The Black Diamond

by Francis Brett Young

‘Why ain’t there no swing-boats here, mother?’ she would ask.

‘Because there aren’t enough children to go up in them. You’ll see them some day.’

‘Abner’ll take me to see his; won’t you, Abner?’

By this time of the evening, Morgan, curled up on his mother’s lap, was usually as sleepy as Spider who lay like a hedgehog on the hearth between them. Mary sat there hugging the child in her arms and never speaking for fear that she might disturb him, and Gladys, impressed by the silence of the firelit room, would snuggle closer to Abner and talk to him in whispers that her mother could not hear. They sat on either side of the fire in these strangely divided camps, and Abner would become aware of the beauty and placidity of this silent woman sitting still in the gloom with firelight playing in her hair, listening all the time though she did not move, unless it were to touch with her lips the forehead of her sleeping child. He used to watch her and wonder what she was thinking. He could not help watching her as she sat like a statue staring at the fire. When she turned her eyes towards him he would look away. He became so used to her silent company that he could not have been happy without it.

The days shortened, the pollard elms turned gold and the rusty chestnut leaves in the avenue fell of their own heaviness. The drowsiness of summer had passed and a new restlessness seized him. He could not be contented with this peaceful static existence into which he found himself sinking. The silence of Mary Malpas lay on him like a heavy spell. He had rested enough and could no longer be contented to drowse before the fire with a child in his arms. The peace of Wolfpits could tempt him no longer when the chill autumn air stimulated him to action and the natural violence of youth. He felt that what he wanted was the society of men and the pursuits of manliness.

Once or twice he walked down to Chapel Green in the evening and drank a pint with the labourers who gathered in the Buffalo under the eye of old Mrs Malpas, but he found that he couldn’t get on with her. She was always restrained and severe, giving him the impression that she had taken a dislike to him from the first, and when she talked to him he felt that she was trying in her own superior way to find out exactly what her daughter-in-law was doing at Wolfpits. Even her questions about the children seemed to him to be dictated by malevolent curiosity rather than by affection. He felt that he was like a child in her hands and that she could get what she liked out of him. When he went to the Buffalo he had expected to find the cloggers there, but they did little more than sleep in that dismal house, going for their pleasures to the relative gaiety and light of the Pound House, where they could do as they liked. With the labourers at the Buffalo Abner had nothing in common. He understood nothing of their talk of crops and beasts and weather even when he could penetrate the meaning of their speech. He gave the Buffalo up as a bad job and went to the Pound House himself.

He used to go along there with George Malpas as soon as the whistle signalled that the day’s work was at an end, and there, in a brighter light and in the stir of a roaring business he found an atmosphere more suited to his restless spirit. Sometimes he sat with George Malpas; but George was a gloomy drinker and better company when he was sober, so more often he took his seat next to Gunner Eve, who drank nothing but spirits, and sometimes, under their influence, would talk to him of his old days of service in the navy, of blue Pacific havens, palm-huts with brown women, or sometimes of that savage African river on which he had lost his eye. That was the kind of life that Abner wanted. In the Gunner’s stories a vista of adventure opened before him. The liquor made him think that such was the only life for a man. The foreman’s tales of amorous adventure enthralled him. Therein lay the proper use of women.

There was only one woman in the Pound House: Susie Hind, the fine, strapping girl whose presence had disturbed him on his first visit to the inn with George. Mrs Malpas’s hints had led him to believe that she was an old flame of George’s. He found himself comparing her with George’s wife and thinking of the silence and remoteness of Mary he felt it was easy to understand why George had been led away. The freedom of Susie’s manners had suggested that she was attainable. Abner, listening to the gunner’s adventures, brooded on this, and the more he did so the more desirable Susie became. There seemed to him no reason why he should not possess her. Every night he sat in the Pound House looking at her. He drank more than he need have done simply in order that he might remain in her presence. This inflamed his imagination and magnified in his eyes the physical elegance which she regarded as necessary to her calling, but he hardly dared to speak to her openly in this concourse of men, and when she came near him with her bold but beautiful eyes, his heart beat wildly and he could say nothing. He usually stayed in the alehouse till closing time and walked back to Wolfpits through the haunted night arm-in-arm with George Malpas who was by this time a little sentimental. In one of these walks he asked George about his relations with Susie.

‘Oh, she’s all right, you can take my word for that,’ said George with a laugh.

‘Yo’ve seen a good bit of her,’ said Abner.