The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from
Selston with seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats
of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still
flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, outdistanced it at a canter. A
woman, walking up the railway line to Underwood, drew back into the hedge, held
her basket aside, and watched the footplate of the engine advancing. The trucks
thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood
insignificantly trapped between the jolting black waggons and the hedge; then
they curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped
noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the track,
made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney. In the open,
the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough grass. The fields were
dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip that led to the whimsey, a reedy
pit-pond, the fowls had already abandoned their run among the alders, to roost
in the tarred fowl-house. The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like
red sores licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon’s stagnant light. Just
beyond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black headstocks of Brinsley
Colliery. The two wheels were spinning fast up against the sky, and the
winding-engine rapped out its little spasms. The miners were being turned up.
The engine whistled as it came into the wide bay of railway lines beside the
colliery, where rows of trucks stood in harbour.
Miners, single, trailing and in groups, passed like shadows diverging home. At
the edge of the ribbed level of sidings squat a low cottage, three steps down
from the cinder track. A large bony vine clutched at the house, as if to claw
down the tiled roof. Round the bricked yard grew a few wintry primroses.
Beyond, the long garden sloped down to a bush-covered brook course. There were
some twiggy apple trees, winter-crack trees, and ragged cabbages. Beside the
path hung dishevelled pink chrysanthemums, like pink cloths hung on bushes. A
woman came stooping out of the felt-covered fowl-house, half-way down the
garden. She closed and padlocked the door, then drew herself erect, having
brushed some bits from her white apron.
She was a tall woman of imperious mien, handsome, with definite black eyebrows.
Her smooth black hair was parted exactly. For a few moments she stood steadily
watching the miners as they passed along the railway: then she turned towards
the brook course. Her face was calm and set, her mouth was closed with
disillusionment. After a moment she called:
“John!” There was no answer. She waited, and then said distinctly:
“Where are you?”
“Here!” replied a child’s sulky voice from among the bushes.
The woman looked piercingly through the dusk.
“Are you at that brook?” she asked sternly.
For answer the child showed himself before the raspberry-canes that rose like
whips. He was a small, sturdy boy of five. He stood quite still, defiantly.
“Oh!” said the mother, conciliated. “I thought you were down
at that wet brook—and you remember what I told you——”
The boy did not move or answer.
“Come, come on in,” she said more gently, “it’s getting
dark. There’s your grandfather’s engine coming down the
line!”
The lad advanced slowly, with resentful, taciturn movement. He was dressed in
trousers and waistcoat of cloth that was too thick and hard for the size of the
garments. They were evidently cut down from a man’s clothes.
As they went slowly towards the house he tore at the ragged wisps of
chrysanthemums and dropped the petals in handfuls along the path.
“Don’t do that—it does look nasty,” said his mother. He
refrained, and she, suddenly pitiful, broke off a twig with three or four wan
flowers and held them against her face. When mother and son reached the yard
her hand hesitated, and instead of laying the flower aside, she pushed it in
her apron-band. The mother and son stood at the foot of the three steps looking
across the bay of lines at the passing home of the miners. The trundle of the
small train was imminent. Suddenly the engine loomed past the house and came to
a stop opposite the gate.
The engine-driver, a short man with round grey beard, leaned out of the cab
high above the woman.
“Have you got a cup of tea?” he said in a cheery, hearty fashion.
It was her father. She went in, saying she would mash. Directly, she returned.
“I didn’t come to see you on Sunday,” began the little
grey-bearded man.
“I didn’t expect you,” said his daughter.
The engine-driver winced; then, reassuming his cheery, airy manner, he said:
“Oh, have you heard then? Well, and what do you
think——?”
“I think it is soon enough,” she replied.
At her brief censure the little man made an impatient gesture, and said
coaxingly, yet with dangerous coldness:
“Well, what’s a man to do? It’s no sort of life for a man of
my years, to sit at my own hearth like a stranger. And if I’m going to
marry again it may as well be soon as late—what does it matter to
anybody?”
The woman did not reply, but turned and went into the house. The man in the
engine-cab stood assertive, till she returned with a cup of tea and a piece of
bread and butter on a plate. She went up the steps and stood near the footplate
of the hissing engine.
“You needn’t ’a’ brought me bread an’
butter,” said her father. “But a cup of tea”—he sipped
appreciatively—“it’s very nice.” He sipped for a moment
or two, then: “I hear as Walter’s got another bout on,” he
said.
“When hasn’t he?” said the woman bitterly.
“I heered tell of him in the ‘Lord Nelson’ braggin’ as
he was going to spend that b—— afore he went: half a sovereign that
was.”
“When?” asked the woman.
“A’ Sat’day night—I know that’s true.”
“Very likely,” she laughed bitterly. “He gives me
twenty-three shillings.”
“Aye, it’s a nice thing, when a man can do nothing with his money
but make a beast of himself!” said the grey-whiskered man. The woman
turned her head away. Her father swallowed the last of his tea and handed her
the cup.
“Aye,” he sighed, wiping his mouth. “It’s a settler, it
is——”
He put his hand on the lever. The little engine strained and groaned, and the
train rumbled towards the crossing. The woman again looked across the metals.
Darkness was settling over the spaces of the railway and trucks: the miners, in
grey sombre groups, were still passing home. The winding-engine pulsed
hurriedly, with brief pauses. Elizabeth Bates looked at the dreary flow of men,
then she went indoors. Her husband did not come.
The kitchen was small and full of firelight; red coals piled glowing up the
chimney mouth. All the life of the room seemed in the white, warm hearth and
the steel fender reflecting the red fire. The cloth was laid for tea; cups
glinted in the shadows. At the back, where the lowest stairs protruded into the
room, the boy sat struggling with a knife and a piece of whitewood. He was
almost hidden in the shadow. It was half-past four. They had but to await the
father’s coming to begin tea. As the mother watched her son’s
sullen little struggle with the wood, she saw herself in his silence and
pertinacity; she saw the father in her child’s indifference to all but
himself. She seemed to be occupied by her husband. He had probably gone past
his home, slunk past his own door, to drink before he came in, while his dinner
spoiled and wasted in waiting. She glanced at the clock, then took the potatoes
to strain them in the yard. The garden and fields beyond the brook were closed
in uncertain darkness. When she rose with the saucepan, leaving the drain
steaming into the night behind her, she saw the yellow lamps were lit along the
high road that went up the hill away beyond the space of the railway lines and
the field.
Then again she watched the men trooping home, fewer now and fewer.
Indoors the fire was sinking and the room was dark red. The woman put her
saucepan on the hob, and set a batter pudding near the mouth of the oven. Then
she stood unmoving. Directly, gratefully, came quick young steps to the door.
Someone hung on the latch a moment, then a little girl entered and began
pulling off her outdoor things, dragging a mass of curls, just ripening from
gold to brown, over her eyes with her hat.
Her mother chid her for coming late from school, and said she would have to
keep her at home the dark winter days.
“Why, mother, it’s hardly a bit dark yet. The lamp’s not
lighted, and my father’s not home.”
“No, he isn’t. But it’s a quarter to five! Did you see
anything of him?”
The child became serious. She looked at her mother with large, wistful blue
eyes.
“No, mother, I’ve never seen him. Why? Has he come up an’
gone past, to Old Brinsley? He hasn’t, mother, ’cos I never saw
him.”
“He’d watch that,” said the mother bitterly,
“he’d take care as you didn’t see him. But you may depend
upon it, he’s seated in the ‘Prince o’ Wales’. He
wouldn’t be this late.”
The girl looked at her mother piteously.
“Let’s have our teas, mother, should we?” said she.
The mother called John to table. She opened the door once more and looked out
across the darkness of the lines. All was deserted: she could not hear the
winding-engines.
“Perhaps,” she said to herself, “he’s stopped to get
some ripping done.”
They sat down to tea. John, at the end of the table near the door, was almost
lost in the darkness. Their faces were hidden from each other. The girl
crouched against the fender slowly moving a thick piece of bread before the
fire. The lad, his face a dusky mark on the shadow, sat watching her who was
transfigured in the red glow.
“I do think it’s beautiful to look in the fire,” said the
child.
“Do you?” said her mother. “Why?”
“It’s so red, and full of little caves—and it feels so nice,
and you can fair smell it.”
“It’ll want mending directly,” replied her mother, “and
then if your father comes he’ll carry on and say there never is a fire
when a man comes home sweating from the pit. A public-house is always warm
enough.”
There was silence till the boy said complainingly: “Make haste, our
Annie.”
“Well, I am doing! I can’t make the fire do it no faster, can
I?”
“She keeps wafflin’ it about so’s to make ’er
slow,” grumbled the boy.
“Don’t have such an evil imagination, child,” replied the
mother.
Soon the room was busy in the darkness with the crisp sound of crunching. The
mother ate very little. She drank her tea determinedly, and sat thinking. When
she rose her anger was evident in the stern unbending of her head. She looked
at the pudding in the fender, and broke out:
“It is a scandalous thing as a man can’t even come home to his
dinner! If it’s crozzled up to a cinder I don’t see why I should
care. Past his very door he goes to get to a public-house, and here I sit with
his dinner waiting for him——”
She went out. As she dropped piece after piece of coal on the red fire, the
shadows fell on the walls, till the room was almost in total darkness.
“I canna see,” grumbled the invisible John. In spite of herself,
the mother laughed.
“You know the way to your mouth,” she said. She set the dustpan
outside the door. When she came again like a shadow on the hearth, the lad
repeated, complaining sulkily:
“I canna see.”
“Good gracious!” cried the mother irritably, “you’re as
bad as your father if it’s a bit dusk!”
Nevertheless she took a paper spill from a sheaf on the mantelpiece and
proceeded to light the lamp that hung from the ceiling in the middle of the
room. As she reached up, her figure displayed itself just rounding with
maternity.
“Oh, mother——!” exclaimed the girl.
“What?” said the woman, suspended in the act of putting the lamp
glass over the flame. The copper reflector shone handsomely on her, as she
stood with uplifted arm, turning to face her daughter.
“You’ve got a flower in your apron!” said the child, in a
little rapture at this unusual event.
“Goodness me!” exclaimed the woman, relieved. “One would
think the house was afire.” She replaced the glass and waited a moment
before turning up the wick. A pale shadow was seen floating vaguely on the
floor.
“Let me smell!” said the child, still rapturously, coming forward
and putting her face to her mother’s waist.
“Go along, silly!” said the mother, turning up the lamp. The light
revealed their suspense so that the woman felt it almost unbearable. Annie was
still bending at her waist. Irritably, the mother took the flowers out from her
apron-band.
“Oh, mother—don’t take them out!” Annie cried, catching
her hand and trying to replace the sprig.
“Such nonsense!” said the mother, turning away. The child put the
pale chrysanthemums to her lips, murmuring:
“Don’t they smell beautiful!”
Her mother gave a short laugh.
“No,” she said, “not to me. It was chrysanthemums when I
married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they
ever brought him home drunk, he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his
button-hole.”
She looked at the children. Their eyes and their parted lips were wondering.
The mother sat rocking in silence for some time. Then she looked at the clock.
“Twenty minutes to six!” In a tone of fine bitter carelessness she
continued: “Eh, he’ll not come now till they bring him. There
he’ll stick! But he needn’t come rolling in here in his pit-dirt,
for I won’t wash him. He can lie on the floor—— Eh,
what a fool I’ve been, what a fool! And this is what I came here for, to
this dirty hole, rats and all, for him to slink past his very door. Twice last
week—he’s begun now——”
She silenced herself, and rose to clear the table.
While for an hour or more the children played, subduedly intent, fertile of
imagination, united in fear of the mother’s wrath, and in dread of their
father’s home-coming, Mrs Bates sat in her rocking-chair making a
‘singlet’ of thick cream-coloured flannel, which gave a dull
wounded sound as she tore off the grey edge. She worked at her sewing with
energy, listening to the children, and her anger wearied itself, lay down to
rest, opening its eyes from time to time and steadily watching, its ears raised
to listen. Sometimes even her anger quailed and shrank, and the mother
suspended her sewing, tracing the footsteps that thudded along the sleepers
outside; she would lift her head sharply to bid the children
‘hush’, but she recovered herself in time, and the footsteps went
past the gate, and the children were not flung out of their playing world.
But at last Annie sighed, and gave in. She glanced at her waggon of slippers,
and loathed the game. She turned plaintively to her mother.
“Mother!”—but she was inarticulate.
John crept out like a frog from under the sofa. His mother glanced up.
“Yes,” she said, “just look at those shirt-sleeves!”
The boy held them out to survey them, saying nothing. Then somebody called in a
hoarse voice away down the line, and suspense bristled in the room, till two
people had gone by outside, talking.
“It is time for bed,” said the mother.
“My father hasn’t come,” wailed Annie plaintively. But her
mother was primed with courage.
“Never mind. They’ll bring him when he does come—like a
log.” She meant there would be no scene. “And he may sleep on the
floor till he wakes himself. I know he’ll not go to work tomorrow after
this!”
The children had their hands and faces wiped with a flannel. They were very
quiet. When they had put on their nightdresses, they said their prayers, the
boy mumbling. The mother looked down at them, at the brown silken bush of
intertwining curls in the nape of the girl’s neck, at the little black
head of the lad, and her heart burst with anger at their father who caused all
three such distress. The children hid their faces in her skirts for comfort.
When Mrs Bates came down, the room was strangely empty, with a tension of
expectancy. She took up her sewing and stitched for some time without raising
her head. Meantime her anger was tinged with fear.
