Part 21

The only force that tended to drag him out of this centripetal existence was Susie. Whatever her father might think of Abner, and however little he might come to the Pound House, she had no intention of giving up a man to whom she had taken such a passionate fancy. Of all those with whom she came in contact in Mainstone, Abner had pleased her best, being more completely her opposite than any of the others. His fairness, his strength, and a certain innocence in his composition, had made her choose him for her own, and even though he found the relation exacting and occasionally inconvenient, Abner was still under the spell of her physical attraction. Indeed there seemed to be no fear of this being exhausted, for their meetings were necessarily rarer and therefore more enthralling.

In the regularity of his new life at Wolfpits lurked the obvious disadvantage that Abner’s visits to Susie became conspicuous. Mary knew better than to question him on his movements—pride, as well as the tact which she had learned in her experience of George forbade her to do so—but when Abner returned late at night from these assignations she would look at him queerly, and a silence and restraint out of which she could not school herself, made it evident that she resented the mystery. He wished, indeed, that she would ask him where he had been, for then he would have been able to put her off with some deliberate lie which she could believe or reject as she pleased. Anything, he felt, was better than this uncomfortable chill, this shy curiosity of gaze, this silence. It was a condition of affairs that he could not stand and made him anxious, beyond all considerations of prudence, to blurt out his secret—if secret it were—and dissolve the grudging air of mystery with which she received him.

One night when he had come home late and could stand her silence no longer, he said suddenly:—

‘Where d’you reckon I’ve been to-night?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to know.’

He laughed, and she made a slight gesture of annoyance.

‘I never met a woman yet who didn’t want to know where a man had been,’ he said.

She turned her back on him. ‘Will you lock the door and put out the lamp?’ she said coldly.

‘I’ve been to the Pound House,’ he volunteered, watching her all the time.

‘I should have thought you’d had enough of the Pound House,’ she was tempted to reply bitterly.

‘To see Susie Hind . . .’ he continued.

‘Yes?’

‘So now you know, missus.’

He wished, perversely, that she would turn on him and tell him what she thought of him. It would have cleared the air. Instead of this she spoke calmly and almost scornfully.

‘Why did you want to tell me this?’

‘Because a woman’s always itching to know.’

‘Do you think I didn’t know it already?’ Then she repeated her first words: ‘Please lock the door and put the lamp out,’ and left him.

This made things no better. He had wanted to justify himself, or, at any rate, to brazen the matter out. He wanted to pierce her armour of reserve, to see her as she was. Whether she were jealous or merely actively scornful didn’t matter as long as she showed herself to be alive and tangible. He wanted to feel the shock of their two wills, their two persons clashing without this irritating veil in which she hid herself intervening. Whether it were love or hate he wanted to feel some definite contact with her: something comparable with the moment when she had spoken to him of George’s woman at Lesswardine. This she denied him. It was unreasonable that she should behave in this way to the man on whose charity, if he put it at the bluntest, she was now living. It seemed as if she had made the maintenance of this spiritual remoteness the condition of her dependence on him. He felt, vaguely, that she wasn’t playing the game, and explained her attitude to himself as the result of her unnatural fear of old Mrs Malpas’s tongue. He was tempted, at times, to throw in his hand, to launch out again, to leave Chapel Green and let her go her own way. He pretended to himself that his promise to George, an obligation that went a good deal deeper than friendship, restrained him; but he knew in his heart that even if he had not undertaken the care of George’s wife he would never have left Wolfpits. He only wished that her pride, or whatever it was, would let her be reasonable.

Susie wasn’t like that. With Susie he knew exactly where he was. She had even, once or twice, shown herself jealous of his devotion to Mary, and tried to read into it an intimacy which was very far removed from their real state. She had seen Mary in the police-court and in the gallery at the assizes, had recognised her beauty and the dignity which contrasted so deeply with her own abandon. She would ask Abner questions about her, implying that Mary must be jealous of his visits to Mainstone, in this way half convincing Abner that it was unnatural for her not to be jealous, and aggravating his grievance.

‘I suppose she takes your money and then treats you like dirt,’ she said scornfully. And Abner could not be sure that she hadn’t described the situation exactly.

Christmas came and passed: a meagre Christmas such as their means imposed upon them. The morning was bright, and Mary took the children to church. In the evening Mrs Mamble and old Drew joined them, and in their company the bearing of Mary curiously lightened. She became young and gay, almost childish. There was laughter in her eyes and her cheeks were flushed with firelight. The old labourer had brought with him a bottle of cowslip wine that he had made in the spring, and they sat together late into the night telling stories of forgotten people and distant counties. About midnight the others left them, and though her attitude sensibly changed, a little of the glow was left in Mary’s face.

‘Last Christmas,’ she said musingly, ‘we all went down to the Buffalo in the evening—George and me and the children.’

Abner also remembered. He told her of his own Christmas at Hackett’s Cottages, how John Fellows had been in hospital with his broken thigh and he had been left alone with Alice and little John. Mary leaned forward and listened to him in the firelight with her soft eyes fixed upon his face.

‘Was it her you wrote that letter to?’ she asked.

‘The one you wanted to post?’

‘I thought I could save you the trouble.’

He laughed. ‘Yes . . . that was her.’

‘How old was she?’

‘Somewhere about the same as you, I reckon.’

‘And two children?’

‘No, only one kid.’

‘How long was he . . . I mean your father . . . in hospital?’

‘Pretty nigh six month.’

‘And you had to keep the house going?’

‘Of course I had. There wasn’t nought coming in except his club, and that bain’t nothing to speak on.’

‘Six months . . .’ She stared into the fire, and there was a long silence. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ she said at last, without raising her eyes. ‘Funny how things turn out?’

‘Yes, it’s a rum go.’

Then she began slowly to question him about Alice: what was she like, fair or dark, how tall, the kind of dress she wore—curious details that he had to search his memory to answer. She seemed to be working out for herself the obvious parallel, but never looked at him.

‘Why did you leave them?’ she said at last.

By this time is was no longer difficult to talk to her. He told her continuously the story of his last days at Halesby. She listened eagerly, putting in from time to time a short question for which he could see no reason. He told her of John Fellows’s bouts of drink, of the way in which he had set himself to work through his compensation money, of the day of Dulston Wakes, the boxing booth, the brooch, the moment when he had come blundering down into the kitchen at Alice’s cry for help, the struggle—and the blow with which he had knocked his father out. He even told her of the sovereigns that Alice had slipped into his pocket when he left her.

‘That’s what I sent back to her in that letter,’ he said.

‘Was that all? It was good of you.’

He was silent, and she pressed him again.

‘Why didn’t you go before?’ she said. ‘Why did you stay on there till that happened?’

‘I dunno’,’ he said. ‘I reckon I’d got to see it through. That football business turned me up.’

‘You wanted to go before?’

‘Yes, I was pretty well sick of it. Any one would have been.’

She looked at him, and her eyes were now humble. She spoke almost with diffidence.

‘Abner,’ she said, ‘if ever you want to go from here for any reason, no matter what it is, promise me that you’ll tell me straight. Don’t you keep it hidden like that, feeling that the children and me are a drag on you! If you want to go to-morrow, you go. Don’t you think of what you said to George. You don’t owe him anything. You don’t owe me anything at all. If ever you feel for one minute you want to go, please tell me straight. I can look after myself, and I shall understand. That’s what I felt with George. Promise me. . .’ She leaned toward him with clasped, beseeching hands.

‘I’ll tell you right enough,’ he said awkwardly. ‘Don’t you fret yourself about that.’

She sighed, and pushed her hair back from her forehead.

‘Now I feel easier,’ she said. ‘How late it is!’

She wished him good-night, and left him; but he did not move till the logs collapsed in the grate. He was thinking drowsily of the other Christmas in Halesby, of the different way in which Alice had approached him, how she had tried to draw him nearer to her and how he had resisted her. He thought of the clinging dependence of Alice contrasted with the strength and independence of this other woman. Poor Alice! She had never answered his letter or acknowledged his postal order; but then, she was never one for letter-writing. The suggestion of freedom, the open way of escape which Mary, in her pride, had shown him, made him feel for a moment curious about that other life that had seemed so far away. If he wanted to do so, he reflected, he could throw up his job at a week’s notice and take a train that would transport him in half a day back to North Bromwich, back to the familiar smoke-pale sky, to the chimney stacks, the furnaces and the smell of pit mounds. The odour of coal-dust and slag-heaps was in his nostrils. He saw the packed amphitheatre of the Albion ground and the white-lined turf within it. He heard the rumour of a football crowd, the thud of the ball, the referee’s whistle. So utterly remote. . . . He went to the door and opened it before he turned the key in its wards. He saw nothing but the high blackness of the winter night, not even a single star. The dank air chilled him; it crept into the lighted room.

‘It’s a rum go . . . a bloody rum go!’ he said, yawning.

With the New Year, Abner’s work on the pipe-track became more strenuous, for much time had been lost in the ten days of snow that fell about the time of Bastard’s death and in the violent floods that followed on the thaw. A mild January did little to dry the sodden workings, and the task of shovelling earth was heavier to Abner than his old labours in Mawne Pit. His mate, Munn, who lodged miserably in a leaky labourer’s cottage on the river-bank at Mainstone, was taken ill with bronchitis, and Abner worked alone. Up to his ankles in reddish clay he toiled, his hands were rufous and his trousers caked with it. The burden of the wet earth weighed on him. It was like a sullen enemy that made his feet leaden and strained against the muscles of his arms. All the labourers felt it. Their speech, which had been gay and good-humoured, became dogged and irritable. Nor were they the only folk who suffered. In every farm of the sodden Wolfpits valley men were making the same struggle under the raw and steely sky. Brimming dykes that drained the meadows shone cold beside the black hedgerows. The Folly Brook, a brown torrent, dammed with broken branches that gathered leaves and creamy foam, filled the whole valley with melancholy roaring. Waterfowl, snipe, and mallard and even slow-winged herons, moved upward to the sodden springs. It was a sad season in which the solitary workers on the farms, seen at evening in the fields, looked as if they were stuck fast in mires from which they could not escape: so slowly they moved, so huddled and pitiful they seemed. Even on the drive at Wolfpits, where the gravel was reasonably dry, it was painful to see the bowed figure of old Drew returning at night, his boots so caked with mud that he could scarcely drag himself along. It was no wonder that the man found consolation in the sweet, fiery spirits that he distilled. He sang so loudly at night that Mrs Mamble would come in and sit with Mary and Abner rather than listen to his high, cracked voice.

Toward the end of January the vicar of the parish awoke to the fact that George Malpas was in prison and his wife presumably destitute. Between his vicarage and Wolfpits lay the vast bulk of Castel Ditches, so that he rarely visited the valley in winter. George Malpas, too, was a member of a dissenting family, his mother being known as a fanatic Methodist; but the Condovers, in so far as they had ever professed religion, were church people. Morgan and Gladys had both been baptized in the parish church, and since scandal informed him that old Mrs Malpas, like the dissenter that she was, had abandoned her son’s family, the vicar sent the parish relieving officer on a special visit to Wolfpits to see if Mary were starving.

It pained and astonished the vicar to learn that she was doing nothing of the sort. She was not even humble, as a woman in her degrading position should be. The relieving officer, who had made his long journey to Wolfpits for nothing, reported that she was not in need of relief, and for the most shameful of reasons. There was a lodger, a young man employed on the water-works and known to the police as a desperate character, who appeared to be filling the absent husband’s place. Malpas’s wife had not even made any decent attempt to conceal this state of affairs. She had confessed brazenly that she was living on this young man’s earnings. To help her in any way would merely be putting a premium on immorality. The vicar nodded his head gravely. Such cases were all too frequent in rural districts, and yet it was a relief to feel that his principles freed him from any further responsibility. He mentioned the matter with satisfaction to his wife at supper on Sunday. At this meal, his weekly labours being ended, he always felt that he could speak more lightly of parish matters.

The vicar’s wife was shocked. ‘I always thought her such a superior young woman, dear. Do have some more beef!’ she said. The idea of the superior and desirable young woman, whom she remembered as the mother of those two sweet children, living in open sin, obsessed her. It was a terrible and fascinating picture, and since the usual supply of gossip failed at the next Lesswardine working party, she dilated, in hushed tones, on the latest enormity.

‘One feels a thing like that in one’s own parish,’ she said, speaking, as usual, as if she, and not the vicar, were the incumbent. ‘But I am afraid nothing can be done.’

Somebody made a suggestion. The sister of the vicar of Aston-by-Lesswardine, Mr Cyril Malpas—the name was a curious coincidence—was shortly to be married to a young engineer, and the vicar would consequently be in need of a housekeeper. What a providential escape it would be if this young woman could find a home in Mr Malpas’s vicarage! ‘If only Mr Malpas would overlook this terrible state of affairs and take her,’ they added.

‘The only difficulty that I see,’ said the vicar’s wife, ‘is that of the children.’

‘But the matron at the workhouse is so motherly, and such a religious woman. Poor little things! It would be a blessing in disguise.’

Mr Malpas readily consented. His sister Celia, to tell the truth, had not been very successful as a housekeeper. Her individuality had been too marked—not to say aggressive—for that position, and a woman who had her reputation to regain would surely be anxious to please.

The new arrangement was proposed to Mary. The vicar’s wife put the matter delicately, for she prided herself on her tact. More than ever she was impressed with the young woman’s superiority and the sweetness of the children.

‘Then I shall tell Mr Malpas that you will be glad to come, Mrs . . . er . . . Malpas?’

‘I must talk it over with Mr Fellows,’ said Mary.

‘Mr Fellows?’

‘My lodger.’

‘Oh . . . yes, I see . . .’ said the vicar’s wife. That evening Abner came in tired from a day’s work in the rain. His clothes were soaked; they steamed as he stood before the fire and filled the room with a harsh odour of wool and sweat. She told him calmly of her visitor and of the proposal that she had made. She did not say a word of her own inclinations.

‘What about the kids?’ he asked.

‘I couldn’t take them with me. They would go to the workhouse.’

‘To hell with the work’us!’ said Abner. ‘Not likely! What do they take you for?’

Mary smiled. She told him what they took her for.

Abner was seized with rage. ‘They’re a dirty lot of swine, that’s what they are!’ he said. ‘By God, I’d like to tell ’em of it!’

‘It’s natural,’ she said. ‘It looks like that.’

‘And what the hell does it matter what it looks like, so long as there bain’t nothing wrong? Old George knows it’s all right, and he’m the only one as matters.’

She did not answer.

‘An’ what’s the difference you being here with me or living alone with that there parson?’

‘He’s a clergyman,’ she said.

‘A clergyman, is he?’ Abner cried. ‘A clergyman! I like that!’

It pleased her, in her heart, to see him so moved.

‘Well, what do you think of it?’ she said quietly. ‘If you want to go, like you did before when you were at home, this is your chance.’

He stood scowling in front of the fire. He couldn’t make her out. When he left the court at Shrewsbury he had set himself to a deliberate line of conduct and determined to go through with it. When they had spoken of it before it had seemed to him that he and Mary were agreed on it and that nothing could change it until George’s return. Even now he couldn’t bring himself to believe that she wanted to make a change. He knew her quiet passion for the children too well to think that anything could tempt her to abandon them to the care of strangers. Also he knew her pride. He believed that her pride and nothing else was keeping her from telling him exactly what she felt. It was useless for her to pretend to him that she had no feelings. It struck him that she was not playing the game. When a man and woman were placed in their position anything but the most complete confidence in each other was unfair. He would force her to say what she thought. Even if it humbled her he would force her to speak.

‘It’s naught to do with me,’ he said. ‘If you want to go, you go, and that’s all that matters.’

She was silent for a long time.

‘If you want to go, you go,’ he repeated.

At last she spoke, very quietly.

‘I don’t want to go,’ she said.

A feeling of joy swept over him, a curious, almost physical exultation. He had brutally broken through the veil in which she hid herself. He had seen herself at last. Now, with the blood tingling in his fingers, he would assert himself triumphantly as the man by whose labour she lived. She could despise him no longer. He wanted to tell her so, to make himself strong before her, but when he looked at her and saw her humility, he could do nothing. His words withered on his lips. He scarcely knew what he was saying.

‘Give us a spot of tea, then,’ he said roughly, and she turned from him without another word.

The Seventeenth Chapter

SHE stayed at Wolfpits. The iron of winter lay heavy on the land. The hills were leagued with winter to hem them in and isolate them. It was as though Wolfpits were besieged. For many years there had been no such winter in the Powys march, and old men who divined portents of weather from the berries of holly and the conduct of birds, foretold that there was worse to come. By the end of January the cloggers, as sensitive to sky-change as any feathered migrants, had struck their tents in the Wolfpits valley, leaving half their harvest of alder ungathered, and set off north for Lancashire where, in a country parched with fire and warmed with millions of huddled houses, they might finish the shaping of their wood for market. In any case they had stayed in the country later than usual, and when old Mrs Malpas, shocked by Wigan Joe’s attempts to put life into her husband, bundled them out of their lodging at the Buffalo, they had no choice but to go, for the tenting that flapped miserably by the banks of the Folly Brook was no shelter for men in that bitter weather.

‘We’ll be back to hear the cuckoo, lad,’ said Wigan Joe. ‘You’ll none get rid of bad pennies like uz.’ And Abner, walking down the valley to work, heard no longer the echoing of their axes nor the crack of rending wood. Where the trim piles of billets had stood covered in tarpaulin he now saw nothing but squares of withered grass, and charred circles where they had made their fires among the birches by the river. Their departure made Wolfpits seem more distant and desolate than ever. Little by little the constriction of winter was crushing all life out of the valley. Only Wolfpits was alive, and it seemed a miracle that even Wolfpits should live.

For a few days at the latter end of February there came a mockery of sunshine, sad, like the suns of autumn. Abner sang as he walked down the valley; the labourers sang at their work. In a moment, such is the indomitable hope of living things, the birds broke their silence, the purple hedges were flushed, the bare twigs of hazel trembled as though they would shake their pale catkins out; one could feel the sap of life secretly stirring. But on the third day March came in howling like a lion with a dry wind from the northwest, sweeping brown leaves along, and the branches of the trees that bowed before it rattled dryly like dead bones. Once more the floods arose and drowned the land, and there was no more thought of spring.

Through all this season the excavations under Callow Hill went on, and this was fortunate for Mary and her children, since Abner’s wages came in steadily through many weeks when snow and flood made it impossible for men to work on the farms. Sometimes old Drew would be weatherbound at Wolfpits for two days at a time, and this was a misery to him, for he had no life but his work, and his employer knew better than to pay him for anything less than he performed. On these days he would shut himself up in his rooms leading the life of a hibernating animal, lighting no fire and cooking no food, simply lying wrapped up in the blankets on his bed with door and windows closed against the cold. At night he would drink himself warm with his turnip-wine, and keep Mrs Mamble awake by singing.