He took leave of his host, who called after him: “You'd better wait for
a steamer! It's a beastly drive!”
Scorrier shook his head. All night, jolting along a rough track cut
through the forest, he thought of Pippin. The other miseries of this
calamity at present left him cold; he barely thought of the smothered
men; but Pippin's struggle, his lonely struggle with this hydra-headed
monster, touched him very nearly. He fell asleep and dreamed of watching
Pippin slowly strangled by a snake; the agonised, kindly, ironic face
peeping out between two gleaming coils was so horribly real, that he
awoke. It was the moment before dawn: pitch-black branches barred the
sky; with every jolt of the wheels the gleams from the lamps danced,
fantastic and intrusive, round ferns and tree-stems, into the cold heart
of the forest. For an hour or more Scorrier tried to feign sleep, and
hide from the stillness, and overmastering gloom of these great woods.
Then softly a whisper of noises stole forth, a stir of light, and the
whole slow radiance of the morning glory. But it brought no warmth; and
Scorrier wrapped himself closer in his cloak, feeling as though old age
had touched him.
Close on noon he reached the township. Glamour seemed still to hover
over it. He drove on to the mine. The winding-engine was turning,
the pulley at the top of the head-gear whizzing round; nothing looked
unusual. 'Some mistake!' he thought. He drove to the mine buildings,
alighted, and climbed to the shaft head. Instead of the usual rumbling
of the trolleys, the rattle of coal discharged over the screens, there
was silence. Close by, Pippin himself was standing, smirched with dirt.
The cage, coming swift and silent from below, shot open its doors with a
sharp rattle. Scorrier bent forward to look. There lay a dead man, with
a smile on his face.
“How many?” he whispered.
Pippin answered: “Eighty-four brought up—forty-seven still below,” and
entered the man's name in a pocket-book.
An older man was taken out next; he too was smiling—there had been
vouchsafed to him, it seemed, a taste of more than earthly joy. The
sight of those strange smiles affected Scorrier more than all the
anguish or despair he had seen scored on the faces of other dead men. He
asked an old miner how long Pippin had been at work.
“Thirty hours. Yesterday he wer' below; we had to nigh carry mun up at
last. He's for goin' down again, but the chaps won't lower mun;” the old
man gave a sigh. “I'm waiting for my boy to come up, I am.”
Scorrier waited too—there was fascination about those dead, smiling
faces. The rescuing of these men who would never again breathe went on
and on. Scorrier grew sleepy in the sun. The old miner woke him, saying:
“Rummy stuff this here chokedamp; see, they all dies drunk!” The very
next to be brought up was the chief engineer. Scorrier had known him
quite well, one of those Scotsmen who are born at the age of forty
and remain so all their lives. His face—the only one that wore no
smile—seemed grieving that duty had deprived it of that last luxury.
With wide eyes and drawn lips he had died protesting.
Late in the afternoon the old miner touched Scorrier's arm, and said:
“There he is—there's my boy!” And he departed slowly, wheeling the body
on a trolley.
As the sun set, the gang below came up. No further search was possible
till the fumes had cleared. Scorrier heard one man say: “There's some
we'll never get; they've had sure burial.”
Another answered him: “'Tis a gude enough bag for me!” They passed him,
the whites of their eyes gleaming out of faces black as ink.
Pippin drove him home at a furious pace, not uttering a single word. As
they turned into the main street, a young woman starting out before the
horses obliged Pippin to pull up. The glance he bent on Scorrier was
ludicrously prescient of suffering. The woman asked for her husband.
Several times they were stopped thus by women asking for their husbands
or sons. “This is what I have to go through,” Pippin whispered.
When they had eaten, he said to Scorrier: “It was kind of you to come
and stand by me! They take me for a god, poor creature that I am. But
shall I ever get the men down again? Their nerve's shaken. I wish I were
one of those poor lads, to die with a smile like that!”
Scorrier felt the futility of his presence. On Pippin alone must be the
heat and burden. Would he stand under it, or would the whole thing come
crashing to the ground? He urged him again and again to rest, but Pippin
only gave him one of his queer smiles. “You don't know how strong I am!”
he said.