The night was hot and overcast, the sky redrimmed 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. Further 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’m 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’s 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. The 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 door half open.
Raut stepped towards him. “Better say good-bye 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 by-way 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 rhythmic
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 fine effects of 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 towards 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 left go, and before Raut was aware, 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 a
fine effect. 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 puddler’s 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 undernote 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 block 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 an immense effect. 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 effects— 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 tuyeres came into it, some fifty
yards up—a tumultuous, almost boiling affluent, and the steam rose up
from the water in silent white whisps 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 tuyeres, 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 underfoot 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 place. 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 handrail 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 handrail, 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.
His human likeness departed from him. When the momentary red had passed
Horrocks saw a charred, blackened figure, its head streaked with blood,
still clutching and fumbling with the chain and writhing in agony—a
cindery animal, an inhuman, monstrous creature that began a sobbing,
intermittent shriek.
Abruptly at the sight the ironmaster’s anger passed. A deadly sickness
came upon him. The heavy odour of burning flesh came drifting up to his
nostrils. His sanity returned to him.
“God have mercy upon me!” he cried. “Oh, God! what have I done?”
He knew the thing below him, save that it still moved and felt, was
already a dead man—that the blood of the poor wretch must be boiling in
his veins. An intense realisation of that agony came to his mind and
overcame every other feeling. For a moment he stood irresolute, and
then, turning to the truck, he hastily tilted its contents upon the
struggling thing that had once been a man. The mass fell with a thud and
went radiating over the cone. With the thud the shriek ended, and a
boiling confusion of smoke, dust, and flame came rushing up towards him.
As it passed he saw the cone clear again.
Then he staggered back and stood trembling, clinging to the rail with
both hands. His lips moved, but no words came to them.
Down below was the sound of voices and running steps. The clangour of
rolling in the shed ceased abruptly.