Hungry Hill (55 page)

And then, sitting round the fire in the Rectory study, it would be difficult to imagine that Hal was ever anything but charming, light” hearted and gay. He would chaff Aunt Harriet on skimming the cream with a scallop shell, and tease Uncle Tom on the length of the Sunday sermon, and standing on the hearth with his arm round Jinny’s waist it might have been Henry himself, some thirty years before, thought the Rector, with the same amusing chatter about people and places, telling them of wild-cat schemes and pranks he had played in Canada with his partner, the dissolute Frank.”

“Are you too proud, Hal,” he said, when Jinny and her mother had left the room, “to try to earn your living?”

“Not too proud,” said Hal, smiling, “but too lazy. That’s why I failed in Canada.”

“No,” said Tom, “you failed in Canada because you were friendless and alone, and spent all your money in the Winnipeg saloons. That won’t happen here.”

“What do you suggest, then, Uncle Tom? No one will buy my pictures. I hawked three canvases round Slane last week, and didn’t sell one of them. It made me ashamed before Jinny, who still believes I’m a good painter. But after I’d had a couple of drinks I felt better about it.”

“Yes, lad, and if you go on like that you’ll be ill again, as you were in Canada. No, keep your painting as a hobby, and a very good hobby it is. I want to know if you have the courage to do something else.”

“What should I do?”

The Rector looked at him with a twinkle in his eye. “You know old Griffiths, the manager up at the mine?” he said.

“Yes.”

“His head clerk has gone to America. He wants someone to do the books and keep accounts, and the hundred and one odd jobs that he can’t see to himself.

Office hours, of course, nine till six.

Small salary, but not to be despised. What about it?”

Hal thrust his hands in his pockets and made a face at his father-in-law.

“A Brodrick go and earn a few pounds a week in the mine that will one day bring him thousands?” he said. “It’s a funny sort of suggestion.”

“Never mind about that,” answered the Rector.

“It’s the present you have to think about, not the future.

And there would be no question of taking money from your father. The salary is paid to the head clerk, whoever takes the place. The question is, can you pull yourself together and do it?

I know someone who would be very proud of you if you did, and that’s Jinny.”

Hal did not answer for a moment. He stood staring at the fire.

“I want to please Jinny more than anything else on earth,” he said, “and yet I know in my heart I shall always let her down. I’m no good, you see, Uncle Tom. I shall make a mess of this job as I’ve done of everything else.”

“No, Hal boy, you will not.”

“All right then, I’ll have a shot at it.”

And so on the 25th of February, 1890, Hal Brodrick walked up to his father’s mines on Hungry Hill, shoulder to shoulder with the men of Doonhaven, and hanging his hat on the peg in the counting-house, sat down on a high stool before a desk, with young Murphy the grocer’s son on the other side of him. Old Griffiths sat in state in an inner room. Hal remembered him standing with his hat in his hands before his father in the old days, and now Hal was his clerk, and said “Thank you, sir,” for his weekly wage, just like young Murphy and the others.

It was strange to be just another employee in the mine, when twenty years ago he had driven here in state with his father, the men doffing their hats at his approach, and he remembered being taken below to watch the miners working the lodes, and visiting the engine-houses to see the great pumps at work. Now for the first time he became acquainted with the vast inner life of the mine, which seemed to have no connection with the world outside.

At six in the morning, in his house at Doonhaven, Hal would wake to hear clanging from Hungry Hill the great bell that called the miners to work, and allowed the night-shift to come wan and tired-eyed to the surface. The bell had gone day after day for nearly seventy years, calling the men and women and little children to the mines, but the Brodricks lying in their beds at Clonmere had never heard it. There was a line that ran from Doonhaven out to the mines on Hungry Hill, and those miners who lived in the village would ride out in the trucks to their work.

Hal would hear the whistle of steam and the clanging of wheels on the rollers, and sometimes the sound of running feet under his window as the men hastened to catch the trucks. It would still be dark outside, with the stars shining.

“Poor devils,” whispered Hal to Jinny, feeling in some queer, obscure fashion that he was to blame for their early rising in the bleak raw morning, and then his conscience would prick him as he arrived himself at the counting-house shortly before nine, having ridden out in all probability in the Rector’s trap.

The women and children in the dressing-sheds who had the work of washing the ore would look up as he drove past, and he would have the feeling that they laughed at him, and resented him too, believing that he had the place by favour and did not need the money.

At the end of each month, when the books had to be made up and the returns sent in, Hal would find himself working overtime to get through with the stuff on his desk, and then he too would catch the six-o’clock truck with the miners in the village, Jinny rising bright and early to keep him company and see that he ate his breakfast before leaving. The first time he did this the men stood apart from him in the truck, joking and talking amongst themselves.

There was a fellow called Jim Donovan, son of Pat Donovan who kept the farm beneath the hill, and the first of his family, by his talk, to become a miner.

“Sure, it’s the truth,” he said, “we owned the land for miles around in the old days,” looking over his shoulder at Hal as he spoke.

“That’s right, Jim,” said his mates, “you had it on lease from the devil.”

“No devil at all,” answered Jim, “my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather, he was nothing less than a Chief, living below there at the castle, and as for knowing a pig from a sow, I tell you he wouldn’t have soiled his hands with either. He had a thousand men to work for him, and the King of France was his best friend.”

“That’s true,” said one of the men; “the French were always for helping us, and the Spanish too. I had it from my father.”

“Who was it, then,” asked another, “who shot a landlord for interfering with the smugglers? That’s another true story, and happened in Doonhaven.”

“It was one of the Donovans,” said Jim, “and small blame to him either. What right had the landlord to spoil the livelihood of innocent men ? I’d shoot anyone who did the same to me.”

“And be strung up by the redcoats in the garrison,” laughed his friend.

“Oh, I care nothing for them,” said Jim, waving his hand. “We’ll be rid of the lot of them before you can turn round. And then I’ll invite you to shoot hares on the island.”

If Hal had been in Canada he would have joined in the fun, and chaffed Jim Donovan, as he had done his fellow-ranchers. But back at home it was different. These men could not forget he was a Brodrick, whose father owned Clonmere and the mine also, and they believed him stiff and proud. Should he try to joke with them they would feel awkward and shy, or imagine he did it out of condescension, to stand in well with them for some ulterior design. And so, in spite of smiles and valiant efforts to seem friendly and natural, Hal would achieve no more than a “Good-day,” and a remark about the weather.

It was part of his work, as clerk to the manager, to supervise the payment of wages every Friday. It was the day he hated most in the week. He would have to sit in the counting-house, beside Mr. Griffiths, with a stack of coins in front of him, reading the names out from a sheet of paper, and then handing the required amount to the manager as each man in turn stepped forward to take his pay. The wages seemed so pitifully small, the coins so few in number. Every Friday morning his heart would sink as he heard the tramp of men queuing up outside the door of the counting-house, and then Mr.

Griffiths would take his place beside him and the names would be called. The skilled miners first, and the engineers, descending in scale to the surface men, and the dressers, and the women and children.

“Pat Torrens,” he would call, and a man would step forward, lean and grey, his skin like wrinkled parchment, and a great Adam’s apple moving in his throat, big pouches under his eyes. Two pounds.

Two pounds for working eight hours at a stretch, on his back perhaps, in the damp, low levels beneath Hungry Hill, and coming to the surface to change his clothes in the draughty shed where the wind whistled through the open doors, home to his cabin or cottage to eat potatoes and salt fish and sleep before the reeking turf fire, and then back again, down to the black rock-face and the wet walls of the mine.

Hal would hand over the little pile of coins, avoiding the man’s eye. Surely Pat Torrens must think to himself, “This is one of the men I’m working for.

Every ounce of stuff I break out of the rock and bring to the surface, with my sweat and labour, turns into gold when it is sent across the water to Hal Brodrick’s father. He lives in a great house and has servants and carriages and sits on his backside all day. He does not even have the running of the mine, like the manager. He just lies back and puts the gold into his pockets.” Pat Torrens would shuffle from the counting-house and Hal would call the next name on the list.

And so on and so on for an hour or so, finishing with the women and children. One or two little fellows of not more than nine years of age, coming forward for their two-shilling piece, the reward for standing barefoot on the tin as it was washed in the “buddle,” or for breaking large pieces of ore with a hammer outside the dressing-sheds.

One Friday morning, when the last had been paid, Hal turned to the manager in anger and disgust.

“Surely it’s not right?” he said. “They ought to get more. Why, when every man, woman and child in the mines has been paid, it’s barely a tenth of what goes to my father.”

Mr. Griffiths stared at him.

“The pay is good,” he said. “I’ve known it lower in other mines. They don’t expect more. Of course your father must make his profit. He’s the owner, isn’t he? Don’t tell me you’re a Radical-you’ll be preaching revolution next.”

“I’m not a Radical, or a revolutionist,” said Hal. “I don’t care a twopenny damn about politics. But I feel ashamed, that’s all.”

“Oh, come,” said the manager, getting up and reaching for his coat, “that’s all false sentiment. You keep the books in order, and forget the moral side of it. Besides, the day will come when you will be the owner yourself.

You can give all your profits away then, if you feel like it.”

“Yes,” said Hal, “but that’s just the point. I shan’t want to. I’ll be thinking of sitting back and taking my ease, the same as my father.”

He would drive home in the evening, turning his back on the sight and sound of the mines. The tall chimneys, black against the hill, would point their fingers to the sky, and a glare of fire would come from the open doors of the boiler-houses. He would hear the winding rattle of the drums in the shafts, and the ceaseless throb of the engine pumps. There would be the inevitable pungent smell in the air coming from the dressing-sheds where the ore was cleansed. And once away, along the road, with the chimneys out of sight, and the smoke from the furnaces blown eastward, and the tramping miners gone below on night-shift, there would be no other sound but the steady clop-clop of Tom Callaghan’s mare taking Hal back to Doonhaven, and on his left the smooth, untroubled waters of Mundy Bay. Hungry Hill would rise above him, white and silent under the moon, and away yonder the pin-prick lights of Doonhaven danced and flickered.

Yes, thought Hal, and for all my brave talk to Griffiths about the hard work and low pay of the miners, all I want really is to be living in comfort in Clonmere, because of them, with Jinny dressed for dinner as my mother used to do, and a butler waiting on her instead of that half-witted girl. I want to enjoy the mines, as my forebears did, and forget the cost.

I don’t want to go back to my poky little house in the village street and know that Jinny has cooked my supper for me and is feeling tired and worn.

He would leave the trap with Patsy at the Rectory, and walk through the village to his house.

A smell of cooking would greet his nostrils as he entered, a thing he detested and which it was impossible to smother in so small a house, for all the care that Jinny took.

She came, dear girl, running to meet him, with her bright eyes full of love, and her hair a little untidy, her face flushed from bending over the stove.

“Your favourite supper,” she said, beaming, “herrings and cauliflower cheese. I’ve been given a new recipe from mother’s precious book. Oh, and the chimney’s been smoking in the sitting-room; we’ll have to have it swept. Kitty and Simon called from Andriff; they left us a lovely melon and some grapes. So good of them. And Simon wants to buy one of your pictures, the little sketch of Doon Island from the creek.”

“He doesn’t really,” said Hal. “He just does it out of charity.”

“No, dear, he does not. You must not be so proud. He thinks you have great talent. Kitty told me so.”

“He’s the only one that does, then.”

“No, Hal, that’s naughty. Your wife is proud of your work.”

“It’s more than I am. I’m a rotten painter, and a rotten husband.”

“Don’t be so grumpy, love. Come and sit down and rest in your chair, even if the fire is smoking, and I’ll bring you your supper on a tray.”

Hal flung himself down and stretched out his arms to her.

“Why should you wait on me?” he said, drawing her on to his knee. “It’s I who should look after you.

I’d like to see you with your hair smoothed back, Jinny girl, and a low-cut frock, instead of that old apron and your little hands all sticky with cooking.”

“I’ll smooth my hair for you, and I’ll wear my wedding-dress, and I’ll wash my hands in milk, if you will promise to be a good boy.”