The Quality of Mercy

20



As the time approached for the handball match with the neighboring colliery village of Northfield, Michael Bordon spent his Sunday mornings and evenings practicing, alone or with anyone who cared to play, at the handball court, which lay alongside the alehouse. He was now, by the consent of a large majority, Thorpe’s appointed champion, and he took the responsibility very seriously. Sunday afternoons he spent walking out with Elsie Foster. They had now reached the stage of walking hand in hand.

His mother had been the first to notice the change in him. He would previously, after the practice session, put on his pit clothes and go to play chuck farthing or sit in talk with the other men. Now he would spend a long time over combing his hair, and ask her more often to trim it for him. He would get out his best suit, the breeches with embroidered kneebands, the coat close-fitting, cut in at the waist.

Nan was carried back to the days of her courtship. She had been lucky in Bordon, she knew that; he was sometimes violent with others but never other than gentle with her. There was something unfulfilled in him, something rebellious and unresigned, that made him often somber, and this was more evident now that he grew older. He knew that Michael was walking out with Elsie Foster and that the family would lose income when the boy married; this would not be yet, but probably as soon as Michael went from putter to hewer. Bordon had married then himself.

Both of them approved of the girl and the family. Elsie worked on the tips, just as Nan had done. Bordon had taken her from that work, as it was likely Michael would do with Elsie.

Her husband’s best clothes were still there, in the trunk, though it was seldom that he wore them now. She went and got out the cravat, remembering how smart he had looked when he first came calling, so tall and straight, turning his cap in his hands. Her brother Billy had run off to sea before that …

She decided to give the cravat to Michael as a special thing to wear for this first walking-out. It was very fine, muslin edged with lace. He was dismayed by it. Fancy cravats of this kind were no longer worn by anyone he knew. But he said nothing. He looked at his mother’s face, which was lit up, the lines of work and weariness all smoothed away by the memories this totally unwearable cravat had brought her. He put on the cravat, tied it properly in a bow and set forth. When he was out of the sight of the house he took it off and put it in his pocket.

Elsie too wore her best clothes for these outings; they were always much the same, but he was always smitten anew by the look of her, the white hose and short dimity petticoats, the printed cotton gown, the stomacher with its bunches of variously colored ribbons, the straw hat tied under the chin—it was what the other girls wore for Sunday best, but on her it seemed uniquely fetching.

They took the path that led across the big field, where Michael had fought with Walker. It was a fine afternoon; others were walking there, they exchanged greetings as they passed. Ahead of them, to the north, the sky was divided by a broad, straight-edged band of cloud that seemed precisely ruled across from verge to verge. Above this band there was still the blue of day, deep and luminous; below it the delicate and reticent shades of evening were gathering, bronze, silver, slate gray, palest apricot.

Michael slowed his step. “Shall we gan through the Dene?” he said.

There was a pause before the reply came, but it was of the briefest. “If tha likes.”

She would have thought it improper in Michael to suggest this at any earlier stage. Like holding hands, it was a necessary and time-honored step in the progress of courtship, the first experience of enclosure, of being screened off and out of view. Generations of couples had traversed these paths above the beck; many were the children that had been conceived here.

Talk was more personal and intimate with them now, and as they crossed the pasture fields and began to descend toward the deep cut which marked the beginning of the Dene, Michael told her of the attempts he had made to get the overman to shift David from being Walker’s marrow to being his. “Walker an’ me are both puttin’ the coal, just the same,” he said. “Why not keep it in the family? Walker can find someone else—he can have the lad that works with me, if he wants.”

“Well, but,” she said, “tha wouldna be doin’ him nay favor. Walker would just start knockin’ him about. What a mean, he’ll keep his hands off yor David, now that tha’s had it out with him.”

“Well, that’s one way of lookin’ at it,” Michael said. It was an aspect that had not occurred to him, or to his father either.

Elsie turned to smile at him as they walked. “ ’Tis sometimes better to let things be,” she said. Michael was like the men of her own family, set on having his own way and keeping close to his own idea of things. But he would listen to her, and she liked him for this—it was one of the things she liked most about him. “My uncle would be alive to this day if they had only let things be,” she said. She had been fond of this uncle, her mother’s brother, who had died in an accident at the pit some two years before, killed by a haphazard fall of stone from the mouth of the shaft. “They changed the work hours,” she said. “The men went off without puttin’ the timbers across where the stone was loose, an’ the basketman had just come on an’ he didn’t know it. Usual game, tryin’ to get more work out of the men for the same money.”

Anger had come with the words into her voice and into her face. Michael made no answer, allowing silence to mark his agreement and sympathy. He knew the circumstances of Thomas Fenby’s death; pit deaths and injuries formed part of the collective knowledge of the colliery. But Elsie’s quickness of feeling was still strange to him. She had gone from a smile to a flare of anger in two shakes of a duck’s tail. “Look,” he said, with a certain relief at finding a change of subject. He pointed down at the path as it began to descend through the wooded slopes of the Dene. There were the trot marks of a fox in the dried clay.

There had been high winds in the previous days, and they could see a tangle of damage higher up on the slope, where the trees were more exposed. Branches had been torn from some of the elms there; they lay in a jagged debris of timber, the pale yellow of the breaks deepening to reddish in the core of the wood. In places the bark had been stripped off in the fall, leaving raw-looking, ocherous patches. Chaffinches fluttered among the tangle of boughs, repeating a single sharp note.

They fell silent as they went farther in. Both were aware of the momentousness of the occasion. Elsie was nearly eighteen. She had come here often as a child, with other children, played hide-and-seek, gathered primroses, splashed in the stream. But this had ended for her at the age of ten, when she had started working on the tips. Since then she had come only rarely. Girls did not go alone into the Dene, and it was not customary for women of any age to go on excursions of this sort together. Now it seemed to her altogether a different place, hushed and strange.

For Michael too these slopes felt unfamiliar and new. For the first time he felt truly alone with Elsie, in spite of the presence—felt by both—of others here, occasional muted voices and rustlings of movement among the trees.

They took the path that led downward, toward the beck. From somewhere on the other side of the narrow valley they heard the voices of children. Elsie was having some difficulty in walking now, on this steepest part of the slope. She had hesitated over the choice of shoes and finally, not thinking they would be going into the Dene, chosen the only pair she possessed with raised heels—Italian heels they were called, she had no idea why. She was walking in front of Michael—the path was too narrow for them to walk side by side—and she feared she might seem ungainly to him. But he, able now for the first time to look as much as he liked at her, was too much taken with the carriage of her shoulders and the sway of her hips to pay much attention to the way she set her feet. This too she sensed might be the case, but the thought did not make her less eager to reach easier footing.

As they drew near the beck the ground leveled out. There was a gleam of sunshine on the wet stones, and they saw a green leaf, fallen before its time, go drifting by, edged with bright specks of foam. They followed the stream as it curved sharply and ran through a broad sweep of fern and tall grasses with plumy, bluish heads. There was a blaze of yellow from the kingcups that grew along the wet border, following the line of the curve.

“My father has always wanted to own this piece of land,” Michael said. He had never shared this knowledge of his father’s wish with anyone before—it was like admitting Elsie into the family. “For a market garden, tha knows, to grow vegetables and fruit. About two acres, it is, two an’ a bit, all on this side of the beck.”

Elsie looked about her. “It feels different,” she said. It was completely still here, out of the breeze that had been in their faces as they walked. “It feels warmer,” she said. “A never marked it in arl the times a used to come here.” She paused, seeking for words. “Mebbe a did mark it. When tha’s little, tha sees things, then they gan out of yor mind, but tha dinna truly forget them.”

“Just an idea of his,” Michael said. “A mean, he never had a chance of gettin’ it.” He pointed up the slope. “Nay shortage of water, the beck never dries.”

She looked up to where he was pointing and saw the glint of water as it came down to feed the stream. There was a drift of bluebells alongside the spring and a rowan tree in flower.

“Everythin’ here comes out early,” he said. “Tha sees butterflies here before tha sees them anywhere else. He said so once. An’ dragonflies, he said. He comes down here on his own, tha knows, just to stand an’ look.”

They looked at each other in silence for some moments. Then he said, “Would tha like to sit down for a bit?”

“Yes,” she said, and her eyes rested steadily on him. “If tha wants.”

“A wanted to bring you to this bit of ground,” he said. “A wanted to tell you … there is nowt I canna tell you. A long time a was watchin’ out for you, every mornin’ a was waitin’ to see you. Seein’ you in the mornin’ was like a light a took down with me, down the pit.”

“A was hopin’ tha’d speak,” she said. “But tha needed a good batterin’ first. Walker done us a good turn. Without him we might still be just lookin’ at each other an’ lettin’ the days gan by.”

They went some way up from the stream to where the ferns grew thickly. Elsie sat very straight for a while. Then she untied the strings of her hat, which were knotted in a bow under her chin, and took it off and laid it beside her. Below the hat was a mobcap drawn tight across her head, and when she loosened this and took it off, her fair hair, which had been contained in it, fell round her shoulders.

“That’s better,” she said, smiling. “My head was feelin’ hot.”

“All of me is feelin’ hot,” he said.

Whether her balance was precarious and easily upset by his hands on her shoulders or whether he pushed her gently down was not something that occupied the mind of either. Hidden among the thickly growing ferns on this so much desired piece of ground, they lay embraced together.