AMATEUR LECTURERS.

The girls did not tire soon of their self-imposed task--when it came to that, one of them was not an amateur; and if the Board schoolmaster was placed _hors de combat_ by professional scruples and professional fatigue, the same reservation might have applied equally to Bennet Gray. But Bennet had an excellent gift of being interested in everything, especially everything that had to do with Redcot. She extended her interest to the grimy coal-pits--the gaunt shears and piston, with their relentless iron clang and rattle--the boilers ostentatiously puffing steam from their safety-valves. She cared to see the ugly rows of colliers’ houses, which, in spite of the good wages said to be spent in them, could not escape a chronic sordidness. She wished to walk on the bleak moor, with even its sandy vegetation blackened and blighted, trodden down and strewn with cinders, encumbered by heaps of rubbish, intersected with rusty dwarf railways for waggons, threaded with a wasteful multitude of footpaths for many a yard round the pit mouth.

Bennet did not shrink from the burly, round-shouldered men in blue flannels, with the whites of the eyes and what of the skin was not coated with coal-dust acquiring a ghastly and demoniacal prominence--an effect increased by the red glimmer of the lamps in the caps. She listened breathlessly to the tales of subterranean life, with its dreary hardships and awful dangers. She stood and tried to realise to herself how the scene must have looked on the occasion of the great fire-damp explosion. A roar and a rumble as of thunder, and a shaking of the earth beneath the feet, a cloud of smoke and dust rising from the pit, a frantic whirling round of the pit gear, followed by a sudden standstill of the machinery as when a clock or a watch that has been recklessly wound up in the agitation of the moment, snaps and stops ominously in the chamber of death. Bennet could almost fancy she heard the rush to the cottage doors, the sobbing wail of women’s voices taken up and prolonged, the wildly irregular, feeble patter of the feet of the wives and mothers, hurrying deliriously beyond their strength to know the worst of the tragedy.

The experiment in which Jane Prior and Miss Gray took part was fairly successful. The half-grown lads, however uncouth and unruly to their schoolmaster, did not refuse to be amenable to the daughter of the owner of the pits and the other fine young madam, whom at the same time her pupils addressed, in an unvarnished fashion that ought to have done good to the hearts of reformers in education, as ‘Schoolmistress.’ The drawback was the dense atmosphere of bashfulness that surrounded the scholars. In vain Jane Prior spread out her geographical maps and hung up her physiological diagrams, and gave admirably succinct yet comprehensive explanations. They were nought against the intangible barrier.

Miss Gray followed suit with further lectures, not quite so clear and cuttingly concise perhaps, but in some respects more interesting in their picturesque discursiveness. Neither did she break through the thick mist of clumsy self-consciousness, overpowering false shame, and abject dread of ridicule.

If the courageous young lecturers dreamed of anything in the nature of an observation, whether acquiescent or dissentient, from the rude human material they had to work upon, any faintest ghost of a question or an objection to indicate that the audience heard or attended to the words spoken, then the rash dreamers found themselves very much mistaken.

The girls were considerably daunted by their failure to elicit a spark from the cold iron on which they hammered with all their might. At last it struck Bennet, who was the more original, the more visited by inspiration of the two, to appeal to individual curiosity, ‘Have none of you relations abroad that you would like to hear about?’ she asked anxiously.

A slight sensation followed the speech. One youth was more moved than the rest. Possibly the renown of spiritualism with grotesque variations had travelled even to Kershaw Moor, and a display of it was expected, enough to provoke any amount of nudges and grins, for there was no lack of hard-headedness among the sons of the soil.

With a convulsion of the shoulders--already brawny and already bowed--and a contortion of his face, Jim Ashe gave utterance to an admission in a sepulchral whisper that he had an uncle and cousins in Ameriky. Barty Noakes, yonder, had brothers in New Zealand; Bill Tummas, he weren’t sure, for it were afore his day, that his mother--as had married again a sodger, hadn’t gone with the regiment to Roosia, where the wars was, and stayed there after her second man was killed.

‘Well, wouldn’t you like to hear what the places are like where your friends are? then those at home can understand better any letters that come, and have a more correct guess what the absent people are doing,’ suggested Bennet, insinuatingly.

There were one or two slow nods and well-nigh inaudible ‘Ay, surelys’ to the teachers, as well as sundry nudges--approving, critical, or derisive--among the taught, in reply to this offer, and Jane and Bennet threw themselves once more into the undertaking, and renewed their expositions with fresh zest.

The thin wedge was inserted. The big boys were roused to care a little for what they were hearing--to forget who were speaking, and even who were listening. Somebody was induced to come up and look at the spot on the map that all the talking was about, and three or four others, with shuffling feet, crowded after their companion, sheeplike, to gain the same advantage.

Some other body cried, half under his breath, ‘By Golly!’ when he heard of the virgin corn, the wild turkeys, the sheep runs, the cherries which grow stone outwards. It was not an elegant expression, it had even a flavour of profanity, but there was a certain satisfaction in it, as showing pleased wonder in place of stolid indifference.

Matters progressed till Jim Ashe was not above rehearsing the number of his bones, and candidly confessing he never knowed he had such a many or such heaps of sinews--for all the world like sticks strung up in a faggot. And Bill Tummas was brought to believe by the aid of the glasses in a telescope that he saw with the back of his eyes as well as with the front--in fact, it was the picture on the back that did it.

Then all at once the lecturers made an astounding discovery. There was one phlegmatic young miner who had listened to everything and said nothing, that knew all about it beforehand. He was as full-fledged an impostor as any prisoner in jail who is a dexterous penman, but gets rid of some of the tedium of his incarceration and curries favour with the chaplain by the rogue’s putting his tongue in his cheek, and beguiling the worthy man to toil on in the pleasing delusion that he is inducting a promising scholar into the mystery of pot-hooks. This collier of the future happened to have brains--he could read, he had devoured all the printed matter he could come across, and having once had the chance to break his leg in the discharge of his duties, and to be supported at Mr. Prior’s expense for seven or eight weeks, he had even enjoyed a little leisure for the improvement of his mind. As he was regarded somewhat in the light of a monster and a deserter from the traditions of his class by his companions, he might be forgiven for hiding his talent in a napkin. His betrayal was purely accidental. Miss Gray had let her thoughts get entangled in the net-work of veins and arteries on the diagram before her, and was on the point of tripping, when she was caught up from an unexpected quarter. ‘Nay, schoolmistress,’ burst out the pedant, ‘T’ blude runs t’other way.’

It was as when Brutus spoke with the voice of a man. Jane, who had little or no sense of humour, simply stared. Bennet tittered in a spasmodic effort to restrain a peal of laughter. ‘Hear till him!’ cried the rest of the class excitedly; ‘hear till Noah King having the imperence to fault schoolmistress--set him up! Though he do know a thing or two, he’s none such a scholard as that comes to. Turn him out! turn him out!’

‘But he is right, and I am wrong,’ cried Bennet, in horror lest condign punishment should be inflicted on the modern Galileo before her face. ‘It is I and not he who deserve to be punished, only I’m sure you’ll excuse a slip of the tongue, and let me say that I’m exceedingly obliged to Noah King for correcting my mistake. He does credit to his teacher,’ she added enviously, with a recollection of the next to futile labours of the last few weeks.

Jane had recovered herself. She had a turn for organising and economising power. ‘Noah King,’ she said, ‘you take the foot of the class, and if nobody else can answer, you put what you know into your own words, and it will save us from saying it over again.’ The device answered, and the station allotted to Noah forbade jealousy.

The class increased instead of diminishing, and admission to it was actually coveted. In proof of it, the first lad who had spoken out to the ladies, confided to them that he knew of another chap who would come to the club-room if he knew what to do with his ‘babby’ in his absence. He was a young widower, who had neither mother nor sister, while his late wife had come from a distance, and had no relations in the place. He lived alone, save for the child, in a cottage a quarter of a mile off. He was accustomed to bring the child every morning, and leave it for the hours he was in the pit with one of the women in the nearest row. But he took the ‘babby’ home with him, and if he came to the class, which was not held in a house in one of the rows, but in a building fitted up for the purpose, standing midway between the Rectory and the works, he would either have to lock up the child alone in the cottage, or to walk a considerable distance out of his way--both coming and going--to fetch the little girl to and from the particular row. ‘Joe thinks,’ his ambassador ventured to propose, ‘that if he were let bring the babby here, as is a good wench going three, he could keep her main quiet, for she would sleep like a top the most of the time.’

It was a puzzling proposal for those who were cultivating popularity, and aiming hard at giving satisfaction. ‘I think I know who “Joe” is,’ said Jane Prior, aside in consultation. ‘He is not much older than the rest, though he has been married and has a baby. Mr. Haynes spoke of him at the time the lad’s wife--the merest girl--died. My brother used to know the husband, and have him to go with him, Jack, across the moor to shoot snipes and plovers. The collier boy was acquainted with all the birds’ haunts, though it might not have been wise to encourage the acquaintance. Some of the colliers are the most desperate poachers in this part of the country. They have cost my father no end of trouble as a landlord and Justice of the Peace.’

‘Do they poach on Mr. Prior’s land?’

‘No; but it was not pleasant to have his own men brought up before him and his fellow-Justices. He could not help saying a word in the culprit’s favour, because of the relations between them, which made them look to him to help them, though he threatened every time he would never do it again. However, I daresay you have learned by this time my father’s bark is worse than his bite. Another thing, he was alive to the deprivations of the men in their underground life.’

‘No doubt your brother would use the same argument in taking this Joe to shoot with him,’ said Miss Gray, a little formally and stupidly.

‘No,’ said Jane, with a droop of the corners of her mouth. ‘My brother would not want an argument if he liked the lad, and he had a fancy for him. Jack--my brother--went down the pits in the same cage, and he believed that once when his inexperience brought him into some kind of danger Joe Jones’s presence of mind and fidelity to his charge saved him from the painful consequences.’

‘Don’t you think we might have the child?’ Bennet began to plead, pressing her hands together with nervous eagerness, according to a trick she had. ‘If we refused, it would seem so disobliging and unrelaxing, and make such a bad impression. Surely among so many grown-up people the little thing might be nursed, sat upon, suppressed. Certainly it is not good for her to be out late, but I am afraid that must often happen. Think of a little child like that having nobody to care for her save her father, and he quite a young fellow!’

Joe Jones, a thin pale-faced lad--preternaturally thoughtful and careworn, was suffered to bring his child--sickly, and ill got-up in its faded cotton frock and an old washed-out shawl of its mother’s. It was withheld from screaming, but seemed always on the brink of the performance, as it sat up with wide open blinking eyes, which it refused to close, even for the forty winks granted to its elders. Joe was distressed, and everybody else was on the alert and distracted from the business of the hour. Miss Prior looked put out. The elderly parish clerk, who was a bachelor, and had never approved of the incongruous introduction of that young fool Joe Jones’s bantling, appeared still more shaken. More than one of the remaining occupants of the room showed symptoms of recantation and secession, and of a mean triumph in the flooring of their teachers.

Bennet Gray asked if the child might be tried with her. She could speak with it in her lap when her turn came, if her hearers would not mind. She thought she could put the baby girl to sleep.

Joe, who was a modest lad, still more sobered down by circumstances, felt horrified at the trouble he was causing, and reluctantly consented to impose his burden, which was, nevertheless, precious to him, upon another.

Bennet was awkward, to begin with, in the task she had undertaken. She had not been accustomed to very young children. But she acted upon her womanly instincts. She cuddled up the creature in her arms, and bent her lovely, kind face over it. The shriek with which small Nancy Jones was about to testify her violent dislike to being transferred from her father’s arms to those of a stranger died away on the child’s lips. Her round eyes opened yet wider at the new face presented to them; her mouth formed itself into a ‘three-cornered smile of bliss,’ while the crystal tears were still hanging on her eye-lashes. She consented to look at the glorious, glittering, yellow face of Bennet’s watch, produced for the little woman’s edification, and to hearken to the ‘tick, tick’ of the extraordinary thing. She leant back, overcome by the combination of marvels, took to meditating upon them, while she sucked her thumb à la Molly Crabtree, and in five minutes was fast asleep.

‘Weel done, schoolmistress,’ grunted one of the lads who had watched the feat, and his unvarnished applause met with a general echo. The supremacy of the promoters of the higher education of mining youth was re-established on a firmer basis than before.