‘I don’t,’ said Myers, with a wink. ‘I heard a fellow from Brum offer him forty, and he’s a fool if he don’t take it.’
‘There’s high prices going this fair,’ said Prowse. ‘There’s a great scarcity down our way. Jenkins is a chap as knows his business.’
‘And so do I,’ said the Jew. ‘So do I.’
Abner, mildly exalted, walked out into the moonlit street. At the cottage doors and down by the bridge little groups of men in breeches and leggings stood talking together with low voices. From time to time the clatter of approaching hoofs was heard and the men stopped to listen. The village was full of a strange sense of expectancy. Abner wandered over the bridge and a little way upstream. In the hush of the night he heard a girl laughing. The sound disturbed him. He thought suddenly of Susie. The excitement of drink and a full stomach turned his thoughts in the direction of physical desire. He stopped and listened for the girl’s voice again, and wondered what man was with her.
He walked back irritably into the village. An old man was putting out the oil lamps that gave a feeble light to the street. What was he, Abner, doing without a woman, when the village was full of them? He looked up at the front room of the inn where Mary and the children were sleeping. It filled him with an unreasoning annoyance to think of her sleeping calmly there. She was treating him ridiculously, without confidence. Why hadn’t she come down into the room for supper as soon as she had put the children to sleep? Just because the landlady had shocked her by suggesting that they should sleep together, he supposed, and, by God, it might have put some sense into her if they had done so. He laughed. He hadn’t thought of Mary in that light before; but in this curious state to which the liquor, the moonlight, and that light voice heard in the darkness had excited him, he felt that he had been a fool not to make love to Mary. If once he had treated her that way and she had accepted him, there would be an end of her airs and graces. George . . .? Well, George’s own life didn’t exact a high degree of fidelity from his wife.
So, like a hungry animal, Abner prowled beneath the inn windows. The panes of that which belonged to Mary’s bedroom shone blankly in the moon through twigs of white jessamine. In the bar, Mr Prowse, now very drunk, was declaiming staccato judgments on the value of basic slag. Abner would have joined them and got drunk if he had any money to spend, but the small sum that he had saved for the occasion would do no more than pay for their lodging and their return fares to Llandwlas. The moonlight seemed to cool the air. Even the smell of jessamine grew fainter in the cold. It was no good standing there any longer, and so he found a sleeping place on some straw in the loft above the stable, and settled down as well as he could, listening to the steady grinding of the horses’ jaws and the snatching noise that they made as they pulled out hay from the racks above their mangers.
Mary slept badly. Earlier in the evening, when Morgan and Gladys had fallen asleep, she had caught the landlady on the stairs and begged that her supper might be brought to her in her bedroom. There she had devoured a solitary plate of the famous rabbit-pie, but hearing below her the sound of many men’s voices and still dreading to be mistaken for Abner’s wife, she had not dared to go downstairs and find him. Instead of thinking any more about it she decided to go to bed, creeping gently under the sheets for fear of disturbing the children. But she could not sleep. The bedroom was immediately over the room in which supper was served, and she could not hear so many voices buzzing beneath her without wanting to catch what they were saying. As the evening wore on the house grew noisier. It seemed as if they would never go to bed; and when, at last, the noise ceased and she had nearly fallen asleep, the moonlight, beating in through the muslin-curtained window, awoke Morgan. He said that he was thirsty, and after much groping, she gave him water from the ewer on the washhand-stand. Thus awakened from the sleep that followed his train-sickness, the excitement of his strange surroundings kept him going for a couple of hours of questions about the fair.
‘Why bain’t Abner up here?’ he said at last.
This was more than she could explain. ‘If you don’t keep quiet, my son,’ she said, ‘I shall take you right out and give you to Abner for the night. Then you’ll cry to come back to your mother. You’re a little nuisance, that’s what you are!’
She tucked him away and huddled him against her breast away from the moonlight, and so, at length, he fell asleep.