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Updated: June 5, 2025
Put me in your report, 'New Superintendent sad, dull dog not a word to throw at a cat!" And as if the new task were too much for him, he sank back in thought. The last words he said to Scorrier that night were: "Very silent here. It's hard to believe one's here for life. But I feel I am.
With wide eyes and drawn lips he had died protesting. Late in the afternoon the old miner touched Scorrier's arm, and said: "There he is there's my boy!" And he departed slowly, wheeling the body on a trolley. As the sun set, the gang below came up. No further search was possible till the fumes had cleared. Scorrier heard one man say: "There's some we'll never get; they've had sure burial."
"So I'm going to get a wigging," he said; "I suppose I deserve it; but if you knew if you only knew...! Out here they've nicknamed me 'the King' they say I rule the colony. It's myself that I can't rule"; and with a sudden burst of passion such as Scorrier had never seen in him: "Why did they send this man here? What can he know about the things that I've been through?"
Scorrier, sir who went out for us." These sentences were murmured in a way suggestive of their uncommon value. The director uncrossed his legs, and bowed. Scorrier also bowed, and Hemmings, leaning back, slowly developed the full resources of his waistcoat. "So you are going out again, Scorrier, for the other side? I tell Mr. Scorrier, sir, that he is going out for the enemy.
"My importance is concerned," was written all over the secretary's face. Moved by an impulse of loyalty to Pippin, Scorrier answered, as if it were all settled: "Well, let me know when you are starting, Hemmings I should like the trip myself." As he was going out, the chairman, old Jolyon Forsyte, with a grave, twinkling look at Hemmings, took him aside.
The occasion indeed was a melancholy one, only six weeks having elapsed since that telegram had come from Scorrier, the mining expert, on a private mission to the Mines, informing them that Pippin, their Superintendent, had committed suicide in endeavouring, after his extraordinary two years' silence, to write a letter to his Board.
It came at a moment when Pippin had raised his hand with the carving-knife grasped in it to answer some remark of Hemmings' about the future of the company. The optimism in his uplifted chin, the strenuous energy in his whispering voice, gave Scorrier a more vivid glimpse of Pippin's nature than he had perhaps ever had before.
The late superintendent, a cowed man, regaled them at lunch with his forebodings; his attitude toward the situation was like the food, which was greasy and uninspiring. Alone together once more, the two newcomers eyed each other sadly. "Oh dear!" sighed Pippin. "We must change all this, Scorrier; it will never do to go back beaten.
At the end of the day all but four bodies had been recovered. "In the day o' judgment," a miner said, "they four'll come out of here." Those unclaimed bodies haunted Scorrier. He came on sentences of writing, where men waiting to be suffocated had written down their feelings. In one place, the hour, the word "Sleepy," and a signature. In another, "A. F. done for."
Pippin put out a hand, as if to push something away. "Let them try the life here!" he broke out; "it's like sitting on a live volcano what with our friends, 'the enemy, over there; the men; the American competition. I keep it going, Scorrier, but at what a cost at what a cost!" "But surely letters?" Pippin only answered: "I try I try!"
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