Part 4

Mrs Moseley feebly protested that it wasn’t her fault that the Wades had been told even now. ‘I don’t want to be a trouble to people,’ she said. Mrs Wade assured her that she wasn’t anything of the kind.

‘George, he says to me: “Now, Florrie, you mind you bring Eliza hack with you.” But, of course, any one could see with half a glance that that’s impossible like you are. We could have made you that comfortable, too! We ’ave a lovely little ’ouse. What with the money George is picking up, and what we’ve saved.’

By the time of the evening train on which her sister had promised to return to North Bromwich, Mrs Moseley was heartily sick of George’s name and achievements. She hadn’t really ever known her sister Florrie, and now she felt that in spite of her suave manner and affectation of kindnesses that cost nothing she had really come to spy out the nakedness of the land, to check the value of her sister’s scanty effects, to reckon just how much lay between her and the workhouse. And all the time Mrs Moseley was in a fever wondering what the house was like downstairs; whether, in her absence, dirt had accumulated; whether Tiger had made the washhouse in a mess. Indeed, when Mrs Wade departed, she crept downstairs to see for herself. ‘Whatever they says’—this was always her cry—‘they can’t say I bain’t clean!’

The upshot of this visit was revealed to Abner a week or two later, when he arrived one evening to find the faithless Tiger playing at the knee of a stranger, a girl with the city’s matte complexion, hair that was almost black with a gleam of copper in it, and brown, long-lashed eyes.

‘That your dog?’ she said, smiling. Her voice was low. Abner was now used to the high-pitched voices of Alice and her neighbours. He had never heard a woman speak so quietly.

He said ‘Yes,’ and she, with the utmost self-possession, told him that Tiger was a beauty. It wasn’t strictly true, but it gave Abner a flush of pleasure, for he loved Tiger. Then she said: ‘I’m Susan Wade. Mother sent me here to look after Auntie Liza for a week or two.’

As a matter of fact mother, warned by a snuffy shilling-doctor in Lower Sparkdale that Susan was anæmic and needed country air, had suddenly felt more than usually generous toward her sister, and sent Susan to ‘help,’ with no more than the price of her keep.

‘Afford it?’ she said, when her husband questioned her about Mrs Moseley’s ability to feed another mouth, ‘Afford it? You don’t know our Liza! She was always the quiet one of the family. And a saving kind, too. I know well enough she’s got a stocking somewhere!’

Mr Wade was not in the habit of arguing with his wife, and Mrs Moseley, when Susan arrived at Halesby with a small wicker basket containing her best dress and a bag of apples with mother’s love, was so deeply touched that when she kissed her her eyes filled with tears.

‘You’ll be lonely,’ she said, ‘with an old woman like me.’

‘I shall go out into the lanes,’ said Susan. ‘Mother told me I must get all the fresh air I can. For the blood, you know.’ That put the matter quite plainly.

Mrs Moseley assured Abner that Susan was a dear, sweet child, and such a little woman; but he never met her in Mrs Moseley’s presence, for the old lady had decided against the impropriety of Susan and himself together beholding her in bed. Awkward, at first, he found in a little while that she wasn’t as formidable as he imagined, though all his triumphs in the football field could not have given him one half of her staggering self-possession. What impressed him most about her was, without doubt, the sense of personal cleanliness that she carried with her. Susan was on a holiday, and had time for such refinements. She wore clean print dresses, while Alice and her shrill-voiced neighbours in Hackett’s Cottages, by whose appearance Abner had regulated his ideas of feminine nicety, wore, as a rule, the livery of their toil. Susan, on the other hand, lived like a lady, having no better work for her fingers than the braiding of her dark hair. In the mornings she stayed with Mrs Moseley, listening, in a kind of dream, to her aunt’s recitation of the virtues of people whom, in the days before her marriage, she had served. It seemed as if that were the time in her life toward which her thoughts now returned most happily, and the mere scraping together of its unimportant details filled her with a mild afterglow of enjoyment.

‘I remember,’ she would begin, in a weak, contented voice that was soothing in its tiredness, ‘I remember one day Mrs Willis—the first Mrs Willis that is, old Mr Hackett’s daughter down the Holloway and Mr Edward’s mother—I remember her coming into the kitchen with a beautiful basketful of cherries. Fine, black fruit they was! And she says “Hannah”—that’s the Hannah that’s still there, but I expect she’s forgotten _me_—“Hannah,” she says, “look what the master’s sent from the cherry-orchard.” They always call it the cherry-orchard, you know, up above Mawne bank, and that was a wonderful year for cherries. “We’ll make them into jam, Hannah,” she says. “And Liza”—that’s me—“will help you stone them.” _Stone them_, she says! And how we laughed to be sure! I can see her standing there now, a bit red in the face, for she was new to housekeeping and never knew you don’t stone cherries. She had a couple of black-hearts in her lips, like the game you play. A dear lady, she was! I can see her again in Mr Edward. Time passes, doesn’t it? You’ll know that some day, Susan.’

Susan tossed her head. Perhaps some day she would know, but sufficient unto this were its quiet languors and the breath of summer air drifting in at a chink in her aunt’s window from the fields towards the hills. She herself had grown up in the cramped quarter of Sparkdale, where, in summer-time the blue-brick pavements burn under a pale sky, where there is always a smell of dust and fire and rotting remnants of fruit dropped from the hawkers’ barrows into the gutter. At the back of their house in Sparkdale lay a little garden plot; but her father had always given it over to fowls that made it an arid, gritty patch littered with shed feathers. All the parks lay miles away over the streets, and the only green that Susan knew was the grass that grew within the railings of an ugly Georgian church standing in a square that had once been fashionable but was now neglected and unkempt. For this reason the sloping fields beyond Halesby were wonderful to her, and things that would have seemed common to a country child, enchanting. In the afternoon she went out walking with Tiger. There was no need for Abner to be jealous, for these walks bore no comparison in Tiger’s mind with his evening visits to rabbit-haunted banks.

Susan had come to Halesby thrilled by her first experience of romance. She had been initiated by a pale young clerk named Bagley who taught in the Sunday-school of the decayed Georgian church. It had happened at their annual ‘outing’ to Sutton Park. There, in a hot slade of larches, Mr Bagley had held her hand, a small and very sticky hand in a lace mitten. While he did so he had confided to her that his was an extremely passionate nature, and that nothing but his hold on the Anglican faith restrained him from exploiting it, and after this, immediately before tea, he had kissed her once. That had been all; for after tea Mr Bagley, weighed down no doubt by a sense of shame, had avoided her. All that remained to her of this adventure was the power of making Mr Bagley blush; and this was no very signal achievement, for Mr Bagley flushed easily and had already written privily to advertisers in the weekly papers who claimed to cure this weakness. It appeared indeed that there would never be any more between them than a bond of secret guilt; and since Susan had liked being kissed, even by Mr Bagley, she decided to continue her experiments whenever the chance came.

From the first sight of him Abner had pleased her. He was eighteen, just a year older than herself. His handsome head, his excellent teeth, his contrasting fairness, the size and strength of his body, all attracted her. She thought she would like to be alone with him and see what would happen. Therefore she began by inviting herself to accompany him on one of his evening excursions with Tiger. Abner resented the proposal, partly because he had never quite shaken off the convention of his boyhood that girls were soft and any dealings with them shameful, and partly because he was jealous of any stranger invading a world that was so particularly his own and so specially guarded from the feminine influence hitherto represented by Alice. But Susan, by her quiet determination, made it impossible for him to refuse. She had always been—after the poultry—her father’s principal pet, and when Abner put her off, she simply declined to believe that he meant it.

He grumbled and submitted. He supposed that he was doing a kindness to Mrs Moseley by taking her, and comforted himself with the thought that, after all, Susan wasn’t like other girls: a conclusion at which he arrived without difficulty, seeing that he had known no other girl but Alice. On his side, indeed, the relationship was as natural as it might be. It was Susan who found it rather a failure in the absence of sentimental developments. Abner treated her, she found, very much as if she had been a boy; and though this was the pose with which she had started their acquaintance, she didn’t want it to remain at that. Mrs Moseley’s looking-glass, in which she could see herself when she sat in her favourite place at the foot of the bed in the morning, assured her that she was much nicer to look at now than when she first came to Halesby from the city. She was plumper, her cheeks and lips were more brightly coloured and her eyes clearer. Mr Bagley would have noticed the difference. Abner, apparently, didn’t. She comforted herself with the reflection that he was too rough and rugged to realise her delicacy, that he was only a common labourer and no fit associate for a foreman’s daughter, but when she came to think of it, her social quality should really have made her more attractive to him.

She was a very direct young woman. One evening when they went out for their walk down the lane that leads to the woody basin known as Dovehouse Fields they came to a lonely stile at the end of a bridge over a tributary of the Stour, beyond which the red bank was tunnelled by many rabbits. Tiger ran forward eagerly over the bridge and began to sniff at the holes in the bank, and Abner would have followed him if Susan had not barred the way, sitting complacently on the top of the stile. She sat there in the low sunlight that warmed her cheeks, lighted gleams of copper in her hair, and made her brown eyes amber.

‘I want to stay here, Abner,’ she said.

‘Well, let us pass then,’ said Abner, thinking only of rabbits. ‘Wait till I come back.’

But she wouldn’t move from her perch. She sat there smiling and swinging her long legs. Tiger, who couldn’t realise why any scentless human should hesitate on the verge of such excitements, ran back and looked at them, making little quick noises of encouragement. Susan called him, and rather reluctantly he scuttled back over the bridge and jumped up to her knees licking her hands. She said:

‘Don’t you think I look nice, Abner?’

‘I don’t see nothing wrong with you,’ said Abner, without enthusiasm.

‘Don’t be soft!’ she said. ‘I mean, don’t you want to kiss me?’

He didn’t. He hadn’t thought about such a thing. It was she who was being soft now. And yet he couldn’t help wanting to try when he saw her smiling at him from the stile. He kissed her, very clumsily, on the cheek. He had never kissed any one before, and its softness and coolness bewildered him. But she wasn’t content with this. She took his face in both her hands and kissed his lips. He lost his head. He didn’t know what he was doing. He took her in his arms in a way that was very different from Mr Bagley’s passionate embrace. It seemed as if he wanted to kiss the life out of her. She drew back, almost frightened of him, but he wouldn’t let her go. They left Tiger to his rabbits and wandered off into the woods. When Susan returned in the darkness Mrs Moseley could not help remarking how well she looked.

This was no more than the beginning of the adventure. There was nothing lukewarm about the passion that Susan had thus precipitated. Her education, which had brought her very nearly to the level of middle-class prudishness, had not prepared her for Abner’s love-making. Mr Bagley, she reflected, would have made her timid presents of sweets and, perhaps, occupied the pew behind hers in church. He would have taken her for walks in one of the decorous parks on the other side of the city. He would have held her hand on the tram and paid her spoony compliments. Abner paid her no compliments, gave her no presents. Nor did he hold her hand: he held her whole body till she felt that her will was failing and that her only duty was to obey him. She was terrified by his violence, ashamed of responding to its crudity. She was almost sorry that she had provoked him, for now it was she who fled from him and feared to be overtaken, and though the excitement of the chase thrilled her she could never escape from the vague threat of its inevitable end. Her mother, she knew, would have approved of Mr Bagley. What would she think of this handsome young labourer, this professional footballer? She knew that she was bound to resist him as long as she could.

This was no easy matter. Abner absorbed her, gave her no chance. Once having got her he would not let her go. Her calculations of the future didn’t trouble him. Every evening when he had knocked off work he came along to Mrs Moseley’s house and called for her, and in spite of any excuse that she might make, he took her off over the fields and into the woods. Mrs Moseley unconsciously abetted him.

‘Your mother’s anxious that you should get all the fresh air you can, dear,’ she used to say, ‘and it’s a beautiful evening. I wish I could go with you!’

The old woman was sure that she could trust them together, and for three weeks of brilliant summer weather they spent the evening and the twilight in each other’s arms. Susan tried a series of tactics that she invented for her own protection. She pretended to shrink from his coarseness and from the dirt of the works in contrast with her own clean fragility. She adopted another, distant attitude, proprietary and maternal. Abner laughed at both of them. She even, in an extremity, played her last card: the attentions of the elegant Bagley. ‘You give him five minutes alone with me, and I’ll settle that!’ said Abner. ‘You’re my wench, and don’t you forget it!’

Providence, in the shape of a calamity, saved her. Her mother sprained an ankle in the fowl-pen, and wired for Susan to return to North Bromwich at once. The telegram came while Abner was at work, and when he reached Mrs Moseley’s cottage in the evening, Susan was gone. She left a carefully written note behind her in which she addressed him as Mr Fellows and said that she hoped he would always think of her as kindly as she did of him. She said it would be nice to get back to North Bromwich after so long in the country, but carefully omitted to supply him with her address. At first Abner was stunned, then angry. He couldn’t put up with Mrs Moseley’s mild meanderings. He hadn’t the heart to go out into the desecrated woods. When Tiger leapt at him, in anticipation of a walk, he kicked the dog in the ribs. The football season would not begin for another month, and since he had nothing to do he returned to Hackett’s Cottages. Alice, who had kept an eye full of jealous suspicions on him for the last month, received him. She saw that something had bowled him over. It gave her a secret satisfaction.

‘Early to-night, Abner,’ she said.

He would not answer her.

‘Whatever’s up with you?’ she said. ‘You’m all moithered.’ And then, with a laugh, she answered her own question by another: ‘Too much sweethearting?’ in a tone that pretended to be merely bantering but in reality carried a sting. He knew that faint touch of malice in her so well that it made him flare up at once with: ‘I don’t want no bloody girls.’ It didn’t strike him that her malice might be taken as a compliment, and when she laughed at his reply he walked out of the house in a temper.

He didn’t know where to go; but taking his father’s example he wandered down to the Royal Oak, where he sat drinking pint after pint with one of his football friends and a couple of women. At closing time the whole party were turned out together and walked down into Halesby. It was nearly daybreak when he returned to Hackett’s Cottages, still the worse for liquor, and blundered upstairs to bed. He slept so heavily that he did not hear the Mawne bull in the morning. At ten o’clock a feeling that some one was in the room aroused him. He opened his eyes to a blinding light and saw that Alice had placed a cup of hot tea at his bedside. He drank it so eagerly that he scalded his mouth.

The Fifth Chapter

THIS sudden outburst was sufficiently violent to satisfy Abner that for the present he could do without liquor or women. It wasn’t very difficult to forget Susan, for she had really been more trouble than she was worth. The affair would never have begun but for her provocation, and since she hadn’t the pluck to go through with it, Abner satisfied himself by exaggerating her insipidity in his own mind.

After the first sting of malice with which she had sent him off on the drink, Alice showed her repentance, first symbolised by the waiting cup of tea, in a hundred attentions and kindnesses. He never told her about his affair with Susan, but she appeared to understand more or less what had happened and even to sympathise with him in his violent methods of getting over it. She made him so comfortable at Hackett’s Cottages that there was no more talk of his finding other lodgings. In the early days of her married life the responsibilities of the house and its two male inhabitants had been too much for her inexperience, and the coming of the baby in the first year had made her abandon all attempts to keep pace with domestic demands. In the second year she regained her strength and a great deal of the physical charm that had originally attracted John Fellows. The baby, a normal, healthy child, had also prospered, and now that he was weaned slept away most of the day on his mother’s bed upstairs or in his cradle in the kitchen. Nothing marred the smoothness of domestic life at Number Eleven but the uncertainty of John Fellows’s temper and his periodical bouts of drinking; and even in these emergencies Alice’s increasing knowledge of life and her absorption in the care of Abner and her baby sustained her.

The strangest part of the whole business was that Abner and his father never fell foul of one another. Since that one dangerous moment on the morning of the baby’s birth there had never been any danger of this. It was as if they had agreed to go on their own ways. Abner kept clear of his father because his natural love of peace and increasing concern for the convenience of Alice made him anxious to avoid a quarrel; and John Fellows condoned his son’s unreasonable abstinence from liquor on the grounds of his success in the football field. Although he never said so he was proud of Abner’s prowess, gathering indeed a little reflected glory from it among his mates at the pit and his boon companions at the pub.

It was fortunate for Alice that her family was so small; for it meant not only that she was unburdened with housework, but also that the question of money never troubled her. John Fellows never did anything by halves. He worked as hard as he drank, and since all colliers are paid by piecework, he earned enough to keep the house going and himself in liquor. Abner also was well paid for the work he did at Mawne, and in addition to this received a pound a week from the United Football Club during the season. Out of these earnings he paid Alice eighteen shillings for his board and keep, and this, together with her husband’s weekly allowance, enabled her to make the house exactly what she wanted. There seemed to be no reason why this happy state of affairs should not go on for ever, or, at any rate, until Abner found some other wretched girl who took his fancy. This was the event that Alice dreaded most, and for the present Abner’s life was too full of work and training to make it probable.

They spent most of their evenings together while John Fellows was down at the Royal Oak and the baby placidly sleeping in its cradle. They were the happiest of Alice’s life, for they realised all her ideals of what domesticity should be. The little room was cheerful with firelight and always warm, for John Fellows had the privilege of buying coal for next to nothing at the pit. On the table she used to spread a cloth of bright red chequers. A lamp in the middle of it cast a mild and homely light. Alice would sit on one side of the fire, knitting woollen vests for the baby or mending the men’s clothes. She sat in her rocking chair, enthroned with content, glancing from time to time at the sleeping baby, at the shining brass, on which she particularly prided herself, at all the tokens of comfort with which she was surrounded. The door of Number Eleven was ill-made or warped with age so that a draught blew in beneath it towards the fire; but Abner had arranged a curtain of red rep on a running string above it, so that the draught was not felt and the swaying of the curtain only emphasised the contrast between the winter without and that glowing cosiness within. All these things that surrounded her were her own, her world. She would not have changed one of them. The glances that she gave to them were proprietary and richly satisfied.

Sometimes, in the same way, she would let her eyes fall on Abner: a big, loose-limbed fellow, over six feet high, with the closely cropped hair of the footballer and a yellow moustache. In the evenings at home he wore no collar and the firelight played on his powerful neck and lit the fair down on his arm when he sat in his shirtsleeves. Even with him her glance was proprietary. He also belonged to her, and she mended his clothes with the same delight and devotion that she experienced in making the ridiculous garments of her son. She rejoiced in his beauty and in his strength. Perhaps, sometimes, the physical comparison that he suggested with John Fellows made her admiration more poignant.

Usually these long evenings were lonely. At times, however, Alice’s father, the timekeeper at Mawne, would come stumping up on his wooden leg and take a seat before the fire between them. He was very fond of Alice. He would pinch her cheek and hold her arm and make her blush by asking every time he came when she was going to give him another grandson. He was a poor old man. His pay, like most pensions, was inadequate, and the cottage on the edge of the works which the company allowed him rent-free was old and so damp that he suffered from rheumatism, particularly, as he always said with a chuckle, in the leg that he had lost. Here Alice’s younger sister, Elsie, kept house for him. She had never been a favourite of his and was a bad manager. She and her sister, who had always quarrelled before Alice’s marriage, were now, for reasons which Alice attributed to jealousy, no longer on speaking terms. Mr Higgins always tried to gloss this unfortunate circumstance with one of his little jokes.

‘When I come up here,’ he said, ‘Abner ought to go and keep our Elsie company.’