Chapter XIII: Part 13

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

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

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

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

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

‘Gone? Why, the girl must be mad!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘_Your loving husband_,
‘_GEORGE_.’

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

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

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

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

‘_I_ don’t keep you here,’ she said.

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

‘It’s hurt,’ she cried. ‘Kill it!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She looked away without answering.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Twentieth Chapter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He waited for her, and in another moment they had crossed the road under the shadow of the poplar. From that point she could see the roof of the cottage where the evangelist was staying. The gable rose up high like a symbol of the power she was obeying. ‘Not here,’ she whispered. ‘We might be seen.’ He helped her over the gate, taking her down in his arms. She stiffened beneath his touch. A heavy dew had come out on the grass that washed her ankles as she walked, for she had not pulled on her stockings. Owls were hunting in the misty starlight. One floated before them along the hedgerow—ghostly on quiet wings. He caught her up in his arms.

‘Now what’s it all about?’ he said.

She hurried to tell him before it grew more difficult, stammering with haste; but when she came to the story of her conversion and her interview with Evan Hughes she felt the weight of his ridicule overbearing her. She hadn’t humbled herself enough to bear the indignity of being laughed at, and least of all by Abner. She stopped suddenly.

‘Let me go back!’ she said, trying to free herself. ‘Let me go back!’

He only held her closer.

‘What’s all this havering?’ he said. ‘What’s up with you, eh? Give us a kiss!’

She put her hands up to his mouth, struggling. ‘I can’t . . . I can’t!’

‘What do you want then?’

She took her plunge. ‘Abner, why don’t you marry me?’ she said.

‘Marry you? Marry?’ he cried. He laughed out loud at the idea.

Then it came to him in a flash that there must be some urgent reason for her request. People in his class and in that part of the country rarely married unless they were obliged to in accordance with the local custom. He had been caught in the same way as nine out of ten of his married mates. It was like his cursed luck! He wouldn’t believe it. His first feeling was one of bitter rage. He saw himself tied hand and foot, helplessly handed over to the commonest of fates, another fool caught in the web that women spun for a free man’s undoing. He saw in front of him an endless dull routine of life at Mainstone. He saw himself finished, and the idea of paternity gave no consolation to his bitterness. Then, in the same swift vision, he saw the little household at Wolfpits that depended on him for support, and among them the wan, devoted face of Mary Malpas.

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ he said at last. ‘How do you know you’re like that?’

She flushed in the dark, with an involuntary affectation of modesty.

‘How dare you?’ she cried. ‘How dare you? I’m not. There’s nothing wrong with me.’

‘Then what the hell is all this talk of marrying about?’ he cried. ‘What d’you take me for? I’m not that soft?’

He laughed out loud in the suddenness of his relief. It stung her pride to think that he was laughing at her. Anger boiled up in her, and she forgot all her pietistic resolves as she freed herself in abuse. In a single second the penitent had been turned into a virago mad with jealousy, letting fly at him a spate of foul words that she had learned in the taproom. She didn’t stop to think what she was saying. The words swept over her mind in a flood and made her deaf. Then she saw Abner shaking with laughter at her performance and pulled herself together.

‘I’ve finished with you, you great beast!’ she said. ‘A dirty chap that goes running all over the country after women! I’m not going to take turn and turn about with a married woman, so don’t you think it! You and that great stick of a Condover as George Malpas got sick and tired of in three year . . . you and your Mary!’

‘Here, drop that?’ said Abner darkly. ‘Shut your mouth!’

‘Drop it?’ she cried. ‘You’re not going to shut my mouth when the whole village is disgusted with you and your goings on . . . and her putting on a face as innocent as a saint and taking the children out for walks, poor little devils! You wait till George comes back and then she’ll show you the back door quick enough. I don’t know what you want taking up with a piece of muck like that. You’re a dirty hypocrite, and as for her . . .’

Abner stopped her mouth, but she fought and struggled.

‘Next time you’d better go farther off than Redlake,’ she spluttered. ‘You dirty, rotten swine!’

It was lucky for her that she wrenched herself away from him, for Abner’s blood was in his head. She went running like a madwoman over the ghostly field. If she had stayed he could have murdered her. Slowly following, he came to himself, and wondered what the devil he was doing in that damp field in the middle of the night. He cursed all women as he saw them in her violent image, but when he set his feet on the high road, his anger had subsided and he began to realise how blind he had been. He knew that Susie had probably spoken no less than the truth about the local scandals. Looking backward he found that he could explain the smiles and winks and sidelong glances of his mates. Fine friends they were, who made sport of a man and never told him why! And it dawned on him, still stupidly incredulous, that this trouble and nothing else was the cause of the change in Mary’s behaviour, the thing that had snatched her so violently away from him. No doubt it had come to her ears through Mrs Mamble. All women were spiteful by nature, and could not resist the pleasant temptation of giving pain to others of their kind. They had let her know in some covert way what folk were saying, and she, too proud to confide in him, was protecting herself as best she could. He knew her pride . . . he wished to God she were not so proud, and yet, since that was her nature, he must be patient with her.

He was not built for patience. Walking home to Wolfpits with the high road beneath him, and the mild humming of telegraph wires that stretched away to the ends of the earth above, he felt once more the restlessness with which his spirit was so familiar: the desire that had come over him in fierce gusts from time to time ever since the days of his childhood, the will to be free, to cut all coils and launch out into the life to which he had a right. Ever since his boyhood he had been as much a prisoner as George Malpas, and for even less reason. Breaking free from Mawne and reaching out over these hills, he had merely passed from one prison to another. The only periods of freedom he had known had been those dimly-remembered days with his father before Alice came to Hackett’s Cottages, and the week of his travels on the road with Mick Connor. Always, somehow or other, a woman had been at the bottom of his slavery. Women were the curse of his existence. It pleased him fiercely to think that in his breach with Susie he had shorn through one of these shackles. He hated women, and yet, in his heart, he could not remember Mary without tenderness, and knew that, however loudly he might protest, he was going back along the road to Wolfpits of his own free will, and whatever it might cost him, must stay there until George Malpas returned.

That night he was too late to see Mary; but next morning, when he arrived at the work, he tackled Munn on the subject of the Redlake scandal.

‘What do they say about me and Mrs Malpas, Joe?’ he asked.

Munn stammered. ‘Nowt as I know, Ab,’ he said.

‘Drop that, kid! Don’t you come that over me!’ he said. ‘Spit it out!’

‘Naught out of the way,’ Munn said at last. ‘They say as you and her is pretty thick.’

‘Oh, they do, do they?’ said Abner. ‘And what do you think about it, eh?’

‘It’s none of my business,’ said Munn doggedly.

‘No more it is, my son,’ Abner laughed. ‘Get on with it!’

‘They said you’d been caught out over at Redlake.’

‘Then it’s that bleeder Badger!’ said Abner. ‘Wait till I see the sod! That all?’

‘I didn’t hear no more,’ said Munn.

‘Well, kid,’ said Abner. ‘You keep clear of the women! Don’t you have naught to do with them!’

‘No fear,’ said Munn, with a smirk of his hare-lip.

Abner had meant to have the matter out with Mary, but when he thought it over he saw that nothing was to be gained by this. He understood her awkwardness, and, knowing the delicacy of her temper, left well alone. She, on her part, would have suffered an agony of shame in showing him George’s letter. After his final interview with Susie she noticed a change in him and wondered what had caused it. He began to spend his evenings again at Wolfpits, going out to talk in the stables with old Drew, picking baskets of fruit from the walled garden and working, more rarely, in their own tilled plot. She was curious to know what had happened, but kept her thoughts to herself, and was grateful at least for his forbearance.

She had heard no more of George, and though she had lived in fear of seeing old Mrs Malpas ever since Susie’s visit had told her that the new scandal was abroad, the weeks passed by and no outside intelligence penetrated the remoteness of Wolfpits. At times, when she saw Abner moving quietly about the heavy work of the house she was overwhelmed with a sensation which she persuaded herself was gratitude, and longed to burst through the convention of silence or commonplace that bound them. It would have been fairer, she thought, to open her heart to him, to stand face to face without a veil between. But she did not know what her own heart contained, or what the veil concealed, and her courage always failed her. Not only would her confession involve an abasement, a sacrifice of pride that she could not face, but Heaven only knew where it might lead. And yet, in spite of these things, they were almost happy.

One Wednesday evening early in August, just before the gang knocked off for the day, the clerk of the works came walking gingerly among the scattered culverts to the trench in which Abner and Munn were working. He carried a paper in his hand which he consulted with short-sighted eyes before he addressed them.

‘Fellows and Munn, isn’t it?’ he mumbled. ‘Munn and Fellows. Yes.’

‘That’s us!’ said Abner, throwing down his shovel.

‘I’ve a letter from the boss,’ said the clerk, ‘orders to cut down the wage-bill on this job. We’ve got to sack all supernumerary hands—those that aren’t regular, that is—so we shan’t need you two after Saturday week. That gives you ten clear days’ warning to look about you.’

‘Right you are, gaffer!’ said Abner.

The clerk went blundering on to another trench, having ticked off two names on his list.

‘Well, Joe,’ said Abner. ‘What about it, my son?’

‘I dunno, Ab,’ said Munn dolefully. ‘Back to bleedin’ old Brum, I reckon. That’s about the ticket. I wouldn’t have had this happen not for a bit! I shall never find another lodge like old Mrs Taylor’s. She’s been a mother to me, that woman! What are you going to do?’

‘Stay on here, Joe,’ said Abner. ‘Pick up another job somewhere.’

‘That’s right enough for you,’ said Munn. ‘I can’t go farmerin’ an’ all.’

‘Right enough is it?’ Abner laughed. ‘You wait and see!’

The siren sounded, and Connor came along the trench whistling jauntily as he always did when he was up against it.

‘Got the boot, Mick?’ Abner asked.

Mick nodded. ‘It breaks the heart in me to think I’m afther leavin’ all them pheasants,’ he said. ‘Off on the touch again: that’s what it’s come to. Ireland’s the only place to live in, and I’ll knock down enough for a double at Punchestown if it’s only hawking of dead Roses of Jericho round the basements of Merrion Square. Shure, an’ you’ll come along wud me!’

Abner shook his head.

‘God help you, you couldn’t be worse if you was married’ said Mick, with a leer.

Abner laughed. He knew Mick Connor too well to take his tongue seriously.

That night when he went home he did not tell Mary what had happened, for it seemed to him his news would only disturb her needlessly. At the same time he knew that something must be done, and after tea he went down to the bridge to wait for old Drew’s return.

The labourer looked at him and scratched his head. ‘That’s the worst of they casual jobs,’ he said. ‘Money? Yes . . . but you never get knowed, and there’s nothing permanent to them.’

Abner asked how he should set about finding a job in the district, and the old man looked solemn.

‘I rackon you’ll find it easy enough for a month or maybe six week with the harvest coming. They be glad of any help they can get in they times. After that you can whistle for it.’

‘Anything ‘ll do for me,’ said Abner.

‘Now mark ’ee, ’tis like this,’ the old man explained, ‘this country, when fust I know’d ’en, were a tarrable place for barley and wheat, but now, like the vules they be, they’ve a’ given it up and gone in for this dairyin’. Proper women’s work, I call it; and women be cheap in these parts, as they ought to be. I don’t say as there ban’t the apples as well.’

Sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof. Abner knew now that he could not look beyond the harvest for regular work, but harvest labour, being rare, was well paid, and by working overtime he might easily amass a little store of money. More than that, he might even prolong his employment, if he made good friends, by helping to pick the yellow apples from which thin Shropshire cider is made, but on this, he knew well, he could not count with any certainty, as the orchards were alien and few. He begged old Drew not to mention his quest to any one at Wolfpits, and the old man blinked his assent.

Next Sunday evening he said good-bye to the friends who shared in his dismissal. Munn, who had scraped together a little money, was going to Ludlow, where he would catch a train for Dulston. Mick Connor, being sick of England, as he said, was tramping north to Holyhead. Abner walked with him to the crest of hills above Clun.

‘If you’re ever in the city of Dublin,’ Mick said, ‘all you’ve got to do is to go into Nagle’s Back. Ask for the devil they call Kerry Mick, used to lodge with Mother Muldoon, and the grocer’s curate ‘ll give you a naggn’ for the love on him.’

Abner watched him swing away down the hill, with his loose-jointed, loping stride. He returned home late at night. Mary, contrary to her custom, was sitting up for him.

She sat at the table reading, and he quickly tumbled to her reason for doing so. In the midst of his farewells he had forgotten to give her his week’s wages the night before. She would not ask him for money; but she was hoping that her unusual presence would make him realise what he had forgotten. Seeing this he was tempted, for a moment, to withhold it; to wait and see what she would do, to force her into a spiritual submission; but then he remembered that the shock which he was being forced to give her would be quite enough.

‘Here’s the brass,’ he said, placing it on the table in front of her.

‘Thank you, Abner,’ she said.

‘I reckon it’s got to go a long way this week. I’ve kept none back.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

‘It’s going to be the last, far as I can see.’

For a second she thought that the moment had come; that her coldness had actually forced him into leaving her. Remorse, mingled with cold fear for the future, overwhelmed her; but he saw her bewilderment and told her simply what had happened.

‘I’ve got to look out for work,’ he said. ‘It may come along any day, only the harvest’s late.’

‘We shall have to manage,’ she said calmly. ‘You can trust me to do the best I can.’ She stood waiting as if she wanted to say something more, but at the last her courage failed her. ‘I have a few shillings put by,’ she said. ‘I always thought something might happen.’

‘Well, yo’m a marvel and no mistake!’ he cried.

During his first week of idleness Abner went out every day visiting the farms of the neighbourhood in search of a promise of harvest work. It was a lean year: the drought of the summer had stunted the straw; a couple of violent thunderstorms had done more harm than good, and the farmers were now hanging on as long as they dared, gambling on the chance of rain that was due. Wherever Abner went they shook their heads.

‘Can’t say when we’ll be cutting,’ they said. ‘Next week, or week after, or three weeks’ time. It depends on the weather, and the damned stuff’s that poor it isn’t worth reaping. Worse than the hay . . . and that’s saying something!’

At night, when he came home, Mary looked anxiously for his news, but he could tell her nothing. He made casts farther afield. He did not care how far he went if only he could find work; but down in the plains, although he could see for himself that the ears were fuller, he was met by the same evasive replies. He came to hate the sight of these sour, prosperous farmers. It seemed to him that they all had the same callous faces as the distant Mr Cookson who had killed his dog; but he knew better than to let Spider follow him on these visits.

‘You might try Mr Prosser of The Dyke,’ said old Drew one evening. ‘That be a fine big farm, and they say he do go in for barley.’

Next day Abner visited The Dyke. It was a farm that he had missed in his former expeditions, a house buried in beechwoods that stood, unappropriately, high and dry on a lofty ridge south of the main road between Mainstone and Lesswardine. It lay five miles from Wolfpits as the crow flies, and nearly seven by road. A green drive bordered by hazels and sheltered by smooth beeches in which squirrels were playing, brought him to the house: a melancholy edifice, built four-square, and covered with plaster that had once been painted white but was now streaked with green. He knocked at the back door, but could make nobody hear. A dog flew out of a kennel near the yard gate, tugging at his chain, and inside the house two others, excited by the sound, came pattering along the passage and scraped at the lower edge of the door with their paws.

Abner gave it up. Evidently nobody was at home. He took a drink of cold water at the pump and set off home through the green lane. Half-way down it he heard a sound of muffled hoofs, and a dog-cart, of the sturdy kind that farmers use, came swinging round the corner. The driver was a woman of twenty-five to thirty years of age, swarthy, with a rich autumnal colouring, and gray eyes. Another, younger girl, with her hair in a pigtail, sat beside her. They passed Abner at a trot, but twenty yards later the driver pulled up and looked back.

‘Have you been up to The Dyke?’ she called.

‘Yes, miss,’ said Abner, taking off his cap, and approaching.

‘I don’t suppose you’d find any one in,’ she said. ‘Dad’s gone to Ludlow, and the girl’s out. What do you want?’

‘I came to ask if Mr Prosser wants any outside help for harvest.’

She looked at him steadily. Their eyes met. ‘I don’t know. What’s your name?’

‘Fellows. Abner Fellows.’

‘Where do you live? You don’t belong to these parts?’

‘Wolfpits.’

‘Wolfpits?’ She examined him more closely, repeating the word with an accent of surprise. She put a brown-gloved finger to her lip. ‘I think dad will want some one: they’re beginning the barley on Monday,’ she said slowly. ‘Tell you what . . . you’d better look up here to-morrow morning. I’ll tell dad you’re coming. So long!’

She touched up the horse and the dog-cart shot forward. Abner went on his way encouraged.

‘Where did you try to-day?’ Mary asked him. She was doing her utmost to appear interested in his quest. Indeed she could not well do less.

‘Up to The Dyke . . . Prosser’s place.’

Mary blushed. ‘Did you see any one there?’

‘The place was all shut up,’ he said, ‘but I met a young lady as I took to be Mr Prosser’s daughter in the drive just after I turned back.’

‘What age was she?’

‘Summat about yourn.’

‘Dark?’

‘Ah, darkish. There was a young ’un along with her.’

‘How was she dressed?’

‘Now you’m asking things out of reason,’ Abner laughed. ‘Them’s the sort of things a man don’t notice.’

‘It must have been Marion,’ she said, and later in the evening she explained to him that Mr Prosser’s elder daughter was an old schoolfellow of hers, and rather more than a schoolfellow, for they had once been great friends. Mary’s father, the unfortunate Condover, had been something of a crank on the subject of education and had sent her to a school in Ludlow, where she had mixed with all sorts of people who were, in fact, her social superiors. ‘But that’s all ages ago,’ she said. ‘I expect that she’s forgotten me by now. Mr Prosser lost his wife five or six years ago, and Marion’s had charge of the house ever since then. A great big place, The Dyke! She’s a queer girl, I’ll give you my word for that.’

Next day Abner went up early to the farm. In the yard he found the younger of the two girls. She was dressed in a holland overall and a big straw hat and was watching a hatch of ducklings that an anxious hen had mothered, learning to swim in an iron bath. When she saw Abner she ran into the house calling: ‘Marion! Marion!’

The elder came to the door. Abner scarcely recognised her, for she had changed her tweeds and her sporting hat for an overall like that of her sister, and her dark hair was bound in thick plaits about her head. She greeted him frankly, smiling and showing between her parted lips a set of beautiful teeth.

‘I’ve told dad about you,’ she said. ‘He’s just gone over to have a look at the bull and ’ll be back in a minute. Have a glass of cider?’

Abner thanked her. She returned brightly with a mug of cider and a plate of scones hot from the girdle.

Five minutes later Mr Prosser came into the yard with his ploughman Harris. The farmer was a tall, fair man, with golden whiskers and a moustache that almost hid the weakness of his mouth.

‘H’m, you’re the young man, are you?’ he said, looking Abner up and down with more curiosity than he could have been expected to show for a casual labourer. ‘What is it you want? Eh?’

Abner repeated his request, and the farmer, with a little less than the usual surliness of his kind, said: ‘Well, yes, I dare say we can do with you so long as you’re not afraid of work. But it’s a short job, I warn you!’

The younger girl, who had been listening dreamily to their conversation, turned and uttered a shrill cry. ‘Dad! Dad!’ she said, ‘I’m afraid I’ve drowned one of them!’ She ran forward with an inanimate piece of yellow fluff in her hand. ‘Oh, what a shame!’

‘That’s like you, Ethel,’ the father grumbled. ‘Take it in to Marion.’

But by this time the elder sister had appeared and was holding the duckling to her breast as though she would have liked to nurse it back to life. Ethel stood watching her with tears in her eyes.

‘You’ll never make a farmer’s wife, Ethel,’ said Mr Prosser, teasing her. ‘Come here! Give us a kiss!’ He held the child’s face in his hands and kissed her noisily. Marion had carried the duckling into the house. He turned to Abner.

‘Day after to-morrow,’ he said. ‘Come up early . . . about five o’clock.’

The Twenty-First Chapter

SINCE the time of her Ludlow schooldays and her friendship with Mary Condover, Marion Prosser’s horizon had widened to an extent that might easily have explained the distance which now separated them. From Ludlow she had been sent on to finish her education at a Cheltenham college; for her mother had social ambitions and knew that the nearest way to the homes of her superiors lay through the schools that their daughters frequented. She always taught Marion to speak of her father as a ‘gentleman-farmer,’ a description which Mr Prosser accepted under more protest than he usually offered to anything that his wife dictated. For all that, he was proud of the fact that The Dyke had belonged to his family for six generations, and when he walked round his fields on a Sunday evening and surveyed their richness from the crumbled earthwork of Offa’s Dyke, which gave the farm its name, could even be sentimental on the subject.

Marion went to Cheltenham when her sister Ethel was a baby two years old. She made many friends, for she was good at games and a creature of unusual spirit; but the principal feature of her life was a sudden and passionate friendship for one of her mistresses, a languid pre-Raphaelite young woman with a phthisical tendency who made her read a good deal of romantic literature of a sentimental kind. Miss Randall’s literary heroes were Parsifal and Galahad, and her fetish personal purity, the shame-faced purity of impotence. She was not fond of men, she said, although she allowed herself the licence of a spiritual flirtation with an advanced young priest of the Church of England, to whom she opened her soul.

In due course Marion’s adoration of her mistress went the way of all such passions; but her taste for letters remained. In her eighteenth year her mother suddenly died, and she returned to The Dyke to look after her father and her baby sister. Even in the excitement of her new activities she rebelled, feeling herself isolated, alien, condemned to an infinity of small-talk.

She became the hostess of her father’s friends; farmers of every age and type, who made love to her with varying degrees of rustic clumsiness but seemed to Mr Prosser the most desirable of suitors. Usually they drove up to The Dyke on Sunday evenings or after Ludlow market. Some, by their liquorish assumption of an easy conquest, offended her and caught the rough side of her tongue; but she soon found that with them her genteel shades of irony were so much waste of time, since they were not even understood.

The young men retired puzzled, and their sisters sympathised with them. ‘She isn’t natural,’ they said, ‘and you can’t go against nature like that. I never could think what you saw in her.’ In this way Marion Prosser got a reputation for shrewishness and conceit. The young men of the neighbourhood felt that even the possession of The Dyke would be a small compensation for that of such a difficult wife. They began to treat her with the instinctive respect of the terrier for the hedge-hog, leaving her to her books and to her fancies.

With these, for some years, she was content. The walls of her bedroom at the Dyke showed evidences of culture in as many strata as can be found in the coloured ribbon along the edge of a geological map of England. They ranged from the primary Rossettis of her Cheltenham period to reproductions of late impressionist pictures. Among books she groped her way determinedly. In Ludlow she found a branch of one of the London circulating libraries. Every week she would drive there in her pony trap and bring back the books that she had ordered, to the amazement of the stationer who kept the shop. Her father laughed at her tastes. Among his friends she gained the reputation of a bluestocking, which was enough to make any young man think twice before he spoke to her. And the years went by.

They were dull years, and for very boredom she tried to identify herself with the work of the farm. She threw herself violently into these new interests to the amazement of her father. Although he was still more than a little afraid of her, he could not help respecting her capability. During the lifetime of her mother he had been so infused with the spirit of this active woman that he had appeared to be a man of some determination. Her death annihilated him: he had relapsed into nonentity, caring nothing, as it seemed, for his crops or his herds, driving in regularly every week to Ludlow market like an automaton, driving back in the evening, morose and fuddled, with no clear idea of what he had been about. On these occasions he would talk piteously of his motherless girls, and his large, sentimental eyes would fill with tears. He confided to his friends that he himself was not long for this world, though, physically, he was as strong as a horse.

Marion’s determination changed all that. Subtly, without his knowledge, she pulled him together and made a man of him again, and, never having known the subjection with which her mother had entered the estate of marriage, she did what she liked with him, sometimes wounding his pride with her rather brutal frankness. Yet, even when he was wounded, he submitted to her; for she flattered him by pretending that he was the real head of the household. At root he was a lazy man, and dared not quarrel with his comforts. He realised, too, that the knowledge of practical farming, that was as deeply rooted in him as an instinct, was more essential to the success of their partnership than Marion’s acute and active mind.

He prospered, and in moments of exaltation would tell himself that she was only a girl after all and that he was the man who counted. He made a startling recovery of his self-possession and talked no more of death; but his greatest happiness he still found in the society of his younger daughter Ethel, a child whose nature was nearer to his own. Some day, he decided, Ethel should marry a solid husband of his choosing, some big man with many lowland acres, and when the grandchildren began to come along, he would pass a quiet old age among them. Marion should have The Dyke. Even if she were not the elder she had earned it. It seemed unlikely that she would ever marry, being so hard to please.

Now, at the age of twenty-eight, Marion found herself lonely. The farm work had become so intimate a part of her life that it served no longer to distract her. Life was slipping away from her. Ten years had passed almost without her knowing it. In another ten she would be nearly forty. A hidden fear possessed her that by separating herself from her own class and kind she had sacrificed the chance of living. Life was the thing that mattered, and she had exchanged her heritage for a few pitiful shreds of culture. The motherly cares that she lavished on Ethel were a poor substitute for veritable maternity, and she knew it. She began to see that by refusing all commerce with the men of her own class in the hope of realising a problematical grand passion she had sacrificed all opportunity of passion whatever.