The days shortened, the pollard elms turned gold and the rusty chestnut leaves in the avenue fell of their own heaviness. The drowsiness of summer had passed and a new restlessness seized him. He could not be contented with this peaceful static existence into which he found himself sinking. The silence of Mary Malpas lay on him like a heavy spell. He had rested enough and could no longer be contented to drowse before the fire with a child in his arms. The peace of Wolfpits could tempt him no longer when the chill autumn air stimulated him to action and the natural violence of youth. He felt that what he wanted was the society of men and the pursuits of manliness. Once or twice he walked down to Chapel Green in the evening and drank a pint with the labourers who gathered in the Buffalo under the eye of old Mrs Malpas, but he found that he couldn’t get on with her. She was always restrained and severe, giving him the impression that she had taken a dislike to him from the first, and when she talked to him he felt that she was trying in her own superior way to find out exactly what her daughter-in-law was doing at Wolfpits. Even her questions about the children seemed to him to be dictated by malevolent curiosity rather than by affection. He felt that he was like a child in her hands and that she could get what she liked out of him. When he went to the Buffalo he had expected to find the cloggers there, but they did little more than sleep in that dismal house, going for their pleasures to the relative gaiety and light of the Pound House, where they could do as they liked. With the labourers at the Buffalo Abner had nothing in common. He understood nothing of their talk of crops and beasts and weather even when he could penetrate the meaning of their speech. He gave the Buffalo up as a bad job and went to the Pound House himself. He used to go along there with George Malpas as soon as the whistle signalled that the day’s work was at an end, and there, in a brighter light and in the stir of a roaring business he found an atmosphere more suited to his restless spirit. Sometimes he sat with George Malpas; but George was a gloomy drinker and better company when he was sober, so more often he took his seat next to Gunner Eve, who drank nothing but spirits, and sometimes, under their influence, would talk to him of his old days of service in the navy, of blue Pacific havens, palm-huts with brown women, or sometimes of that savage African river on which he had lost his eye. That was the kind of life that Abner wanted. In the Gunner’s stories a vista of adventure opened before him. The liquor made him think that such was the only life for a man. The foreman’s tales of amorous adventure enthralled him. Therein lay the proper use of women.