The Black Diamond

by Francis Brett Young

‘I can’t make mother out,’ George grumbled. ‘Here she is with Wigan Joe and the rest of them in the house: a mint of money for the asking, and she goes scaring them over to Mainstone with her long face. If I had the Buffalo I’d soon see they spent their money in the house. It’s as good as robbing me the way she sends them away. She don’t want the money, but I want it bad enough, God knows!’

They parted when they reached the workings. George whistled to Spider, but the dog only wagged her tail and then dived into a trench, preferring to stay with Abner. Munn appeared, rubbing his hands with cold. Abner laughed at him.

‘Put your back into it, Joe, and you’ll soon feel right,’ he said.

The day’s work began. A red sun rose sluggishly, half frozen. The light glinted on the long line of swinging picks and the sounds of the work rose cheerily in the thin air. Very different was this from the subdued activity of summer. The labourers did not work only for money but because the exertion sent the blood tingling warm into their hands and feet. Work was an ecstasy and to Abner a greater ecstasy than to the rest of them. He thought of Susie and of the night before. He whistled as he worked for sheer physical joy, rejoicing in his strength, for now once more, after months of soft disuse, his body was finding its right expression and coming splendidly to its own. He stretched his limbs in the sunlight, recapturing the moments of physical exaltation that used to come to him when the Mawne United team stepped out on to the smooth turf of the Albion ground, a company of clean and splendid athletes. And all the time, beneath the pleasant anodyne of work, his body glowed with a rich contentment, knowing that in a few hours night would come and Susie be clinging in his arms again.

He had no fear that she would forsake him. He felt, in every fibre of his body that he was a match, and more than a match for Badger. Having once attained her he knew that he could keep her; and in this he was not deceived, for Susie, having looked on him and found that he was good, had taken a fancy to him and now kept pace with his passion, asking as much as he could give. Every evening, as was already his custom, he would go to the Pound House and take his seat beside Gunner Eve; but now he no longer needed to follow Susie with his eyes, was no longer tortured with vague jealousies, for when she passed him he could feel her soften and respond to his presence. Sometimes, when no one was looking, she would turn her head in his direction and for a moment their eyes would meet. He did not care when men spoke to her lightly or placed their hands upon her arm, for now he knew that she belonged to him and could be his for the asking. The events of the first night were repeated many times. Now a single whisper was enough to ensure that when the alehouse was empty and Mr Hind safely in bed, the kitchen door would be opened softly and Susie waiting for him in the warm darkness. It amused Abner to see the coldness that she now showed toward Badger. The keeper was puzzled, for all their love-making was secret and nocturnal, and Susie and Abner never appeared in public together. Badger knew that for some unknown reason he had lost her, and this made him more persistent than ever in his attentions, being far too important in his own estimation to be discarded without good reason. Abner laughed to see his irritation. He and Susie laughed together in the night. ‘I can’t imagine whatever I saw in him,’ she said.

At the end of November Susie went away for a week to stay with her grandparents in Hereford. Without her the Pound House meant nothing to Abner, and without considering that his absence might be noticed, he drifted back into his old habit of returning to Wolfpits in the evening. It was now more than a month since he had done this, and in the interval he had scarcely spoken to Mary Malpas. Returning, and expecting to pick up the threads of the old life exactly as he had left them, he was surprised to find the atmosphere of Wolfpits curiously changed. The attitude of Mary herself was cold and unfriendly. He found it difficult to make headway against it, for she scarcely spoke to him, and even the children seemed to have become infected with their mother’s distrust. It was true that they had seen so little of him as almost to have forgotten him, but it seemed strange that his old favourite, Gladys, no longer came instinctively to his arms. He could not accept the change without a protest. One evening, finding Mary alone, he tackled her.

‘What’s come over you?’ he said.

‘Nothing’s come over me. What do you mean?’ she replied coldly.

‘Yo’m different . . . like you was scared of me. What have I done?’

‘You know best. You know what you told me . . . that night,’ she said, with tight lips.