"What did they close the mine for, when the stuff was as rich as ever underground?" Some were bewildered, some truculent and angry, one or two used threats. "We've been cheated," said one of them, "induced to stay and lost our chances elsewhere. I've a son in South Africa, wanted me to join him two months back, in the mines out there, and I refused. Now it's too late. What am I going to do? Sit in this country and starve?"
"I'm very sorry," said the manager wearily, for the hundredth time. "I can't do anything. Blame the price of tin."
The tramp of feet, the tired, angry faces of men and women-they never stopped coming, one after the other, through the counting-house door.
"The owners don't lose by it," said some man.
"They make their pile and retire in comfort. It's we that have to pay for it."
"True for you," said Jim Donovan, who stood behind him, looking at Hal as he received his money.
"Here's Mr. Brodrick, son of the last owner; he'll not be parting with his shirt, will you, Mr.
Brodrick? Sure, you can go and live across the water if you have the mind." He tramped past, sullen and resentful, his usual impudent, cheerful face set in hard lines of anger and disappointment.
They did not understand, once they had been paid, that this was the end, and there was no more to do. They continued to stand about the shafts and the boiler-houses and the dressing-sheds, staring stupidly at the half-loaded trolleys and trucks.
"The waste of it," was heard on every side. "It doesn't make sense. There's something wrong somewhere.
There's a mistake been made."
But there was no mistake. The mines on Hungry Hill had ceased to work. The fires went out at last, and the smokeless stacks lifted black faces to the sky. The whine and whirl of machinery were still. A queer silence seemed to fall upon the place, broken only by the restless walking up and down of the bewildered men, who would not disperse. In the counting-house the papers were filed and packed away in bags and boxes. Hal could scarcely see; he had worked up to ten o'clock every evening now for five days. Wherever he went and wherever he walked he would find one of the miners standing idle by the road, that same dazed, resentful look upon his face as Jim Donovan had worn. The women called to one another in shrill voices from their cottages. The children, free and excited, chased each other about the empty dressing-sheds, or made castles in the slack-heaps that had not been cleared away. No one stopped them. They could do as they liked. There was, no order any more, no supervision. Four days, five days, six days, and the work of clearing the files and accounts was almost done.
The men had begun to drift away, to walk down in bands to the village, coming back drunk and singing from the public-houses. The mine began to wear a deserted air. The door of the engine-house swung backwards and forwards on a broken hinge.
"Desolation reigns supreme," Hal said to Jinny. "I never want to see the mines again. Why the devil didn't I leave when my father sold them five months ago?"
The Rector, and his wife, and Jinny were doing their best to help the miners' families, those who had no money put by for such an emergency. It was difficult for Tom Callaghan, because the most improvident of the families did not attend his church, and came under the care of the priest.
"No time for differences now," said Tom, in consultation with him, a young raw fellow, hardly more than a boy, who had been appointed to Doonhaven only six months before. "We have got to work together, and see what we can do to help the people. It's the greatest mercy of God that this blow has fallen in midsummer, instead of in winter."
The young priest was only too willing to co-operate, and to seek advice from the older man.
It was decided to use the parish room belonging to the Rector as a store for food and clothing, and anyone in real need would be able to go there and ask for assistance.
The store was put in charge of Jinny and her mother.
Meanwhile the Rector and Mr. Griffiths were kept busy going backwards and forwards to Slane to see the emigration authorities, for over half the mining population began to clamour now to leave Doonhaven as soon as possible, before the autumn started, and seek a new livelihood in America and Australia and Africa.
It was easiest for those who had saved money and were skilled miners. They would soon fall on their feet again, and it was not difficult to get them a passage.
But the odd-job men, the surface workers, the firemen and others, who were trained in nothing in particular and had spent their pay every week as it came along, these constituted the problem of Doonhaven.
Many of them were local men, or had come from the neighbouring country, and had worked in the mines from early boyhood. They knew no other trade. The older men, philosophical and more easy-going, shrugged their shoulders and tilled their bit of land. It was pleasant in a way to sit in the sun and do nothing for a change; something would turn up before the winter. The younger men, restless and dissatisfied, roamed the countryside in bands, bent on mischief which they felt justified in doing. Fences were broken, chickens and pigs stolen, orchards robbed, and a spirit of terrorism began to spread abroad which brought no sympathy for the men themselves, only harsh words from the magistrates and threats to bring the soldiers ashore from the garrison on Doon Island.
"It will blow over," said Simon Flower, Kitty's husband, who had much of the easy-going tolerance of his grandfather and namesake.
"In a couple of months' time the fellows will be lifting potatoes and keeping pigs, as peaceful as you or I. Let them have their fling first."
"Yes," said the Rector, "I agree with you.
It will blow over, and they will go back to the land. But first they may do a considerable amount of damage, poor fellows, and cause trouble to themselves and to other people."
"Seriously," said Jinny, "there are several people who have become quite nervous of Jim Donovan and his crowd. They flung stones at Mrs. Griffiths when she was driving into Mundy last week, and lamed the pony. And you know I am certain it was his lot that broke all the windows in the Post Office."
They none of them really understood, thought Hal, except perhaps his father-in-law, what a shock it had been to the young men of Doonhaven to see the mines go as they had done, almost overnight. The mines of Hungry Hill, which they had known from childhood, and their fathers before them, and to which they instinctively turned for a living, had become dead and lifeless. What irked them most was the fact that the ore was still there underground, waiting to be brought to the surface. They could not understand why a precious mineral should suddenly become valueless.
"The world still needs tin, doesn't it?" Jim Donovan had asked.
How was it possible to explain to him about cheap labour in Malay? No, thought Hal, it was much simpler to give Jim Donovan a drink and tell him to forget his troubles. For himself, he was glad to be free again. Glad that the whistle of the six-o'clock engine and the clanging bells no longer woke him from sleep, and he could lie in bed, if he wanted to, until ten in the morning, and then, leaning out of his bedroom window, sniffing the summer day, decide to take his paint-box and his easel across the harbour to Clonmere, and alone all day, with a sandwich for lunch, paint the still waters of the creek below the house, the low hump of Doon Island, and the great, green shoulder of Hungry Hill.
"It's the best you've ever done," said Jinny, when after three days he brought his picture home to her and put it up in their little sitting-room, the paint still wet on the canvas. "Do you know, I am sure that if you took it to London and sent it up to the Academy they would accept it, and you would sell it for a hundred guineas?"