‘Come on, gaffer,’ he said, ‘I’m game.’ He moved forward through the crowd. Alice, clinging to him desperately, tried to hold him back, but the people made way for him, and even helped him forward, swarming up on to the platform after him. Garside, pleased with the result of his stratagem, shook hands with him. ‘That’s the spirit I like,’ he said thickly. ‘Come on in and strip. Let’s have a drink to start with.’ They disappeared together into the tent. Sixpences rattled into the wooden bowl that the negro held to receive them. Men and women poured into the booth anxious to see what kind of battering the representative of the district would get. The little Jew pushed back the crowd and held up a piece of boarding with the words ‘House Full’ painted on it, while the negro fastened the strings of the tent door. Alice was left alone in the crowd outside clutching the baby nervously in her arms. She could not have borne to see Abner fight. All she could do was to wait patiently outside and listen in agony for any sounds within. She could hear very little but the buzz of conversation. Even when she crept round to the side of the tent and put her ear to the canvas the sounds that came to her were indistinct, unreal, and blurred by the nearer rumour of the multitude, the hiss of naphtha flares, the creaking of swing-boats, cracks of rifles, and above all the raucous blaring of the steam organs and the shriek of their whistles. If only she could have heard something she would have been happier. She could not bear to think of Abner’s white flesh being bruised, and yet, curiously enough, she was thrilled and proud of him. Her distaste for violence couldn’t get the better of her exultation in her man’s virility. She stood at the side of the tent tensely listening. A rocket screamed into the sky; there was a moment of relative silence from the crowd in which she thought she heard a sound of dull thuds mingled with another pattering noise. The rocket burst into a shower of gold amid a salvo of ‘Oh’s!’ The crowd, noisily streaming towards the ramparts, from which they could see the fireworks against a blacker sky, jostled her, passing between the boxing-booth and the next tent. Six rounds! It could not last much longer. Why had he left her so roughly? Why hadn’t he taken her with him? Of course you couldn’t take a baby into a boxing-booth—not even a black-country baby—but there was no reason why he should have pushed her aside like that. She wouldn’t forgive him that roughness in a hurry! But she knew that she would: she would forgive Abner anything as long as he did not disregard her. The crowd still streamed past her. Showers of starred rockets and tadpoles of fire were bursting above her in the velvet sky. A whole battery of maroons shook the ruins. He would be sorry to have missed the fireworks! If he were badly knocked about she still had some of Mrs Moseley’s ointment left—a fine thing for bruises or broken skin.