Volume 035-4 - October 1981 (8 pages)

top; both have held their own underground from generation to generation without change or visible improvement. They do their work by virtue of main strength and dogged constancy, and neither one can be hurried. On this last head, the pump-man will answer for his pump—speaking of it as of an old comrade, in the masculine singular, if you ask how many beats of the great connecting rod are normal:— ‘°K ’ave been as ’igh as seven and a quarter; ’e’ave been, but it dostrain’im. Seven, about seven, is what ’e can bear.” John Trenberth of Penzance, spoken of familiarly as “old Joh,” was pump-man first and last at the Morning Watch. He was there when the first pump-station was put in and the rod was but four hundred feet long. He saw that mighty member grow, section by section, pump added to pump, as the shaft went down. Each new pump was as a child born to him; there was room in his pride always for one more. If one had a failing more than another, he made a study of its individual crankiness and learned to spare the fault he could not remedy nor hide. To the mining captain, to whom he was forced to go for supplies, he might confess that ‘“‘No. 5, ’e do chaw up more packin’ than all the pumps in the mine”’; but in general it was like touching upon delicate family matters with old John to question the conduct of his pumps. He was a just man, Trenberth, but not perfect; he had his temporal bonds. It went hard with him on the Lord’s day to choose between the public duty of worship in the miners’ church above ground and his private leaning towards his pumps below. Can a man do his work in this world too well? Escessive devotion to the interests of the mine was not a common fault with its employees. The boys at the Morning Watch made friendly sport of the old enthusiast, declaring that he took his pumps to bed with him and dreamed at night of their kicking and bucking. It is true that the thought of Sammy Trebilcox, and what he might be doing or not doing as his substitute underground, took the heart out of his Sabbath observances and made his day of rest, when he gave himself one, the longest of the seven. Wherefore his little wife—“a good bit older nor ’e”— and a woman of grave disposition saddened by the want of children—sat mournful in church without her man, and thought of his clean shirts folded in the drawer at home and of him in his week day livery of mud, earning unblessed wages underground. She knew it was not the extra day’s pay that ensnared him; her prayer was that he be delivered from pride in carnal labors, and that he make not unto himself a graven image and an idol of “they pumps”. A pump-man has his regular shifts; but so well known was the quality of John’s service that not a man about the mine, from the oldest tributer to the new superintendent, would have questioned his appearance above ground at any irregular hour of the day or night. He looked, when he came on top, like some old piece of mining machinery that has been soaked underground for half a century— plastered with pallid mud of the deepest levels, coated with grease and stained with rust from fondlings of his pumps,— the recognizably human parts of him, his unsunned face and hands, pitted and drawn with steam. The day’s pay men were lively in the stopes; the car-boys romped with the landing men, and chalked the names of one another's sweethearts on the sides of the refractory cars; every tributer in the old workings had his partner to help him hammer out a “crushin’”’; the contractors tunneled and drifted and argued in gangs; but old John, in the bowels of the mine, with death withina foot of him on either side, kept his one man watch alone. In his work there was no variety, no change of surroundings or of seasons, no irrelevant object to rest his fixed attention; solitude, monotony, and ceaseless nagging vigilance, imprisoned in a tube of darkness between the crashing of the cars on the one hand and the squeeze of the rod on the other. Iron will crystallize after years of such use, lose its elasticity and cohesive strength. Ol John had ceased to find pleasure in society or sunlight. He chose the darkest paths going home through the woods, the old roads deep in pine needles undisturbed by passing feet. The sound of a boy’s whoop or a man’s hearty halloo drove him deeper into the shade. If spoken to, he had no answer ready but would whisper one to himself, later, with his eyes on the ground. Once the night shift, going down, saw the old man bare headed in the hoist-shaft, standing motionless on the track, his hand up as if listening. He appeared not to hear the noise of the car, or to have heard it from some imaginary direction. They waved, they roared to him, and he vanished in the pump-shaft. Afterward they remembered his stare of bewilderment as if he had come awake suddenly in a strange place, uncertain how he had got there. Sometimes he would pop up like a stage ghost in the hoisting works, haggard and panting, as if in urgent haste. Greeted with jocular questioning, he would gaze about him vaguely, turn, and plunge down again without a word. The wife began to hear from relatives and neighbors disquieting comments on her husband's looks. ‘It’s more than a whole month ’e ’aven’t ’ad a Sunday off,” said the buxom wife of one of the shift bosses. “Whatever is the sense of ’im workin’ so *ard, and you only two in family? A rest is what ’e need.” “Rest, dear! ‘Aven’t I telled ’im so, pom scores and scores of times! An’ ’e just like a fish out o’ water when ’e’s parted from they pumps. ‘E talk of ’em the same as they were humans—made of the same piece wi’ ’is own flesh and blood.” “Eh! It’s a bad lookout when a man can’t leave his work behind ’im when the day is done. We belongs to ’ave our rest sometime. Why don’t ’e coax ’im out more? ‘Twould do him good to see the folks.” ‘*E never was one to be coaxed. What ’e think right, that ’e’ll do; man nor woman can’t make ’im do other,” Mrs. Trenberth would boast, proud ofa husband’s will unbroken after forty years of marriage. One morning there was summons from the mistress at the kitchen door of the superintendent’s house. “Clen’ want see you—kitch’,” was the Chinese cook’s sketchy way of transmitting the message. Clemmo was there, the gardener and general utility man. The two do not go together unless the man is good natured, as Clemmo was. He stood, hat in hand, in his deferential way, perspiring and quite noticeably pale. There was a catch in his breath from running. He had come to borrow an umbrella. The mistress looked at him in surprise. It was cloudless summer‘ * weather, the hot valley steaming up in the face of the foothills, dust on the cloaking pine woods, red dust inches deep on all the roads and trails, dust like a steamer’s smoke in the wake of ore teams miles away. The shadows of the mine buildings were short and black where a group of men had gathered, though the twelve bell had not yet struck. A sun umbrella did he mean? “Any kind, ma’am; any old one will do,’”’ Clemmo repeated apologetically. “It’s just to hold over Mr. Trenberth when they’re carryin’ him home. Yes, Ma’am, he was hurt in the shaft just now—an hour ago. Oh, yes, the doctor’s seen him. He’s pretty bad. It was an empty car struck him; dragged him quite a ways before the shaft men heard him scream. They can’t tell just how it happened; he hasn’t spoken since they brought him up, Yes, Ma’am, one of the boys has gone to tell the wife. They’ve got an old mattress to carry him on; they have brandy. No, Ma’am, there ain’t anything, thank you—only the umbrella. Any old one will do.” When the umbrella was brought and it proved to be a silk one, Clemmo took it reluctantly, protesting that “any old one—”, but the mistress cut him short. He went off with it finally; assuring her over his shoulder that he would carry it himself and see that it “came right back.” 28

top; both have held their own underground from generation to generation without change or visible improvement. They do their work by virtue of main strength and dogged constancy, and neither one can be hurried. On this last head, the pump-man will answer for his pump—speaking of it as of an old comrade, in the masculine singular, if you ask how many beats of the great connecting rod are normal:— ‘°K ’ave been as ’igh as seven and a quarter; ’e’ave been, but it dostrain’im. Seven, about seven, is what ’e can bear.” John Trenberth of Penzance, spoken of familiarly as “old Joh,” was pump-man first and last at the Morning Watch. He was there when the first pump-station was put in and the rod was but four hundred feet long. He saw that mighty member grow, section by section, pump added to pump, as the shaft went down. Each new pump was as a child born to him; there was room in his pride always for one more. If one had a failing more than another, he made a study of its individual crankiness and learned to spare the fault he could not remedy nor hide. To the mining captain, to whom he was forced to go for supplies, he might confess that ‘“‘No. 5, ’e do chaw up more packin’ than all the pumps in the mine”’; but in general it was like touching upon delicate family matters with old John to question the conduct of his pumps. He was a just man, Trenberth, but not perfect; he had his temporal bonds. It went hard with him on the Lord’s day to choose between the public duty of worship in the miners’ church above ground and his private leaning towards his pumps below. Can a man do his work in this world too well? Escessive devotion to the interests of the mine was not a common fault with its employees. The boys at the Morning Watch made friendly sport of the old enthusiast, declaring that he took his pumps to bed with him and dreamed at night of their kicking and bucking. It is true that the thought of Sammy Trebilcox, and what he might be doing or not doing as his substitute underground, took the heart out of his Sabbath observances and made his day of rest, when he gave himself one, the longest of the seven. Wherefore his little wife—“a good bit older nor ’e”— and a woman of grave disposition saddened by the want of children—sat mournful in church without her man, and thought of his clean shirts folded in the drawer at home and of him in his week day livery of mud, earning unblessed wages underground. She knew it was not the extra day’s pay that ensnared him; her prayer was that he be delivered from pride in carnal labors, and that he make not unto himself a graven image and an idol of “they pumps”. A pump-man has his regular shifts; but so well known was the quality of John’s service that not a man about the mine, from the oldest tributer to the new superintendent, would have questioned his appearance above ground at any irregular hour of the day or night. He looked, when he came on top, like some old piece of mining machinery that has been soaked underground for half a century— plastered with pallid mud of the deepest levels, coated with grease and stained with rust from fondlings of his pumps,— the recognizably human parts of him, his unsunned face and hands, pitted and drawn with steam. The day’s pay men were lively in the stopes; the car-boys romped with the landing men, and chalked the names of one another's sweethearts on the sides of the refractory cars; every tributer in the old workings had his partner to help him hammer out a “crushin’”’; the contractors tunneled and drifted and argued in gangs; but old John, in the bowels of the mine, with death withina foot of him on either side, kept his one man watch alone. In his work there was no variety, no change of surroundings or of seasons, no irrelevant object to rest his fixed attention; solitude, monotony, and ceaseless nagging vigilance, imprisoned in a tube of darkness between the crashing of the cars on the one hand and the squeeze of the rod on the other. Iron will crystallize after years of

such use, lose its elasticity and cohesive strength. Ol John had ceased to find pleasure in society or sunlight. He chose the darkest paths going home through the woods, the old roads deep in pine needles undisturbed by passing feet. The sound of a boy’s whoop or a man’s hearty halloo drove him deeper into the shade. If spoken to, he had no answer ready but would whisper one to himself, later, with his eyes on the ground. Once the night shift, going down, saw the old man bare headed in the hoist-shaft, standing motionless on the track, his hand up as if listening. He appeared not to hear the noise of the car, or to have heard it from some imaginary direction. They waved, they roared to him, and he vanished in the pump-shaft. Afterward they remembered his stare of bewilderment as if he had come awake suddenly in a strange place, uncertain how he had got there. Sometimes he would pop up like a stage ghost in the hoisting works, haggard and panting, as if in urgent haste. Greeted with jocular questioning, he would gaze about him vaguely, turn, and plunge down again without a word. The wife began to hear from relatives and neighbors disquieting comments on her husband's looks. ‘It’s more than a whole month ’e ’aven’t ’ad a Sunday off,” said the buxom wife of one of the shift bosses. “Whatever is the sense of ’im workin’ so *ard, and you only two in family? A rest is what ’e need.” “Rest, dear! ‘Aven’t I telled ’im so, pom scores and scores of times! An’ ’e just like a fish out o’ water when ’e’s parted from they pumps. ‘E talk of ’em the same as they were humans—made of the same piece wi’ ’is own flesh and blood.” “Eh! It’s a bad lookout when a man can’t leave his work behind ’im when the day is done. We belongs to ’ave our rest sometime. Why don’t ’e coax ’im out more? ‘Twould do him good to see the folks.” ‘*E never was one to be coaxed. What ’e think right, that ’e’ll do; man nor woman can’t make ’im do other,” Mrs. Trenberth would boast, proud ofa husband’s will unbroken after forty years of marriage. One morning there was summons from the mistress at the kitchen door of the superintendent’s house. “Clen’ want see you—kitch’,” was the Chinese cook’s sketchy way of transmitting the message. Clemmo was there, the gardener and general utility man. The two do not go together unless the man is good natured, as Clemmo was. He stood, hat in hand, in his deferential way, perspiring and quite noticeably pale. There was a catch in his breath from running. He had come to borrow an umbrella. The mistress looked at him in surprise. It was cloudless summer‘ * weather, the hot valley steaming up in the face of the foothills, dust on the cloaking pine woods, red dust inches deep on all the roads and trails, dust like a steamer’s smoke in the wake of ore teams miles away. The shadows of the mine buildings were short and black where a group of men had gathered, though the twelve bell had not yet struck. A sun umbrella did he mean? “Any kind, ma’am; any old one will do,’”’ Clemmo repeated apologetically. “It’s just to hold over Mr. Trenberth when they’re carryin’ him home. Yes, Ma’am, he was hurt in the shaft just now—an hour ago. Oh, yes, the doctor’s seen him. He’s pretty bad. It was an empty car struck him; dragged him quite a ways before the shaft men heard him scream. They can’t tell just how it happened; he hasn’t spoken since they brought him up, Yes, Ma’am, one of the boys has gone to tell the wife. They’ve got an old mattress to carry him on; they have brandy. No, Ma’am, there ain’t anything, thank you—only the umbrella. Any old one will do.” When the umbrella was brought and it proved to be a silk one, Clemmo took it reluctantly, protesting that “any old one—”, but the mistress cut him short. He went off with it finally; assuring her over his shoulder that he would carry it himself and see that it “came right back.” 28