The Quality of Mercy

2



Late in the afternoon of the day of that fortunate wayside encounter, a Durham coal miner named James Bordon, who was married to Billy Blair’s sister Nan, was standing near the head of a steep-sided and thickly wooded ravine known locally as the Dene. He was looking in the direction of the sea, which at that distance was no more than a change in the quality of the light, a pale suffusion low in the sky. At his back, little more than half a mile away, was the colliery village of Thorpe, where he lived, though nothing of it could be seen from where he was standing; cottages and surrounding fields belonged to the upper world; here below, vagrant streams, over great spans of time, had gouged through the bolder clay and limestone to make a deep and narrow chasm.

Bordon had not attended any school, and he could not read or write. He was ignorant of this long scooping-out of the rock, the millions of years that had gone into it. But he knew the Dene with a knowledge no study of geology could have given him. He had known it all his life; he had played here as a child, made tree houses with other children, fished for sticklebacks and newts in the beck that ran through the gorge below him, slate gray in color now, under this lowering sky. Childhood had ended for him at the age of seven, when his father, in accordance with the general habit, and as his own father had done, had taken him down to work in the mine. His father was gone now; he had died as a good number of miners did, his lungs choked up with all the years of inhaling flint dust.

Bordon had come here straight from the pit, as he sometimes did—more often nowadays than before, as if from a need that was growing. He was black with coal dust; the acrid smell of it, together with the sweat of his labor, rose to him from the folds of his clothing, thick cotton shirt and trousers, leather waistcoat and apron and knee pads. For fourteen years now he had been a full pitman, a hewer, cutting out the coal from the face. He had worked for ten hours that day, starting at six in the morning, and he had done his stint—he was not paid by the hour but bound by contract to cut coal enough to fill six corves, thirty hundredweight, in one working shift, or suffer loss of wages if he came short of this. The condition met—and the judgment was his—he was free to leave the coal lying for the putters to load into the corves and drag to the pithead.

He stood still now, letting the peace and silence of the place settle around him, and the strange sense of a stronger existence that came with them. He could not easily have found words for this. He was unpracticed in speaking about feelings, and there was no one, in any case, with whom he might have made the attempt, without fear of being thought softheaded. But it was mainly the reason why he came to this place, the sense of intensified life that visited him when he stood alone here. Partly he knew it, though confusedly, for the shelter afforded by the open sky, the removal of a roof too close, the fact that he could raise his head and shift his limbs freely, the steady light after the hours of kneeling with hammer and wedge at the narrow seam, in the close heat, by the variable flame of the candle.

But it was more than this, more than mere awareness of freedom; he felt a gathering of the heart and pulse of his existence, stronger now for the faint sounds that came to him as he stood here, sounds of other existences blending with his own, voices of children from somewhere among the trees, the calling of curlews from the fields in that other world above, the distant hiss and clatter of the pump bringing up water from a flooded shaft somewhere among the mine workings.

The children’s voices came to him again, too faint for him to know whether happy or angry. They were lower down, somewhere close to the bank of the stream. Down there, further into the Dene, the ground leveled out and the beck made a turn southward, out of the path of the ice-laden winds that sometimes came in from the sea and tore through the long hollow of the glen. Here, in this sheltered loop of land, the climate was different, milder; there were zones of air that never felt the frost; willow herb grew here, and wild daffodils, and a thick vegetation of ferns and flowering grasses covered the ground. Two acres, roughly speaking. Fertile, well-watered, level ground, screened from the worst of winter, designed by nature for a market garden …

It was a thought that came often to him, more a kind of vision than a thought. It had accompanied his life, or so it seemed—he could not remember when first this picture had come into his mind, the flowering fruit trees, the green rows well hoed and neat, the pit pony he would rescue from toiling in darkness to carry his produce along the streamside to the coast. It was a vision orderly and beautiful, and it came to him not only here, though here it was stronger, here it seemed almost possible of fulfillment. He might think of it as he was falling asleep, or as he trudged to work in the early morning. Sometimes, at the end of a stint, when his eyes were tired, the shifting glints of the coal seemed like stirring leaves and gleams of light on water.

Occasionally he had spoken to his eldest son, Michael, about this piece of land, not directly as an ambition of ownership but as representing a happy state of existence, a labor that made sense, being on ground that was your own. In fact the Dene, and all the lands surrounding it as far as the coast, and all the coal that lay beneath, had belonged for several generations to the Spenton family, whose mansion and park and gardens and lake lay on a commanding rise of ground some two miles from where he was standing.

The clouds to the west lifted suddenly and a shaft of sunlight fell across the wooded incline. The voices of the children came to him again. He descended some yards along the narrow path that led through trees down the side of the glen. His sight was confused by the gleam of sunlight on the dark, clustering foliage of the yew trees that grew here on the upper slopes and the mist of green formed by the first buds of leaf on the beeches. After some moments he came to a point from which he could look down to the valley floor, see again the cold gray of the beck, too far below to be touched by the sunshine, though the change of light had made it possible to see the movement of the current, a whiteness at the edges where the water was whisked in eddies.

Then, quite suddenly, he saw the children; they were at the streamside, five diminutive figures, all boys, crouching by the water. Something about their gestures and voices, the way they crouched so intently, looking down, told him that a competition of some sort was going on. Then he saw a fleeting gleam of white, then another and another: they were racing boats as far as the overhang of rock some dozen yards farther down, where the stones in the streambed rose to the surface and broke the current. He remembered doing the same as a child—just there, just in that same place. You took some loose bark from a silver birch, stripped the pith and set your boat on its beveled side, well clear of the bank … At the same moment that he was recalling this he saw that one of the boys was his youngest son, Percy, who would soon be seven years old.

With some impulse of secrecy, or tact, he turned aside, began to go back the way he had come. As he reached the level of the rough pasture above, the hollow from which he had emerged closed behind him, to be replaced by a new order of familiarity, the slate roofs of the village, the smoke from the coal fires burning in the houses, the fumes of the open salt pans that lay beyond, swathing the houses themselves and all the air above and around them in a mist that was sour and all-pervasive.

Entering the lane that led to the village, he fell in with a miner named Saul Parrish, who lived close by him, he too returning from work and black with the dust of the coal. As they drew nearer to the first houses they heard a sudden outcry, the voices of women raised in shrill protest, the rarer voices of men. A strong smell of excrement was carried to them. Then they saw the coop cart and the black dray horse and the lines of washing running down the alleys below the houses.

“They are aboot the emptyin’ of the netties,” Parrish said, in the tone of pleased authority that comes to one who after study has found the answer to a difficult problem.

It was a note of self-satisfaction peculiar to Parrish. And perhaps it was this, the habit of delivering information obvious to all as if it were a special shaft of insight, that caused the beginnings of anger in Bordon, an anger not primarily directed at Parrish but at the tangle and confusion he knew to be reigning there in the narrow lanes, the washing lines caught up, clothes in danger of soiling, the weaving of the men with the stinking buckets, the confused upbraiding of the women, his wife Nan among them.

“A can see that for mesen,” he said. “A dinna need nay tellin’.”

The privies were in the yards behind the houses; they were emptied every so often into a cart specially designed for the purpose, high-sided, fitted with a huge tin basin with a sliding cover, to be borne away and tipped into a deep and monstrously reeking cesspool in the moorland some miles away.

“Anyone can see what they are doin’,” Bordon said. “What a want to know is why them fellers always come to us on a washin’ day. Tha never knows when they’ll come next, but tha knows it will always be on a washin’ day, so they can clag everythin’ up.”

Parrish’s eyes were bloodshot, after the hours of close and dusty work. They gleamed now in the blackened face with the light of superior wisdom. “Why, man,” he said, “they have their hours, as we arl do, rain or shine, that’s the way of it. ’Tis arl planned out by the manage.”

“The manage?” Bordon felt the rage rising in him, stiffening his jaw. “Is tha tellin’ me that the manage plans it out so them fellers always come to empty the shit in the village of Thorpe on a bleddy washin’ day? What is the manage, is it God? There’s someone there has a grudge against us.”

He had spoken loudly, and a man who had approached without their noticing, so intent were they on their talk, now spoke from behind him. “Who is that taking the name of God in vain?”

Turning, Bordon saw the very man least welcome to him at such a moment. It was Samuel Hill, who always had to be interfering and putting his nose in, judging everything and awarding points this way and that. He it was who always tried to set himself up as arbiter in the fistfights that were sometimes chosen, when words failed, as the means of settling an argument. Because of this mania for sitting in judgment, he was generally referred to—but never by Bordon—as Arbiter Hill, a title of which he was proud. He had been to a charity school and could read and write after a fashion, an advantage that had got him a place as assistant overman, tallying the loaded corves as they were dragged by the putters from the coal face to the pit bottom.

“Tha takes everythin’ personal,” Parrish said. He never liked his words of wisdom to be questioned, and he reacted now with some rage of his own to the rage he had heard in Bordon’s voice. “Tha brings everythin’ back to theesen. Does tha think they do it out of spite?”

He turned to Hill. “He is sayin’ there is a grudge against us in the manage because they always comes to empty the privies on a washin’ day. Them fellers empty the buckets in pit villages as far as the banks of the Wear, but he thinks Thorpe is the only colliery in the County of Durham that has shithouses in the yards.”

“I think I’ve understood the issue.” Hill had somehow managed to insert himself between the two disputants. “Here on my right,” he said, “in the person of Saul Parrish, we are hearing the opinion that the workings of authority as regards the emptying of the netties in Thorpe do not take account of the likes of you and me, having a wider view of things, ranging farther afield and emptying more netties in the course of a week than what we can imagine. On my left, we have James Bordon, who is stating that there is more to the emptying of the netties than meets the eye, there being some reason lying below why they always come to us on a washing day. There is the further question, not so far touched upon, whether they always do come on a washing day or whether it only seems so because of the nuisance. That is the position as it stands at the present time. Now, lads, box on.”

But Bordon’s rage had died as he listened, and weariness had returned. The voices of quarrel still came from the village, sounds ugly and discordant, so much at odds with those he had emerged from, which had seemed part of the silence. “Take it personal?” he said. “The manage dinna pay them fellers. Him that owns the mine, Lord Spenton, he dinna pay neether. Every man jack of us is docked tuppence a week, as you know well, Saul Parrish. That is personal enough, an’t it? Them that pays should have a say in the runnin’ of it.”

“It’s as well nobody but us is listening,” Hill said. “Those are words that could be took wrong.”

Bordon shrugged. “Bad cess to them that would take it so,” he said. He had long suspected Hill for a tale-bearer. Then, realizing he had made a sort of joke, though by accident, he smiled a little. “You two gan on,” he said. “A’ll stay here till they’ve done.”

He lingered in the lane for some time longer, greeting the men who passed but remaining alone. Only when the cart was gone did he start to make his way toward the village. He knew now, rage spent, that he had been wrong in what he had said about the nettie men; he knew they came on various days, he knew there was no plot. He had been angered at the sight and sound of them because washing day was always Saturday and it was the day he looked forward to most in the working week, the clean shirt and trousers, the prospect of rest next day.

There was free coal for all the mining families and fires were kept up all day, in all seasons. Nan was waiting for him with the water already heated for his bath. She was the only woman of the house; their one daughter had died in early childhood. The two older sons worked longer hours than their father, fourteen hours a day, dragging the loaded baskets along the workways from the coal face. It would be after dark when they returned; at this season they saw full daylight only on Sundays.

The hip bath was brought out and set before the fire, the hot water poured out from the big copper pan and mixed with the cold brought in from the well in the alley. His clean clothes were laid over a kitchen chair; there was the pipe to enjoy afterward. He looked at Nan’s face as she ministered to him, and felt a concern for her that came close to sorrow. She had had to endure that chaos and rage with the other women, after the long day of washing, the poss tub, the mangle, the tall lines to reach up to. There was weariness in her face, but no trace of anger; she was intent, pouring clean water from a tin mug over his shoulders and back.

“A saw our Percy in the Dene,” he said. “He was racin’ with birch boats in the beck. A dinna know if he saw me watchin’.”

“He wouldna have knowed it was you, all black from the pit. Men are different inside of them but tha canna tell much difference on the outside till they wash the coal off.”

Different inside they were indeed, she thought, whether clean washed or not. Bordon was subject to rages and there was violence in him, but it was never directed at her. From the day she had agreed to marry him he had tried to protect her as far as he could; he had wanted her to stop working at the pithead, sorting the shale and slate from the heaped coal, work she had started at the age of nine. It had meant a sacrifice of money, but he had insisted. There were some who made their wives labor at the mine even when they were advanced in pregnancy.

His hair had thinned in these last two or three years; she could feel the small ridges of the scars that ran over his scalp. He was taller than average, and the only protection any of them had was the cloth cap; he did not always remember to stoop enough, and so he banged and bloodied his head against the roofs of the galleries as he passed.

“It minded me of doin’ the same when a was that age,” he said. He turned his head in an effort to look at her through the blur of the water. Percy’s age was frequently in their minds nowadays; this summer would see the end of childhood for him, set him on the long course of becoming a pitman. It was not something to be much talked about, any more than other obvious facts of life. Percy himself was ready to go down, as his brothers had done before him; but he was the last of their children, and both felt a sense of regret they had not felt for the others.

“He should be gettin’ back home by now,” Nan said. Then, after a moment, “He does well to play while he can.”

“Just in that selfsame place,” he said, closing his eyes, seeing the place again. “The beck runs fast there.”

He was dressed and had finished his tea by the time Michael and David came home. They came back together, as happened now and then, when their hours of work coincided.

There was no hot water for them—that was the privilege of the head of the family. They took buckets to the well that was shared by all the houses in their alley, brought the water back to their own yard and washed down there. Their only light was a candle lamp, but it was enough for Michael to see that his twelve-year-old brother, with the coal dust washed away, had livid bruises on his arms and legs. “How did tha get them marks?” he said.

David was reluctant to say. Stoicism came naturally to him; bruises of whatever kind were part of the life of the pit; it did not seem manly to complain, he did not want to look a weakling in his admired elder brother’s eyes. But as they fumbled their working clothes back on again in the cold yard, Michael persisted, and finally got the answer that confirmed the suspicions he had held for some time now. David worked as putter’s mate with a man named Daniel Walker; together they loaded the coal hacked out by the hewers, together they hauled and pushed the loaded sledges along the gallery ways to the pit bottom, where the quantities were tallied and the corves winched up to the surface. This was piecework; they were paid by the quantity of the coal they shifted. It seemed that Walker, thinking to spur David on to greater efforts, frequently struck him with his fists on the arms and shoulders and kicked him on the legs.

“Is tha doin’ the best tha can to share the work?”

“Yes,” David said, with some indignation at this slur on him. “A canna do more, a canna gan faster.”

“An’ yon fool thinks he can make you do more by hittin’ you?”

David made no reply to this, standing there with his face averted, as if he had done some wrong. And this unhappy silence, this childish guilt at the fault of another, moved Michael and angered him at the same time. “Right then,” he said. “A’ll have a word or two with Walker.”