第85章 THE SILENCE(2)

'Suppose he were to snap!' he thought.Impelled to justify this fancy, he blurted out: "You're a nervous chap.The way you look at those poor devils!"Pippin hustled him along the deck."Come, come, you took me off my guard," he murmured, with a sly, gentle smile, "that's not fair."He found it a continual source of wonder that Pippin, at his age, should cut himself adrift from the associations and security of London life to begin a new career in a new country with dubious prospect of success.'I always heard he was doing well all round,'

he thought; 'thinks he'll better himself, perhaps.He's a true Cornishman.'

The morning of arrival at the mines was grey and cheerless; a cloud of smoke, beaten down by drizzle, clung above the forest; the wooden houses straggled dismally in the unkempt semblance of a street, against a background of endless, silent woods.An air of blank discouragement brooded over everything; cranes jutted idly over empty trucks; the long jetty oozed black slime; miners with listless faces stood in the rain; dogs fought under their very legs.On the way to the hotel they met no one busy or serene except a Chinee who was polishing a dish-cover.

The late superintendent, a cowed man, regaled them at lunch with his forebodings; his attitude toward the situation was like the food, which was greasy and uninspiring.Alone together once more, the two newcomers eyed each other sadly.

"Oh dear!" sighed Pippin."We must change all this, Scorrier; it will never do to go back beaten.I shall not go back beaten; you will have to carry me on my shield;" and slyly: "Too heavy, eh? Poor fellow!" Then for a long time he was silent, moving his lips as if adding up the cost.Suddenly he sighed, and grasping Scorrier's arm, said: "Dull, aren't I? What will you do? Put me in your report, 'New Superintendent--sad, dull dog--not a word to throw at a cat!'"And as if the new task were too much for him, he sank back in thought.The last words he said to Scorrier that night were: "Very silent here.It's hard to believe one's here for life.But I feel Iam.Mustn't be a coward, though!" and brushing his forehead, as though to clear from it a cobweb of faint thoughts, he hurried off.

Scorrier stayed on the veranda smoking.The rain had ceased, a few stars were burning dimly; even above the squalor of the township the scent of the forests, the interminable forests, brooded.There sprang into his mind the memory of a picture from one of his children's fairy books--the picture of a little bearded man on tiptoe, with poised head and a great sword, slashing at the castle of a giant.It reminded him of Pippin.And suddenly, even to Scorrier--whose existence was one long encounter with strange places--the unseen presence of those woods, their heavy, healthy scent, the little sounds, like squeaks from tiny toys, issuing out of the gloomy silence, seemed intolerable, to be shunned, from the mere instinct of self-preservation.He thought of the evening he had spent in the bosom of "Down-by-the-starn" Hemmings' family, receiving his last instructions--the security of that suburban villa, its discouraging gentility; the superior acidity of the Miss Hemmings; the noble names of large contractors, of company promoters, of a peer, dragged with the lightness of gun-carriages across the conversation; the autocracy of Hemmings, rasped up here and there, by some domestic contradiction.It was all so nice and safe--as if the whole thing had been fastened to an anchor sunk beneath the pink cabbages of the drawing-room carpet! Hemmings, seeing him off the premises, had said with secrecy: "Little Pippin will have a good thing.We shall make his salary L----.He'll be a great man-quite a king.Ha-ha!"Scorrier shook the ashes from his pipe.'Salary!' he thought, straining his ears; 'I wouldn't take the place for five thousand pounds a year.And yet it's a fine country,' and with ironic violence he repeated, 'a dashed fine country!'

Ten days later, having finished his report on the new mine, he stood on the jetty waiting to go abroad the steamer for home.

"God bless you!" said Pippin."Tell them they needn't be afraid; and sometimes when you're at home think of me, eh?"Scorrier, scrambling on board, had a confused memory of tears in his eyes, and a convulsive handshake.

II

It was eight years before the wheels of life carried Scorrier back to that disenchanted spot, and this time not on the business of the New Colliery Company.He went for another company with a mine some thirty miles away.Before starting, however, he visited Hemmings.

The secretary was surrounded by pigeon-holes and finer than ever;Scorrier blinked in the full radiance of his courtesy.A little man with eyebrows full of questions, and a grizzled beard, was seated in an arm-chair by the fire.

"You know Mr.Booker," said Hemmings--"one of my directors.This is Mr.Scorrier, sir--who went out for us."These sentences were murmured in a way suggestive of their uncommon value.The director uncrossed his legs, and bowed.Scorrier also bowed, and Hemmings, leaning back, slowly developed the full resources of his waistcoat.

"So you are going out again, Scorrier, for the other side? I tell Mr.Scorrier, sir, that he is going out for the enemy.Don't find them a mine as good as you found us, there's a good man."The little director asked explosively: "See our last dividend?

Twenty per cent; eh, what?"