Like awkward boys the miners fell into groups
and walked along behind the black hearse and the carriage in which sat
the dead woman's son with the minister. The men kept looking at each
other and smiling sheepishly. There had been no arrangement to follow
the body to its grave and when they thought of the son and the
attitude he had always maintained toward them they wondered whether or
not he wanted them to follow.
And McGregor was unconscious of all this. He sat in the carriage
beside the minister and with unseeing eyes stared over the heads of
the horses. He was thinking of his life in the city and of what he
should do there in the future, of Edith Carson, sitting in the cheap
dance hall and of the evenings he had spent with her, of the barber on
the park bench talking of women and of his life with his mother when
he was a boy in the mining town.
As the carriage climbed slowly up the hill followed by the miners
McGregor began to love his mother. For the first time he realised that
her life was full of meaning and that in her woman's way she had been
quite as heroic in her years of patient toil as had been her man
Cracked McGregor when he ran to his death in the burning mine.
McGregor's hands began to tremble and his shoulders straightened. He
became conscious of the men, the dumb blackened children of toil
dragging their weary legs up the hill.
Pages:
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142