blending with his own, voices of children from somewhere among the trees, the calling of curlews from the fields in that other world above, the distant hiss and clatter of the pump bringing up water from a flooded shaft somewhere among the mine workings.
The children’s voices came to him again, too faint for him to know whether happy or angry. They were lower down, somewhere close to the bank of the stream. Down there, further into the Dene, the ground leveled out and the beck made a turn southward, out of the path of the ice-laden winds that sometimes came in from the sea and tore through the long hollow of the glen. Here, in this sheltered loop of land, the climate was different, milder; there were zones of air that never felt the frost; willow herb grew here, and wild daffodils, and a thick vegetation of ferns and flowering grasses covered the ground. Two acres, roughly speaking. Fertile, well-watered, level ground, screened from the worst of winter, designed by nature for a market garden …
It was a thought that came often to him, more a kind of vision than a thought. It had accompanied his life, or so it seemed—he could not remember when first this picture had come into his mind, the flowering fruit trees, the green rows well hoed and neat, the pit pony he would rescue from toiling in darkness to carry his produce along the streamside to the coast. It was a vision orderly and beautiful, and it came to him not only here, though here it was stronger, here it seemed almost possible of fulfillment. He might think of it as he was falling asleep, or as he trudged to work in the early morning. Sometimes, at the end of a stint, when his eyes were tired, the shifting glints of the coal seemed like stirring leaves and gleams of light on water.
Occasionally he had spoken to his eldest son, Michael, about this piece of land, not directly as an ambition of ownership but as representing a happy state of existence, a labor that made sense, being on ground that was your own. In fact the Dene, and all the lands surrounding it as far as the coast, and all the coal that lay beneath, had belonged for several generations to the Spenton family, whose mansion and park and gardens and lake lay on a commanding rise of ground some two miles from where he was standing.
The clouds to the west lifted suddenly and a shaft of sunlight fell across the wooded incline. The voices of the children came to him again. He descended some yards along the narrow path that led through trees down the side of the glen. His sight was confused by the gleam of sunlight on the dark, clustering foliage of the yew trees that grew here on the upper slopes and the mist of green formed by the first buds of leaf on the beeches. After some moments he came to a point from which he could look down to the valley floor, see again the cold gray of the beck, too far below to be touched by the sunshine, though the change of light had made it possible to see the movement of the current, a whiteness at the edges where the water was whisked in eddies.
Then, quite suddenly, he saw the children; they were at the streamside, five diminutive figures, all boys, crouching by the water. Something about their gestures and voices, the way they crouched so intently, looking down, told him that a competition of some sort was going on. Then he saw a fleeting gleam of white, then another and another: they were racing boats as far as the overhang of rock some dozen yards farther down, where the stones in the streambed rose to the surface and broke the current. He remembered doing the same as a child—just there, just in that same place. You took some loose bark from a silver birch, stripped the pith and set your boat on its beveled side, well clear of the bank … At the same moment that he was recalling this he saw that one of the boys was his youngest son, Percy, who would soon be seven years old.
With some impulse of secrecy, or tact, he turned aside, began to go back the way he had come. As he reached the level of the rough pasture above, the hollow from which he had emerged closed