behind him, to be replaced by a new order of familiarity, the slate roofs of the village, the smoke from the coal fires burning in the houses, the fumes of the open salt pans that lay beyond, swathing the houses themselves and all the air above and around them in a mist that was sour and all-pervasive.
Entering the lane that led to the village, he fell in with a miner named Saul Parrish, who lived close by him, he too returning from work and black with the dust of the coal. As they drew nearer to the first houses they heard a sudden outcry, the voices of women raised in shrill protest, the rarer voices of men. A strong smell of excrement was carried to them. Then they saw the coop cart and the black dray horse and the lines of washing running down the alleys below the houses.
“They are aboot the emptyin’ of the netties,” Parrish said, in the tone of pleased authority that comes to one who after study has found the answer to a difficult problem.
It was a note of self-satisfaction peculiar to Parrish. And perhaps it was this, the habit of delivering information obvious to all as if it were a special shaft of insight, that caused the beginnings of anger in Bordon, an anger not primarily directed at Parrish but at the tangle and confusion he knew to be reigning there in the narrow lanes, the washing lines caught up, clothes in danger of soiling, the weaving of the men with the stinking buckets, the confused upbraiding of the women, his wife Nan among them.
“A can see that for mesen,” he said. “A dinna need nay tellin’.”
The privies were in the yards behind the houses; they were emptied every so often into a cart specially designed for the purpose, high-sided, fitted with a huge tin basin with a sliding cover, to be borne away and tipped into a deep and monstrously reeking cesspool in the moorland some miles away.
“Anyone can see what they are doin’,” Bordon said. “What a want to know is why them fellers always come to us on a washin’ day. Tha never knows when they’ll come next, but tha knows it will always be on a washin’ day, so they can clag everythin’ up.”
Parrish’s eyes were bloodshot, after the hours of close and dusty work. They gleamed now in the blackened face with the light of superior wisdom. “Why, man,” he said, “they have their hours, as we arl do, rain or shine, that’s the way of it. ’Tis arl planned out by the manage.”
“The manage?” Bordon felt the rage rising in him, stiffening his jaw. “Is tha tellin’ me that the manage plans it out so them fellers always come to empty the shit in the village of Thorpe on a bleddy washin’ day? What is the manage, is it God? There’s someone there has a grudge against us.”
He had spoken loudly, and a man who had approached without their noticing, so intent were they on their talk, now spoke from behind him. “Who is that taking the name of God in vain?”
Turning, Bordon saw the very man least welcome to him at such a moment. It was Samuel Hill, who always had to be interfering and putting his nose in, judging everything and awarding points this way and that. He it was who always tried to set himself up as arbiter in the fistfights that were sometimes chosen, when words failed, as the means of settling an argument. Because of this mania for sitting in judgment, he was generally referred to—but never by Bordon—as Arbiter Hill, a title of which he was proud. He had been to a charity school and could read and write after a fashion, an advantage that had got him a place as assistant overman, tallying the loaded corves as they were dragged by the putters from the coal face to the pit bottom.
“Tha takes everythin’ personal,” Parrish said. He never liked his words of wisdom to be questioned, and he reacted now with some rage of his own to the rage he had heard in Bordon’s voice. “Tha brings everythin’ back to theesen. Does tha think they do it out of spite?”
He turned to Hill. “He is sayin’ there is a grudge against us in the manage because they always comes to empty the privies on a washin’ day. Them fellers empty the buckets in pit villages as far as the banks of the