The Quality of Mercy Read Online Free

reach up to. There was weariness in her face, but no trace of anger; she was intent, pouring clean water from a tin mug over his shoulders and back.
    “A saw our Percy in the Dene,” he said. “He was racin’ with birch boats in the beck. A dinna know if he saw me watchin’.”
    “He wouldna have knowed it was you, all black from the pit. Men are different inside of them but tha canna tell much difference on the outside till they wash the coal off.”
    Different inside they were indeed, she thought, whether clean washed or not. Bordon was subject to rages and there was violence in him, but it was never directed at her. From the day she had agreed to marry him he had tried to protect her as far as he could; he had wanted her to stop working at the pithead, sorting the shale and slate from the heaped coal, work she had started at the age of nine. It had meant a sacrifice of money, but he had insisted. There were some who made their wives labor at the mine even when they were advanced in pregnancy.
    His hair had thinned in these last two or three years; she could feel the small ridges of the scars that ran over his scalp. He was taller than average, and the only protection any of them had wasthe cloth cap; he did not always remember to stoop enough, and so he banged and bloodied his head against the roofs of the galleries as he passed.
    “It minded me of doin’ the same when a was that age,” he said. He turned his head in an effort to look at her through the blur of the water. Percy’s age was frequently in their minds nowadays; this summer would see the end of childhood for him, set him on the long course of becoming a pitman. It was not something to be much talked about, any more than other obvious facts of life. Percy himself was ready to go down, as his brothers had done before him; but he was the last of their children, and both felt a sense of regret they had not felt for the others.
    “He should be gettin’ back home by now,” Nan said. Then, after a moment, “He does well to play while he can.”
    “Just in that selfsame place,” he said, closing his eyes, seeing the place again. “The beck runs fast there.”
    He was dressed and had finished his tea by the time Michael and David came home. They came back together, as happened now and then, when their hours of work coincided.
    There was no hot water for them—that was the privilege of the head of the family. They took buckets to the well that was shared by all the houses in their alley, brought the water back to their own yard and washed down there. Their only light was a candle lamp, but it was enough for Michael to see that his twelve-year-old brother, with the coal dust washed away, had livid bruises on his arms and legs. “How did tha get them marks?” he said.
    David was reluctant to say. Stoicism came naturally to him; bruises of whatever kind were part of the life of the pit; it did not seem manly to complain, he did not want to look a weakling in his admired elder brother’s eyes. But as they fumbled their working clothes back on again in the cold yard, Michael persisted, and finally got the answer that confirmed the suspicions he had held for some time now. David worked as putter’s mate with a man named Daniel Walker; together they loaded the coal hacked out by the hewers, together they hauled and pushed theloaded sledges along the gallery ways to the pit bottom, where the quantities were tallied and the corves winched up to the surface. This was piecework; they were paid by the quantity of the coal they shifted. It seemed that Walker, thinking to spur David on to greater efforts, frequently struck him with his fists on the arms and shoulders and kicked him on the legs.
    “Is tha doin’ the best tha can to share the work?”
    “Yes,” David said, with some indignation at this slur on him. “A canna do more, a canna gan faster.”
    “An’ yon fool thinks he can make you do more by hittin’ you?”
    David made no reply to this,