The Black Diamond

by Francis Brett Young

He set off, walking furiously through the mellow evening, trying to cool his blood with violent exertion as instinctively as an animal eats grass. By nightfall he had reached the remote valley, nine miles away in folds of the Forest of Clun, whither his friends the cloggers had returned in the spring. He found their canvas pitched in a coomb under high sheepwalks, and Wigan Joe made him as welcome as ever. They sat out in the soft, moonless night, talking and drinking beer. It was like old times for Abner to hear Joe reeling off stories one after another in his flat Lancashire dialect. He lolled there listening till the company grew drowsy. There was no question of his returning to Wolfpits that night, for the sky drooped like a pall of velvet on the earth and he could never have found his way. He turned in with the others on a pile of dried bracken, waking at dawn to set off again toward Chapel Green.

For a few hours he had shed his restlessness, but when he reached Wolfpits in the evening the sense of restraint descended on him again. He felt that Mary was watching him, wondering where he had been. Her eyes were tragic, and, as he thought, reproachful.

This only irritated him. He couldn’t be bothered with her moods. When, speaking to Mrs Mamble, he happened to mention that he had walked over in the evening to the sloggers’ workings, she looked at him with such a searching suspicion that he could not contain himself.

‘What’s up with you?’ he said. ‘Do you think I’m codding you?’

She looked away without answering.

‘There’s no need to believe me if you don’t want to,’ he said.

And what the hell did it matter to her where he went or what he did? If he were to leave her to herself for a bit perhaps she’d begin to realise that he was useful, and that it wouldn’t pay her to treat him like dirt. It was time she had a lesson!

He spent the next evening with Mick Connor in a pub at Lesswardine, mixing his drinks, standing treat recklessly. He had to borrow six shillings from Mick to pay his score. It pleased him to think how Mary would stare at his money next Saturday when she found it six bob short . . . she, who was too proud to pick it up when he gave it her!

At the yellow turnpike house outside Lesswardine their paths diverged; and this was unfortunate, for it was easier to walk arm in arm. Mick left him; but as soon as he found himself alone the vision of Mary returned to him: Mary, as he had seen her and desired her, sitting pale on the border of the pool a fortnight ago. In his perverse and drunken mind he hated her. It seemed to him that she had been making a fool of him, alternately alluring and rejecting.

He walked along, sweating violently, in the direction of Mainstone, wishing to God he’d never known the damned woman. Women . . . and yet a lusty man of his age couldn’t live without women! It was against nature to live without women, and a man was a fool if he did so. He went hot and cold, thrilled with voluptuous sensations. He laughed at himself, and staggered up to a gate at the side of the road to light his pipe. He broke three matches and then discovered that they were damp and would not strike. He remembered indefinitely that Mick had upset a pint of beer into his pocket. He cursed the matches and Mick together.