Out of the Pit

by Alan Sullivan

OUT OF THE PIT

BY ALAN SULLIVAN

JOCK STRANG plodded along the shore road to Pit No. 2 of the Neddrie Collieries. Short, squat, and broad-shouldered, with cropped hair and wide black brows, he seemed to traverse this strip of shining highway like a gigantic insect hurrying for cover in the grimy buildings that surrounded the mouth of the pit. And, as he walked, other insects emerged from the square, rain-washed cottages that lined the road and, falling silently in behind Strang, swelled the sullen tide of drab humanity.

Below and beside them the Forth flashed in the morning sun. Eastward the Bass Rock jutted darkly into the sea, with a fringe of milk-white foam around its base. Westward the great Forth Bridge reared its gigantic frame, and to the south the slopes of the Lothian fields lifted themselves slowly into the far blue rim of the Pentland Hills.

Jock knew that there were all these things to be looked at, but now he never looked. He only knew that he would never see anything else. He was sick of looking at them. His mind was on the blackness of that deep chamber into which he would shortly crawl on hands and knees and, lying on his side, swing a pick into a three-foot face of coal for the next seven hours. What had he to do with the purple shades of the Pentlands?

A new step fell heavily on the road. Jock Strang raised his black brows till they caught the glint of Don Robson's dinner-pail.

"Morn', Jock," said Don blithely.

"Morn', yersel'," replied Jock, and relapsed again into silence.

Always at this exact inch of the road Don joined him. Always this gruff interchange ushered in the speechlessness that lasted to the mouth of the pit. Always for the next half-mile the vision of the same girl danced before the heavy steps of either man and reconciled him to another day of danger, toil, and sweat.

Jock's mind worked painfully, but with a certain grim insistence that gripped things and held them for ever. Now it went slowly back to the wondrous coming of Nan, to the shrieking of the storm that whipped the Forth into flying spume, to the glimpses of the French schooner that lay pounding on the sands off the mouth of the Esk, to the thunder on the shore and the long, red leap of rockets, and, last of all, to the small waxen figure that his wife snatched out of the whistling undertow and held so desperately to the hungry warmth of her own childless breast. Twenty years ago, and now Elsie Strang had slept long in the plot beside the Neddrie Manse, and many a thousand ton had been hoisted from the Neddrie pits.

The sheaves of the headgear were whirling rapidly, and the day shift was dropping out of sight when Jock tramped into the lamp-house to get his Davy safety. Then, with Don close behind, he stepped into the cage and disappeared between the creaking guide-timbers.

Five hundred feet from sunlight, Neddrie No. 2 thrust out its black galleries beneath the laughter of the sea. Mile upon mile these gloomy passages extended. Generations of miners had laboured there. The pale light of Davy lamps flickered ghost-like along the hollow lanes. Voices sounded from remote distances. Figures appeared, blurred in the omnipresent gloom, and vanished utterly. The clang of steel, the roar of coal trucks lurching along narrow tracks, the cool, steady pressure of air, driven down by the great fans overhead—these things spoke of humanity that seemed to grope laboriously in unending conflict with the dark and threatening ruler of this strange and underground world.

Now, it stands to reason that if a flat seam of coal is three feet thick, anything mined above or below that three feet is dead loss. But since a man, a truck, and a pit pony are all more than three feet high, the main gangways in a coal mine have head-room enough for purposes of transportation, while every other passage or heading is reduced to the minimum height. And this is why the miners of thin seams generally carry their heads well sunk between their shoulders.

A mile along a main gangway and another quarter through old galleries brought Jock Strang and Don Robson to their own chamber. They crawled on hands and knees between long walls of coal left to support the fiat and ebony roof. Above them lay the world of light and the shining Forth.

In this grim theatre, advancing slowly from chamber to chamber, the drama of life was being played. Side by side, with swinging pick and straining sinewy with sweat and weariness, the two laboured—for Nan, and Nan alone. Jock's slow nature was struggling between love and desire for the girl, who, after all, was not so much younger than himself, and a queer, subjective, honourable hesitancy. The girl was his adopted daughter—the child of the sea, the beloved companion, the idol of his eyes. He had dreamed that Elsie knew all about it, and from some high place smiled down contentedly at the prospect. He felt his own powerful frame and muscles, and knew himself for a man among men, and, as the coal rattled down at each stroke, it appeared that every black avalanche made Nan a little nearer, a little surer. All this he had kept hidden away in his heart, and never by sign or word revealed the worship that was consuming him. But he watched Don out of the corner of his eye.

And Don Robson, blithe, blue-eyed, and twenty-two, had dreams of Nan that sent the young blood jumping through his veins. Of Jock, dour and silent Jock, he never thought at all. He was as good a miner as any man in the Neddrie pits. He was saving, saving steadily. There had been two eventful days of late. He had taken Nan to the Musselburgh races, and once as far as Edinburgh, where they had climbed the Calton Hill and Scott's Monument, and—most wonderful of all—had seen Edinburgh go crazy when the Black Watch came home from foreign service. Those were days to put away in one's mind and remember. And he made no bones about it to Jock, but chatted cheerfully as to his prospects, and the cottage he was buying from John Anderson, the timekeeper. He had got used to Jock's silence, because the older man always breathed through his nose to keep the dust out.

Behind all this, far back in each man's head, was the consciousness of a common enemy that lurked in deadly silence throughout the booming galleries of Neddrie No. 2. Some mines are cursed with firedamp, that light thin gas which, floating on the heavier air, steals along the splintered roof of coal seams and gradually displaces the pure fresh current from the surface fans. But the bane of Neddrie No. 2 was carbonic acid gas, which, heavier than air, crawled along its floors and slowly rose, ankle-high, knee-high, breast-high, face-high, till it choked the life out of those who might be caught in its deadly embrace. Sometimes, when the fog lay thick upon the Forth, and the lift of the Pentlands was shrouded in driving mist, the dank atmosphere outside weighed down the steady current of the upcast, and the gas was very bad. So that every time a shift went underground there was a turning of grimy faces to the east and a sniffing of the salt airs that drifted in from the grey expanse of the North Sea.

To-day Jock Strang felt strangely depressed. All was well overhead, so far as he knew. His life lay in the hands of others. He was used to that. But for the first time he began to question this interminable round of toil. Yesterday he had seen the owner of Neddrie No. 2 driving in his dog-cart to the links at Musselburgh, and yesterday, for the first time, he had cursed him. Two golf balls meant a day's pay to Jock, and the owner would lose them in the morning, and laugh and order more. And Nan seemed farther away than ever.

At eleven o'clock the two left their chamber and crawled out to the nearest gangway to eat. The Davy lamps burned beside them, spear-heads of flame inside their gauze cylinders. The pit ponies, that never would see daylight, munched contentedly in the long stable at the far end of the gangway. Silence was everywhere, broken only by those indescribable sounds that circulate like ghosts through the hollow . caverns of every mine. Jock ate slowly, champing his food with deliberation. Then, as always, he took the lamp on his knee and pored over the scrap of The North British Chronicle in which his dinner was wrapped. Don Robson lay on his back and stared at the shadows on the roof. He was thinking of Nan.

Jock's eyes traversed the greasy paper till they stopped at the wide, stained margin. There was writing on it. His heart halted as he recognised Nan's large, childish scrawl. He glanced towards Don, and bent closer.

"Jock, why don't you speak? I'm tired waiting for you."

He sat motionless, in terror lest the sudden fierce pounding of his heart became audible. Then, with another flash of his dark eyes at the motionless figure, he read again, spelling it out letter by letter, sucking the words into the innermost fibre of his existence. He was no longer in the Neddrie pit, but exalted to the height of his dearest dream. His whole frame relaxed and he began to breathe deeply, and all the time a strange, delirious fire was leaping through his grimy body. He thought of Don, and instantly put the thought out of his mind. It was his affair—not Don's.

At four o'clock their stint was nearly done. Jock was still swinging his pick, but with a nervous uncertainty that Don had never known before. He dropped it, laid fiat on his back and stretched his great arms, a prone image of blackened labour. He was wondering what Don would say or do when he heard. It would go very hard with Don.

Suddenly from the black abyss that lay between their own chamber and the main gangway came a deep cracking that ended abruptly with a dull fall of roof slate. Then silence for a moment, followed by the heavy plunge of tons of splintering shale. After that silence again and the abrupt ceasing of the cool air pressure that had constantly flowed in from the wooden brattices. Jock rolled swiftly over and scuttled out of sight. Don, dazed and trembling, could do nothing but listen. He heard him stop, then go on again. He heard the big man pushing against the sliding face of broken rock. Then Jock came slowly back.

"Pit oot yer lamp, laddie; the roof is doun," he said grimly.

But Don's fingers were shaking, so Jock twisted the thick wire trimmer that comes up through the base of every Davy. The two spear-heads of flame blinked once, then darkness.

Don slid over till their shoulders touched. "How much is doun?"

"Here tae the gangway, I'm thinkin'. 'Twas an awfu' fa'."

Silence took them again, during which their ears strained for some sound, however slight.

"They'll no be long reachin' us," said Don tentatively. "Ye ken the day Angus Mutry was trappit in No. 3. He was i' his ain house by sundoun."

"Ay, laddie, I mind it weel. 'Twas me that howked him oot o' his chamber. But yon was no sic a fa' as this."

"The fowk wull be gey busy up top," went on Don confidently, then coughed as an exasperating tickling took him in the throat.

Jock said nothing. His mouth was shut. He was breathing steadily, very steadily, through his nose.

Don's voice came in again. "I was thinkin' o' Nan," he said abruptly.

The invisible face of the older man was transformed in its impalpable shroud. The blood rushed into his eyes, "An' what aboot Nan?"

"I'm takin' her tae the kirk come New Year."

Jock's fingers closed like steel over the tightly-folded fragment of newspaper in his pocket. His whole frame stiffened. "What's yon?" he snarled.

"I've no speired her yet, ye ken, but the lassie's a' for me. There's nobbut yersel', Jock, an' ye auld enough tae be her feyther. D'ye ken ony ither mon?"

Jock thought swiftly. If this was death, why torture Don further? If it was not death, the sunlight would be more merciful. He would tell him then.

"Yer richt, laddie. Wha' cud there be?"

"The cottage wull be clear sune, an' then I'll hae a crack wi' her and settle the day. Mon Jock, but the air is rotten! What gars me choke?"

"Dinna talk sae muckle, laddie. Haud yer wind."

Slowly along the smooth floor of the chamber came the first breathings of gas. From ruptured fissures and innumerable crevices in the shattered earth it crept. Heavy with portent, it flooded the broken coal about the men's feet. No life-giving breath could penetrate the mountain of fallen rock to dissipate these deadly fumes. At last they both knew it. Don began to ramble, talking now to Nan, now to Jock, and bursting into sudden heartrending appeals for help. Somewhere on the other side of that barrier men were fighting viciously to get at them and drag them up to sunlight. Jock felt Don slip from his shoulder and topple over with his face down.

By now the gas was very bad. He could not tell how much time had gone by, but he knew that if Don lay there he could not last ten minutes. So he hoisted him up again, and, as he did so, the vision of Elsie seemed to come right out of the darkness and put her face against his and say, "My mon Jock." Then it vanished.

He still held Don up, so that his face was above the worst of the gas. It was rising rapidly. He tried to think what Elsie meant by that. Then Don began to ramble again. This time it was all about Nan.

At last he saw what Elsie meant. It was that Jock had had her love and was her man, but that Don had not had the love of any woman. And, thinking harder, he felt very cold, though the sweat began to run down his face. Then Don fell over again, and once more Jock jerked him up, though he had to get down into the gas to do so. And just at that moment he thought he heard something like the stroke of a pick.

He shouted. It meant filling his lungs with gas, but his whole soul went into the shout. Don did not seem to hear him. He had almost stopped breathing.

At the far end of the chamber a rock slid down, then another and another, and a million miles away he caught the glimmer of a Davy.

By this time his breathing was very bad, but his brain was working fiercely. The Davy drew nearer, held high up near the roof. Two men came slowly towards him. Oxygen tanks were strapped to their backs, and they wore huge helmets, with tubes running back to the tanks. Then he heard one of them say very quickly: "We've got to get out of this; my tank's done."

Jock had no power for speech, so he kicked a piece of coal.

The men stopped. One of them said: "There's some here. Likely Strang and Robson."

"We can only take one," said the other figure, "and that if he's alive."

Jock heard it. He could not speak, but he knew there was something he must do, and it must be done very quickly, so he kicked again and held Don up higher than ever.

The two men came up, one of them swinging his lamp across Don's face, and in the darkness Jock pushed the lad's arm. It was for all the world as if Don had raised his hand in welcome.

"He's alive," said the one hooded rescuer.

The other man felt about on the floor and touched Jock's body. It was limp and motionless.

"Strang's gone," said a voice. "Come on with the other. We've got to get out of this."

Jock held his breath. It was hard work. He was now very weak. The hooded figures stumbled away with Don's unconscious body between them. Their Davys glimmered and disappeared. Utter silence fell again in Neddrie No. 2. It was all over now.

Jock began to choke, but somehow he was happier than ever before in his life. His dizziness increased. By this time Don was out in the air, and he would live, and—— Jock could not think much about the rest of it, but he smiled once, took a piece of The North British Chronicle out of his pocket, and, laying it smoothly against his face, slipped down into the thick of the gas.

They pulled him out a little later. A fall of slate had gashed his head. Strange to say, life was not yet extinct. Hours afterwards he was breathing normally, but there was still a part of Jock Strang that did not come back from the Neddrie pits. The bones and blood and muscles and marvellous lungs of him survived, but the brain yet wandered somewhere in the booming darkness.

Months went by. Don Robson took Nan to the kirk, and then they both took Jock to the cottage that Don bought from Anderson, the timekeeper.

The big man sat in front of it, his gnarled fingers plucking at his long beard, peering down the road to the pits and mumbling snatches of underground talk—a great, witless, helpless child. Thus till came a night when there drove up the Forth the brother of the great storm that sent Nan ashore to Elsie's empty arms.

He listened to the roar of it, shaking his black head and darting strange glances at Don Robson and Nan. In the midst of the uproar he went suddenly to pieces. They helped him to his bed. He lay there, staring and wordless, till slowly the idiot in him went out to meet the storm, and for one poignant instant the old, dour Jock came back, his dark eyes looking up from beneath the black brows.

In that moment the brave slow brain began again its mysterious function, began it just where it left off in the gloom of Neddrie No. 2.

"Hand yer heid up, laddie. Dinna be frichtened. Think o' Nan, Don. Keep oot o' the gas; it'll gar ye sick. Aye, lad, Nan's no for me. She's ower muckle a lassie. I'll bide a wee, and aiblins I'll find Elsie."

He stopped, scanned them quietly, and smiled. "Eh, mon, you was a lang time syne."

Then he turned his face to the wall.