Harry pushed back the hair from his brow.
“It’s in the paper… the new Bill… it’s the biggest swindle in years. They’ve gi’en us nothing, lads. Not one damned thing….” Again words failed him.
Dead silence had come upon the company. They all knew what had been promised them. Subconsciously the hopes of every man within that room had centred on the Bill. Jack Reedy moved first.
“By God,” he said. “Show us that paper.” He seized the paper and looked at it. They all bent over crowding and craning, looking at the paper where, in a double spread, the terms of their betrayal lay revealed.
“By God,” Jack said again. “So it is!”
Then Cha Leeming jumped to his feet, half-tight and furious.
“It’s too much,” he shouted, “we’ll not put up with it.”
Everybody started talking at once, an uproar. The paper was passed from hand to hand. Jack Reedy was on his feet now, cold and contained. In the midst of the chaos he saw his opportunity. His eyes were not dead now, but burning.
“Give us another whisky,” he said. “Quick.” He tossed down the whisky. He looked round the men. Then he shouted: “I’m goin’ to the Institute. Them that wants can come after us.”
An answering shout went up. They all came after him. They crowded out of the pub into the squally darkness of Cowpen Street, crowding towards the Institute with Jack slightly in the lead.
Outside the Institute more men had collected — most of the younger Neptune men who were out, all of the men who had been discharged at the beginning, and every one of them brought to a pitch of desperation by this news flashed through the Terraces, the final extinction of their hopes.
Jack raced up the steps of the Institute and stood facing the men. Above the door of the Institute an electric globe stuck out like a yellow pear on the end of a stiff branch and the light from the electric pear fell upon Jack’s unbroken face. It was almost dark in the street; the street lamps cast only a flickering pallor in little pools.
Jack stood for a minute facing the men in the darkness. The whisky in him concentrated his bitterness to a kind of venom; his whole body pulsed with that envenomed bitterness. He felt that his moment was approaching, the moment for which he had suffered, for which he had been born.
“Comrades,” he cried, “we’ve just got the news. We’ve been swindled. They’ve give us the go-bye, like Heddon did: they’ve twisted us, like they always do. And in spite of everything they promised!” He drew a panting, tortured breath, his eyes glittering towards them. “They’re not going to help us! Nobody’s goin’ to help us. Nobody! D’y hear me. Nobody! We’ve got to help ourselves. If we don’t we’ll never get out the bloody gutter where Capitalism has shoved us. Christ Almighty, can’t you see it, lads, the whole economic system’s rotten as dung. They’ve got the money, the motorcars, fine houses, carpets on the floor, an’ it’s all bled out the likes of us. We do the slavin’ and sweatin’ for them. An’ what do we get? We don’t even get food, lads, nor fire, nor proper clothes, nor boots for our kids. The minnit things go wrong we’re chucked out on our necks! Chucked on to bread and margarine, and not enough of it to feed the missus and kids! Don’t tell me it’s because there’s no money. The country’s choked with money, the banks is burstin’ with it, millions and millions of money. Don’t tell me it’s because there’s no food. They’re throwin’ fish back into the sea, burnin’ coffee and wheat, slaughterin’ pigs to let them rot, and us here goin’ half-starvin’. If that’s a proper system, lads, then God Almighty strike me dead.” Another sobbing breath. Then in a rising voice: “We didn’t see it when they had the disaster in this bloody Neptune pit and murdered a hundred men. We didn’t see it in the war when they murdered millions of men. But by Christ we see it now! We can’t stand it, lads. We’ve got to do something. We’ve got to show them, lads. We’ve got to do somethin’. We’ve got to, I tell you, we’ve got to. If we don’t we can rot in hell for all our days.” His voice rose to a shriek now, wild and mad. “I’m goin’ to do somethin’, lads, and them that wants to can come along. I’m goin’ to make a start this minnit. I’m goin’ to show them at the Neptune pit where my two brothers was done in. Now I’m goin’ to wreck the pit, lads. I’m goin’ to do a bit of payin’ back on my own. Are you comin’ with me or are you not?”
A loud yell went up from the mob. Inflamed by Reedy’s words they pressed round him as he ran down the steps, escorted him in a body down the street. Some, terrified, melted back towards the Terraces. But at least a hundred men joined up with Jack. They all began to move to the Neptune pit, exactly as the crowd had moved towards Ramage’s shop over twenty years before. But there were more men in the movement, a great many more. The pit was a greater attraction than Ramage’s shop. The pit was the focus, the centre wherein the sound and the fury of their souls were concentrated. The pit was the arena, the amphitheatre. Life and death and work and wages and sweat and blood were mingled in the black dust of that arena, that dark amphitheatre.
The men poured into the pit yard with Jack Reedy leading them. The pit yard was silent and the offices were closed and the shaft gaped empty like the entrance to a great empty tomb. There was no person underground, no night shift now, not a soul inbye. Even the pit bank seemed deserted, though the safety men were there, the pump-men. The two pump-men were in the engine house behind the locker room; their names were Joe Davis and Hugh Galton. The crowd streamed towards the engine house where Davis and Galton were, and Galton heard them coming first. One of the windows of the engine house was half open to let out the heat and the hot smell of oil, and Galton, an oldish man with a short grey beard, popped his head through the window.
The crowd were around the engine house now, a crowd of one hundred men, their faces all upturned to Galton in the high window of the engine house.
“What is it?” Galton called down.
With his face upturned Jack Reedy said:
“Come out here. We want you out here.”
“What for?” Galton said.
Jack repeated in a deadly tone:
“Come out here. Come out and you’ll not get hurt.”
In answer Galton drew his head back and banged down the window shut. There was a pause of about ten seconds filled by the slow thumping of the pumping engines, then Cha Leeming let out a yell and threw a brick. The window shivered, and the sound of shivering glass came above the thumping and thudding of the pumping engines. That did it. Jack Reedy ran up the steps of the engine house and Leeming and a dozen others ran after him. They burst through the door of the engine house.
The engine house was very hot and bright and full of oily heat and vibrating noise.
“What the hell,” Joe Davis said. He was a man of forty in blue dungarees with his sleeves rolled up and a coil of waste wrapped round his neck. He had been cleaning brasses with bath brick and a tin of paraffin.
Jack Reedy looked at Joe Davis from under the peak of his cap. He said rapidly:
“We don’t mean you no harm, none of the two of you. We only want you out. Out, see.”
“I’ll be damned,” Joe Davis said.
Jack came a step forward. He said, carefully watching Joe Davis:
“You’ll get out, see; the men want you out.”
“What men?” Joe Davis said.
Then Jack rushed at Joe Davis and caught him round the waist. They caught each other round the waist and wrestled like that. They wrestled and struggled for a minute with everybody looking on, and as they wrestled they knocked over the tin of paraffin. It was a big tin of paraffin and it ran out over the grating and poured into the box of cleaning rags; Slattery was the only one who saw the paraffin pour into the waste rags, they were all watching the fight, and with a kind of reflex Slattery took the cigarette end out his mouth and flicked it at the waste rags. The lighted cigarette end fell right in the middle of the box of waste rags. No one but Slattery saw it fall, for at that moment Davis slipped and went down with Jack on the top of him. The crowd rushed forward. They got hold of Davis, then rushed at Galton, and bundled them out of the engine house.