MAGIC PICTURES
Stopping only to wash his hands and brush his hair, Kellock left his
rooms and hastened up the coomb, where towered immense congeries of
buildings under the slope of the hills. Evening sunshine fell over the
western height which crowned the valley, and still caught the upper
windows of the factory; but the huge shadow quickly climbed upward as
the sun set.
A small house stood at the main gate of Dene Paper Mill, and at the
door sat a man reading a paper and smoking his pipe.
It was Mr. Trood, foreman of the works.
“Guvnor’s asking for you, Kellock,” he said. “Five o’clock was the
time.”
Jordan hurried on to the deserted mills, for the day was Saturday
and work had ceased at noon. Threading the silent shops he presently
reached a door on an upper floor, marked “Office,” knocked and was told
to enter.
On the left of the chamber sat a broad-shouldered man writing at a
roll-top desk; under the windows of the room, which faced north,
extended a long table heaped with paper of all descriptions and colours.
The master twisted round on his office chair, then rose and lighted a
cigarette. He was clean-shaved with iron-grey hair and a searching but
genial expression. His face shone with intelligence and humour. It was
strong and accurately declared the man, for indomitable perseverance
and courage belonged to Matthew Trenchard.
His own success he attributed to love of sport and love of fun. These
pursuits made him sympathetic and understanding. He recognised his
responsibilities and his rule of conduct in his relations with the
hundred men and women he employed was to keep in closest possible
touch with them. He held it good for them and vital for himself that
he should know what was passing in their minds; for only thus could he
discover the beginning of grievances and destroy them in the egg. He
believed that the longer a trouble grew, the more difficult it was to
dissipate, and by establishing intimate relations with his staff and
impressing upon them his own situation, his successes and his failures,
he succeeded in fixing unusual bonds.
For the most part his people felt that Trenchard’s good was their
own—not because he said so, but because he made it so; and save for
certain inevitable spirits, who objected on principle to all existing
conditions between capital and labour, the workers trusted him and
spoke well of him.
Kellock was first vatman at Dene, and one of the best paper makers in
England. Both knew their worth and each was satisfied with the other.
“I’ve heard from that South American Republic, Kellock,” said Mr.
Trenchard. “They like the new currency paper and the colour suits them.”
“It’s a very fine paper, Mr. Trenchard.”
“Just the exact opposite of what I’m after for these advertisements.
The public, Kellock, must be appealed to by the methods of Cheap Jack
at the fair. They love a conjuring trick, and if you can stop them
long enough to ask ‘how’s it done?’ you often interest them and win
them. Now samples of our great papers mean nothing to anybody but the
dealers. The public doesn’t know hand-made paper from machine-made.
What we’ve got to do is to show them—not tip-top paper, but a bit of
magic; and such a fool is the public that when he sees these pictures
in water-mark, he’ll think the paper that produces them must be out of
the common good. We know that it’s not ‘paper’ at all in our sense,
and that it’s a special brew for this special purpose; but the public,
amazed by the pictures, buys our paper and doesn’t know that the better
the paper, the more impossible such sleight of hand would be upon it.
We show them one thing which awakes their highest admiration and causes
them to buy another!”
All this Jordan Kellock very well understood, and his master knew that
he did; but Trenchard liked to talk and excelled in lucid exposition.
“That’s right,” said the vatman; “they think that the paper that can
take such pictures must be good for anything; though the truth is that
it’s good for nothing—but the pictures. If there was any quality to
the pulp, it could never run into such moulds as these were made in.”
He began to pick up the impressions of a series of large, exhibition
water-marks, and hold them to the windows, that their transparent
wonders might be seen.
“Real works of art,” he said, “with high lights and deep shadows
and rare half tones and colour, too, all on stuff like tissue. The
beaterman must give me pulp as fine as flour to get such impressions.”
“Finer than flour, my lad. The new moulds are even more wonderful. It
is no good doing what your father did over again. My father beat my
grandfather; so it’s my duty to beat him—see?”
“These are wonderful enough in all conscience.”
“And for the Exhibition I mean to turn out something more wonderful
still. Something more than craft—real art, my friend. I want the
artists. I want them to see what our art paper for water-colour work
is. They don’t know yet—at least only a handful of them.”
“But this is different. The pulp to do this sort of thing must be as
thin as water,” said Kellock.
“Fibre is the first consideration for paper that’s going to be as
everlasting as parchment; but these water-mark masterpieces are _tours
de force_—conjuring tricks as I call them. And I want to give the
public a conjuring trick more wonderful than they’ve ever seen in paper
before; and I’m going to do it.”
“No paper maker ever beat these, Mr. Trenchard,” declared Kellock. He
held up large sheets of the size known as “elephant.” They appeared
to be white until illuminated; then they revealed shades of delicate
duck-green, sunrise yellow, dark blue, light blue and umber.
A portrait by Romney of Lady Hamilton shone through the first, and
the solidity of the dark masses, the rendering of the fabric and the
luminous quality of the flesh were wonderfully translated by the
daylight filtering through.
“There can be no painted pictures like these,” said Matthew Trenchard
stoutly. “And why? Because the painter uses paint; I use pure daylight,
and the sweetest paint that ever was isn’t a patch on the light of day.
Such things as these are more beautiful than pictures, just because the
living light from the sky is more beautiful than any pigment made by
man.”
Kellock was too cautious to agree with these revolutionary theories.
“Certainly these things would be very fine to decorate our windows, if
we didn’t want to look out of them,” he admitted.
Then he held up a portrait of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria.
“Pure ultramarine blue, you see,” commented the master, “and the light
brings out its richness, though if you looked at the paper, you’d be
puzzled to find any blue in it. That’s because the infinitely fine
atoms of the colour would want a microscope to see their separate
particles. Yet where the pulp sank to the depths of the mould, they
collected in millions to give you those deep shadows.”
Kellock delayed at the copy of a statue: the Venus Victrix from
Naples—a work which certainly reproduced the majesty of the original
in a rounded, lustrous fashion that no reproduction on the flat could
echo.
“We can’t beat that, though it is fifty years old,” declared Kellock.
“We’re going to, however; and another statue is my idea. Marble comes
out grandly as you see. I’m out for black and white, not colour. I’ve
an idea we can get something as fine as the old masters of engraving,
and finer.”
“The vatman is nought for this work,” confessed Kellock. “He makes
paper in his mould and that’s all there is to it—whether for printing,
or writing, or painting. The man who matters is him who makes the
mould.”
“But we can help him; we can experiment at the vat and in the beating
engine. We can go one better in the pulp; and the stroke counts at the
vat. I reckon your stroke will be invaluable to work the pulp into
every cranny of such moulds as I’m thinking about.”
“I’ll do my best; so will Dingle; but how many men in England are there
who could make such moulds as these to-day?”
“Three,” replied Trenchard. “But I want better moulds. I’m hopeful that
Michael Thorn of London will rise to it. I go to see him next week, and
we put in a morning at the British Museum to find a statue worthy of
the occasion.”
“I can see a wonderful thing in my mind’s eye already,” declared
Kellock.
“Can you? Well, I never can see anything in my mind’s eye and rest
content for an hour, till I set about the way to see it with my body’s
eye.”
“We all know that, Mr. Trenchard.”
“Here’s my favourite,” declared the other, holding up a massive head of
Abraham Lincoln. “Now that’s a great work in my judgment and if we beat
that in quality, we shall produce a water-mark picture worth talking
about.”
“You ought to show all these too,” said Jordan Kellock.
“I shall—if I beat them; not if they beat me,” replied the other.
“I wanted you to see what my father and grandfather could do, so that
you may judge what we’re up against. But they’re going to be beaten at
Dene, or else I’ll know the reason why.”
“It’s good to see such things and worth while trying to beat them,”
answered the vatman.
“To improve upon the past is the business of every honest man in my
opinion,” declared Trenchard. “That’s what we’re here for; and that’s
what I’ve done, I believe, thanks to a lot of clever people here who
have helped me to do it and share what credit there may be. But I don’t
claim credit, Ned. It’s common duty for every man with brains in his
head to help push the craft along.”
“And keep its head above water,” added the listener.
Matthew Trenchard eyed him doubtfully and lighted another cigarette.
“Yes,” he admitted rather reluctantly. “You’re right. Hand-made paper’s
battling for its life in one sense—like a good many other hand-made
things. But the machine hasn’t caught us yet and it will be a devil of
a long time before it does, I hope.”
“It’s for us not to let it,” said Jordan—a sentiment the paper master
approved.
“I’m fair,” he said, “and I’m not going to pretend the machine isn’t
turning out some properly wonderful papers; and I’m not going to say it
isn’t doing far better things than ever I thought it would do. I don’t
laugh at it as my grandfather did, or shake my head at it as my father
used. I recognise our craft is going down hill. But we ain’t at the
bottom by a long way; and when we get there, we’ll go game and die like
gentlemen.”
They talked awhile longer; then the dusk came down, Kellock departed
and Trenchard, turning on an electric light, resumed his writing.