Tender Victory

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  He unbolted the door. “You’ll stay away from the mine!” shouted the doctor, aghast. “You’ll stay on the outside of the gates, with the other parsons. That’s your job, not diving down into holes. I’m not going to let—”

  But Johnny was outside, running to the garage. The doctor groaned, and followed as fast as his waddling legs would go. He squeaked to the bright, moonlit night. “Oh, the fool, the fool! He never stops to think. A miner, says he! He’ll be scrambling down into the pit—he never thinks. I’ve got to keep him away.” He yelled to Johnny, “Not your old heap, idiot! I’ve got a siren on my car, and we’ll use that to clear the way! Look at all the fools already pouring out into the street in their hacks, getting in the way of ambulances and fire equipment and doctors! Get in, get in. And turn that siren on, and the extra light. You’re not going near that mine, damn you! Careful of my bag; keep your big feet off it. You took that corner too fast—all right, straightaway. Down that next street, turn left at the corner—you’re not going near that mine!”

  The night air vibrated with the blasts of the frantic sirens calling for help. Houses were lit up; people were on door-steps and stoops, scenting disaster. Voices shouted back and forth; cars backed from driveways. Women began to scream, children were crying with excitement. “Faster, faster,” said the doctor, “but don’t get us killed. Turn that siren on louder. Watch out! That damned fool nearly ran into you. My God! You’re going to stay outside the gates—”

  But Johnny was praying. His mouth moved in supplication.

  “Father, I know all about it,” he prayed silently. “The smoke, the roaring in the earth, the shaking walls, the stench of gas, the terror, the panic of the spirit. But I remember something else, too. I was only a boy, but I remembered to stop to pray, while the men were running and screaming in the darkness, and I remembered what we had been taught, to fall on our hands and knees, to cover our faces—I had to have Thy help to calm me, before I could remember those simple things. And Thou gavest me the power so that I could shout to the men, to encourage them to follow me out, and Thou madest them listen to me, and they followed me, each man crawling with his hand on the back of the man ahead of him. We got out, with Thy help, Father, and we lost only one man who was too terrified to hear and keep his wits. Father, those men down in the mine now—calm them, reassure them, send them help. Preserve their souls; speak to their families.” Johnny drew a deep breath, and while the car careened through the crowded streets and the siren screamed with the deeper and louder voices of the other sirens, he prayed the prayer for the dead.

  “Down there, now,” squawked the doctor, pointing. “Watch out for those ambulances! Hell, why don’t the police keep the mobs back? God damn the nosy bastards! That’s right, Jack!” he shouted to a policeman who was using his club to restrain the curious throngs and drive them back. “Crack their heads open!”

  Now the air was full of the scent of the first explosion. “Swing around, man!” cried Dr. McManus, “there, behind that wire fence. We’ve got to stop there. Why don’t those women and kids stop yelling?”

  “Their husbands and fathers are down there,” said Johnny grimly. He pulled up the car behind a swarm of other cars, flung open the door, and ran to the fence and its locked and guarded gates. This was a scene out of hell, he thought. Floodlights were trained brilliantly down the shaft. Puffs of smoke belched from the shaft, but Johnny, sniffing strongly, could smell no more gas. So there was still time to get out the men—if luck held. All around him was the confused roaring of human sound, the shrieks of praying and weeping women, the howling of the sirens, the hoarse rushing and retreating of men’s voices, the ringing of bells, the threats of the police, and some hissing sound. Ambulances were drawn up near the gates; only hospital attendants were permitted inside near the shaft. The side glare of the floodlights showed the jostling and jumbled faces of men and women peering through the strong chain-wire fence, the tearful, open-mouthed faces, the smeared, wet faces of children. “Here comes the elevator again!” a man cried. “Look, they got two more!”

  Johnny struggled to the fence. The elevator had risen from the shaft and rescuers, in masks, were dragging two unconscious miners out. Young interns, doctors, including Dr. McManus, were bending over the men. Now the white stretchers were out, the men lifted upon them, carried to the police-guarded ambulances, and the ambulances bellowed away in the darkness to a hospital. Johnny looked about him desperately for a calm face. Men, women, and children were pushing about him; he was pressed almost immovably against the fence. He saw the glittering eyes, the gaping mouths emitting prayers and cries. He shouted, “You’re not doing any good! You’re just making things worse by screaming! For God’s sake, move back, let me out!”

  But he had to fight his way out of the mass of hysterical humanity. He found a cleared place, ringed about by the curious. In that one small circle he saw Father Krupszyk kneeling beside a stretcher, and he knew that this poor miner, at least, was beyond help.

  The priest’s broad face was running with sweat, and his eyes with tears. Yet his voice was very quiet; his head was bent over the miner’s bloody and almost featureless face. And from that ragged and bleeding hole, smeared with soot, came a faint whispering. Johnny came closer to his friend and put his hand on his shoulder, bending, but the priest did not remove his confessional ear from the miner’s dying face. “And now,” murmured the priest, “make a good Act of Contrition.”

  It was darker here, and quieter, and a woman was quietly sobbing; she had come to kneel beside her dying husband, and her two little children knelt with her. Johnny could hear that bubbling whisper; he saw, now, that the miner’s torn clothing was one tattered mass of red rags.

  “I am very sorry that I have offended Thee,” whispered the miner, struggling to live for a few moments longer for the sake of his soul. “Thou art so good—do Thou have mercy on me—I have sinned against heaven and before Thee—unworthy to be called Thy child—have mercy, Lord have mercy—sorry—”

  His battered chest heaved, the priest made the sign of the cross, and the man’s head rolled aside, and his dead eyes stared sightlessly at his wife and children. The priest murmured, crossed himself, murmured again, and the miner’s family broke into the sad and wordless dirge for the dead. The woman laid her head against her husband’s shoulder, and the priest turned to her comfortingly. Johnny moved back, weeping. Act of Contrition. The miner had made his confession, had been contrite, had not gone alone into the darkness, without comfort, without a sustaining hand. It was true that at the very end a man was alone with his God, but it was good that he could be led into the Presence by a loving hand, and with the words of sincere contrition on his lips.

  He felt someone touch him, and it was Father Krupszyk. Johnny stammered incoherently, through a thick throat, “I’m a miner; I’ve got to go down there. I know what to do, I’m helpless this way, it’s wonderful if you know how to be contrite at the last minute, but no one teaches—I wish, I wish—I’ve got to go down there!”

  The priest pressed his shoulder. Johnny turned aside desperately. Now, through the fence, he could see Mr. Dowdy’s ghastly face, and he called to him, and Mr. Dowdy turned and came to the fence. “How many?” asked Johnny. Mr. Dowdy wiped his gritty face, and Johnny remembered that he too was dying. The other man said simply, “There were sixty down there. Just one explosion so far. There’ll be others. They’ve got out all but twelve. There’s the elevator going down again, Mr. Fletcher. There’s going to be another explosion soon; you can feel it coming under your feet.”

  Johnny could feel it; he clung to the gate. The elevator was rising again. Someone shouted, “Four!” Women screamed with joy; the press against the fence almost bent it. The rescuers, grotesque in their masks, were pulling the men from the elevator; an ambulance howled up, the doctors were quickly examining the men, then came the stretchers, the wheeling ambulance, and then another.

  “Only two have died so far, Mr. Fletcher,” said a shy voice ne
ar Johnny, and he turned to see the old face of a minister he knew slightly. “This is terrible, isn’t it, but they’ve gotten nearly everybody out, and there goes the elevator again, so there’s a chance for the rest.”

  “I’m a miner,” said Johnny dazedly. “They don’t understand. I’m a miner. I’ve got to go down there with them!”

  The minister stared at him, coughed, moved back a step. Johnny saw Father Krupszyk looking at him strangely, with an even stranger smile. Johnny caught the locked gate in his hands and shook it savagely. Mr. Dowdy came closer to him. “We’ll get them out, Mr. Fletcher,” he said uncertainly, staring at Johnny’s distracted face.

  “You don’t understand!” said Johnny. “There’s still eight down there! I’m a miner. Open the gate,” he implored. “I can help. There’ll be another explosion almost any minute, and there won’t be time—”

  “Yes, yes,” said Mr. Dowdy in a feeble voice. “I understand. Look, Mr. Fletcher, the elevator’s coming up again. Look! They’ve got five men piled on it! Only three left now, only three—” He turned from Johnny and went to the elevator, where the doctors were thronged. He talked to the masked rescuers, then suddenly flung out his hands in despair.

  “What is it?” cried Johnny. “What is it?” The rescuers looked only at Mr. Dowdy, and shook their heads. Mr. Dowdy wiped his face with a stained handkerchief and turned away, bent and staggering. “What is it?” cried Johnny again.

  Mr. Dowdy started. “Mr. Fletcher,” he said dully, “there’re three down there, just three. Far back. We can’t send down these men again; there’s another explosion coming almost immediately—if they go down they’ll just be killed themselves.”

  If he had bellowed the words the wives of the three miners could not have heard them clearer. They burst into loud and anguished wailing. They beat on the fence with their clenched fists. Their children wailed with them. Their cries rose higher, above the sirens, when they saw the rescuers remove their masks.

  Johnny, distraught, looked from the women and the children, at the mobs and masses of humanity surging against the fences, at the unbearable brilliance of the searchlights, at the gleaming ambulances, police, and then at the shaft beyond the fence. The rescuers themselves were receiving ministrations from the doctors, for they were exhausted. Mr. Dowdy, like a blind man, was stumbling about, shaking his head over and over, wringing his hands, a lost and forgotten soul. Interns rushed in through a briefly opened gate to take up the last five men rescued, who had been laid upon the ground; their stretchers were blobs of whiteness under the searchlights. They moved so fast that they almost tumbled the unconscious miners on the stretchers, for the word had been given for everyone to leave the aperture of the shaft. Johnny, groaning between his teeth, shook the strong fence impotently. Someone took his arm, spoke in concern, and he turned almost furiously on the speaker.

  “John Kanty, I can save those men!” he exclaimed. “I’m a miner! Why won’t anyone believe me? I spent years, every summer and three straight years—God help me. John Kanty, try to help me!”

  A stretcher was coming out. Johnny flung off the priest’s restraining hand, seized intervening shoulders and arms and thrust them aside, and forced a passage to the gate. Before anyone could stop him he was inside the enclosure, jostling against the doctors who were leaving precipitately. All at once it seemed to him, in the press, that every man in the vicinity stood between him and the shaft. Someone tore at his clerical coat, and Dr. McManus’s aghast face, enlarged in that moment before Johnny to the dimensions and expression of a gargoyle’s face, bobbed up before him. “Where’re you going, damn you?” the doctor squealed as he clutched again at Johnny. “Out of your mind? It’s going to explode—”

  Johnny swept him out of his way. He bounded to the shaft and the waiting elevator. The puffs of smoke from below were coming in billows now. One of the rescuers, gaping, stood nearby, his mask and his flashlight in his hand. “Give me!” said Johnny, and seized the mask. But he did not know how to put it on; it fumbled out of his hands and fell to the ground. He snatched the flashlight from the stunned miner and jumped into the elevator.

  “Now, God,” he said aloud, “show me how to operate this. It’s been years.”

  A great roaring cry, followed by a greater silence, fell over the people as the cones of light focused on Johnny as he climbed into the elevator. He tugged at ropes frantically. The elevator swayed, began to drop in a sluggish manner. Then out of the awful silence he heard a voice calling to him. “Johnny! Johnny! Come back, come back!” And like an echo voices took up the cry: “It’s the minister! It’s the minister! It’s Mr. Fletcher!”

  His head was hardly above ground now, but he turned it and looked full into Barry Lowell’s face, straining against the fence. And there was the priest, his hands clasped in prayer, and Dr. McManus. Johnny waved. “I’ll be back!” he shouted triumphantly. “Just stand by!”

  The ropes slipped through Johnny’s hands, burning them, for they dropped him down the black shaft too swiftly for his control. The elevators he had known had not been as large as this; the floor dipped from side to side and bumped against the sides of the shaft, and he was thrown from side to side. He looked up, and the top of the shaft was a rough rectangle of blazing light which followed him. He saw a few bobbing heads, the heads of dolls. The flashlight, which he had thrust into his pocket, fell, and he bent and caught it just in time. The smoke, streaming upward, began to choke him. He remembered what to do; he tore off his coat, leaving the ropes for a moment, and wrapped it about his head and crouched down on the floor of the elevator. All at once the floor hit the bottom of the shaft, tilted, righted itself, and in so doing knocked his head against the wall so that his ears rang.

  He climbed dizzily out of the elevator. “Let me remember just what to do, Father,” he murmured in the depths of his coat. “Let me remember nothing except that I’m a miner.”

  He had left only a slit for his eyes, but they began to smart fiercely, and he was coughing in paroxysms. Then, as if by instinct, his feet felt for the narrow rails and found them; they were hot through the leather. Someone had turned a searchlight far down into the shaft, and it dazzled him. He held the flashlight and, holding to the rails with his feet, ran into the mine, going down a rough slope.

  He was surrounded by blackly-gleaming and faceted walls of sifting coal. His flashlight danced on the facets, and they glimmered duskily. Johnny, the miner, was remembering. He moved faster and faster, going down and down; sometimes at intervals he pulled a fold of his coat away from his face and shouted. Only echoes answered him. He stumbled, fell sideways, returned to the rails. The heat was becoming intolerable, and the stench of the first explosion stung his lungs. He crouched almost on his heels and shuffled along rapidly, breathing as little as possible. This he remembered. Then he was on his knees, crawling, the stones and little bits of coal tearing through the cloth of his trousers to his flesh.

  He could feel the earth trembling under him, sharper and sharper. Soon, there would be another explosion. Soon the whole mine would collapse. Prayer was a bright centric of flame in his mind. He would rescue those men; he would not die. God would preserve him. He could hear coal falling all about him; once a heavy chunk struck his shoulders. Somewhere in this poisonous black pit three men were about to perish. He did not count himself.

  Two of the miners, apparently awakening out of consciousness of the imminence of their awful plight, had reached the rails after the last rescuers had left the mine. Johnny was upon them before he realized it. He cried aloud in his joy. Their black hands seized him; their black faces gibbered at him. His voice came in a muffled blur from the depths of his coat. “Put your coats over your faces! Keep your heads down! Crawl along the rails; keep close together, your hands on each other. Don’t let go. Hurry, hurry!”

  They were paralyzed with terror, and could not move. He struck one on the shoulder with his flashlight. “Go on, go on!” he shouted. “There, turn around! Go on! That way!
Don’t leave the rails! Hold your breath as much as possible!” He pushed and shoved them into position. One miner whimpered, “We’re going to be killed.” “No!” said Johnny savagely, “not if you keep your heads. Move, move! There, that’s right, go on ahead, stay with the rails. You’ll find the shaft. I’ve got to get the other man.”

  They were shapeless, coughing, black-shrouded animals in the feeble flare of his flashlight; docilely, still almost semiconscious, they obeyed him. They began to crawl between the rails, one man clutching the coat of the man ahead of him. Johnny sent the beam of his light with them as long as he dared. Then he called encouragingly, “Just keep on; the elevator’s there, they’ll pull you up. Now I’ll get the last man.”

  The tremors in the earth made the whole mine rumble. Johnny got to his feet, not feeling the protest of his own bleeding flesh. This was no longer a time for crawling, so he bent double and began to run deeper into the mine. Smoke was thickening; the rumbling became ominous, the rails swayed under Johnny’s stumbling feet. He turned the sword of his light into every smoking crevice; a beam cracked, and Johnny instinctively jumped aside as the heavy wood fell, barely missing him. The floor was full of ruts and cracks, and once he turned his ankle so that he cried out. Now there was a sickening smell of fire and gas.

  “Dear Father,” he prayed aloud, behind the shelter of his coat, “let me find him. Lead me to him. He’s got a wife and children up there.”

  His ear, remembering, warned him just before a ponderous slide of coal fell to the rails. He watched it with his light; it smoldered. Then, standing upright, holding his breath, he leaped upon the pile lightly, jumped to the other side. He wound his coat closer about his face.

  Smoking, crackling silence. He called again and again. His light appeared to be growing more feeble, and for the first time he was conscious of the straining of his lungs, the laboring of his heart, the exhaustion of his muscles, the cramping of his injured legs. “Please,” he pleaded, “let me find him.” A horrible nausea was rising in him, and his flashlight seemed to dance insanely before his eyes. He was streaming with sweat.