But he laughed as he spoke; for there was no trouble in their hearts, neither could anything appall them.
CHAPTER XIX. DANGER.
“Beware equally of a sudden friend and a slow enemy.”
Roden and Von Holzen were at work in the little office of the malgamite works. The sun had just set, and the soft pearly twilight was creeping over the sand hills. The day's work was over, and the factories were all locked up for the night. In the stillness that seems to settle over earth and sea at sunset, the sound of the little waves could be heard—a distant, constant babbling from the west. The workers had gone to their huts. They were not a noisy body of men. It was their custom to creep quietly home when their work was done, and to sit in their doorways if the evening was warm, or with closed doors if the north wind was astir, and silently, steadily assuage their deadly thirst. Those who sought to harvest their days, who fondly imagined they were going to make a fight for it, drank milk according to advice handed down to them from their sickly forefathers. The others, more reckless, or wiser, perhaps, in their brief generation, took stronger drink to make glad their hearts and for their many infirmities.
They had merely to ask, and that which they asked for was given to them without comment.
“Yes,” said Uncle Ben to the new-comers, “you has a slap-up time—while it lasts.”
For Uncle Ben was a strong man, and waxed garrulous in his cups. He had made malgamite all his life and nothing would kill him, not even drink. Von Holzen watched Uncle Ben, and did not like him. It was Uncle Ben who played the concertina at the door of his hut in the evening. He sprang from the class whose soul takes delight in the music of a concertina, and rises on bank holidays to that height of gaiety which can only be expressed by an interchange of hats. He came from the slums of London, where they breed a race of men, small, ill-formed, disease-stricken, hard to kill.
The north wind was blowing this evening, and the huts were all closed. The sound of Uncle Ben's concertina could be dimly heard in what purported to be a popular air—a sort of nightmare of a tune such as a barrel-organist must suffer after bad beer. Otherwise, there was nothing stirring within the enclosure. There was, indeed, a hush over the whole place, such as Nature sometimes lays over certain spots like a quiet veil, as one might lay a cloth over the result of an accident, and say, “There is something wrong here; go away.”