I was still meditating a tremendous retort, an indictment of all Lord Redcar’s class, their manners, morals, economic and political crimes, when my trouble with Nettie arose to swamp all minor troubles.  Yet, not so completely but that I snarled aloud when his lordship’s motor-car whizzed by me, as I went about upon my long meandering quest for a weapon.  And I discovered after a time that my mother had bruised her knee and was lame.  Fearing to irritate me by bringing the thing before me again, she had set herself to move her bed out of the way of the drip without my help, and she had knocked her knee.  All her poor furnishings, I discovered, were cowering now close to the peeling bedroom walls; there had come a vast discoloration of the ceiling, and a washing-tub was in occupation of the middle of her chamber. . . .

It is necessary that I should set these things before you, should give the key of inconvenience and uneasiness in which all things were arranged, should suggest the breath of trouble that stirred along the hot summer streets, the anxiety about the strike, the rumors and indignations, the gatherings and meetings, the increasing gravity of the policemen’s faces, the combative headlines of the local papers, the knots of picketers who scrutinized any one who passed near the silent, smokeless forges, but in my mind, you must understand, such impressions came and went irregularly; they made a moving background, changing undertones, to my preoccupation by that darkly shaping purpose to which a revolver was so imperative an essential.

Along the darkling streets, amidst the sullen crowds, the thought of Nettie, my Nettie, and her gentleman lover made ever a vivid inflammatory spot of purpose in my brain.

Section 3

It was three days after this—­on Wednesday, that is to say—­that the first of those sinister outbreaks occurred that ended in the bloody affair of Peacock Grove and the flooding out of the entire line of the Swathinglea collieries.  It was the only one of these disturbances I was destined to see, and at most a mere trivial preliminary of that struggle.

The accounts that have been written of this affair vary very widely.  To read them is to realize the extraordinary carelessness of truth that dishonored the press of those latter days.  In my bureau I have several files of the daily papers of the old time—­I collected them, as a matter of fact—­and three or four of about that date I have just this moment taken out and looked through to refresh my impression of what I saw.  They lie before me—­queer, shriveled, incredible things; the cheap paper has already become brittle and brown and split along the creases, the ink faded or smeared, and I have to handle them with the utmost care when I glance among their raging headlines.  As I sit here in this serene place, their quality throughout, their arrangement, their tone, their arguments and exhortations, read as though they came from drugged and drunken men.  They give one the effect of faded bawling, of screams and shouts heard faintly in a little gramophone. . . .  It is only on Monday I find, and buried deep below the war news, that these publications contain any intimation that unusual happenings were forward in Clayton and Swathinglea.