And, permeating everything, into the very nostrils of all of them, there crept a ghastly smell of gas and coal-dust--a smell that brought to the vision of the imaginative the shambles in the twisting galleries of coal below their feet; great falls of black boulders, nameless tortured hulks that once were men--living, loving, laughing--lying haphazard as they fell to the same gigantic fist that smote the iron wheel above the shaft, and crumpled the brickwork as if it were cardboard.
They had to see it all: they met other reporters wandering in and out--dream-people in a world of terrible reality. Their companions of the train were all there: Kenneth Carr, surveying that wall of women silently; Mainham, talking to the mine-manager, whose black and sweating face told of many descents into the mine; Gully, buttonholing a woman with a baby in her arms, and making notes in his notebook; Grame, plodding to and fro in the coaly mire, for it had been raining that morning in the North: all working, all observing, all gathering facts. It was not their business to moralize, to link up dead men and disasters with the idea of these desolate women and humanity at large. That was the leader-writer's work. Their business was to get the news and say how it happened. They dared not even expose criminal negligence, or inhuman cruelty, or savage conditions of work--and libel laws were there to restrain them.
And they all felt--yes, I believe even the brutal Gully felt it for a moment--the unspeakable horror of the tragedy, the injustice not of men dying like this, but having to live like this; great waves of sympathy and pity came over them, and they pitied themselves for their impotence. Ah! if they could have told the millions that would read their writings in the morning, the thoughts that were in their minds....
Humphrey saw it all. He saw the gaunt, drear shed where the flickering lamp-light played over a dozen shapeless bundles sewed up in white. A man came to the shed--this business of identification was no woman's work--the policeman in charge whispered something: they went in together; the policeman turned back the sheet--O God! is it possible that a face once human could look like that! Turn down the sheet. We cannot recognize him. All we know is that the bundle of clothes seared from his body is his; that pocket-book is his too, and we recognize the bone crucifix that he bought one Easter-tide in Manchester.