by Nigel Dennis
“Are you working?” asked Morgan, amazed by Divver’s fluency.
Divver flushed. “I don’t know that I could say that.” He got up and began to pace again, muttering. “It’s some business, I tell you: the only worthwhile enterprise I’ve seen around here”—and he looked crossly over the tourists’ heads toward the kitchens. “Do I look too dirty?” he asked, stopping suddenly.
“Well, I notice it.”
“That’s what I mean. A man needs a worksuit for this kind of thing.”
Dishevelled, black-eyed, Divver was nonetheless changed into a tower of exuberance. His waiter came hurrying up with a small square hamper, and Divver pressed a tip into his hand so hard that the coin fell on the ground. “Well,” he said to Morgan, tucking the hamper under one arm, “come out if you like and see.” He disappeared through the arch: a moment later Morgan heard a car roar away with the urgency of a fire-engine.
He finished his lunch slowly. His astonishment at the change in Divver, and his own responsibility in the change, was overshadowed by excitement at the idea of meeting the engineer. Shall I be afraid of him? he wondered. Shall I think he is more than I am? And what shall I do if he is kind to me?
As he rose from the table he was struck by another of those absurd, despicable reflections that emerged from nowhere with such casualness: Perhaps I shall become his best friend; he will think the world of me, and Harriet will be left out in the cold. Eventually, I shall even confess my crime against him, and he will like me all the better for my courage in doing so. He may even come to me for advice about some jam he’s got into with Harriet, and there’ll be both brilliance and loyalty in my reply.
*
When the little bus dropped him at the bend in the road where the mines began, a gusty wind had come up, the sky had turned grey with drizzle, and speckles of moisture were jumping over the yellow dust. The twisting mine-road ahead of him passed each of the thirty mines; but it did so only because of years of common usage; no smallholder could have thought of it as a continuous line that exceeded his particular needs. Rough, weedy tracks and paths turned off from it, sometimes nearly carrying it away; but somehow it kept on, leaving tumbledown farmhouses behind at intervals, each house so tightly engaged to its quarry and stamp-battery that the trio made one, broken up only by the restlessness of a few chickens. Puffs of steam burst open above the tree-tops, and Morgan could hear the clang of metal pieces striking together. Most of the mines he passed as he walked hurriedly toward the engineer’s headquarters, were identical: first there was a shallow quarry, in the bottom of which buckets of ore were being wound out of well-shafts with a windlass. Occasionally, a remote, resonant cry floated up from the bottom of the well, and a man on the surface bent low over the hole and cried something back. A few men, who would have looked more at home in a byre, sat in the quarry with their legs spread out, smashing the rocks that came up in the bucket with short-handled hammers; one man was pounding away at a drill, making holes for dynamite. Brown rock-dust clung to the hot faces of the men like a dark face-powder, but in spite of the dust and the sweat, the quarrymen wore black or navy-blue waistcoats over flannel shirts; though they had rolled up their sleeves and wore neither collars nor ties, each shirt was tightly fastened at the throat with a brass collar button, and each man wore a tight-fitting hat: two of them were even in a rural type of derby. Beside one quarry was a signboard:
VISITORS WELCOME
HERZLICHES WILLKOMMEN
Near the board was a shack, surrounded by a bed of zinnias, bearing the letters W.C. in Gothic script, but fitted with an up-to-date penny-in-the-slot door-lock; and not far away, under a tree, a wooden table with a dirty cloth on it and a pasteboard bearing the word LIMONADE.
Behind all this was a row of old-type gold-mills such as Morgan had never dreamed of: three or four thumping, rattling contraptions, each carrying three tall stamps. An old steam-engine turned a master-wheel connected to the mills with a series of bands; when the wheel turned, an iron shoulder appeared under each stamp, hoisted it up a couple of feet by brute force, and then suddenly turned away, leaving the stamp to fall with a crash. Each time a stamp fell, it helped to pulverize a binful of ore; and a stream of water which poured into the bin out of a leaky hose washed the crushed particles through a sieve and out over a long metal tray. The tray was painted with mercury, and any particles of gold that passed over it stuck to the mercury in a tight amalgam, while the useless dirt and water ran on into a ditch, piling up eventually into dried-out hills of white dust. From time to time a man with a pony and cart shovelled up a load of ore from the quarry and dumped it into the wooden containers that fed the bins. Although the sky was cloudy, the silver trays of mercury shone under the running brown water; a windmill’s blades revolved slowly, gently detouring into the changing faces of the damp breeze, its pump hissing; the worn driving belt jumped and smacked when its splices crossed over its own centre; the curved metal shoulders struck up against the stamps with a sound of gongs. Every few minutes the many shoulders would strike and ring in unison, making that perfect, rhythmic, hasty suspense of sound that obtains when all the time-pieces in a jeweller’s shop tick together. Already, the mills held the status of relics, the characteristics of elaborate legend, but Morgan could see everywhere the beginnings of vigorous, up-to-date reconstruction. Here and there, among the old, disused shafts with their careless protections of rotted timber, a new road—flat, hard, unrelated to the weedy tracks—pushed in a straight line toward a point that was still in blueprints; among the scraggly trees, broad spaces were being cleared and levelled: there was everywhere the disruption that is pointless in relation to what it is displacing, and orderly only to the eye that can envisage its complete intention. One pile of sharp stones had been dumped in the very front of a cottage, so that the doorstep was actually touched by a rocky foothill; one of the new roads, cutting toward some point that was still in the engineer’s mind, ran so sharply at a slant between a mill and its dwelling that it appeared to have avoided them purely by the grace of God.
Morgan walked a full mile before he reached an imitation villa, the kind preferred by ex-workmen. In front of it, freshly painted, stood a large, bold sign: TOURISTS ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN.
At the villa’s back door stood a waggon and two horses. Mounted in the forefront of the waggon were two wardrobes as huge as the one he had hidden in. Behind them were piles of furniture whose every void between the legs was stuffed with bags and sacks of domestic small stuff. As Morgan approached, two men were dragging a dusty tarpaulin over the load; the drizzling rain had dulled the horses’s coats, but it was slicking up the tarpaulin so that the waggon glistened like a hearse. Under the back eaves of the hideous villa, huddled against the wall, the remaining furniture stood with the stricken air of objects for whom the outdoors is a ridiculous world: dislocated metal bed-frames, cracked, bulging trunks and cases germane to nothing but decades of dust and half-light in attics, pots and pans drawn by a cord through the handle-holes into one clumsy paddle-wheel, blushing colour-prints of youth and huge roses, blown-up family photographs in wooden frames, buckets and barrels of crockery, mattresses wound up like Swiss rolls with bedding for filling; and here and there the stacks of things that fit into no packer’s categories but may not be left behind, hopelessly shovelled together along with old shoes, hats, and dolls, awaiting a last-minute receptacle.
The front of the villa was undisturbed, save by a theodolite leaning against the lintel of the front door, its spiked legs standing in a bed of marigolds. The door opened, a hand came out, closed on the theodolite’s neck, and drew it in out of the rain.
A burly mechanic stepped out, shaped an empty burlap sack into a hood and walked off into the rain.
His heart beating fast, Morgan wiped his feet and entered the villa.
The engineer had made the parlour his conference-room. The brown rectangles on the dirty wallpaper where pictures had hung were all that remained of family life, and already two walls
of the room had been limewashed into spotless white. On one of them was pinned a twelve-foot map of the entire mine area; against the other stood a row of kitchen chairs, occupied by a dozen miners.
In the centre of the false-parquet floor was a long kitchen table. Behind it, dead-centre, sat the descendant of William Rufus’ cup-bearer, in worksuit and gold spectacles. On his right, discreetly, like a hooded bird perched on his master’s wrist, sat the Polish Ministry’s representative-interpreter. On his left, modestly drawn back some feet from the table, an associate rather than a colleague, sat Divver. He gave Morgan a practical-man’s brusque nod, put his finger to his lips and pointed to an empty chair.
The room was as silent as a chapel. Streeter appeared not even to hear Morgan cross the room. He was bent over a map: opposite him sat the owner of the hand that had come out into the rain, a young surveyor, with the legs of the theodolite now resting between his knees, his arms wrapped comfortably around its middle section, its heavy japanned head with filmy glass eyes lying cosily against his neck and shoulder.
Morgan kept his eyes on the floor; his heart beat faster. He felt in his pocket for cigarettes, but changed his mind when he saw that no one else was smoking. A familiar feeling came over him—of sullen resentment instilled by a close air of respect around a figure of authority.
He did not have to look up to know that Streeter was imposing dead-silence on the room. He also knew it as the silence of a broad stage, empty except for a single figure facing a full house.
He looked up, and saw his rival for the first time.
Streeter’s lips were pursed, his head swayed gently; from time to time he raised his eyebrows high and opened his lips; he slowly toyed with a sharp pencil, and gave a total impression of a man sunk in reflection, advancing with firm steps toward a conclusion at which his audience could only patiently guess. At one point, he left his chair to study the big wall map, and found it necessary, while observing the map, to rub his chin reflectively with two fingers. Back in his chair, he emitted a few satisfied grunts and even hummed a few bars of a tune.
He did this miming in a relaxed, self-assured way, without once looking at anyone. But his audience watched him intently, following the faint sounds, the mysterious grimaces, as though they were clues that could lead to profound discoveries. To this steady, analytical curiosity, Streeter presented an impervious front that might have suggested contempt were it not set upon a face that was as noble and disinterested as a philanthropist’s.
It was not a weak face; it was round and chubby, but well-shaped and strong enough under the mane of white hair to make Morgan’s heart sink.
He lowered his eyes and stared at the engineer’s worksuit. It was blue denim jeans. They were faded and patched, but extremely neat and clean, as in an advertisement displaying an honest foreman whose patches and fadings indicate that he is perfectly equipped to manage coarse objects and rough people, but whose lyric cleanliness reveals him as a man whom neither wife nor nation may ever be ashamed to embrace. But Morgan could see that the jeans were less genuine even than the advertized article. It was as though some previous set, ordered long, long ago from Montgomery Ward, had worn out, and Streeter, with one of those intensely personal surges of patriotic pride that emerge always in connection with trifles, had taken the old suit to an alien tailor, with orders to reproduce it exactly. Then, over the years, the counterfeit costume had been counterfeited again and again, with so large an accumulation of small errors that the result had at last become almost the opposite of the simplicity in which it had originated. Where the long-forgotten original had displayed hard, broad seams with coarse stitching, the current number had the almost invisible joints of a lounge-suit; the metal hooks and eyes, the buttons, looked to be hand-made; and there were additions such as a man might demand for personal reasons—trifles in terms of usage, but enormously satisfying as marks of independent inventiveness—ankle straps that brought the legs trimly to the brink of rugged, custom-made boots, two special pockets that looked special even when the untidy edges of papers and the head of a carpenter’s rule lolled in the opening. So studious a democracy was as refined as the use of “ain’t” by a duchess.
The bottle of hock that Divver had obtained so proudly stood unopened on the window-sill. On the floor beside the engineer’s chair was an empty bottle of common, Polish beer.
Divver was holding a notebook and pencil. Already, he resembled the privileged amateur satellite who has penetrated the outer circle of a distinguished jazzband, who is known to its members by his first name, and whose mixed demeanour of respect and studied carelessness suggests that he has attained to a dignity whose total dependence on its idols makes inevitable that he should cover his subservience with mannerisms of self-assurance. Of all the people in the room, Divver appeared the least impressed by its atmosphere; his legs were stuck far out in the most negligent way, and on his face was a look that was nearly inane in its extreme sophistication. Morgan regarded him first with contempt, then with mild horror at the thought of such vulnerability: a precocious instinct told him that no woman could resist the desire to inflict humiliating punishment on such a man, and no male idol accept without suspicion a homage so clearly based on desperate opportunism that it might at any moment decide to achieve the same, vain gratifications through traitorous betrayal. Morgan looked from Divver to the engineer and back again: when he remembered Harriet’s humiliated appearance, angry jealousy came over him; when he looked at Divver, lounging in his vicarious dignity, the jealousy became revengeful: he stared hard at the engineer’s senatorial head and absurd clothes, and he spitefully revelled in a young man’s triumph at the sight of his elders’ capacity for cheap and pompous glory.
The engineer’s eyes passed back and forth between a small map and a page of figures; he was fitting output to area and noting the results on a pad. But by now his isolated, intense concentration had ceased to provoke curiosity; his audience had reached the point where it had abrogated all desire to think about anything. The men’s faces still hung in masks of respect, but their eyes now had the vapid looks of people who are vaguely recalling childish and inconsequential scenes, dreamily safe in the thought that they will be recalled to mature duties by the one personality who is still grown-up.
Outside, the ragged bushes pulled on their thin, tough roots, the brown rocks and slag-heaps glistened with rainwater; the local mill rattled on as usual, its silver trays sheltered under faded awnings cut from the same cloth as the café umbrellas. Gradually, the outside world faded from sight as a grey mist crept up the inside of the window-panes; it was now a full quarter-hour since Streeter had spoken, and one of the waiting men at last lit a cigarette. Soon the room was filled with thick air, smoke and damp; the men began to cough and shuffle.
The engineer went on working. At one end of the room a miner yawned, a huge yawn framed in jagged yellow teeth and black stubble. In a half-minute the yawn had passed down the row of faces, had come and gone genteelly behind the representative’s white fingers and, skipping the engineer, had reached its last gasp with Morgan. Everyone noticed this, and smiled; but no one laughed or spoke. A few minutes later the room’s fog and seclusion from the rainy world overwhelmed everyone; even Divver’s eyes lost their unnatural nonchalance, his note-book slipped from his fingers, and he slept with the suddenness of a child. The twelve men drooped forward on their chairs; their breathing thickened into snores …
The engineer threw down his pencil with a hard crack. “O.K., Mr. Hovich!” he snapped.
There was a convulsive jumping of limbs; heads shot up straight; the sleepers blinked awake and shook their muzzy heads.
“It seems like everyone decided to fall asleep,” said the engineer. He sniffed disdainfully. “We’d better have that door open, Mr. Hovich.”
He looked slowly down the row of sheepish faces. The representative blushed, and rudely snapped an order to a mechanic, who jumped up clumsily and opened the door. The engineer sighed, and passed his ha
nd over his face, emerging from the gesture weary but resolute. A gust of wet wind whirled through the room, sweeping the cigarette smoke out into the rain. “Much better,” said the engineer. He paused, fingering his pencil, until everyone was quiet but alert, and then said, staring at the man with the theodolite, “Well, we’ll take this surveyor now.”
The surveyor wore rimless spectacles, his face was sharp and pale, his fingers delicate. He gave his report in the manner of a man whose shyness has made him fear his own words: he spoke very precisely, his lips drawing quickly together after each word, like a nibbling rabbit. While he spoke, he clung to the waist of his long instrument. When the interpreter had translated his words, the engineer looked displeased.