Fallen Into the Pit

Four

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Charles and Chad came down through the silvery woods, between the quivering birches, the intervals of naked whitish clay crunching and powdering softly under their feet after the hot, dry summer. They were still arguing, in much the same terms as they had argued three weeks ago, when this expedition had first been suggested.

“I still don’t see that such poor-quality coal is worth getting at all, at a time when there’s no shortage of deep-mined stuff. The question of how to get it ought not to arise.”

“But it would arise some time—or there’s a long chance it would.”

“Not in my time, or yours,” scoffed Charles, as if that clinched it.

“And that’s all you damn well think about! My God, you sound like something from the nineteenth century! ‘It’ll last our time!’ Is that all that matters?”

The suggestion that anything else ought to matter certainly jolted Charles, but some sensitivity in him recognized at once, against the whole armory of his training, that he ought to resent the implication of his short-sightedness.

“I dare say I do as much thinking a generation ahead as you do, for that matter—”

“So you never put a plough into the ground, or plant a tree, until you’ve calculated whether it’s going to be you or your grandchildren who’s going to get the benefit of it! Leaving clean out of the question anybody else’s grandchildren!”

“You’re a damned sanctimonious prig!” said Charles, and unexpectedly scored a hit. Chad was sometimes horribly afraid that he was. His dark cheeks flushed. But even if it was true, it couldn’t be helped; and what he had said of Charles was certainly no less true.

“Sorry! It’s something you’ve got to decide yourself, I suppose. Do it how you like!” He kicked at the thick blond tussocks of grass, and the trailers of bramble in his path, and moved a little aside from Charles to skirt a place where the rains of many years had made a deep channel, too permanent for even this dry season to obliterate. Aside among the scattered trees and clearings of new saplings, funnel-shaped pits, a dozen yards across and often as deep, punctured the level crest of the mounds. These were so frequent, and so taken for granted, that the infants of Comerford, though reared only a mile from genuine and normal hills, thought it more fitting to have them of waste clay, and pitted with holes.

Charles, strolling moodily with his hands in his pockets, thought: I suppose we do rather tend to talk about uneconomic propositions where we can’t look forward to covering costs inside a very few years. Maybe it is a mistake, at that! Only it seems crazy to have to look thirty years ahead for a thing to pay for itself—even if it saves no end from then on. And even the entertainment of the doubt was new to him, and made him feel like looking guiltily over his shoulder.

“Anyhow,” he said generously, “you were right about the numbers. I didn’t think there were so many shafts—never bothered actually to count ’em.”

“And about the mess they made?” asked Chad, with a fleeting grin.

“Oh, well, I knew they didn’t exactly improve the place. Being brought up in the middle of it, one forgets about it, rather, but the facts were always there to be seen. It didn’t need you to point ’em out.”

“Some of the ground could be put back into use, I’m sure of it. Oh, I know it sounds odd to be recommending surface mining as a method of reclaiming land, but it does happen. There was a piece of the old canal-bed running round one side of a field at Harsham, and they had it all up, and put it back level. Farmer’s got a field double the size now. If it does nothing else, it certainly can iron out the creases, and you must admit you’ve got more than your share of the creases up here.”

“Oh, in that way there isn’t all that much to lose, I suppose. Except that even a rather seedy wood with some sort of growth on it is better than a bare patch. After all, hasn’t this generation got its rights, too, as well as the next? They’ve had their fair share of ugliness, I should have said. Is it so selfish to leave a bit for the future?”

Chad said nothing. They came to the hedge, and the gate in it, and leaned looking down on the undulating slope, and over into the crater where the scored underworld of red-and-yellow machines lay, with its knife-edged deep where the water drained down into a dwindling mud-circled pool. Deep as a quarry in places, with lorry tracks running up the beaten clay mountains, and the larger, cruder marks of tractors patterning the whole surface. A growth of huts lay on the distant rim from them, with the canyon in between made deeper by the blue evening shadows.

“I’m not really so sure,” said Charles, gazing into the depths, “that they’re as keen on going here as they were. They haven’t had much luck lately, and they say the cost per ton is getting rather alarming—I mean alarming even to the people who believe in the method. Naturally the contractor isn’t going to carry the can back if he can help it. Did you know they lost a digger over the edge there the other day? Lord knows how! Sort of accident you get sometimes in stone quarries— probably the driver’s miscalculation, but there’s no knowing. The kid driving was pretty lucky to come out of it alive, but the digger’s a dead loss. Crazy expensive business! The boy’s in hospital, but they say he’ll be all right.”

“I heard about it,” said Chad. “They’ve had quite a run of accidents lately. Must have some pretty deadly mechanics, to judge by the number of tractors they’ve had to send away for major repairs.”

“You hear all about ’em, evidently,” said Charles.

“What my boys don’t know about every piece of machinery down there isn’t worth knowing. We have no train-spotters any more, only tractor-spotters. On the whole I think it’s a safer amusement.”

They moved on, detaching themselves with a countryman’s reluctance from the top bar of the gate. The undulating ground, dryly prolific with brambles and bilberry wires, descended with them on its many and complicated levels, here and there cracking and falling away into new funnels about the bricked-over shafts, more often falling clear into holes, only half-boarded up, and already rotting away within.

“The old man had a lot of these filled,” said Charles, “in 1941, after he lost a calf down one of ’em at the back of the long field. It wasn’t a very good job, because labor was busy on other things, and all they could find time to do was rush round about twice with a tractor, and shove as much clay and stuff down ’em as the machines could move. But they didn’t do the lot, and even those they did do are falling in again. Some of ’em have sagged yards in these few years, and I wouldn’t care to trust any stock around them now. I hand you that much, if it’s any use to you.”

“You don’t need me,” said Chad, surveying the wreckage of land still beautiful. “It speaks for itself. What made your old man suddenly decide to fill the things, just when labor and machinery were nonexistent? Not,” he added frankly, “that that isn’t typical!”

“Oh, I suppose the calf touched it off, turned it into that particular channel; but the fact is he was trying to work himself to death at that time, any way that offered, to take his mind off his troubles. Don’t you remember the business about my stepmother? But I suppose you were walled up somewhere in Europe at the time, it wouldn’t reach as far as that—not even my dad’s troubles carried that far in 1940. She left him, you know—went off with some fellow he didn’t even know existed, and left him a characteristic note saying it had all been a failure and a mistake, and he wasn’t to try and find her, because she could never be happy with him. I dare say you heard bits of it afterwards. They still talk about it round the village, when there’s no more recent stink to fill their nostrils.”

“Oh, yes, I did hear something about it, of course. Not very much. But I remember seeing her around, just prewar—she was rather pretty, wasn’t she, and quite young?”

“Not so frightfully, but too young for him. Old man’s folly, and all that. I wasn’t surprised,” said Charles, “when it went smash. Tell you the truth, I never could stand her myself. Stupid, fluffy-brained, self-centered woman—I never could see why it cut him up so. But you know, it wasn’t so much being deserted, it was the way she did it. It was 1940, and the scare was on, and lots of people, especially comfortably-off old-style lads like my father, were talking about getting the women and children out of the country and clearing the decks for action—expecting invasion any minute, and all that. She had quite a lot of property in jewels, and securities and so on—not terribly rich, but it was a good little nest-egg, all told. She went about quietly realizing the lot, turned everything into cash, explaining in confidence to every dealer that the old boy was sending her to the U.S.A. to be safe and off his mind. Her nerves! She was one of those women who have nerves! Well, you can see it made sense, he was just the chap who might do exactly that. Then she disappeared. Just left him this note, saying she was off with her lover— Well, he’s a stiff-necked old devil, and he didn’t try to find her, he let her go, since that was what she wanted. But it knocked him, all the same, especially as the rotten story leaked out gradually, as they always do. That was the first he’d heard of this tale she’d put up. Poor, silly old devil, he was the only one who knew nothing whatever about it! People didn’t talk about it in front of him once they had the rights of it—but how would you feel, having been made to look that kind of a doting fool?”

“Not so good,” admitted Chad. “So he went about working off his losses any way he could! Ramming up these holes in the ground for one thing—well, he might have done worse!”

“Oh, it’s an ill wind! And mind you, I believe he does realize by now that she was no great loss, but I’m dead sure he’d never admit it. Funny thing!” said Charles pensively, “everything he touched after that seemed to turn up trumps. He prospered every way except the way he wanted. That’s the way things often work out in this world.”

“Surely your old man never had much to complain about in the quality of his luck,” said Chad, with recollections of a childhood in which Selwyn Blunden had loomed large and fixed as any eighteenth-century squire.

“Oh, I don’t know! It hasn’t been all one way with him. Just before the war he had a bad patch—not that he ever confided in me, I was still looked upon as a bit of a kid. But I knew he’d had a disastrous spell of trying to run a racing stable. It wasn’t his line of country, and he should have had sense enough to leave it alone. He did, luckily, have sense enough to get out of it in time.” Charles laughed, but affectionately. “A great responsibility, parents! It was after that woman left him, though, that he first began to seem almost old. When I came home he was glad to turn over the farm to me, I think, and sit back and feel tired.”

“Not too tired to continue calling the tune,” said Chad provocatively.

“It would be diplomatic to let him think he called it, in any case. Besides, his tune usually suits me very well.”

“This appeal, for instance?”

“This appeal, for instance! You haven’t made me change my mind, don’t think it.”

They went on amicably enough down the rutted track through the blond grass, toward the spinney gate and the dust-white ribbon of the lane.

“If you did change your mind,” said Chad to himself, “I wonder, I really wonder, which way the tune would be whistled then?”