Hungry Hill (57 page)

“My father does not write to me,” he said, “but I think it’s pretty obvious why he sold them.”

“He had the large price for them, I’ll be bound,” said Donovan, nudging his companion. “He won’t suffer from the fall in price, who-ever else does.”

“That’s what they call a sound business sense, Jim, in financial circles,” said Hal, driving away.

The men stared after him, muttering amongst themselves.

They did not believe a word he told them, of course, thought Hal. They imagined that as the son of the original owner he must know much more than he chose to say. Old Griffiths began to look preoccupied and worried.

On the twenty-fourth of the month the manager went to Slane, and sent word back by the boy who drove him that business would keep him in the city for two or three days. In the harbour at Doonhaven one of the ships belonging to the company was due to sail with her cargo for Bronsea. Hal had occasion to go on board and give some instructions to the skipper. He knew the man well, he had been master of the vessel since his grandfather’s day, “Is it true, sir, what they were telling me in Bronsea before I left?” asked the skipper.

“What’s that, Captain Davis?” said Hal.

“Why, that the Lucy-Ann is the last ship to carry tin back to Bronsea?”

Hal put down the glass of rum that the skipper had poured out for him.

“I think they were pulling your leg in Bronsea,” he said quietly.

“I don’t know, sir; it wasn’t just idle dock-yard chatter. It was one of the agents from the smelting works. “Next load will be your last, Davis,” he said to me. “The Doonhaven mines are going to close down.” I haven’t heard a word of it this end. The talk here is all for another change of owners again, and a fortune for every man-jack in the place.”

“The truth is probably somewhere between the two,” said Hal.

“I’ve been on this trade for fifty years,” said the skipper. “Came first as a youngster aboard my father’s ship the Henrietta, as a lad of twelve.

I can remember your great-grandfather-old Copper John, they used to call him-with his shovel hat and his cudgel stick, coming down here to the harbour to inspect the cargo. No Plimsol mark for him. Down to the scuppers with the copper, and the decks awash, and off to Bronsea on the tide, fair wind or foul. Well, that’s a long time back now. It will seem strange to come no more to Mundy Bay of an evening, and see the lights of the garrison on Doon Island winking at me across the water.”

“Let’s try some more of your excellent rum,” smiled Hal, “and drink to the past. It never does to think about the future.”

Next morning when he drove up to the mine he found the road blocked with men, all standing about talking excitedly, women and children amongst them. Some of the men were grinning, and shouting jokes one to the other, the remainder looked bewildered, and were going from group to group gesticulating, asking questions.

The dressing-shed doors were wide open, no one was at work inside them. One of the firemen leant from the boiler-house, a pipe in his mouth. The biggest crowd was gathered round the shaft, where the shift below had just come above ground, and was being seized upon by the surface-workers.

“What about that three-shilling rise?” yelled someone, and an answering roar came from the crowd of men.

“What’s happened?” said Hal, to a group of men gathered at the counting-house door.

“Work’s suspended,” said one. “Look at the notice there on the door. We’re all to be paid off… . We don’t any of us understand. What’s wrong, Mr. Brodrick? There’s plenty of stuff below ground.”

Hal did not answer. He went into the counting-house. Mr. Griffiths was standing in the middle of the room. He had not taken off his coat or his hat. He was surrounded by a little group of skilled workers and engineers, who were plying him with questions. His face was white and drawn.

“It’s no use asking me,” he said. “I can’t do anything. I have my orders, just like the rest of you.

I shall draw my salary today for the last time. It’s not my fault, it’s not anyone’s fault. The notices came through to the offices in Slane, and were handed on to me. What machinery there is has been bought by a firm in Slane, and will be sold as scrap, I suppose. I tell you I don’t know.”

“What about the stuff in the lodes,” asked one of the men, “where we’ve been working? There’s pounds of it there, not yet brought to the surface.”

“It will have to stay,” said the manager, “the company aren’t paying for any more work. That’s what was told me in Slane. Every man employed here is to be paid off today. If the firm who have bought up the machinery care to employ any of you in the clearance, no doubt they will do so. My orders don’t give me any authority. I tell you it’s nobody’s fault.

You must blame the fall in the price of tin, that’s all.”

He withdrew into the inner room. Hal followed him, and found him standing before the desk, turning over papers and documents in a hopeless, resigned fashion.

“What can I do?” he said to Hal. “It’s almost as big a shock to me as it is to them. It’s true I’ve put by, my wife is a careful manager, and we’ve got a small property in the north where we can go and retire. But I didn’t expect it so suddenly. And look at all the clearing that has to be done, files going back seventy-five years, all to be checked and sorted, some of them burnt, the rest taken into Slane. But it’s the men, and the women and children, who are going to suffer, Mr. Brodrick.

They don’t put aside for a rainy day. And they’ve been spending more freely of late, ever since they got that rise of pay. If it had come gradually they might have understood, but coming suddenly as it has done, they’re going to take it hard.” .

They were grim hours that followed, when Hal, for the last time, sat beside Mr. Griffiths in the counting-house and gave the men their pay. The tramp of feet had never sounded so ominous, so heavy, and each man as he stepped forward to receive his money asked the same question. “Why had it happened?”

“What did they close the mine for, when the stuff was as rich as ever underground?” Some were bewildered, some truculent and angry, one or two used threats. “We’ve been cheated,” said one of them, “induced to stay and lost our chances elsewhere. I’ve a son in South Africa, wanted me to join him two months back, in the mines out there, and I refused. Now it’s too late. What am I going to do? Sit in this country and starve?”

“I’m very sorry,” said the manager wearily, for the hundredth time. “I can’t do anything. Blame the price of tin.”

The tramp of feet, the tired, angry faces of men and women-they never stopped coming, one after the other, through the counting-house door.

“The owners don’t lose by it,” said some man.

“They make their pile and retire in comfort. It’s we that have to pay for it.”

“True for you,” said Jim Donovan, who stood behind him, looking at Hal as he received his money.

“Here’s Mr. Brodrick, son of the last owner; he’ll not be parting with his shirt, will you, Mr.

Brodrick? Sure, you can go and live across the water if you have the mind.” He tramped past, sullen and resentful, his usual impudent, cheerful face set in hard lines of anger and disappointment.

They did not understand, once they had been paid, that this was the end, and there was no more to do. They continued to stand about the shafts and the boiler-houses and the dressing-sheds, staring stupidly at the half-loaded trolleys and trucks.

“The waste of it,” was heard on every side. “It doesn’t make sense. There’s something wrong somewhere.

There’s a mistake been made.”

But there was no mistake. The mines on Hungry Hill had ceased to work. The fires went out at last, and the smokeless stacks lifted black faces to the sky. The whine and whirl of machinery were still. A queer silence seemed to fall upon the place, broken only by the restless walking up and down of the bewildered men, who would not disperse. In the counting-house the papers were filed and packed away in bags and boxes. Hal could scarcely see; he had worked up to ten o’clock every evening now for five days. Wherever he went and wherever he walked he would find one of the miners standing idle by the road, that same dazed, resentful look upon his face as Jim Donovan had worn. The women called to one another in shrill voices from their cottages. The children, free and excited, chased each other about the empty dressing-sheds, or made castles in the slack-heaps that had not been cleared away. No one stopped them. They could do as they liked. There was, no order any more, no supervision. Four days, five days, six days, and the work of clearing the files and accounts was almost done.

The men had begun to drift away, to walk down in bands to the village, coming back drunk and singing from the public-houses. The mine began to wear a deserted air. The door of the engine-house swung backwards and forwards on a broken hinge.

“Desolation reigns supreme,” Hal said to Jinny. “I never want to see the mines again. Why the devil didn’t I leave when my father sold them five months ago?”

The Rector, and his wife, and Jinny were doing their best to help the miners’ families, those who had no money put by for such an emergency. It was difficult for Tom Callaghan, because the most improvident of the families did not attend his church, and came under the care of the priest.

“No time for differences now,” said Tom, in consultation with him,, a young raw fellow, hardly more than a boy, who had been appointed to Doonhaven only six months before. “We have got to work together, and see what we can do to help the people. It’s the greatest mercy of God that this blow has fallen in midsummer, instead of in winter.”

The young priest was only too willing to co-operate, and to seek advice from the older man.

It was decided to use the parish room belonging to the Rector as a store for food and clothing, and anyone in real need would be able to go there and ask for assistance.

The store was put in charge of Jinny and her mother.

Meanwhile the Rector and Mr. Griffiths were kept busy going backwards and forwards to Slane to see the emigration authorities, for over half the mining population began to clamour now to leave Doonhaven as soon as possible, before the autumn started, and seek a new livelihood in America and Australia and Africa.

It was easiest for those who had saved money and were skilled miners. They would soon fall on their feet again, and it was not difficult to get them a passage.

But the odd-job men, the surface workers, the firemen and others, who were trained in nothing in particular and had spent their pay every week as it came along, these constituted the problem of Doonhaven.

Many of them were local men, or had come from the neighbouring country, and had worked in the mines from early boyhood. They knew no other trade. The older men, philosophical and more easy-going, shrugged their shoulders and tilled their bit of land. It was pleasant in a way to sit in the sun and do nothing for a change; something would turn up before the winter. The younger men, restless and dissatisfied, roamed the countryside in bands, bent on mischief which they felt justified in doing. Fences were broken, chickens and pigs stolen, orchards robbed, and a spirit of terrorism began to spread abroad which brought no sympathy for the men themselves, only harsh words from the magistrates and threats to bring the soldiers ashore from the garrison on Doon Island.

“It will blow over,” said Simon Flower, Kitty’s husband, who had much of the easy-going tolerance of his grandfather and namesake.

“In a couple of months’ time the fellows will be lifting potatoes and keeping pigs, as peaceful as you or I. Let them have their fling first.”

“Yes,” said the Rector, “I agree with you.

It will blow over, and they will go back to the land. But first they may do a considerable amount of damage, poor fellows, and cause trouble to themselves and to other people.”

“Seriously,” said Jinny, “there are several people who have become quite nervous of Jim Donovan and his crowd. They flung stones at Mrs. Griffiths when she was driving into Mundy last week, and lamed the pony. And you know I am certain it was his lot that broke all the windows in the Post Office.”

They none of them really understood, thought Hal, except perhaps his father-in-law, what a shock it had been to the young men of Doonhaven to see the mines go as they had done, almost overnight. The mines of Hungry Hill, which they had known from childhood, and their fathers before them, and to which they instinctively turned for a living, had become dead and lifeless. What irked them most was the fact that the ore was still there underground, waiting to be brought to the surface. They could not understand why a precious mineral should suddenly become valueless.

“The world still needs tin, doesn’t it?” Jim Donovan had asked.

How was it possible to explain to him about cheap labour in Malay ? No, thought Hal, it was much simpler to give Jim Donovan a drink and tell him to forget his troubles. For himself, he was glad to be free again. Glad that the whistle of the six-o’clock engine and the clanging bells no longer woke him from sleep, and he could lie in bed, if he wanted to, until ten in the morning, and then, leaning out of his bedroom window, sniffing the summer day, decide to take his paint-box and his easel across the harbour to Clonmere, and alone all day, with a sandwich for lunch, paint the still waters of the creek below the house, the low hump of Doon Island, and the great, green shoulder of Hungry Hill.

“It’s the best you’ve ever done,” said Jinny, when after three days he brought his picture home to her and put it up in their little sitting-room, the paint still wet on the canvas. “Do you know, I am sure that if you took it to London and sent it up to the Academy they would accept it, and you would sell it for a hundred guineas?”

“A hundred rejection slips,” smiled Hal.

“No, Jinny girl, I’d rather not risk the blow to my pride. It’s a present for John-Henry’s second birthday. He can look at it when he’s a man and see the sun, as I have painted it, on the top of Hungry Hill, and think there’s the old hill that brought my family good fortune. The grass will be growing out of the chimney-stacks by the time he’s turned twenty-one.”