The Black Diamond

by Francis Brett Young

They passed three villages in which closed doors confirmed this gloomy reflection. The villages themselves were not gloomy. Leisure, prosperity and content radiated from their flowery gardens, from the clean pinafores and collars of the children loitering to church, from the faces of the men who gossiped at the gates of sunny gardens in their shirt-sleeves. In no part of England could villages more trimly English have been found than in this ultimate border of the Marches. It was as though the nearness of another and an alien civilisation compelled them to insist on their national character.

‘In Wales,’ said Mick, sourly, ‘there’s divil a one open Sunda’.’

They crossed another river, the noisy Barbel, a torrent of mountain water wherein no weeds could grow, swirling clear into black pools. A stone set in the middle of the bridge told them that they were now in Wales, and as though to emphasise the change of country the barren hill-sides rose abruptly to receive them; on their right a tremendous crag of gray stone crowned with a pointed earthwork, and in front of them fold on fold of softer contours pale in the sunlight from the intricate convolutions of which the brawling river issued.

A village of stone awaited them, blank house-walls fronting on the roadway with small windows and roofs of clumsy slate. In the midst an ugly chapel, with the word ‘Ebenezer’ carved above its doorway, from which the sound of a drawling hymn emerged, and at the end of the village a public-house with the painted head of a bison for sign and, as Mick had anticipated, closed doors. Even the windows were shuttered.

‘We’ll see if there’s annything stirrin’, said Mick, beating at the door.

For a time they could get no answer, but at last the door was cautiously opened and the head of an old man appeared. How old he was it would have been difficult to say, for though his eyes were rheumy and the irises ringed with the white circles of age, his hair was plentiful and scarcely streaked with gray. He leaned on a stick and did not seem pleased to see them, speaking in a tongue that Abner could scarcely understand. When they told him that Wigan Joe had sent them he became a little more hospitable, but the consciousness of a Wesleyan policeman in the village still prevented him from opening the door to them. The foreman of the water-works job, he said, whose name was Eve, could certainly be found at the Pound House at Mainstone, three miles away over the river. ‘That’s in England,’ he mumbled, as though he were speaking of a barbarous foreign country. As to lodgings he could not help them. On Tuesday the cloggers were coming over from Lesswardine and had arranged to take his two rooms. Mick pressed him, and he admitted that, at a pinch, his wife might be able to put them up until then, provided that they were in a position to pay for a room and food. Abner assured him that that was all right, but he still refused to commit himself till Mrs Malpas returned from chapel. As a favour he allowed them at last to leave their bundles with him while they set off again to find the foreman. They promised to return to Chapel Green in the evening, and before they turned their backs he had closed the door again with evident relief.

They reached Mainstone just before the opening of the Pound House. The foreman Eve, whom his associates called Gunner, a little man who wore a shield over the socket from which one of his eyes was missing, told them that they need not want for a job if they meant business and told them to apply to the clerk of the works early on Monday morning. ‘You say Mr Eve sent you and it’ll be all right.’ At the end of this sentence he was snatched away by a power beyond his control, for the doors of the ale-house opened and the twenty or thirty men who had been lounging outside flowed into the bar like metal into a mould.

It was a clean and pleasant place surrounded by settles of black Welsh oak. The presence of the navvies from the waterworks had made it into a kind of recognised canteen, and behind the bar were ranged three great barrels of Astill’s ales. Even at a distance of eighty miles from North Bromwich the power of Astill’s influence was felt. Mick, without any difficulty, had already enrolled himself as a member of the company. He had paired off with a big lumbering fellow in corduroys with a red, stupid face and curly hair.

‘Who’s going to give the ball a kick?’ Abner heard him saying, and a moment later he was taking a quart pot of beer from a dark, strapping girl who served behind the counter. A medley of voices arose: the high-pitched accents of the Welsh, the soft Hereford burr, a smattering of audacious cockney, and then the harsher northern speech of a number of cloggers who had wandered in. The room was crowded to suffocation, and Abner found himself lucky to get a seat alongside the one-eyed foreman, Eve, on a bench near to the window. Abner began to talk to him, but the Gunner was not inclined to keep it up. He was a little man with firm-set jaws from which speech seemed to escape with difficulty. His whole body was spare and dessicated and his skin so tanned with exposure to weather that the blue-black patterns tattooed on his forearms were scarcely distinguishable from his skin. He drank rum and water stolidly with a little cough between each gulp and scrutinised all the company with his one eye that was dark and keen like that of a bird of prey. He drank three or four rums, one after the other, but the process had no loosening effect on his taciturnity, nor did it dim the brightness of his eye. Abner asked him how long he had been on the waterworks job.

‘Fourteen year,’ he said.