The Quality of Mercy

16



The flammable gas known to the miners as firedamp was colorless and odorless and it could gather anywhere below the ground, in newly opened workings or in old hollows where work had been abandoned. As the shafts got deeper and the leakage of water more controlled, the currents of air that the water had caused were much reduced, and the gas at the deeper levels became more frequent. It could lurk undetected for long periods and could be exploded without warning by the flame of a candle, carrying death and destruction throughout the mine.

Four hours into his work at the coal face, his stint of coal only half hewed out, James Bordon saw a pale, bluish cap appear at the tip of his candle, a kind of ghost flame that he knew, that he had seen before. By accustomed practice this had to be reported immediately to someone in authority. Shielding the flame with his hand, he made his way back along the gallery, found the assistant overman tallying the corves at the pit bottom and told him he suspected that firedamp had gathered in the area where he was working. The men would not be cleared from the workings until the presence of gas was definitely established. Bordon offered to do the testing himself, and this was agreed. He asked for a knife to trim the wick of his candle, and one was found for him. He scraped off the layers of semiliquid sheep fat from the top of the candle, snuffed the wick short and carefully cleaned away the fiery particles that had collected on it. When he was satisfied that the flame was as pure as possible, he returned to the section of the face where he had been working, accompanied by the overman, whose duty this was, having once been informed of the danger.

Holding the candle between the fingers and thumb of his right hand, Bordon made a screen with the palm of his left, so that nothing but the spire of the flame could be seen. The gas was known to be lighter than air, and he began close to the floor, raising the flame, and his screening hand, very slowly. At a height of five feet or so the flame took on a slight tinge of bluish gray, shooting up from the peak of the spire and ending in a fine point of deeper blue that was neither flame nor air. This, as the candle was raised slightly higher, increased in size and deepened in color. It was an infallible sign: they were no more than two feet from the firing point, and both men knew it. They retreated to the pit bottom and the overman rang the bell that was kept there as an emergency signal for the men to return to the surface. There were a dozen men and boys working in this section of the mine; they were checked by name as they came out from the workings and were winched up to the surface.

So it was that these men returned to the village before midday, an event of rare occurrence. Percy Bordon had no notion of it and did not see them come, engrossed as he was in a game of marbles with his best friend, Billy Scotland. These two had known each other since the toddling stage and were bound by their shared knowledge that they were only weeks away from the first step toward manhood and the dignity of wage earners.

In spite of this friendship, there was very keen competition between them when it came to marbles. This was so even when the winner stood to gain only the small and common marbles called pot alleys, made of baked clay and stained in dull colors. But today it was keener than ever, because in a spirit of mutual challenge and bravado they had agreed to stake a glass alley, larger, much more beautiful, with a blaze of color at the heart of it, red or blue or yellow. Whoever won would dispossess the other, a sore loss as they were rare and greatly prized.

“Cow-cow-diddio, there’s rings round it,” Percy chanted as his friend took aim. It was a magic formula designed to put Billy off his stroke and make him miss. Whoever got his alley into the small and shallow scrape of ground known as the mott had the right to shoot it between forefinger and thumb and strike, if his aim was good, that of his adversary. This mott-and-strike, if repeated three times, decided the winner. Billy was ahead by two to one, and Percy was seriously worried.

The game was played on the waste ground adjoining the back lanes of the village, and for this reason neither of the boys was aware of the men’s return until they heard the voices from the front of the houses. Billy had so far failed to make the winning stroke and Percy had caught up, so they were two games each. However, now that the issue was so much on a knife edge and could go either way, both of them were regretting the reckless challenge of earlier. It seemed much preferable not to risk their glass alleys after all. And the voices of the returning miners came at just the right moment, providing grounds for curiosity and an honorable reason for abandoning the game.

The two made their way to the lane that ran past the front of the cottages. There they found the older miners sitting together in the yard of the alehouse—it had been agreed that this break from custom warranted a jar or two. It made no difference whether or not they had the money to pay; many of the men were in permanent debt to the landlord and had their wages docked every week, on pain of being barred from the tavern if they defaulted. The yard was bordered by a low wall, and the two boys sat with their backs against this, invisible from the yard but still within earshot.

“They will have to get the firemen in,” the overman, whose name was Campbell, said. “I cannot say I envy the lads that job.”

There were six firemen employed in the colliery, all of them below the age of thirty. The one on duty in the section of the mine where firedamp was found would soak his clothes in water and crawl along the workway with a lighted candle attached to a long pole held out before him until he arrived at the concentration of gas. When the explosion came he would fling himself facedown against the ground. Fortune assisting, he would escape the rush of flame that shot along the roof over his head. For this he received a daily wage of five shillings, which put him among the highest-paid workers, not only in the colliery but in the country as a whole.

“Aye,” said another man, “the money is good, but naybody would do it with a family to think of. The wife would never know if tha’d come back with a whole skin.”

“It is all a question of weighing things up.” Arbiter Hill was one of those who had come out of the pit, and he was at his usual game of clarifying the issues and trying to control everybody. “On the one hand we have a desire for betterment of the finances, on the other hand we have the risk of serious hurt by fire, a risk accepted freely by agreement with the manage. That is the issue lying before us. Now lads, box on.”

Bordon, always irritated by Hill’s habit of laying down the law and telling other people the way they should think about things, said, “We can all see why they do it, there is nay mystery in that. Does tha think them fellers sit around and balance it all out? So long as we have nay light to work by but a bare flame, lads will gan on gettin’ the skin burned off their backs.”

“It is a matter of luck,” Campbell said. “Do you mind when them six men went down to repair a wall that was fallen in? About eight years now, one of them shafts with a long workway, longer than is usual nowadays.”

“Aye, sinkin’ a new shaft is cheaper than roofin’ a long gallery, so they say in the manage,” another man said.

“Well, this one ran underground for a good three hundred yards, mebbe more, an’ they had built the wall to go from the shaft bottom nearly as far as the end, rig ht down the middle, to shift the air down one side and back down the other. No one had been working the coal there for six months or so, an’ the firedamp had gathered, unbeknown to anyone. They sent these six fellers down to put the wall right, and they hadn’t been at it long before the candle flames exploded the gas an’ there was a great flow of fire from where they were working, back down the tunnel toward the shaft bottom. They started crawling on hands and knees, hoping the fire would pass over them, but they never got back, they were frazzled one after the other as the fire caught up with them, burned to a cinder in no time, all except one, name of Harry Matthews. They had to fetch him up, he had lost his senses an’ that was the saving of him, he fell flat on the ground and the greater part of the fire went over him. He was badly scorched, but they got him out alive. That’s what I mean, see, it is a matter of luck.”

“What became of Matthews?”

“He never went back down. He was scarred by the fire, but that wasn’t the reason. He never got over the fear of it, an’ the thought of what had happened to his mates. The family moved away to Castle Eden. I’ve heard since that Harry is fit for nothing.”

“Well,” Bordon said, “he was luckier than the other lads, but that’s about all tha can say.”

“Putting the matter in a nutshell,” Arbiter Hill said, “and weighing up the pros and cons of it, on the one hand you have the state of being overtook by fire, on the other hand you have the state of being a human wreck.”

“Water can be a worse enemy than fire sometimes.”

This had come from an elderly man known to all as Bushy, who had worked underground for almost fifty years and whose face was darkly veined with coal dust.

“A first went down the mine when a was six years old,” he said. “Before any of you lads was born. A Tyneside colliery it was, near Jesmond. There was an old pit nearby that was fallen out of use, but there was coal left standin’ in the pillars holdin’ up the roof. They went down to get this an’ they were workin’ in a dyke between two galleries when the water burst through from the old workin’s, an’ they were cut off, seventy-seven men an’ boys. It was deep down, they didna have pumps that could deal with that much water, an’ they still don’t. It took eight months to dry out the pit. When they got down to them, they found them all starved to death. They had eaten the pit ponies, they had eaten their candles, they had eaten the bark of the roof props. They had lingered an’ died in the dark. The lads that found them said that some had died only recent.”

In the silence that followed upon this grisly story, Percy and Billy, still behind the wall, looked at each other with wide eyes. Now, more strongly than ever before, Percy was tempted to ask his friend if he too felt fear at going down the pit—fear and pride mixed, he would make a point of saying. The imagined hiss and burst of flame, the crawling, doomed men, the terrible washing and slapping of the water, like laughing, while the men and boys, some not much older than themselves, were slowly dying in the dark—all this seemed to Percy the doing of the great beast that lived in the pit, whose breathings and thrashings carried across the fields and accompanied his days. Did Billy feel the same? It would have been a comfort to him to know that he was not alone in these feelings, that his best friend shared them. But as always, another kind of fear kept him silent. Supposing Billy professed not to know what he was talking about, supposing Billy declared himself to be counting the days to starting down the mine? Even if it were not true, he, Percy, would have shown himself up as cowardly, and that would be worse—much worse—than losing his glass alley.