The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories
inky-black, and crowned with smoke and fitful flames, stood the great
cylinders of the Jeddah Company Blast Furnaces, the central edifices of
the big ironworks of which Horrocks was the manager. They stood heavy and
threatening, full of an incessant turmoil of flames and seething molten
iron, and about the feet of them rattled the rolling-mills, and the
steam-hammer beat heavily and splashed the white iron sparks hither and
thither. Even as they looked, a truckful of fuel was shot into one of the
giants, and the red flames gleamed out, and a confusion of smoke and black
dust came boiling upwards towards the sky.
"Certainly you get some colour with your furnaces," said Raut, breaking a
silence that had become apprehensive.
Horrocks grunted. He stood with his hands in his pockets, frowning down at
the dim steaming railway and the busy ironworks beyond, frowning as if he
were thinking out some knotty problem.
Raut glanced at him and away again. "At present your moonlight effect is
hardly ripe," he continued, looking upward; "the moon is still smothered
by the vestiges of daylight."
Horrocks stared at him with the expression of a man who has suddenly
awakened. "Vestiges of daylight? ... Of course, of course." He too looked
up at the moon, pale still in the midsummer sky. "Come along," he said
suddenly, and gripping Raut's arm in his hand, made a move towards the
path that dropped from them to the railway.
Raut hung back. Their eyes met and saw a thousand things in a moment that
their lips came near to say. Horrocks's hand tightened and then relaxed.
He let go, and before Raut was aware of it, they were arm in arm, and
walking, one unwillingly enough, down the path.
"You see the fine effect of the railway signals towards Burslem," said
Horrocks, suddenly breaking into loquacity, striding fast and tightening
the grip of his elbow the while--"little green lights and red and white
lights, all against the haze. You have an eye for effect, Raut. It's fine.
And look at those furnaces of mine, how they rise upon us as we come down
the hill. That to the right is my pet--seventy feet of him. I packed him
myself, and he's boiled away cheerfully with iron in his guts for five
long years. I've a particular fancy for _him_. That line of red
there--a lovely bit of warm orange you'd call it, Raut--that's the
puddlers' furnaces, and there, in the hot light, three black figures--did
you see the white splash of the steam-hammer then?--that's the rolling
mills. Come along! Clang, clatter, how it goes rattling across the floor!
Sheet tin, Raut,--amazing stuff. Glass mirrors are not in it when that
stuff comes from the mill. And, squelch! there goes the hammer again. Come
along!"
He had to stop talking to catch at his breath. His arm twisted into Raut's
with benumbing tightness. He had come striding down the black path towards
the railway as though he was possessed. Raut had not spoken a word, had
simply hung back against Horrocks's pull with all his strength.
"I say," he said now, laughing nervously, but with an undertone of snarl
in his voice, "why on earth are you nipping my arm off, Horrocks, and
dragging me along like this?"
At length Horrocks released him. His manner changed again. "Nipping your
arm off?" he said. "Sorry. But it's you taught me the trick of walking
in that friendly way."
"You haven't learnt the refinements of it yet then," said Raut, laughing
artificially again. "By Jove! I'm black and blue." Horrocks offered no
apology. They stood now near the bottom of the hill, close to the fence
that bordered the railway. The ironworks had grown larger and spread out
with their approach. They looked up to the blast furnaces now instead of
down; the further view of Etruria and Hanley had dropped out of sight with
their descent. Before them, by the stile, rose a notice-board, bearing,
still dimly visible, the words, "BEWARE OF THE TRAINS," half hidden by
splashes of coaly mud.
"Fine effects," said Horrocks, waving his arm. "Here comes a train. The
puffs of smoke, the orange glare, the round eye of light in front of it,
the melodious rattle. Fine effects! But these furnaces of mine used to be
finer, before we shoved cones in their throats, and saved the gas."
"How?" said Raut. "Cones?"
"Cones, my man, cones. I'll show you one nearer. The flames used to flare
out of the open throats, great--what is it?--pillars of cloud by day, red
and black smoke, and pillars of fire by night. Now we run it off--in
pipes, and burn it to heat the blast, and the top is shut by a cone.
You'll be interested in that cone."
"But every now and then," said Raut, "you get a burst of fire and smoke up
there."
"The cone's not fixed, it's hung by a chain from a lever, and balanced by
an equipoise. You shall see it nearer. Else, of course, there'd be no way
of getting fuel into the thing. Every now and then the cone dips, and out
comes the flare."
"I see," said Raut. He looked over his shoulder. "The moon gets brighter,"
he said.
"Come along," said Horrocks abruptly, gripping his shoulder again, and
moving him suddenly towards the railway crossing. And then came one of
those swift incidents, vivid, but so rapid that they leave one doubtful
and reeling. Half-way across, Horrocks's hand suddenly clenched upon him
like a vice, and swung him backward and through a half-turn, so that he
looked up the line. And there a chain of lamp-lit carriage windows
telescoped swiftly as it came towards them, and the red and yellow lights
of an engine grew larger and larger, rushing down upon them. As he grasped
what this meant, he turned his face to Horrocks, and pushed with all his
strength against the arm that held him back between the rails. The
struggle did not last a moment. Just as certain as it was that Horrocks
held him there, so certain was it that he had been violently lugged out of
danger.
"Out of the way," said Horrocks with a gasp, as the train came rattling
by, and they stood panting by the gate into the ironworks.
"I did not see it coming," said Raut, still, even in spite of his own
apprehensions, trying to keep up an appearance of ordinary intercourse.
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. "Eigh?" 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 immense. You've never seen it? Fancy that! You've spent too
many of your evenings philandering up in Newcastle there. I tell you, for
real florid quality----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 tuyères 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 tuyères, 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 thing.
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, half-way 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 rain-water boiling off the trucks. And