The Black Diamond

by Francis Brett Young

That night, in a condition of sublime charity toward the world and each other, they could find no barn to sleep in and rolled themselves up on a bank of dry bracken under the misty moon. Counting his money next morning Abner found that most of it had gone. He knew better than to grumble about it, but suggested to Mick that they had better go easy.

‘Go aisy, is it? Not at all!’ said the Irishman.

At midday, leaving Abner in a small spinney of firs, he went off to the nearest village with the price of a quart, and returned a couple of hours later laden not only with the beer but with a good-sized fowl and pockets full of potatoes. Displaying these spoils he winked, and Abner asked no questions. They boiled water in Mick’s treacle tin, and having poured this over the bird to make the plucking easy, roasted it with the potatoes in the embers of their fire. It was a splendid meal. Beneath its charred covering the flesh was sweet and juicy. Abner had never felt fitter in his life or freer from every vestige of care. When the meal was over Mick slept like a gorged boa-constrictor and woke in an ill-temper, but by this time Abner was getting used to his alternations of enthusiasm and melancholy and left him alone. It was a good life: there was no denying that, and in another day or so they would arrive at the scene of their new work.

That misty moon was no negligible portent, for at sunset great clouds began to gather from the south, and, before night, fell a thunder shower that drenched them. The dusty road drank up the rain and all the earth smelt sweet, but the August weather had broken and the country of wooded hills into which they had now come seemed to breed rain. They decided that it would be impossible to dry their clothes, and pushed on through the night, Mick loping ahead like some drowned bird and Abner stolidly following. They passed through the wet streets of a country town at midnight. Not a light could be seen in the solemn Georgian houses, but from a belfry, almost lost in cloud, the sound of a plaintive carillon floated down.

‘Ludlow,’ said Mick. ‘There do be races here.’

They crossed another noisy river. The road climbed endlessly, winding over a steep hill-side. They entered a forest where the rain troubled them no more, so tired that they decided to rest for a while. Here they had the luck to find a hut thatched with heather that had been used by woodcutters. At the risk of burning it over their heads they lit a fire with some dry branches that they found inside it. Here they lay half-blinded with wood-smoke stolidly chewing tobacco, for Abner, unused to the road, had allowed his store to become soaked. Mick soon fell asleep, but Abner could not do so. He lay there till dawn in his steaming clothes, listening to the incessant dripping of the rain from millions of leaves, a sound that was soothing in spite of its desolation. Sometimes a wind that could not be felt would stir the tops of the trees to a commotion and then the drops would fall like hail on the soaked leaves of the forest. The fire died down; there was no more wood in the hut, and drops of water began to fall from the roof into the hissing embers. It was hellishly cold, but Mick still slept like a dog, though his left leg twitched in his sleep. At dawn Abner woke him. He grumbled because Abner in his vigil had finished the tobacco. It looked once more as if they were going to fall out, but the sense of common misery was too great to allow them to do so.

They tramped on through the woods in the rain. They could see nothing ahead of them but misty trees and no sound came to them but that of dripping moisture and sometimes the harsh call of a jay. The sun was so completely veiled that dawn passed into day almost without their knowing it. Only a whiter, colder light gleamed from the wet leaves. ‘We’ll never get shut on these bleedin’ trees,’ said Abner; but his companion did not answer. Suddenly Mick began to sing in a hoarse, unnatural voice:—

Macarthy took the floor in Enniscorthy;
Macarthy took the floor in Enniscorthy;
For his eyes and ears and nose
Were like marbles on the floor
Of the fragments of the man they called Macarthy.

He sang the same verse over and over again, and at the end of the third repetition, he stood stock still, for they had come to the edge of the wood. ‘By the houly, we’re through wud it!’ he said.

The huge confusion of the Radnor march lay before them, vast and sombre and wild with cloud. To north and south of the spot where they were standing the woods rolled backward into England, upward to the sky. It was difficult to believe that they had emerged a little below the crest of the hills, for the precipitous wall behind them rose magnificently black into the mist with fleeces of cloud entangled in its surface like wisps of wool in a winter hedge. Beneath their feet a lake of white vapour hid the trough of the Teme valley lapping the bases of other wooded hills. Nothing could they see but dark masses of trees thrown into fantastic folds and pinnacles by the shapes of the hills that carried them: an amphitheatre of savage stone fleeced with unending woods. ‘That’s Wales,’ said Mick. ‘God! I could do with a drop!’