Chapter VII

“And what now?” queried Dennis Blackwood, as they got out of the train, and stood upon the dripping wet platform at Crannack.

“P-put up here for the night, and p-push on to-morrow,” Crispin responded. Dennis agreed that it was the only thing to be done.

They had left Exeter that afternoon, Dennis having agreed to Crispin’s suggestion that they might sample the Cornish coast. Dennis was in no hurry to return to London. There was a dream-like quality about all his days just now, days shared with his dream-companion, Antoinette. And perhaps at the back of his mind lurked an indefinable fear of the moment when he must exchange dreams for reality. If he went on to Cornwall, there would be more days, and more, of hard walking and healthy sleep, and all the haphazard fun of eccentric stoppages at eccentric places—and above all, the dream-companionship would be prolonged....

From Exeter, they had intended taking the train down to Penzance, and thence starting to explore the Land’s End district; but it had got late while they visited the Cathedral at Exeter, and on arriving at the station they found that they had missed the Cornish express, and had to be content with a very slow train that stopped at all stations, and finally stopped altogether at Crannack, the centre of the mining-district. They were informed that they could get no connection to Penzance the same night.

“Dismal-looking hole, isn’t it?” remarked Dennis, as they trudged up the High Street, through the rain, in search of lodgings. Crispin grunted assent, and turned up his coat-collar. He detested the wet. They took rooms at the first Commercial Hotel they reached; and had a belated supper in a dingy and badly-lighted dining-room. When they had finished, Dennis declared: “I’m going out for some air, rain or no rain,” but Crispin preferred to remain in the stuffy little smoking-room with a book and a pipe.

Dennis resolved that before settling down to write to Antoinette, he would have a look round the place. It seemed unprepossessing enough, especially when contrasted with the clean cheerful Devonshire villages which they had just left. Crannack was neither clean nor cheerful; yet for Dennis there was a certain fascination about the way its little twisted streets ran steeply upwards from the docks, as if trying to scramble away from the perpetual harbour-noises; the rasping of chains, hooting of steam-sirens, rattling of coal-trucks. But the few upward-winding streets which Dennis explored attained to nothing more romantic or beautiful than a tin-roofed Methodist Chapel or Temperance Hotel. And as if in mockery of, or in opposition to, these hideous symbols of virtue, a great multitude of public-houses and drinking-saloons clustered about the centre of the town and straggled all along the wharf. From behind the blurred windows came the sound of drunken laughter and voices raised in discussion; voices raucous and yet mournful, that reminded Dennis of the screeching of sea-gulls. He strolled across the market-place, where the gas-flares over the stalls spluttered and wavered in the rain-laden wind, and cast fantastic lights and shadows—evil lights and shadows—upon the grimy faces of the men who hung about in groups, seemingly aimless, as if waiting to take their turn in the overcrowded drinking-saloons. Whenever any of the swing-doors were pushed open, giving a glimpse of sanded floor and iridescent bottles, and some figure reeled out, or was pushed out into the night air, his place was immediately filled by one of the waiting crowd. Dennis moved away from the noise and glare, and up a quiet side-street. The wet soft wind was in his face, bringing with it a faint tang of the sea. He walked on, while behind him the lights of the town became dimmer and more dim, and the sounds more and more muffled; and at last the monotonous outlines of the houses on either side of the narrow street merged into irregular humped shadows, that represented tumbledown barns and deserted cottages, and then fell away altogether. The wind blew harder now, and Dennis guessed that he must be in open country. The darkness was thick and moist; tangible almost. But further up the road, a red glow of light beckoned, that was neither the light of a public-house, nor yet the flare above a market-stall. It was the unmistakable glow of a blacksmith’s forge, that was luring him on through the darkness; and Dennis pressed forward, for there was something subtly attractive to him in these sudden alternations of blackest shadows and glaring light.

The door of the smithy stood wide open. Dennis, rather dazzled, sat down upon a ramshackle fence on the opposite side of the road. Two swarthy-faced men stood facing the forge, and a third, a muscular-looking giant was holding by the bridle a great cart-horse, that impatiently pawed the ground and shook back its mane.

A youth was at work at the anvil. He was stripped to the waist, and in the leaping light of the flames, his body seemed white and slender. Dennis reflected that it was a most effective picture: in the midst of the clammy surrounding darkness, this great square of blazing heat and light; crimson glow illuminating the men’s dark faces, the glossy coat of the horse, and the boy’s black head; and showing every ripple of the muscles under the fine skin, as he raised his arms to hammer the red-hot iron into shape. The three men watched him attentively, talking in their Cornish dialect that was almost incomprehensible to Dennis across the road.

He caught snatches. “Coomin’ on fine, that be.”

“What d’ I tell ee, la-ad? Slowly does ut—slowly.”

“Ee doan’t want fur tu use all that strength—thur, I knew it’d ’appen ...” as the boy brought down the hammer with a smashing blow upon the horseshoe, and a piece of the red-hot iron flew off and, before he had time to avoid it, landed upon his foot. He dropped the hammer and broke into a picturesque flow of bad language; but to Dennis’s surprise, his speech bore no trace of Cornish dialect, but every trace of the accent that is manufactured at Oxford....

“All right, you needn’t crow over me, Tremayne! I tell you, that shoe would have been every bit as good as one of yours, if I hadn’t smashed it. Holy saints and martyrs, the touch of red-hot iron on the flesh is damnable, simply damnable. I wish my mother were here to ‘kiss the place and make it well’....”

There was a burst of gruff laughter from the blacksmith and the man holding the horse, but the third, a round-shouldered little man with weak, kindly eyes, spoke with some concern. “And what’ll yer fa-ather be sayin’, Mr. Alan, if us let ee go knockin’ yerself tu bits like this?”

“My father, Jenkins, would send down another army of chaperons and guardians to look after me, or would censure you most heartily for allowing me to play with the nasty fire.... Have any of you got a spare handkerchief? I want to tie up my foot and hobble home.”

Several more or less grimy rags were produced simultaneously, and Dennis came forward across the road. “Here, take mine. Are you badly hurt?”

“Oh, dear me, no, I’m not badly hurt. It’s fun, dropping pieces of red-hot metal upon portions of one’s anatomy. Especially if one isn’t accustomed to it.”

“A fresh emotion, at any rate,” Dennis smiled.

Alan looked up at him quickly from where he sat on the ground, nursing his foot. “I say, where do you come from? What are you? We don’t get any tourists here. You’re not another new inspector, sent down by my benighted parent, are you?”

“Inspector?” Dennis repeated blankly, “inspector of what?”

“Of coal-mines, of course. In this God-forsaken place we think of nothing but coal. We live in it, count in it, breathe it—lots of them die of it. Jenkins here has nearly lost his sight through it.... No one comes to Crannack who isn’t somehow or other connected with coal.”

“I assure you solemnly, then, that I haven’t the least connection with it, and that I know nothing whatever about coal, barring the strictly domestic variety that appears in the family grate.”

“Thank God at least for that! Well, if it isn’t coal that has brought you here, what is it?”

“A train that refused to carry us on to Penzance, as we desired, and apparently preferred to deposit us here. We’re staying over night and going on to-morrow morning.”

“I thought as much. It was too good to be true. No one stops at Crannack longer than they can help. Where are you putting up?”

Dennis told him, and he replied: “That’s not far from my digs. Are you going back there now? If so, we may as well walk together, and you can support my fainting footsteps if necessary. I say—will you?”

There was so much boyish eagerness in the tone, that Dennis laughed. “Of course I will. Come along.”

Alan put on his coat, bade good-night to the three men, and he and Dennis set off together down the dark road. At the bottom of the hill, the clustered lights of the town twinkled sleepily.

“It doesn’t look so bad at night,” remarked Alan, “but in the daytime—Lord, the ugliness and the filth of it! And the ugliness and the filth of the people, too. Not that it’s their fault, poor devils. The material is good enough in itself—it’s the use that’s being made of it.”

“But,” said Dennis, “whatever are _you_ doing here, in this place that you hate, and among these people to whom you don’t belong?”

Impatiently Alan replied: “My father sent me here to study mining-engineering after I left Oxford. He owns several more or less prosperous coal-mines up in Lancashire, and he’s having this one developed as a speculation. He wants me to take over the management of it. So I’m supposed to be learning the ropes—seeing how the thing’s done—or how the maximum of profit can be ground out of the minimum of expenditure; financial expenditure of course; not expenditure of human life.”

“But I thought that everything in mortal power had been done to reduce the liability of accidents in mines; is the expenditure of life really so great?”

“Greater than it need be. Oh, we have sanitary inspectors nosing around, and plastering up the Government regulations, and finding everything to their satisfaction—but all the same, every lump of coal that is burnt is soaked in blood, human blood....” The boy was talking with a curious vehemence and excitement—vehemence and excitement that seemed to have been long pent-up. “Sometimes we have quicksand, and sometimes we have floods, and sometimes we have fire-damp and explosions, and sometimes we have all the lot.... You can see the results: you’ve only to look at the blind and the cripples and the consumptive wrecks in the streets. It’s in the pits that they’ve lost their sight and their limbs and their health, grubbing in the dark, in the foul air, so that capitalists like my father may grow sleek.”

“That’s socialist-talk, isn’t it?”

“Not only talk; I’m going to _do_....”

“What can you do—what is there to be done about it?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out; and the only way to find out is to do what I’m doing now.”

“Well...?” Dennis looked at the boy limping along at his side; saw his face, white and dim, in the darkness, the clean line of the jaw and throat. It might have been the face of a young knight, Dennis thought; a young knight ardent and fearless, setting out to combat evils as old as the world....

Alan replied: “I’m living with the people and among them and beside them. My father thinks I’m safely wrapped in cotton-wool, and that sometimes the head-engineer takes me round the mine in state, with very clean hands, while the miners touch their caps to me and say ‘Yes, sir,’ when out of my graciousness I put the asinine questions that show I’m taking an intelligent interest in my father’s property.... But I’ve worked in the mine day by day myself, I tell you, and come out as grimy and ready for drink as the rest. It’s no use standing at the top of the shaft and wondering—I must get at things from the inside—discover exactly where these Labour conditions of ours are wrong, and how to improve them.”

“You’ve got your work cut out! Forgive me for saying so, but you seem so young to be attempting so much.”

Alan grinned and swung his arms a little. “I’ll give all the youth and nerves and strength that are in me, if by giving them I can achieve my ends.”

“I think you will achieve them,” murmured Dennis. He was suddenly lost in admiration of the earnestness, the virility and the steadfastness of purpose on the part of one who still seemed—he could not help coming back to it—such a child.

“Don’t you ever let yourself play?” he asked.

Alan laughed. “Oh, Lord, yes. I go down to the harbour and mess about with the old boats, old iron and rusty cranes. And I watch the kids digging up winkles out of the mud at low tide. And I sit on barrels and let the seamen tell me their yarns, specially concocted on the spur of the moment for landlubbers like myself. That was play-time just now, up at the smithy.... Well, you saw how that ended!”

He was limping badly now. Dennis put an arm through his as they crossed the glaring market-place, and once again found themselves in the darkness of a side-street, rising steeply from the wharf-side. Alan led the way into one of the houses, lit a candle-end which he found on a shelf in the hall and painfully climbed the wooden stairs to his room. Dennis followed. The light from the guttering candle wavered and flickered in the draught from under the front door, and cast grotesque, elongated shadows of the two men upon the opposite wall. Dennis had time to reflect that here indeed he had stumbled into a strange adventure, but he was in no mind to withdraw from it. Alan lit the candles in his room. It was small and bare, but the walls were covered with pen-and-ink sketches and caricatures nailed up with drawing-pins.

“Are those yours?” asked Dennis, and Alan replied: “Yes; that’s how I keep myself from going crazy with depression.”

“They’re good, by Jove,” said Dennis; the drawings, indeed, some of them only half-finished, were exceptionally strong. “Living in the wilds doesn’t seem to have spoilt your technique.”

Alan looked pleased. “Greatest effect in the fewest possible lines—that’s what I tried to get.”

“And that’s what you have got, no doubt of it. I must look at the drawings closer later on, but let me see to your foot first. One puts oil on a burn, doesn’t one? Have you got any?”

The landlord eventually produced a doubtful-looking compound in a bottle; and Dennis removed his handkerchief from Alan’s foot, and began to bandage it afresh. As he did so, a quick spasm of pain passed across the boy’s face, and Dennis thought again with an odd pang of tenderness, how absurdly young he looked, and how his mother must love to stroke back the dark hair from his forehead. There was a photograph of her on the mantelpiece—a tired-looking woman with dull eyes and long slender hands. The father, from his portrait, was evidently thick-set, with side-whiskers and a self-assertive expression. A queer couple, they seemed, to have bred this finely-strung creature with the tanned face, sensitive level brows, and great black eyes that burned with a smouldering fire.

“Thanks awfully,” said Alan, as Dennis finished his task; “you’ve been a god-send to me to-night. I was getting pretty near the end of my tether—I do sometimes, you know. It’s the loneliness, and being so completely cut off from everything down here. It’s been refreshing to talk to an absolute stranger who doesn’t understand any of the technicalities appertaining to this beastly mining-village.”

Dennis smiled. “You’re right. I know nothing whatever about mining, and not much about any trade or profession outside my own. You make me feel fearfully narrow and selfish.”

“Rot! What is your line?”

“Music.”

“Music? Oh, good.... I’ve not heard any music for over six months. Sometimes I’m positively hungry for it—any sort of music—even a barrel-organ.... If anyone played one of those tango-tunes that were all the rage in London before I came down here, I believe I’d weep!”

“Poor kid,” said Dennis.

Alan went on: “Do you come from London?”

“Near enough to be there as often as I want to.”

“Oh, lucky beggar! To think of being in London now—theatres—dancing—art-shows. They’ve got the Russian Ballet on too, haven’t they?”

“Yes, and the opera. Chaliapine is just beyond all powers of description. I heard him in ‘Boris’ before I left.”

Alan groaned. “We’re buried alive here. Not the humblest and shoddiest of touring-companies comes to alleviate our boredom—we haven’t as much as a picture-palace. The only diversions our people get are drink and women, women and drink. If it were ‘Woman, wine and song,’ it wouldn’t be so bad; but there’s no ‘song’ about the people’s lives in Crannack, and in all the other places like it, that are dead to all beauty, and are mere sores on the face of the earth.... And you come from London—I look at you positively with awe—and you’re going back there, when is it? To-morrow?”

“We’re going to Penzance to-morrow.”

“Oh, what’ll you do at Penzance?” Alan exclaimed impatiently, “it’s an awful hole, not much better than this—and without even me in it, as a redeeming feature....”

“I am going to be shown the beauties of the Cornish coast, not to hunt for social reformers tossing red-hot horse-shoes in blacksmiths’ shops! And anyway,” Dennis added in a lower voice, “I shouldn’t find one like you. I shouldn’t find anything half as good....”

Alan glanced up with a quick flush of pleasure. “You’ve liked meeting me, then.... Ah, but you can’t have liked it half as much as I’ve liked meeting you. Think of it—after all this time and among these people, suddenly to come across another human being from the world I’ve almost forgotten!”

Dennis said half-aloud: “Consider the even greater wonder of meeting someone from a world that one didn’t know really existed—that one had scarcely dared to dream into existence.”

Alan cried eagerly: “Then you’ll stop on here for a bit, won’t you? Give a poor starving wretch a chance! I want to hear you talk about London with the London voice; I want to be able to talk about ideas instead of machinery; and I want to hear your music—do you play the piano? I haven’t got one ... but I believe there’s one up at the Sunday-school. You will stop, won’t you?”

It would be cruel to refuse Alan’s request. In spite of the magnitude of the task which the boy had set himself, and although he was engrossed in it heart and soul, he was still young enough to want his play-time, genuine play-time; not the play-time of which, ironically he had told Dennis.... He was asking for his play-time now, but Dennis knew that he must not yield; must tear himself away from a danger doubly dangerous, because, far from wishing to avoid it, he longed to succumb to it.

He said, with an effort to play for safety: “I can’t tell you off-hand. I must consult my pal, and see what he says....” He could not quite bring himself to make his refusal absolutely definite just yet.... “But our train doesn’t leave till eleven in the morning, so perhaps if your foot’s well enough, you’ll come round and see what we’re doing.” He had quite decided that he must go, but at least by this arrangement, he would see Alan again before he left. “Ask for Dennis Blackwood, if you turn up.”

“I’ll turn up all right,” said Alan.

Dennis walked back to rejoin Crispin. He felt oddly stimulated, oddly excited. And all night long his heart throbbed to a new and strange music; and his brain found utterance for that music that was as virile and splendid as the one who had inspired it.

It was not the music that he had promised to Antoinette. He did not write to Antoinette that night, nor the next night, nor the night after....

* * * * *

Alan came round to the hotel early next morning, and burst into Dennis’s room.

“Well, what have you decided? Where’s your pal? I’ll murder him, if he doesn’t agree to your stopping.”

Dennis was kneeling on the floor, packing his bag; and he spoke without looking up. “You needn’t murder him, Alan; but I’m not going to stop.”

The boy said after a moment’s silence: “Why...?” Then hotly, almost pitifully he began to plead: “When I’ve only just found you—and when I needed you most.... Why must you go? Why?”

Dennis picked up a roll of manuscript-music. “This will tell you why, Alan, if you can understand it. I wrote it out for you this morning. It will tell you all that I mustn’t tell you in words, or—or”—he clenched his hands desperately and continued: “You can play it to yourself, boy, on the piano at the Sunday-school, after I’m gone....”

* * * * *

The secret terror that had beset him ever since he was a boy, was upon him, urging him to flight; secret terror, unavowed, unshared, upon which even in thought he had scarcely allowed himself to dwell ... terror that nevertheless had been part and parcel of his being, since the first dawn of adolescence.

Different from the others, even in his schooldays; different, not only by reason of his music. It was not his music alone that he had striven to keep out, when he had avoided Eric Rubenstein.... He must be for ever an outcast amongst men, shunned by them, despised and mocked by them. He was maddened by fear and horror and loathing of himself.

Abnormal—perverted—against nature—he could hear the epithets that would be hurled against him, and that he would deserve. Yes, but what had nature been about, in giving him the soul of a woman in the body of a man?

And beyond all powers of reasoning; beyond the fear, and the horror, and the loathing, the thought of Alan reasserted itself, and the blinding pain that had been inflicted at parting from him.

The train pounded onwards—westwards—Dennis cared little enough whither it bore him. He knew only that it carried him away from that which all his life long he had sought, and from which he now must flee, in order that it might not become shameful.

Shameful—strange that such a word might ever be applied to love such as his for Alan; love that had grown up in one night of happiness, and that every instinct bade him welcome with glad lips and eyes and heart ... love that was so strong that it would not die even under the torture that was in store.