Part 23

Abner, mildly exalted, walked out into the moonlit street. At the cottage doors and down by the bridge little groups of men in breeches and leggings stood talking together with low voices. From time to time the clatter of approaching hoofs was heard and the men stopped to listen. The village was full of a strange sense of expectancy. Abner wandered over the bridge and a little way upstream. In the hush of the night he heard a girl laughing. The sound disturbed him. He thought suddenly of Susie. The excitement of drink and a full stomach turned his thoughts in the direction of physical desire. He stopped and listened for the girl’s voice again, and wondered what man was with her.

He walked back irritably into the village. An old man was putting out the oil lamps that gave a feeble light to the street. What was he, Abner, doing without a woman, when the village was full of them? He looked up at the front room of the inn where Mary and the children were sleeping. It filled him with an unreasoning annoyance to think of her sleeping calmly there. She was treating him ridiculously, without confidence. Why hadn’t she come down into the room for supper as soon as she had put the children to sleep? Just because the landlady had shocked her by suggesting that they should sleep together, he supposed, and, by God, it might have put some sense into her if they had done so. He laughed. He hadn’t thought of Mary in that light before; but in this curious state to which the liquor, the moonlight, and that light voice heard in the darkness had excited him, he felt that he had been a fool not to make love to Mary. If once he had treated her that way and she had accepted him, there would be an end of her airs and graces. George . . .? Well, George’s own life didn’t exact a high degree of fidelity from his wife.

So, like a hungry animal, Abner prowled beneath the inn windows. The panes of that which belonged to Mary’s bedroom shone blankly in the moon through twigs of white jessamine. In the bar, Mr Prowse, now very drunk, was declaiming staccato judgments on the value of basic slag. Abner would have joined them and got drunk if he had any money to spend, but the small sum that he had saved for the occasion would do no more than pay for their lodging and their return fares to Llandwlas. The moonlight seemed to cool the air. Even the smell of jessamine grew fainter in the cold. It was no good standing there any longer, and so he found a sleeping place on some straw in the loft above the stable, and settled down as well as he could, listening to the steady grinding of the horses’ jaws and the snatching noise that they made as they pulled out hay from the racks above their mangers.

Mary slept badly. Earlier in the evening, when Morgan and Gladys had fallen asleep, she had caught the landlady on the stairs and begged that her supper might be brought to her in her bedroom. There she had devoured a solitary plate of the famous rabbit-pie, but hearing below her the sound of many men’s voices and still dreading to be mistaken for Abner’s wife, she had not dared to go downstairs and find him. Instead of thinking any more about it she decided to go to bed, creeping gently under the sheets for fear of disturbing the children. But she could not sleep. The bedroom was immediately over the room in which supper was served, and she could not hear so many voices buzzing beneath her without wanting to catch what they were saying. As the evening wore on the house grew noisier. It seemed as if they would never go to bed; and when, at last, the noise ceased and she had nearly fallen asleep, the moonlight, beating in through the muslin-curtained window, awoke Morgan. He said that he was thirsty, and after much groping, she gave him water from the ewer on the washhand-stand. Thus awakened from the sleep that followed his train-sickness, the excitement of his strange surroundings kept him going for a couple of hours of questions about the fair.

‘Why bain’t Abner up here?’ he said at last.

This was more than she could explain. ‘If you don’t keep quiet, my son,’ she said, ‘I shall take you right out and give you to Abner for the night. Then you’ll cry to come back to your mother. You’re a little nuisance, that’s what you are!’

She tucked him away and huddled him against her breast away from the moonlight, and so, at length, he fell asleep.

Next morning, Abner, who had slept well, was early astir, but no earlier, it seemed, than the rest of the world. In the yard below him the owner of the stabled horses was up and grooming them. He asked Abner to give him a hand and offered him a shilling for his trouble. ‘I reckon they’m going to make wonnerful prices to-day,’ he said. An opaline sky, covered with the faintest veil of mist, promised a hot morning.

The landlord of the Harley Arms had not yet risen, but the girls were sweeping the passage and setting the table for breakfast in the long room, and his wife was watching them with sleepy eyes, while she sipped a cup of tea. Abner joined her, paid the bill for the night, five shillings, and took some tea with bread and butter to the door of Mary’s room. He knocked and called to her, and she answered in a voice that seemed alarmed by his nearness.

‘I bain’t going to eat you _nor_ the children,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be a fine day. How long do you want to keep us waiting?’

She assured him timidly that they wouldn’t be long, and by half-past nine they had become part of the stream of traffic flowing along the road from Redlake to Brampton Bryan, raising clouds of hot dust under the heavy green of the trees.

‘I don’t think the sun will come through, after all,’ said Mary regretfully, though the sight of the horses sweating on the road should have told her that this was fortunate. They walked slowly along the edge of the white highway, Mary anxiously pulling in the children to her side when swift traps or single horses, southward bound, came past them. It seemed to her that so great a collection of strong, spirited animals, which snorted and sniffed the air excited by the presence of strangers of their kind, was dangerous. What would happen to Morgan and Gladys if some sudden noise or infectious fear threw them into a stampede? All the way along the road she was looking anxiously ahead for the next gateway or gap in the hedge, planning ways of escape.

The children loitered, and it was nearly noon when they reached the outskirts of Brampton Bryan. The sky was still white. Mist lay cold on the hills, but the plain grew suffocating. At this point, where the traffic began to feel the backward pressure of the congested village, matters were complicated by an actual constriction of the road. Horses and traps were crowded together in a block, and the men who drove them looked serious and impatient. There was scarcely room along the side of the road for them to pass.

‘Come on,’ said Abner. ‘What are you waiting for?’

‘Can’t we wait here till they move on?’ said Mary, gathering the children closer to her. If she could have done so without encountering other advancing dangers she would have turned back. She hated this narrow, twisting neck of roadway.

They waited, leaning up against an iron fence, breathing the hot smell of the horses. Other people on foot passed them in a steady stream. Among these Abner saw the farmer from the Black Mountain and his friend the lethargic Jew. They appeared to be talking together, and thinking of nothing else, but their eyes were wide open, and when they saw a likely animal they would stop and ask the driver about prices or stoop and run their hands along the horse’s slender legs. They did not notice Abner with Mary and the children in the hedge. The block of vehicles moved on a little and was checked. The movement, slight as it was, infected the animals with restlessness. They snorted, and champed their bits; they danced with springing fetlocks and necks arched to the tightened reins. Mary pressed closer to the iron railings. She felt that she was foolish to be scared, and yet it irritated her to see the unconcern of Abner. What was his strength compared with the violence of horses? Again the block moved on.

‘We can’t wait here all day,’ he said; but she only shook her head.

A strange cart pulled up opposite to them, drawn by a spiritless pony and bearing a black tin plate with the words: Hughes, Brecon, painted on it in a scrawl of white. A gipsy drove it, and behind, on the tilted cart-tail sat a withered, dirty woman and a girl of fifteen with a beautiful dark face and long, black hair, which the old woman was carefully and necessarily combing. To the tail of the cart a cowed and mangy mongrel of the greyhound breed was tied with a strand of rope. The eyes of the girl were dark and wild as those of an animal, and she stared insolently at Abner, half-smiling, attracted, no doubt, by the contrast of his fair strength. For some strange reason Mary felt that the girl’s glance hurt her. ‘She’s smiling at you. Don’t look at her, Abner!’ she whispered. ‘How dirty she is!’ The whisper disturbed the old woman, who ceased her hairdressing, wiped the comb on her apron and smiled across at Mary. She had no teeth but a single yellow tusk in the middle of her lower jaw. She leaned over the edge of the cart and held out her hand toward them.

‘Shall the old woman tell your fortune, my pretty dear?’ she whined. ‘You and your lovely children and your husband? A fine upstanding man, my dear, if ever there was one. Cross the old woman’s hand with a bit of silver and she’ll tell you the future as it’s written!’

Mary looked away. The gipsy girl continued to stare at Abner.

‘Ah, don’t you want to know the happiness that’s coming?’ the old woman went on, with her hand outstretched. ‘I tell you that’s worth more to you than a piece of silver. All that lays before you, my pretty dear. . . ’

Mary clutched at Abner’s arm. ‘Don’t look at her! She’s staring at you! I think we’d better go on,’ she whispered. But a cart had pulled in to the side in front of them, and they could not move. The old woman continued to pester them with her whinings. When she saw that no silver would cross her palm she changed her tone. She leaned further out of her cart, speaking now of ill-fortune rather than good, gratuitously prophesying evil, and a near evil at that. Abner bandied words with her and laughed, but Mary felt her heart sinking within her. From more maledictions they were saved by a sudden forward movement of the block. The cart started with a jerk which pulled the mongrel who had been biting at fleas on its belly, to its feet. The girl gave Abner a final, dark smile; the old woman spat in Mary’s direction.

‘Come on,’ said Abner, ‘now’s your chance!’

But Mary could not move. In some way the encounter had destroyed her nerve. ‘Let’s wait till it’s clearer!’ she pleaded.

A drove of mountain ponies that the gipsies had driven down to the fair from some heathery upland of Montgomery or Clun, followed them. They were small, shaggy, and very wild. They stamped and snorted, then huddled together anxiously in a bunch, sniffing the air with distended nostrils. The sense of being herded together between the hedge and the iron railings made them tremble with fright, and Mary was no less frightened than they. Her anxiety spread to the children, and for the first time since they had left Redlake Morgan forgot his cakes. He began to whimper.

‘They’re all right,’ said Abner. ‘Don’t you take no notice of them.’

A little black stallion, the last of the herd, suddenly took fright. He made a dash for the hedge on the opposite side, but the blackthorn was too high for him and he stood quivering half-way up the bank. A heavy loutish man, of Atwell’s build, who seemed a giant beside the little animal, climbed up and took hold of it by the ear. It gave a sudden convulsive movement, and in a moment the man and the horse were fighting together. The animal pulled him to the ground and for a moment they struggled in the dust. Then another man sat on its head and put a snitch on its muzzle. They jumped aside and the pony leapt to its feet. It stood trembling and screamed with pain. The big man, panting and dusty, held the rope of which the snitch was made. A bitter fight followed, the pony rushing wildly from side to side with fierce, terrible screams, the man holding on grimly yet barely keeping his feet. The other gipsies drove on the rest of the herd, and those who came behind ran forward to watch the duel, with cries of encouragement now to the man, now to the beast. It was a horrible sight, at which Mary did not dare to look, though Abner enjoyed it. To and fro the panting animal plunged. It rolled on the ground, leapt in the air, with fierce snortings and shrill cries. Its eyes were bright with rage. At last it stood stock still in the middle of the road and would not move. The man who had sat on its head approached it with a halter. Still it stood its ground, trembling violently, shaken with angry snorts, foaming. It seemed that the fight was over and the wild spirit conquered, but before he could slip the halter on its head the animal had taken another violent leap. Abner saw its body hurling through the air and threw himself in front of Mary and the children. He went over with the stallion on the top of him, hearing Mary’s cry. The iron railings were bent back, and Mary was holding Gladys in her arms. The shouts of the crowd rang in Abner’s ears: ‘Her’s dead! They’ve no business to drive ’em on a public road! Savage they are! Poor little thing! These bloody gipsies! That chap did his best . . .’

Two men were now holding the pony, and the big fellow was bending over Mary and the ghastly face of the child. Abner pushed him aside. ‘She’s all right . . . she’s all right!’ said Mary. Gladys was crying in shrill, frightened gasps.

‘My leg, mam, oh, my leg!’ she wailed.

‘Try to move your toes, love,’ a woman said. ‘If she can move her toes the bone’s not broken.’

A dozen others clustered round with various advice, while the men stood staring stupidly with pained eyes. Mary was hiding the child’s face in her bosom. Morgan clung crying to her skirts. Her face was terribly set, but she soon recovered her presence of mind.

‘Abner . . . you take Morgan,’ she said. ‘We must find a doctor.’

‘He lives just round the corner, ma’am,’ a bustling woman cried. ‘The red ’ouse with the trees in front of it. You can see the roof.’

‘Let me take her. She’s too heavy for you,’ said Abner and Mary surrendered the child, picking up Morgan in her own arms. A curious crowd followed them to the doctor’s house.

The Eighteenth Chapter

THEY found the doctor just setting out on his morning round. His wife, a forbidding woman, plainly dressed and flat-chested, caught him in the stableyard and brought him back into the surgery.

‘It’s the first accident . . . a little girl,’ she said. ‘Did you ever know the fair without one?’

He followed her in fussily, hoping that there was nothing to keep him, for he had a long list of country visits to get through before the broken heads should begin to roll up in the evening. Abner had laid the child down on a high couch covered with American leather. In the road she had screamed her breath away and now she lay shivering and whimpering softly, almost quiet.

‘Well, what is it?’ said the doctor brusquely.

‘It’s her leg,’ Mary whispered. ‘I’m afraid it’s broken.’

‘A kick from a horse,’ said the doctor’s wife from the background.

‘Let’s see!’

Mary’s fingers fumbled with the tapes of the child’s drawers.

‘Scissors!’ said the doctor. The sudden touch of steel made Gladys cry out loud, and the first cry of alarm was quickly changed to one of pain. She struggled with the pain and by her movement increased it. The doctor leaned his left arm above her body and held her still. Mary, clasping Gladys’s hands in hers, put down her face to the child’s tear-dabbled cheek. Her own tears were mingled with those of her child, but she made no sound. Abner stood helpless, watching, and behind him also stood the doctor’s wife, gaunt, flat, immobile. In a former state she had been a sister at the North Bromwich Infirmary.

The doctor was leaning over Gladys and breathing heavily through his nostrils. His hands, lean, brown, and slightly stained with iodine, were placed firmly yet tenderly upon the pink and white of the child’s thigh. His fingers moved like tentacles, searching, soothing the spastic muscles under the skin. Gladys gave a sudden frightened, ‘Oh . . . _mam_!’—and the fingers tightened like bands of steel. All the man’s mind was in his fingers; his eyes gazed vaguely out of the window to the cascades of fading laburnum blossom in his shrubbery, the billowy outline of lilac against the white sky.

‘Yes . . .’ he said at last. ‘Separated epiphysis. Lower end of femur. I shall want a small Liston splint and plenty of strapping. I expect she’ll need a whiff of chloroform, too. If you’ll get it I won’t move.’ Then he addressed Mary. ‘I think it will be better if the small boy is out of the room. They can look after him in the kitchen.’

Bribed by a sup of cocoa, Morgan allowed himself to be taken away from his mother by the doctor’s wife, who soon returned with the splint, the dressings, and the anæsthetic.

‘I’ll just get her under, if you’ll see that she doesn’t move. If she kicks about there may be a lot more hæmorrhage.’

His wife took his place and he sprinkled a few drops of heavy liquid on to a wire mask covered with lint. A sweetish odour mingled with that of the lilac. It seemed to Abner that the room had suddenly become oppressively hot.

‘Now breathe deeply. Smell it in! It’s ever so nice!’ said the doctor. Gladys sniffed, then choked, and tried to push away the mask with her hands.

‘Hold her fingers, mother!’ said the doctor. Mary closed her eyes and took the child’s fingers in her own.

‘That’s better . . . that’s better.’ He sprinkled more chloroform on the lint. In another minute he raised the mask. Gladys was now breathing heavily; her face was suffused, and she puffed out her lips with each breath. The doctor handed over the mask to his wife. ‘Give her a drop now and then,’ he said, ‘and plenty of air as well. She’s just nicely under.’ He pushed back an eyelid with his finger to see that the pupillary reflex was active. ‘Nicely . . . nicely.’

He rose to his feet and changed places with his wife.

Again he placed his hands on the child’s thigh, but now the hands were no longer gentle agents of perception, but strong and ruthless weapons. His brown fingers grasped the limb firmly. The room swam before Abner’s eyes. He went down like a stone. Mary gave a cry of alarm.

‘He’s all right,’ said the doctor, with a glance over his shoulder. ‘These big strong fellows are always the most liable to faint over a job like this. Give me a woman, any day!’

When Abner came to his senses the limb was set. A long splint with a serrated lower end had been strapped to the child’s body from armpit to heel. Her face was still flushed, but she breathed as softly as though she were lying in a natural sleep. The doctor was washing his hands and preparing to set out again. He offered Abner a medicine glass full of cold water with a dash of brandy in it.

‘What’s owing, gaffer?’ Abner asked.

The doctor looked him up and down. ‘A labourer,’ he thought, ‘with a wife and two kids: a decent-looking young fellow.’ He hated asking those people for money in the middle of a misfortune; but he had to live.

‘Oh, we’ll say five shillings,’ he said, ‘but don’t forget to send me the splint back. Dr Davies, Brampton Bryan. That will find me!’

Abner gave him two half-crowns that were loose in his pocket.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You must be careful how you carry her. The bone’s in a nice position if you don’t disturb it.’

‘How long will it take, doctor?’ Mary asked.

‘Five or six weeks with luck. Good-morning!’

For an hour or more they stayed in the surgery, visited from time to time by the doctor’s wife. Gladys awoke as from a gentle sleep. The support of the splint freed her from the spasm of the torn muscles. She rubbed her eyes and cried softly in her mother’s arms.

‘We’d best go straight to the station,’ said Abner.

So, having torn the unwilling Morgan from the material attentions of the cook, they set off along the hot road that they had travelled earlier in the day. They walked slowly, for they had at least three hours to spare before the afternoon train left Redlake station. They reached their goal at three o’clock and laid the child down flat on a bench in the waiting room, while Abner produced the sandwiches which he had cut earlier in the morning at the inn. Morgan, having fed and cried a little because his dinner did not include specimens of the famous Bron cakes, fell asleep upon his mother’s knees. Mary and Abner talked together in undertones for fear of waking the children, until the station-master entered the waiting-room with a swagger and threw up the shutter of the booking-office, peering at them with official eyes through the wire grille.

‘I reckon I’d better get the tickets,’ said Abner. He went to the window, asking for two third singles and two halves to Llandwlas. The station-master whipped the tickets out and stamped them as smartly as though a queue of a hundred trippers was waiting for him. ‘Five and four pence ha’penny,’ he said.

Abner felt for his purse: he knew that the doctor’s fee had only left him a few coppers loose in his pocket. A panic seized him. He could not find it. He turned to Mary.

‘You got my purse?’

‘No, I’ve never seen it.’

‘There was a quid in it. I must have put it in my waistcoat. Wait a moment, gaffer. . . . God! my watch is gone too!’

‘Don’t get moithered now,’ she urged.

But though he searched everywhere he could not find it. He appealed again to Mary, but she had no money, not a single penny. Abner had nothing but a handful of coppers left.

‘They must have took both of them . . . picked my pocket!’ he said.

She advised him to look again, but it was useless. ‘While we was standing up again’ those railings,’ he muttered, ‘talking to that gipsy woman. It’s gone right enough. Not a bloody cent except this!’ He threw the coppers on the sill of the booking window.

‘Had your pocket picked?’ said the station-master with a laugh. ‘It’s not the first time that’s happened at Bron Fair!’ A bell clanged in the signal box, and a porter peered at them through the door with a stupid, rustic face.

‘Can’t you let us have a ticket on strap?’ Abner asked.

‘Not likely!’ said the stationmaster. ‘I’ve heard that tale before.’

‘The little girl’s had an accident . . . broken her leg,’ Mary pleaded.

The station-master shook his head.

‘There’s not another train to-day,’ she said. ‘Have we time to try and get some money in the village?’

The porter gave a stupid laugh.

‘Train’s two minutes overdue now,’ said the station-master blandly, glancing at the clock on the booking-office wall.

‘But what can we do?’ she cried.

The train clanked in. A number of country people in their Sunday clothes, coming from the villages under the Long Mynd, swarmed on to the platform. They came laughing into the booking-office. ‘All tickets!’ shouted the porter at the door. Abner was still rummaging in his pockets when the train went out. They were left quite alone.

‘What can we do?’ Mary repeated, in a voice full of trouble.

‘We’ve got to walk, that’s all,’ said Abner.

‘But you can’t carry her all that way!’

‘It’s only eight or nine miles over the hills. We can walk that easy before dark if we take our time.’ She shook her head. ‘There’s Morgan,’ she said.

‘You’ll have to help Morgan on a bit.’