Part 26

That night she heard the gang from the pipe-track discussing the accident at Bron, winking at each other over the way in which the story had come out. They laughed without condemning. To them it seemed no more than a good joke. When her father’s back was turned the Gunner began to pull her leg about it; but she laughed back at him, giving him coarseness for coarseness, and went on wiping her glasses, humming to herself the refrain of a pantomime tune. She heard herself singing. Her voice sounded toneless and unreal. When she went to bed she could not sleep for fretting. Abner had not been near her for more than a week, and she did not dare to take the risk of sending him a message at his work. She knew that she wanted him. She was not going to lose him without a fight.

Next afternoon she was free, and knowing that Abner would be safely at work, she dressed herself elaborately in her best clothes and a pair of new shoes and set off boldly for Wolfpits. Her hands trembled and her frock was drenched with perspiration as she dressed.

‘Where are you off to, got up like that?’ her father called after her.

‘Can’t I dress as I like, dad?’ she said, with a toss of her head.

‘There’s tempest about. You’ll get soaked to the skin!’ he shouted.

She felt as if she were soaked to the skin already. The long spell of rainless weather had reached its climax, and the delaine frock that she had chosen had been cut for elegance rather than for comfort. The sun went in, leaving a white and heavy sky. The leaves of elm and chestnut drooped in the heat as with the weight of their own dust. Her new shoes were too small for her, and by the time that she had toiled up to the bridge over the Folly, she wished that she had not come. A yaffle mocked her from the edge of the wood. Swallows were hawking low down over the dust of the road. An awful, oppressive silence weighed on the land. She hesitated, then turned painfully up the Wolfpits avenue, but when she had almost decided to turn back, the thunder broke above her and big drops spattered the dust. The thought of the new tulle in her hat made her run for shelter. The trees of the avenue gave a long sigh and the rain swished down in torrents. Round the corner she saw Mrs Mamble running about, like a woman possessed, after the washing that she had spread on the bushes to dry.

‘Slip into the porch, miss,’ she cried, catching sight of Susie, ‘or you’ll be drownded.’ Then she called to Mary, who was ironing in the kitchen: ‘There’s a young lady got caught in the storm, Mrs Malpas!’

‘Please come inside and wait till it’s over,’ Mary cried, glancing through the window.

Susie entered. ‘Take a seat,’ Mary said, and went on with her ironing. One side of her face was flushed with the heat of the iron that she had tested by holding it to her cheek. It made her look as if she were angry or embarrassed. The kitchen was full of the sweet, scorched smell of linen. Susie, sitting nervously on the edge of the seat to which she had been shown, felt that the falseness of her position must be made clear. She was out to fight, and not without courage.

‘My name is Hind . . . Susan Hind,’ she said. ‘From the Pound House, you know.’

Mary stopped ironing and looked at her. She began to wish that she had not turned herself out so elegantly. She felt that she must look like a street-woman.

‘Yes . . . I thought I knew you,’ Mary said.

‘I came over to speak to you.’ Susie hesitated: ‘About Mr Fellows . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘There’s a tale going round . . .’ She faltered. She wished that she were not sitting on the edge of the chair, that Mary were not taller than herself. There was something unfair and consciously superior in the woman’s plain white apron. More than this, she had the subtle, inexplicable advantage of being a married woman with children . . . even if her husband had deserted her. Mary put down her iron on its stand and looked her full in the eyes. Now her cheeks were equally flushed. Susie wished that she would speak, even if she were only to repeat her provocative ‘Yes?’ She took fright suddenly, stood up, and plunged.

‘It’s not fair!’ she cried. ‘You know it’s not fair! You, a married woman, that have had your life and a couple of children! But as soon as your husband’s well out of sight you must go running after another man. Take his money—that’s one thing! But take him—that’s another! I suppose you’re the kind that can’t make yourself happy unless you’re making some man soft on you . . . so they can hang round you and you play the lady on them! Don’t you imagine I don’t know the dog’s life you give George! And now you’ve got hold of your lodger—lodger, I says!—and turned him crazy. Call yourself a lady! Doesn’t every one know what your father was? We all know about that. George himself told me. And I can tell you what you are, straight. You’re nothing better than a whore on the streets if the truth was known.’

Mary trembled. ‘Don’t shout so! Don’t shout so!’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘What I mean?’ cried Susie hysterically. ‘What I mean? Why, going about the country in strange places and laying about with single men. That’s what I mean. Call yourself a married woman . . .’

‘You’re wrong . . . you’re quite wrong!’

‘Am I wrong then? I know whose word I’d sooner take: Mr Williams’s and Mr Badger’s or yourn! I know that was the first time it came out, but that makes no difference to what every one in the district has known for a fact these months. But I’ll tell you one thing—and don’t you forget it!—you’re not going to take Abner off me. Not if I kill him first. And I’m not talking wild, understand. I mean it. If I have to shame you to your face I’m not going to let him go. Shame . . .’ she laughed. ‘That’s a fine word to use for the likes of you!’

She gave a gasp for breath, then, with a flash of hopeless hatred, as though she were searching the room for something that her violence might appropriately destroy, she went out blindly into the rain.

Mary stood rigidly at her ironing-table. A flash of lightning ripped the sky in front of her window, nearly blinding her, and her lips uttered a cry. Mrs Mamble ran in with her skirt thrown over her head, for she was frightened of thunder.

‘My!’ she cried from under the skirt. ‘My, what a downpour!’ She looked out timidly. ‘Well, I never! She’s gone!’

‘Yes,’ said Mary, with a helpless laugh. ‘She’s gone!’

‘Gone? Why, the girl must be mad!’

Again Mary laughed at the wide astonishment in Mrs Mamble’s eyes. Another flash followed and the old woman wrapped up her head again, waiting for the thunder. It came with a crash, right overhead, and the house shook. Mary suddenly remembered the children, who were playing in the parlour.

‘Do go and see to them, Mrs Mamble,’ she said. ‘There’s a dear.’

She herself could not move. She went on folding her linen. It seemed as if she must find some mechanical task for her hands to do. In a moment Mrs Mamble returned to say that the children were not in the least frightened. She kept dodging in and out of the house all afternoon for fear of the storm returning and catching her unawares, telling of the damage that the rain might have done to the hay lying out in the meadows or to the standing corn.

‘But there’s no denying that it’s wanted,’ she said inconsequently.

By the time that Abner left work that evening the storm had rolled away, rumbling over the treetops of Bringewood Chase. All day he had worked under the heavy sky, breathing an air that was dead and choked with dust. Now the vault was clear and brilliant as that of an evening in spring. The smell of dust rose from the road, blackbirds were singing, and from the pale, steaming hayfields waves of sweetness drifted across his path. His steps were light and his heart happy.

Mary received him as usual and gave him his tea. He laughed with her over the violence of the storm and asked her gaily if the doctor had been to take the splint off Gladys’s leg.

‘We must put by a shillin’ or two for that,’ he said. For the moment he was so full of his own content that he had scarcely noticed her preoccupation; but when he mentioned money she made a quick, instinctive movement, as though she wanted to speak and to refuse it. Little by little he began to realise that she was trying to avoid him and sometimes leaving his questions unanswered.

‘What’s up with you, missus?’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ she replied. ‘Nothing at all that I know of.’

But her denial did not convince him. All the evening he tried to guess what could have upset her, but she evaded him, pretending that she was her normal self. He knew better. Even when she spoke to the children or to Mrs Mamble, who came in to talk about the havoc of the storm and to give them the news that a sheep had been struck by lightning on Williams’s farm, Mary was listless and dull.

Abner used her gently. He knew that women must have their moods, and that a man needed to be patient with them if he would be happy; but day after day now passed without any change in her attitude. Since the discovery of his own passion that he had made by the sea-crows’ pool, it had been hard enough as it was for him to live with her on ordinary terms; but now, even though he humoured her, she was distant with him.

He tried to make her explain herself. She only shook her head. It seemed, indeed, as if a single day had thrown them back into all the awkwardness of his early life at Wolfpits, and that she had suddenly taken it into her head to upset the convention under which they had agreed to live. Most of all, she avoided him whenever he spoke of money, and when he brought her his wages at the end of the week she left them lying on the table as though touching them would have burned her fingers. If he had not loved the woman, and her children too, he would have broken away in accordance with his nature. As it was, he hung on, sore and bewildered, wondering what new coldness she could inflict upon him.

Another shock awaited her. One day, when Abner was away at work, the postman bicycled up to Wolfpits and handed her a letter. This was so rare an event at Wolfpits that the man waited, as country postmen, who also act as interpreters, often do, to hear its contents.

‘You’ll see by the postmark it’s come from Shrewsbury,’ he said.

‘Yes, so I see,’ she replied, thrusting it into the pocket of her apron.

She had already recognised George’s freehand writing. He went away, but she kept the letter in her pocket unopened. She dared not open it; and when at last she did so, the words sent a chill over all her body.

‘_MY DEAR WIFE_,’—_she read, shivering_—‘_Although I may be doing time I’m not yet dead that I know of_. _They say that love is blind_, _but don’t you go imagining that other people haven’t got eyes_.

‘_Your loving husband_, ‘_GEORGE_.’

She was seized with a pain that had scarcely abated when Abner came home at night. She could not bring herself to speak to him. She desired, passionately, to show him the letter, but shame would not let her do so. He, in his turn, was sick of the wretchedness of their present relation, and when the children had been put to bed, he told her so in words that he had chosen for their roughness. She stared at him from the other side of the supper table with grief and resentment in her eyes.

‘If it’s as bad as that, what makes you stay here?’ she said slowly.

‘I like that!’ he replied. ‘You know as well as I do.’

She took fright at this, for she wasn’t sure of his meaning, though she knew in her heart what she wanted him to mean. She was afraid that he would guess at her unspoken admission.

‘_I_ don’t keep you here,’ she said.

He got up and walked the room. A hay-moth hurled itself against the shade of the lamp with a sharp ringing sound and fell crippled on the tablecloth.

‘It’s hurt,’ she cried. ‘Kill it!’

Abner crushed the insect with his thumb and threw it in the fireplace. The coppery bloom came off on his fingers. For a moment she was hypnotised watching him. Then she recovered her senses.

‘I don’t keep you. There’s no need for you to stay in every night,’ she said.

‘No. There bain’t. I’m damned if there be!’ he replied.

He picked up his cap and walked out of the room. She nearly ran after him to thrust George’s letter into his hand. But she was too late. ‘So much the better,’ she thought. She felt that she had been saved from some calamity.

He set off, walking furiously through the mellow evening, trying to cool his blood with violent exertion as instinctively as an animal eats grass. By nightfall he had reached the remote valley, nine miles away in folds of the Forest of Clun, whither his friends the cloggers had returned in the spring. He found their canvas pitched in a coomb under high sheepwalks, and Wigan Joe made him as welcome as ever. They sat out in the soft, moonless night, talking and drinking beer. It was like old times for Abner to hear Joe reeling off stories one after another in his flat Lancashire dialect. He lolled there listening till the company grew drowsy. There was no question of his returning to Wolfpits that night, for the sky drooped like a pall of velvet on the earth and he could never have found his way. He turned in with the others on a pile of dried bracken, waking at dawn to set off again toward Chapel Green.

For a few hours he had shed his restlessness, but when he reached Wolfpits in the evening the sense of restraint descended on him again. He felt that Mary was watching him, wondering where he had been. Her eyes were tragic, and, as he thought, reproachful.

This only irritated him. He couldn’t be bothered with her moods. When, speaking to Mrs Mamble, he happened to mention that he had walked over in the evening to the sloggers’ workings, she looked at him with such a searching suspicion that he could not contain himself.

‘What’s up with you?’ he said. ‘Do you think I’m codding you?’

She looked away without answering.

‘There’s no need to believe me if you don’t want to,’ he said.

And what the hell did it matter to her where he went or what he did? If he were to leave her to herself for a bit perhaps she’d begin to realise that he was useful, and that it wouldn’t pay her to treat him like dirt. It was time she had a lesson!

He spent the next evening with Mick Connor in a pub at Lesswardine, mixing his drinks, standing treat recklessly. He had to borrow six shillings from Mick to pay his score. It pleased him to think how Mary would stare at his money next Saturday when she found it six bob short . . . she, who was too proud to pick it up when he gave it her!

At the yellow turnpike house outside Lesswardine their paths diverged; and this was unfortunate, for it was easier to walk arm in arm. Mick left him; but as soon as he found himself alone the vision of Mary returned to him: Mary, as he had seen her and desired her, sitting pale on the border of the pool a fortnight ago. In his perverse and drunken mind he hated her. It seemed to him that she had been making a fool of him, alternately alluring and rejecting.

He walked along, sweating violently, in the direction of Mainstone, wishing to God he’d never known the damned woman. Women . . . and yet a lusty man of his age couldn’t live without women! It was against nature to live without women, and a man was a fool if he did so. He went hot and cold, thrilled with voluptuous sensations. He laughed at himself, and staggered up to a gate at the side of the road to light his pipe. He broke three matches and then discovered that they were damp and would not strike. He remembered indefinitely that Mick had upset a pint of beer into his pocket. He cursed the matches and Mick together.

A light breeze moved above him, and as in the distance he heard a sound like that of a gentle shower falling on leaves in June: a sound that meant something to his memory. He became suddenly aware that he was standing at that moment on the outskirts of Mainstone village, immediately beneath a big poplar tree. A dozen times he had stood there in the shadow waiting for the light to go out in the windows of the Pound House, for the steps of Bastard to pass him, for the moment when he might safely steal across to Susie’s door.

His pulse quickened. Some hidden instinct must have made him stop there. No light could be seen, but there, in the darkness, was a woman whom he could have for the asking. He pulled himself together, and a moment later was standing by the outhouse door. He threw a clod at her window-pane. She had better not try putting him off to-night! If he had to climb in at her window she must come to him. He fretted with impatience.

But he had not long to wait. In a few minutes she had opened the back door. He heard the door scrape, but it was so dark that he could not see her. He put out his hands, groping in the darkness, and found her, warm and breathing.

‘I thought you were never coming again,’ she whispered.

He took her in his arms and clothed her in kisses. She clung to him, breathing softly, while his kisses enveloped her. His misery left him, vanished miraculously in the darkness. In the black confusion of his thoughts it seemed to him as if he were kissing Mary Malpas.

The Twentieth Chapter

A STRANGE fate awaited this renewal of passion. Over the border in Wales, where many dark and violent things are born, a sultry flame had been kindled about this time in the heart of a Wesleyan local preacher named Evan Hughes. He was a Montgomery peasant, a carpenter by trade, on whom, brooding over the historical sanctity of his calling, an inspiration had fallen. He preached in the chapel Bethesda, in the hamlet Llandewi Waterdine. He spoke in the dialect of his fellow-workmen; his words were ludicrous and pathetic; but the fire that scorched his heart was in them, so that men and women rode over the mountains on their ponies to hear him and many professed themselves converted. Why, or to what they were converted it would be hard to say, unless it were that the isolation of their lives laid them open to long broodings on sin and on salvation, and that knowing, as all men know, that they were sinful, they could not be happy in solitude till they were saved.

The unconverted said maliciously that Evan Hughes had been shocked into sanctity by proceedings of affiliation and a maintenance order. However this may have been, his preaching was on chastity of the body, and more particularly of the bodies of women, a doctrine that was acceptable, for the most obvious reasons, to married men with wives younger than themselves, and on sentimental grounds to young unmarried girls. The flame spread quickly through these green shoots, and the dry, withered twigs went up with a crackle. Women of sixty years and older stood up on the chapel floor and prayed God to grant them continence. Evan Hughes, with a singular lack of humour, hailed them as souls plucked from hell and greeted them as sisters. Thus, having cleansed the Kerry Hills and the borders of Clun, he set his eyes, like any spiritual freebooter, on the English border, cursing the fatness and laxness of the Teme valley so violently and with such free quotations from the prophet Jeremiah, that the local circuit invited him to conduct a revival from their pulpits.

First he came to Chapel Green, and naturally enough converted old Mrs Malpas, who was always on the side of the angels. She sat under him with tears streaming from her eyes for the sins of her friends, and afterward had the honour of putting him up at the Buffalo in spite of his prejudices against the licensed trade. On this, the first Sunday of the revival, the Chapel Green Methodists achieved the authentic shiver, and the vicar of Mainstone, who had heard all about it, made a reconnaissance of his parish, shaking his head and warning his people against the influence of unhealthy fanatics.

‘It’s a crime,’ he said, ‘putting such ideas into young people’s minds. We don’t want that sort of thing in the country. Mainstone is a clean parish. Apart from that unfortunate young Mrs Malpas at Wolfpits there is scarcely an . . . unsavoury household in it.’

In spite of this official discouragement, Evan Hughes increased. The revival, unlike those epidemics of disease which afflict the body, spread steadily eastward. Chapel Green with its sober, bucolic population, had made the mildest of beginnings. At Mainstone half the vicar’s congregation thronged the chapel. People walked over from Lesswardine on the Sunday evening in little laughing groups and returned in silence with a Roman segregation of the sexes. Those who scoffed had such a bad time of it that they held their tongues.

Among the victims of this collective exaltation was Susie Hind. No doubt the violence of her renewed passion for Abner had thrown her into an emotional state. Abner was now absorbed in it, and content to be absorbed, seeing that in this way he purchased forgetfulness; but Susie had to run the risk of discovery or worse until her nerves were all on edge.

At first Abner could not make out what was the matter with her. One Sunday night she cried and cried in his arms and would not tell him why. For the rest of the week she brooded on the extremity of her sin; then, with the same queer directness that had driven her to confront Mary Malpas some time before, she sought an interview with the evangelist and laid her confession before him. He turned away from her.

‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘I cannot hear these things. My ears are full of them. “_Go and sin no more_!” and remember me when you pray.’

She went home burning but humiliated, and gave herself up to an ecstasy of self-abasement in prayer. When the men joked with her in the bar at night she would not listen to them. Next Sunday she went again to the chapel and wept. She knew that after dark that night Abner would come and call her. She loved him, but it seemed to her that her immortal soul was more precious than mortal love, and here were two souls to be saved. She lay stiff in bed waiting for his signal, compelling herself to be cold. A clod struck the window-pane. She clasped her hands in an attitude of prayer and lay like a stone. Again he signalled to her. She dared not lie there any longer for fear he should become impatient and waken her father. She slipped on some clothes and came to the door.

‘I can’t see you, Abner,’ she whispered hurriedly. ‘I can’t let you in. I can’t . . . don’t ask me.’

He thought she had taken leave of her senses. ‘What the devil’s up with you?’ he said.

She shook her head and would have closed the door on him, but he put his foot in it. ‘Don’t!’ she said. ‘Oh, don’t!’

He had no intention of being put off like this. He tried to kiss her, but she kept him at arm’s length, and when he had done his best with persuasions and still could get no sense from her, he became angry and raised his voice. Now genuine fear was added to her other emotions, and in order that he should not awaken her father she consented at last to follow him out into the lane. He was on the point of agreeing when it flashed into his mind that this was only a ruse to get him away from the door so that she might lock it in his face.

The only explanation that suggested itself to him was that she might be expecting another lover. ‘No, you don’t my girl!’ he said. ‘You’ll come along with me.’