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Sam
SA Good morning. This is dreadful, John. At Midnight. This morning's story is by H.G. wells. It is entitled the Cone. It is taken from the platinum story and others. Copyright 1897 by Methuen. Sam. The night was hot and overcast, the sky red rimmed with the lingering sunset of midsummer. They sat at the open window trying to fancy the air was fresher there. The trees and shrubs of the garden stood stiff and dark. Beyond, in the roadway a gas lamp burned bright orange against the hazy blue of the evening. Further were three lights of the railway signal against the lowering sky. The man and woman spoke to one another in low tones. He doesn't suspect, said the man a little nervously. Not he, she said peevishly, as though that too irritated her. He thinks of nothing but the works and the prices of fuel. He has no imagination, no poetry. None of these men of iron have, he said sententiously. They have no hearts. He hasn't. Children, she said. She turned her discontented face towards the window. The distant sound of a roaring and rushing drew nearer and grew in volume. The house quivered. One heard the metallic rattle of the timber as the train passed. There was a glare of light above the cutting and a driving tumult of smoke. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 black oblongs. Eight trucks passed across the dim gray of the embankment and were suddenly extinguished one by one in the thro tunnel, which with the last seemed to swallow down train smoke and sound in one abrupt cor. This country was all fresh and beautiful once, he said. And now it is gehenna. Down that way nothing but pot banks and chimneys belching fire and dust into the face of heaven. But what does it matter? An end comes an end to all this cruelty. Tomorrow. He spoke the last word in a whisper. Tomorrow, she said, speaking in a whisper too, and still staring out of the window. Dear, he said, putting his hand on hers. She turned with a start, and their eyes searched one another's. Hers softened to his gaze. My dear one, she said, and then it seems so strange that you should have come into my life like this. To open, she paused. To open, he said. All this wonderful world. She hesitated and spoke still more softly. This world of love to me. Then suddenly the door clicked and closed. They turned their heads, and he started violently back. In the shadow of the room stood a great shadowy figure, silent. They saw the face dimly in the half light, with unexpressive dark patches under the penthouse brows. Every muscle in Rob's body suddenly became when could the door have opened? What had he heard had he heard all? What had he seen? A tumult of questions. The newcomer's voice came at last, after a pause that seemed interminable. Well, he said, I was afraid I'd missed you. Horrocks, said the man at the window, gripping the window ledge with his hand. His voice was unsteady. The clumsy figure of Horrocks came forward out of the shadow. He made no answer to Ralph's remark. For a moment he stood above them. The woman's heart was cold within her. I told Mr. Rod it was just possible you might come back, she said in a voice that never quivered. Horrocks, still silent, sat down abruptly in the chair by her little work table. His big hands were clenched. One saw now the fire of his eyes under the shadow of his brows. He was trying to get his breath. His eyes went from the woman he had trusted to the friend he had trusted, and then back to the woman. By this time, and for the moment, all three half understood one another. Yet none dared say a word to ease the pent up things that choked them. It was the husband's voice that broke the silence at last. You wanted to see me? He said to Ralph. Ralph started as he spoke. I came to see you, he said, resolved to lie to the last. Yes, said Horrocks. You promised, said Ralph, to show me some fine effects of moonlight and smoke. I promised to show you some fine effects of moonlight and smoke, repeated Horrocks in a colourless voice. And I thought I might catch you tonight before you went down to the works. Proceeded rout and come with you. There was another pause. Did the man mean to take the thing coolly? Did he know after all, how long had he been in the room? Yet even at the moment when they heard the door, their attitudes. Horrocks glanced at the profile of the woman, shadowy, pallid in the half light. Then he glanced at route and seemed to recover himself suddenly. Of course, he said. I promised to show you the works under the proper dramatic conditions. It's odd how I could have forgotten. If I'm troubling you, began Ralph. Horrocks started again. A new light had suddenly come into the sultry gloom of his eyes. Not in the least, he said. Have you been telling Mr. Rout of all these contrasts of flame and shadow? You think so? Splendid, said the woman, turning now to her husband for the first time, her confidence creeping back again, her voice just one half note too high. That dreadful theory of yours about machinery is beautiful and everything else in the world ugly. I thought he would spare you, Mr. Ralph. It's his great theory, his one discovery in art. I'm slow to make discoveries, said Horrock, grimly dampening her suddenly. But what I discover. He stopped. Well? She said nothing, and suddenly he rose to his feet. I promised to show you the works, he said to Raut, and put his big clumsy hand on his friend's shoulder. Are you ready to go? Quite, said Ralph, and stood up also. Very well, said Horrocks, and dropping his hand, turned towards the door. My hat. Ralph looked around in the half light. That's my work basket, said Mrs. Horrocks with a gust of hysterical laughter. Their hands came together on the back of the chair. Here it is, he said. She had an impulse to warn him in an undertone, but she could not frame a word. Don't go and beware of him struggled in her mind, and the swift moment passed. Got it, said Horrocks, standing with the door half open. Rock stepped towards him. Better say goodbye to Mrs. Horrocks, said the iron master, even more grimly quiet in his tone than before. Ralph started and turned. Good evening, Mrs. Horrocks, he said in their hands touched. Horrocks held the door open with a ceremonial politeness unusual in him towards men. Ralph went out and then, after a wordless look at her, her husband followed. The oppressive stillness of the evening weighed heavily upon Ralph. They went side by side down the road in silence, and in silence turned into the cinder made byway that presently opened out of the prospect of the valley. A blue haze, half dust, half mist, touched the long valley with mystery. Beyond were Hanley and Etruria, gray and black masses outlined thinly by the rare golden dots of the street lamp, and here and there a gas lit window, or the yellow glare of some late working factory or crowded public house. Out of the masses, clear and slender against the evening sky, rose a multitude of tall chimneys, many of them reeking, a few smokeless during a season of play. Nearer at hand was the broad stretch of railway, and to the left, between the railway and the dark mass of the low hill beyond, dominating the whole view, colossal, inky black, and crowned with smoke and fitful flames, stood the great cylinders of the Jeddah Company blast furnaces, the central edifices of the big ironworks of which Horace was the manager. They stood heavy and threatened, full of an incessant turmoil of flames and seething molten iron, and about the feet of them rattled the rolling mills, and the steam hammer beat heavily and splashed the white iron sparks hither and thither. Even as they looked a truck full of fuel was shot into one of the giants, and the red flames greened out, and a confusion of smoke and black dust came boiling upwards towards the sky. Certainly you get some fine effects of color with your furnaces, said Ralph, breaking a silence that had become apprehensive. Horrocks grunted. He stood with his hands in his pockets, frowning down at the dim, steaming railway and the busy ironworks beyond, frowning as if he were thinking out some knotty problem. Ralph glanced at him and away again. At present your moonlight effect is hardly right, he continued, looking upward. The moon is still smothered by the vestiges of daylight. Horrocks stared at him with the expression of a man who has suddenly awakened. Vestiges of daylight. Of course, of course. He too looked up at the moon, pale still in the midsummer sky. Come along, he said suddenly, and gripping Ralph's arm in his hand, made a move towards the path that dropped from them to the railway. Ralph hung back. Their eyes met, and he saw a thousand things in a moment that their lips came near to say. Horrock's hand tightened and then relaxed. He let go, and before Ralph was aware of it they were arm in arm and walking one unwillingly enough down the path. They stood now near the bottom of the hill, close to the fence that bordered the railway. The ironworks had grown larger and spread out with their approach. They looked up to the blast furnaces now instead of down, the further view of Etruria and Hanley had dropped out of sight with their descent. Before them, by the style rose a notice board bearing still dimly visible, the words Beware of the trains half hidden by splashes of coaling mud. Fine effects, said Horace, waving his arm. Here comes a train. The puffs of smoke, the range glare, the round eye of light in front of it, the melodious rattle finer. But these furnaces of mine used to be finer before we shoved cones in their throats and saved the gas. How? Said Ralph. Cone cones, my man, cones. I'll show you one nearer. The flames used to flow out of the open throats. Great. What is it? Pillars of cloud by day, red and black smoke and pillars of fire by night. Now we run it off in pipes and burn it to heat the blast, and the top is shut by a cone. You'll be interested in that cone. But every now and then, said Ralph, you get a burst of fire and smoke up there. The cone's not fixed. It's hung by a chain from a lever and balanced by an equipoise. You'll see it now Else, of course, there'd be no way of getting fuel into the thing. Every now and then the cone dips and out comes the flare. I see, said Ralph. He looked over his shoulder. The moon gets brighter, he said. Suppose this slouching, scowling monster did know anything. For a minute or two, then Ralph was really afraid for his life. But the mood passed as he reasoned with himself. After all, Horrocks might have heard nothing. His odd manner might be due to the mere vague jealousy he had shown once before. He was talking now. The ash heaps in the canal, eh? Said Horrocks. What? Said Ralph. Rather the haze in the moonlight. Fine, our canal, said Horrocks, stopping suddenly. Our canal by moonlight and firelight is an immense effect. Effect? You've never seen it. Fancy that. You've spent too many of your evenings philandering up in Newcastle. There, I tell you, for real florid effects. But you shall see. Boiling water. As they came out of the labyrinth of clinker heaps and mounds of coal and ore, the noises of the rolling mill sprang upon them suddenly, loud, near and distinct. Three shadowy workmen went by and touched their caps to harbor. Their faces were vague in the darkness. Ralph felt a futile impulse to address them, and before he could frame his words, they passed into the shadow. Horrocks pointed to the canal close before them now, a weird looking place, it seemed. In the blood red reflections of the furnaces, the hot water that cooled the Tuileries came into view some 50 yards up, a tumultuous, almost boiling affluent, and the steam rose up from the water in silent white wisps and swelling streets, wrapping damply about them, an incessant succession of ghosts coming up from the black and red eddies, a white uprising that made the head swim. The shining black tower of the larger glass furnace rose overhead out of the mist, and its tumultuous riot filled their ears. Ralph kept away from the edge of the water and watched. Har, here it's red, said Horace. Blood red. Vapor is red and hot as sin. But yonder there, where the moonlight falls on it and it drives across the clinker heaps, it's as white as death. Rob turned his head for a moment and then came back hastily to his watch on harp. Come along to the rolling nose, said Horror. The threatening hold was not so evident that time, and Ralph felt a little reassured. But all the same, what on earth did Horrocks mean about white as death and red as sin? Coincidence, perhaps. Come on, said Horace in Ralph's ear. And they went and peeped through the little glass hole behind the tuyres and saw the fumarole fire rising in the pit of the glass furnace. It left one eye blinded for a while. Then, with green and blue patches dancing across the dark, they went to the lift by which the trucks of ore and fuel and lime were raised to the top of the big cylinder and out upon the narrow rail that overhung the furnace. Ralph's doubts came upon him again. Was it wise to be here? If Horace did know everything, do what he could, he could not resist a violent trembling. Right underfoot was a sheer depth of 70ft. It was a dangerous place. They pushed by a truck of fuel to get to the railing that crowned the place. The reek of the furnace, a sulfurous vapor streaked with pungent bitterness, seemed to make the distant hillside of Hanley quiver. The moon was riding out now from among a drift of clouds halfway up the sky above the undulating wooded outlines of Newcastle. The steaming canal ran away from below them under an indistinct bridge and vanished into the dim haze of the flat fields toward Durham. That's the cone I've been telling you all. Shouted Horrocks. And below that, 60ft of fire and molten metal with the air of the blast frothing through it like gas in soda water. Ralph gripped the handrail tightly and stared down at the cone. The heat was intense. The boiling of the iron and the tumult of the blast made a thunderous accompaniment to Horrocks voice. But the thing had to be gone through now. Perhaps after all. In the middle bawled Horrocks. Temperature near a thousand degrees. If you were dropped into it, flash into flame like a pinch of gunpowder in a candle. Put your hand out and feel the heat of its why, even up here I've seen rainwater boiling off the truck and the comb there. It's a damn sight too hot for roasting cakes. The top side of it's 300 degrees. 300 degrees? Said Ralph. 300 centigrade mine, said Horrocks. It'll boil the blood out of you in no time. Eh? Said Ralph and turned. Boil the blood out of you in the no you don't. Let me go. Screamed out. Let go my arm. With one hand he clutched at the handrail, then with both. For a moment the two men stood swaying. Then suddenly, with a violent jerk, Horrocks had twisted him from his hold. He clutched at Horrocks and minced his foot, went back into empty air. In mid air he twisted himself and then cheek and shoulder and knee struck the hot cone. He clutched the chain by which the cone hung and the thing sank an infinitesimal amount. As he struck it, a circle of glowing red appeared about him and a tongue of flame, released from the chaos within flickered up towards him. An intense pain assailed him at the knees and he could smell the singeing of his hands. He raised himself to his feet and tried to climb up the chain. And then something struck his head, black and shining with the moonlight. The throat of the furnace rose about him. Horrocks, he saw, stood above him by one of the trucks of fuel. On the rail. The gesticulating figure was bright and white in the moonlight and shouting, fizzle, you fool. Sizzle, you hunter of women, you hot blooded hound. Boil, boil, boil. Suddenly he caught up a handful of coal out of the truck and flung it deliberately, lump after lump at route. Horrocks. Cried Ralph Horrocks. He clung, crying to the chain, pulling himself up from the burning of the cone. Each missile Horace flung hit him. His clothes charred and glowed, and as he struggled, the cone dropped and a rush of hot, suffocating gas whooped out and burned round him. In a swift breath of flame, his human likeness departed from him. When the momentary red had passed, Horrocks saw a charred, blackened figure, its head streaked with blood, still clutching and fumbling with the chain and writhing in agony. A cindery animal, an inhuman, monstrous creature that began a sobbing, intermittent shriek. Abruptly, at the sight, the iron master's anger passed. A deadly sickness came upon him. The heavy odor of burning flesh came drifting up to his nostrils. His sanity returned to him. God have mercy upon me. He cried. Oh, God, what have I done? He knew the thing below him, save that it still moved and felt, was already a dead man, that the blood of the poor wretch must be boiling in his veins. An intense realization of that agony came to his mind and overcame every other feeling. For a moment he stood irresolute, and then, turning to the truck, he hastily tilted its contents upon the struggling thing that had once been a man. The mask fell with a thud and went radiating over the cone. With the thud, the shriek ended and a boiling confusion of smoke, dust and flame came rushing up towards him. As it passed, he saw the cone clear again. Then he staggered back and stood trembling, clinging to the rail with both hands. His lips moved, but no words came to them. Down below was the sound of voices and running steps. The clangor of rolling in the shed ceased abruptly. Gutville, John at midnight this morning Featuring HG Wells the cone was produced by J Willis Morrow. With the technical assistance of J. Douglas Gotthoffer, J. Peter Boehm and H. Burl Kramer, this is Kings Crown Radio.