The Black Diamond

by Francis Brett Young

She looked at him, and her eyes were now humble. She spoke almost with diffidence.

‘Abner,’ she said, ‘if ever you want to go from here for any reason, no matter what it is, promise me that you’ll tell me straight. Don’t you keep it hidden like that, feeling that the children and me are a drag on you! If you want to go to-morrow, you go. Don’t you think of what you said to George. You don’t owe him anything. You don’t owe me anything at all. If ever you feel for one minute you want to go, please tell me straight. I can look after myself, and I shall understand. That’s what I felt with George. Promise me. . .’ She leaned toward him with clasped, beseeching hands.

‘I’ll tell you right enough,’ he said awkwardly. ‘Don’t you fret yourself about that.’

She sighed, and pushed her hair back from her forehead.

‘Now I feel easier,’ she said. ‘How late it is!’

She wished him good-night, and left him; but he did not move till the logs collapsed in the grate. He was thinking drowsily of the other Christmas in Halesby, of the different way in which Alice had approached him, how she had tried to draw him nearer to her and how he had resisted her. He thought of the clinging dependence of Alice contrasted with the strength and independence of this other woman. Poor Alice! She had never answered his letter or acknowledged his postal order; but then, she was never one for letter-writing. The suggestion of freedom, the open way of escape which Mary, in her pride, had shown him, made him feel for a moment curious about that other life that had seemed so far away. If he wanted to do so, he reflected, he could throw up his job at a week’s notice and take a train that would transport him in half a day back to North Bromwich, back to the familiar smoke-pale sky, to the chimney stacks, the furnaces and the smell of pit mounds. The odour of coal-dust and slag-heaps was in his nostrils. He saw the packed amphitheatre of the Albion ground and the white-lined turf within it. He heard the rumour of a football crowd, the thud of the ball, the referee’s whistle. So utterly remote. . . . He went to the door and opened it before he turned the key in its wards. He saw nothing but the high blackness of the winter night, not even a single star. The dank air chilled him; it crept into the lighted room.

‘It’s a rum go . . . a bloody rum go!’ he said, yawning.

With the New Year, Abner’s work on the pipe-track became more strenuous, for much time had been lost in the ten days of snow that fell about the time of Bastard’s death and in the violent floods that followed on the thaw. A mild January did little to dry the sodden workings, and the task of shovelling earth was heavier to Abner than his old labours in Mawne Pit. His mate, Munn, who lodged miserably in a leaky labourer’s cottage on the river-bank at Mainstone, was taken ill with bronchitis, and Abner worked alone. Up to his ankles in reddish clay he toiled, his hands were rufous and his trousers caked with it. The burden of the wet earth weighed on him. It was like a sullen enemy that made his feet leaden and strained against the muscles of his arms. All the labourers felt it. Their speech, which had been gay and good-humoured, became dogged and irritable. Nor were they the only folk who suffered. In every farm of the sodden Wolfpits valley men were making the same struggle under the raw and steely sky. Brimming dykes that drained the meadows shone cold beside the black hedgerows. The Folly Brook, a brown torrent, dammed with broken branches that gathered leaves and creamy foam, filled the whole valley with melancholy roaring. Waterfowl, snipe, and mallard and even slow-winged herons, moved upward to the sodden springs. It was a sad season in which the solitary workers on the farms, seen at evening in the fields, looked as if they were stuck fast in mires from which they could not escape: so slowly they moved, so huddled and pitiful they seemed. Even on the drive at Wolfpits, where the gravel was reasonably dry, it was painful to see the bowed figure of old Drew returning at night, his boots so caked with mud that he could scarcely drag himself along. It was no wonder that the man found consolation in the sweet, fiery spirits that he distilled. He sang so loudly at night that Mrs Mamble would come in and sit with Mary and Abner rather than listen to his high, cracked voice.

Toward the end of January the vicar of the parish awoke to the fact that George Malpas was in prison and his wife presumably destitute. Between his vicarage and Wolfpits lay the vast bulk of Castel Ditches, so that he rarely visited the valley in winter. George Malpas, too, was a member of a dissenting family, his mother being known as a fanatic Methodist; but the Condovers, in so far as they had ever professed religion, were church people. Morgan and Gladys had both been baptized in the parish church, and since scandal informed him that old Mrs Malpas, like the dissenter that she was, had abandoned her son’s family, the vicar sent the parish relieving officer on a special visit to Wolfpits to see if Mary were starving.

It pained and astonished the vicar to learn that she was doing nothing of the sort. She was not even humble, as a woman in her degrading position should be. The relieving officer, who had made his long journey to Wolfpits for nothing, reported that she was not in need of relief, and for the most shameful of reasons. There was a lodger, a young man employed on the water-works and known to the police as a desperate character, who appeared to be filling the absent husband’s place. Malpas’s wife had not even made any decent attempt to conceal this state of affairs. She had confessed brazenly that she was living on this young man’s earnings. To help her in any way would merely be putting a premium on immorality. The vicar nodded his head gravely. Such cases were all too frequent in rural districts, and yet it was a relief to feel that his principles freed him from any further responsibility. He mentioned the matter with satisfaction to his wife at supper on Sunday. At this meal, his weekly labours being ended, he always felt that he could speak more lightly of parish matters.