The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories
her bag, at which my wife heaved a premature sigh of relief. We heard her
go upstairs and replace the boots with considerable emphasis.
"Quite a crowd at the wedding, ma'am," she said presently, in a purely
conversational style, sitting in our little kitchen, and scrubbing the
potatoes; "and such a lovely day for them." She proceeded to numerous
other details, clearly avoiding some cardinal incident.
"It was all extremely respectable and nice, ma'am; but _her_ father
didn't wear a black coat, and looked quite out of place, ma'am. Mr.
Piddingquirk--"
"_Who_?"
"Mr. Piddingquirk--William that was, ma'am--had white gloves, and a coat
like a clergyman, and a lovely chrysanthemum. He looked so nice, ma'am.
And there was red carpet down, just like for gentlefolks. And they say he
gave the clerk four shillings, ma'am. It was a real kerridge they had--not
a fly. When they came out of church there was rice-throwing, and her two
little sisters dropping dead flowers. And someone threw a slipper, and
then I threw a boot--"
"Threw a _boot_, Jane!"
"Yes, ma'am. Aimed at her. But it hit _him_. Yes, ma'am, hard. Gev
him a black eye, I should think. I only threw that one. I hadn't the heart
to try again. All the little boys cheered when it hit him."
After an interval--"I am sorry the boot hit _him_."
Another pause. The potatoes were being scrubbed violently. "He always
_was_ a bit above me, you know, ma'am. And he was led away."
The potatoes were more than finished. Jane rose sharply with a sigh, and
rapped the basin down on the table.
"I don't care," she said. "I don't care a rap. He will find out his
mistake yet. It serves me right. I was stuck up about him. I ought not to
have looked so high. And I am glad things are as things are."
My wife was in the kitchen, seeing to the higher cookery. After the
confession of the boot-throwing, she must have watched poor Jane fuming
with a certain dismay in those brown eyes of hers. But I imagine they
softened again very quickly, and then Jane's must have met them.
"Oh, ma'am," said Jane, with an astonishing change of note, "think of all
that _might_ have been! Oh, ma'am, I _could_ have been so happy!
I ought to have known, but I didn't know...You're very kind to let me talk
to you, ma'am...for it's hard on me, ma'am...it's har-r-r-r-d--"
And I gather that Euphemia so far forgot herself as to let Jane sob out
some of the fullness of her heart on a sympathetic shoulder. My Euphemia,
thank Heaven, has never properly grasped the importance of "keeping up her
position." And since that fit of weeping, much of the accent of bitterness
has gone out of Jane's scrubbing and brush work.
Indeed, something passed the other day with the butcher-boy--but that
scarcely belongs to this story. However, Jane is young still, and time and
change are at work with her. We all have our sorrows, but I do not believe
very much in the existence of sorrows that never heal.
II.
THE CONE.
The night was hot and overcast, the sky red-rimmed with the lingering
sunset of midsummer. They sat at the open window, trying to fancy the air
was fresher there. The trees and shrubs of the garden stood stiff and
dark; beyond in the roadway a gas-lamp burnt, bright orange against the
hazy blue of the evening. Farther were the three lights of the railway
signal against the lowering sky. The man and woman spoke to one another in
low tones.
"He does not suspect?" said the man, a little nervously.
"Not he," she said peevishly, as though that too irritated her. "He
thinks of nothing but the works and the prices of fuel. He has no
imagination, no poetry."
"None of these men of iron have," he said sententiously. "They have no
hearts."
"_He_ has not," she said. She turned her discontented face towards
the window. The distant sound of a roaring and rushing drew nearer and
grew in volume; the house quivered; one heard the metallic rattle of the
tender. As the train passed, there was a glare of light above the cutting
and a driving tumult of smoke; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
eight black oblongs--eight trucks--passed across the dim grey of the
embankment, and were suddenly extinguished one by one in the throat of the
tunnel, which, with the last, seemed to swallow down train, smoke, and
sound in one abrupt gulp.
"This country was all fresh and beautiful once," he said; "and now--it is
Gehenna. Down that way--nothing but pot-banks and chimneys belching fire
and dust into the face of heaven...But what does it matter? An end comes,
an end to all this cruelty..._To-morrow."_ He spoke the last word in
a whisper.
"_To-morrow,"_ she said, speaking in a whisper too, and still staring
out of the window.
"Dear!" he said, putting his hand on hers.
She turned with a start, and their eyes searched one another's. Hers
softened to his gaze. "My dear one!" she said, and then: "It seems so
strange--that you should have come into my life like this--to open--" She
paused.
"To open?" he said.
"All this wonderful world"--she hesitated, and spoke still more softly--
"this world of _love_ to me."
Then suddenly the door clicked and closed. They turned their heads, and he
started violently back. In the shadow of the room stood a great shadowy
figure-silent. They saw the face dimly in the half-light, with
unexpressive dark patches under the pent-house brows. Every muscle in
Raut's body suddenly became tense. When could the door have opened? What
had he heard? Had he heard all? What had he seen? A tumult of questions.
The new-comer's voice came at last, after a pause that seemed
interminable. "Well?" he said.
"I was afraid I had missed you, Horrocks," said the man at the window,
gripping the window-ledge with his hand. His voice was unsteady.
The clumsy figure of Horrocks came forward out of the shadow. He made no
answer to Raut's remark. For a moment he stood above them.
The woman's heart was cold within her. "I told Mr. Raut it was just
possible you might come back," she said in a voice that never quivered.
Horrocks, still silent, sat down abruptly in the chair by her little
work-table. His big hands were clenched; one saw now the fire of his eyes
under the shadow of his brows. He was trying to get his breath. His eyes
went from the woman he had trusted to the friend he had trusted, and then
back to the woman.
By this time and for the moment all three half understood one another.
Yet none dared say a word to ease the pent-up things that choked them.
It was the husband's voice that broke the silence at last.
"You wanted to see me?" he said to Raut.
Raut started as he spoke. "I came to see you," he said, resolved to lie to
the last.
"Yes," said Horrocks.
"You promised," said Raut, "to show me some fine effects of moonlight and
smoke."
"I promised to show you some fine effects of moonlight and smoke,"
repeated Horrocks in a colourless voice.
"And I thought I might catch you to-night before you went down to the
works," proceeded Raut, "and come with you."
There was another pause. Did the man mean to take the thing coolly? Did
he, after all, know? How long had he been in the room? Yet even at the
moment when they heard the door, their attitudes ... Horrocks glanced at
the profile of the woman, shadowy pallid in the half-light. Then he
glanced at Raut, and seemed to recover himself suddenly. "Of course," he
said, "I promised to show you the works under their proper dramatic
conditions. It's odd how I could have forgotten."
"If I am troubling you--" began Raut.
Horrocks started again. A new light had suddenly come into the sultry
gloom of his eyes. "Not in the least." he said.
"Have you been telling Mr. Raut of all these contrasts of flame and shadow
you think so splendid?" said the woman, turning now to her husband for
the first time, her confidence creeping back again, her voice just one
half-note too high--"that dreadful theory of yours that machinery is
beautiful, and everything else in the world ugly. I thought he would not
spare you, Mr. Raut. It's his great theory, his one discovery in art."
"I am slow to make discoveries," said Horrocks grimly, damping her
suddenly. "But what I discover ..." He stopped.
"Well?" she said.
"Nothing;" and suddenly he rose to his feet.
"I promised to show you the works," he said to Raut, and put his big,
clumsy hand on his friend's shoulder. "And you are ready to go?"
"Quite," said Raut, and stood up also.
There was another pause. Each of them peered through the indistinctness of
the dusk at the other two.
Horrocks' hand still rested on Raut's shoulder. Raut half fancied still
that the incident was trivial after all. But Mrs. Horrocks knew her
husband better, knew that grim quiet in his voice, and the confusion in
her mind took a vague shape of physical evil. "Very well," said Horrocks,
and, dropping his hand, turned towards the door.
"My hat?" Raut looked round in the half-light.
"That's my work-basket," said Mrs. Horrocks with a gust of hysterical
laughter. Their hands came together on the back of the chair. "Here it
is!" he said. She had an impulse to warn him in an undertone, but she
could not frame a word. "Don't go!" and "Beware of him!" struggled in her
mind, and the swift moment passed.
"Got it?" said Horrocks, standing with the door half open.
Raut stepped towards him. "Better say goodbye to Mrs. Horrocks," said the
ironmaster, even more grimly quiet in his tone than before.
Raut started and turned. "Good-evening, Mrs. Horrocks," he said, and their
hands touched.
Horrocks held the door open with a ceremonial politeness unusual in him
towards men. Raut went out, and then, after a wordless look at her, her
husband followed. She stood motionless while Raut's light footfall and her
husband's heavy tread, like bass and treble, passed down the passage
together. The front door slammed heavily. She went to the window, moving
slowly, and stood watching, leaning forward. The two men appeared for a
moment at the gateway in the road, passed under the street lamp, and were
hidden by the black masses of the shrubbery. The lamplight fell for a
moment on their faces, showing only unmeaning pale patches, telling
nothing of what she still feared, and doubted, and craved vainly to know.
Then she sank down into a crouching attitude in the big arm-chair, her
eyes-wide open and staring out at the red lights from the furnaces that
flickered in the sky. An hour after she was still there, her attitude
scarcely changed.
The oppressive stillness of the evening weighed heavily upon Raut. They
went side by side down the road in silence, and in silence turned into the
cinder-made byway that presently opened out the prospect of the valley.
A blue haze, half dust, half mist, touched the long valley with mystery.
Beyond were Hanley and Etruria, grey and dark masses, outlined thinly by
the rare golden dots of the street lamps, and here and there a gas-lit
window, or the yellow glare of some late-working factory or crowded
public-house. Out of the masses, clear and slender against the evening
sky, rose a multitude of tall chimneys, many of them reeking, a few
smokeless during a season of "play." Here and there a pallid patch and
ghostly stunted beehive shapes showed the position of a pot-bank or a
wheel, black and sharp against the hot lower sky, marked some colliery
where they raise the iridescent coal of the place. Nearer at hand was the
broad stretch of railway, and half-invisible trains shunted--a steady
puffing and rumbling, with every run a ringing concussion and a rhymthic
series of impacts, and a passage of intermittent puffs of white steam
across the further view. And to the left, between the railway and the
dark mass of the low hill beyond, dominating the whole view, colossal,