The Country of the Blind and Other Stories Page 9

  Horrocks answered with a grunt. ‘The cone,’ he said, and then, as one who recovers himself, ‘I thought you did not hear.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Raut.

  ‘I wouldn’t have had you run over then for the world,’ said Horrocks.

  ‘For a moment I lost my nerve,’ said Raut.

  Horrocks stood for half a minute, then turned abruptly towards the ironworks again. ‘See how fine these great mounds of mine, these clinker-heaps, look in the night! That truck yonder, up above there! Up it goes, and out-tilts the slag. See the palpitating red stuff go sliding down the slope. As we get nearer, the heap rises up and cuts the blast furnaces. See the quiver up above the big one. Not that way! This way, between the heaps. That goes to the puddling furnaces, but I want to show you the canal first.’ He came and took Raut by the elbow, and so they went along side by side. Raut answered Horrocks vaguely. What, he asked himself, had really happened on the line? Was he deluding himself with his own fancies, or had Horrocks actually held him back in the way of the train? Had he just been within an ace of being murdered?

  Suppose this slouching, scowling monster did know anything? For a minute or two then Raut was really afraid for his life, but the mood passed as he reasoned with himself. After all, Horrocks might have heard nothing. At any rate, he had pulled him out of the way in time. His odd manner might be due to the mere vague jealousy he had shown once before. He was talking now of the ash-heaps and the canal. ‘Eh?’ said Horrocks.

  ‘What?’ said Raut. ‘Rather! The haze in the moonlight. Fine!’

  ‘Our canal,’ said Horrocks, stopping suddenly. ‘Our canal by moonlight and firelight is an immense effect. You’ve never seen it? Fancy that! You’ve spent too many of your evenings philandering up in Newcastle7 there. I tell you, for real florid effects – But you shall see. Boiling water…’

  As they came out of the labyrinth of clinker-heaps and mounds of coal and ore, the noises of the rolling-mill sprang upon them suddenly, loud, near, and distinct. Three shadowy workmen went by and touched their caps to Horrocks. Their faces were vague in the darkness. Raut felt a futile impulse to address them, and before he could frame his words, they passed into the shadows. Horrocks pointed to the canal close before them now: a weird-looking place it seemed, in the blood-red reflections of the furnaces. The hot water that cooled the tuyeres came into it, some fifty yards up – a tumultuous, almost boiling affluent, and the steam rose up from the water in silent white wisps and streaks, wrapping damply about them, an incessant succession of ghosts coming up from the black and red eddies, a white uprising that made the head swim. The shining black tower of the larger blast furnace rose overhead out of the mist, and its tumultuous riot filled their ears. Raut kept away from the edge of the water, and watched Horrocks.

  ‘Here it is red,’ said Horrocks, ‘blood-red vapour as red and hot as sin; but yonder there, where the moonlight falls on it, and it drives across the clinker-heaps, it is as white as death.’

  Raut turned his head for a moment, and then came back hastily to his watch on Horrocks. ‘Come along to the rolling-mills,’ said Horrocks. The threatening hold was not so evident that time, and Raut felt a little reassured. But all the same, what on earth did Horrocks mean about ‘white as death’ and ‘red as sin’? Coincidence, perhaps?

  They went and stood behind the puddlers for a little while, and then through the rolling-mills, where amidst an incessant din the deliberate steam-hammer beat the juice out of the succulent iron, and black, half-naked Titans rushed the plastic bars, like hot sealing-wax, between the wheels. ‘Come on,’ said Horrocks in Raut’s ear, and they went and peeped through the little glass hole behind the tuyeres, and saw the tumbled fire writhing in the pit of the blast furnace. It left one eye blinded for a while. Then, with green and blue patches dancing across the dark, they went to the lift by which the trucks of ore and fuel and lime were raised to the top of the big cylinder.

  And out upon the narrow rail that overhung the furnace, Raut’s doubts came upon him again. Was it wise to be here? If Horrocks did know – everything! Do what he would, he could not resist a violent trembling. Right under foot was a sheer depth of seventy feet. It was a dangerous place. They pushed by a truck of fuel to get to the railing that crowned the place. The reek of the furnace, a sulphurous vapour streaked with pungent bitterness, seemed to make the distant hillside of Hanley quiver. The moon was riding out now from among a drift of clouds, halfway up the sky above the undulating wooded outlines of Newcastle. The steaming canal ran away from below them under an indistinct bridge, and vanished into the dim haze of the flat fields towards Burslem.

  ‘That’s the cone I’ve been telling you of,’ shouted Horrocks; ‘and, below that, sixty feet of fire and molten metal, with the air of the blast frothing through it like gas in soda-water.’

  Raut gripped the hand-rail tightly, and stared down at the cone. The heat was intense. The boiling of the iron and the tumult of the blast made a thunderous accompaniment to Horrocks’s voice. But the thing had to be gone through now. Perhaps, after all…

  ‘In the middle,’ bawled Horrocks, ‘temperature near a thousand degrees. If you were dropped into it… flash into flame like a pinch of gunpowder in a candle. Put your hand out and feel the heat of his breath. Why, even up here I’ve seen the rainwater boiling off the trucks. And that cone there. It’s a damned sight too hot for roasting cakes. The top side of it’s three hundred degrees.’

  ‘Three hundred degrees!’ said Raut.

  ‘Three hundred centigrade, mind!’ said Horrocks. ‘It will boil the blood out of you in no time.’

  ‘Eh?’ said Raut, and turned.

  ‘Boil the blood out of you in… No, you don’t!’

  ‘Let me go!’ screamed Raut. ‘Let go my arm!’ With one hand he clutched at the hand-rail, then with both. For a moment the two men stood swaying. Then suddenly, with a violent jerk, Horrocks had twisted him from his hold. He clutched at Horrocks and missed, his foot went back into empty air; in mid-air he twisted himself, and then cheek and shoulder and knee struck the hot cone together.

  He clutched the chain by which the cone hung, and the thing sank an infinitesimal amount as he struck it. A circle of glowing red appeared about him, and a tongue of flame, released from the chaos within, flickered up towards him. An intense pain assailed him at the knees, and he could smell the singeing of his hands. He raised himself to his feet, and tried to climb up the chain, and then something struck his head. Black and shining with the moonlight, the throat of the furnace rose about him.

  Horrocks, he saw, stood above him by one of the trucks of fuel on the rail. The gesticulating figure was bright and white in the moonlight, and shouting, ‘Fizzle, you fool! Fizzle, you hunter of women! You hot-blooded hound! Boil! boil! boil!’

  Suddenly he caught up a handful of coal out of the truck, and flung it deliberately, lump after lump, at Raut.

  ‘Horrocks!’ cried Raut. ‘Horrocks!’

  He clung crying to the chain, pulling himself up from the burning of the cone. Each missile Horrocks flung hit him. His clothes charred and glowed, and as he struggled the cone dropped, and a rush of hot suffocating gas whooped out and burned round him in a swift breath of flame.

  His human likeness departed from him. When the momentary red had passed, Horrocks saw a charred, blackened figure, its head streaked with blood, still clutching and fumbling with the chain, and writhing in agony – a cindery animal, an inhuman, monstrous creature that began a sobbing intermittent shriek.

  Abruptly, at the sight, the ironmaster’s anger passed. A deadly sickness came upon him. The heavy odour of burning flesh came drifting up to his nostrils. His sanity returned to him.

  ‘God have mercy upon me!’ he cried. ‘O God! what have I done?’

  He knew the thing below him, save that it still moved and felt, was already a dead man – that the blood of the poor wretch must be boiling in his veins. An intense realization of that agony came to his mind, and overcame
every other feeling. For a moment he stood irresolute, and then, turning to the truck, he hastily tilted its contents upon the struggling thing that had once been a man. The mass fell with a thud, and went radiating over the cone. With the thud the shriek ended, and a boiling confusion of smoke, dust, and flame came rushing up towards him. As it passed, he saw the cone clear again.

  Then he staggered back, and stood trembling, clinging to the rail with both hands. His lips moved, but no words came to them.

  Down below was the sound of voices and running steps. The clangour of rolling in the shed ceased abruptly.

  THE ARGONAUTS OF THE AIR

  One saw Monson’s flying machine from the windows of the trains passing either along the South-Western main line1 or along the line between Wimbledon and Worcester Park, – to be more exact, one saw the huge scaffoldings which limited the flight of the apparatus. They rose over the tree-tops, a massive alley of interlacing iron and timber, and an enormous web of ropes and tackle, extending the best part of two miles. From the Leatherhead branch this alley was foreshortened and in part hidden by a hill with villas; but from the main line one had it in profile, a complex tangle of girders and curving bars, very impressive to the excursionists from Portsmouth and Southampton and the West. Monson had taken up the work where Maxim2 had left it, had gone on at first with an utter contempt for the journalistic wit and ignorance that had irritated and hampered his predecessor, and had spent (it was said) rather more than half his immense fortune upon his experiments. The results, to an impatient generation, seemed inconsiderable. When some five years had passed after the growth of the colossal iron groves at Worcester Park, and Monson still failed to put in a fluttering appearance over Trafalgar Square,3 even the Isle of Wight trippers4 felt their liberty to smile. And such intelligent people as did not consider Monson a fool stricken with the mania for invention, denounced him as being (for no particular reason) a self-advertising quack.

  Yet now and again a morning trainload of season-ticket holders would see a white monster rush headlong through the airy tracery of guides and bars, and hear the further stays, nettings, and buffers snap, creak, and groan with the impact of the blow. Then there would be an efflorescence of black-set white-rimmed faces along the sides of the train, and the morning papers would be neglected for a vigorous discussion of the possibility of flying (in which nothing new was ever said by any chance), until the train reached Waterloo, and its cargo of season-ticket holders dispersed themselves over London. Or the fathers and mothers in some multitudinous train of weary excursionists returning exhausted from a day of rest by the sea, would find the dark fabric, standing out against the evening sky, useful in diverting some bilious child from its introspection, and be suddenly startled by the swift transit of a huge black flapping shape that strained upward against the guides. It was a great and forcible thing beyond dispute, and excellent for conversation; yet, all the same, it was but flying in leading-strings, and most of those who witnessed it scarcely counted its flight as flying. More of a switchback it seemed to the run of the folk.

  Monson, I say, did not trouble himself very keenly about the opinions of the press at first. But possibly he, even, had formed but a poor idea of the time it would take before the tactics of flying were mastered, the swift assured adjustment of the big soaring shape to every gust and chance movement of the air; nor had he clearly reckoned the money this prolonged struggle against gravitation would cost him. And he was not so pachydermatous as he seemed. Secretly he had his periodical bundles of cuttings sent him by Romeike,5 he had his periodical reminders from his banker; and if he did not mind the initial ridicule and scepticism, he felt the growing neglect as the months went by and the money dribbled away. Time was when Monson had sent the enterprising journalist, keen after readable matter, empty from his gates. But when the enterprising journalist ceased from troubling,6 Monson was anything but satisfied in his heart of hearts. Still day by day the work went on, and the multitudinous subtle difficulties of the steering diminished in number. Day by day, too, the money trickled away, until his balance was no longer a matter of hundreds of thousands, but of tens. And at last came an anniversary.

  Monson, sitting in the little drawing-shed, suddenly noticed the date on Woodhouse’s calendar.

  ‘It was five years ago today that we began,’ he said to Wood-house suddenly.

  ‘Is it?’ said Woodhouse.

  ‘It’s the alterations play the devil with us,’ said Monson, biting a paper-fastener.

  The drawings for the new vans to the hinder screw lay on the table before him as he spoke. He pitched the mutilated brass paper-fastener into the waste-paper basket and drummed with his ringers. ‘These alterations! Will the mathematicians ever be clever enough to save us all this patching and experimenting? Five years – learning by rule of thumb, when one might think that it was possible to calculate the whole thing out beforehand. The cost of it! I might have hired three senior wranglers for life. But they’d only have developed some beautifully useless theorems in pneumatics. What a time it has been, Woodhouse!’

  ‘These mouldings will take three weeks,’ said Woodhouse. ‘At special prices.’

  ‘Three weeks!’ said Monson, and sat drumming.

  ‘Three weeks certain,’ said Woodhouse, an excellent engineer, but no good as a comforter. He drew the sheets towards him and began shading a bar.

  Monson stopped drumming, and began to bite his fingernails, staring the while at Woodhouse’s head.

  ‘How long have they been calling this Monson’s Folly?’7 he said suddenly.

  ‘Oh!Year or so,’ said Woodhouse carelessly, without looking up.

  Monson sucked the air in between his teeth, and went to the window. The stout iron columns carrying the elevated rails upon which the start of the machine was made rose up close by, and the machine was hidden by the upper edge of the window. Through the grove of iron pillars, red painted and ornate with rows of bolts, one had a glimpse of the pretty scenery towards Esher.8 A train went gliding noiselessly across the middle distance, its rattle drowned by the hammering of the workmen overhead. Monson could imagine the grinning faces at the windows of the carriages. He swore savagely under his breath, and dabbed viciously at a blowfly that suddenly became noisy on the window-pane.

  ‘What’s up?’ said Woodhouse, staring in surprise at his employer.

  ‘I’m about sick of this.’

  Woodhouse scratched his cheek. ‘Oh!’ he said, after an assimilating pause. He pushed the drawing away from him.

  ‘Here these fools… I’m trying to conquer a new element – trying to do a thing that will revolutionize life. And instead of taking an intelligent interest, they grin and make their stupid jokes, and call me and my appliances names.’

  ‘Asses!’ said Woodhouse, letting his eye fall again on the drawing.

  The epithet, curiously enough, made Monson wince. ‘I’m about sick of it, Woodhouse, anyhow,’ he said, after a pause.

  Woodhouse shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘There’s nothing for it but patience, I suppose,’ said Monson, sticking his hands in his pockets. ‘I’ve started. I’ve made my bed, and I’ve got to lie on it. I can’t go back. I’ll see it through, and spend every penny I have and every penny I can borrow. But I tell you, Woodhouse, I’m infernally sick of it, all the same. If I’d paid a tenth part of the money towards some political greaser’s expenses – I’d have been a baronet before this.’

  Monson paused. Woodhouse stared in front of him with a blank expression he always employed to indicate sympathy, and tapped his pencil-case on the table. Monson stared at him for a minute.

  ‘Oh, damn!’ said Monson suddenly, and abruptly rushed out of the room.

  Woodhouse continued his sympathetic rigour for perhaps half a minute. Then he sighed and resumed the shading of the drawings. Something had evidently upset Monson. Nice chap, and generous, but difficult to get on with. It was the way with every amateur who had anything to do with engineering – wanted e
verything finished at once. But Monson had usually the patience of the expert. Odd he was so irritable. Nice and round that aluminium rod9 did look now! Woodhouse threw back his head, and put it, first this side and then that, to appreciate his bit of shading better.

  ‘Mr Woodhouse,’ said Hooper, the foreman of the labourers, putting his head in at the door.

  ‘Hullo!’ said Woodhouse, without turning round.

  ‘Nothing happened, sir?’ said Hooper.

  ‘Happened?’ said Woodhouse.

  ‘The governor just been up the rails swearing like a tornader.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Woodhouse.

  ‘It ain’t like him, sir.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘And I was thinking perhaps’ –

  ‘Don’t think,’ said Woodhouse, still admiring the drawings.

  Hooper knew Woodhouse, and he shut the door suddenly with a vicious slam. Woodhouse stared stonily before him for some further minutes, and then made an ineffectual effort to pick his teeth with his pencil. Abruptly he desisted, pitched that old, tried, and stumpy servitor across the room, got up, stretched himself, and followed Hooper.

  He looked ruffled – it was visible to every workman he met. When a millionaire who has been spending thousands on experiments that employ quite a little army of people suddenly indicates that he is sick of the undertaking, there is almost invariably a certain amount of mental friction in the ranks of the little army he employs. And even before he indicates his intentions there are speculations and murmurs, a watching of faces and a study of straws. Hundreds of people knew before the day was out that Monson was ruffled, Woodhouse ruffled, Hooper ruffled. A workman’s wife, for instance (whom Monson had never seen), decided to keep her money in the savings-bank instead of buying a velveteen dress. So far-reaching are even the casual curses of a millionaire.

  Monson found a certain satisfaction in going on the works and behaving disagreeably to as many people as possible. After a time even that palled upon him, and he rode off the grounds, to everyone’s relief there, and through the lanes south-eastward, to the infinite tribulation of his house steward at Cheam.