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Updated: May 5, 2025
Mustn't be a coward, though!" and brushing his forehead, as though to clear from it a cobweb of faint thoughts, he hurried off. Scorrier stayed on the veranda smoking. The rain had ceased, a few stars were burning dimly; even above the squalor of the township the scent of the forests, the interminable forests, brooded.
On an afternoon, thirteen years before, he had been in the city of London, at one of those emporiums where mining experts perch, before fresh flights, like sea-gulls on some favourite rock. A clerk said to him: "Mr. Scorrier, they are asking for you downstairs Mr. Hemmings of the New Colliery Company." Scorrier took up the speaking tube. "Is that you, Mr. Scorrier?
His manner to Hemmings was full of flattering courtesy; but his sly, ironical glances played on the secretary's armour like a fountain on a hippopotamus. To Scorrier, however, he could not show enough affection: The first evening, when Hemmings had gone to his room, he jumped up like a boy out of school.
An older man was taken out next; he too was smiling there had been vouchsafed to him, it seemed, a taste of more than earthly joy. The sight of those strange smiles affected Scorrier more than all the anguish or despair he had seen scored on the faces of other dead men. He asked an old miner how long Pippin had been at work. "Thirty hours.
When he came up at last Pippin was still waiting, pocket-book in hand; they again departed at a furious pace. Two days later Scorrier, visiting the shaft, found its neighbourhood deserted not a living thing of any sort was there except one Chinaman poking his stick into the rubbish.
I always carried a copy of the photograph about me; and I thought to myself, "Here is the ghost of a chance of tracing the knife to Mr. Deluc!" The shop door was opened, after I had twice rung the bell, by an old man, very dirty and very deaf. He said "You had better go upstairs, and speak to Mr. Scorrier top of the house." I put my lips to the old fellow's ear-trumpet, and asked who Mr.
"But how " Scorrier began. "We get telegrams. He writes to no one, not even to his family. And why? Just tell me why? We hear of him; he's a great nob out there. Nothing's done in the colony without his finger being in the pie. He turned out the last Government because they wouldn't grant us an extension for our railway shows he can't be a fool. Besides, look at our balance-sheet!"
And suddenly, even to Scorrier whose existence was one long encounter with strange places the unseen presence of those woods, their heavy, healthy scent, the little sounds, like squeaks from tiny toys, issuing out of the gloomy silence, seemed intolerable, to be shunned, from the mere instinct of self-preservation.
"Tell them they needn't be afraid; and sometimes when you're at home think of me, eh?" Scorrier, scrambling on board, had a confused memory of tears in his eyes, and a convulsive handshake. It was eight years before the wheels of life carried Scorrier back to that disenchanted spot, and this time not on the business of the New Colliery Company.
It was all so nice and safe as if the whole thing had been fastened to an anchor sunk beneath the pink cabbages of the drawing-room carpet! Hemmings, seeing him off the premises, had said with secrecy: "Little Pippin will have a good thing. We shall make his salary L . He'll be a great man-quite a king. Ha-ha!" Scorrier shook the ashes from his pipe.
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