I
In a car of the Naples express a mining expert was diving into a bag for
papers. The strong sunlight showed the fine wrinkles on his brown
face and the shabbiness of his short, rough beard. A newspaper cutting
slipped from his fingers; he picked it up, thinking: 'How the dickens
did that get in here?' It was from a colonial print of three years back;
and he sat staring, as if in that forlorn slip of yellow paper he had
encountered some ghost from his past.
These were the words he read: “We hope that the setback to civilisation,
the check to commerce and development, in this promising centre of our
colony may be but temporary; and that capital may again come to the
rescue. Where one man was successful, others should surely not fail? We
are convinced that it only needs....” And the last words: “For what can
be sadder than to see the forest spreading its lengthening shadows, like
symbols of defeat, over the untenanted dwellings of men; and where was
once the merry chatter of human voices, to pass by in the silence....”
On an afternoon, thirteen years before, he had been in the city of
London, at one of those emporiums where mining experts perch, before
fresh flights, like sea-gulls on some favourite rock. A clerk said to
him: “Mr. Scorrier, they are asking for you downstairs—Mr. Hemmings of
the New Colliery Company.”
Scorrier took up the speaking tube. “Is that you, Mr. Scorrier? I hope
you are very well, sir, I am—Hemmings—I am—coming up.”
In two minutes he appeared, Christopher Hemmings, secretary of the
New Colliery Company, known in the City—behind his back—as
“Down-by-the-starn” Hemmings. He grasped Scorrier's hand—the gesture
was deferential, yet distinguished. Too handsome, too capable,
too important, his figure, the cut of his iron-grey beard, and his
intrusively fine eyes, conveyed a continual courteous invitation to
inspect their infallibilities. He stood, like a City “Atlas,” with
his legs apart, his coat-tails gathered in his hands, a whole globe of
financial matters deftly balanced on his nose. “Look at me!” he seemed
to say. “It's heavy, but how easily I carry it. Not the man to let it
down, Sir!”
“I hope I see you well, Mr. Scorrier,” he began. “I have come round
about our mine. There is a question of a fresh field being opened
up—between ourselves, not before it's wanted. I find it difficult to get
my Board to take a comprehensive view. In short, the question is: Are
you prepared to go out for us, and report on it? The fees will be all
right.” His left eye closed. “Things have been very—er—dicky; we are
going to change our superintendent. I have got little Pippin—you know
little Pippin?”
Scorrier murmured, with a feeling of vague resentment: “Oh yes. He's not
a mining man!”
Hemmings replied: “We think that he will do.” 'Do you?' thought
Scorrier; 'that's good of you!'
He had not altogether shaken off a worship he had felt for Pippin—“King”
Pippin he was always called, when they had been boys at the Camborne
Grammar-school. “King” Pippin! the boy with the bright colour, very
bright hair, bright, subtle, elusive eyes, broad shoulders, little stoop
in the neck, and a way of moving it quickly like a bird; the boy who
was always at the top of everything, and held his head as if looking
for something further to be the top of. He remembered how one day “King”
Pippin had said to him in his soft way, “Young Scorrie, I'll do your
sums for you”; and in answer to his dubious, “Is that all right?” had
replied, “Of course—I don't want you to get behind that beast Blake,
he's not a Cornishman” (the beast Blake was an Irishman not yet twelve).
He remembered, too, an occasion when “King” Pippin with two other boys
fought six louts and got a licking, and how Pippin sat for half an hour
afterwards, all bloody, his head in his hands, rocking to and fro, and
weeping tears of mortification; and how the next day he had sneaked
off by himself, and, attacking the same gang, got frightfully mauled a
second time.
Thinking of these things he answered curtly: “When shall I start?”
“Down-by-the-starn” Hemmings replied with a sort of fearful
sprightliness: “There's a good fellow! I will send instructions; so glad
to see you well.” Conferring on Scorrier a look—fine to the verge
of vulgarity—he withdrew. Scorrier remained, seated; heavy with
insignificance and vague oppression, as if he had drunk a tumbler of
sweet port.
A week later, in company with Pippin, he was on board a liner.
The “King” Pippin of his school-days was now a man of forty-four. He
awakened in Scorrier the uncertain wonder with which men look backward
at their uncomplicated teens; and staggering up and down the decks in
the long Atlantic roll, he would steal glances at his companion, as if
he expected to find out from them something about himself. Pippin had
still “King” Pippin's bright, fine hair, and dazzling streaks in his
short beard; he had still a bright colour and suave voice, and what
there were of wrinkles suggested only subtleties of humour and ironic
sympathy. From the first, and apparently without negotiation, he had
his seat at the captain's table, to which on the second day Scorrier too
found himself translated, and had to sit, as he expressed it ruefully,
“among the big-wigs.”
During the voyage only one incident impressed itself on Scorrier's
memory, and that for a disconcerting reason. In the forecastle were the
usual complement of emigrants. One evening, leaning across the rail to
watch them, he felt a touch on his arm; and, looking round, saw Pippin's
face and beard quivering in the lamplight. “Poor people!” he said. The
idea flashed on Scorrier that he was like some fine wire sound-recording
instrument.
'Suppose he were to snap!' he thought. Impelled to justify this fancy,
he blurted out: “You're a nervous chap. The way you look at those poor
devils!”
Pippin hustled him along the deck. “Come, come, you took me off my
guard,” he murmured, with a sly, gentle smile, “that's not fair.”
He found it a continual source of wonder that Pippin, at his age, should
cut himself adrift from the associations and security of London life to
begin a new career in a new country with dubious prospect of success.
'I always heard he was doing well all round,' he thought; 'thinks he'll
better himself, perhaps. He's a true Cornishman.'
The morning of arrival at the mines was grey and cheerless; a cloud of
smoke, beaten down by drizzle, clung above the forest; the wooden houses
straggled dismally in the unkempt semblance of a street, against a
background of endless, silent woods. An air of blank discouragement
brooded over everything; cranes jutted idly over empty trucks; the long
jetty oozed black slime; miners with listless faces stood in the rain;
dogs fought under their very legs. On the way to the hotel they met no
one busy or serene except a Chinee who was polishing a dish-cover.
The late superintendent, a cowed man, regaled them at lunch with his
forebodings; his attitude toward the situation was like the food, which
was greasy and uninspiring. Alone together once more, the two newcomers
eyed each other sadly.
“Oh dear!” sighed Pippin. “We must change all this, Scorrier; it will
never do to go back beaten. I shall not go back beaten; you will have
to carry me on my shield;” and slyly: “Too heavy, eh? Poor fellow!” Then
for a long time he was silent, moving his lips as if adding up the cost.
Suddenly he sighed, and grasping Scorrier's arm, said: “Dull, aren't I?
What will you do? Put me in your report, 'New Superintendent—sad, dull
dog—not a word to throw at a cat!'” And as if the new task were too much
for him, he sank back in thought. The last words he said to Scorrier
that night were: “Very silent here. It's hard to believe one's here for
life. But I feel I am. Mustn't be a coward, though!” and brushing his
forehead, as though to clear from it a cobweb of faint thoughts, he
hurried off.
Scorrier stayed on the veranda smoking. The rain had ceased, a few stars
were burning dimly; even above the squalor of the township the scent of
the forests, the interminable forests, brooded. There sprang into his
mind the memory of a picture from one of his children's fairy books—the
picture of a little bearded man on tiptoe, with poised head and a great
sword, slashing at the castle of a giant. It reminded him of Pippin. And
suddenly, even to Scorrier—whose existence was one long encounter with
strange places—the unseen presence of those woods, their heavy, healthy
scent, the little sounds, like squeaks from tiny toys, issuing out of
the gloomy silence, seemed intolerable, to be shunned, from the mere
instinct of self-preservation. He thought of the evening he had spent
in the bosom of “Down-by-the-starn” Hemmings' family, receiving his
last instructions—the security of that suburban villa, its discouraging
gentility; the superior acidity of the Miss Hemmings; the noble names
of large contractors, of company promoters, of a peer, dragged with the
lightness of gun-carriages across the conversation; the autocracy of
Hemmings, rasped up here and there, by some domestic contradiction. It
was all so nice and safe—as if the whole thing had been fastened to
an anchor sunk beneath the pink cabbages of the drawing-room carpet!
Hemmings, seeing him off the premises, had said with secrecy: “Little
Pippin will have a good thing. We shall make his salary L——. He'll be a
great man--quite a king. Ha-ha!”
Scorrier shook the ashes from his pipe. 'Salary!' he thought, straining
his ears; 'I wouldn't take the place for five thousand pounds a year.
And yet it's a fine country,' and with ironic violence he repeated, 'a
dashed fine country!'
Ten days later, having finished his report on the new mine, he stood on
the jetty waiting to go abroad the steamer for home.
“God bless you!” said Pippin. “Tell them they needn't be afraid; and
sometimes when you're at home think of me, eh?”
Scorrier, scrambling on board, had a confused memory of tears in his
eyes, and a convulsive handshake.