"Yes," Wratten said shortly. "I'm trying to think out a plan. You'd better come with me to Hyde, and after we've got some stuff for the main story, you can hang on, and I'll bump back here in the car, and put it on the wire. Then I'll come back to the mine and relieve you. You'll probably have got some interviews by then, and we can run them on to the story."
They arranged for the motor-car, and during a ten-minutes' wait, Wratten dashed off to the post-office. "Always call at the post-office when you get on a job like this, and tell them what you're going to send. Besides, the office may have some instructions for you in the poste restante. And always wire your address to the office. We'd better stop at the Royal. I daresay every one else will be there, but it can't be helped."
They set out in the evening for the mine. The car took them through the mean streets of Wigan and the outlying villages, where the shadow of disaster hung like a black curtain over the houses. The streets were strangely silent: groups of men stood at the street corners, talking in constrained voices, and women with shawls over their heads flicked across the roads, grey and ghostlike, the slap of their clogs breaking harshly into the silence. Now and again they passed a beer-house, brilliantly lit, and from here came sounds of voices, and high nervous laughter. "They always get drunk on days like these," Wratten said. "They have to forget that death is always sitting at their shoulders."
And now there was a stretch of open country, yet even the fields had not the bright green of the Southern fields. The very grass was soiled with the coal, and the mines and the tall chimneys made a ring round their horizon. Humphrey moved uneasily in the car: the brooding spirit of tragedy that hovered over the place was beginning to seem intolerable. It was all so grey, so appallingly dismal and squalid. Here were the houses with the blinds drawn over their windows—whole streets of them—houses where there was no man to come home now. Here were women leaning over the railings of the patches of gardens, staring before them into the desolate future. Fatherless babes crawling about the dusty pavements and gutters, unheedingly, knowing nothing of the disaster that had scorched and withered the mankind of their world.
They turned down a side-street, and came out upon an open space filled with a mighty crowd of people. Behind them was the gate that led to the colliery, and far away, above their heads, Humphrey saw the winding wheel above the shaft, twisted and broken, the shaft itself jagged and castellated where the force of the explosion had torn the brickwork, and the cable-ropes shattered and tangled, as if some giant hands had wrenched it loose and made a plaything of it.
The crowds before the gate parted as they heard the noise of the motor-car. They made a narrow lane, just wide enough for the car to creep through. The gate was guarded by a police-sergeant, who, overcome by the sight of the motor-car, opened the way, and saluted: Wratten, bulky with rugs and wraps, touched the peak of his cap. The car drew up outside the offices, and they set out to walk up the black hill to the pit-mouth.
Desolation, utter and dismal; the lowering sky stained and splashed with the red of the dying sun; dark masses gathering below the purple pall of clouds; the ground barren and black with coal beneath the feet: these were Humphrey's first impressions as they walked up the hill, with thousands of envious, resentful eyes regarding them from the crowds that huddled beyond the railings. Nobody questioned them; nobody asked them what right they had to be there. They were part and parcel of the scheme—the literary undertakers, or, if you like, the descendants of the bards of old, the panegyrists, come to sing their elegies to the dead.
The full force of the tragedy came, as a blow between the eyes, when they reached the pit-mouth. Those women, waiting patiently throughout the day,—and they would wait, too, long into the night, keeping up their vigils of despair—who could forget them? Who could look at their faces without feeling an overwhelming gush of pity flooding the heart; those eyes, red-rimmed and staring intensely, eyes that could weep no more, for their tears were exhausted, and nothing but a stony impassive grief was left! The shawls made some of the faces beautiful, Madonna-like, framing them in oval, but others were the faces of dolorous old women, grey-haired, and mumbling of mouth. And some of them laid their forefingers to their lips, calling the world in silence to witness their stupendous sorrow. They stood there compact and pitiful: thinking of God knows what—perhaps of the last good-bye, of a quarrel before parting, of a plan for the morrow, of all the little last things that had been done by their men, before death had come.
And, permeating everything, into the very nostrils of all of them, there crept a ghastly smell of gas and coal-dust—a smell that brought to the vision of the imaginative the shambles in the twisting galleries of coal below their feet; great falls of black boulders, nameless tortured hulks that once were men—living, loving, laughing—lying haphazard as they fell to the same gigantic fist that smote the iron wheel above the shaft, and crumpled the brickwork as if it were cardboard.
They had to see it all: they met other reporters wandering in and out—dream-people in a world of terrible reality. Their companions of the train were all there: Kenneth Carr, surveying that wall of women silently; Mainham, talking to the mine-manager, whose black and sweating face told of many descents into the mine; Gully, buttonholing a woman with a baby in her arms, and making notes in his notebook; Grame, plodding to and fro in the coaly mire, for it had been raining that morning in the North: all working, all observing, all gathering facts. It was not their business to moralize, to link up dead men and disasters with the idea of these desolate women and humanity at large. That was the leader-writer's work. Their business was to get the news and say how it happened. They dared not even expose criminal negligence, or inhuman cruelty, or savage conditions of work—and libel laws were there to restrain them.