CHANCE.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXV, Issue 13949, 4 January 1906, Page 3

CHANCE.

! (By L. C. HOPKINS.)\ "Throw mo that drill, Jim,” said th© blacksmith to a fellow on the opposite dele of the '©haft. Jim picked it up and teased it over to the speaker. I looked venomously at the murderous dullards, a half-formed idea in my mind that it would be a charity to - humanity to take. the drill and crush in their miserable skulls with it; but I merely pulled out my watch and time-book, scribbled a line on each of two slips and banded one to the- blacksmith and one to Jim. | “Take those up to tho office, boys,”' ■ I said mildly 7. " We won’t need yon i round here any more,” and sticking a ' prospecting pick in ray belt, I started down the perpendicular ladder in the | wall of the shaft, cursing the stupidity I of men in general and of miners in I particular. Not six weeks before a miner bad ; violated the simple rule about passing tools across the shaft; a hammer dr-o-p- ---: ped in. and we paid 10,000dol to the widow of one of the men who bad been at work below. Reflecting that I would start a training school for fool-killers as soon as I i had money enough, I reached the end : of the ladder after a somewhat tedious descent and stopped down on a large ledge of rock.which was something like a hundred feet below the surface. I i paused a moment to look about me. j Tire vein had " faulted ” at this point, 1 about four feet, and having been found i after some difficulty, the three-foot ledge of rock on which I stood had been ; IcfT standing temporarily while the re- | covered vein had been opened for some 1 twelve feet further down. I scrambled | into this narrower portion of the shaft, 1 and by the aid of projecting stones reached tho bottom. Here there had been trouble again, and I turned on tho electric light, buckled my waterproof coat tighter round my throat and started in, with the assistance of my pick, for a minute examination of the bottom and sides. An hour and a half’s work, and I thought I had found a cine to the difficulty. About the same time i I came to the conclusion that it must , be near the dinner hour. i I leaned back against the wall to rest a moment before beginning the laborious ascent, and mechanically looked j. up. I As I did so, I distinctly heard the words: "Throw me tliat dynamite, I Bill,” and a second later, two dark j objects entered my field of vision at one side of the top of the shaft, and one of them passed across—one only 7 —the other struck the edge of tho topmost timber, rebounded slightly, and—started down. I heard a yell of horror, and for a fraction of a second a face was thrust over the edge of the shaft, then quickly withdrawn. I felt a convulsive grip at my throat, and a cold sweat broke out on my forehead. The muscles at the roots of my hair contracted vigorously. There it was—my doatn-warrant. Death? Well, I should guess yes! Death alone; caught like a rat! Hopeless death; awful death! The cartridge was falling near the wall of the shaft; I measured its path with my eye, and saw it would strike the ledge of rock, above mo. 1 knew it to be "sixty per cent,” and that the concussion of its fall would be far more than sufficient to explode it, and blow the entire bottom of the shaft- to smithereens. I watched it os it spun over and over like a wheel, and there came to ms a statement in a school book I bad studied when a child as to the speed of falling bodies, and I made a nice mental calculation that in a shade over two seconds tho trouble would be : over. This train of thought ran through my mind, and was completed : before, the cartridge had accomplished j tho first- yard of its journey. A school book I bad studied when a child? That was a queer experience I : A vista in my brain, long closed, seemed slowly to open. A- boy, I saw myself in tho old schoolhouso —tho master on his bench, drowsing over his weekly newspaper; the sleepy hum of study; the. quiet of a summer day ; the lowing j of a cow in the meadow outside. There : was the girl, her hair plaited in two long tails down her back, one tied with bine and one with red ribbon. She was looking out of the corners of her eyes, alternately at mo and at the master, while she chewed a pencilled note into a transmissible wad before flipping it across to me. That note seemed to me , to be tho opening of my life. ■ One by one, the important scenes in our child-life passed in orderly and deliberate succession before my mind’s eye, and all the time the cartridge was falling, falling; and all tho time that ' grip at my throat seemed tightening, tightening. - ' I saw the boy grow to youth, tho girl into young womanhood. I saw the i ever-increasing sympathy and affection

between them. .1 saw them on moonlight nights, walking home from the country church ; I saw them on late afternoons, rowing on the river and riding horseback through the pines. I saw them drift, drift, on and on, until one afternoon the boy went to the father, and, after much circumlocution and needless verbosity, approached the fatal subject. Approached; that was all; then the boy went back down the lane, with his mind filled with murder and suicide.

I saw him pack his trunk, leave the home of his boyhood, and start life for himself in the Far West. I saw him become a miner; after a while he staked out a claim of liis own; a little later he sold it for a modest fortune.

And all the time the cartridge was falling, falling. The boy returned to his native town. Late one Sunday afternoon he drove into the wood near her father’s home. He quietly sat down on a stump and lighted a cigarette. I seemed to smell that cigarette! The girl walked down the lane to the edge of the woods. The boy ran up the path and took her in his arms. Ho led her to the buggy, and they drove out of the wood together. I saw them in the West, as man and wife, their life full of hope, strength, faith. I passed over with them a thousand incidents. of those happy years in their little home with their little child. And then I saw him make an unwise venture, and lose all but his health, his energy and his family.' I saw them start life again. I saw them in a modest cottage the boy had just begun to pay for. I saw the boy reading to the girl at night. I saw them struggling with the questions no man can solve, and I recalled the night the hoy and the girl were first struck in the face with the full force of the law of Chancel I saw them as they Jay awake all that night, asking themselves; Can Chance and God live together in the same worid? Is God Chance, or is Chance God ? The cartridge was half-way down. I recalled the details of an incident I had met with once in a Western town. A cyclone had demolished tne village. Death, destruction, butchery everywhere. Four days later, a house, apparently uninjured, was entered by the relief corps for the first time. The back roof had fallen in on tho bed where had lain tho husband and wife, and on the crib by their side where had lain their little child. The child and the husband were dead ; the mother lay there still alive, both lege broken, and by her eide. a two-days-old dead baby*. That was a lovely instance of what Brute Chance can do When he tries himself ! It was a lovely illustration of the operation of the eternal and immutable laws of justice and compensation I That woman had come into the world through no volition of her own. As she lay in her cradle, she might well have said to those about her: “You have, brought me here. I did not ask yon to let mo come. If it he true that I am the result of natural law existent in the world, then let that law protect me until I pass out the way 1 : have come. You should not starve me ; you should not brutalise me; you should not subject me to torture of disease. You should deal with me kindly, fairly, honourably, so long as I deal with your other children kindly, fairly, honourably ; and at the last, when all is finished, you should allow me to pass out quietly, peacefully, painlessly.” As sue lay helpless on her bed by the side of her dead hush anti and her dead child, did she think'of those things? Aa she felt the crucifying pangs of child-birth coming on her there alone, and after racking hours of untold agony saw another little corpse added, to those around her, did she think of the uselessness, the injustice of that agony? Did she know that she was only a victim of Chance, and that before nim the God of all tho worlds was helpless? Did she say to herself, “There is no God but Chance?” When the Christ drank the last drop of the bitter cup which in Gethseman© He had prayed might pass from Him if it was His Father’s will, He set the golden goblet gently down and .faced the frightful and ignoble death of the cross unfalteringly. Ho knew Ho should pass through these gates into His Father’s arms. He knew He was soon to be clasped to that , bosom of boundless love, to hear those priceless words, “ Well done, thou good and faithful servant!” And He knew that through that death would pass out also the influence of tho life He had completed, and that it would go echoing down the ages, with ever-increasing strength and power, until time should cease and eternity begin.

But tills woman felt no such sustaining thought. Every child of Mother Nature shows his kinship in his inherited abhorrence of a vacuum, in his hatred of a useless thing; and the bitterest thought that can come to one at the close of a great trial is that it has been for nothing won. , As the woman lay there, her body broken, her soul upon the rack, she must have felt the immeasurable tragedy of that thought; and she must have felt the thrice-immeasurable tragedy of Chance! She must have felt that she had suffered, by Chance, as even tho Christ had never suffered, and that it had been in vain! As I remembered how the boy and the girl had clasped each other that night in an unspoken terror of what . Chance might have in store for them, some words of lloyce which the hoy had once read to her came vividly to my mind. 1 “ The worst tragedy of the world is tho tradegy of the Brute Chance to which everything spiritual seems to be subject amongst us. ... If it were only our sin that kept us from God, might men not often nope to see His face? The true Devil isn’t crime, but Brute Chance. For this Devil teaches us to doubt and grow cold of heart; he denies God everywhere, and in 'all His creatures makes our world of action that was to he a spiritual tragedy too often a mere farce before our eyes. And to see this farcical aspect of the universe is for the first time to come to a sense of the true gloom of life.” When had I read those words to my wife? Last night! And then I j realised for the first time I had had a most wonderful experience. In the j second or two that had elapsed since v the cartridge had fallen into the shaft, j there had passed before me a vision |of the whole of m.v past life 1 I had heard of such' a thing, but I had never realised the literalness of it. Actually in that short space of time, I had lived my life over again, and had brought it from childhood up to last night! And as I realised this, 1 realised that tho cartridge was now r scarce twenty feet above the ledge! Well, the end had come. Chance had wound it up!. Through no fault of mine my life was to be blotted out; |my wife left alone penniless at the | mercy of a brutal world, to meet it 'as best she could .with her little fatherless child. Knowing how inseparably her life was locked with mine, I looked forward down the mutilated years that lay before her, and cursed that impotent God who could not control Brute Chance! For I felt within my heart of hearts that the argument was against the Christ and against the Father! When Brute Chance , takes the i reins I thought the immutability' of God, God Himself, passes ! No Hand has over yet been stretched across the gulf to stop a butchery that Brute Chance had set his mind to! Ten feet above the ledge! \ I would meet death calmly! I would face it fearlessly! Why this drumming in my ears? Why this grip at ray throat? Fear? I would cast it off! I would spurn it! I took one deep, free breath . . . and then . . . It chanced that tho spinning cartridge, now falling with the speed _of a bullet, grazed a stone in the side of the shaft and caromed off at an angle. I saw it would clear the ledge and strike the wall above my head. I made a great leap upward, . . . and caught it in my hand. There it lay, as innocent now as my little child in its cradle at home. I seemed scarcely to notice how it had crushed, my hand against tho jagged rock. I felt no pain, only a great Weariness.,. I looked at it a moment as if with passing curiosity, and then—everything grew black before my eyes.