for their talk was ordinary enough. But Alvina liked to be with Miss
Pinnegar in the kitchen. Miss Pinnegar wasn't competent and
masterful like Miss Frost: she was ordinary and uninspired, with
quiet, unobserved movements. But she was deep, and there was some
secret satisfaction in her very quality of secrecy.
So the days and weeks and months slipped by, and Alvina was hidden
like a mole in the dark chambers of Manchester House, busy with
cooking and cleaning and arranging, getting the house in her own
order, and attending to her pupils. She took her walk in the
afternoon. Once and only once she went to Throttle-Ha'penny, and,
seized with sudden curiosity, insisted on being wound down in the
iron bucket to the little workings underneath. Everything was quite
tidy in the short gang-ways down below, timbered and in sound order.
The miners were competent enough. But water dripped dismally in
places, and there was a stale feeling in the air.
Her father accompanied her, pointed her to the seam of
yellow-flecked coal, the shale and the bind, the direction of the
trend. He had already an airy-fairy kind of knowledge of the whole
affair, and seemed like some not quite trustworthy conjuror who had
conjured it all up by sleight of hand. In the background the miners
stood grey and ghostly, in the candle-light, and seemed to listen
sardonically. One of them, facile in his subordinate way as James in
his authoritative, kept chiming in:
"Ay, that's the road it goes, Miss Huffen--yis, yo'll see th' roof
theer bellies down a bit--s' loose. No, you dunna get th' puddin'
stones i' this pit--s' not deep enough. Eh, they come down on you
plumb, as if th' roof had laid its egg on you. Ay, it runs a bit
thin down here--six inches. You see th' bed's soft, it's a sort o'
clay-bind, it's not clunch such as you get deeper. Oh, it's easy
workin'--you don't have to knock your guts out. There's no need for
shots, Miss Huffen--we bring it down--you see here--" And he
stooped, pointing to a shallow, shelving excavation which he was
making under the coal. The working was low, you must stoop all the
time. The roof and the timbered sides of the way seemed to press on
you. It was as if she were in her tomb for ever, like the dead and
everlasting Egyptians. She was frightened, but fascinated. The
collier kept on talking to her, stretching his bare, grey-black
hairy arm across her vision, and pointing with his knotted hand. The
thick-wicked tallow candles guttered and smelled. There was a
thickness in the air, a sense of dark, fluid presence in the thick
atmosphere, the dark, fluid, viscous voice of the collier making a
<<BackPagesTo menuForward>>