This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler

THE
BLACK DIAMOND

by

FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG

LONDON AND GLASGOW
COLLINS’ CLEAR-TYPE PRESS

Copyright

Manufactured in Great Britain

TO
M. Compton Mackenzie
GRATEFULLY : AFFECTIONATELY

The First Chapter

Abner Fellows was born in the front bedroom of Number Eleven Hackett’s Cottages, a four-roomed house of old brickwork that stood in the middle of a row of twenty-one, set diagonally across a patch of waste land on the outskirts of Halesby. The terrace was fifty years old, and looked older, for the smoke and coal dust of the neighbouring pits had corroded the surface of the bricks, while the ‘crowning in’ of the earth’s crust above the gigantic burrowings of the Great Mawne Colliery had loosened the mortar between them and even produced a series of long cracks that clove the house-walls from top to bottom like conventional forked lightning. One of these lines of cleavage split the face of Number Eleven and ran through the middle of a plaster plaque on which the pious owner of the cottages had carved the words:—

ISAIAH HACKETT:
GLORY BE TO GOD, 1839.

This plaque, together with the metal medallion of a fire insurance corporation and two iron bosses connected with the system of stays by which Mr Hackett’s descendants had tried to save their property from collapsing, made the Fellows’s house the most decorative feature of the row, and gave Abner a feeling of enviable distinction in his childhood long before he knew what they meant.

His father, John Fellows, like the rest of the tenants, was a miner. He had chosen to live in Hackett’s Cottages because they lay nearer to the colliery than any other buildings in Halesby and were within a reasonable distance of the cross-roads where stood his favourite public-house, the Lyttleton Arms. Hackett’s Cottages, in fact, hung poised, as it were, between two magnetic poles: the pit where the money was earned and the pub where it was spent. To remain there contented would have implied a nice equilibrium, had it not been that eastward of the cross-roads and the Lyttleton Arms ran the Stourton Road, with houses on both sides of it, and amongst them the Lord Nelson, the Greyhound, and the Royal Oak. Next to the Royal Oak came the entrance of the Mawne United football ground, and since John Fellows’s passion for football was only exceeded by his devotion to ‘four-penny,’ the pull of the colliery was hopelessly overbalanced by these delights.

At the side of the Royal Oak, on Saturday afternoons, the entrance to the football ground swarmed with black coats; and the crowd of small boys, of whom Abner made one, peering through cracks in the match-board palings could see nothing but the backs of other black coats, or perhaps, above the tilted heads of the spectators, the sphere of a football leaping gaily into the dreary gray that passes for heaven in a black-country winter. It cost threepence (ladies and children half-price) to enter the football ground, and since John Fellows never wasted the price of a pint on any one but himself, Abner had to be content with an occasional sight of the football soaring above this or that quarter of the field of play and with the hoarse waves of encouragement or derision that went up from the crowd inside.

Later, in the happy days before his father’s second marriage and the second family, John Fellows used to take the boy along with him to the football field on Saturday afternoons, or rather Abner would trail behind him as far as the gate and then pass through the turnstile in front of him, wedged between his father’s trousers and those of the man in front, breathing perpetually the acrid smell of oily coal-dust which he accepted as the natural odour of humanity. Whenever he could get himself washed in time John Fellows made a point of going early to the ground so that he might place himself in his favourite position, immediately behind the nearer goal-posts, so close to the net that he could talk with George Harper, the Mawne United goalkeeper, who, before this translation, had been a collier working in the same shift as himself, or under-mine the self-possession of the visiting ‘custodian’ with jeers and abuse.

Even at these close quarters, where Abner felt the pressure of his father’s protecting legs and heard him spitting into the net over his head, there was no conversation between them. John Fellows kept his speech for his mates, for George Harper, or, on occasion, for the referee; but at half-time, when most of the players ran in to the pavilion and the ball was free, he would give Abner a poke in the back and his neighbours a wink, and the lad would slip under the wire roping and plunge into the mêlée of boys who were scrambling for its possession. Once Abner had dribbled the ball away from the others and sent a shot at the goal which George Harper, who had stayed behind talking, moved mechanically to stop, and missed; a ripple of laughter had spread round the field, and when Abner ran back under the ropes with his face flaming, his father pulled him in by the ear and said with his clay pipe between his teeth: ‘Damn’ little blood-worm yo’ are! Bain’t he, George?’ And George Harper, staring down at him with his big, melancholy eyes, said, ‘Ah . . .’

Next day, as a reward for his prowess, John Fellows took Abner with him on his afternoon walk, past the cherry orchard, past the stationary cages at the pithead and the silent engine-house of the Great Mawne Colliery, down between the smoking spoil-banks to the bridge over the Stour which separates the two counties of Worcester and Stafford, in either of which the police of the other are providentially powerless. Here, on a cinder pathway shaded by the sooty chestnuts of Mawne Hall, there was racing between the limber fawn-skinned whippets that the miners fancy: timid, quivering creatures, with their slim waists bound in flannel jackets like frail women in their stays. It was thrilling to watch them slip from the leash, race with their pointed heads converging, and roll over at the finish in a cloud of cinder-dust.

On that Sunday the police of Staffordshire were quiescent. George Harper was there, his massive thighs bulging striped cashmere trousers. There was joking between George and Abner’s father about the goal that the boy had kicked. John Fellows won five shillings on a dog called Daisy, and Abner trailed home behind him at six o’clock, when the steam in the engine-house was beginning to hiss from its exhaust in preparation for Monday’s work. John Fellows retired to the Lyttleton Arms with his five shillings and spent a dozen more, while Abner went home, too tired to play and clammed for his tea. It surprised him to find number eleven locked up, though he ought to have remembered that before they went out dog-racing his father had left the key with Mrs Moseley, who did the housework, and cooked their dinner; but when he walked round to Mrs Moseley’s he found that she had gone to church and forgotten to take the key out of her pocket. He tramped back home again and fell asleep on the doorstep.

In later years, when the conflict with his father began, he always remembered these untroubled days with regrets: the Saturday football matches; the Sunday whippet-racing and terrier-fighting, together with certain afternoon walks along the tow-path of the canal, where the bodies of puppies that were old enough to be taxed floated into beds of loose-strife and willow-weed, and jack-bannocks hung swimming in shoals through the yellow water. In all these memories John Fellows was a benignant figure; and this one would hardly have guessed, for John Fellows was not prepossessing. He was a short man with a low-set head and an immense shoulder-girdle. His eyes were small and lost in deep orbits, so that when his face was ingrained with carbon the white of the sclerotics was intensified in a way that made them seem grudging and malignant. Walking home in his pit clothes, bow-legged and with the dazed and hampered gait which is the mark of men who labour underground, he always looked as if he had been drinking. Generally he had been drinking, but at his soberest he was an ugly customer, and the blue enamelled tin pot in which he carried his tea struck one as a dangerous weapon.

Poverty their household never knew. John Fellows could reckon on picking up his three pounds a week, and spent every penny of it. There was always meat in the house, and Mrs Moseley knew better than to serve him with food that was not freshly cooked. In his way he was an epicure. Although the Lyttleton Arms was the nearest public-house, Abner would often be sent out with a jug to fetch his father’s supper beer from the Greyhound, or even from the Royal Oak, next the football ground, where they kept Astill’s Guaranteed Old Stingo. John Fellows had no use for bottled beer. Bottled belly-ache, he called it. He rarely smoked a pipe, for lights were forbidden in the pit, and the habit of chewing plug-tobacco had made him prefer his nicotine neat.

He was shaved once a week, on Saturday nights, and upon this function depended another of Abner’s special joys: the privilege of going with him to the barber’s shop, a low, boarded room heated by gas-jets and the breath of expectant, expectorant men. Here, wedged upon a bench at his father’s side, he would read the comic papers that Mr Evans provided for his customers. Some were printed on pink paper and some on green; and while Abner absorbed the adventures of two alliterative tramps, he would hear the sing-song of Mr Evans, a Welshman from some remote Radnorshire village, as he talked to the victim of his razor and the other waiting customers. Mr Evans was a great authority on local football, and subscribed to a news-agency that sent him a sheet of half-time and final scores long before the evening edition of the North Bromwich Argus arrived. His knowledge of football politics and personalities was all the more remarkable because Saturday was his busiest day, and for that reason he could never see a game of football played. Abner envied him this abstract knowledge of the game; but more than Mr Evans he envied a small boy with pink face and plastered hair who, wearing a long white jacket, lathered the customers’ chins, and when Mr Evans had scraped them, sprayed their faces with bay-rum. At last, with dramatic suddenness, this entertainment was withdrawn. John Fellows developed a rash on his chin which Mr Ingleby, the chemist, declared to be barber’s itch, and Mr Evans became the object of his most particular hatred.

‘That bloody Welshman!’ said John Fellows. ‘I reckon shaving’s a dirty business.’

And so he grew a beard . . . but he wouldn’t let that Evans trim it, not he!

All Abner’s early pleasures were in some way or other related to his father. It was natural that John Fellows should take a pride in his only child. He didn’t talk to him much—a man who chews tobacco has better work for his jaws than talking—but he was sometimes amused by his company and proud of his sturdiness and capacity for mischief. He rejoiced that his son was a ‘bloodworm’ much in the same way as his mates rejoiced that their terriers were good fighters. He liked him to be hard, and boasted that Abner could take the strap (as he called it) without yelling. Indeed there was something to boast about in this, for the miner chastened his son with a brown leather belt which, as the buckle witnessed, had once belonged to a member of the South Staffordshire Regiment. This belt, he sometimes affirmed, had been all round the world before it came into his possession; but Abner was too well acquainted with its other qualities to pursue the history of this.

In spite of his weekly lickings Abner’s life was generally happy. He had no cares for the future. He knew that when his schooling was over he would be sent to work at the pit. He wouldn’t be sorry for that, for it seemed to him quite natural to work underground, to earn big money and spend it freely. When that day came he felt that he and his father would be able to drink together on equal terms. By the time that he was fourteen he was already taller than John Fellows, and meant to grow a lot taller still. He was going to be strong and to learn boxing: perhaps, in a few years’ time, he would be able to strip and fight in one of the boxing-booths at the wakes: perhaps, in stripes of chocolate and yellow, he might even play football for Mawne United and talk like a brother with the great George Harper.

In this manly, indefinite future, women had no place. He had never had a sister; as far as he remembered he had never had a mother; and so he followed the example of his father whose domineering attitude towards the widow, Mrs Moseley, was beyond any doubt correct, while Mrs Moseley, who had her living to make, accepted it without protest, as a woman should do. Towards girls themselves Abner felt no positive hostility, though he passed them in the street as a well-mannered dog passes cats, with a solid appreciation of their potential evil; but for members of his own sex who dallied with emasculating tendernesses he and the boys with whom he played were full of scorn and even of active malice. The worst libel that any of his companions could suffer was a chalk inscription on his own back door of the words: ‘Tommy So-and-so goes with Cissy Something-else.’

Abner and his friends even went so far as to pester these votaries of passion in their own most sheltered haunts. Above the pithead of the Great Mawne Colliery runs a lane skirting the ancient cherry orchard of Old Mawne Hall. It is short: at the end of it the pit-mound stands up black, and over beyond the Stour valley a desert of blackness stretches westward, with smoke-stacks thronging thick as masts of shipping in a harbour. Over its hedges, in the dusk, light clouds of cherry-blossom may be seen, but even before the wind has tumbled the petals down they are blackened by smuts from the colliery chimney. This lane, indeed, was a decorous walking place where one might hear a patter of moving feet and low laughter on any evening in May; but lower down the slope, past the colliery, it turned into another, shadowed with hot-smelling elder, stunted hawthorns and oak-apple trees, which had a darker reputation. Dipping down over the hillside this lane climbs back upon itself and opens out again into the orchard road. This loop, which is called in Halesby the ‘Dark Half-hour,’ was the favourite hunting ground for Abner and his friends. Carrying the smelly dark-lanterns that are sold on Guy Fawkes’ day, they would creep as quietly as possible under the shadows of the trees, selecting at a signalled moment some unfortunate couple locked in each other’s arms whom they might shame with their lights. Often they got their heads smacked, but this only served to reinforce their opinion that lovemaking which shrank from publicity was discreditable.

One evening in summer when Abner was fourteen he took part in one of these expeditions. The day had been hot. His father had promised him that he would make him a kite in the evening. The split lath lay ready on the table with a roll of blue paper. Mrs Moseley had boiled some paste, and Abner had borrowed enough string and folded newspaper to make a tail. As the heat of the afternoon declined a gusty wind began to blow from the west, filling the street with dust and scraps of paper. At six o’clock John Fellows came back from the pit. The dust had blown into his eyes, that were never very strong. Tears and sweat together were tracking down through the grime on his cheeks. He seemed to have forgotten all about Abner’s kite.

‘What’s that?’ he cried, irritably. ‘Can’t yo’ give us a moment’s peace? Wait till I’ve swilled!’

He had his swill in the brewhouse, filling a tin bath with black soap-suds. The kite had become a grievance. ‘Nattering away . . .’ he muttered, with his head in a roller towel, ‘werriting about kites on a day that would make a pig sweat blood!’

Abner, who knew his father, got away without any further discussion, leaving Mrs Moseley to soothe him. He went out and played cricket in the sloping field above the pit where the ponies that have worked so long underground that they are blind are put out to green grass and to a white mockery that they get to know as daylight. When the boys came down to play, these shaggy creatures stood huddled in a corner and edged against one another, rubbing the coal-dust out of their matted coats. If they strayed over the field of play Abner and his friends pelted them with pieces of slag from the cinder heap behind the wickets. They also threw slag at a group of little girls who dared to look at them over the broken hedge. When the light faded so much that they could no longer see to play, and the beam-engine in the power-house ceased to grunt, the boys all lay down talking in the hedgerow, and the ponies wandered back to pull at the grass on either side of the pitch. At last Abner, who was the leader of the set, because he was the strongest, said: ‘Let’s go down the Dark Half-hour and scare some of ’em.’

On such a clammy evening there were certain to be many lovers. One of the boys produced a halfpenny packet of red Bengal-lights. Abner snatched them from him, left him crying, and with three others ran down to the mouth of the lane. In the hedge-side couples stirred uneasily. The tunnel under the elders was full of a hot odour of dust and nettles and some kind of mint. They crept forward through the darkness in Indian file. ‘Let’s try this one, kid,’ whispered a boy named Hodgetts, ‘him over there up agen’ the tree. ’Ere, where’s the bloody box?’

‘There’s somebody coming,’ whispered a woman’s voice.

They struck three lights together. The tunnel glowed like a furnace. Against the trunk of a tree a short man was leaning with a pale young woman clutched in his arms. Abner saw that it was his father. He dropped his match and ran.

The boy Hodgetts came panting behind him. He was shouting: ‘Kid . . . kid . . . did yo’ see who he were? It were your gaffer!’ Abner turned and swiped at him viciously as he ran. Joe Hodgetts crumpled up in the hedge howling. Abner went on blindly into the Cherry Orchard Road. His heart thudded in his throat like a water-hammer. He didn’t know where he was. He only knew that he was crying and that he had broken his knuckles on Joe Hodgett’s skull. He rubbed them in the black dust of the roadway, and that stopped the bleeding. But nothing, it seemed, could stop his tears.

The Second Chapter

When he reached home, half an hour later, he was ashamed of himself. It didn’t matter to him what his father did. He only hoped that John Fellows hadn’t recognised him, for that would make him sure of a belting. Still, he was glad that he had given Joe Hodgetts what for. He wasn’t going to have a fellow of his own age laughing at his father even if his father had let him down by making a fool of himself.

A year later John Fellows was married. In spite of Abner’s scorn the proceeding was natural enough. The man was under forty, and had been a widower for more than fourteen years. The new wife, the woman of the tunnel, was a girl named Alice Higgins, the elder daughter of an old friend of Fellows, the timekeeper at the colliery, who had lost his left leg many years ago in a crushing fall of coal. She was tall, slight, with a fair complexion and honey-coloured hair: in every physical particular the opposite of her swart and stubby husband. If such a thing had to be, Abner would have preferred the maturer charms of Mrs Moseley, whom he knew so well and liked, to those of any stranger. Indeed, from the day of his father’s marriage onward his life became more complicated.

The very presence in the house of this new inmate, a woman wielding authority, whom he remembered only a little time ago as a girl with a pigtail down her back, made him awkward. His father had never even mentioned their meeting in the lane—probably he had not recognised Abner, but the boy was certain that Alice had seen him and remembered. The consciousness of this mystery that they shared only aggravated the distrust and shyness that separated them: a shyness which Alice herself honestly tried to overcome by little overtures of affection. She was quite determined, in her quiet way, that she wasn’t going to be like the stepmothers of tradition. She would try to be a real mother to Abner. But how did real mothers feel?

‘Why don’t you call me mother, like other boys would, Abner?’ she said one day, coaxingly. Abner only laughed. She hated him for laughing at her. A boy of his age!

But the real trouble did not begin till a year later when the first baby of the new family was coming. It was a bad time for all of them. John Fellows, after fifteen years of a widower’s life, had forgotten anything that he had ever learnt in the way of matrimonial tactics. He wasn’t any longer a young man, and his nature had inevitably stiffened. Besides, the coming of this child was not like the adventure of Abner’s birth, when he and his first wife had been two tender young people rather overwhelmed by the responsibilities of marriage. Alice became more conscious than ever of the gap of years that separated them, the distance which had always been implicit in her idea of her father’s friend, ‘Mr Fellows.’ With her it could never be naturally ‘John.’ And now that she wanted somebody to take hold of her and share her fears she found herself face to face with an elderly stranger. She was frightened at the thought of being so utterly alone. Abner, a member of her own generation, and the son of her baby’s father, was a symbol of the whole disastrous circumstance.

In spite of all her good resolutions she couldn’t help letting off a little of her unhappiness on him. It was against her will that she did so. Sometimes she cried with vexation at her own irritability and resolved to overcome it. Then, as the months dragged on, she began to wonder if it were worth while tiring herself out with good resolutions or anything else in the world. She found herself becoming wilfully vixenish with her husband. That didn’t matter, for she seldom saw him; but a little later a new emotion, stronger and more positively devastating than any that she had known before, seized her. It was a thing that she couldn’t understand. She felt as if some strange, dark spirit had invaded and perverted her consciousness, making her think madly and not in the least as she wanted to think, filling her with a mixture of hate and jealousy towards Abner. This passion would not let her be. However tired and jaded she were the fiend was ready to tear her. She could not see the boy without hating him. She felt just like a cat with kittens, who spits at the kittens of another cat.

She had plenty of opportunities for showing her hatred. Abner was now fifteen. His schooling was finished, and he had begun to work at the colliery, leading the ponies that drag trollies of coal along the galleries of the pit. He found it quite good fun. The pony of which he had charge was very old and quite blind, for it had worked in Mawne pit since before Abner was born. He found it slower than a pony should be and spent the first Sunday after he had started work in searching Uffdown Wood for an ash-plant with which he might induce the pony to go faster. When he had found one he fitted a pin in the end of it.

A few minutes after six every evening the cage would come clanking up to the pit-head, and before it settled with a jerk, Abner, black with coal-grime, would shoot out like a hare and go whistling home to his tea. He whistled because there was always a curious lightening of his heart at the change from the murk of the pit to daylight. It was spring when he started work. Every evening as he passed the cherry orchard he heard the whistle of a blackbird poised on the topmost bough of one of the foamy trees. He wondered exuberantly if he could find its nest some day. He even collected a couple of pebbles to put in the place of eggs. But when he got home there was no Mrs Moseley, waiting with a ‘piece’ ready buttered and a cup of steaming tea—only Alice, dragging about the kitchen, greeting him with jealous eyes.

‘Abner, you dirty little beast,’ she would say, ‘don’t you dare soil that table now. Mind your filthy hands! It’s summat to have your father, let alone yo’. Here, that’s your father’s towel. Loose it quick!’

None of this was very serious, but it made a great difference to Abner. He was continually being shocked to find that small details in the arrangement of the house, such as the position of a chair which had always been his favourite, were being altered from day to day. Alice had a fever for making freakish variations in the kitchen furniture. She couldn’t be happy to see things in the same place for two days running. She was never satisfied, making alterations, as it seemed, simply for the sake of finding fresh work to do, yet always working under protest. Her presence became dragged and unhappy, and the only results of her unnatural labours were untidiness and confusion.

Even John Fellows could not help being irritated by these fruitless activities. His first wife, and later Mrs Moseley, had known that it was as much as their lives were worth not to have the house swept and speckless by evening ready to receive the pit dirt of the master. Now, when he came home to find Alice crouching over the fireplace in her bulged apron smearing red raddle on the hearth without as much as a kettle boiling, he would stand still in the doorway, a short, aggressive figure, and ask the wench what she thought she was doing croodled down there in the grate and him waiting for his tea. Then Alice, with her pale face averted, would snarl back at him and his dirt in the high-pitched voice in which she used to gossip with Mrs Hobbs, three doors down. All the women in Hackett’s Cottages eventually developed the same sort of voice.

John Fellows really behaved rather well. He knew that it wasn’t worth while grumbling, reflected that all women were more than usually unreasonable at these times, and so he would sometimes start his washing in the scullery with cold water, knowing well that in a moment the little vixen would be at his elbow with a boiling saucepan. Then he would catch hold of her in his grimy arms, and she would cry out shrilly that he was a great mucky beast and tell him to ‘give over.’ A little sparring of this kind often put him in a good humour, and Alice, quick to recognise the peculiar power which her physical presence still exercised on her husband, sometimes presumed on it so far that these passages of arms ended in tears. At such times it frightened her to see him suddenly revealed to her as a strange, hard man, nearly double her own age, with whom she was unaccountably living. Even maternity couldn’t make her feel anything but a little girl in the face of his strange maturity. She felt that John Fellows knew, as well as she did, that she was only making believe to be a grown-up married woman; he had shown it more than once by his roughness to her; but that didn’t really matter as long as the neighbours never guessed her secret—the neighbours, and more particularly Abner. For if Abner once knew the truth she could never again be mistress in her own house (that was how she put it) and she was so jealous of this imaginary dignity, and at the same time so conscious of its artificiality, that she could never cease trying to put Abner in his place.

It was bad enough for Alice that her husband should laugh at her. Certainly, she determined, she wasn’t going to stand anything of that kind from Abner; and though Abner himself had not yet shown her any signs of disrespect she took great pains to give him no opportunity of doing so by repressing him whenever she had the chance. Just as John Fellows had once approved in Abner the aggressive tendencies that went to the making of a ‘bloodworm,’ he now approved in Alice, so little and so desperately game, the temper that made things so uncomfortable for Abner. As long as she kept her temper for the boy and didn’t try any of her tricks on him it didn’t matter. And since it pleased John Fellows, who loved nothing better than a dog-fight, to see his little Alice bare her teeth, the girl played up to him, knowing that her husband would keep Abner from hitting back as long as the game pleased him.

Abner suffered her sullenly. He soon found out that it wasn’t worth while disputing with her, and indeed, sometimes her violence, wasting itself against his unconcern, recoiled on her, so that he had the satisfaction of seeing her in tears. This vexed her, partly for shame and partly because she saw that crying, which she had always regarded as her last and most telling weapon, had no effect on him. They were both of them little more than children.

In the end it came to this: Abner, realising that Hackett’s Cottages could never again be a real home to him, decided, with the philosophy which is learned early among people who have to fight for themselves, that he must cut his losses and strike out for himself as soon as he could manage to do so. He knew that for the present he could not afford to find another lodging, but already he was doing a man’s work at the colliery and soon he would be earning a man’s wages. When she realised this Alice was sorry that she had helped to drive him away, for she had dreamed pleasantly of all the money that she would soon be able to handle, and had decided to buy a piano for the parlour and a marble-topped washhand-stand, with a pink toilet set, for the front bedroom. It would be a pity, she reflected, to get rid of a full wage-earner in exchange for a little personal dignity.

So, suddenly relenting, she became towards Abner the incarnation of sweetness. Abner, however, wasn’t having any. Even though he didn’t see through her, he felt that her attitude was rather too good to be true. For the present he went on his way, paying regularly his weekly ‘lodge’ and the subscription to an industrial death-policy that had been taken out in the year of his birth to provide for his burial. But with the fulfilment of these obligations, his dealings with Hackett’s Cottages ceased. He became a lodger pure and simple, only appearing at night, when the others had gone to bed, tired, and ready to tumble into the nest of blankets which Alice had not disturbed since he left them in the morning.

She wasn’t going to put herself out for him, she said. In those days she didn’t feel inclined to put herself out for anybody. Unfortunately she couldn’t have it both ways; for by frightening Abner away with her temper she had lost the use of his strength in the heavier work of the house. She knew that she couldn’t ask her husband to help her. He hadn’t married her for that. Her weary, and palpably interested attempts to coax Abner back to her were a failure. Without showing a vestige of bitterness he went stolidly on his way, and so she resigned herself, with a sort of tired pride, to the heaviness of her lot.

In a way this desertion of Hackett’s Cottages was a good thing for Abner, for it drove him out into the open air and rid his lungs of the coal-dust that he breathed in the galleries of the pit. Joe Hodgetts, now more than ever his friend and admirer, shared these joys. Together they roamed over all the sweet country-side that ponders above the smoke of Mawne. They did not know that it was beautiful. They only knew that there were banks of hazel under which one might play pitch and toss or nap without the fear of a policeman; that there were cool streams with bottoms of red sand in which it was good to bathe; that there were rabbits that came out timidly in the evening to be shot with catapults, and wood-pigeons that rustled the trees on the edge of Uffdown Wood and then emerged with clapping wings.

Both boys had the instincts of poachers, and in the spring another partner joined them: an equivocal terrier with a sandy coat, a long, thin tail and a guttersnipe’s intelligence which Abner got for the asking from a miner at Mawne who didn’t think the beast worth the cost of a licence. He couldn’t house the animal in Hackett’s Cottages, for Alice couldn’t abear dogs . . . the dirty beasts! Abner’s old friend, Mrs Moseley, came to his help. The dog, now christened Tiger, found a home in her washhouse, living among his hoarded bones on a strip of sacking in the ash-hole beneath the copper. Here he would lie in the evening waiting for his master, his thin snout pressed to the ground between extended paws, motionless, pretending to be asleep. When he heard Abner’s step approaching he would lie still, with gleaming open eyes, and wait for his name to be called. Then he would leap out and lick the pit-dust from Abner’s face with his tongue. Even Mrs Moseley, who fed him, was nothing to Tiger if Abner were there.

Together they would go out into the golden evening hunting rabbits which Abner would sometimes bring home to Mrs Moseley, who had a way of cooking them with onions soused in milk. They were a great treat to her, for being a widow and no longer employed in John Fellows’s house, she rarely tasted meat. Sharing the proceeds of their hunting Abner and Mrs Moseley would sit late over their tea next day, and Tiger, under the table, would crack the rabbit’s head and lick out the brains with his pointed tongue. Later in the week Mrs Moseley would sell the rabbit-skin to a rag-and-bones man for twopence. She was really very fond of Abner, and even if he hadn’t brought food to the house she would have been glad of his visits, ‘for company’ as she called it.

Because he kept the dog there, and because he was happy in Mrs Moseley’s society, Abner made her cottage his real home. It stood last in one of a series of parallel streets that climbed desperately out of the dust of the Stourton Road towards a low crest facing Uffdown and the other hills of its chain. The lower story looked out on a wall of the local blue brick; but the windows of the bedroom, a stuffy chamber in which the widow spent the greater part of her day, and which the district nurse penetrated every morning in a whiff of iodoform for the purpose of dressing Mrs Moseley’s bad leg, commanded, beyond a foreground of cinder-waste, blue distances from which the hill air could have blown in cleanly. The doctor had told Mrs Moseley that her leg would never heal unless she gave it rest, and since all her relatives were now married and too prosperous to give the old woman a thought, she was left to herself, hobbling from the bedroom to the kitchen whenever it was necessary to bank up the fire. On the hob stood a teapot, brewing a decoction of tannin which had long since ruined her digestion but was the thing for which she cared most in life. She called it her ‘cup of tea.’

Abner rarely noticed what an effort she made to receive him cheerfully when he came for his dog. He didn’t see how slow and painful her movements were becoming. She never seemed to him any different from the Mrs Moseley whom he had always known and taken for granted, until, one day, she was put to bed and forbidden to move at all. She had spent the whole morning crying to herself, for it seemed to her that the day was not distant when she would have to be moved to Stourton workhouse, to be carried downstairs and placed in the black van before a crowd of gaping neighbours, dirty women with babies in their arms. She had always been shy of the people who lived near her. A country woman, she felt out of place with these industrial folk. She wished very much that she might die.

When Abner came into the house that evening he found the grate cold and full of ashes. He ran into the washhouse to fetch Tiger, but the dog was not there. Then he heard the voice of Mrs Moseley, distressed and quavering, calling him from above, and a minute later Tiger came scampering downstairs, thoroughly ashamed of himself, from his nest on Mrs Moseley’s bed. Abner, standing at the bottom of the stairs, listened to the story of her troubles. She wouldn’t tell him much about them, and nothing at all about the deeper fears that haunted her. She told him to get a cup of tea for himself, but when he suggested bringing another upstairs to her she was scandalised. Even though she was old enough to be his grandmother she thought that this would be indelicate; besides, she couldn’t be quite certain that the cleanliness of her bedroom was beyond reproach, and had determined that before any one visited her, leg or no leg, she must spend a day putting things straight. And of course the floor must be scrubbed with carbolic soap. She begged Abner to get her some from Mr Ingleby’s shop.

Later, as the days of her imprisonment lengthened, she found that she couldn’t be so independent after all. At an immense sacrifice she consented to the presence of Abner in her room, that narrow, ill-lighted chamber which the bulging four-poster nearly filled, where, in fact, it was the only piece of furniture. Here Abner would sit in the hot evenings of summer, staring through the closed windows at the distant hills, while Mrs Moseley, in a tired, unhurried voice, talked of things that had happened in his childhood and other days, more remote, when his mother had been alive. The old woman had always been fond of Abner, always a little frightened of his father; and now that this tall youth was repaying her in some degree for the care that she had given him in his childhood, she became very tender toward him. At times his coming made her vaguely emotional, her tenderness helping her to realise how very lonely she was. Sometimes, when she heard his step in the room beneath her, she would very nearly cry, and the dog Tiger, lying on the patchwork quilt, would lick her outstretched arm. She began to count on his visits. Indeed, rather than lose him, she would even have consented to have the bedroom windows opened.

He never spoke of his own accord about Alice, but Mrs Moseley compelled him to do so, inquiring every day how she was getting on. She had promised John Fellows, to whom she was always grateful for her old employment, that she would be in the house during the confinement, and to lend the doctor a hand. John Fellows remembered well what a tower of strength she had been at the time when Abner was born. In those days she had possessed a comfortable figure and a jolly laugh.

‘I don’t want her there!’ Alice had protested. ‘I’d rather have anyone with me nor her!’

She didn’t object to Mrs Moseley in herself, but she was suspicious of any one who had known the house before she came there, convinced that the old woman would sniff at her improvements and perhaps make mischief, poking her nose into all the drawers and cupboards while she, the mistress, was in bed. And perhaps John Fellows would compare Mrs Moseley’s cooking with her own! But her husband wasn’t having any nonsense of that kind. ‘Silly wench, yo’ don’t know what’s good for you!’ he said, considering the matter settled. Alice cried; but he didn’t take any notice of that sort of thing.

As the time drew nearer it distressed Mrs Moseley to think that she might still be in bed when she was wanted. She wished to be there not only for the sake of the husband but also because she couldn’t afford to miss the ten shillings that her fortnight’s work would bring her, to say nothing of the fortnight’s keep. Abner was impatient with her questions.

‘Oh, don’t yo’ worry about her,’ he said. ‘She’s not worth it. Got a temper like a cat.’

‘You shouldn’t say that, dear,’ said Mrs Moseley. ‘She’s the mother that the Lord’s given you. And it’s hard days for women when they’re like that. I’ve been through it myself, so I know what they feels like. It’ll be different when the baby comes along.’

But Abner was sure it wouldn’t be different. It would take more than a baby to change Alice. ‘Besides, she bain’t my mother,’ he said. ‘A regular cat . . . that’s what she bin! You’m the nearest I’ve ever had to a mother.’

Mrs Moseley smiled. Secretly, when he wasn’t looking, she wiped her left eye on the patchwork counterpane.

The Third Chapter

In the middle of a summer night Abner’s father came blundering into his son’s bedroom. ‘Come along, get a shift on you!’ he said. ‘Go and holler to Mrs Moseley, and then run on to the doctor’s.’

In his hand he carried a candle which lit up his surly face and threw the folds on either side of the grimy wrinkles into relief. His eyes were bleared and angry, for he had been sleeping like a log and resented any disturbance at night.

‘It bain’t no good my going for her,’ said Abner sleepily. ‘She’s got a bad leg.’

‘Bad leg be bosted!’ shouted John Fellows. ‘She’ll have to come if I send for her. Tak’ your hook now!’

While Abner dressed, his father was prowling from room to room letting the tallow from the candle drip down the front of his trousers, and shouting at the boy to hurry up from time to time. In a few minutes Abner was ready and had crossed the patch of waste ground that lay between the terrace and the Stourton Road. This highway was more desolate than he had ever seen it before. In some of the upper windows subdued gas-jets were burning, but most of them took on the gray light of a moon that could not be seen. He was halfway into Halesby before he really woke. Then, in the cool night air, he forgot his grudge against his father for waking him. Even the foul dust of the Stourton Road smelt sweet. He had never felt fitter nor more awake in his life.

As he reached Mrs Moseley’s door Tiger began to bark. He heard the voice of Mrs Moseley trying to soothe the beast. Then he picked up some pebbles and threw them against the window panes, and a moment later the old woman looked out, Tiger scrambling into the window beside her.

‘Our father wants you,’ he called. ‘And I’ve got to go for the doctor.’

‘Dear, dear,’ said Mrs Moseley, ‘I knew it would happen like this. I wouldn’t disappoint your father for anything . . . that I wouldn’t!’

‘Don’t you take no notice of it!’ Abner urged. ‘Don’t you come! I’ll tell ’em the doctor won’t let you.’

She shook her head solemnly and disappeared from the window.

Abner, exhilarated with the night air, ran on to the doctor’s house. This gentleman appeared to resent his call. Abner was told to wait below so that he might carry the bag. He stood there in a garden heavy with the perfume of stocks. In the meadows along the Stour a corncrake was calling. He wondered what kind of bird it was, and whether it was easy to kill. He didn’t mind how long the doctor kept him waiting.

On the way back to Hackett’s Cottages Dr Moorhouse spoke very little. He asked Abner the kind of questions he usually put to young people, and grunted in reply, as if he hadn’t heard what Abner said.

‘Are you John Fellows’s son?’ he asked. And then: ‘How old are you?’

When Abner said that he was going in seventeen, he grunted. It scarcely seemed possible that more than sixteen years had passed since, in the same small house of Hackett’s Cottages, he had ushered this tall youth into the world. It filled him with a kind of discontent to realise that for all these years he had been moving in the same groove, in a vicious circle that had brought him back once more to this identical point. Only it hadn’t been so hard to turn out at night sixteen years ago. A dog’s life! People didn’t realise it. There was Ingleby, the chemist, a sensible man in most things, fool enough to make his only son a doctor!

When they reached Hackett’s Cottages they found the door of number eleven open and a light shining in it. John Fellows came out to meet them and insisted on shaking hands with the doctor. It was obvious that he had been sampling the bottle of brandy that is always in evidence on these occasions.

‘She’s all right,’ he said. ‘She’s all right, doctor. A tough wench she is! Tougher than the other one.’

He turned on Abner. ‘Get the fire lit. Sharp, now! Else I’ll drap thee one. Fill the big kettle. Plenty of hot water. That’s it, isn’t it, doctor? I know . . . don’t I, doctor? . . . I know.’

Somebody came limping downstairs. It was Mrs Moseley.

‘What . . .?’ shouted the doctor. ‘What’s the meaning of this? What do you mean by it, woman? Didn’t I tell you to stay in bed till I let you out? Of all the damned pig-headed foolishness . . ‘

Mrs Moseley smiled her tired, patient smile; but the doctor knew she was in pain. He couldn’t help admiring her.

‘You’ll forgive me all right, doctor,’ she said. ‘Now, what could I do with the poor young thing lying here like that . . . and after all I’d promised Mr Fellows here? Don’t you remember the last time?’

‘No, I’m hanged if I’ll forgive you,’ he smiled. ‘You’re an obstinate old fool. Now run along upstairs. If you lose your leg it’s not my fault.’

Abner was left alone in the kitchen with his father. While the boy raked out the ashes from the grate and lit the fire John Fellows took the brandy from the cupboard and had another swig, putting the neck of the bottle in his mouth. He said ‘Ah!’ and smacked his lips. Then he went out into the strip of garden at the back and walked violently up and down. It was almost light when he returned. He was sweating and quarrelsome. Abner had a bad time of it. Now that his poor mother was suffering like this John Fellows hoped he’d be sorry for the way he’d used her. If anything went wrong—he implied gloomily that something probably would—Abner would be to blame for it. To give his fuddled brain the chance for indignation that it wanted there entered the dog Tiger, fawning, ingratiating. He had escaped from Mrs Moseley’s house and followed the scent of her or of Abner. He jumped up at Abner, yelping with joy.

For a second John Fellow’s stared at him stupidly. Then he burst out with: ‘And here’s that bloody dog again! Your mother’s told you she can’t a-bear it, but she’s no sooner upstairs . . .’ He slipped the belt from his waist and lashed at the wretched Tiger’s quarters. The dog squealed piteously. For a moment Abner saw red. He didn’t see his father any longer, only a stubby man, shorter than himself, staring at him with bloodshot eyes, and sweat trickling down two grimy wrinkles. He would have knocked his father down if Mrs Moseley hadn’t suddenly appeared at the foot of the stairs asking what the noise was about. The sound of her voice steadied both of them as they stood staring hatred at one another, and Abner’s anger passed as quickly as it had come. Mrs Moseley, standing between them, brought with her a pungent odour of some antiseptic. The smell impressed Abner with the moment’s seriousness. He was suddenly sorry for Alice. He even wished that he had been more patient with her. Then the whole sky was shaken with the vibrations of the great bull at Mawne Colliery. Five-thirty. He slipped into his pit clothes, left his father staring, and hurried from the house.

When he came back from his turn at night the sense of stress that he had quite forgotten in the work of the day returned. On the doorstep of Number Eleven he felt intensely nervous. Something was going to happen, perhaps something had happened already. The house was quiet. In the kitchen a fire was burning that made for cheerfulness in spite of the heat. All this was attributable to Mrs Moseley, who now appeared with an encouraging smile. She told him that Alice’s baby had been born at ten o’clock. ‘And when I got her clean and comfortable and washed the baby, I thought, “Well, now, while I’m on my legs I may as well have a bit of a tidy round.” A lovely boy!’ she said. ‘Oh, what a beautiful babby—just like his father!’

Abner didn’t want to hear about the baby. He stuck to his obstinate determination not to countenance the affair at all, and Mrs Moseley laughed at him for behaving like a baby himself. He asked her what had happened to his father.

‘I haven’t seen him, not since you went to work. But men’s best out of the way at these times.’

Abner guessed that, once having started to drink, his father had probably been drinking all day and might well by this time be lying drunk in some hedge at the back of the Royal Oak. Mrs Moseley rebuked him.

‘You’re hard on your father, Abner,’ she said. ‘It’s a bad time for a man when he feels he can’t do nothing. You don’t love and honour your father the way you ought.’

All through the fortnight of Alice’s lying-in Mrs Moseley did her best to keep the peace of the house and to reconcile Abner to the new state of things. She made him feel almost as much at home as he had been in the old days, limping downstairs in the evening to talk to him. Alice was very jealous when she heard them talking below. On most evenings they sat alone in the kitchen together, but sometimes they went out into the strip of garden at the back of the house to a wooden bench screened by a straggling hedge of scarlet runners. They sat there, often in silence, till the sky darkened, reflecting above the western horizon all the furnaces of Mawne; and no one disturbed them, for John Fellows, having once yielded to the bottle, had continued his celebrations of the event. After all, such things didn’t happen very often.

One evening Mrs Moseley brought down the baby for Abner to see. ‘Look at him, Abner,’ she said, ‘bain’t he a pretty dear? bain’t he a little lovee?’

Whatever the baby may have been he certainly wasn’t pretty; but there was something in his helplessness that appealed to Abner’s generosity. In spite of his prejudices he couldn’t see himself being vindictive toward this comical creature. He touched the baby’s downy, wrinkled face with his hand. The creature made a sucking noise, seeking Abner’s fingers with his lips, and at the same moment Tiger, with a snarl, took Abner’s calf between his teeth, and, with the gentlest pressure, threatened to bite him.

‘There you are,’ said Mrs Moseley. ‘Look at jealousy! You and Tiger are a pair, and that’s the truth!’

He laughed, but for all that he didn’t look forward happily to Mrs Moseley’s departure. He felt that the baby would only serve to make Alice more intolerably important. When, on the thirteenth night, a dead-white, incredibly diminished Alice came down to sit for a couple of hours on the sofa, he decided to ask Mrs Moseley to take him into her house as a lodger. ‘The money will come in handy,’ he urged. ‘I could sleep in the washhouse with old Tiger.’

But she wouldn’t think of it. ‘I couldn’t do it,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t like to put your father out, not if it was ever so! John’s been a good friend to me. I don’t know how I could have lived all these years without him.’

‘He’s got a sight more out of yo’ than ever yo’ got out of him!’ Abner grumbled.

But again she said ‘No’—partly, it is true, because she felt that Alice might make it the occasion for a quarrel, and partly because, much as she loved Abner she knew that her strength would not allow her to look after him properly. On many days of late she hadn’t really been fit to do her own housework, and so she fought shy, for Abner’s sake as much as her own, of the arrangement that he suggested. The money, alas! was very tempting.

Abner, who didn’t generally notice things particularly and had always taken people like Mrs Moseley for granted, had not appreciated the changes that were slowly overtaking her. He didn’t see the slight contraction of her brows that had lately become a fixed expression of the pain that wouldn’t let her be. Neither he nor Alice nor John Fellows were aware of Mrs Moseley’s suffering; but the doctor, on his daily visits, saw how gamely she was fighting, and said nothing; for he knew that to abstain from obvious advice was the highest tribute that he could pay to her fortitude. He knew that there was trouble ahead, but he still joked with Mrs Moseley, and she, in answer, returned him a smile that struck him as particularly sweet in this plain old woman, making excuse for the reproach that remained unspoken. In the end, Abner, piqued at her refusal, quarrelled with her.

‘Any one ‘d think I was likely to be a nuisance,’ he said.

Mrs Moseley shook her head. She nearly told him all her reasons against his plan, but when she came to speak of them her lips trembled. She knew that she couldn’t keep up much longer. On the fifteenth day she left Hackett’s Cottages. Alice, who paid her the agreed ten shillings from a leather purse that she kept wrapped up in a handkerchief under her pillow, thought it rather shabby of her not to offer to stay longer. ‘You’d think it ‘d be the least she could do after all your kindness,’ she said to her husband. John Fellows, not to be buttered with flattery, merely grunted.

It took Mrs Moseley more than an hour to walk the mile home. The doctor passing in his trap, saw her resting on a doorstep in the Stourton Road. He pretended not to recognise her, but scribbled a note on his list that she was to be visited in the afternoon. Toward evening he stumped up the crooked stairs and stood at the bottom of her bed looking at her with a curious smile on his lips. She knew it was no good making excuses.

‘Let’s have a look at it,’ he said. And then: ‘Well, my dear, this means six weeks in bed. You know that, don’t you? Ten shillings’ worth, eh?’

Mrs Moseley, conscious of the fact that it was worth a good deal more than ten shillings, said nothing. If he only realised what a blessed relief it was to her to be off her feet again!

When Alice ‘came downstairs’ again, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Abner had never known her so studiously charming. From the first it was as if she smiled: ‘For goodness’ sake let us forget what has happened and make a new start!’ and he couldn’t very well refuse to meet her. At the same time he found it difficult to conceal his suspicions that she was getting at him in some covert, female way. The situation would have been easier to handle if Alice hadn’t been a trifle pale and interesting. She didn’t pick up very quickly, and now, of course, in addition to the ordinary housework she had to look after the baby, who was already suffering from its mother’s dietetic indiscretions. Like many thin young women Alice could never conquer her inclination for sweets and for vinegar, and as a consequence the child was noisy and irritable. Her housework went to the wall, and in despair she turned to Abner to help her out. Nothing could have been sweeter than her temper, and though he didn’t believe in it he couldn’t help being sorry for her, and did what she asked him. As a matter of fact, he was already a little interested in the baby. The smallness of its limbs and the timid uncertainty of its movements fascinated him. He regarded it with a certain benignant curiosity, much as he might have looked at a nestling taken from a hedge in April.

Of course Alice was feeding her child at the breast. If Abner came into the kitchen in the middle of this performance she would turn round quickly and take the baby upstairs or out into the washhouse, blushing. Abner wondered why she did this. Other women weren’t so sensitive. Sometimes he would pass a couple of them standing at their garden gates gossiping and feeding their babies at the same time. He had never taken any notice of them. Nobody else took any notice of them. There was something in Alice’s blushes that embarrassed him unreasonably. Afterward he asked himself why this should be; but when next he saw Alice hiding her white breast he blushed himself.

The new relation was very curious. If it hadn’t been for Abner’s profound distrust of her they might even have become intimate. It was no good for Alice to pretend that she wasn’t lonely. In spite of all her pride in being a married woman and the mother of a family’s beginning, she couldn’t conceal the fact that since the baby’s birth her husband took very little notice of her. It was as if he had said: ‘Now that I’ve done my duty by the nation and given you something to play with you can just attend to my comforts without bothering me.’ He had lately transferred his custom from the Greyhound to the Lyttleton Arms. A shorter walk at closing time. So far he had never maltreated Alice, but she knew very well that she couldn’t now play him the tricks that had pleased him in their courting days.

So, from being with her husband like a little girl in school, with Abner she behaved like a schoolgirl released, chattering, eager and friendly. It puzzled him, for he had never had a sister and didn’t understand the creature in the least. Her flatteries and sudden kindnesses surprised him every bit as much as her spurts of temper. In each case she seemed equally childish, particularly on days when she had been too busy to do her hair and wore it in a honey-coloured pigtail at the back. Then, there was another Alice who could assert with something very near to dignity the fact that she was mistress of the house; and another, blushing Alice, before whom he too had blushed.

On the whole, however, her most obvious feature was her kindness. In the evening, when Abner came home dirty from the pit, he would find the soap-suds waiting for him and tea laid ready on the kitchen table. Alice, as likely as not, would be bathing the baby, who already showed a native sturdiness in spite of his mother’s indiscretions. While Abner ate his tea she would talk to the baby in a low, cooing voice, which she was evidently convinced would fetch him. From time to time in the middle of these whispers, she would look up sideways to where Abner sat munching bread and butter with the sunlight in his hair. Abner, who knew that he was good-looking, and was now a little conscious of his manly superiority, took no notice of her.

And yet, in the end, he couldn’t help being dragged into the atmosphere of intimacy which her small attentions created. Grudgingly he was forced to admit that she had changed for the better. He was now old enough to be flattered too. They became almost good friends, and only Abner’s native cautiousness prevented a complete reconciliation. Alice knew this. She knew the shy spirit with which she had to deal, but was happy to feel that she had accomplished so much already. Somewhere in the back of her mind she suspected that a time might come in which she would rely on Abner’s strength to protect her and her baby. Some day she might need his help. It was of John Fellows, her husband, that she was afraid.

This new relation, Abner thought, was all very well. Still, just because they had patched up their old quarrel, they needn’t necessarily be always together. He wasn’t going to abandon his friend, Joe Hodgetts, and Tiger for the sake of feminine small talk. Nor did he mean to forsake Mrs Moseley, at whose house the dog still slept. Those early autumn evenings were great times for Tiger. Abner knew of a dozen fields in which he could be certain of putting up a hare.

It annoyed Alice to see him so eager to get away just when she wanted him most. She knew that he went in to see Mrs Moseley. She told herself that she had always hated the old woman, even before she had been forced on her by her husband. One evening when Abner was hurrying away after tea she called him back.

‘Where are you going, Abner?’

‘Down town.’

‘You’m going to Mrs Moseley’s.’

‘And why shouldn’t I go to Mrs Moseley’s? You can’t stop me!’

‘Stay with us to-night, Abner,’ she coaxed.

Abner only laughed at her. Then she flew into a passion, standing up white and trembling at the side of the table.

‘How can you go to Mrs Moseley’s?’ she cried. ‘Who’s Mrs Moseley, I should like to know? You’re all cracked on your Mrs Moseley, you and your father! That fat old woman in her nasty smelly house! And you didn’t ought to leave me when I want you. You didn’t ought to! I’m your mother . . ‘

‘Oh, you’m my mother, are you?’ Abner burst into a laugh. ‘That’s bloody funny, that is!’

‘Oh, you and your swearing . . .’ she cried.

He didn’t wait to hear any more. When he was gone she fell down on her knees beside the table and sobbed with her head in her hands: a frail, pathetic figure with her hair in curling rags. Her sobs woke the baby, whose cradle had been carefully placed in a draught between the open door and the fireplace.

‘Oh, you now!’ she cried, rocking the cradle roughly. She might easily have upset it. Then, suddenly repenting, she picked up her son tenderly, and hugging him to her breast, buried her sobs in his downy face.

The Fourth Chapter

As the autumn hardened into an iron winter Abner had less time than ever to spend on these distractions. When the football season opened he began to play for the little club named Halesby Swifts, from which Mawne United usually drew its recruits. Technically it was a professional club, but the gate money that it drew from its adventures in pursuit of the local charity cups did no more than pay for the boots and clothes and footballs of the players. In the first round of the North Bromwich Hospital Cup competition the Swifts had the good luck to be drawn against their big neighbours, Mawne United, on the Mawne ground, and Abner, playing centre-half, repeated the exploit of his childhood by scoring a goal against the goalkeeper who had succeeded the celebrated Harper. It was an elevating moment. The captain and others of the Swifts came running up to Abner and wrung his hand. All Mawne and Halesby on the touchline waved black bowler hats under the flag of Mawne United languidly flying from its staff beside the Royal Oak. A great moment! Abner did not see his father standing in his old place behind the Mawne goal posts with his hands thrust into the pockets of his reefer coat and his eyes sparkling as he puffed away at his black clay pipe. That was how John Fellows showed his emotion. Later in the evening he showed it in another way.

This match, however, made a considerable difference in John Fellows’s attitude. It gave Abner a standing with his father that had never been granted to him before. Nor was this the only result of his success; for on the following Monday Mr Hudson, the chief clerk in Mr Willis’s works at Mawne, and secretary of the United, an irreproachable expert in a game that he had never played, sent up a message to the pit for Abner, and on Tuesday he had ‘signed on’ for the senior club.

‘A lad like you, growing and that,’ said Mr Hudson, ‘didn’t ought to be working in the pit. I’ll speak to the manager, and if you’ll come down to the Furnaces next Monday we’ll see what sort of job we can find you.’

On Monday morning Abner walked over to the Stour valley in which the great works lay angrily seething, and picked his way through the gigantic debris of the iron age: huge discarded boilers, brown with rust; scrap-heaps of tangled metal that had served its day; stacks of rails; purple mountains of iron ore standing ready for the blast-furnaces that snored like dragons in their sleep and made the air around them quiver with hot breath. Over a network of rails on which an officious shunting-engine that the head of the firm had christened Lilian, in honour of his daughter, ran to and fro, whistling shrill warnings; over many steam pipes, snaky tentacles of the central power-house, that hissed steam from their leaky joints, he passed to the office that Mr Hudson inhabited. On the steps in the middle of his path stood a tall, pale young man who stared out over the works as though some vision entranced him. Abner, wondering what he was looking at, and following the direction of his eyes, saw nothing unusual. He knew that this was young Mr Willis, Mr Edward, as Hudson called him. He asked Abner what he wanted.

‘Mr Hudson, gaffer.’

‘You’ll find him inside.’

He moved out of the way, still, apparently in the toils of his dream, and Abner was shown into Mr Hudson, whom he found sitting at a desk with a pencil behind either ear. ‘Ah, here you are,’ said Mr Hudson. ‘There’s a good chap!’ and took him straightway to one of the foremen, an old butty of John Fellows, who gave him an indefinite labouring job that consisted of moving metallic rubbish from one part of the works to another as occasion demanded. At Mawne, it seemed, no fragment of iron was ever allowed to leave the works as long as there was a foot of space in which it could be stored. Abner also had to grease the wheels of a little line of trolley-trucks that blundered up and down the hill in front of the manager’s house, between the furnaces and the high colliery of Timbertree.

‘This is work for an old man, not for a strong lad like you,’ the foreman grumbled. He knew that there was always work above ground and good pay at Mawne for a promising footballer. ‘They’ll fause you up now! Wait till your footballing’s over,’ he said, ‘wait till you’ve broke your leg, and then you ask your Mr Hudson for a job like this and see what he’ll tell you!’

But Abner was seventeen and had no thoughts for age. The greatest delight of all was that he now breathed the air of the open sky all day instead of the darkness of the pit; and even if the ecstasy of his evening’s relief was now blunted, there seemed to be no end to his capacity for physical enjoyment. Beneath the caresses of air and light his physique began to expand. He took a delight in the strict training that the Mawne United directors enforced on their players. With skipping and rubbing and sprinting his muscles became hard and supple and his whole body marvellously fit. Football became his whole life. In his work at Mawne, even in his dreams, he pondered on its tactics. All his friends were players absorbed in the same game. He gained confidence and skill, and by the end of the season he had become one of the crowd’s idols, followed from the arena by a trail of small boys and patted on the back by strangers as he walked home after a match in his muddy clothes. The girls also used to turn and look at him with bold glances; but his life was far too full in those days for him to worry his head about women.

His relation with Alice had now passed its first emotional stage, and though she was more interested in him than she had ever been before, she had grown to understand him better, so that the storms which had made life at Hackett’s Cottages so intense no longer occurred. She washed his football clothes with care and fed him regularly and well, as indeed she should have done, for he was now earning good money. She had discovered that it paid her best not to worry him. Sometimes a fit of restlessness would make him say that he must change his lodging; but although he often grumbled, he still stayed on in the room that he had occupied since he was a child. In her anxiety to please him she even offered of her own accord to have the dog Tiger in the house; but Abner only stared at her, wondering what she was getting at, and laughed. ‘Still jealous of the poor old woman?’ he said.

Of course she was still jealous of Mrs Moseley. She couldn’t help being jealous; but though she denied this indignantly, and even tried to prove her goodwill by paying several awkward visits with the baby to Mrs Moseley’s bedroom, she knew very well that the old woman’s attractions for Abner were the very least that she had to fear. She was really and deeply jealous of the young women who stared at him on the football field or in the Stourton Road. She knew how handsome he was growing; realised, with an agony that was not wholly maternal, that sooner or later he was bound to fall in love, and that was a calamity which somehow she felt she could not bear. Little by little John Fellows was becoming less important to her. All her life seemed more and more centred in her baby and in Abner. Thinking the matter over she decided that it was her best policy to encourage him in his friendship for the old woman, and she did so gradually, insidiously, so that Abner should not guess what she was doing or wonder why she was doing it.

Abner needed no encouragement. He had never wavered from his loyalty, and now more than ever he felt that he owed some attention to his old friend. Since the day when she had taken to her bed after the fortnight’s work at Hackett’s Cottages, she had never recovered sufficiently to resume her former activities. Sometimes, indeed, it had seemed that her leg was on the point of healing; but as soon as she crawled downstairs and tried to go about her business it broke down again, which was not surprising seeing how much her lying in bed had weakened her. The doctor could do nothing but preach patience and leave her in the hands of the district nurse.

For a whole year she struggled along on the pittance that the relieving officer gave her; but at last the disorder of the cottage became so overwhelming that the nurse took the law into her own hands and, in spite of all Mrs Moseley’s protests, wrote a letter to the nearest of the old woman’s relatives, a younger sister, the wife of a North Bromwich brass-worker named Wade.

In answer to the letter Mrs Wade came over to see her sister, dressed as for a funeral in closely-fitting black sateen. Being rather afraid that she might find it awkward to get out of taking Mrs Moseley home with her, the sight of the old woman’s helplessness gave her a distinct feeling of relief which showed itself in the warmth of her condolences.

‘Well, Eliza, this is a shame, isn’t it? And my! won’t George be shocked when I tell him? To think of your never ’aving let us know! Just to think of it!’

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.’

Abner would laugh, but Alice glanced sharply at him. She hated to hear any woman’s name mentioned in connection with his, and most of all her sister’s; but Mr Higgins, unaware of these fine shades of feeling, constantly pursued the project. ‘Now if Abner here went and married our Elsie what a queer kettle of fish it would be to be sure! Which would you be, his mother or his sister-in-law? Both on ’em. Likewise Elsie’d be your daughter-in-law and your sister. And if our Elsie was Abner’s aunt she’d be the great-aunt of her own babbies, surely!’

‘Oh, don’t go on so, dad!’ said Alice, sharply. ‘Do give over!’

‘You can say what you like, Alice,’ said Mr Higgins, ‘but that’s a knot it’d take more than a parson to get over.’

At half-past nine the old man would leave them with another of his little jokes. Abner would see him out, and then, yawning, stretch his legs and say that it was time he was turning in. He used to ask Alice, before he went upstairs, if there was anything he could do for her. It was only a formula, but the words always gave her a flush of pleasure. When he was gone upstairs she would busy herself with preparing his can of tea, and bacon sandwiches to take to the works next day. Then she would settle down again in her chair at the fireside and sit with her work in her lap dreaming and waiting for the unsteady, deliberate step of her husband on the path. This was the worst moment of her day.

John Fellows rarely returned home until half an hour after closing time, and for this reason it was seldom that he saw Abner off the football field. At home he never approached him except with the hope of extracting inside information as to the probable results of the league matches on which he proposed to bet, and in this he found Abner unsympathetic, for although league football had not sunk in those days to its present depths of unabashed commercialism, Abner knew that the result of a match was sometimes decided in accordance with the bookmaker’s instructions. John Fellows never backed horses, for he regarded the turf as a resort of crooks and sharks. He put his money on dogs and football teams, and even if he lost it he had at any rate the satisfaction of seeing it lost with his own eyes. He didn’t mind losing money as long as he had a run for it. According to his lights he was a sportsman.

The football season had opened with a flourish as far as Mawne United were concerned. In the North Bromwich league they had beaten all their principal rivals, Wolverbury, Dulston, and even the Albion Reserves. Now, in the semi-final of the Midland Cup they were to meet the Albion again. The members of the team became more than ever popular heroes, and Abner, down at the works, was conscious of his share in the distinction. The winter had set in early with a November of black frost that made the scrap-iron with which he was still engaged under the same grumbling foreman harder and more icy to the touch, and congealed the grease in the running guide-wheels of the trolley railway. It was some compensation that the blast furnaces, which were surrounded in summer by a zone of air undulant with intolerable heat, now gave a sense of neighbourly warmth to the centre of the works.

Abner, who knew that his position was more secure than ever, managed to spend most of his day near these black towers, talking football to the men who were engaged in making the moulds of sand into which the molten metal would flow when the furnaces were tapped. It was an idle and a pleasant life; but he enjoyed it, knowing, as did every one else in the works, that it was no more than a preparation for the sterner business of Saturdays.

One Wednesday, in the middle of the afternoon, he was at work loading some pigs of iron into a truck that stood waiting on the siding near the furnace. It was good warm work for a winter’s day, and Abner had thrown off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and unfastened the neck of his shirt. He and his mate had just hoisted the last of the pigs into the truck when the furnace foreman gave the signal for the tapping of the nearest tower. Abner watched the proceeding as he put on his coat and wiped the sweat from his forehead. The men, stripped to the waist, approached the vent of the furnace carrying a heavy crowbar with which they loosened the plug of fireclay which kept the contents of the furnace from escaping. They leapt aside as the first stream of molten mineral gushed out. The foreman watched them, shading his eyes from the heat. The fluid that came first was the dross of the ore which had sunk to the bottom of the furnace, and this was diverted so that it flowed into a wide pan where it would cool into a cake of brittle, iridescent slag. A moment later pure iron began to flow. The puddlers closed the entrance to the pool of slag, and molten metal crept, with the slow persistence of a lava-flow, down the central channel and into the moulds of sand that were ready to receive it. The damp air above the beds first steamed, then swam with heat. Not molten gold could have seemed more beautiful than this harsh, intractable metal. It ran into the moulds sluggishly and with a soft, hissing sound.

Some one tapped Abner on the shoulder and drew him aside. It was Mr Hudson, who had walked down delicately from the office, so delicately that he had not even disturbed the two pencils wedged above his ears. He shivered slightly, for he had been shut up all day with a coke stove. Drawing Abner aside behind the line of trucks he began to talk to him about the cup-tie with the Albion. With the utmost friendliness he discussed the prospects of Mawne United in the match, which was now only ten days ahead. Abner answered him respectfully. Mr Hudson had not only given him his present comfortable job, but also carried in his pocket the future of every man employed in the works, for Mr Willis, whose eager mind was always set on expansions of the monster that he had created out of the fortune which his father-in-law had made in the Franco-Prussian war, was far too busy to worry his head about such details.

‘So you think we’ll win?’ said Mr Hudson, fingering the bronze cross on his watch-chain.

‘It bain’t no good playing any match if you don’t think you’ll win,’ said Abner.

Mr Hudson stroked his red moustache. ‘I may say that the Albion has offered us a hundred pounds to play the match at North Bromwich, on their ground. The club could do with the money.’

‘Don’t you take it,’ Abner replied. ‘Don’t you take it. The Mawne ground’s worth a couple of goals to our chaps in a match of that kind. That slope down by the Royal Oak puzzled the Albion last time. Our forwards know how to use it.’

‘The Albion’s particular anxious to win,’ said Hudson. ‘What’s more, the bookmakers are giving three to one against Mawne. That shows you which way the wind’s blowing.’

‘Well, I hope to God it busts them!’ said Abner. ‘I’m no friend to football bookmakers.’

Mr Hudson blenched at this loose employment of the deity’s name. He took Abner by the arm. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘speaking in the strictest confidence, I can tell you that the club will accept Albion’s offer to play at North Bromwich. What’s more, if Albion win, I can safely say it will be worth ten pounds to you personally.’

Abner shook himself free from Mr Hudson’s friendly arm. If he had followed the inclination of the moment he would have laid Mr Hudson flat there and then on the cinders. His feelings had passed beyond the stage of words. But while he stood glaring at Mr Hudson’s face, now weakly smiling and white with fear, he saw something else that stopped him: the figure of a woman running towards them as fast as she could over the cumbered ground of the works. She was hatless and had a shawl thrown round her shoulders. He knew, even at a distance, that it was Alice. She ran straight up to Abner, with her hair blown loose and with a flush of excitement that made her singularly beautiful.

Mr Hudson snatched at the opportunity for retreat. ‘This lady wants you,’ he said.

Abner, still under the influence of a divided emotion, took a step in his direction, but Alice pulled at his sleeve. The tears that she had been restraining as she ran overcame her and she could only cry ‘Abner . . . Abner . .’

‘What the hell’s up with you?’ he said roughly.

‘Your father, Abner . . .’ she sobbed. ‘It’s your father.’

‘What’s that? What’s he done?’

‘It’s an accident at the pit. Father sent up Elsie with the message.’

‘You mean he’s dead?’ said Abner, suddenly sobered.

‘No . . . not dead. . . . I don’t think so. It’s an accident. Some kind of accident. Elsie was that moithered she couldn’t say proper. So I left her there and ran off for you. I couldn’t take him in myself. I couldn’t think of nowt but running for you.’

‘Nell, if he bain’t dead what the hell’s the matter?’ said Abner practically.

They left the works together. Alice, still out of breath, could scarcely keep pace with Abner’s long strides, but now her nervous sobbing had ceased and she even smiled. At the corner of Hackett’s Cottages they met the procession from the colliery. For some obscure reason Alice’s father had lost the key of the store in which the stretchers were kept, and so they carried John Fellows home on a door. In his progress from the pit they had fallen in with a stream of children suddenly disgorged from the Ragged Schools, and a train of these had swollen the cortège, curious to find out who, or what, lay under the brown blanket. All the women of Hackett’s Cottages gathered at the gateway of Number Eleven to receive him, many of them carrying babies and offering haphazard advice in the intervals of giving them refreshment. The doorway of the house was too small to admit the improvised stretcher, so they laid it down at the side of the garden.

‘Be careful of my bloody tomatters,’ John Fellows growled. It was the first sign of life he had given. Abner and two others lifted him from the door and carried him through the kitchen and up the twisting stairs. The boards creaked under their weight as though they were on the point of splintering. It was his right thigh that had been broken; and once, on the journey upstairs, they jolted him so much that he unclenched his teeth and roared like a bull. The crowd in the roadway shuddered. This was their first considerable sensation.

They laid him on the bed. Alice, now very pale and composed, followed them upstairs with a cup of tea.

‘God! if I’m come to tea drinking it’s a gonner,’ said John Fellows. ‘Send out for a spot of brandy!’

A small boy was sent running to the Lyttleton Arms. Elsie had already gone for the doctor. The news had spread quickly in various forms, and all Halesby heard with sensation that John Fellows had had his skull smashed in Mawne pit. The brandy came. He wouldn’t have it spoiled with water and swallowed it neat, but even the brandy could not alter the ashen pallor of his face beneath its coating of coal dust.

John Fellows was a hard case and could bear pain or any other human calamity with fortitude. He lay on his back, gritting his teeth and squirting the floor with tobacco-juice. Whenever he spoke it was with a curious dry humour that seldom appeared in his ordinary conversation. He never complained of his own sufferings, though he cursed the criminal economy of the Mawne management in the matter of pit-props. ‘They might as well use match-sticks as this Norway stuff. They’ve put a stopper on my football!’ he said. ‘But I’ll see that they pay for it. I will, and no fear!’

Indeed they owed him something. The collapse of coal that had buried him had taken place in a remote gallery on one of the lower levels of the mine; and though Mr Willis, proud of his electric lighting and American coal-cutting machinery, was in the habit of describing Mawne as a drawing-room pit, the arrangements for salvage were by no means elegant. John Fellows had lain for three hours beneath a ton or more of coal; and though the weight of it saved him from the pain of movement, acting as a kind of ponderous splint to the broken limb, the suspense of waiting till he was dug out would have broken the nerve of a more sensitive man. From this purgatory he had been hauled to one of the trolley-lines that traverse the galleries of the pit: his only moment of relative smoothness between the scene of the accident and his home being his upward journey in the hoisting cage.

They waited anxiously for the doctor. The boy made three more journeys to the Lyttleton Arms for brandy. ‘It’s the only thing that keeps the life in me,’ John Fellows said.

In a couple of hours Dr Moorhouse arrived. ‘Sorry to see you like this, Fellows,’ he said.

‘You’d be sorrier if you was me!’ Fellows grunted.

With the help of Alice they split up his trouser leg, and the doctor manipulated the thigh until he felt the crepitus of the broken bone. Then he disturbed the patient no longer. ‘It’s a three months’ job,’ he said. ‘You can’t have it seen to properly here. You want X-rays. You’ll have to go into hospital.’

‘Hospital . . .’ John Fellows cried.

Then, at last, he became fluent. The brandy had stimulated his imagination even if it had dulled the pain, and he launched into an uncompromising statement of the opinions with which poor people regard the institutions that are erected for their care. He made it plain that he, at any rate, wasn’t going to die in any hospital, or be pulled about by any students, and not a spot of drink.

‘I don’t want you to die in any hospital,’ the doctor said. He was painfully used to this kind of outburst. It was always a long and bitter controversy, and it always ended, as he knew well, in submission. While John Fellows was fuming he fixed him up on a temporary splint and then went home to telephone for the ambulance. At the foot of the stairs his eyes fell on the patient face of Mrs Moseley, who had driven up on the cart of a friendly baker as soon as she heard the news.

‘You here again!’ he cried. ‘Upon my word a lunatic asylum’s the place for you. Take your leg out of my sight. I never want to see it again. I wash my hands of you!’ He went off grumbling, and Mrs Moseley climbed the stairs.

It pleased John Fellows to see her. Indeed, from the moment of her arrival, he would not let any one else touch him. In the old days Alice would have been jealous; but hardship and difficulty had so changed her nature that she even concerned herself with Mrs Moseley’s comfort. The old woman moved about the room like a soothing influence, and when, an hour later, the ambulance arrived, she insisted on accompanying her old friend to the infirmary at North Bromwich. John Fellows went off cheerfully, with a quartern of brandy in his coat pocket. He was even bright enough to joke with Mr Higgins, who now arrived on the scene, having just discovered the key of the stretcher-store in his hip-pocket.

John Fellows’s removal to hospital made no great difference to any one but Alice. To her the relief was enormous, for it not only saved her the trouble of irregular meals, allowing her to devote her days to her baby, but freed her nights from, at the best, uncertainty, and, at the worst, terror. Now, when Abner had said good-night to her, she need no longer sit with her nerves on edge, waiting for Fellows to come home, wondering what would be the humour of his entrance. Instead of this she now sat over the fire for half an hour of luxurious drowsiness, then picked up the baby and went off placidly to bed.

Of course she had to go easy with her housekeeping expenditure, for all John Fellows’s club pay would be absorbed in paying for tobacco and other luxuries, such as butter, which the hospital did not provide for its patients, but Abner, as soon as he realised this, told her that she could count on the pound a week that he earned from the football club, and more, if necessary, for during the last year he had found it possible to put by a few sovereigns for himself. Alice did not find it necessary, however, to draw on his reserves. Her own tastes were simple and Abner was easily pleased. Indeed, John Fellows had always been the most expensive member of the household.

Abner was now in strict training for the cup-tie with the Albion and went to bed early every night. The Mawne directors, as Mr Hudson had foretold, jumped at the big club’s offer to play the match at North Bromwich, tempted not only by the welcome hundred pounds but by the prospect of an even bigger share of gate-money. The team went through their training with the greatest earnestness. Every afternoon they turned out on the Mawne ground practising passing, shooting, and tactics, followed by the eyes of the trainer, an international long since retired, who walked about the field carrying always a black bag that contained lemons, elastic bandages, and a patent embrocation of his own that smelt like Elliman’s.

Nobody who saw these men at practice could possibly have suspected that they thought of anything but winning their match, though each of them must have known that all the others had been offered ten pounds a head to lose it. In the dressing-room, where they stood rubbing each other down with flesh-gloves in the clouds of steam that the cold air condensed from half a dozen tin baths of hot water, they talked of plans and prospects just as if no shadow of corruption had ever approached them. Nobody had mentioned the subject to Abner since Hudson had tackled him at the works. That, no doubt, was the policy of those who had put up the money: to let the thought of it sink in over a period of ten days and trust to the frailty of human nature on the eleventh. They knew their business, for the mere presence of such a disturbing problem was enough to demoralise the team.

On the day before the match the Mawne goalkeeper sprained his ankle at practice, and neither the bandages nor the embrocation of the trainer could restore him. In this emergency the committee called upon George Harper, who had retired four or five years before and was now a man of substance and landlord of a public-house, to take his place. Abner, who had always been on good terms with this idol of his boyhood, went up to him after the last practice game and told him of Hudson’s offer. Harper listened to him in silence, nodding his head, but when Abner asked him if he too had been approached by Hudson, he only laughed. ‘Hudson?’ he said, ‘that red-whiskered b—? No fear of that! He dursen’t come near me. He knows what he’d get, does Mr Hudson.’

In spite of this, when the team were assembled in the dressing-room of the Albion ground on the day of the cup-tie, Abner saw the trainer take George Harper aside. He talked excitedly in a low voice, but Harper only went red in the face and said nothing. As they left the dressing-room Abner winked at George, and George, solemnly, winked back at him. The captain kicked the ball into the middle of the field, and the Mawne team ran out after him, amid a spreading uproar of cheers.

The turf of the Albion ground was incredibly smooth and level after the rough field in which they were accustomed to play at Mawne. The place was, indeed, a vast oval amphitheatre, with high stands rising above the dressing-rooms on the west and on every other side a sloping embankment so packed with people that the ground on which they stood could nowhere be seen. The vastness of this white-faced multitude was imposing in its ugliness. Its pale, restless masses, represented on a horrible scale the grimy flatness of the city complexion. From the crowd a low murmur arose like the noise of the sea breaking on distant shingles, and over all its surface floated a fume of tobacco smoke. A moment later the Albion team emerged; the crowd swayed, and the murmur swelled to a roar of welcome. The chocolate and yellow jerseys of Mawne so nearly resembled the Albion’s colours that the home team turned out in white shirts and knickers. It was partly the spotlessness of this attire that made them seem like a company of athletic giants, swifter, more flexible and stronger than their opponents. Even Abner’s six feet were dwarfed by the diverse colours of his clothes. It seemed a ridiculous thing to match this shabby team of stunted pitmen with eleven picked athletes.

The game began. Almost at once the white line of the Albion forwards was in motion. It was a lovely sight, a lesson in fleetness, elasticity and precision. The Albion, taking no risks, had included a number of their first league players in the team, and it looked as if Mawne must be nowhere. Abner, at centre half, the pivotal position of the whole field, felt that he could do no more than play a spoiling game against this perfect machine. In the back of his mind he knew also that a certain number, probably the majority of the Mawne players, were not anxious to win. It is not easy, however, to play deliberately a losing game, or indeed to play football with any degree of deliberation. The heat of the game seemed to inspire the Mawne team to a stubborn, almost desperate, defence. As a last barrier to the Albion attacks he knew that George Harper, even if he were an old stager, was incorruptible; and George Harper, in his prime, had never played a more marvellous game. Perhaps the feeling that he belonged to an older and more gifted generation of footballers helped him. Time after time, when the Albion forwards came swinging down the field in a perfect crescent, he saved the Mawne goal. His play was inspired, and when half-time came, no goal had been scored. The players stood sweating in the dressing-room. The trainer handed round cut lemons. Once again Abner saw him approach George Harper and take him by the sleeve; but this time the goalkeeper pushed him away. Mr Willis came down into the dressing-room to congratulate the players. He was smoking a big cigar, and evidently immensely pleased with himself. He, at any rate, was above suspicion. The referee called the players out again.

In the second half Abner worked as he had never worked before. The Mawne team was tiring; play grew scrappy and spiteful; but though the Albion players could do what they liked with the ball in midfield, they did not seem able to score. Even if Mawne were equally ineffective it seemed probable that the match would end in a draw. The Albion crowd grew restless, and began to think that the referee was favouring their opponents. The Albion players, now a little rattled, tried to effect by roughness what they could not achieve by skill. Several free-kicks were given against them for fouls, and the crowd began to boo the referee. It was like the hollow voice of some sullen ocean-monster. The Albion, encouraged by the support of the crowd, pursued these tactics. Two men were ordered off for fighting. A moment later the crowd regained its good humour stimulated by the sight of a shot from the Albion centre-forward that hit the cross-bar above George Harper’s head. If the shot had been three inches lower he could not possibly have saved it. The kick that followed transferred the play to the other end of the field. It was close on time and everybody was nervous. A centre from the Mawne outside right came to Abner’s feet in front of the Albion goal. One of the Albion backs tried to trip him, getting cleverly on the blind side of the referee. Abner stumbled free, and since the goal was now open, the player lashed out at his ear. Abner’s temper was up. He left the ball and closed with his opponent. The Mawne team held up their hands and called on the referee like one man. A violent fight had begun when the referee arrived, shaking himself free from a gesticulating escort of Mawne players. The Albion men separated the fighters, and though the referee warned both of them that if anything more happened he would send them off, he gave a free kick to Mawne. The crowd howled. It seemed for a moment as if they would burst their barriers and swarm on to the field. Very grimly, his face streaming with blood, Abner took the kick. The Albion goalkeeper, making a high save, tipped the ball over the cross-bar. A corner. The players lined up, panting, in front of the Albion goal. The young outside right, whose centre had been the beginning of the trouble, took the kick. The ball sailed high and fell slowly into the mêlée of players. Abner, who had proved his dangerousness, was carefully marked and charged at as the ball fell, but he butted his opponent aside, and making full use of his superior height, managed to head it into the top left-hand corner of the net. A shout of ‘goal’ rose from the crowd, but there was no applause. The strange thing about the whole business was the attitude of the Mawne players. These men, who had been playing a half-hearted game all afternoon, appeared to be overwhelmed with joy. They ran up to Abner and shook both his hands as if there had been no matter of ten pounds depending on his achievement. Even George Harper came running down the field and patted him on the back. George had his work cut out, for in the last three minutes of the game the Albion made a desperate effort to equalise, and subjected him to an incessant bombardment. Luck aided his skill, and when the whistle went for time Mawne had won their match.

Abner went home that night with a thick ear and a slowly closing right eye. He was tired and sore but elated. He wanted to do nothing but sit in front of the fire and think over again the progress of the match. Alice, on the other hand, was terribly concerned with his injuries. She dressed his face with some ointment that Mrs Moseley had recommended her for the baby, and sat opposite to him burning with pain and indignation.

‘I wish you’d give it up, Abner,’ she said. ‘One of these days you’ll get killed. It’s downright brutal. It’s worse than prize-fighting.’

‘That’s what it was,’ Abner chuckled.

He pretended that he didn’t want her to fuss over him; but all the same this devotion was very pleasant. As for Alice, the pain of seeing him so battered was almost equalled by her pleasure in tending him. And they were alone. She was thankful that they were alone. Time after time she returned to her pleading that he would give up football. ‘You’ve never come home in a state like this,’ she said.

‘Give up football?’ said Abner. ‘And what would we live on then? You couldn’t manage, and that’s straight!’

‘I’d do it,’ she said. ‘I’d manage somehow.’

He laughed at her intensity. ‘Don’t you fret yourself about me,’ he said, ‘I’m all right.’ He went to bed and slept like a log. She brought him breakfast and clean dressings to his bedroom.

On Monday morning down at the works Mr Willis met him. ‘Good lad!’ he said. ‘Good lad!’ Later in the day Mr Hudson came down from the office to the place where he was working. He smiled to conceal his annoyance. ‘Well, I suppose we’ve got to thank you and Harper for the win,’ he said.

‘I reckon we’ve not got to thank you!’ Abner replied.

‘H’m, that’s it, is it?’ said Hudson. ‘You’d better go up to the pay-office for your money.’

‘Time enough when I’ve finished,’ said Abner. Football always prevented him from collecting his pay on a Saturday morning with the other men. At the end of the day he went to the pay clerk. Instead of twenty-five shillings as usual he was given fifty.

‘What’s this for?’ he asked.

‘Lieu of a week’s notice,’ said the clerk. ‘The gaffer says we have to cut down. Mr Hudson’s orders.’

‘B—r Hudson!’ said Abner angrily.

The Sixth Chapter

That night he went down to the public-house for the first time since the day of Susan’s defection more than a year before. The crowd at the Royal Oak were glad to see him, for they were still talking about nothing else but the result of the cup-tie. Every one was anxious to treat him and to condole with him on his black eye, and he was prepared to drink as much as they would give him, standing his own share up to the limit of the fifty shillings in his pocket, as long as he could forget the anger with which he had left the works. If he didn’t, somehow, get the idea of his injury out of his mind, he felt that he would probably go down to Hudson’s private house and wring his neck.

In the Royal Oak, drinking nothing but hot whisky, he managed to lose himself and the troubles of the day. He was conscious of nothing but the warmth and comfort of the private bar, the dark varnished walls, the polished beer engine, the shining rows of bottles, the crackle of the bright fire. For a time the room was also full of jolly people who laughed and spoke with loud, buoyant voices, the happiest company imaginable. The spirituous air was exhilarating and endowed all the contents of the bar, from the postage stamps on the ceiling to the brass spittoons and sawdust of the floor, with a quality of unusual vividness. At last this curious clarity faded and the details that had seemed for some curious reason exciting, became blurred. Abner tucked up his feet on a settle covered with American leather and tried to go to sleep. When he awoke, his old friend Joe Hodgetts was piloting him home along the Stourton Road under a sky of dancing stars.

Alice was waiting up for him. Supper was laid on the table and she rose from her chair by the fire to welcome him as he entered. The new light dazzled him, and as he stood uncertainly at the door he took hold of the red curtain to steady himself, and, lurching, pulled it down from its string. Alice gave a cry. Even though she knew the symptoms well enough in her husband she couldn’t believe that Abner was drunk. She only saw him standing there with the great discoloured bruise on his flushed face. He held the curtain in his hand and looked at it stupidly, as if he didn’t know what to do with it.

‘Abner . . . what’s up with you?’ she said, running to take it from him.

‘There’s nowt up with me,’ he said solemnly. ‘I’m drunk. That’s all. If any one’s a right to be drunk it’s me.’

The equanimity with which she had trained herself to receive John Fellows in such circumstances deserted her. She knew perfectly well that it was no use arguing with a drunken man, but the case of Abner was so exceptional that she began to do so. He took no notice of her, and then she rated him violently, so that overcome by a sudden flush of anger he took hold of her arms as if he were going to throw her down. He had never taken hold of her like that before. She faced him, panting for breath, and they stared into each other’s eyes. He felt the warmth of her arms through the sleeve of her bodice and realised her for the first time as a living, warm-blooded creature. She trembled under his gaze, but did not try to free herself. He felt that something like this had happened before; remembered Susan. Suddenly sobered, almost frightened, he relaxed his grip on her arms. Still she did not move. She stood dazed, with her breath coming and going. ‘I’m going to bed,’ he said. He staggered to the foot of the stairs and left her standing there.

When he had gone she pulled herself together and put her hands to her eyes as though she wanted to shut out what she had seen. She had forgotten her first resentment and the emotion with which she trembled now was one that frightened her and put her to shame. She felt that she had just experienced the most thrilling moment of her life. After that she could never pretend to herself that she was not in love with Abner.

In the morning he woke early. Before Alice knew that he was astir he went downstairs in his stockinged feet and lit the kitchen fire. By the time that she herself appeared he had made himself a cup of tea and laid the table for breakfast. Neither of them spoke of his violent homecoming the night before or of the stranger scene that followed it. She had half expected that he would ask her pardon for what had happened, but such a proceeding didn’t seem to him important. He had been drunk, now he was sober, and that was the end of the matter. When breakfast was over he went out into the dank washhouse and shaved. She was puzzled to see that he was not going to work, for he had dressed in his Sunday clothes and wore his watch-chain, decorated with a couple of silver football medals. At last she plucked up courage to ask him if he was not going to Mawne.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I bain’t going there no more.’

‘What’s up then?’

‘Got the sack,’ he said laconically.

‘But the money . . .’ she said. ‘We’ve got to live.’

‘I picked up two weeks’ pay last night. You can have what’s left.’

He turned out his pockets and gave her a handful of small change. ‘That’s more than I reckoned there’d be,’ he said.

She threw down the money on the table and stared at him. ‘I owe more nor this!’ she said. ‘What about the football money?’

‘Don’t talk to me about football,’ he said. ‘I’ve done with football as long as that Hudson’s on the committee.’

The situation baffled her. Money they must have, and she was quick to rack her brains for some way in which it could be got. An inspiration came to her. ‘You didn’t ought to work with your eye in that state,’ she said. ‘Better go down to the doctor’s and put yourself on the box. You’ve been paying into that club long enough and not had a penny out of it.’

‘Club?’ said Abner. ‘I don’t sponge on no clubs! I’m going down to the pit to see the doggy. I reckon he’ll find me a job underground.’ He lit his pipe and went out into the frosty morning. A delayed impulse made her want to give him his knitted neck-scarf, but it came too late. She didn’t know what to make of it. In a single night all the pleasant, ordered happiness of the life that they had been leading since John Fellows’s accident had been overwhelmed. She felt it unreasonable, incredible, that this should have happened. She could not even solace herself with the care of her baby, who was now beginning to babble and to stagger with uncertain steps from chair to chair. She found herself wishing, for a moment, that there wasn’t a kid to worry about, and was as quickly bitten with remorse, for she knew that the baby was her most precious possession on earth. She could settle down to nothing. The foundations of her routine life had been dissolved. She had not even money enough to meet the bills that she always paid on Mondays. But the thought of money was nothing to her compared with her anxiety as to Abner’s attitude toward herself. She found a little comfort in thinking that he had not yet recovered from the effects of his debauch, and that when he returned in the evening they might take up their relation at the point where it had been so abruptly convulsed. On this her whole happiness depended.

Abner’s visit to the pit was satisfactory in so far as it procured him without the least difficulty a job underground. He was a trained miner, and in those days, when the output of the mine had been diminished by a series of accidents and a growing tendency to work short time, any new hand was welcome at Mawne pit. When he came back in the evening he reassured Alice that even if they had to go easy in the matter of expenditure they need not starve in the interval before John Fellows returned to double their income. To meet the present emergency he handed her the sovereign that he had received from the football club. ‘If that sod Hudson had had his way you’d have had ten,’ he said enigmatically. ‘You’d better send a nipper to the Oak with my boots and football gear,’ he told her. ‘I’ve done with Mawne United.’

She was thankful for his solution of her money difficulties, for pride would not have allowed her to face the butcher and the grocer without the money in her hand. In spite of the loss that it implied, she couldn’t reasonably refuse to be glad that he had abandoned football since she had so often begged him to do so. What troubled her far more than this was the fact that his attitude toward her was changed. It was clear that he had not been too drunk to realise the significance of the moment when he had held her in his arms and they had looked into each other’s eyes. He had seen the emotional precipice on the edge of which they were standing. Well, so had she; but that seemed to her no reason why they should not pretend that things were as they had always been. She was content to play her part; even, for their common comfort, to forget what had happened. The only thing that she could not bear was that he should avoid her as though she were an evil thing to be feared and distrusted.

This, in effect, was what he did. To drink habitually was not in his nature. When he drank he did so simply as a means to escape from himself or from some harassing emotion; and so he did not seek a refuge, as she had feared he would, in a public house. None the less it soon became clear that the pleasant homely evenings at Hackett’s Cottages were now at an end. The chair which Alice always arranged for him at the fireside was never occupied. When he came home from the pit at night and had washed himself in the scullery he now went out again to spend the evenings with his friends, with old Mr Higgins, with George Harper, or with Mrs Moseley. He hated his work at the colliery: the dark, cramped labour in remote subterranean stalls was a terrible change from his free and easy life at the furnaces. He hated the dirt no less than the darkness and it scarcely mended matters to realise that he was wanted at the pit.

Opportunities of escape soon presented themselves. The retirement of their most promising player from the United team created a sensation not only in Mawne but in the surrounding towns. Abner would give no explanation for it. When people asked him why he was not playing for Mawne he merely told them to go and ask Hudson. It was impossible for him to change his team in the middle of the season without an official transfer. The secretary of the Albion made a special journey to Halesby to ask him to consent to this; but since this proceeding would have presented the Mawne club with a handsome transfer fee, he refused. The Albion offered him good and easy work in North Bromwich if he would sign on for them next season. ‘You can have it for the asking,’ they said—but he refused, for though he would have liked nothing better he felt that it would be wrong to desert Alice in her present emergency. Until his father returned it was his duty to stay with her.

The winter wore on, and John Fellows, whose alcoholic history made him a bad subject for a fractured thigh-bone, still lay in hospital. Abner stuck to his thankless labours at the pit. He worked longer underground than he need have done, simply for the reason that he did not want to spend his evenings in the dangerous company of Alice. After that night he knew that he could not wholly trust himself. His earnings were now sufficient to keep the household in comfort, and the money that he drew from his overtime he put aside for an emergency, concealing them in an old stocking underneath the mattress of his bed. He wanted to be sure of his liberty as soon as his father returned.

At Christmas, Alice made a heroic attempt to recover her lost happiness. A week before the festival she went down into the market at Halesby and bought a branch of berried holly which she hung above the middle of the table from a nail that had once supported a hanging lamp. She decorated the branch with cheap trifles, flags, lustred balls and candles of coloured wax in metal clips shaped like butterflies. Over the mantelpiece she pinned a scroll of varnished paper with ‘God Bless Our Home’ in gothic characters upon it, and in various inaccessible places she put sprigs of mistletoe. Although she said nothing to Abner it was evident that she was counting on him to celebrate the feast at home. A few days before the event she showed him a present that she had bought for the child, a wooden horse with red nostrils, a lambskin mane, and a ridiculous dab of a tail. Even this failed to move him, and up to the last moment she was in doubt as to whether he would forsake her. She schemed her very hardest to keep him, using as a bait the child whose curious ways and stumbling attempts at speech amused him. This creature loved, above all things, to be caught up and perched on the dizzy height of Abner’s shoulder, so high that he was able to examine the unexplored country of the ceiling. He also loved to play with Tiger, who now came and went in Hackett’s Cottages of his own accord. Tiger liked children, and he and little John would roll over together on the kitchen floor. Alice always made the dog welcome, tempting him with such bones as never entered Mrs Moseley’s house. He was a link with Abner, and therefore to be encouraged.

In the end Abner spent Christmas Day at Hackett’s Cottages, or, to be exact, the morning and evening of it, for the afternoon he devoted to watching the league match between Mawne United and Dulston on the Royal Oak ground. He could not bring himself to forget football altogether even though he persisted in his determination not to play. In spite of all Alice’s pathetic efforts, the day was not a success. In the evening, when they sat over the fire and Mr Higgins, who had brought in a basket of oranges, had left them alone together, she made a direct attempt to have the matter out with him.

‘Why are you so funny with me, Abner?’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I’ve done that you should treat me distant like this. You didn’t use to do it.’ But he would not answer. ‘You’ve took a turn against me,’ she said. ‘I know you have. What is it I’ve done?’

‘You ain’t done nothing,’ he said. ‘And I ain’t took a turn again’ you neither. I’m all right if so be you’ll leave me alone.’

‘Yo’m different even with our John,’ she said.

‘Don’t yo’ bother,’ he said at last. ‘It’ll be different time ourn comes back. He must be getting on a bit now.’

She had to leave it at that. It had been a difficult evening for Abner, for in spite of her troubles the firelight and the excitement that the baby’s pleasure in his presents had given her made her look very attractive in her own fragile way. ‘When ourn comes back . . .’ She sighed, for she felt that John Fellows’s return would put an end even to the small measure of happiness that she managed to extract from the present. When John Fellows came back she would be faced with all the old desperate problems, the old terrible nights. As they sat over the fire she turned her face aside to hide the tears that came into her eyes. Abner puffed stolidly at his pipe. ‘When he comes back,’ he said, ‘I reckon I’ll have a look round for another job.’

‘Where?’ she asked, in alarm.

‘Oh, anywhere out of this place,’ he said. ‘I’m sick of Halesby. I reckon I’ll go to Coventry or Wales. There’s good money in Wales.’

‘Abner,’ she cried. ‘Oh, Abner, you’m not going to leave me? Not with him. . . . I couldn’t abide it, Abner. Abner, if you leave me, I’ll make a hole in the cut, God strike me if I won’t!’ She could contain herself no longer and went sobbing upstairs. Abner found it difficult to resist an impulse to follow her and comfort her. He was not used to a woman’s tears. He got as far as the foot of the stairs, then slowly turned back and sat on, smoking till midnight amid the pathetic decorations of that poor room. His reflections determined him more than ever to cut himself free from the embarrassments of life at Halesby. Coventry was almost too near. Yes, he would go down into Wales. On his way upstairs he listened for a moment outside her bedroom door. He thought he heard her still sobbing under the sheets, but when he listened the sound of sobbing stopped.

Next day she had quite regained her self-possession. They went together, taking the baby with them, to visit John Fellows in the North Bromwich Infirmary. They found him lying in a long, clean ward festooned with Christmas decorations. The ominous erection of an apparatus of weights and pulleys at the foot of his bed emphasised his helplessness. He did not appear to be very pleased to see them, and his embraces so frightened the baby that he set up a howl. The baby need not have been frightened, for John Fellows was far less impressive than he had been in his former state. The whole man seemed to have shrunk. He was newly shaved; his rough hands had become clean and almost transparent; but though he now looked as if he couldn’t hurt any one, the presence of the visitors set him grumbling at once. From the first he appeared to be offended with Abner because he had not thought to smuggle in any liquor for him.

‘You ain’t brought a spot,’ he said. ‘Well, you’re a b—y fine son!’ Even three months of abstinence had not diminished his craving. He told them that he dreamed of liquor, but that there seemed to be no chance of him getting any nearer to it than in dreams, for, as far as he could see, his leg was exactly as it had been when he came into hospital. After this outburst of discontent he softened a little, pinched Alice’s cheek, played a little with the baby, who had by this time overcome his fears, and even talked to Abner about football. In this way he heard the story of the Albion match and Mawne committee’s attempt to square the players. At first he was enthusiastic about George Harper’s resistance to the corrupting influence; but on second thoughts he disapproved of it. ‘I reckon you and George done your mates a bad turn. It ain’t every day you can pick up ten pound for nothing.’ The only thing that modified his opinion was the dislike that he shared with all the other men at Mawne of Hudson. ‘Hudson . . .’ he said. ‘I wish you’d a’ finished him!’

While Abner and his father were talking football Alice had approached the sister, a dark, capable-looking woman whose features and hair and eyes were as rigid and sharp and metallic as the scissors hanging from her starched belt, on the subject of John Fellows’s progress. This woman stared at her for a moment. ‘Are you Fellows’s daughter?’ she asked.

‘No, sister, I’m his wife.’

‘He’s the worst grumbler we’ve ever had in this ward,’ said the sister; ‘but as a matter of fact he’s getting on finely. The doctor says the bone is set nicely, and he should be out in a couple of weeks now. I expect they’ll send him out on a Thomas’s splint. You don’t know what that is,’ she added, with a rather scornful intonation, but then, noticing that Alice looked tired, she took her into her bunk and gave her a cup of tea.

‘I couldn’t imagine that you were Fellows’s wife,’ she said, ‘and this his baby. I thought your husband was the young man who came with you.’

‘He and baby’s half-brothers,’ Alice explained, blushing. ‘By Mr Fellows’s first wife, you know.’

‘Well, I hope you’ll be happy,’ replied the sister doubtfully. ‘It’s time the visitors were going. Is Fellows a very heavy drinker?’

‘I’m afraid he is,’ said Alice mildly.