Hungry Hill (56 page)

“I am a good boy.”

“You know what I mean by a good boy.”

“You mean I’m not to help myself to the whisky bottle in the cupboard? Don’t worry, sweetheart; it’s empty.”

“Oh, Hal, and I asked you to keep some, in case of chills and colds.”

“The winter’s over, there won’t be any chills and colds. I’m a brute and a swine, and I don’t deserve you, Jinny girl. Why should you love me?”

“I don’t know, Hal, but there it is.”

She smiled, and he did not move, but stretched out his legs to the smoky fire, thinking of the great hall at Clonmere and the fire-place there, where no fire had ever been lit. Presently she came back with their supper on a tray, the herrings a little over-cooked, bless her, but he swore they were excellent, and she sat down at his feet afterwards and took her mending, while he stared into the fire and played with her hair.

“It’s embroidery you should be doing,” he told her, “not my old bocks.”

“And if I let your socks go undarned,” she asked, “who would do them?”

“You ought to have a lady’s maid,” he said, “and half-a-dozen servants to look after you. And me, dressed in a dinner-jacket, be coming into my drawing-room with a flower in my buttonhole, having dined on a saddle of venison and drunk old brandy.”

“That means you didn’t care for the herrings,” she said in distress.

“It means nothing of the sort,” he said, kissing the top of her head. “It means that I let my imagination run away with me when I look at that funny little top-knot of yours, pinned out of the way of your cooking. You have a neck that I can encircle with one hand. I wonder Patsy has never run amok and felled it with his axe when killing your mother’s chickens.”

“Ah, get along with you. Would you take your great hand away? I can’t see the hole in your sock.”

“Let it alone, darling.”

“And you go barefoot?”

“I would have you sit beside me in the chair and watch the pictures in the fire.”

She laid the mending aside, and curled up beside him in the old leather chair that had come from the Rectory, and they said little to one another, but listened to the clock in the corner, left by Doctor Armstrong, and heard the soft rain patter against the window, and saw the smoky turf sink lower on the hearth.

Up at the Rectory Tom Callaghan was writing to Herbert Brodrick at Lletharrog.

Dearest old Herby, You can’t think what a real pleasure it was to get a letter once more from one of the family. It is years since I saw you, but I have photographs of you and the brothers as mementos of the past. It was so good to read your kind words about our dear Jinny, and that she has been a blessing to poor Hal. I never now say a word about either of them to Henry when I write, as no matter what I say he always speaks about the hopelessness of Hal’s case. ‘ I am glad to say Hal is, I think, one of the most charming fellows I ever met-in fact his daddy over again, only with the one drawback, and he is getting over that too… . There are no babies as yet, but I tell Jinny they will come along by-and-by. They are certainly one of the happiest couples it has ever been my good fortune to see’.

Hal was not a great newspaper reader. He took little interest in the affairs of the day. On winter evenings when he came back from the mines all he wanted to do was to sit with Jinny in front of the fire, and listen to her prattle, or laugh with her over the happenings in the counting-house. Therefore when he went one day to Slane, in the early spring of ‘94, to make purchases for Jinny and the household, and stood before the bar in one of the public-houses and turned over the pages of the Slane and County Advertiser, it was news to him, and something of a shock, to read a long column in the middle page about the large tin deposits in Malay, and the companies that had been formed to work them; and how, in the opinion of the writer, the discoveries would kill the home markets.

Life was so much a matter of routine these days-the day up at the mines, the keeping of the books, the going home to Jinny and the baby-that the rise and fall of prices had conveyed nothing to him, and when old Griffiths shook his head and spoke gloomily about the future Hal had put it down to the man’s natural pessimism, that could see small hope in mining prospects, for either tin or copper. When Hal had read the article, he turned to the financial page to see the current price of tin. It was able84 a ton. It had been able100 six months ago. Yes, old Griffiths had reason to be gloomy. Hal, content and preoccupied with his own home life, had neglected to watch the fluctuations of the trade that gave him his livelihood. He wondered what his father thought about it. That evening, when he returned home, and found his father-in-law, the Rector, seated in the living-room nursing the solemn John-Henry, he asked him if he had read the article in the Slane Advertiser.

“Yes, Hal, I have,” said Tom Callaghan, “and I think the writer of the article speaks sound sense. We shall see some changes before very long.”

“What do you suppose my father will do?”

“Henry always was a shrewd business man, Hal.

You may depend upon it he has been watching the Malay business and the drop in price in the last six months. He was one of the first owners to change over from copper to tin, more than fifteen years ago, and the people in Cornwall followed suit, at least those who struck lucky and also had the capital to do so.”

The Rector hesitated, and, Jinny coming in at this moment to bear John-Henry off to bed, he waited until she had left the room, and then looked up at his son-in-law.

“You haven’t heard any rumours, then?”

“No, Uncle Tom,” said Hal. “I never listen to gossip anyway. Rumours of what?”

“That your father intends selling the mines very shortly?”

Hal shook his head.

“It’s the first I’ve heard of it,” he said, “but perhaps Griffiths would not say anything to me, out of delicacy. As for the men, they fabricate fresh tales every day. Last week I heard Jim Donovan tell his pal there was gold at the foot of Hungry Hill, and it all belonged to him.”

“Jim Donovan has “folie de grandeur” like others of his family. No, Hal, it’s no idle gossip I’m repeating to you. I had a talk with Griffiths after church on Sunday, and he says letters have been coming from across the water, which presumably you haven’t seen, from some director of a London company, also letters from your father and from your father’s solicitors, and negotiations are in progress.”

Hal lit his pipe, and stirred the fire with his foot.

“After what I have read today I can’t blame him,” he said. “My father, I mean. If the price of tin falls much further I suppose it will not pay him to continue working the mines. But what fool of a fellow has he induced to buy them off him?”

“Speculators,” said Uncle Tom, “people who know nothing of the land or the country, and will drive the mine for all they are worth, to get every ounce out of the ground before the crash comes. I’m not a prophet, but that’s what will happen, you may depend upon it.”

“It will be queer,” said Hal, “to think of the mines no longer belonging to the family. My great-grandfather would turn in his grave.”

“From all I have ever heard of him he would do nothing of the sort,” said the Rector. “Copper John was no sentimentalist. He would rub his hands in satisfaction to think that his grandson Henry was getting rid of it all, in the nick of time, with his fortune intact. Not like some of the Cornish families, who have gone bankrupt. No, Hal, you Brodricks don’t all run to sentiment and dreams. There are some hard-headed fellows amongst you.”

“It’s a pity I’m not one of them,” said Hal.

“I’d have done more for myself, and for Jinny as well.”

A few days later it was all over Doonhaven that Henry Brodrick had sold the mines to a London company. Mr. Griffiths took Hal aside and showed him the letters, and a copy of the agreement.

“Seventy-four years,” said Hal, “and now it’s finished. All the tears and the sweat and the foresight and the labour. It’s funny, I’ve never had a lot of feeling about the mines, Mr. Griffiths. I’ve considered them a blot on the landscape, spoiling the rugged grandeur of Hungry Hill, but now they’re to be handed over to strangers I feel resentful. I wish that it didn’t have to happen.”

“It won’t affect you, Mr. Brodrick. The new company will take over the staff, you know.”

“Yes… . That’s not quite what I meant, though.”

“Well, your father is a very clever man, that’s all I can say,” said the manager. “He’s made the bargain of a life-time. And you needn’t worry.

You’ll reap the benefit of it all one day.”

He doesn’t see the point, thought Hal; he doesn’t see that the mines were part of the family, like Clonmere. And now one is sold, and the other is barred and shuttered. It’s queer. It’s the breaking up of things.

A fortnight later the new director came over in person to inspect his property. He was a hard-faced man, with a north-country accent and a loud, authoritative voice. He walked round the mines, hustling Mr. Griffiths, and rattling questions at him which flustered the old manager. Hal only caught a glimpse of him as he passed through the counting-house. His visit was followed by others: people he sent down to give expert advice about the workings; new engineers, new foremen. Strangers to the country.

And for the first time in his life Hal felt one with the miners, and in a strange way they sensed it too. The men were more open with him, more friendly, they cursed the intruders as “dour-faced northern bastards,” and laughed when Hal called them something stronger still. He knew now what it felt like to be employed by a stranger, working to a stranger’s orders, and knowing that the product of the mine would give him nothing in return but his bare weekly wage.

“You see,” he told Jinny, “what a hypocrite I’ve been. These few years, going up to the mines every day, I’ve had it in the back of my mind all the time that they belonged to the family, and one day they would be mine. And although it made me shy with the men, it gave me a sort of satisfaction, deep down. And now they are nothing to do with me any more. I might be working for the Slane Timber Works or the brick-yard in Mundy. And I feel sullen and fed-up, just like Jim Donovan or any of the others.”

“I know,” said Jinny. “It’s sad. Ever since I remember anything, I saw the trucks going up from the harbour to the mines with “Brodrick” written on them. Will they have another name now?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” said Hal, “but I can’t forgive my father for it all the same.”

The Rector was right when he summed up the purchasers as speculators. The method in the Doonhaven mines, instigated by Copper John and continued by Henry when he lived at Clonmere, was to explore the lodes carefully and slowly, never going to too great a depth at a time and risking the wasting of the ore by excessive flooding. They had planned for the years ahead, and not for the immediate present. The ore that might be reached with greater caution and more skill in six or seven years could be left until that time, and the stuff nearer the surface dealt with first.

The new company cared for none of these ideas. They wanted immediate value for their money, and the richest lodes tapped and the ore brought to the surface and away for shipment, all in six months. The price of tin was dropping all the time, and unless they could make a quick profit at once their losses would be enormous. The Doonhaven miners, used to a casual, happy-go-lucky method of working for the past twenty years, for old Griffiths was no driver, were expected to work longer hours and to extract double the quantity of stuff, all at the same time. The only way to achieve this was to raise the men’s wages.

The new owners decided to take the risk, and by announcing a spectacular rise in wages all round get the necessary labour out of the men, for the few months they had set themselves as a working margin.

The news was hailed gleefully by the men, underground and above the surface. The new owners were no longer “dour-faced bastards” but “fine go-ahead fellows, who knew their job.” A feverish activity spread over the mining population. The furnaces blazed all night, the trucks rattled to and fro from Hungry Hill to Doonhaven. Hal, scratching his head over the books, would come back late in the evening and profess himself bewildered by the change of speed. His father-in-law looked grave and shook his head.

“It’s a false boom,” he said; “the men don’t understand. Look at the price of tin in this morning’s paper. able75 a ton. A ten-pound drop in under two months. The speculators will clear out of it before a very few months are over, and the mines will close.”

“But there’s God’s quantity of tin still in the ground,” protested Hal, “and copper too, if it was only worked. I heard one of the fellows talking about it the other day.”

“It will be worked just as long as it pays the company to do so,” said the Rector, “and after that it will remain untouched where Nature planted it in the first place.”

April… May… June… July … and nearly five months had passed since the mines had changed hands. The third week in July the new senior engineer, working under contract to the London company, told Mr. Griffiths that he had been sent for by the director to report.

“If they want me to carry on through the summer,” he told the manager, “I shan’t be able to do it without complete new fittings to the main pumps, and between you and me I don’t for a moment think they will stand the expense. I rather suspect this is the last I see of Doonhaven.”

He left two days later, taking his staff of three with him. A new rumour began to circulate that the present machinery was to be scrapped and new engines shipped across the water from Bronsea. This was followed by a further rumour that the wages of the miners were to be raised again. One or two of the men asked Hal if he had any private information.

“I’m sorry,” said Hal. “I know no more than you do; but with tin at its present low level I hardly think the company will raise wages any higher. Have you seen today’s paper? Tin’s down to able64 a ton.”

He was climbing into the trap, preparatory to driving home. One of the men, Jim Donovan, stood with his hand on the rein.

“Is that why Mr. Henry Brodrick sold the mines, then?” he said.