They laid him on the bed. Alice, now very pale and composed, followed them upstairs with a cup of tea.
‘God! if I’m come to tea drinking it’s a gonner,’ said John Fellows. ‘Send out for a spot of brandy!’
A small boy was sent running to the Lyttleton Arms. Elsie had already gone for the doctor. The news had spread quickly in various forms, and all Halesby heard with sensation that John Fellows had had his skull smashed in Mawne pit. The brandy came. He wouldn’t have it spoiled with water and swallowed it neat, but even the brandy could not alter the ashen pallor of his face beneath its coating of coal dust.
John Fellows was a hard case and could bear pain or any other human calamity with fortitude. He lay on his back, gritting his teeth and squirting the floor with tobacco-juice. Whenever he spoke it was with a curious dry humour that seldom appeared in his ordinary conversation. He never complained of his own sufferings, though he cursed the criminal economy of the Mawne management in the matter of pit-props. ‘They might as well use match-sticks as this Norway stuff. They’ve put a stopper on my football!’ he said. ‘But I’ll see that they pay for it. I will, and no fear!’
Indeed they owed him something. The collapse of coal that had buried him had taken place in a remote gallery on one of the lower levels of the mine; and though Mr Willis, proud of his electric lighting and American coal-cutting machinery, was in the habit of describing Mawne as a drawing-room pit, the arrangements for salvage were by no means elegant. John Fellows had lain for three hours beneath a ton or more of coal; and though the weight of it saved him from the pain of movement, acting as a kind of ponderous splint to the broken limb, the suspense of waiting till he was dug out would have broken the nerve of a more sensitive man. From this purgatory he had been hauled to one of the trolley-lines that traverse the galleries of the pit: his only moment of relative smoothness between the scene of the accident and his home being his upward journey in the hoisting cage.
They waited anxiously for the doctor. The boy made three more journeys to the Lyttleton Arms for brandy. ‘It’s the only thing that keeps the life in me,’ John Fellows said.
In a couple of hours Dr Moorhouse arrived. ‘Sorry to see you like this, Fellows,’ he said.
‘You’d be sorrier if you was me!’ Fellows grunted.
With the help of Alice they split up his trouser leg, and the doctor manipulated the thigh until he felt the crepitus of the broken bone. Then he disturbed the patient no longer. ‘It’s a three months’ job,’ he said. ‘You can’t have it seen to properly here. You want X-rays. You’ll have to go into hospital.’
‘Hospital . . .’ John Fellows cried.