The Making of a Novelist | Page 5

journals of next morning
that the prisoner met his fate with equanimity. I think that in that report
I bottomed the depths of human stupidity, if such a thing is possible. I
had never seen a man afraid before; and, when I found time to think
about it, I prayed that I might never see that shameful and awful sight
again.

II
I wrote three small-type columns--three columns of leaded
minion--about that execution, describing everything I had seen with a
studied minuteness. Dawson was nervous about the whole affair, and,
whilst the copy was yet in the hands of the printer, asked two or three
times what had been done with the theme. He was kept at bay by the
subeditor, who scented a sensation, and was afraid that the
editor-in-chief might cut the copy to pieces. Dawson was purposely
kept waiting for proofs so long that at last he went home without seeing
them; and he often spoke to me afterwards of the rage and anguish he
felt when he opened the paper at his breakfast-table and found that
great mass of space devoted to the report of an execution. He began, so
he told me, by reading the last paragraph first; then he read the
paragraph preceding it; and next, beginning resolutely at the beginning,
found himself compelled to read the whole ghastly narrative clean
through. The machine was at work all day to supply the local demand
for this particular horror, and Mr. George Augustus Sala wrote
specially to ask who was the author of the narrative. I began to think
my fortune made.
The journalist is like the doctor, his services are in requisition mainly in
times of trouble. The Black Country which lies north of Birmingham is
full of disaster, and the special correspondent has a big field there.
Quite early in my career I was sent out to Pelsall Hall, near Walsall,
where a mine had been flooded and two-and-thirty men were known to
be in the workings. I was born and bred in the mining district, and was
familiar with the heroism of the miners. They are not all heroes, and
even those who are are not always heroic. But use breeds a curious
indifference to danger.
I remember once paying a visit to the Tump Pit at or near Rowley
Regis at a time when the men were taking their midday meal. There
was a sort of Hall of Eblis there, a roof thirty feet high or thereabouts,
and the men sat in a darkness dimly revealed by the light of one or two
tallow candles. Down in the midst of them fell a portion of the rocky

roof--enough to have filled a wheelbarrow, and enough certainly to
have put out the vital spark of any man on whom it might have fallen.
One coal-grimed man, at whose feet the mass had fallen, looked up
placidly and said, 'That stuck up till it couldn't stick no longer;' and that
was all that was said about the matter. I suppose there was a tacit
recognition of the fact that the same thing might happen in any part of
the mine at any moment, and that it was useless to attempt to run away
from it. A passive scorn of danger is an essential element in the miner's
life, and when need arises he shows an active scorn of it which is finer
than anything I have ever seen in battle.
The Pelsall Hall Colliery disaster was the hinge on which the door of
my fate was hung. I wrote an unspeakably bad novel which had that
disaster for its central incident, and it was published from Saturday to
Saturday in the Morning News, to the great detriment of that journal;
and so long as the story ran, angry subscribers wrote to the editor to
vilify it and its author. There was some very good work in it none the
less; and an eminent critic told me that, though it was capital flesh and
blood, it had no bones. It resulted years afterwards in 'Joseph's Coat,'
which is, if I may say so, less inchoate and formless than its dead and
buried original.
But it was not that exasperating novel which made the Pelsall Hall
disaster memorable in my personal history. I made an acquaintance
there--an acquaintance curiously begun--which did much for me. I met
there the king of all special correspondents, and had an immediate
shindy with him. There was only one decent room to be found by way
of lodging in the village, and this was in the cottage of one Bailey, a
working engineer. Mr. Bailey, without his wife's knowledge, had let
that room to me for a week at a rent of one sovereign, and Mrs. Bailey,
without her husband's knowledge, had