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Updated: June 9, 2025
Bess had dressed herself up in her best attire, in a bright red stuff gown, and with yellow ribbons tied in her hair, which had been brought to a degree of smoothness wonderful to Stephen, who saw her daily on the pit-bank.
"Water has come into Twenty-Two. God knows where are the others. I have brought these men from Tibu's gallery in our cutting; making connection through the north side of the gallery. Take us to the cage," said Janki Meah. At the pit-bank of Twenty-Two, some thousand people clamored and wept and shouted. One hundred men one thousand men had been drowned in the cutting.
'Hillo! cried a voice down the shaft as they were nearing the top; 'one of you chaps have got to carry a sack o' coals one mile. The voice belonged to Tim Cole, who was the terror of the pit-bank, from his love of mischief and his insatiable desire for fighting. He was looking down the shaft now, with a grin and a laugh upon his red face, round which his shaggy red hair hung like a rough mane.
As he came in sight of the distant pit-bank he saw a crowd of women swarming up it; a confused and hideous sound of crying and shrieking came to his ears; and at the same moment a boy, panting and dead-white, ran through the lodge-gates to meet him. "Where is it, Sprowston?" "Oh, sir, it's No. 2 pit. The damp's comin up the upcast, and the cage is blown to pieces.
There was a large, brilliant evening star in the early twilight, and underfoot the earth was half frozen. It was Christmas Eve. Also the War was over, and there was a sense of relief that was almost a new menace. A man felt the violence of the nightmare released now into the general air. Also there had been another wrangle among the men on the pit-bank that evening.
Martha and the old grandfather, who had been a capital singer in his day, began to help; and little Nan mingled her sweet, clear, childish notes with their stronger tones. It was a long hymn, and, before it was finished, Bess found herself shyly humming away to the tune, almost as if it had been the chorus of one of the pit-bank songs.
And the pumps sobbed and panted: 'Never, never! The Manager sat in the shelter of the pit-bank roofing, trying to dry himself by the pump-boiler fire, and, in the dreary dusk, he saw the crowds on the dam scatter and fly. 'That's the end, he groaned. 'Twill take us six weeks to persuade 'em that we haven't tried to drown their mates on purpose. Oh, for a decent, rational Geordie!
All day long except on Sundays and Mondays when he was usually drunk he worked in the Twenty-Two shaft of the Jimahari Colliery as cleverly as a man with all the senses. At evening he went up in the great steam-hauled cage to the pit-bank, and there called for his pony a rusty, coal-dusty beast, nearly as old as Janki Meah.
While some detail of the machinery was being adjusted, a fine stalwart young man, some three-and-twenty years of age, forced his way through the crowd, and, seizing one of the rescue-party, literally flung him out of the cage to the pit-bank, and before the people could recover from their astonishment the men were being lowered through the pathway of the deep.
The prodigal revelry of the reckoning night, the drunkenness of Sunday, the refusal to work on Monday and perhaps Tuesday, and then the untidiness of their home towards the latter part of the two or three weeks which intervene before the next pay-day; their children kept from school, their wives and daughters on the pit-bank, their furniture in the pawnshop; the crowded and miry lanes in which they live, their houses often cracked from top to bottom by the 'crowning in' of the ground, without drainage, or ventilation, or due supply of water; such a state of things as this, co-existing with earnings which might ensure comfort and even prosperity, seems to prove that no legislation can cure the evil."
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