H.G. Wells Short Stories, page 19
“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.
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. “O 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.
The Reconciliation
Temple had scarcely been with Findlay five minutes before he felt his old resentments, and the memory of that unforgettable wrong growing vivid again. But with the infatuation of his good resolution still upon him, he maintained the air of sham reconciliation that Findlay had welcomed so eagerly. They talked of this and that, carefully avoiding the matter of separation. Temple at first spoke chiefly of his travels. He stood between the cabinet of minerals and the fireplace, his whisky on the mantel-board, while Findlay sat with his chair pushed back from his writing-desk, on which were scattered the dozen little skulls of hedgehogs and shrew mice upon which he had been working.
Temple’s eye fell upon them, and abruptly brought his mind round from the topic of West Africa. “And you,” said Temple. “While I have been wandering I suppose you have been going on steadily.”
“Drumming along,” said Findlay.
“To the Royal Society and fame and all the things we used to dream about – how long is it?”
“Five years – since our student days.”
Temple glanced round the room, and his eye rested for a moment on a round greyish-drab object that lay in a corner near the door. “The same fat books and folios, only more of them, the same smell of old bones, and dissection – is it the same one –? In the window. Fame is your mistress?”
“Fame,” said Findlay. “But it’s hardly fame. The herd outside say, ‘Eminence in comparative anatomy.’”
“Eminence in comparative anatomy. No marrying – no avarice.”
“None,” said Findlay, glancing askance at him.
“I suppose it’s the happiest way of living. But it wouldn’t be the thing for me. Excitement – but, I say –!” his eye had fallen again on that fungoid shape of drabbish-grey –, “There’s a limit to scientific inhumanity. You really mustn’t keep your door open with a human brainpan.”
He went across the room as he spoke and picked the thing up. “Brainpan!” said Findlay. “Oh, that! Man alive, that’s not a brainpan. Where’s your science?”
“No. I see it’s not,” said Temple, carrying the object in his hand as he came back to his former position and scrutinising it curiously. “But what the devil is it?”
“Don’t you know?” said Findlay.
The thing was about thrice the size of a man’s hand, like a rough watch-pocket of thick bone.
Findlay laughed almost naturally. “You have a bad memory – it’s a whale’s ear-bone.”
“Of course,” said Temple, his appearance of interest vanishing. “The bulla of a whale. I’ve forgotten a lot of these things.”
He half turned, and put the thing on top of the cabinet beside Findlay’s dumb-bells.
“If you are serious in your music-hall proposal,” he said, reverting to a jovial suggestion of Findlay’s, “I am at your service. I’m afraid – I may find myself a little old for that sort of thing – I haven’t tried one for ages.”
“But we are meeting to commemorate youth,” said Findlay.
“And bury our early manhood,” said Temple. “Well, well – yes, let us go to the music-hall, by all means, if you desire it. It is trivial – and appropriate. We want no tragic issues.”
When the men returned to Findlay’s study the little clock in the dimness on the mantel-shelf was pointing to half-past one. After the departure the little brown room, with its books and bones, was undisturbed, save for the two visits Findlay’s attentive servant paid, to see to the fire and to pull down the blinds and draw the curtains. The ticking of the clock was the only sound in the quiet. Now and then the fire flickered and stirred, sending blood-red reflections chasing the shadows across the ceiling, and bringing into ghostly transitory prominence some grotesque grouping of animals’ bones or skulls upon the shelves. At last the stillness was broken by the unlatching and slamming of the heavy street door and the sound of unsteady footsteps approaching along the passage. Then the door opened, and the two men came into the warm firelight.
Temple came in first, his brown face flushed with drink, his coat unbuttoned, his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets. His Christmas resolution had long since dissolved in alcohol. He was a little puzzled to find himself in Findlay’s company. And his fuddled brain insisted upon inopportune reminiscence. He walked straight to the fire and stood before it, an exaggerated black figure, staring down into the red glow. “After all,” he said, “we are fools to quarrel – fools to quarrel about a little thing like that. Damned fools!”
Findlay went to the writing-table and felt about for the matches with quivering hands.
“It wasn’t my doing,” he said.
“It wasn’t your doing,” said Temple. “Nothing ever was your doing. You are always in the right – Findlay the all-right.”
Findlay’s attention was concentrated upon the lamp. His hand was unsteady, and he had some difficulty in turning up the wicks; one got jammed down and the other flared furiously. When at last it was lit and turned up, he came up to Temple. “Take your coat off, old man, and have some more whisky,” he said. “That was a ripping little girl in the skirt dance.”
“Fools to quarrel,” said Temple slowly, and then woke up to Findlay’s words. “Heigh?”
“Take off your coat and sit down,” said Findlay, moving up the little metal table and producing cigars and a siphon and whisky. “That lamp gives an infernally bad light, but it is all I have. Something wrong with the oil. Did you notice the dodge of that stone-smashing trick?”
Temple remained erect and gloomy, staring into the fire. “Fools to quarrel,” he said. Findlay was now half drunk, and his finesse began to leave him. Temple had been drinking heavily, and was now in a curious rambling stage. And Findlay’s one idea now was to close this curious reunion.
“There’s no woman worth a man’s friendship,” said Temple abruptly.
He sat down in an easy chair, poured out and drank a dose of whisky and lithia. The idea of friendship took possession of him, and he became reminiscent of student days and student adventures. For some time it was, “Do you remember” this, and “Do you remember” that. And Findlay grew cheerful again.
