stockinged feet. Still they listened. Then at last, if the wind allowed,
they heard the water of the tap drumming into the kettle, which their
mother was filling for morning, and they could go to sleep in peace.
So they were happy in the morning--happy, very happy playing, dancing at
night round the lonely lamp-post in the midst of the darkness. But they
had one tight place of anxiety in their hearts, one darkness in their
eyes, which showed all their lives.
Paul hated his father. As a boy he had a fervent private religion.
"Make him stop drinking," he prayed every night. "Lord, let my father
die," he prayed very often. "Let him not be killed at pit," he prayed
when, after tea, the father did not come home from work.
That was another time when the family suffered intensely. The children
came from school and had their teas. On the hob the big black saucepan
was simmering, the stew-jar was in the oven, ready for Morel's dinner.
He was expected at five o'clock. But for months he would stop and drink
every night on his way from work.
In the winter nights, when it was cold, and grew dark early, Mrs. Morel
would put a brass candlestick on the table, light a tallow candle to
save the gas. The children finished their bread-and-butter, or dripping,
and were ready to go out to play. But if Morel had not come they
faltered. The sense of his sitting in all his pit-dirt, drinking, after
a long day's work, not coming home and eating and washing, but sitting,
getting drunk, on an empty stomach, made Mrs. Morel unable to bear
herself. From her the feeling was transmitted to the other children. She
never suffered alone any more: the children suffered with her.
Paul went out to play with the rest. Down in the great trough of
twilight, tiny clusters of lights burned where the pits were. A few last
colliers straggled up the dim field path. The lamplighter came along. No
more colliers came. Darkness shut down over the valley; work was done.
It was night.
Then Paul ran anxiously into the kitchen. The one candle still burned on
the table, the big fire glowed red. Mrs. Morel sat alone. On the hob
the saucepan steamed; the dinner-plate lay waiting on the table. All
the room was full of the sense of waiting, waiting for the man who was
sitting in his pit-dirt, dinnerless, some mile away from home, across
the darkness, drinking himself drunk. Paul stood in the doorway.
"Has my dad come?" he asked.
"You can see he hasn't," said Mrs. Morel, cross with the futility of the
question.
Then the boy dawdled about near his mother. They shared the same
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