The Making of a Novelist | Page 6

let the room at a similar rent to
the great Special. Box and Cox encountered, each determined on his
rights and each resolute to oust the other.
I was leaving the cottage at about seven in the morning, when I met a
man in a flannel shirt with no collar attached to it, a three days' beard, a
suit of homespun, and heavy ankle jack-boots much bemired with the

clay of the rain-sodden fields. He smoked a short clay pipe and looked
like anything but what he was--the comet of the newspaper firmament.
'What are you doing here?' he asked--The manner was aggressive and
dictatorial, and I resented it.
'Is that your business?' I retorted.
'Who are you?' he asked. I told him that I was the representative of the
Birmingham Morning News, but questioned his right to the
information.
'Look here, young man,' he said; 'there's only one spare room in that
cottage, and it belongs to me. I've rented it from the woman of the
house for a pound a week.'
'And I have rented it,' I answered, 'from the woman's husband for a
pound a week.'
'Well,' said the great man with much composure, 'if I find you there I
shall chuck you out of window.'
I told him that that was a game which two might play at; at which he
burst into a great laugh and clapped me on the shoulder. We agreed to
take bed and sofa on alternate nights, and there the matter ended; but I
found out my rival's name, and would have been willing, in the
enthusiasm of my hero-worship, to resign anything to him. Anything,
that is to say, but my own ambitions as a journalist and the interests of
the Morning News.
Here was a chance indeed. Here was a foeman worthy of any man's
steel. To beat Archibald Forbes would be, as it seemed then, to crown
oneself with everlasting glory, and I was not altogether without hope of
doing it. For one thing, I was native to the country-side. I spoke the
dialect, and that was a great matter. Forbes was incomprehensible to
half the men, and three-fourths of what they said was incomprehensible
to him. There was to be a descent and an attempt at rescue on the
midnight of the third day after the breaking in of the waters, and I had

secured permission to accompany the party.
I hired a horse at a livery-stable at Walsall, and had him kept in
readiness in the back yard of a beerhouse. My giant enemy, after
maintaining a strict watch on matters for eight-and-forty hours at a
stretch, had gone to bed at last, convinced that nothing could be done. It
was a dreadful night, and not an easy matter for one unaccustomed to
the place to find his way to the pit's mouth. The iron cages of fire that
burned there in the windy rain and the dark impeded rather than helped
the stranger on his way towards them. The feet of thousands of people,
who had visited the spot since the news of the accident was made
known, had worn away the last blade of grass from the slippery fields
and had left a very Slough of Despond behind them. I was down half a
dozen times, and when I reached the hovel where the rescue-party had
gathered I was as much like a mud statue as a man. Everything was in
readiness, and the descent was made at once.
We were under the command of Mr. Walter Ness, a valiant Scotchman,
who afterwards became the manager of her Majesty's mines in Warora,
Central India. Five or six of us huddled together on the 'skip,' the word
was given, and we shot down into the black shaft, which seemed in the
light of the lamps we carried as if its wet and shining walls of brick
rushed upwards whilst we kept stationary. In a while we stopped, with
a black pool of water three or four fathoms below us.
'This 'll be the place,' said one of the men, and tapped the wall with a
pick.
'Yes,' said Mr. Ness, 'that will be about the place; try it.'
The man lay down upon his stomach upon the floor of the skip and
worked away a single brick, which fell with a splash into the pool
below. Then out came another and another, until there was a hole there
big enough for a man to crawl through. We had struck upon an old
disused airway which led into the inner workings of the mine. One by
one we snaked our way from the skip into the hole; and, whatever the
miners thought about it, it was rather a scarey business for me. We all
got over safely enough