Chapter VI: Part 6

For a time they could get no answer, but at last the door was cautiously opened and the head of an old man appeared. How old he was it would have been difficult to say, for though his eyes were rheumy and the irises ringed with the white circles of age, his hair was plentiful and scarcely streaked with gray. He leaned on a stick and did not seem pleased to see them, speaking in a tongue that Abner could scarcely understand. When they told him that Wigan Joe had sent them he became a little more hospitable, but the consciousness of a Wesleyan policeman in the village still prevented him from opening the door to them. The foreman of the water-works job, he said, whose name was Eve, could certainly be found at the Pound House at Mainstone, three miles away over the river. ‘That’s in England,’ he mumbled, as though he were speaking of a barbarous foreign country. As to lodgings he could not help them. On Tuesday the cloggers were coming over from Lesswardine and had arranged to take his two rooms. Mick pressed him, and he admitted that, at a pinch, his wife might be able to put them up until then, provided that they were in a position to pay for a room and food. Abner assured him that that was all right, but he still refused to commit himself till Mrs Malpas returned from chapel. As a favour he allowed them at last to leave their bundles with him while they set off again to find the foreman. They promised to return to Chapel Green in the evening, and before they turned their backs he had closed the door again with evident relief.

They reached Mainstone just before the opening of the Pound House. The foreman Eve, whom his associates called Gunner, a little man who wore a shield over the socket from which one of his eyes was missing, told them that they need not want for a job if they meant business and told them to apply to the clerk of the works early on Monday morning. ‘You say Mr Eve sent you and it’ll be all right.’ At the end of this sentence he was snatched away by a power beyond his control, for the doors of the ale-house opened and the twenty or thirty men who had been lounging outside flowed into the bar like metal into a mould.

It was a clean and pleasant place surrounded by settles of black Welsh oak. The presence of the navvies from the waterworks had made it into a kind of recognised canteen, and behind the bar were ranged three great barrels of Astill’s ales. Even at a distance of eighty miles from North Bromwich the power of Astill’s influence was felt. Mick, without any difficulty, had already enrolled himself as a member of the company. He had paired off with a big lumbering fellow in corduroys with a red, stupid face and curly hair.

‘Who’s going to give the ball a kick?’ Abner heard him saying, and a moment later he was taking a quart pot of beer from a dark, strapping girl who served behind the counter. A medley of voices arose: the high-pitched accents of the Welsh, the soft Hereford burr, a smattering of audacious cockney, and then the harsher northern speech of a number of cloggers who had wandered in. The room was crowded to suffocation, and Abner found himself lucky to get a seat alongside the one-eyed foreman, Eve, on a bench near to the window. Abner began to talk to him, but the Gunner was not inclined to keep it up. He was a little man with firm-set jaws from which speech seemed to escape with difficulty. His whole body was spare and dessicated and his skin so tanned with exposure to weather that the blue-black patterns tattooed on his forearms were scarcely distinguishable from his skin. He drank rum and water stolidly with a little cough between each gulp and scrutinised all the company with his one eye that was dark and keen like that of a bird of prey. He drank three or four rums, one after the other, but the process had no loosening effect on his taciturnity, nor did it dim the brightness of his eye. Abner asked him how long he had been on the waterworks job.

‘Fourteen year,’ he said.

‘Is it like to last long?’

‘It’s like to last as long as I do. I’m what you might call on the establishment, as they say in the service. Been with it since they made the resservoyer in the Dulas valley. They say it’s an unlucky job this here water. I was there when the dam was broke nine year ago. Always something up with it. . .’

Then, warming a little, he began to ask Abner if he were used to navvying work, snorted when he told him he was a miner, and told him that he’d have a job to get a bed to sleep in. ‘The cloggers is coming into the Buffalo Tuesday,’ he said, ‘and the folk round here is scared of us. They’re like children with strangers. They’re a lot of damned Welshmen, only don’t you tell ’em so or they’ll let you know about it.’ He waved to the dark girl behind the counter, who brought him another tot of spirit as though she understood his signal.

‘You’re looking up fine to-day, Susie,’ he said.

‘Get away with you, Mr Eve,’ she replied. She may have blushed, but the blood ran so richly under her brown cheeks that no blush could have been seen. Eve took hold of her arm and pulled her gently towards him. Evidently she was used to being handled, for she did not seem to resent it. With her dark hair almost brushing the foreman’s cheek she winked at Abner.

‘Mr Badger been down to-day,’ said Eve in a whisper.

‘Oh, you _are_ a tease,’ she said, with a movement of petulance. ‘Now, do let me go! You’re not the only gentleman that wants serving.’

Eve gently pinched her arm. ‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘just you ask George Malpas to come and have a word with me, there’s a good girl!’

She left them, pushing her way familiarly through the crowd of men with a refined ‘Excuse me!’ and crossed the room towards a tall, dark young man, better dressed than most of the company, who stood holding a pot of ale in the opposite corner, and talking to Wigan Joe, who had just arrived. When the girl spoke to him he nodded, and a moment later came over to the bench on which Abner and the foreman were sitting. From the very first Abner liked his face, and indeed he was a handsome specimen of the border type, with an olive skin and dark eyes set rather wide apart under level brows. At the moment his cheeks were a little flushed with the liquor that he had been drinking.

He and the Gunner were evidently old friends.

‘Well, George,’ said Eve, ‘how goes it?’

‘Middling, Gunner, middling.’

‘Now, my son, hark to me. This young chap here is coming on to our job to-morrow . . . a mining chap from North Bromwich way . . . and he wants to find a lodge. Think you can do something for him?’

‘Well, now you’m asking!’ said George Malpas. ‘The cloggers are coming into the Buffalo Tuesday; but I reckon mother might find him a bed time they come. ‘T’is all accarding. . . . Not that her won’t be glad to oblige you, Gunner.’

‘I’ve a mate along of me,’ said Abner.

‘Your mate looks more like sleeping in a ditch,’ said the Gunner with a dour glance at Mick. ‘Irishmen are all alike. God, don’t I know ’em! I’ve been shipmates with one or two of them chaps in my time. Well, George?’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said George Malpas.

‘Your mother ought to be glad of a decent chap.’

‘All right, I’ll take him along with me when they close, don’t you fear.’

He moved off again towards the bar. At the same moment there appeared in the doorway a man of middle height and sturdy build. He was dressed in a cord shooting coat and breeches. His face was swarthy and sanguine and he surveyed the company as though he had a grudge against every one of them. Indeed he had reason to be suspicious, for if black glances could have killed he would have been a dead man within a minute of entering the room. He stood there as if he were waiting for the hostility of the bar to take some more tangible form, and at last a young man emerging from a pint pot with an accession of Dutch courage, said mildly: ‘Well, Mr Badger, how be the young pheasants going?’

‘Don’t you ask him,’ said another. ‘This be a terrible place for foxes.’

The keeper took no notice of these remarks nor yet of the laughter that followed; he went straight up to the counter where Susie stood polishing glasses and shook hands with her formally.

‘Who’s he?’ asked Mick Connor, already considerably nourished, ‘A keeper? You leave go of him, darlin’. You’d as well be shaking hands with the divil!’

‘You’d best hold your tongue,’ said another. ‘He’m our Susie’s fancy.’

‘Gard be good to her then!’ said Mick with a sigh.

Neither Badger nor the girl seemed to be conscious of these reflections on their intimacy. Badger was leaning over the bar with his face close to hers and whispering. She still went on polishing her glasses mechanically, nodding with pursed lips, in response to whatever he was saying and glancing from time to time in a mirror, advertising Astill’s Bottled Ales, that hung on the wall at her right hand. Evidently all was not well, for she hurriedly rearranged a curl of dark hair that hung in front of her right ear and had become entangled in a garnet ear-ring. This process of preening attracted Abner’s attention to her sex. Suddenly he found himself comparing her rather maturer charms with those of Susan Wade. Perhaps her name had something to do with it. Both were of the dark beauty which had always attracted him, though Susan the first had been a pale city-dweller and little more than a girl, while the barmaid was a woman of his own age, generously yet perfectly formed, full of strength and health and physical splendour. She bent over to listen more carefully to the keeper’s whisper that was almost lost in the hubbub of the taproom, and Abner saw the smooth whiteness of her neck, faintly browned like an egg. The liquor that he had taken inflamed his imagination. For the moment she seemed definitely desirable.

Mick Connor, having kicked as many drinks out of his neighbours as they would give him, staggered over to Abner’s side. In this state he looked more than ever like a bird. His small eyes glistened and the arteries of his temples stood out like whipcord. He asked Abner for money, and when Abner said, quite truthfully, that he had none to spare, he began to round on him fiercely in a language that nobody could understand. It seemed as if a row were in the making, and this was the last thing that Abner wished for. He didn’t want to be involved with Mick in a dispute before the foreman, Eve, who stared critically at his friend, and particularly before the girl who stood behind the counter. He tried to lead Mick away before it was too late, but the Irishman wrenched himself free from his hands and began to take off his coat for a fight. The whole room was now listening and laughing at the scene. The girl behind the bar, seeing that things were getting serious, excused herself to the keeper and came down to ask Abner to take his friend away.

‘We can’t have this sort of thing in here, you know,’ she said.

She came so near to Abner that he was aware of the smell of her hair. Her nearness disturbed him so that he could scarcely answer her. Mick, however, found no difficulty in stating his case at the top of his voice.

‘I know,’ she said, with the air of one who was used to the settling of such complications. ‘You two boys had better go out and get a bit of fresh air. Go on now, be good chaps,’ she continued good-humouredly, ‘or I shall have to call father.’

Mick turned on her savagely. ‘Call your father, is it? Who said I was drunk?’

‘I never said you was drunk. Just you sit down and be quiet.’

By this time Badger had reached her side. ‘Best leave him alone, Susie,’ he said. ‘Half-past six, then?’

She nodded, and the keeper went out. At the same moment the landlord of the house, a short, wheezy man, with yellow pockets under his eyes that made him look like an owl, appeared behind the bar, and shouted to Susie in a high-pitched voice, asking what was the matter.

‘It’s all right, dad,’ she said, smiling back at Abner, who had by this time succeeded in pushing Mick Connor down into the seat next to the foreman and thrusting his own unfinished pot of beer into his hand.

‘Then what’s all the bloody noise about?’ Mr Hind inquired, with a violent wheeze at the end of the sentence. ‘Don’t forget we’ve got a new policeman here that’s a stranger to the ways of the place, and the justices lying in wait for me. I can’t have no rows here, or they’ll be saying the place isn’t properly conducted. You mind that, boys!’

But there was no further disturbance. Mick, having finished the rest of Abner’s beer, retired mechanically to the society of his first friend, the big navvy in corduroys, who was now too drunk to realise what money he was spending. The landlord walked to and fro behind the narrow bar, glancing anxiously at the minute hand of the clock that was gradually approaching the hour of two, and talked wheezily about his distrust of the new policeman. Through the little door of the kitchen behind the bar came the frizzle of a basted joint followed by the metallic clang of an oven door. Something savoury was doing for dinner. The clock gave a whirring noise which suggested that it was as asthmatic as its owner and struck two with a harsh, ringing note. The landlord stopped dead in his prowling. ‘Time . . .’ he shouted.

‘See you Monday,’ said the Gunner, winking at Abner, who was already preparing to rescue Mick Connor from his new friend. The bar emptied. In the space of two hours its atmosphere had become so thick with tobacco smoke and the fumes of liquor that it smelt stale and fetid. Mick was walking arm in arm with the navvy in a state of unstable equilibrium. Abner took his arm. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s see about the lodge.’

‘And who the hell are you?’ said the Irishman truculently. ‘You keep a civil distance!’

The big man rallied to his supporter, and Abner saw that for the present Mick was best left alone. The other two went off together, Mick singing a song in which the navvy joined though he did not know the tune. A tall policeman with mutton-chop whiskers watched them from the other side of the road. Abner turned and saw that the young man whom the Gunner had addressed as George Malpas was waiting for him.

‘Best come along of me to the Buffalo and have a bite,’ he said, and they set off together.

Abner found that from the first he liked George Malpas. His dark face and eyes were bright with the drink that he had taken, his speech rapid and vivacious. They walked quickly towards Chapel Green and the hills, talking all the way, and Abner felt that this was the first person whom he had met on his travels who really accepted him with naturalness and without suspicion. Malpas told him that he need not worry about his lodging. ‘Dad’s getting up in years,’ he said, ‘and a shadow’d frighten him, but mother’s all there and she don’t know how to say “no” to me.’

He spoke all the time quickly and with a certain restlessness that, on the surface, made him seem free and daring. He questioned Abner eagerly about life in the black-country. Once he had been in North Bromwich and this experience had made him discontented with a country life. ‘It’s proper dead here, that’s what it is!’ he said. ‘Time a man gets to my age he ought to see a bit of the world; but a chap gets nabbed with a wife and a couple of kids and then it’s kiss me good-bye to all that! You single chaps don’t know your luck!’ Evidently George Malpas had tried his hand at everything. He had been a wheelwright; a farm bailiff; for a year or two he had helped his mother in the management of the Buffalo, and lately, since the job on the pipe-line had begun, he had been doing labourer’s work: a thing that seemed unnatural to a man so handsomely and delicately made. ‘Anything for a change: that’s what I say,’ he maintained. ‘What a chap like me ought to do is go to sea, but these old hills are like a prison. Damn me if I wouldn’t as soon be in Shrewsbury jail as here!’

They crossed the bridge into Wales. By this time George Malpas’s mother had returned from chapel and the door of the Buffalo was unlocked. George opened it for Abner. In the bar, on the left, he saw the two bundles exposed prominently on the table. Beyond in the kitchen they found the old man sitting in the chimney-corner and Mrs Malpas dredging flour into the roasting-tin from which a joint of beef had been taken.

‘Just in time, mother!’ said George. ‘How’s the old legs, dad?’

‘Badly . . . badly, George,’ mumbled his father.

‘Can you give us a bite of dinner, mother?’

At first Mrs Malpas did not reply. She was a little woman, primly dressed in a constricted black dress. She had a mass of gray hair with a tinge of yellow in it; her features were finely shaped, like those of her son, but her mouth was hard as stone. When she had finished making her gravy she turned a pair of piercing black eyes on Abner and spoke in a low voice. It was level and expressionless, but one felt, all the time, that she meant exactly what she said and that nothing could turn her from a determination once expressed. Facing her, he found that her face was beautiful, but hardened by suffering, by the responsibility of an old and ailing husband and the anxiety of a wayward son.

‘Is this the young man who left his bundle here with dad?’ she asked.

‘Yes, this is the chap. All he wants is a bed.’

‘Well, I can’t do it, George, and you know I can’t,’ she cried; ‘what with the cloggers coming, and all! Your father told them so.’ The old man nodded.

‘Give us some dinner first, mother,’ said George persuasively. ‘Then we’ll talk about it.’

‘It’s no good talking,’ Mrs Malpas persisted. ‘I mean what I said, and so does your father.’

Although it was obvious that nothing that the old man might say would alter the course of events that she had ordained, his wife had acquired the habit of pretending that he shared the responsibility of her decisions. George, with a side glance of encouragement at Abner, tried to joke her out of her seriousness.

‘You can’t get over me that way, George,’ she said; but when he took her arm her eyes and mouth softened and she made no attempt to prevent Abner sharing the meal which her son helped her to put on the table. At the end of the process he kissed her, and she suddenly stiffened.

‘You’ve been to the Pound House, George! I can smell your breath.’

‘Well, can’t a chap go to the Pound House without a fuss being made?’ he laughed. ‘You’m jealous, mother, of that seven days’ licence!’

‘If it was to make my fortune this minute,’ she said intensely, ‘I wouldn’t sell one spot of drink on a Sunday. Nor would father,’ she added in a milder tone.

The flash subsided and she went on to ask about Mr Hind’s asthma; but she took no notice of George’s reply, for her inquiry had only been a preliminary to asking how Susie was. She watched him closely when he replied that Susie was all right. ‘Her new friend Badger was there,’ he added with a laugh.

‘I mind the time,’ said the old man dreamily, ‘when there was three badgers dug out one month up the Castel Ditches. Turrible teeth a badger has. Turrible . . .’

‘He means Mr Badger, the keeper, father,’ said Mrs Malpas.

‘All keepers is the same,’ said the old man. ‘Water or game-keepers, there’s not a pin between ’em.’

He relapsed into one of those fits of vacuity which often droused his normal, if senile, intelligence. Mrs Malpas dragged him back with the announcement that the dinner was ready.

‘I’ll go and draw some beer,’ said George.

‘You’ll do nothing of the sort, George,’ replied Mrs Malpas. ‘You’ve had all that’s good for you at the Pound House. If your father can do without beer before evening, so can you!’

George passed the reproof off with a smile, but stayed where he was.

Meanwhile Mrs Malpas rescued four hot plates from the oven and thrust them into Abner’s hands with ‘Catch on, please!’ and the party settled down at the table, the old man occupying a shiny chair with a patchwork cushion; the mother, rigid as her own chair-back, facing him, Abner and George disposed on either side of them. The food was excellent and Abner was more than ready for it. It was the first square meal that he had got his teeth into for a week. Mrs Malpas’s appetite was in keeping with the ascetic character of her face, but the old man ate ravenously of beef, vegetables, and dumplings, and the two others were not far behind him. All through the meal Mrs Malpas cast anxious glances at her son’s plate. Abner could see that beneath her mask of severity she was really full of a fierce maternal concern for his comfort. The only tokens of tenderness that ever appeared in her were shown towards him. When she spoke of George’s wife and of the children there was an almost imperceptible hardening in her tone, and George answered her shortly, as if he knew that the subject had only been raised for politeness’ sake.

For all this they enjoyed their meal. The room was dim, for the hot sun from outside was caught in the folds of a lace curtain and a mass of lush geranium plants with which the window-sill was crowded. The scent of their leaves filled the room with an atmosphere of summer, languid and happy. One could almost have guessed that it was Sunday.

When the meal was over Abner began to fill his pipe.

‘No smoking in here, young man,’ said Mrs Malpas sternly. ‘If you want to smoke you’d best go into the tap.’

‘It’s mother’s fancy on a Sunday,’ George apologised.

‘You know your father can’t abear it,’ said Mrs Malpas, but the old man, who usually woke up when his name was mentioned, did not hear her, being busy with a paper packet of snuff.

When she began to clear the table, George returned gallantly to the subject of their visit. ‘What about this chap’s lodging?’ he asked.

‘It’s no good asking me, George. I’ve told you once.’

‘You can give him a bed till Tuesday while he’s looking round, mother.’

She shook her head positively. ‘I’ve got to clean things up between now and Tuesday. Besides, there’s two of them.’

‘Don’t you trouble yourself about the other,’ said George. ‘He’s gone off with one of our gang. This is a nice, steady chap. . .’

But Mrs Malpas did not budge. ‘Your father wouldn’t hear of it,’ she said finally. By this time she had cleared away the dinner things, taken off her apron and placed a family Bible with a blue silk marker on the table. Mr Malpas had settled back in his chair by the hearth with a snuffy handkerchief over his head.

‘Just for two days,’ said George.

‘George, ’tis no good.’

He knew better than to press her under the circumstances, and so they prepared to go. Abner took out his money to pay for the meal. Cupidity struggled with principle in Mrs Malpas’s eyes.

‘Not on a Sunday, young man,’ she said.

Abner thanked her clumsily. George kissed her, and for a moment she dropped her stiffness and clung to him.

‘Come on, then,’ he said to Abner. ‘Good-bye, dad.’

But Mr Malpas was already asleep, his mouth sagging beneath the edge of his handkerchief. Abner picked up his bundle in the taproom and he and George went out into the grilling sunshine.

The Eleventh Chapter

GEORGE MALPAS, having taken a fancy to Abner at first sight, had determined to ask his own wife to give him a lodging. The relation between the two young men had begun with a quick, spontaneous liking on either side. Abner was only too glad to see a friendly face, not being built, as was Mick Connor, for picaresque adventure, and feeling that it would be well to settle down again. George Malpas, on the other hand, liked him because he represented something new, because he had exhausted the possibilities of the cloggers’ company, which led no farther than the Pound House—a place which he could only visit with irritation since Badger, the keeper, had cut him out with Susie Hind—and because the idea of a presentable stranger living in his own house appealed to him on the score of variety as well as from the financial point of view.

As they left the Buffalo, George expounded his project to Abner. It did him good, he said, to talk, and particularly to talk to a man of his own age who could understand him. If Abner had been married he would have realised that it was useless talking to women who pretended to listen, but never gave a thought to what a man was saying. The thought of his marriage always roused him to bitterness. It had been imposed on him, indeed, by the anxiousness of his mother, who adored him, her only son, beyond words and, under the influence of chapel, had conceived it her particular duty to save his soul from hell. Hell, in the eyes of Mrs Malpas, meant neither more nor less than sexual promiscuity, and seeing in the handsomeness of George a spiritual danger, she had followed the advice of St Paul and married him safely, as she thought, before worse happened.

She herself had chosen a wife for him. Indirectly, for she knew that he was wilful and easily scared, she had contrived to make him fall in love with the daughter of a local farm-bailiff, Morgan Condover, a steady, and, as it seemed, a solid man, who managed the outlying members of the Powys estate. Mary Condover, the daughter, was a little older than George; a shy beauty, with whom the lad soon fell in love. George, as the only son of the innkeeper at Chapel Green, was considered a good match, and Mrs Malpas played her cards so well that within six months of falling in love George found himself married and installed in a house of his own. He was happy: Mrs Malpas could see that for herself, and she thanked Heaven that she had been permitted to save her son alive.

Before a year was over George’s first child was born. There was a great christening party at Wolfpits at which old Mr Condover, having drunk a good deal more than Mrs Malpas approved, confided to her that his newly-born grand-daughter, whom they had christened Gladys, would take the first place in his will. This was exactly what Mrs Malpas had intended from the first, and her satisfaction was so deep that she could almost have forgiven the bailiff his lapse from sobriety in spite of the unfortunate example that he had given to his son-in-law. The intense thankfulness that flooded her heart when she saw George so happily and satisfactorily bound in the chains of domesticity atoned for the troubles that were crowding on her own life. Her husband, who had been ailing for some years, was smitten with a stroke of paralysis from which he never fully recovered. She knew that hard times were coming but faced them cheerfully. For many years Mr Malpas had meant less to her as a husband than as the father of her son. She would do her duty by him—nobody could suggest that she had ever done less—on the surface she would acknowledge him still as the head of her household, but his illness would give her the opportunity of managing the business to her own liking and scraping together, in the years that remained to them, a little money that, added to the small fortune of which Mr Condover had boasted to her at the christening, should make her son secure for life. She even hoped that he might succeed Mr Condover in the care of the Powys estate.

Her _Nunc dimittis_ was premature. Just before the birth of George’s second child, a healthy boy whom they had decided to name Morgan after his grandfather, Mr Condover, at the very height of his prosperity, hanged himself in an outhouse. His death revealed the fact that the money of which he had boasted at the first christening did not exist. It soon appeared that he had defrauded the Powys estate of more than eight hundred pounds, and rumour said that he had been involved with some woman in Ludlow. This was a terrible blow to Mrs Malpas, for in remote country places the shames of the fathers are visited on the children to the third generation, and never forgotten. When the baby was born she begged her daughter-in-law not to give the child his grandfather’s name; but Mary, who had loved her father, obstinately persisted, and Mrs Malpas could never hear it without feeling that it carried with it a reproach. She tried to persuade George to change it, but George did not care. He was no longer in love with his wife, who now stood to him for a symbol of the chains that his mother had imposed on him. He felt that she had cheated him out of an enjoyment of life that was his due. At any cost he meant to regain his freedom, and Mary and his mother were the sufferers. The wife, indeed, had the care of her children to console her for George’s neglect; but the mother, against whom he nursed a deep, indefinite grudge as the author of all his misfortunes, found that she must bear the responsibility of her own schemes.

The household at Wolfpits now missed the subsidies which Mr Condover had generously distributed from his masters’ money. George had drifted into an extravagant way of life that he had no intention of changing. Partly because of his expansive nature, and partly because, in truth, he had never had his fling, George found it difficult to settle to any steady work. He became a drain upon the resources of the Buffalo, and Mrs Malpas, who found it hard to refuse him anything, was forced to draw upon her savings to support him. In her irritation and despair she blamed Mary for all this, thinking of her as a feckless housewife who had been brought up in the lavish ways of her father.

‘The bad blood’s in her and is bound to come out,’ she said, airing her grievances on Mr Malpas who now cared for nothing but his food. George did not mind who was to blame as long as he got the money that he wanted. He was beginning to be interested in other women, particularly, for a little while, in Susie Hind, the daughter of the proprietor of the Pound House, an inn which Mrs Malpas had always regarded as the Buffalo’s bitterest rival. It pained her beyond words to think that her hard-earned savings should find their way into Mr Hind’s till.

‘George,’ she said, ‘if only you’ll keep away from that there place I’ll see what I can do for you. Or if only you’d settle to regular work. . .’

‘Thank you kindly!’ said George. ‘Why don’t you let me take on the licence of the Buffalo now that dad can’t do it justice? Then you and dad could go and live somewhere quiet as you’ve a right to do at your age.’

‘Never, George!’ she said intensely. ‘Never. . .’

He laughed at her. ‘Why not?’

‘I couldn’t trust you,’ she said. ‘The man that keeps a public ought to be teetotal. I know what would happen to you.’

‘You’ve never give me a chance,’ he protested.

‘What’s more, I’m not going to,’ she maintained.

‘It’s a job I’m cut out for. I like company. I could double your business in a month.’

‘And drink yourself dead in six,’ she said.

‘You’ve never seen me drunk, mother.’

‘But I know you, my son!’

‘I’m dead sick of this country,’ he said. ‘Town’s the place for me. If I could get away out of this and make a fresh start. Damn me if I won’t do it.’

‘Hush, George!’ she said. ‘I’ve never heard your father use a word like that in his life.’

But the thing that she was really frightened of was that he should go. He was the only thing left to her, and if he went all light would have gone from her life. She controlled her tears and took him into the little bedroom where, in an oak chest, she kept her savings. She gave him money, and he left her, contented, kissing her with an affection that was mingled faintly with pity. When she held him in her arms all her tense anxiety for a moment disappeared. She could only think of him as the son of her body in whose happiness and physical welfare she delighted. It seemed to her that she could now only purchase these precious moments with money, but for a little while she could forget this in the joy that he gave her.

Time after time he begged her to let him take on the business, but she always refused him, sheltering herself, as her habit now was, behind the negligible personality of her husband. It would have shocked her beyond words if George had pointed out to her that his father didn’t count, and that her consideration for him was a pretence; but George knew better than to vex her in this way, for the key of the chest upstairs was kept in her pocket. What is more, even though their two wills were always in conflict, he loved his mother. She meant a great deal more to him than Mary had ever done except in the first blindness of his passion, and for this reason, no less than for the other, he was tolerant.

‘Don’t you take no notice of mother,’ he told Abner as they walked along together. ‘She’s got a funny way with her, but she’s all right at the bottom. There’s not many women could have done what she has. The only bad turn she ever done me was when she got me threw over the pulpit.’

It was the third time in their walk that George had spoken grudgingly of his wife, but this did not strike Abner as strange, for it was exactly the attitude not only of his father but of most of the men with whom he had worked at Mawne. He grunted sympathetically in answer to George’s complaints, and all the time, as Malpas eagerly expounded his own aspirations towards freedom and adventure, they were climbing gradually, passing by many gyrations of a narrow road into the curve of the hills in which Wolfpits lay.

Within a mile of Chapel Green the character of the country changed. Before that only a hint of mountainous severity had been visible in the stone buildings of the village with their narrow windows and their cruel roofs of slate. At Chapel Green the pastures that lay beside the river were not greatly different from the water-meadows of Teme, which is an English river, but the fields through which the road to Wolfpits passed were poor and of a paler green. Their hedges were scanty, writhen and knotted with hard life. The generous elms grew fewer, standing stunted, forsaken and sparing of leaf. They seemed to shiver with poverty in this alien soil. In their place the hardier mountain trees appeared: birches that quivered even in this tranquil air: oak and holly and yew crouching in the hedgerow sombrely but crowned with waxen honeysuckle. These poor fields seemed to feel the pressure of the hills on either side from the slopes of which blown spores of bracken and seeds of gorse had settled and thriven like hill-men in a rich plain. In the midst of the fields smooth water-worn boulders were scattered, and through the pit of the valley a noisy tributary of the Barbel, that Abner came to know as the Folly Brook, set up an unceasing murmur like that of a thunder-shower on summer leaves behind a dense curtain of green.

Still the road climbed. It rose in bold curves, like a kestrel soaring, into colder air. Sometimes the brook flowed near it, and Abner could see through gaps in the arras of alders roaring stickles of bright water. Sometimes it swept away from them, hugging the foot of the hills, sounding no more than the evening breeze in a poplar tree. Gullies that fed it scored the road with tracks of winter torrents. At that season of the year no moving water could be seen, but once or twice in shadier places slow moisture oozed and dripped from beds of mosses on the banks.

‘The cloggers is coming up the Folly when they’ve finished down Lesswardine way,’ said George. ‘I reckon they’ll liven things up a bit.’

The road grew rougher; it seemed to falter in its purpose.

‘Where do you get to this way?’ Abner asked.

‘Right up into the Forest and on to Clun, but not many uses it,’ said George. ‘The Clun men don’t come much over our way. ’Tis a stiffish bit of collar-work. This here’s Wolfpits.’

The road swept up obliquely to a crest and then sank to the level of the stream. Abner had a vision of the whole valley expanding into a kind of amphitheatre through the middle of which the little river pursued a more leisurely course, winding gently through the fields as though it rejoiced to linger under the open sky. On either side the mountains rose to their full height, no longer concealed by foothills: from lip to lip the cup was roofed with dazzling blue. In the open space beneath, an avenue of chestnuts led upwards from the river to a great red house fronted with three pointed gables and crowned by clusters of fantastic chimney-stacks.

‘You don’t mean that one?’ said Abner.

‘Ay, that’s Wolfpits,’ George replied. ‘Looks all right, don’t it?’

As they descended the house was lost from sight and George began to explain that Wolfpits had once been a great house, the most westerly possession of the family whom Condover, his father-in-law, had served, but that the pastures which surrounded it, for all their greenness were poor and the mansion itself too remote and gloomy for gentlefolks to inhabit in this age of comfort.

‘They say it’s ha’nted, too,’ he declared, with a laugh, ‘though I don’t pay no heed to such stories. I reckon it stood here empty for close on a hundred years till Mary’s father got Mr McKellar, the agent, to let it off in pieces to them that wanted houses. There’s more than five farms up this valley lying empty for the want of a bit of work putting into them, but the old lord was so took up with his new model village down by Lesswardine, he hadn’t the money to put into the old ones. Not that I grumble at him. . . . ’Tis a good solid house to live in. There’s three families in it now, and room for four more in my opinion. And I reckon I’ve a kind of right to it,’ he went on; ‘the Malpases was big people in these parts at one time. You’ll find their names on the vault in Lesswardine church. _John Malpas_, _Gentleman_, that’s how it’s written. There’s a Reverent Cyril Malpas rector of Aston to this day. Mary’s father went into the family history at the time we was married. The Condovers is an old family too.’

These claims to a faded aristocracy did not interest Abner, but he could not help being impressed by the size of the house as they approached it through the shade of the chestnut avenue. It was built of small red bricks, strange to the country but now beautifully weathered by time. The eastern end was covered with a gigantic growth of ivy, but from the western side, which they were approaching, the parasite had been stripped on Mr Condover’s advice and the red wall glowed as though it were exuding the imprisoned sunshine of three centuries. In this generous light one did not notice an air of desolation which the uncurtained upper windows gave to it.

‘All that’s wrong with this old place,’ said George, ‘is the rats. But I reckon you’ve been sleeping rough and won’t notice them. This is our garden. Mary’s a great one for flowers.’

They had entered a drive that swept up in a spacious curve to the steps of the front-door, an entrance which had been closed for many years. In place of the lawns that had once been the pride of its inhabitants lay three long strips of garden, each carefully tilled and separated from its neighbour by a fence of wire netting, the remains of some dismantled fowl-run. A path of bricks, salved from one of the dilapidated stables of the mansion, ran down the middle of the nearest garden-patch, and in the centre of it two children sat playing in the sun, a fair-haired girl, some six years of age, and a boy, a little younger, in whose dark features Abner could trace a resemblance to the handsome face of George Malpas.

‘Them’s my youngsters,’ he said carelessly. He opened the gate and tweaked the girl’s ear as he passed. ‘Well, Gladys?’ he said; but neither of the children seemed much moved by his arrival, being more interested in the strange figure of Abner, whose progress up the path they watched with the vague suspicion of mountain sheep that stare before they plunge away through heather.

‘I’ll see if the missis is in,’ said George. ‘Mary . . .’ he called. ‘Where’s the girl got to? Sit yourself down.’

The room had once been the kitchen of the great house. An enormous iron range was built into the wall on one side, and on the other were racks and shelves which must once have held many dozens of plates. The sun slanted through a western window and showed Abner that the comfort of this stone-paved room lay in its cleanliness. The iron range was almost handsome in its massive, shining bulk above the whitened hearth, and in the fender a bundle of green bracken was set in an attempt at decoration. The fronds of this plant filled the room with a warm and drowsy odour. In a corner a grandfather clock, with a solemn face on which the name of _Carver_, _Hay_, was engraved, marked the passage of time with a slowly swinging pendulum.

George Malpas called his wife again, and from a cool-smelling chamber on a lower level that might well have been a dairy, a woman appeared and stood in the doorway.

‘I’ve put the dinner away, George,’ she said. ‘It’s past three o’clock.’

‘Don’t you worry your head about the dinner,’ he replied. ‘I’ve brought this chap back with me. He’s coming to work with us on the water job. Mother has a fancy she can’t take any one in at the Buffalo, so I’ve arranged to give him a lodge here. You’d better put him in the top room. I reckon you won’t find him particular.’

At first she made no reply, but stood looking intently at Abner. It was difficult for him to believe that she was George Malpas’s wife and the mother of the two children whom he had seen playing in the garden: she seemed too young, too slight, little more, indeed, than a young girl. She wore a clean apron of white linen, still creased from the ironing, and her straight chestnut hair was bound back plainly on either side of her temples and braided in heavy plaits behind.

She was tall, and her slimness, together with the narrow apron, made her appear taller. Her brow was wide and unwrinkled, her eyes were hazel, her nose straight and slightly marked with golden freckles. One would have said that her face represented the most untroubled calm if it had not been that her mouth was a little sad. Only her lips betrayed the fact that she had suffered. She stood in the shadow and looked at Abner narrowly but did not speak, for she had known enough already of George’s boon companions to be a little careful of them.

‘Don’t stare at the chap like that!’ said George irritably, ‘or he’ll think you’re cracked.’

Then she spoke in a voice that showed more refinement than could have been expected. Her speech was almost free from the pleasant burr of the Marches.

‘I dare say we can manage,’ she said. ‘I’ll see about it.’ Then she addressed Abner directly. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Damn me if I ever thought to ask him!’ muttered George.

Abner told her, and she repeated it after him: ‘Abner Fellows.’

‘Well, that’s a queer name,’ said Malpas. ‘I don’t mind ever having heard it before.’

‘It’s out of the Bible, George,’ said his wife.

‘Out of the Bible, is it?’ he laughed. ‘Well, that’s more in your line than mine.’

She left them quietly to attend to the details of Abner’s room. Malpas, still a little restless, took him out again, talking incessantly and showing him what remained of the ancient features of Wolfpits: the line of damp stables with boxes for thirty horses, the yew-trees that had once been clipped to the shape of peacocks but had now straggled into those of monstrous antediluvian birds; the red-walled garden, now a wilderness of nettles, whose fruit trees spilled their pulpy produce on the mossed paths. From the farthest corner of the garden they could see the house which, from this angle appeared tall and narrow like a tower, with chimney-pots for battlements. In an upper window there appeared the figure of a woman standing still and gazing out over the mountain.

‘That’s Mary putting your room to rights,’ said George, but he did not call to her.

He spoke to Abner of the other inhabitants of Wolfpits. One was an old woman, Mrs Mamble by name, the widow of a labourer who had worked on a neighbouring farm. ‘She don’t properly belong to these parts,’ he said; ‘they came from down Tenbury way, but she’s took up with Morgan and Gladys, and Mary likes her company. He must have been a good chap in his time, for they give her the house rent-free.’

The other tenant, whom they saw working in his garden beneath the ivied end of the house, was another solitary creature, an old man named Drew who had worked as a farm-labourer in the district for more than thirty years. He, too, was a foreigner, having first come to Wolfpits in charge of a pedigree Devon bull. In the middle period of his life he had been employed in a flour mill a few miles down the valley of the Folly Brook. The new steam mills at Lesswardine had robbed him of this employment, but not before the constant carrying of heavy sacks had twisted his back to a curve in which rheumatism had fixed it. Now he could only walk with his shoulders bent so that when he spoke he had to raise his eyes, staring up at those who questioned him, as though his back still bore the burden of a phantom load. All his joints were swollen and knotted with rheumatism; his huge hands resembled the branches of an ancient tree and his whole aspect, staring with pale blue eyes beneath a tangle of reddish hair as yet untouched with gray, was that of a gnome, and proper to these inaccessible mountains. His life was lonely, and for this reason he had never lost the uncouth speech of the South Hams from which he had originally come. When they passed his garden on their way back George gave him good-afternoon and he raised himself, as with infinite labour, from his work, gazing at them with the patient eyes of a yoked beast of burden.

‘He’s a rum old chap,’ said George. ‘You wait till he’s on one of his boozing fits, and then you’ll see.’

By this time Mary had finished Abner’s room and set the table. The children, tired with play, had come in and were clamouring for their tea. At the same time the fourth member of the Malpas family arrived, a yellow lurcher bitch, named Spider, who had been absent on some dark business of her own and now returned to gambol with little Morgan on the floor. The children were never tired of teasing this animal, but George, who only tolerated her when he himself went rabbiting in the evening, generally treated her cruelly. The dog fawned on him, but there was more fear than affection in her devotion. Abner told them the story of Tiger. The children listened with wide eyes and the mother looked at him without speaking. A fire of sticks crackled merrily down in the room that Abner had taken for a dairy. At last Mary Malpas brought in tea and the children ate stolidly and shyly, talking to each other in whispers as though they were disturbed by the presence of the stranger.

Perhaps it was also the presence of Abner that made George Malpas take unusual notice of his wife. He treated her very much as he would have treated the children or the dog when the fancy took him, but his faintly patronising tone only appeared to embarrass her. When she gave him his tea he would have kissed her, but she stiffened slightly and even blushed, so that Abner could see the colour rising in her white neck. Later she softened a little from her seriousness and the children too, realising that Abner was no more than an ordinary mortal, began to raise their voices. They sat on with the door open in the mellow evening light, and an atmosphere of homeliness and quiet descended on the room so happily that Morgan cried when his mother told him that it was time for bed. During all the afternoon she had scarcely spoken to Abner, and she seemed relieved to find a chance of escape. She puzzled him. In his life he had only known one woman intimately, and that was Alice. He could not help comparing the two of them. The cleanliness and refinement of Mary Malpas became exaggerated by this comparison. Instinctively, at first, he had allowed himself to be influenced by George’s treatment of her, but her aloofness and reserve now made him feel that she was in some subtle way superior. He could not say that he liked her; but he wondered, none the less, what she was made of.