He came straight home, sat reading by the fire, went silently to bed. Next morning the caller woke him, at two o’clock he was in the pit working the early fore shift.
All day long she prepared for his return in that same storm of unappeased bitterness. She would show him, make him pay… she kept looking at the clock, waiting for the hours to pass.
At the end of the shift he returned, dead beat and soaked to the skin. She prepared to wound him with her silent anger, but somehow the sight of him killed all the rankling in her heart.
“What’s like the matter?” she asked instinctively.
He leaned against the table, stifling his cough, gasping for breath.
“They’ve couped the cavils,” he said, meaning that the draw for positions in the Paradise had been overruled. “They’ve black-listed me, gi’en me the worst place in the whole district. A scabby three-foot roof. I’ve lay on my stomach in water, hewin’, all the shift.”
A throb of compassion beat within her. And with that beat of anguish something she had thought dead came painfully alive. She reached out her hands.
“Let me help ye, my lad. Let me help ye with your claes.”
She helped him strip the filthy sodden clothes. She helped him to the bath. She knew she still loved him.
NINE
David, five hundred feet underground and two miles from the main shaft, reckoned it was nearly bait time. He was in the Paradise, the Mixen-section of Paradise, the lowest level of the Neptune pit with Globe Coal two hundred feet above, and Five Quarter a hundred higher still. He had no watch, but the number of journeys he had made with his tubs from the flat to the landing gave him the clue. He stood beside Dick, his galloway, in the landing — where the full tubs which he, the horse putter, drove up, were hitched to the mechanical haulage and pulled outbye on the Paradise haulage road. He was waiting for Tally Brown to switch the empties. Though he hated the Paradise, David always liked the landing. It was cool, after a hot sweaty run, and he could stand upright without fear of banging his head.
While David waited he reflected on his own good fortune. He could barely believe it, that this should be his last Saturday in the Neptune. Not only his last Saturday; but his last day! No, he could not fully realise his luck.
He had always hated the pit. Some of the lads liked it, took to the work like a duck to water. But not he. Never! Perhaps his imagination was too vivid, he couldn’t lose the sense of being shut up, buried in these dark little warrens, deep down underground. He always remembered, too, in the Five Quarter Seam, that he was under the sea. Mr. Carmichael, the junior master at Bethel Street Council School, who had helped him over the scholarship, had told him the name of that queer sensation of feeling shut down. Deep underground; deep under the sea. While above the sun shone, the wind blew fresh, the waves broke white and lovely.
He always set himself stubbornly against that feeling. He’d be hanged if he’d give way to a thing like that. Yet, he was glad, glad to be leaving the Neptune, the more so as he had always had the odd notion that once a boy went down the pit, the pit claimed him, refused to let him go. Old pit-men said that, joking. In the darkness David laughed to himself, it was a joke, that, right enough.
Here Tally switched the empty tubs. David coupled them in a train of four, sprang on to the bar, clicked his tongue to Dick and set off down the pitch-black incline. Bang, bang went the tubs, jerking and crashing behind him on the badly laid track as he gathered speed. David prided himself on driving fast, of all the horse putters in the Paradise he could drive the fastest; and he was used to the banging of the tubs, he did not mind the din. What he did mind was the bother when a tub ran off; it nearly killed him, the raxing and straining to lift it back upon the line.
Down he went, down, down, smashing along at a glorious pace, balancing, guiding, knowing when to duck his head and when to throw his weight against the curve. It was reckless, terribly reckless, his father often checked him for driving so fast. But David loved the thrill of it. He drew up with a magnificent jolt at the putters’ flat.
Here, as he had anticipated, Ned Softley and Tom Reedy, the two hand putters who pushed the tubs from the coal face to the flat, were squatted in the refuge hole eating their bait.
“Come on, ye old beggor, and have yer snap,” Tom called out with his mouth full of bread and cheese, and he moved up the refuge hole to make room.
David liked Tom — a big, good-natured lad who had taken Joe’s place in the flat. He had often wondered where Joe had got to, what he was doing; and he wondered, too, why he missed Joe so little — Joe, after all, had been his mate. Perhaps it was because Tom Reedy had made so good a substitute: as genial as Joe, more willing to help with a run-off tub, less ready in the matter of lewd profanity. But though David was fond of Tom’s company he shook his head negatively:
“I’m going inbye, Tom.”
David really wanted to eat his bait with his father; whenever he got the chance he took his bait-poke and went in; he wasn’t going to miss it this last day.
The slant of the coal face was so low he had to bend himself double. The tunnel was like a rabbit run for size, so inky black his naked light, smoking a little, seemed hardly to carry a foot, and so wet, his feet made squelching noises as he plugged along. Once he hit his head against the hard scabby whinstone roof and swore gently.
When he reached the face his father and Slogger had not knocked off, but were still hewing coal to fill the empty tubs that Tom and Ned would shortly bring in. Stark naked except for boots and pit drawers, they were working bord and pillar. The place was awful, David knew, the work frightfully hard. He sat down on a dry bit, watching, waiting till they should finish. Robert, twisted sideways under the jud, was nicking the coal ready to bring it down. His breath came in short gasps, sweat ran out of every pore of his body, he looked done. There was no room to turn, the roof was so low it seemed to flatten him. Yet he worked tenaciously, with experience and wonderful skill. With him worked the Slogger. His enormous hairy torso and bull neck made him a titan beside Robert. He never spoke a word, kept chewing tobacco furiously, chewing and spitting and hewing. Yet David, with a quick pulse of gratitude, saw that he was saving his father, taking the heavy end of the stick, doing all the hardest bits himself. The sweat rained off Slogger’s bashed-in face, he bore no resemblance to the Pitboy Wonder.
At last they knocked off, wiped themselves with their singlets, slipped them on, came over and sat down.
“How, Davey?” said Robert when he saw his son.
“How again, dad?”
Harry Grace and Bob Ogle emerged from another heading and joined them. Hughie, his brother, followed silently. They all began to eat their bait.
To Davey, after a hard morning’s driving, the bread and cold bacon his mother had put up for him was delicious. He saw, however, that his father barely ate, merely drinking enormous draughts of cold tea from his bottle. And he had pie, too, in his poke. Since Robert and Martha had been reconciled she had made him the most appetising pokes. But Robert gave half of the pie to Slogger; he said he was not hungry.
“It ud take any mon’s appetite away,” remarked Harry Brace with a nod towards Robert’s heading. “It’s a bitch of a place for sure.”
“There’s no bloddy head room,” agreed Slogger, chewing pie with the noisy relish of a man whose missus usually gave him cut bread and dripping. “But this is bloddy good pie.”
“It’s the wet,” commented Ogle. “We hev it an’ all. Man, the roof fair bleeds water.”