Hardwick is shut. On the gates, near the old inn, where the atmosphere of the old world lingers perfect, is a notice:“This park is closed to the public and to all traffic until further notice. No admittance.”
Of course!The strike!They are afraid of Vandalism.
Where shall we go· Back into Derbyshire, or to Sherwood Forest.
Turn the car. We’ll go on through Chesterfield. If I can’t ride in my own carriage, I can ride in my sister’s motor-car.
It is a still September afternoon. By the ponds in the old park, we see colliers slowly loafing, fishing, poaching, in spite of all notices.
And at every lane-end there is a bunch of three or four policemen, blue-bottles, big, big-faced, stranger policeman. Every field path, every stile seems to be guarded. There are great pits, coal mines, in the fields. And at the end of the paths coming out of the field from the colliery, along the high-road, the colliers are squatted on their heels, on the wayside grass, silent and watchful. Their faces are clean, white, and all the months of the strike have given them no colour and no tan. They are pit-bleached. They squat in silent remoteness, as if in the upper galleries of hell. And the policemen, alien, stand in a group near the stile. Each lot pretends not to be aware of the others.
It is past three. Down the path from the pit come straggling what my little nephew calls“the dirty ones”. They are the men who have broken strike, and gone back to work. They are not many: their faces are black, they are in their pit-dirt. They linger till they have collected, a group of a dozen or so“dirty oues”, near the stile, then they trail off down the road, the policemen, the alien blue-bottles, escorting them. And the“clean ones”, the colliers still on strike, squat by the wayside and watch without looking. They say nothing. They neither laugh nor stare. But there they are, a picket, and with their bleached faces they see without looking, and they register with the silence of doom, squatted down in rows by the road-side.
The“dirty ones” straggle off in the lurching, almost slinking walk of colliers, swinging their heavy feet and going as if the mine-roof were still over their heads. The big blue policemen follow at a little distance. No voice is raised: nobody seems aware of anybody else. But there is the silent, hellish registering in the consciousness of all three groups, clean ones, dirty ones, and blue-bottles.
So it is now all the way into Chesterfield, whose crooked spire lies below. The men who have gone back to work—they seem few, indeed—are lurching and slinking in quiet groups, home down the high-road, the police at their heels. And the pickets, with bleached faces, squat and lean and stand, in silent groups, with a certain pale fatality, like Hell, upon them.
