The Country of the Blind | Page 8

Horrocks started again. A new light had suddenly come into the sultry
gloom of his eyes. "Not in the least." he said.
"Have you been telling Mr. Raut of all these contrasts of flame and
shadow you think so splendid?" said the woman, turning now to her
husband for the first time, her confidence creeping back again, her
voice just one half-note too high--"that dreadful theory of yours that
machinery is beautiful, and everything else in the world ugly. I thought
he would not spare you, Mr. Raut. It's his great theory, his one
discovery in art."
"I am slow to make discoveries," said Horrocks grimly, damping her
suddenly. "But what I discover ..." He stopped.
"Well?" she said.
"Nothing;" and suddenly he rose to his feet.
"I promised to show you the works," he said to Raut, and put his big,
clumsy hand on his friend's shoulder. "And you are ready to go?"
"Quite," said Raut, and stood up also.
There was another pause. Each of them peered through the
indistinctness of the dusk at the other two.
Horrocks' hand still rested on Raut's shoulder. Raut half fancied still
that the incident was trivial after all. But Mrs. Horrocks knew her

husband better, knew that grim quiet in his voice, and the confusion in
her mind took a vague shape of physical evil. "Very well," said
Horrocks, and, dropping his hand, turned towards the door.
"My hat?" Raut looked round in the half-light.
"That's my work-basket," said Mrs. Horrocks with a gust of hysterical
laughter. Their hands came together on the back of the chair. "Here it
is!" he said. She had an impulse to warn him in an undertone, but she
could not frame a word. "Don't go!" and "Beware of him!" struggled in
her mind, and the swift moment passed.
"Got it?" said Horrocks, standing with the door half open.
Raut stepped towards him. "Better say goodbye to Mrs. Horrocks," said
the ironmaster, even more grimly quiet in his tone than before.
Raut started and turned. "Good-evening, Mrs. Horrocks," he said, and
their hands touched.
Horrocks held the door open with a ceremonial politeness unusual in
him towards men. Raut went out, and then, after a wordless look at her,
her husband followed. She stood motionless while Raut's light footfall
and her husband's heavy tread, like bass and treble, passed down the
passage together. The front door slammed heavily. She went to the
window, moving slowly, and stood watching, leaning forward. The two
men appeared for a moment at the gateway in the road, passed under
the street lamp, and were hidden by the black masses of the shrubbery.
The lamplight fell for a moment on their faces, showing only
unmeaning pale patches, telling nothing of what she still feared, and
doubted, and craved vainly to know. Then she sank down into a
crouching attitude in the big arm-chair, her eyes-wide open and staring
out at the red lights from the furnaces that flickered in the sky. An hour
after she was still there, her attitude scarcely changed.
The oppressive stillness of the evening weighed heavily upon Raut.
They went side by side down the road in silence, and in silence turned
into the cinder-made byway that presently opened out the prospect of

the valley.
A blue haze, half dust, half mist, touched the long valley with mystery.
Beyond were Hanley and Etruria, grey and dark masses, outlined thinly
by the rare golden dots of the street lamps, and here and there a gas-lit
window, or the yellow glare of some late-working factory or crowded
public-house. Out of the masses, clear and slender against the evening
sky, rose a multitude of tall chimneys, many of them reeking, a few
smokeless during a season of "play." Here and there a pallid patch and
ghostly stunted beehive shapes showed the position of a pot-bank or a
wheel, black and sharp against the hot lower sky, marked some colliery
where they raise the iridescent coal of the place. Nearer at hand was the
broad stretch of railway, and half-invisible trains shunted--a steady
puffing and rumbling, with every run a ringing concussion and a
rhymthic series of impacts, and a passage of intermittent puffs of white
steam across the further view. And to the left, between the railway and
the dark mass of the low hill beyond, dominating the whole view,
colossal, inky-black, and crowned with smoke and fitful flames, stood
the great cylinders of the Jeddah Company Blast Furnaces, the central
edifices of the big ironworks of which Horrocks was the manager. They
stood heavy and threatening, full of an incessant turmoil of flames and
seething molten iron, and about the feet of them rattled the rolling-mills,
and the steam-hammer beat heavily and splashed the white iron sparks
hither and thither. Even