‘Oh, you and your swearing . . .’ she cried.
He didn’t wait to hear any more. When he was gone she fell down on her knees beside the table and sobbed with her head in her hands: a frail, pathetic figure with her hair in curling rags. Her sobs woke the baby, whose cradle had been carefully placed in a draught between the open door and the fireplace.
‘Oh, you now!’ she cried, rocking the cradle roughly. She might easily have upset it. Then, suddenly repenting, she picked up her son tenderly, and hugging him to her breast, buried her sobs in his downy face.
The Fourth Chapter
As the autumn hardened into an iron winter Abner had less time than ever to spend on these distractions. When the football season opened he began to play for the little club named Halesby Swifts, from which Mawne United usually drew its recruits. Technically it was a professional club, but the gate money that it drew from its adventures in pursuit of the local charity cups did no more than pay for the boots and clothes and footballs of the players. In the first round of the North Bromwich Hospital Cup competition the Swifts had the good luck to be drawn against their big neighbours, Mawne United, on the Mawne ground, and Abner, playing centre-half, repeated the exploit of his childhood by scoring a goal against the goalkeeper who had succeeded the celebrated Harper. It was an elevating moment. The captain and others of the Swifts came running up to Abner and wrung his hand. All Mawne and Halesby on the touchline waved black bowler hats under the flag of Mawne United languidly flying from its staff beside the Royal Oak. A great moment! Abner did not see his father standing in his old place behind the Mawne goal posts with his hands thrust into the pockets of his reefer coat and his eyes sparkling as he puffed away at his black clay pipe. That was how John Fellows showed his emotion. Later in the evening he showed it in another way.
This match, however, made a considerable difference in John Fellows’s attitude. It gave Abner a standing with his father that had never been granted to him before. Nor was this the only result of his success; for on the following Monday Mr Hudson, the chief clerk in Mr Willis’s works at Mawne, and secretary of the United, an irreproachable expert in a game that he had never played, sent up a message to the pit for Abner, and on Tuesday he had ‘signed on’ for the senior club.
‘A lad like you, growing and that,’ said Mr Hudson, ‘didn’t ought to be working in the pit. I’ll speak to the manager, and if you’ll come down to the Furnaces next Monday we’ll see what sort of job we can find you.’
On Monday morning Abner walked over to the Stour valley in which the great works lay angrily seething, and picked his way through the gigantic debris of the iron age: huge discarded boilers, brown with rust; scrap-heaps of tangled metal that had served its day; stacks of rails; purple mountains of iron ore standing ready for the blast-furnaces that snored like dragons in their sleep and made the air around them quiver with hot breath. Over a network of rails on which an officious shunting-engine that the head of the firm had christened Lilian, in honour of his daughter, ran to and fro, whistling shrill warnings; over many steam pipes, snaky tentacles of the central power-house, that hissed steam from their leaky joints, he passed to the office that Mr Hudson inhabited. On the steps in the middle of his path stood a tall, pale young man who stared out over the works as though some vision entranced him. Abner, wondering what he was looking at, and following the direction of his eyes, saw nothing unusual. He knew that this was young Mr Willis, Mr Edward, as Hudson called him. He asked Abner what he wanted.
‘Mr Hudson, gaffer.’
‘You’ll find him inside.’