IN PROFUNDIS.
The young clergyman’s face, as he walked forward to the shaft, formed
no index to his mind, for while it remained calm and even wore a faint
smile, he was inwardly conscious of a strong desire to take hold of
anything which presented itself, even a straw. He stepped gravely into
the tub amid a low murmur, and, clutching the iron bar above it, felt
himself at a word of command lifted gently into the air, and swung over
the shaft. For an uncomfortable five seconds or so he remained
stationary; then there was a jerk—another—and the dark figures, the
lines of faces, and the glare of the fires leapt suddenly above his
head. He found himself dropping through space with a swift, sickening
motion, as of one falling away from himself. His heart rose into his
throat. There was a loud buzzing in his ears, and yet above this he
heard the dull rattling sound of the rope being paid out. Every other
sense was spent in the stern clutch of his hands on the bar above his
head.
In a few seconds the horrible sensation of falling passed away. He was
no longer in space with nothing stable about him, but in a small tub at
the end of a tough rope. Except for a slight swaying motion, he hardly
knew that he was still descending; and presently a faint light, more
diffused than his own lamp, grew visible. Then he came gently to a
standstill, and some one held up a lantern to his face. With difficulty
he made out two huge figures standing beside him, who laid hold of his
tub and pulled it toward them until it rested on something solid. “You
are welcome,” growled one, as, aided by a hand of each, Lindo stepped
out. “You will be the doctor, I suppose, master? Well, this way. Catch
hold of my jacket.”
Lindo obeyed, being only too glad of the help thus given him; for
though the men seemed to move about with ease and certainty, he could
make out nothing but shapeless gloom. “Now you sit right down there,”
continued the collier, when they had moved a few yards, “and you will
get the sight of your eyes in a bit.”
He did as he was bid, and one by one the objects about him became
visible. His first feeling was one of astonishment. He had put a
quarter of a mile of solid earth between himself and the sunlight, and
yet, for all he could see, he might be merely in a cellar under a
street. He found himself seated on a rough bench, in a low-roofed,
windowless, wooden cabin, strangely resembling a very dirty London
office in a fog. True, everything was black—very black. On another
bench, opposite him, sat the two colliers who had received him, their
lamps between their knees. His first impulse was to tell them hurriedly
that he was not the doctor. “I am afraid you must be disappointed,” he
added, “but I hope one will follow me down. I am a clergyman, and I
want to do something for those poor fellows, if you will take me to
them.”
The two men betrayed no surprise, but he who had spoken before quietly
poked up the wick of his lamp and held the lantern up so as to get a
good view of his face. “Ay, ay,” he said, nodding, as he lowered it
again. “I thought you weren’t unbeknown to me. You are the parson we
fetched to poor Lucas a while ago. Well, Jim will have a rare cageful
of his friends with him to-night.”
The rector shuddered. Such apathy, such matter-of-factness was new to
him. But though his heart sank as the collier rose and, swinging his
lamp in his hand, passed through the doorway, he made haste to follow
him; and the man’s next words, “You had best look to your steps,
master, for there is a deal of rubbish come down”—pointing as they did
to a material danger—brought him, in the diversion of his thoughts,
something like relief.
The road on which he found himself, being the main heading or highway
of the pit, was a good wide one. It was even possible to stand upright
in it. Here and there, however, it was partially blocked by falls of
coal caused by the explosion, and over one of these his guide put out
his hand to assist him. Lindo’s lamp was by this time burning low. The
pitman silently took it and raised the wick, a grim smile distorting
his face as he handed it back. “You will be about the first of the
gentry,” he muttered, “as has been down this pit without paying his
footing.”
Lindo took the words for a hint, and was shocked by the man’s
insensibility. “My good fellow,” he answered, “if that is all, you
shall have what you like another time. But for heaven’s sake let us
think of these poor fellows now.”
The man turned on him and swore furiously. “Do you think I meant that?”
he cried, with another violent oath.
The rector recoiled, not at the sound of the man’s profanity, but in
disgust at his own mistake. Then he held out his hand. “My man,” he
said, “I beg your pardon. It was I who was wrong.”
The giant looked at him with another stare, but made no answer, and a
dozen steps brought them to another cabin. Across the doorway—there was
no door—hung a rough curtain of matting. This the man raised, and,
holding his lamp over the threshold, invited the rector to look in. “I
guess,” he added significantly, “that you would not have made that
mistake, master, after seeing this.”
Lindo peered in. On the floor, which was little more than six feet
square, lay four quiet figures, motionless, and covered with coarse
sacking. No human eye falling on them could have taken them for
anything but what they were. The visitor shuddered, as his guide let
the curtain fall again and muttered with a backward jerk of the head,
“Two of them I came down with this morning—in the cage.”
The rector had nothing to answer, and the man, preceding him to a cabin
a few yards farther on, invited him by a sign to enter, and himself
turned back the way they had come. A faint moaning warned Lindo, before
he raised the matting, what he must expect to see. Instinctively, as he
stepped in, his eyes sought the floor; and although three pitmen
crouching upon one of the benches rose and made way for him, he hardly
noticed them, so occupied was he with pitiful looking at the two men
lying on coarse beds on the floor. They were bandaged and muffled
almost out of human form. One of them was rolling his sightless face
monotonously to and fro, pouring out an unceasing stream of delirious
talk. The other, whose bright eyes met the newcomer’s with eager
longing, paused in the murmur which seemed to ease his pain, and
whispered, “Doctor!” so hopefully that the sound went straight to
Lindo’s heart.
To undeceive him, and to explain to the others that he was not the
expected surgeon, was a bitter task with which to begin his
ministrations; but he was greatly cheered to find that, even in their
disappointment, they took his coming as a kindly thing, and eyed him
with surprised gratitude. He told them the latest news from the
bank—that a cage would be rigged up in a few hours at farthest—and
then, conquering his physical shrinking, he knelt down by the least
injured man and tried to turn his surgical knowledge to account. It was
not much he could do, but it certainly eased the poor man’s present
sufferings. A bandage was laid more smoothly here, a little cotton-wool
readjusted there, a change of posture managed, a few hopeful words
uttered which helped the patient to fight against the shock—so that
presently he sank into a troubled sleep. Lindo tried to do his best for
the other also, terrible as was the task; but the man’s excitement and
unceasing restlessness, as well as his more serious injuries, made help
here of little avail.
When he rose, he found one of the watchers holding a cup of brandy
ready for him; and, sitting down upon the bench behind, he discovered a
coat laid there to make the seat more comfortable, though no one seemed
to have done it, or to be conscious of his surprise. They talked low to
him, and to one another, in a disjointed taciturn fashion, with immense
gaps and long intervals of silence. He learned that there were
twenty-seven men yet missing, but it was thought that the afterdamp had
killed them all. Those already found alive had been in the main
heading, where the current of air gave them a better chance.
One or other of the workers was continually going out to listen for the
return of the party who were exploring the workings near the foot of
the other shaft; and once or twice a member of this party, exhausted or
ill, looked in for a dose of tea or brandy, and then stumbled out again
to get himself conveyed to the upper air. These looked curiously at the
stranger, but, on some information being muttered in their ears, made a
point on going out of giving him a nod which was full of tacit
acknowledgment.
In a quiet interval he looked at his watch and wound it up, finding the
time to be half-past two. The familiar action carried his mind back to
his neat, spotless bedroom at the rectory and the cares and anxieties
of everyday life, which had been forgotten for the last five hours.
Could it be so short a time, he asked himself, since he was troubled by
them? It seemed years ago. It seemed as if a gulf, deep as the shaft
down which he had come, divided him from them. And yet the moment his
thoughts returned to them the gulf became less, and presently, although
his eyes were still fixed upon the poor collier’s unquiet head and the
murky cabin with its smoky lamp, he was really back in Claversham,
busied with those thoughts again, and pondering on the time when he
should be above ground. The things that had been important before rose
into importance again, but their relative values among themselves were
altered, in his eyes at any rate. With what he had seen and heard in
the last few hours fresh in his mind, with the injured men lying still
in his sight—one of them never to see the sun again—he could not but
take a different, a wider, a less selfish view of life and its aims.
His ideal of existence grew higher and purer, his notion of success
more noble. In the light of his own self-forgetting energy and of
others’ pain he saw things as they affected his neighbor rather than
himself and so presently—not in haste, but slowly in the watches of the
night—he formed a resolution which shall be told presently. The
determinations to which men come at such times are, in nine cases out
of ten, as transitory as the emotions on which they are based. But this
time, and with this man, it was not to be so. Kate Bonamy’s words,
bringing before his mind the responsibility which rested upon him, had
in a degree prepared him to examine his position gravely and from a
lofty standpoint; so that the considerations which now assailed him
could scarcely fail to have due and lasting weight with him, and to
leave impressions both deep and permanent.
He was presently roused from his reverie by a sound which caused his
companions to rise to their feet with the first signs of excitement
they had betrayed in their manner. It was the murmur of voices in the
heading, which, beginning far away, rapidly approached and gathered
strength. Going to the door of the cabin, he saw lights in the gallery
becoming each instant more clear. Then the forms of men coming on by
twos and threes rose out of the darkness. And so the procession wound
in, and Lindo found himself suddenly surrounded—where a moment before
no sounds but painful ones had been heard—by the hum and bustle, the
quick question and answers, of a crowd. For the men brought good news.
The missing were found; and though many of them were burned or
scorched, and others were suffering from the effects of the afterdamp,
the explorers brought back with them no still, ominous burden, nor even
any case of hopeless injury, such as that of the poor fellow in
delirium over whom his mates bent with the strange impassive patience
which seems to be a quality peculiar to those who get their living
underground.
Not that Lindo at the time had leisure to consider their behavior. The
injured were brought to him as a matter of course, and he did what he
could with simple bandages and liniment to keep the air from their
wounds, and to enable the men to reach the surface with as little pain
as possible. For more than an hour, as he passed from one to the other,
his hands were never empty; he could think only of his work. The
deputy-manager, who had been leading the rescue party, was thoroughly
prostrated. The rest never doubted that the stranger was a surgeon, and
it was curious to see their surprise when the general taciturnity
allowed the news to spread that he was only a parson. They were like
savants with a specimen which, known to belong to a particular species,
has none of the class attributes, and sets at defiance all preconceived
ideas upon the subject. He, too, when he was at length free to look
about him, found matter for astonishment in his own sensations. The
cabin and the roadway outside, where the men sat patiently waiting
their turns to ascend, had become almost homelike in his eyes. The
lounging figures here thrown into relief by a score of lamps, there
lost in the gloom of the background, had grown familiar. He knew that
this was here and that was there, and had his receptacles and
conveniences, his special attendants and helpers. In a word, he had
made the place his own, yet without forgetting old habits—for more than
once he caught himself looking at his watch, and wondering when it
would be day.
Toward seven o’clock a message directed to him by name came down. A
cage would be rigged up within the hour. Before that period elapsed,
however, he was summoned to see the poor fellow die who had been
delirious ever since he was found and who now passed away in the same
state. It was a trying scene coming just when the clergyman’s
wrought-up nerves were beginning to feel a reaction—the more trying as
all looked to him to do anything that could be done. But that was
nothing; and he felt gravely thankful when the poor man’s sufferings
were over and the throng of swarthy faces melted from the open doorway.
He sat apart a little after that until a commotion outside the cabin
and a cheery voice asking for Mr. Lindo summoned him to the door, where
he found the same manager who had sent him down the night before, and
who now greeted him warmly. “It is not for me to thank you,” Mr. Peat
said—“I have nothing to do with this pit—the owner, to whom what has
happened will be reported, will do that; but personally I am obliged to
you, Mr. Lindo, and I am sure the men are.”
“I wanted only to be of help,” the clergyman answered simply. “There
was not much I could do.”
“Well, that is a matter of opinion,” the manager replied. “I have mine,
and I know that the men who have come up have theirs. However, here is
the cage; perhaps you will not mind going up with poor Edwards?”
“Not at all,” said the rector; and, following the manager to the cage,
he stepped into it without any suspicion that this was a trick on the
part of Mr. Peat to insure his volunteer’s services being recognized.
He found the ascent a very different thing from the descent. The steady
upward motion was not unpleasant, and long before the surface was
reached his eyes, accustomed to darkness, detected a pale gleam of
light stealing downward, and could distinguish the damp brickwork
gliding by. Presently the light grew stronger—grew dazzling in its
wonderful whiteness. “We are going up nicely,” his companion murmured,
remembering in his gratitude that the ascent, which was a trifle to him
even with shattered nerves, might be unpleasant to the other—“we are
nearly there.”
And so they were; and slowly and gently they rose into the broad
daylight and the sunshine which seemed to proclaim to the rector’s
heart that sorrow may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.
Standing densely packed round the pit’s mouth was a great crowd—a
crowd, at any rate, of many hundreds. They greeted the appearance of
the cage with a quick drawing-in of the breath and a murmur of pity.
Lindo’s face and hands were as black as any collier’s; his dress seemed
at the first glance as theirs. But as he helped to lift his injured
companion out and carry him to the stretcher which stood at hand, the
word who he was ran round; and, though no one spoke, the loudest
tribute could scarcely have been more eloquent than the respect with
which the rough assemblage fell away to right and left that he might
pass out to the trap which had been thoughtfully provided—first to
carry him to the vicarage for a wash, and afterward to take him home.
His heart was full as he walked down the lane, every man standing
uncovered, and the women gazing on him with unspoken blessings in their
eyes.
A very few hours before he had felt at war with the world. He had said,
not perhaps that all men were liars, but that they were unjust, full of
prejudice and narrowness, and ill-will; that, above all, they judged
without charity. Now, as the pony-cart rattled down the road through
the cutting, and the sunny landscape, the winding river, and the plain
round Claversham opened before him, he felt far otherwise. He longed to
do more for others than he had done. He dwelt with wonder on the
gratitude which services so slight had evoked from men so rough as
those from whom he had just parted; and unconsciously he placed the
balance in their favor to the general account of the world, and
acknowledged himself its debtor.