414 



The Review of Reviews. 



October 1. 19oe. 



pencilled bulls-eve, and in that state of quiet moodi- 

 ness that sometimes comes with hunger to passion- 

 ate men, I returned by the way of Swathinglea to- 

 ward my home. 



The road I followed came down between banks, of 

 wretched-looking workingmen's houses, in close- 

 packed rows on either side, and took upon itself the 

 role of Swathinglea, High Street, where, at a lamp 

 and a pillar-box, the steam trams began. So far that 

 dirty, hot wav had been unusually quiet and empty, 

 but beyond the corner, where the first group of beer 

 shops clustered, it became populous. It was very 

 quiet still, even the children were a little inactive, 

 iDut there were a lot of people standing about dis- 

 jjersedlv in little groups, and with a general direction 

 toward the gates of the Bantock Burden coalpit. 



The place was being picketed, although at that 

 time the miners were still nominally at work, and 

 the conferences between masters and men were still 

 in session at Clayton town hall. But one of the 

 men employed at the Bantock Burden pit. Jack 

 Briscoe, was a socialist, and he had distinguished 

 himself by a violent letter upon the crisis to the 

 leading socialistic paper in England, T/ie Clarion, 

 in which he had adventured among the motives of 

 Lord Redcar. The publication of this had been 

 followed bv instant dismissal. As Lord Redcar 

 wrote a day or so later to the Times — I have that 

 Times, I have all the London papers of the last 

 month before the Change : " The man was paid oflf 

 and kicked out. Any self-respecting employer 

 would do the same." 



The thing had happened overnight, and the men 

 did not at once take a clear line upon what was, ■ 

 after all, a very intricate and debatable occasion. 

 But they came out in a sort of semi-official strike 

 from all Lord Redcar's collieries beyond the canal 

 that bisects Swathinglea. They did so without 

 formal notice, committing a breach of contract by 

 this sudden cessation. But in the long labour strug- 

 gles of the old days, the workers were constantly put- 

 ting themselves in the wrong, and committing 

 illegalities through that overpowering craving for 

 dramatic promptne.ss natural to uneducated minds. 



All the men had not come out of the Bantock 

 Burden pit. Something was wrong there, an inde- 

 cision if nothing else ; the mine was still working, 

 and there was a rumour that men from Durham had 

 been held in readiness by Lord Redcar, and were 

 already in the mine. Now it is absolutely impos- 

 sible to ascertain certainly how things stood at that 

 time. The newspapers sav this and that, but no- 

 thins: trustworthv remains. 



I believe I should have gone striding athwart the 

 dark stage of that stagnant industrial drama with- 

 out asking a question, if Lord Redcar had not 

 chanced to come upon the scene about the same time 

 as mv-self and incontinently end its stagnation. 



He had promised that if the men wanted a strug- 

 gle he would put up the best fight thev had ever 



had. He had been active all that afternoon in meet- 

 ing the quarrel halfway, and preparing as conspicu- 

 ously as possible for the scratch force of " black- 

 legs,' as we called them, who were, he said, and 

 we believed, to replace the strikers in his pits. 



I was an eye-witness of the whole of the affair 

 outside the Bantock Burden pit, and — I do not 

 know what happened. 



Picture to yourself how the thing came to me. 



I was descending a steep, cobbled, excavated road 

 between banked-up footways, perhaps six feet high, 

 upon which, in a monotonous series, opened the 

 living-room doors of rows of dark, low cottages. 

 The perspective of squat, blue slate roofs and 

 clustering chimneys drifted downward toward the 

 regular open space before the colliery, a space 

 covered with coaly, wheel-scarred mud, with a patch 

 of weedy dump to the left and the colliery gates to 

 the right. Beyond, High Street with its shops re- 

 sumed again in good earnest and went on, and the 

 lines of the steam tramway that started out from 

 before my feet, and were here shining and acutely 

 visible with reflected skylight and there lost in a 

 shadow, took up, fot one acute moment, the greasy 

 yellow irradiation of a newly-lit gas lamp as they 

 vanished round the bend. Beyond spread a dark- 

 ling marsh of homes, an infinitude of little smoking 

 hovels, and emergent, meagre churches, public- 

 houses, board schools, and other buildings amidst the 

 prevailing chimneys of Swathinglea. To the right, 

 very clear and relatively high, the Bantock Burden 

 pit mouth was marked by a gaunt lattice bearing a 

 great black wheel, very sharp and distinct in the 

 twilight. In an irregular perspective beyond, were 

 others following the lie of the seams. The general 

 effect, as one came down the hill, was of a dark, 

 compressed life beneath a very high and wide and 

 luminous evening sky against which these pit wheels 

 rose. And. ruling the calm spaciousness of that 

 heaven, was the great comet, now green-white, and 

 wonderful for all who had eyes to see. 



The fading afterglow of the sunset threw up all 

 the contours and skyline to the west, and the comet 

 rose eastward, out of the pouring tumult of smoke 

 from Bladden's forges. Tlie moon had still to rise. 



By this time the comet had begun to assume the 

 cloud-like form still familiar through the medium of 

 a thousand photographs and sketches. At first it 

 had been an almost telescopic speck ; it had bright- 

 ened to the dimensions of the greatest star in the 

 heavens ; it had still grown, hour by hour, in its 

 incrediblv swift, its noiseless and inevitable rush 

 upon our earth, until it had equalled and surpassed 

 the moon. Now it was the most splendid thing this 

 sky of earth has ever held. I have never seen a 

 photograph that gave a proper idea of it. Never, at 

 anv time, did it assume the conventional tailed out- 

 line comets are supposed to have. Astronomers 

 talked of its double tail, one preceding it, and one 

 trailing behind it, but these were foreshortened to 



