Midnight is a Place Read Online Free

him disagreeably. "Took your time, didn't you? You're to show young Master Bell here over the works, anything he wants to see."
    "What about the new load o' wool?" said the man, who had come into the hut. His tone was not quite insolent, but it was by no means humble; he stood in the doorway, panting a little, and looked squarely at Smallside. He was a thin, white-faced, muscular youngish man with sharp features and black hair, a lock of which had fallen across his forehead, partly obscuring but not concealing the fact that he had one eye covered by a black patch. It might have been the reflection from the red flares outside, shining through the unglazed window, but Lucas thought that Scatcherd's other eye held a spark of something bright, fierce, and dangerous. He looked like a circus animal that had not been very well tamed.
    "Bloggs can handle the wool," Smallside answered shortly. "Show the young gentleman round, anywhere he asks you to take him."
    "Where shall I start?" said Scatcherd in a sulky tone.
    "At the beginning. Show him the wool intake. And then the cutters. And then the looms. And the gluing. And the trimming. And so on—good heavens, I don't have to wet-nurse you, do I?"
    "Shall I show him the press?" Scatcherd inquired. There was nothing out of the way about his manner, but the question somehow fell oddly.
    Smallside's answer took a moment in coming. "Later—that can come later. After the rest. If there's time. Get on, man! I have all these orders to countersign."
    Mr. Smallside turned with a preoccupied busy air to the papers on his desk, and Scatcherd by means of a sideways jerk of his head indicated that Oakapple and Lucas were to follow him. They hurried after him across the cobbled yard. Lucas, glancing back, felt sorry for poor Noddy, the mare, left alone in the dark, noisy, dreary place, and highly apprehensive for himself as to what lay ahead.
    He was to dream, that night and for many nights to come, of what he saw during the next couple of hours.
    It was not so much that the sights were frightening, though some were that; but they were so strange, so totally unfamiliar from anything that he had ever seen before; the shapes and movements of the machines were so black, quick, ugly, or sudden; the noises were so atrociously loud, the heat was so blistering, the smells so sickly, acid, or stifling.
    "This here's the melder"—or the grabber, the sorting-press, or the tub thumper—Scatcherd kept saying, as he dodged nimbly under great metal arms, round swiftly-spinning enormous screws, by wheels that were almost invisible from speed and ever-whirling belts, through arches of pistons that rose and fell like the legs of some great insect, the body of which was hidden in the forest of machinery above them. Scatcherd never bothered to turn his head or to raise his voice while he imparted information about the work. Often Lucas could see his lips move but could catch less than a tenth of what he said. Could those be the right names for the machines, or could Scatcherd be deliberately misleading them? In either case, Lucas felt that at the end of the two hours he would be no wiser than at the start; he was totally bewildered by all he saw.
    The wool intake was the only part of the process that he could really grasp: raw wool, as taken from the sheep's back, came clanking into the works on the trains of trucks that ran through the forecourt. The wool was in huge bales, corded up like outsize parcels. Men slashed through the cords, and the bales immediately exploded apart into masses of springy fluff which was sent sliding down a great chute into a kind of hopper where it was washed and graded; then it was teased, to have the knots and lumps and prickles taken out; then, according to the grade, some wool was dyed, some was bleached. The men in charge of the dye vats were a strange sight, for they were splashed all over in brilliant colors, their hair was colored, their arms were green or blue or