"Yes, ma'am. Aimed at her. But it hit _him_. Yes, ma'am, har

THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND

And Other Stories

H. G. WELLS

[Illustration: He stopped, and then made a dash to escape from their

closing ranks.]

INTRODUCTION

The enterprise of Messrs. T. Nelson & Sons and the friendly accommodation

of Messrs. Macmillan render possible this collection in one cover of all

the short stories by me that I care for any one to read again. Except for

the two series of linked incidents that make up the bulk of the book

called _Tales of Space and Time_, no short story of mine of the

slightest merit is excluded from this volume. Many of very questionable

merit find a place; it is an inclusive and not an exclusive gathering.

And the task of selection and revision brings home to me with something of

the effect of discovery that I was once an industrious writer of short

stories, and that I am no longer anything of the kind. I have not written

one now for quite a long time, and in the past five or six years I have

made scarcely one a year. The bulk of the fifty or sixty tales from which

this present three-and-thirty have been chosen dates from the last

century. This edition is more definitive than I supposed when first I

arranged for it. In the presence of so conclusive an ebb and cessation an

almost obituary manner seems justifiable.

I find it a little difficult to disentangle the causes that have

restricted the flow of these inventions. It has happened, I remark, to

others as well as to myself, and in spite of the kindliest encouragement

to continue from editors and readers. There was a time when life bubbled

with short stories; they were always coming to the surface of my mind, and

it is no deliberate change of will that has thus restricted my production.

It is rather, I think, a diversion of attention to more sustained and more

exacting forms. It was my friend Mr. C.L. Hind who set that spring going.

He urged me to write short stories for the _Pall Mall Budget_, and

persuaded me by his simple and buoyant conviction that I could do what he

desired. There existed at the time only the little sketch, "The Jilting of

Jane," included in this volume--at least, that is the only tolerable

fragment of fiction I find surviving from my pre-Lewis-Hind period. But I

set myself, so encouraged, to the experiment of inventing moving and

interesting things that could be given vividly in the little space of

eight or ten such pages as this, and for a time I found it a very

entertaining pursuit indeed. Mr. Hind's indicating finger had shown me an

amusing possibility of the mind. I found that, taking almost anything as a

starting-point and letting my thoughts play about it, there would

presently come out of the darkness, in a manner quite inexplicable, some

absurd or vivid little incident more or less relevant to that initial

nucleus. Little men in canoes upon sunlit oceans would come floating out

of nothingness, incubating the eggs of prehistoric monsters unawares;

violent conflicts would break out amidst the flower-beds of suburban

gardens; I would discover I was peering into remote and mysterious worlds

ruled by an order logical indeed but other than our common sanity.

The 'nineties was a good and stimulating period for a short-story writer.

Mr. Kipling had made his astonishing advent with a series of little

blue-grey books, whose covers opened like window-shutters to reveal

the dusty sun-glare and blazing colours of the East; Mr. Barrie had

demonstrated what could be done in a little space through the panes of his

_Window in Thrums_. The _National Observer_ was at the climax of

its career of heroic insistence upon lyrical brevity and a vivid finish,

and Mr. Frank Harris was not only printing good short stories by other

people, but writing still better ones himself in the dignified pages of

the _Fortnightly Review. Longman's Magazine_, too, represented a

_clientèle_ of appreciative short-story readers that is now

scattered. Then came the generous opportunities of the _Yellow Book_,

and the _National Observer_ died only to give birth to the _New

Review_. No short story of the slightest distinction went for long

unrecognised. The sixpenny popular magazines had still to deaden down the

conception of what a short story might be to the imaginative limitation of

the common reader--and a maximum length of six thousand words. Short

stories broke out everywhere. Kipling was writing short stories; Barrie,

Stevenson, Frank-Harris; Max Beerbohm wrote at least one perfect one, "The

Happy Hypocrite"; Henry James pursued his wonderful and inimitable bent;

and among other names that occur to me, like a mixed handful of jewels

drawn from a bag, are George Street, Morley Roberts, George Gissing, Ella

d'Arcy, Murray Gilchrist, E. Nesbit, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Edwin

Pugh, Jerome K. Jerome, Kenneth Graham, Arthur Morrison, Marriott Watson,

George Moore, Grant Allen, George Egerton, Henry Harland, Pett Ridge, W.

W. Jacobs (who alone seems inexhaustible). I dare say I could recall as

many more names with a little effort. I may be succumbing to the

infirmities of middle age, but I do not think the present decade can

produce any parallel to this list, or what is more remarkable, that the

later achievements in this field of any of the survivors from that time,

with the sole exception of Joseph Conrad, can compare with the work they

did before 1900. It seems to me this outburst of short stories came not

only as a phase in literary development, but also as a phase in the

development of the individual writers concerned.

It is now quite unusual to see any adequate criticism of short stories in

English. I do not know how far the decline in short-story writing may not

be due to that. Every sort of artist demands human responses, and few men

can contrive to write merely for a publisher's cheque and silence, however

reassuring that cheque may be. A mad millionaire who commissioned

masterpieces to burn would find it impossible to buy them. Scarcely any

artist will hesitate in the choice between money and attention; and it was

primarily for that last and better sort of pay that the short stories of

the 'nineties were written. People talked about them tremendously,

compared them, and ranked them. That was the thing that mattered.

It was not, of course, all good talk, and we suffered then, as now, from

the _à priori_ critic. Just as nowadays he goes about declaring that

the work of such-and-such a dramatist is all very amusing and delightful,

but "it isn't a Play," so we' had a great deal of talk about _the_

short story, and found ourselves measured by all kinds of arbitrary

standards. There was a tendency to treat the short story as though it was

as definable a form as the sonnet, instead of being just exactly what any

one of courage and imagination can get told in twenty minutes' reading or

so. It was either Mr. Edward Garnett or Mr. George Moore in a violently

anti-Kipling mood who invented the distinction between the short story and

the anecdote. The short story was Maupassant; the anecdote was damnable.

It was a quite infernal comment in its way, because it permitted no

defence. Fools caught it up and used it freely. Nothing is so destructive

in a field of artistic effort as a stock term of abuse. Anyone could say

of any short story, "A mere anecdote," just as anyone can say

"Incoherent!" of any novel or of any sonata that isn't studiously

monotonous. The recession of enthusiasm for this compact, amusing form is

closely associated in my mind with that discouraging imputation. One felt

hopelessly open to a paralysing and unanswerable charge, and one's ease

and happiness in the garden of one's fancies was more and more marred by

the dread of it. It crept into one's mind, a distress as vague and

inexpugnable as a sea fog on a spring morning, and presently one shivered

and wanted to go indoors...It is the absurd fate of the imaginative writer

that he should be thus sensitive to atmospheric conditions.

But after one has died as a maker one may still live as a critic, and I

will confess I am all for laxness and variety in this as in every field of

art. Insistence upon rigid forms and austere unities seems to me the

instinctive reaction of the sterile against the fecund. It is the tired

man with a headache who values a work of art for what it does not contain.

I suppose it is the lot of every critic nowadays to suffer from

indigestion and a fatigued appreciation, and to develop a self-protective

tendency towards rules that will reject, as it were, automatically the

more abundant and irregular forms. But this world is not for the weary,

and in the long-run it is the new and variant that matter. I refuse

altogether to recognise any hard and fast type for the Short Story, any

more than I admit any limitation upon the liberties of the Small Picture.

The short story is a fiction that may be read in something under an hour,

and so that it is moving and delightful, it does not matter whether it is

as "trivial" as a Japanese print of insects seen closely between grass

stems, or as spacious as the prospect of the plain of Italy from Monte

Mottarone. It does not matter whether it is human or inhuman, or whether

it leaves you thinking deeply or radiantly but superficially pleased. Some

things are more easily done as short stories than others and more

abundantly done, but one of the many pleasures of short-story writing is

to achieve the impossible.

At any rate, that is the present writer's conception of the art of the

short story, as the jolly art of making something very bright and moving;

it may be horrible or pathetic or funny or beautiful or profoundly

illuminating, having only this essential, that it should take from fifteen

to fifty minutes to read aloud. All the rest is just whatever invention

and imagination and the mood can give--a vision of buttered slides on a

busy day or of unprecedented worlds. In that spirit of miscellaneous

expectation these stories should be received. Each is intended to be a

thing by itself; and if it is not too ungrateful to kindly and

enterprising publishers, I would confess I would much prefer to see each

printed expensively alone, and left in a little brown-paper cover to lie

about a room against the needs of a quite casual curiosity. And I would

rather this volume were found in the bedrooms of convalescents and in

dentists' parlours and railway trains than in gentlemen's studies. I would

rather have it dipped in and dipped in again than read severely through.

Essentially it is a miscellany of inventions, many of which were very

pleasant to write; and its end is more than attained if some of them are

refreshing and agreeable to read. I have now re-read them all, and I am

glad to think I wrote them. I like them, but I cannot tell how much the

associations of old happinesses gives them a flavour for me. I make no

claims for them and no apology; they will be read as long as people read

them. Things written either live or die; unless it be for a place of

judgment upon Academic impostors, there is no apologetic intermediate

state.

I may add that I have tried to set a date to most of these stories, but

that they are not arranged in strictly chronological order.

H. G. WELLS.

CONTENTS.

I. THE JILTING OF JANE

II. THE CONE

III. THE STOLEN BACILLUS

IV. THE FLOWERING OF THE STRANGE ORCHID

V. THE AVU OBSERVATORY

VI. AEPYORNIS ISLAND

VII. THE REMARKABLE CASE OF DAVIDSON'S EYES.

VIII. THE LORD OF THE DYNAMOS.

IX. THE MOTH

X. THE TREASURE IN THE FOREST

XI. THE STORY OF THE LATE MR. ELVESHAM

XII. UNDER THE KNIFE

XIII. THE SEA RAIDERS

XIV. THE OBLITERATED MAN

XV. THE PLATTNER STORY

XVI. THE RED ROOM

XVII. THE PURPLE PILEUS

XVIII. A SLIP UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

XIX. THE CRYSTAL EGG

XX. THE STAR

XXI. THE MAN WHO COULD WORK MIRACLES

XXII. A VISION OF JUDGMENT

XXIII. JIMMY GOGGLES THE GOD

XXIV. MISS WINCHELSEA'S HEART

XXV. A DREAM OF ARMAGEDDON

XXVI. THE VALLEY OF SPIDERS

XXVII. THE NEW ACCELERATOR

XXVIII. THE TRUTH ABOUT PYECRAFT

XXIX. THE MAGIC SHOP

XXX. THE EMPIRE OF THE ANTS

XXXI. THE DOOR IN THE WALL

XXXII. THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND

XXXIII. THE BEAUTIFUL SUIT

I.

THE JILTING OF JANE.

As I sit writing in my study, I can hear our Jane bumping her way

downstairs with a brush and dust-pan. She used in the old days to sing

hymn tunes, or the British national song for the time being, to these

instruments, but latterly she has been silent and even careful over her

work. Time was when I prayed with fervour for such silence, and my wife

with sighs for such care, but now they have come we are not so glad as we

might have anticipated we should be. Indeed, I would rejoice secretly,

though it may be unmanly weakness to admit it, even to hear Jane sing

"Daisy," or, by the fracture of any plate but one of Euphemia's best green

ones, to learn that the period of brooding has come to an end.

Yet how we longed to hear the last of Jane's young man before we heard the

last of him! Jane was always very free with her conversation to my wife,

and discoursed admirably in the kitchen on a variety of topics--so well,

indeed, that I sometimes left my study door open--our house is a small

one--to partake of it. But after William came, it was always William,

nothing but William; William this and William that; and when we thought

William was worked out and exhausted altogether, then William all over

again. The engagement lasted altogether three years; yet how she got

introduced to William, and so became thus saturated with him, was always a

secret. For my part, I believe it was at the street corner where the Rev.

Barnabas Baux used to hold an open-air service after evensong on Sundays.

Young Cupids were wont to flit like moths round the paraffin flare of that

centre of High Church hymn-singing. I fancy she stood singing hymns there,

out of memory and her imagination, instead of coming home to get supper,

and William came up beside her and said, "Hello!" "Hello yourself!" she

said; and etiquette being satisfied, they proceeded to talk together.

As Euphemia has a reprehensible way of letting her servants talk to her,

she soon heard of him. "He is _such_ a respectable young man, ma'am,"

said Jane, "you don't know." Ignoring the slur cast on her acquaintance,

my wife inquired further about this William.

"He is second porter at Maynard's, the draper's," said Jane, "and gets

eighteen shillings--nearly a pound--a week, m'm; and when the head porter

leaves he will be head porter. His relatives are quite superior people,

m'm. Not labouring people at all. His father was a greengrosher, m'm, and

had a churnor, and he was bankrup' twice. And one of his sisters is in a

Home for the Dying. It will be a very good match for me, m'm," said Jane,

"me being an orphan girl."

"Then you are engaged to him?" asked my wife.

"Not engaged, ma'am; but he is saving money to buy a ring--hammyfist."

"Well, Jane, when you are properly engaged to him you may ask him round

here on Sunday afternoons, and have tea with him in the kitchen;" for my

Euphemia has a motherly conception of her duty towards her maid-servants.

And presently the amethystine ring was being worn about the house, even

with ostentation, and Jane developed a new way of bringing in the joint so

that this gage was evident. The elder Miss Maitland was aggrieved by it,

and told my wife that servants ought not to wear rings. But my wife looked

it up in _Enquire Within_ and _Mrs. Motherly's Book of Household

Management_, and found no prohibition. So Jane remained with this

happiness added to her love.

The treasure of Jane's heart appeared to me to be what respectable people

call a very deserving young man. "William, ma'am," said Jane one day

suddenly, with ill-concealed complacency, as she counted out the beer

bottles, "William, ma'am, is a teetotaller. Yes, m'm; and he don't smoke.

Smoking, ma'am," said Jane, as one who reads the heart, "_do_ make

such a dust about. Beside the waste of money. _And_ the smell.

However, I suppose they got to do it--some of them..."

William was at first a rather shabby young man of the ready-made black

coat school of costume. He had watery gray eyes, and a complexion

appropriate to the brother of one in a Home for the Dying. Euphemia did

not fancy him very much, even at the beginning. His eminent respectability

was vouched for by an alpaca umbrella, from which he never allowed himself

to be parted.

"He goes to chapel," said Jane. "His papa, ma'am----"

"His _what_, Jane?"

"His papa, ma'am, was Church: but Mr. Maynard is a Plymouth Brother, and

William thinks it Policy, ma'am, to go there too. Mr. Maynard comes and

talks to him quite friendly when they ain't busy, about using up all the

ends of string, and about his soul. He takes a lot of notice, do Mr.

Maynard, of William, and the way he saves his soul, ma'am."

Presently we heard that the head porter at Maynard's had left, and that

William was head porter at twenty-three shillings a week. "He is really

kind of over the man who drives the van," said Jane, "and him married,

with three children." And she promised in the pride of her heart to make

interest for us with William to favour us so that we might get our parcels

of drapery from Maynard's with exceptional promptitude.

After this promotion a rapidly-increasing prosperity came upon Jane's

young man. One day we learned that Mr. Maynard had given William a book.

"'Smiles' 'Elp Yourself,' it's called," said Jane; "but it ain't comic. It

tells you how to get on in the world, and some what William read to me was

_lovely_, ma'am."

Euphemia told me of this, laughing, and then she became suddenly grave.

"Do you know, dear," she said, "Jane said one thing I did not like. She

had been quiet for a minute, and then she suddenly remarked, 'William is a

lot above me, ma'am, ain't he?'"

"I don't see anything in that," I said, though later my eyes were to be

opened.

One Sunday afternoon about that time I was sitting at my writing-desk--

possibly I was reading a good book--when a something went by the window. I

heard a startled exclamation behind me, and saw Euphemia with her hands

clasped together and her eyes dilated. "George," she said in an

awe-stricken whisper, "did you see?"

Then we both spoke to one another at the same moment, slowly and solemnly:

"_A silk hat! Yellow gloves! A new umbrella!_"

"It may be my fancy, dear," said Euphemia; "but his tie was very like

yours. I believe Jane keeps him in ties. She told me a little while ago,

in a way that implied volumes about the rest of your costume, 'The master

_do_ wear pretty ties, ma'am.' And he echoes all your novelties."

The young couple passed our window again on their way to their customary

walk. They were arm in arm. Jane looked exquisitely proud, happy, and

uncomfortable, with new white cotton gloves, and William, in the silk hat,

singularly genteel!

That was the culmination of Jane's happiness. When she returned, "Mr.

Maynard has been talking to William, ma'am," she said, "and he is to serve

customers, just like the young shop gentlemen, during the next sale. And

if he gets on, he is to be made an assistant, ma'am, at the first

opportunity. He has got to be as gentlemanly as he can, ma'am; and if he

ain't, ma'am, he says it won't be for want of trying. Mr. Maynard has took

a great fancy to him."

"He _is_ getting on, Jane," said my wife.

"Yes, ma'am," said Jane thoughtfully; "he _is_ getting on."

And she sighed.

That next Sunday as I drank my tea I interrogated my wife. "How is this

Sunday different from all other Sundays, little woman? What has happened?

Have you altered the curtains, or re-arranged the furniture, or where is

the indefinable difference of it? Are you wearing your hair in a new way

without warning me? I perceive a change clearly, and I cannot for the life

of me say what it is."

Then my wife answered in her most tragic voice, "George," she said, "that

William has not come near the place to-day! And Jane is crying her heart

out upstairs."

There followed a period of silence. Jane, as I have said, stopped singing

about the house, and began to care for our brittle possessions, which

struck my wife as being a very sad sign indeed. The next Sunday, and the

next, Jane asked to go out, "to walk with William," and my wife, who never

attempts to extort confidences, gave her permission, and asked no

questions. On each occasion Jane came back looking flushed and very

determined. At last one day she became communicative.

"William is being led away," she remarked abruptly, with a catching of the

breath, apropos of tablecloths. "Yes, m'm. She is a milliner, and she can

play on the piano."

"I thought," said my wife, "that you went out with him on Sunday."

"Not out with him, m'm--after him. I walked along by the side of them, and

told her he was engaged to me."

"Dear me, Jane, did you? What did they do?"

"Took no more notice of me than if I was dirt. So I told her she should

suffer for it."

"It could not have been a very agreeable walk, Jane."

"Not for no parties, ma'am."

"I wish," said Jane, "I could play the piano, ma'am. But anyhow, I don't

mean to let _her_ get him away from me. She's older than him, and her

hair ain't gold to the roots, ma'am."

It was on the August Bank Holiday that the crisis came. We do not clearly

know the details of the fray, but only such fragments as poor Jane let

fall. She came home dusty, excited, and with her heart hot within her.

The milliner's mother, the milliner, and William had made a party to the

Art Museum at South Kensington, I think. Anyhow, Jane had calmly but

firmly accosted them somewhere in the streets, and asserted her right to

what, in spite of the consensus of literature, she held to be her

inalienable property. She did, I think, go so far as to lay hands on him.

They dealt with her in a crushingly superior way. They "called a cab."

There was a "scene," William being pulled away into the four-wheeler by

his future wife and mother-in-law from the reluctant hands of our

discarded Jane. There were threats of giving her "in charge."

"My poor Jane!" said my wife, mincing veal as though she was mincing

William. "It's a shame of them. I would think no more of him. He is not

worthy of you."

"No, m'm," said Jane. "He _is_ weak.

"But it's that woman has done it," said Jane. She was never known to bring

herself to pronounce "that woman's" name or to admit her girlishness. "I

can't think what minds some women must have--to try and get a girl's young

man away from her. But there, it only hurts to talk about it," said Jane.

Thereafter our house rested from William. But there was something in the

manner of Jane's scrubbing the front doorstep or sweeping out the rooms, a

certain viciousness, that persuaded me that the story had not yet ended.

"Please, m'm, may I go and see a wedding tomorrow?" said Jane one day.

My wife knew by instinct whose wedding. "Do you think it is wise, Jane?"

she said.

"I would like to see the last of him," said Jane.

"My dear," said my wife, fluttering into my room about twenty minutes

after Jane had started, "Jane has been to the boot-hole and taken all the

left-off boots and shoes, and gone off to the wedding with them in a bag.

Surely she cannot mean--"

"Jane," I said, "is developing character. Let us hope for the best."

Jane came back with a pale, hard face. All the boots seemed to be still in

her bag, at which my wife heaved a premature sigh of relief. We heard her

go upstairs and replace the boots with considerable emphasis.

"Quite a crowd at the wedding, ma'am," she said presently, in a purely

conversational style, sitting in our little kitchen, and scrubbing the

potatoes; "and such a lovely day for them." She proceeded to numerous

other details, clearly avoiding some cardinal incident.

"It was all extremely respectable and nice, ma'am; but _her_ father

didn't wear a black coat, and looked quite out of place, ma'am. Mr.

Piddingquirk--"

"_Who_?"

"Mr. Piddingquirk--William that was, ma'am--had white gloves, and a coat

like a clergyman, and a lovely chrysanthemum. He looked so nice, ma'am.

And there was red carpet down, just like for gentlefolks. And they say he

gave the clerk four shillings, ma'am. It was a real kerridge they had--not

a fly. When they came out of church there was rice-throwing, and her two

little sisters dropping dead flowers. And someone threw a slipper, and

then I threw a boot--"

"Threw a _boot_, Jane!"

"Yes, ma'am. Aimed at her. But it hit _him_. Yes, ma'am, hard. Gev

him a black eye, I should think. I only threw that one. I hadn't the heart

to try again. All the little boys cheered when it hit him."

After an interval--"I am sorry the boot hit _him_."

Another pause. The potatoes were being scrubbed violently. "He always

_was_ a bit above me, you know, ma'am. And he was led away."

The potatoes were more than finished. Jane rose sharply with a sigh, and

rapped the basin down on the table.

"I don't care," she said. "I don't care a rap. He will find out his

mistake yet. It serves me right. I was stuck up about him. I ought not to

have looked so high. And I am glad things are as things are."

My wife was in the kitchen, seeing to the higher cookery. After the

confession of the boot-throwing, she must have watched poor Jane fuming

with a certain dismay in those brown eyes of hers. But I imagine they

softened again very quickly, and then Jane's must have met them.

"Oh, ma'am," said Jane, with an astonishing change of note, "think of all

that _might_ have been! Oh, ma'am, I _could_ have been so happy!

I ought to have known, but I didn't know...You're very kind to let me talk

to you, ma'am...for it's hard on me, ma'am...it's har-r-r-r-d--"

And I gather that Euphemia so far forgot herself as to let Jane sob out

some of the fullness of her heart on a sympathetic shoulder. My Euphemia,

thank Heaven, has never properly grasped the importance of "keeping up her

position." And since that fit of weeping, much of the accent of bitterness

has gone out of Jane's scrubbing and brush work.

Indeed, something passed the other day with the butcher-boy--but that

scarcely belongs to this story. However, Jane is young still, and time and

change are at work with her. We all have our sorrows, but I do not believe

very much in the existence of sorrows that never heal.

II.

THE CONE.

The night was hot and overcast, the sky red-rimmed with the lingering

sunset of midsummer. They sat at the open window, trying to fancy the air

was fresher there. The trees and shrubs of the garden stood stiff and

dark; beyond in the roadway a gas-lamp burnt, bright orange against the

hazy blue of the evening. Farther were the three lights of the railway

signal against the lowering sky. The man and woman spoke to one another in

low tones.

"He does not suspect?" said the man, a little nervously.

"Not he," she said peevishly, as though that too irritated her. "He

thinks of nothing but the works and the prices of fuel. He has no

imagination, no poetry."

"None of these men of iron have," he said sententiously. "They have no

hearts."

"_He_ has not," she said. She turned her discontented face towards

the window. The distant sound of a roaring and rushing drew nearer and

grew in volume; the house quivered; one heard the metallic rattle of the

tender. As the train passed, there was a glare of light above the cutting

and a driving tumult of smoke; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,

eight black oblongs--eight trucks--passed across the dim grey of the

embankment, and were suddenly extinguished one by one in the throat of the

tunnel, which, with the last, seemed to swallow down train, smoke, and

sound in one abrupt gulp.

"This country was all fresh and beautiful once," he said; "and now--it is

Gehenna. Down that way--nothing but pot-banks and chimneys belching fire

and dust into the face of heaven...But what does it matter? An end comes,

an end to all this cruelty..._To-morrow."_ He spoke the last word in

a whisper.

"_To-morrow,"_ she said, speaking in a whisper too, and still staring

out of the window.

"Dear!" he said, putting his hand on hers.

She turned with a start, and their eyes searched one another's. Hers

softened to his gaze. "My dear one!" she said, and then: "It seems so

strange--that you should have come into my life like this--to open--" She

paused.

"To open?" he said.

"All this wonderful world"--she hesitated, and spoke still more softly--

"this world of _love_ to me."

Then suddenly the door clicked and closed. They turned their heads, and he

started violently back. In the shadow of the room stood a great shadowy

figure-silent. They saw the face dimly in the half-light, with

unexpressive dark patches under the pent-house brows. Every muscle in

Raut's body suddenly became tense. When could the door have opened? What

had he heard? Had he heard all? What had he seen? A tumult of questions.

The new-comer's voice came at last, after a pause that seemed

interminable. "Well?" he said.

"I was afraid I had missed you, Horrocks," said the man at the window,

gripping the window-ledge with his hand. His voice was unsteady.

The clumsy figure of Horrocks came forward out of the shadow. He made no

answer to Raut's remark. For a moment he stood above them.

The woman's heart was cold within her. "I told Mr. Raut it was just

possible you might come back," she said in a voice that never quivered.

Horrocks, still silent, sat down abruptly in the chair by her little

work-table. His big hands were clenched; one saw now the fire of his eyes

under the shadow of his brows. He was trying to get his breath. His eyes

went from the woman he had trusted to the friend he had trusted, and then

back to the woman.

By this time and for the moment all three half understood one another.

Yet none dared say a word to ease the pent-up things that choked them.

It was the husband's voice that broke the silence at last.

"You wanted to see me?" he said to Raut.

Raut started as he spoke. "I came to see you," he said, resolved to lie to

the last.

"Yes," said Horrocks.

"You promised," said Raut, "to show me some fine effects of moonlight and

smoke."

"I promised to show you some fine effects of moonlight and smoke,"

repeated Horrocks in a colourless voice.

"And I thought I might catch you to-night before you went down to the

works," proceeded Raut, "and come with you."

There was another pause. Did the man mean to take the thing coolly? Did

he, after all, know? How long had he been in the room? Yet even at the

moment when they heard the door, their attitudes ... Horrocks glanced at

the profile of the woman, shadowy pallid in the half-light. Then he

glanced at Raut, and seemed to recover himself suddenly. "Of course," he

said, "I promised to show you the works under their proper dramatic

conditions. It's odd how I could have forgotten."

"If I am troubling you--" began Raut.

Horrocks started again. A new light had suddenly come into the sultry

gloom of his eyes. "Not in the least." he said.

"Have you been telling Mr. Raut of all these contrasts of flame and shadow

you think so splendid?" said the woman, turning now to her husband for

the first time, her confidence creeping back again, her voice just one

half-note too high--"that dreadful theory of yours that machinery is

beautiful, and everything else in the world ugly. I thought he would not

spare you, Mr. Raut. It's his great theory, his one discovery in art."

"I am slow to make discoveries," said Horrocks grimly, damping her

suddenly. "But what I discover ..." He stopped.

"Well?" she said.

"Nothing;" and suddenly he rose to his feet.

"I promised to show you the works," he said to Raut, and put his big,

clumsy hand on his friend's shoulder. "And you are ready to go?"

"Quite," said Raut, and stood up also.

There was another pause. Each of them peered through the indistinctness of

the dusk at the other two.

Horrocks' hand still rested on Raut's shoulder. Raut half fancied still

that the incident was trivial after all. But Mrs. Horrocks knew her

husband better, knew that grim quiet in his voice, and the confusion in

her mind took a vague shape of physical evil. "Very well," said Horrocks,

and, dropping his hand, turned towards the door.

"My hat?" Raut looked round in the half-light.

"That's my work-basket," said Mrs. Horrocks with a gust of hysterical

laughter. Their hands came together on the back of the chair. "Here it

is!" he said. She had an impulse to warn him in an undertone, but she

could not frame a word. "Don't go!" and "Beware of him!" struggled in her

mind, and the swift moment passed.

"Got it?" said Horrocks, standing with the door half open.

Raut stepped towards him. "Better say goodbye to Mrs. Horrocks," said the

ironmaster, even more grimly quiet in his tone than before.

Raut started and turned. "Good-evening, Mrs. Horrocks," he said, and their

hands touched.

Horrocks held the door open with a ceremonial politeness unusual in him

towards men. Raut went out, and then, after a wordless look at her, her

husband followed. She stood motionless while Raut's light footfall and her

husband's heavy tread, like bass and treble, passed down the passage

together. The front door slammed heavily. She went to the window, moving

slowly, and stood watching, leaning forward. The two men appeared for a

moment at the gateway in the road, passed under the street lamp, and were

hidden by the black masses of the shrubbery. The lamplight fell for a

moment on their faces, showing only unmeaning pale patches, telling

nothing of what she still feared, and doubted, and craved vainly to know.

Then she sank down into a crouching attitude in the big arm-chair, her

eyes-wide open and staring out at the red lights from the furnaces that

flickered in the sky. An hour after she was still there, her attitude

scarcely changed.

The oppressive stillness of the evening weighed heavily upon Raut. They

went side by side down the road in silence, and in silence turned into the

cinder-made byway that presently opened out the prospect of the valley.

A blue haze, half dust, half mist, touched the long valley with mystery.

Beyond were Hanley and Etruria, grey and dark masses, outlined thinly by

the rare golden dots of the street lamps, and here and there a gas-lit

window, or the yellow glare of some late-working factory or crowded

public-house. Out of the masses, clear and slender against the evening

sky, rose a multitude of tall chimneys, many of them reeking, a few

smokeless during a season of "play." Here and there a pallid patch and

ghostly stunted beehive shapes showed the position of a pot-bank or a

wheel, black and sharp against the hot lower sky, marked some colliery

where they raise the iridescent coal of the place. Nearer at hand was the

broad stretch of railway, and half-invisible trains shunted--a steady

puffing and rumbling, with every run a ringing concussion and a rhymthic

series of impacts, and a passage of intermittent puffs of white steam

across the further view. And to the left, between the railway and the

dark mass of the low hill beyond, dominating the whole view, colossal,

inky-black, and crowned with smoke and fitful flames, stood the great

cylinders of the Jeddah Company Blast Furnaces, the central edifices of

the big ironworks of which Horrocks was the manager. They stood heavy and

threatening, full of an incessant turmoil of flames and seething molten

iron, and about the feet of them rattled the rolling-mills, and the

steam-hammer beat heavily and splashed the white iron sparks hither and

thither. Even as they looked, a truckful of fuel was shot into one of the

giants, and the red flames gleamed out, and a confusion of smoke and black

dust came boiling upwards towards the sky.

"Certainly you get some colour with your furnaces," said Raut, breaking a

silence that had become apprehensive.

Horrocks grunted. He stood with his hands in his pockets, frowning down at

the dim steaming railway and the busy ironworks beyond, frowning as if he

were thinking out some knotty problem.

Raut glanced at him and away again. "At present your moonlight effect is

hardly ripe," he continued, looking upward; "the moon is still smothered

by the vestiges of daylight."

Horrocks stared at him with the expression of a man who has suddenly

awakened. "Vestiges of daylight? ... Of course, of course." He too looked

up at the moon, pale still in the midsummer sky. "Come along," he said

suddenly, and gripping Raut's arm in his hand, made a move towards the

path that dropped from them to the railway.

Raut hung back. Their eyes met and saw a thousand things in a moment that

their lips came near to say. Horrocks's hand tightened and then relaxed.

He let go, and before Raut was aware of it, they were arm in arm, and

walking, one unwillingly enough, down the path.

"You see the fine effect of the railway signals towards Burslem," said

Horrocks, suddenly breaking into loquacity, striding fast and tightening

the grip of his elbow the while--"little green lights and red and white

lights, all against the haze. You have an eye for effect, Raut. It's fine.

And look at those furnaces of mine, how they rise upon us as we come down

the hill. That to the right is my pet--seventy feet of him. I packed him

myself, and he's boiled away cheerfully with iron in his guts for five

long years. I've a particular fancy for _him_. That line of red

there--a lovely bit of warm orange you'd call it, Raut--that's the

puddlers' furnaces, and there, in the hot light, three black figures--did

you see the white splash of the steam-hammer then?--that's the rolling

mills. Come along! Clang, clatter, how it goes rattling across the floor!

Sheet tin, Raut,--amazing stuff. Glass mirrors are not in it when that

stuff comes from the mill. And, squelch! there goes the hammer again. Come

along!"

He had to stop talking to catch at his breath. His arm twisted into Raut's

with benumbing tightness. He had come striding down the black path towards

the railway as though he was possessed. Raut had not spoken a word, had

simply hung back against Horrocks's pull with all his strength.

"I say," he said now, laughing nervously, but with an undertone of snarl

in his voice, "why on earth are you nipping my arm off, Horrocks, and

dragging me along like this?"

At length Horrocks released him. His manner changed again. "Nipping your

arm off?" he said. "Sorry. But it's you taught me the trick of walking

in that friendly way."

"You haven't learnt the refinements of it yet then," said Raut, laughing

artificially again. "By Jove! I'm black and blue." Horrocks offered no

apology. They stood now near the bottom of the hill, close to the fence

that bordered the railway. The ironworks had grown larger and spread out

with their approach. They looked up to the blast furnaces now instead of

down; the further view of Etruria and Hanley had dropped out of sight with

their descent. Before them, by the stile, rose a notice-board, bearing,

still dimly visible, the words, "BEWARE OF THE TRAINS," half hidden by

splashes of coaly mud.

"Fine effects," said Horrocks, waving his arm. "Here comes a train. The

puffs of smoke, the orange glare, the round eye of light in front of it,

the melodious rattle. Fine effects! But these furnaces of mine used to be

finer, before we shoved cones in their throats, and saved the gas."

"How?" said Raut. "Cones?"

"Cones, my man, cones. I'll show you one nearer. The flames used to flare

out of the open throats, great--what is it?--pillars of cloud by day, red

and black smoke, and pillars of fire by night. Now we run it off--in

pipes, and burn it to heat the blast, and the top is shut by a cone.

You'll be interested in that cone."

"But every now and then," said Raut, "you get a burst of fire and smoke up

there."

"The cone's not fixed, it's hung by a chain from a lever, and balanced by

an equipoise. You shall see it nearer. Else, of course, there'd be no way

of getting fuel into the thing. Every now and then the cone dips, and out

comes the flare."

"I see," said Raut. He looked over his shoulder. "The moon gets brighter,"

he said.

"Come along," said Horrocks abruptly, gripping his shoulder again, and

moving him suddenly towards the railway crossing. And then came one of

those swift incidents, vivid, but so rapid that they leave one doubtful

and reeling. Half-way across, Horrocks's hand suddenly clenched upon him

like a vice, and swung him backward and through a half-turn, so that he

looked up the line. And there a chain of lamp-lit carriage windows

telescoped swiftly as it came towards them, and the red and yellow lights

of an engine grew larger and larger, rushing down upon them. As he grasped

what this meant, he turned his face to Horrocks, and pushed with all his

strength against the arm that held him back between the rails. The

struggle did not last a moment. Just as certain as it was that Horrocks

held him there, so certain was it that he had been violently lugged out of

danger.

"Out of the way," said Horrocks with a gasp, as the train came rattling

by, and they stood panting by the gate into the ironworks.

"I did not see it coming," said Raut, still, even in spite of his own

apprehensions, trying to keep up an appearance of ordinary intercourse.

Horrocks answered with a grunt. "The cone," he said, and then, as one who

recovers himself, "I thought you did not hear."

"I didn't," said Raut.

"I wouldn't have had you run over then for the world," said Horrocks.

"For a moment I lost my nerve," said Raut.

Horrocks stood for half a minute, then turned abruptly towards the

ironworks again. "See how fine these great mounds of mine, these

clinker-heaps, look in the night! That truck yonder, up above there! Up

it goes, and out-tilts the slag. See the palpitating red stuff go sliding

down the slope. As we get nearer, the heap rises up and cuts the blast

furnaces. See the quiver up above the big one. Not that way! This way,

between the heaps. That goes to the puddling furnaces, but I want to show

you the canal first." He came and took Raut by the elbow, and so they went

along side by side. Raut answered Horrocks vaguely. What, he asked

himself, had really happened on the line? Was he deluding himself with his

own fancies, or had Horrocks actually held him back in the way of the

train? Had he just been within an ace of being murdered?

Suppose this slouching, scowling monster _did_ know anything? For a

minute or two then Raut was really afraid for his life, but the mood

passed as he reasoned with himself. After all, Horrocks might have heard

nothing. At any rate, he had pulled him out of the way in time. His odd

manner might be due to the mere vague jealousy he had shown once before.

He was talking now of the ash-heaps and the canal. "Eigh?" said Horrocks.

"What?" said Raut. "Rather! The haze in the moonlight. Fine!"

"Our canal," said Horrocks, stopping suddenly. "Our canal by moonlight and

firelight is immense. You've never seen it? Fancy that! You've spent too

many of your evenings philandering up in Newcastle there. I tell you, for

real florid quality----But you shall see. Boiling water ..."

As they came out of the labyrinth of clinker-heaps and mounds of coal and

ore, the noises of the rolling-mill sprang upon them suddenly, loud, near,

and distinct. Three shadowy workmen went by and touched their caps to

Horrocks. Their faces were vague in the darkness. Raut felt a futile

impulse to address them, and before he could frame his words they passed

into the shadows. Horrocks pointed to the canal close before them now: a

weird-looking place it seemed, in the blood-red reflections of the

furnaces. The hot water that cooled the tuyères came into it, some fifty

yards up--a tumultuous, almost boiling affluent, and the steam rose up

from the water in silent white wisps and streaks, wrapping damply about

them, an incessant succession of ghosts coming up from the black and red

eddies, a white uprising that made the head swim. The shining black tower

of the larger blast-furnace rose overhead out of the mist, and its

tumultuous riot filled their ears. Raut kept away from the edge of the

water, and watched Horrocks.

"Here it is red," said Horrocks, "blood-red vapour as red and hot as sin;

but yonder there, where the moonlight falls on it, and it drives across

the clinker-heaps, it is as white as death."

Raut turned his head for a moment, and then came back hastily to his watch

on Horrocks. "Come along to the rolling-mills," said Horrocks. The

threatening hold was not so evident that time, and Raut felt a little

reassured. But all the same, what on earth did Horrocks mean about "white

as death" and "red as sin"? Coincidence, perhaps?

They went and stood behind the puddlers for a little while, and then

through the rolling-mills, where amidst an incessant din the deliberate

steam-hammer beat the juice out of the succulent iron, and black,

half-naked Titans rushed the plastic bars, like hot sealing-wax, between

the wheels, "Come on," said Horrocks in Raut's ear; and they went and

peeped through the little glass hole behind the tuyères, and saw the

tumbled fire writhing in the pit of the blast-furnace. It left one eye

blinded for a while. Then, with green and blue patches dancing across the

dark, they went to the lift by which the trucks of ore and fuel and lime

were raised to the top of the big cylinder.

And out upon the narrow rail that overhung the furnace Raut's doubts came

upon him again. Was it wise to be here? If Horrocks did know--everything!

Do what he would, he could not resist a violent trembling. Right under

foot was a sheer depth of seventy feet. It was a dangerous place. They

pushed by a truck of fuel to get to the railing that crowned the thing.

The reek of the furnace, a sulphurous vapour streaked with pungent

bitterness, seemed to make the distant hillside of Hanley quiver. The moon

was riding out now from among a drift of clouds, half-way up the sky above

the undulating wooded outlines of Newcastle. The steaming canal ran away

from below them under an indistinct bridge, and vanished into the dim haze

of the flat fields towards Burslem.

"That's the cone I've been telling you of," shouted Horrocks; "and, below

that, sixty feet of fire and molten metal, with the air of the blast

frothing through it like gas in soda-water."

Raut gripped the hand-rail tightly, and stared down at the cone. The heat

was intense. The boiling of the iron and the tumult of the blast made a

thunderous accompaniment to Horrocks's voice. But the thing had to be gone

through now. Perhaps, after all...

"In the middle," bawled Horrocks, "temperature near a thousand degrees. If

_you_ were dropped into it ... flash into flame like a pinch of

gunpowder in a candle. Put your hand out and feel the heat of his breath.

Why, even up here I've seen the rain-water boiling off the trucks. And

that cone there. It's a damned sight too hot for roasting cakes. The top

side of it's three hundred degrees."

"Three hundred degrees!" said Raut.

"Three hundred centigrade, mind!" said Horrocks. "It will boil the blood

out of you in no time."

"Eigh?" said Raut, and turned.

"Boil the blood out of you in ... No, you don't!"

"Let me go!" screamed Raut. "Let go my arm!"

With one hand he clutched at the hand-rail, then with both. For a moment

the two men stood swaying. Then suddenly, with a violent jerk, Horrocks

had twisted him from his hold. He clutched at Horrocks and missed, his

foot went back into empty air; in mid-air he twisted himself, and then

cheek and shoulder and knee struck the hot cone together.

He clutched the chain by which the cone hung, and the thing sank an

infinitesimal amount as he struck it. A circle of glowing red appeared

about him, and a tongue of flame, released from the chaos within,

flickered up towards him. An intense pain assailed him at the knees, and

he could smell the singeing of his hands. He raised himself to his feet,

and tried to climb up the chain, and then something struck his head. Black

and shining with the moonlight, the throat of the furnace rose about

him.

Horrocks, he saw, stood above him by one of the trucks of fuel on the

rail. The gesticulating figure was bright and white in the moonlight, and

shouting, "Fizzle, you fool! Fizzle, you hunter of women! You hot-blooded

hound! Boil! boil! boil!"

Suddenly he caught up a handful of coal out of the truck, and flung it

deliberately, lump after lump, at Raut.

"Horrocks!" cried Raut. "Horrocks!"

He clung, crying, to the chain, pulling himself up from the burning of the

cone. Each missile Horrocks flung hit him. His clothes charred and glowed,

and as he struggled the cone dropped, and a rush of hot, suffocating gas

whooped out and burned round him in a swift breath of flame.