Chapter III: Part 3

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.

‘I thought so,’ said the sister. ‘We ought to keep him in here for your sake. But there’s always a rush on surgical beds at Christmas time. You’d better call your stepson.’

The Seventh Chapter

ABNER was genuinely relieved when Alice told him the good report that the sister had given her on his father’s condition, for it promised him a speedy release from the discomfort of the situation. Alice, who had accustomed herself to examine every shade of expression that he showed, knew that he was rejoicing at the prospect of leaving her. The thought piqued her, for she had forced herself always to behave toward him exactly as if there had never been a moment of embarrassment between them. Her pride would not let the matter rest.

‘You’m glad he’s coming back,’ she said. ‘I know you be.’

‘I’m glad his leg’s joined, if that’s what you mean,’ he replied. ‘That’s only human-like. Besides, it’s best for everybody.’

‘And what about me?’ she asked, passionately.

He would not answer, and she flowed on with a stream of reproaches, telling him that she knew he hated her and couldn’t bear the sight of her, in the hope that he would be driven to say that he did nothing of the sort. Abner remained passive. He knew very well that if he were to lose his temper with her the situation might easily become just as dangerous as if he were tender. The main thing to be avoided with her was emotion of any kind. Life had been made difficult enough for him already simply because he knew that their relation was capable of passionate developments. He knew what passion was, and in spite of himself he could not always banish the thought of Alice from his mind. Admitting this, he had mapped out a course of conduct for himself, and he meant to stick to it until the happy day of his relief.

It was not a fortnight but a month before John Fellows left the hospital. He came back, as the sister had anticipated, with a Thomas’s splint on his thigh and instructions to attend the infirmary as an out-patient in another month’s time. The splint was an embarrassment that he resented, for it compelled him to sit in an uncomfortable position with the right leg extended, but it did not prevent him walking or drinking, and as soon as he had mastered the first of these processes he lost no time in making up for his long abstinence from the second. The rules of the friendly society to which he belonged forbade its members to visit public-houses as long as they were receiving sick pay, so that the invalid was forced to enter the Lyttleton Arms by a back door which he reached by crossing the garden of a friend, and having once solved this problem Fellows managed to put in the day without any difficulty.

Every Friday morning he hobbled down on his crutches to the doctor’s surgery and obtained a certificate by means of which he drew his weekly pay. It was only twelve shillings a week, and he never parted with a penny of it to Alice, so that the household now depended entirely on Abner’s earnings. It puzzled both of them to imagine how he managed to live in a state of fuddled alcoholism on this small sum. They supposed that his old friend the landlord, trusting him, put it on the slate in the hope of being paid when Fellows went back to work. He had always been free with his money, and no doubt his boon companions of the past were ready to treat him as often as they could afford it.

At the end of February he went in to North Bromwich in accordance with the hospital orders and returned without his splint. The doctors had told him that it would now be wise to use the leg as much as possible and suggested that the colliery authorities, who were partly responsible for the accident, should now give him a light job at the pit-head. John Fellows, however, didn’t see the point of this. He had paid into the Loyal United Free Gardeners for more than thirty years and now that he had the chance he meant to get some of his money back by staying on the box as long as they would let him. He could get quite enough exercise for his leg in his clandestine approaches to the Lyttleton Arms. What was more, he would not do a stroke of work until his claim against the colliery was settled. He had consulted a solicitor, and a claim under the Workmen’s Compensation Act was pending.

Abner meanwhile waited impatiently for his release. The presence of his father in the house had eased the awkwardness of his relation with Alice by abolishing the sense of lonely isolation that surrounded it. Alice herself was almost complacent. She did not mind how long John Fellows abstained from work as long as Abner was left to her. At the end of May the doctor refused to continue the farce of signing the miner’s certificates. John Fellows grumbled, but had to admit that he had done fairly well out of the club. He pushed on his claim for compensation, which was settled for fifty pounds. Alice was overjoyed at this windfall, for the strain of her straitened housekeeping had forced her to run up a few small debts with tradesmen. She took the opportunity of asking her husband for money when Abner was in the room.

‘Money . . .?’ said John Fellows. ‘Money . . .? What do yo’ want with money? What’s money to do with me when I’ve a son at work earning a man’s wages? If yo’ want money better ask our Abner. Didn’t I keep him all through his schooling in food and clothes? working day and night? I reckon it’s his turn now.’

‘I bain’t goin’ to keep you in pub-crawling any longer,’ said Abner. ‘You’d best give her some, while you’ve got it. I’m going off to work in Wales.’

‘Work in Wales!’ cried John Fellows. ‘I’ll teach you to talk to your father like that,’ he cried, coming over to him with his head low between his shoulders like an angry bull. When he reached his son he stopped, for Abner had thrown back his elbow. Alice ran to separate them. There was no need for her to have done so, for Fellows knew better than to appeal to force.

‘You’re a fine pair, the two on you!’ he said. ‘And don’t you go thinking I can’t see.’

He went out of the room with the limp that he now cultivated, and it was well that he did so, for by this time Abner was white with rage. He would have followed his father if Alice had not withheld him.

‘Abner, don’t!’ she cried. ‘What did he mean?’

‘You know what he meant as well as I do,’ said Abner with a laugh. ‘Still, that don’t matter. I’m off to-morrow.’

But he did not go. Thinking the matter over he could not bring himself to abandon Alice and her child to the desolation that he knew must follow his departure. It even seemed to him that his going might suggest to his father that he had hit the right nail on the head. The fact that, this time, Alice knew better than beg him to stay, also influenced him. By this token she accepted his independence and appealed only to his generosity. She never had a penny of her husband’s fifty pounds. Some of it, no doubt, he owed to the landlord of the Lyttleton Arms: but in any case it became clear that as long as it lasted he could not be expected to return to work. In the meantime he took great pains to avoid crossing Abner, feeling less obligation towards the housekeeping expenses from the fact that his nourishment in these days was mainly liquid and taken elsewhere.