Tales of the Ridings Part 4

The story is soon told. For a long time there had been no serious accident at the Leeds Steel Works, and the workmen, almost without being aware of it, had grown somewhat reckless of the dangers which they had to face. They knew quite well that in many of the operations which the metal undergoes in its pa.s.sage from crude ore to ingots of steel, a false step meant instant death. But they had known this so long that the knowledge had lost its terrors.

There are many moments of enforced idleness for the vesselmen as they stand on their raised platform in front of the crucibles; but, even during these moments of inactivity, alertness of mind is required. One morning their minds were not alert, and one of the workmen, Abe Verity by name, seated on the railing which separates the platform from the pit in which stand the ingot-moulds, had s.n.a.t.c.hed the cap from the head of one of his fellows. The latter, in response to this, had raised his crowbar, as if he meant to strike Abe on the head, and Abe, lurching backward on the railing in order to avoid the blow, had lost his balance and fallen backwards. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances this would have meant nothing worse than a drop into the pit below, but, as ill-luck would have it, one of the cauldrons of molten steel was being swung along the arc of the pit by a hydraulic crane, and, at the very moment when Abe lost his balance, it had reached the point beneath which he was sitting.

There was an agonised cry from the vesselmen on their platform, a hissing splash with great gouts of liquid fire flying in all directions, a sickening smell, and then, a few minutes later, a clergyman, hastily summoned from the adjoining church, was reciting the burial service over the calcined body of Abe Verity.

Blank terror gleamed in the eyes of the men who had been witnesses of this grim holocaust. All work was suspended for the day, and Job Hesketh was led home, dazed and trembling in every joint, by his two eldest sons, who worked in another part of the forge. Huddled together in his chair by the kitchen fire, perspiration streamed from his face. He was in a state bordering on delirium, and the answers which he gave to the questions put to him were wildly incoherent.

Abe Verity was his friend. They had been boys together in the little wold village where they had been born, and it was at Job's earnest entreaty that Abe had quitted farm work and joined his friend at the Leeds Steel Works. Their tastes had been similar, and the Veritys had often joined the Heskeths in their summer holiday at the seaside. And now, in one fell moment, the lifelong friends.h.i.+p had been severed, and Abe, the glad, strong, heart-warm man, had plunged from life to death.

Job refused to go to bed that night, but sat in his chair by the flickering embers of his kitchen fire. His wife, lying awake in the bedroom above, listened to his hard breathing and to the half-stifled words which now and again fell from his lips. He was brooding over the terrible scene he had witnessed. Every detail had bitten itself into his brain like acid into metal. He saw the waves of liquid steel closing over his friend, the greedy swirl of the molten metal, and then the little tongues of red fire playing upon the surface. They reminded him of the red tongues of wolves which he had once seen in a cage, as they licked their chops after their feed of horse-flesh. Then it was the clergyman reading from his Prayer Book in the garish light of the forge that fastened itself on his mind. The words seemed charged with bitter mockery: "We give Thee hearty thanks, for that it hath pleased Thee to deliver this our brother out of the miseries of this sinful world."

"Hearty thanks"! he muttered scornfully. "I'll gie G.o.d nowt o' t' sort.

Life tasted gooid to Abe. He knew nowt about t' miseries o' t' sinful world. He led a clean life, did Abe; an' he were fain o' life, same as I am."

Time gradually a.s.suaged the first horror of the tragedy which Job had witnessed, but it failed to bring him peace of mind. Fear of death, which up to the moment of the tragedy at the forge had never given him an uneasy moment, now entered into possession of his mind and haunted him awake or asleep. His work at the forge, once a joy to him, was now an unbroken agony. He saw death lying in wait for him every time he climbed a ladder or lifted a crowbar. Nor could he wholly escape from the terror in what had always seemed to him the security of his home.

The howling of the wind in the chimney, the muttering of a distant thunderstorm, even the sight of his razor on the dressing-table, were enough to arouse the morbid fear and strike terror to his heart.

He said little of the agony that he suffered, but it was written plainly in his eyes, in his ashen face and in the trembling of his hand. I did my best to induce him to speak his mind to me, but with poor success.

One Sunday evening, however, when I found him and his wife seated by themselves over the fire, I found him more communicative, and I realised that what he dreaded most of all in the thought of death was loss of personality. Of the unelect Calvinist's fear of h.e.l.l he knew nothing.

What troubled him was, rather, dissatisfaction with heaven. Job was not much of a theologian, though he attended chapel regularly of a Sunday evening. His ideas of heaven were drawn mainly from certain popular hymns, which depicted the life of the redeemed as a perpetual practice of psalmody.

"What sud I be doin' i' heaven," he asked, "wi' a crown o' gowd on my heead and nowt to do all day but tw.a.n.g a harp, just as if I were one o'

them lads i' t' band? What mak o' life's yon for a chap like me, that's allus bin used to tug an' tew for his livin'!"

"Nay, Job," his wife replied, "but thou'll be fain o' a bit o' rest when thy turn cooms. It's a place o' rest, that's what heaven is; thou'll noan be wanted to play on t' harp without thou's a mind to."

"I can't sit idle like thee, Mary," Job answered. "I mun allus be doin'

summat. If it isn't Steel Works, it's fox-huntin'; and if it isn't fox-huntin' it's fettlin' up t' henhouse, or doin' a bit o' wark wi' my shool i' t' tatie-patch."

"Thou'll happen change thy mind when thou's a bit owder," was Mary Hesketh's answer to this. "When I'm ower thrang wi' wark on a was.h.i.+n'-day, I just set misen down on t' chair and think o' t' rest o'

heaven, an' I say ower to misen yon lines that I larnt frae my m.u.t.h.e.r:

"I knew a poor la.s.s that allus were tired, Shoo lived in a house wheer help wasn't hired.

Her last words on earth were, 'Dear friends, I am goin'

Wheer wes.h.i.+n' ain't doon, nor sweepin', nor sewin', Don't weep for me now, don't weep for me niver, I'm boun' to do nowt for iver an' iver.'"

"Ay, la.s.s," Job replied, "that's reight enif for thee. Breedin' barns taks it out o' a woman. But it'll noan suit me so weel."

I did my best to reason with Job and to enlarge his conception of the life to come and of the progress of the soul after death, but I made little impression on his mind. A heaven without forges, fox-hunting and hen-coops offered him no possible attraction.

"What thou says may be true," he would answer, "but it'll noan be Job Hesketh that's sittin' theer. It'll be somebody else o' t' same name."

Thus did he fall back upon his ever-besetting fear of loss of personality in the life hereafter, and, like his Biblical namesake, he refused to be comforted.

The agony which Job Hesketh was enduring did not make him listless. On the contrary, it seemed to give him new energy. It is true that the old pleasure had gone out of his work and play, but to him work and play meant life, and to life he clung with the energy of one who lived in constant fear lest it should be suddenly s.n.a.t.c.hed from him. It was January when Abe Verity had met with his fatal accident, and all through the next six months Job toiled like a galley-slave.

It was the practice of the Heskeths to spend the first ten days of August at the seaside. It was their annual holiday, long talked of and long prepared, and it was invariably spent at Bridlington. There Job could indulge to the full in his favourite holiday pastime of swimming, and there he was in close touch with the undulating wold country where his boyhood had been spent. He could renew old acquaintances, lend a hand to the farmers, or wander at will along the chalk beds of the _gipsies_ or dry water-courses which wind their way from the hills to the sea. Years ago he and his wife had given a trial to Scarborough, Blackpool and Morecambe as seaside resorts, but they felt like foreigners there and had come back to Bridlington as to an old home.

"There's nowt like Bridlington sands," he would say, in self-defence.

"I'm noan sayin' but what there's a better colour i' t' watter at Blackpool, but there's ower mich wind on' t sea. Sea-watter gits into your mouth when you're swimmin' and then you've to blow like a grampus.

Scarborough's ower cla.s.sy for t' likes o' Mary an' me; it's all reight for bettermy-bodies that likes to dizen theirselves out an' sook cigars on church parade. But me an' t' owd la.s.s allus go to Bridlington. It's homely, is Bridlington, an' you're not runnin' up ivery minute agean foreign counts an' countesses that ought to bide wheer they belang, an'

keep theirsens to theirsens."

There had been no improvement in Job's state of mind during the long summer days that preceded his holiday. In his most robust days inquiries as to his health always elicited the answer that he was "just middlin',"

which is the invariable answer that the cautious Yorks.h.i.+reman vouchsafes to give. Now, with a shrunken frame, and fever in his eye, he was still "just middlin'," and, only when hard pressed would he acknowledge the carking fear that was gnawing at his heart. I was, however, not without hope that change of air and sea-bathing, for which Job had a pa.s.sion almost equal to that for fox-hunting, would restore him to health and tranquillity of mind.

The Heskeths started for Bridlington on a Friday, and on the following Sunday the news reached me that my old friend had been drowned while bathing. I was stunned by the blow, and a feeling of intense gloom pervaded my mind all day. But next morning the rumour was corrected.

Job, it seems, had gone for a long swim on the Sat.u.r.day morning, and, not realising that he had lost strength during the last six months, had swum too far out of his depth. His strength had given out on the return journey, and only the arrival of a boatman had saved him from death by drowning. Relieved as I was by this second account of what had happened, I was, nevertheless, a prey to the fear that this second encounter with death would have enhanced that agony of mind which he had endured ever since the moment when his friend, Abe Verity, had fallen into the cauldron of molten steel. I waited anxiously for Job's return home and determined to go and see him on the evening following his arrival.

I was in my bedroom, preparing to start off, when, to my surprise, I heard Job's voice at my front door. I ran downstairs and was face to face with a Job Hesketh that I had not known for six months. His head and shoulders were erect, he had put on flesh, and the cowed look had entirely vanished from his eyes. I at once congratulated him on his improved appearance.

"Aye, aye," he answered, "there's nowt mich wrang wi' me."

"Bridlington, I see, has done you a world of good."

"Nay, I've bin farther nor Bridlington," he replied, and the old merry twinkle, that I knew so well and had missed so long, came into his eyes.

"What do you mean?" I asked. "Have you been on board one of the Wilson liners in the Humber and crossed over to Holland?"

"Farther nor Holland," he replied, with a chuckle. "I've bin to heaven.

I reckon I'm t' first Yorks.h.i.+reman that's bin to heaven an' gotten a return ticket given him."

"Sit down, Job," I said, "and stop that nonsense. What do you mean?"

Job seated himself by my study fire, leisurely took from his pocket a dirty clay pipe and a roll of black twist, which he proceeded to cut and pound. As he was thus engaged he would look up from time to time into my face and enjoy to the full the look of impatience imprinted on it.

"Aye, lad," he began at last, "I've bin to heaven sin I last saw thee, an' heaven's more like Leeds nor I thowt for."

"Like Leeds!" I exclaimed, and, as Job seemed in a jesting mood, I decided to humour him. "I fancy it must have been the other place you got to. To think of you not being able to tell heaven from h.e.l.l."

"Nay, 'twere heaven, reight enif," he continued, undisturbed. "I could tell it by t' glint i' t' een o' t' lads an' la.s.ses."

I could see that Job had a story to tell of more than ordinary interest.

His changed appearance and buoyant manner showed clearly that something had happened to him which had dispelled the pall of gloom which had settled on him since Abe Verity's death. I was determined to hear the story in full.

"Now then, Job," I said, "let us get to business. Take that pipe out of your mouth and tell me what you have been doing at Bridlington."

Job laid down his clay pipe, cleared his throat, and polished his face till it shone, with a large red handkerchief, and began his story.

"Well, you see, t' missus an' me got to Bridlington Friday afore Bank Holiday, an' next mornin' I went down to t' sh.o.r.e for my swim same as I'd allus done afore. 'Twere a breet mornin', an t' chalk cliffs o'

Flamborough were glistenin' i' t' sun-leet. T' fis.h.i.+n' boats were out at sea, an' t' air were fair wick wi' kittiwakes an' herrin' gulls. So I just undressed misen, walked down to t' watter an' started swimmin'. Eh!

but t' sea were bonny an' warm, an' for once I got all yon dowly thowts o' death clean out o' my head. So I just struck out for t' buoy that were anch.o.r.ed out at sea, happen hafe a mile frae t' sh.o.r.e. That had allus bin my swim sin first we took to comin' to Bridlington, and I'd niver had no trouble i' swimmin' theer an' back. I got to t' buoy all reight an' rested misen a bit an' looked round. Gow! but 'twere a grand seet. I could see t' leet-house at Spurn, and reight i' front o' me were Bridlington wi' t' Priory Church and up beyond were fields an' fields of corn wi' farm-houses set amang t' plane-trees an' t' sun-leet glistenin'

on their riggins. Efter a while I started to swim back. But it were noan so easy. Tide were agean me an' there were a fres.h.i.+sh breeze off t'

land. Howiver, I'd no call to hurry misen, so when I got a bit tired I lay on my back, an' floated an' looked up at t' gulls aboon my head. But then I fan' out 'twere no use floatin'; t' tide were driftin' me out to sea. So I got agate o' swimmin' an' kept at it for wellnigh ten minutes.

But t' sh.o.r.e were a lang way off, an' then, sudden-like, I began to think o' Abe Verity, an' t' fear o' death got howd on me an' clutched me same as if I'd bin taen wi' cramp. There were lads fis.h.i.+n' frae boats noan so far off, an' I hollaed to 'em; but they niver heerd. I tewed an'

better tewed, but I got no forrarder; an' then I knew I were boun' to drown."

As Job got to this point in his story something of the old terror crept into his eyes, and I did my best to cheer him.

"Well, Job," I said, "they tell me that drowning is the pleasantest kind of death that there is."