He glanced round. The men were spending inordinate time in the disposal of the carrion. Again he entered and stood in the midst of the rubbish. Only one section of bookcase remained, crazily askew. He had noted it on the Wednesday. He clambered gingerly towards it. The first slanting, half-charred, half-drenched book, whose title he made out was Queechy. By the author of The Wide, Wide World. Next to it was Flowering Shrubs of Great Britain, the date of which he knew to be eighteen-fifty-four. His heart sank. Only the refuse of his famous deal with the second-hand bookseller remained. Just that little bit of section. The rest of his library was there—down there in the molten quagmire.
At last the men came, shovels on shoulder. He pointed out the place where his long table used to stand and bade them dig. He had brought, too, a shovel for himself, and he dug with them, violently, pantingly, distractedly, heaving the shovelfuls over his shoulders, wallowing in the filth regardless of Pillivant’s expensive clothes; soon an object of dripping sweat and squalor, distinguishable only from his co-workers by his begrimed and bandaged head. The men began to pant and relax. He overheard as in a dream one of them saying, in a grumbling tone, something about beer. The sun beat fiercely down on the roofless site. He said:
“Dig like hell. Dig all day. I’ll stand you a couple of gallons apiece when you get home. If you’re thirsty now, there’s heaps of water.”
The results of severe arithmetical calculation gleamed in each man’s eye. The command over sixteen free pints of ale transcended the dreams of desire. They fell to again, working with renewed vigour.
The incendiary bomb had apparently fallen square on the northern end of the long north to south building and had scattered the original wall in which the great chimney-piece had been built and flung the granite outwards, obliterating the less solidly constructed kitchen and Quong Ho’s quarters, and tearing down the side of the scullery. The lower courses of the rest of the main walls stood more or less secure. But the roof of dried tinder-thatch had fallen in ablaze, and every thing beneath it had been consumed by fire. Nothing remained to distinguish Baltazar’s bedroom at the southern end, once separated from the house-piece by a wooden partition reaching to the rafters, from the remainder of the awful parallelogram of disaster. The rigid mathematical lines of the low granite boundaries, with one end a heap of stony ruin, oppressed him as he dug with a sense of the ghastly futility of human self-imprisonment between walls. The position of the shapeless ragged gaps that had once been windows alone guided him in his search. The precious long deal table ran along the eastern wall. His writing-seat, surrounded by the most precious possessions of all, was situated in front of the north-east window—the long room had two windows, east and west, on each side. And it was just there where he used to sit, the happiest of men, in the midst of objective proof of dreams coming true, that chaos seemed to reign supreme.
“Go on, go on. Dig like hell. Every scrap of unburnt paper is a treasure to me. Look at every shovelful.”
After hours of toil, they found a little heap of clotted fragments, the useless cores of burnt clumps of writing. Now and then a man would come with a few filaments, having shaken the charred edges free, and, looking wonderingly at the unintelligible outer leaf, would ask: “Is this any good to you, sir?” And Baltazar, his heart cold and heavy as a stone, would bid him cast away the mocking remnants of an all but unique copy of a Chinese classic.
It was over. The three men, having loyally earned their twenty shillings and the promised two gallons of beer, stood spent and drenched, like Baltazar himself, with grime and sweat.
“Anything more, sir?”