"'Mary,' he said, 'do you remember your words eleven months ago?'"  

 

 

 THE SAILOR 

 

 BOOK I 

 GESTATION 

 I 

 A large woman in a torn dress stood at the gate of a rag and bone dealer's yard. The season was November, the hour midnight, the place a slum in a Midland textile town. 

 Hanging from the wall of the house beyond was a dirty oil lamp round which the fog circled in a hundred spectral shapes. Seen by its light, she was not pleasant to look upon. Bare-armed, bare-headed, savage chest half bare and sagging in festoons, she stood stayless and unashamed, breathing gin and wickedness. A grin of quiet joy was upon her alcoholic countenance. Nay, more than joy. It was a light of inward ecstasy, and sprang from the fact that a heavy carter's whip was in her hand. 

 Not many feet from the spot on which she stood was the wall of a neighbor's house. Crouching against it so that he was scarcely visible in the darkness was a boy of thirteen. Without stockings or shoes, he wore only a filthy shirt, a thing that had once been a jacket, and a tattered lower garment which left his thighs half naked. 

 His face was transfigured with terror. 

 "Enery Arper," said the woman with a shrill snigger not unlike the whinny of a horse, "Auntie said she'd wait up for you, didn't she? And she always keeps a promise, don't she, my boy?" 

 The figure six yards away the fog was doing its best to hide cowered yet closer to the wall. 

 "And what was it, Enery, that Auntie promised you if you come 'ome again with ninepence?"  The wheeze of the voice had a note of humor. 

 The boy was wedged so close to the wall that he had barked the skin off his bare knees. The woman, watching him intently, began to 

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