Mary the left. It was a strange thing how they had to wrestle with the leather laces and how tightly the boots stuck to his inanimate feet.

‘Now he’s all right,’ said Abner, when the job was finished. ‘He’ll come up like a daisy in the morning, never fear!’

She did not reply to him but stood with the candlestick in her hand staring at her husband’s body.

‘Will you come downstairs with me, please?’ she said.

Abner had not bargained for this. He could not think what she wanted of him, but he could not very well refuse her, and so he followed her down the creaking stairs into the kitchen. She put the candle on the table and faced him silently from the other side. Then she said:—

‘Tell me all about it, please . . . everything.’

There was nothing to tell her. He said that he had found George leaning up against a wall in the avenue and helped him over the last lap.

‘Were you at the Pound House to-night?’

‘Yes, I looked in just on closing time.’

‘Then I’m sure that you know. Please tell me!’

‘I’ve told you. I don’t know nothing.’

‘I don’t believe you . . . not if you was at the Pound House. That’s where he gets it.’

‘Well, you know more about it nor me then,’ said Abner.

‘Don’t talk to me like that! I know . . . I’m not a child.’

‘It’s no good talkin’ like that. A chap must take a drop in and out. It’s human nature.’

‘Oh, it isn’t the drink!’ she said. ‘He doesn’t go to that place only for the drink. I should have thought you being with him would keep him straight.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Yes, you do,’ she said, striking the table with her clenched fist. ‘You know . . . you know. . . . It’s that woman!’

‘I don’t know naught of George’s women,’ said Abner obstinately.

‘Then you’ve no eyes,’ she said, with a gesture of scorn. ‘The woman at the Pound House!’ She blazed with a white anger: ‘That dark-eyed devil that’s been after him these months, that Susie Hind . . .’

‘Oh, her . . .’ said Abner, with a laugh.

‘Don’t you put me off!’ she cried. ‘Don’t put me off! It’s not for me, it’s for his children. You see, I know, so you’d best tell me.’

‘I can tell you one thing,’ he said. ‘George ain’t been with Susie Hind to-night.’

She clenched her hands furiously. ‘You’re only telling me lies . . . lies. How do you know? How do you know?’

‘How do I know? I like that! I know because I’ve been with her myself.’

He thought it was a fine and brutal thing to say. With the same words he had rescued his friend from an awkward suspicion and proclaimed the thing that he had been wanting to shout to the stars on his way home. He had been burning to share his triumph with some one. George would have heard it if he hadn’t been so drunk. Now it was out; he had got it off his chest; he stood there smiling and triumphant, wondering what she could say next.

‘So you needn’t vex yourself about poor old George,’ he said.

For a second she stared at him. The white anger died out of her face. She became suddenly red. Her clenched fingers opened and she clutched at the table. Then she gave a sudden, choking gasp, and spoke:—

‘You . . .’ she said, ‘you . . . ! Oh, I shouldn’t have thought it of you!’

‘What’s up with you now?’ he said, good-humouredly. Her body was shaken with a fit of sobbing and she left him staring in the candlelight.

The Thirteenth Chapter

NEXT morning when Abner came downstairs in the dark he found George making himself a cup of tea in the kitchen.

‘That you, Abner?’ he said, turning his neck gingerly as though it hurt his head to speak. ‘God! It’s lifting the top of my skull off! This dose’ll last me for a bit. Mind you, I wasn’t so boozed I can’t remember what happened. I should have slept up against that old wall if you hadn’t come along. You’m a good pal, Abner.’ At this point his voice gave out. ‘Have a spot of tea?’ he said in a hoarse whisper.

As usual they walked down the valley together at dawn. The fields lay hoary with rime, so that the light of dawn was like cloudy moonlight. Their heels crunched into the brittle ice of the wheel-ruts. Before them, on the white road, ran the wayward pattern of Spider’s dancing feet. Not a bird sang. The cold air gripped their temples. It was as though winter were closing on the world and those who dwelt in it like an iron vice. Dawn whitened beyond Castel Ditches: light without heat—light reflected from ice. But the steady walking thawed their limbs and George was soon asking in a husky voice for details of what had happened the night before. Something in Mary’s attitude when they woke that morning had struck him as unusual. He guessed that she had found a new grievance, and was anxious to know what she had said. He laughed when Abner told him that she had questioned him on the subject of Susie: laughed till the cold air choked him.

‘They’m all the same, the women,’ he said. ‘Jealous . . . that’s the top and bottom of them. What did you tell her?’

‘Said I hadn’t seen you at the Pound House.’

‘God! You didn’t say I’d been to Lesswardine?’

‘I dain’t know naught about it.’

‘And the less you know the better, or you’ll be having these women buzz round you like flies. You can tell our Mary what you like, but you’ll need to keep your eyes skinned with mother. I’ve got to bide on the right side of the old woman or it’s all up. She’ll have it out of you before you know you’re there.’

By this time they had reached the lower end of the valley to which the cloggers had lately transferred their work. The whole gang were now housed in the Buffalo and the other scattered cottages of Chapel Green, but a couple of tents were left standing on the banks of the Folly Brook and the smoke of a wood-fire went up blue into the air.

‘I can’t make mother out,’ George grumbled. ‘Here she is with Wigan Joe and the rest of them in the house: a mint of money for the asking, and she goes scaring them over to Mainstone with her long face. If I had the Buffalo I’d soon see they spent their money in the house. It’s as good as robbing me the way she sends them away. She don’t want the money, but I want it bad enough, God knows!’

They parted when they reached the workings. George whistled to Spider, but the dog only wagged her tail and then dived into a trench, preferring to stay with Abner. Munn appeared, rubbing his hands with cold. Abner laughed at him.

‘Put your back into it, Joe, and you’ll soon feel right,’ he said.

The day’s work began. A red sun rose sluggishly, half frozen. The light glinted on the long line of swinging picks and the sounds of the work rose cheerily in the thin air. Very different was this from the subdued activity of summer. The labourers did not work only for money but because the exertion sent the blood tingling warm into their hands and feet. Work was an ecstasy and to Abner a greater ecstasy than to the rest of them. He thought of Susie and of the night before. He whistled as he worked for sheer physical joy, rejoicing in his strength, for now once more, after months of soft disuse, his body was finding its right expression and coming splendidly to its own. He stretched his limbs in the sunlight, recapturing the moments of physical exaltation that used to come to him when the Mawne United team stepped out on to the smooth turf of the Albion ground, a company of clean and splendid athletes. And all the time, beneath the pleasant anodyne of work, his body glowed with a rich contentment, knowing that in a few hours night would come and Susie be clinging in his arms again.

He had no fear that she would forsake him. He felt, in every fibre of his body that he was a match, and more than a match for Badger. Having once attained her he knew that he could keep her; and in this he was not deceived, for Susie, having looked on him and found that he was good, had taken a fancy to him and now kept pace with his passion, asking as much as he could give. Every evening, as was already his custom, he would go to the Pound House and take his seat beside Gunner Eve; but now he no longer needed to follow Susie with his eyes, was no longer tortured with vague jealousies, for when she passed him he could feel her soften and respond to his presence. Sometimes, when no one was looking, she would turn her head in his direction and for a moment their eyes would meet. He did not care when men spoke to her lightly or placed their hands upon her arm, for now he knew that she belonged to him and could be his for the asking. The events of the first night were repeated many times. Now a single whisper was enough to ensure that when the alehouse was empty and Mr Hind safely in bed, the kitchen door would be opened softly and Susie waiting for him in the warm darkness. It amused Abner to see the coldness that she now showed toward Badger. The keeper was puzzled, for all their love-making was secret and nocturnal, and Susie and Abner never appeared in public together. Badger knew that for some unknown reason he had lost her, and this made him more persistent than ever in his attentions, being far too important in his own estimation to be discarded without good reason. Abner laughed to see his irritation. He and Susie laughed together in the night. ‘I can’t imagine whatever I saw in him,’ she said.

At the end of November Susie went away for a week to stay with her grandparents in Hereford. Without her the Pound House meant nothing to Abner, and without considering that his absence might be noticed, he drifted back into his old habit of returning to Wolfpits in the evening. It was now more than a month since he had done this, and in the interval he had scarcely spoken to Mary Malpas. Returning, and expecting to pick up the threads of the old life exactly as he had left them, he was surprised to find the atmosphere of Wolfpits curiously changed. The attitude of Mary herself was cold and unfriendly. He found it difficult to make headway against it, for she scarcely spoke to him, and even the children seemed to have become infected with their mother’s distrust. It was true that they had seen so little of him as almost to have forgotten him, but it seemed strange that his old favourite, Gladys, no longer came instinctively to his arms. He could not accept the change without a protest. One evening, finding Mary alone, he tackled her.

‘What’s come over you?’ he said.

‘Nothing’s come over me. What do you mean?’ she replied coldly.

‘Yo’m different . . . like you was scared of me. What have I done?’

‘You know best. You know what you told me . . . that night,’ she said, with tight lips.

‘That’s nothing to do with you,’ he said.

‘No . . . Nothing.’

‘Then what’s up with you?’

She laughed uneasily and went into the scullery. Abner was seized with sudden rage. It didn’t surprise him that George couldn’t get on with her. Mrs Malpas was right. She was trying to play the lady with him. With a woman like that it was useless trying to be frank. He could read suspicion into everything that she did. When Gladys, who was now regaining her confidence, climbed on to his knee, she followed the child with anxious eyes as though she feared that he would corrupt her. He determined to have the matter out with her, but she never gave him a chance, arranging carefully that they should never be alone. For this or for some other obscure reason she always invited her neighbour, Mrs Mamble, to come in and sit with her in the evening. This old woman, innocent of the strange relation between them, would sit in front of the fire talking incessantly of her dead husband and her distant relatives down Tenbury way. She had a brother who kept a small shop in a hamlet called Far Forest, and was never tired of talking of his importance as an elder of the local Wesleyan synod and the achievements of her nephew James, whom his father had destined for the ministry. The old woman tried to entertain them both with these recitals, but Abner had little patience with her, and tried to forget that she was there. He sat reading the football news in the last Sunday’s _People_; but even this could not shut out the sound of her slow, insistent voice. One night he asked for pen and paper and wrote a short but laborious note to Alice, enclosing a postal order for two pounds, which he had bought in Chapel Green. Mary watched him all the time that he was writing.

‘Ah, yo’m curious, bain’t yo’?’ he thought. ‘Pretending to take no heed of me, but yo’d give your eyes to see what I’ve written.’

Indeed she offered to post the letter for him; but he declined, putting it in his pocket with a laugh.

In the end he found these evenings at Wolfpits so uncomfortable that he was glad when Mick Connor inveigled him into a new expedition against Badger’s preserves. By this time the keeper had looked about him and made plans for defending his master’s property, so that the game was getting more dangerous every day. Badger had made friends with Constable Bastard, the new policeman, who had been drafted to Mainstone from Shrewsbury and looked upon poaching with the uncharitable eye of a townsman. To the great embarrassment of Mr Hind, who, not unreasonably, lived in terror of the licensing justices, and had not yet determined in what degree the new policeman was corruptible, Bastard began to take an interest in the customers of the Pound House, poking his whiskered face inside the taproom every evening and taking count of the company like a shepherd numbering his sheep. Mr Hind’s heart sank when he found that the constable was a teetotaller. The appearance of Bastard’s face in the doorway made him tremble for his licence, though these visits only meant that the keeper and the policeman were working together, hoping to identify the authors of each poaching outrage by establishing their absence from the Pound House.

The first expedition in which Abner took part during Susie’s visit to Hereford gave them a big haul. Abner’s own share of it was fifteen shillings, and, thus encouraged, they raided the keeper’s preserves on three nights in succession. The constable, checking the tale of drinkers at the Pound House, pointed out that Abner, Mick, Curly Atwell, and another had been absent on each of the nights in question, and that Mick had celebrated his return by recklessly standing treat to the whole taproom.