The journalist is like the doctor, his services are in requisition mainly in times of trouble. The Black Country which lies north of Birmingham is full of disaster, and the special correspondent has a big field there. Quite early in my career I was sent out to Pelsall Hall, near Walsall, where a mine had been flooded and two-and-thirty men were known to be in the workings. I was born and bred in the mining district, and was familiar with the heroism of the miners. They are not all heroes, and even those who are are not always heroic. But use breeds a curious indifference to danger.
I remember once paying a visit to the Tump Pit at or near Rowley Regis at a time when the men were taking their midday meal. There was a sort of Hall of Eblis there, a roof thirty feet high or thereabouts, and the men sat in a darkness dimly revealed by the light of one or two tallow candles. Down in the midst of them fell a portion of the rocky roof—enough to have filled a wheelbarrow, and enough certainly to have put out the vital spark of any man on whom it might have fallen. One coal-grimed man, at whose feet the mass had fallen, looked up placidly and said, 'That stuck up till it couldn't stick no longer;' and that was all that was said about the matter. I suppose there was a tacit recognition of the fact that the same thing might happen in any part of the mine at any moment, and that it was useless to attempt to run away from it. A passive scorn of danger is an essential element in the miner's life, and when need arises he shows an active scorn of it which is finer than anything I have ever seen in battle.
The Pelsall Hall Colliery disaster was the hinge on which the door of my fate was hung. I wrote an unspeakably bad novel which had that disaster for its central incident, and it was published from Saturday to Saturday in the Morning News, to the great detriment of that journal; and so long as the story ran, angry subscribers wrote to the editor to vilify it and its author. There was some very good work in it none the less; and an eminent critic told me that, though it was capital flesh and blood, it had no bones. It resulted years afterwards in 'Joseph's Coat,' which is, if I may say so, less inchoate and formless than its dead and buried original.
But it was not that exasperating novel which made the Pelsall Hall disaster memorable in my personal history. I made an acquaintance there—an acquaintance curiously begun—which did much for me. I met there the king of all special correspondents, and had an immediate shindy with him. There was only one decent room to be found by way of lodging in the village, and this was in the cottage of one Bailey, a working engineer. Mr. Bailey, without his wife's knowledge, had let that room to me for a week at a rent of one sovereign, and Mrs. Bailey, without her husband's knowledge, had let the room at a similar rent to the great Special. Box and Cox encountered, each determined on his rights and each resolute to oust the other.
I was leaving the cottage at about seven in the morning, when I met a man in a flannel shirt with no collar attached to it, a three days' beard, a suit of homespun, and heavy ankle jack-boots much bemired with the clay of the rain-sodden fields. He smoked a short clay pipe and looked like anything but what he was—the comet of the newspaper firmament.
'What are you doing here?' he asked—The manner was aggressive and dictatorial, and I resented it.
'Is that your business?' I retorted.
'Who are you?' he asked. I told him that I was the representative of the Birmingham Morning News, but questioned his right to the information.
'Look here, young man,' he said; 'there's only one spare room in that cottage, and it belongs to me. I've rented it from the woman of the house for a pound a week.'
'And I have rented it,' I answered, 'from the woman's husband for a pound a week.'