I
Gregory still worked obstinately among the vats. Calthorpe had tried to
coax him away to the engine-rooms, but got no more answer than a shake
of the head. In his secret mind, Gregory was preparing a scheme, now
nearly complete, that would reorganise the whole working of the factory;
he saw himself as its originator and supervisor, and was far too proud
to accept a preliminary post as a unit among a number of mechanics. He
was living for the day when, before an assembled board-meeting, he would
lay his designs upon the table; although he could not explain them by
speech, their beautiful precise simplicity would explain itself while he
stood aside, arms folded, and read the effect upon the faces of the
directors. (He had tested some designs upon Calthorpe,—not those
designs, of course,—and the overseer had been seriously impressed.
Gregory knew with calm certainty, untouched by diffidence, that his work
was good.) Perhaps he would take Nan with him as interpreter to the
board-meeting; she was intelligent, her small fingers flew fast, and it
would be a compensation, in some guise, for the hours he had spent away
from her in abstraction over his drawings.
Meanwhile, time progressing towards that day, he worked in the gallery
of vats. It was a sort of grotesque vigil. He hated the nauseous,
automatic work, but obliged himself to keep to it with a strength of
mind that Silas wholly appreciated. Day after day he climbed the long
iron ladder to the upper gallery, dressed in splashed and grimy
overalls, and renewed his occupation, trundling hand-barrows, emptying
an over-full or cooling an overheated vat. When he had to do this he
stripped to the waist, and stirred and flacked the boiling slime with a
weapon shaped like a flail. Sweat ran from him, and in the gaunt gallery
of iron girders, amongst the vats of moving yellow fat, the play of his
shining muscles and sculptural body stood out as a classical and noble
revelation.
Regarding Nan as his chattel, he never wondered whether he was or was
not agreeable to her, and in his egoism never noticed her sensitive
wilting under his caresses. His pride and his machines were
personalities infinitely more living to him than the instrument of
comfort and pleasure that was his wife. When he had married her, he
had loved her in a rough animal way, that never had in it a streak of
consideration or unselfishness; it had amused him to possess as a toy
something so weak, so little, and so pretty, and in the first weeks of
their marriage he had devised games for his own satisfaction, to pick
her up between both hands and lift her till her head touched the
ceiling, or to catch her up and run with her along the dyke—such
eccentric sports, that half frightened her, half pleased her instinct
by his display of strength. Then he had grown accustomed to her
flitting presence. He had ceased to raise his head when she came into
the room, or to finger with wonderment her small hands, or to turn
over with derisive affection the ribbons, cottons, and odds and ends
in her work-box. She ceased to be so distinctly, so newly, Nan, and
became merely one of the little knot of four living in the
double-cottage,—himself, Silas, Nan, and Hannah. He watched her when
he had nothing better to do, just as he watched Silas or Hannah, or,
nowadays, Linnet, but within the vaults of silence his true life was
turned inwards upon himself.
And Silas was studying him; Silas studying Gregory! Communication
between them was almost non-existent; Silas could, indeed, write on a
piece of paper and Gregory could read the message, but, beyond a clumsy
finger-system relating only to elementary practical matters,—names of
objects, and such,—Gregory was quite unable to converse with Silas.
Silas foresaw therefore that he would have no means of judging the
effects of his observations on Gregory’s mind. But difficulties only
whetted his ingenuity. He needed an occupation and an opiate as he had
never needed them before,—not that he allowed himself to own to
this,—and the double disaster he had undergone, far from humbling him,
stung him to a determination of mischief that welcomed any obstacle as
an additional employment for his days. He stood at his work in the
shops, before a trestle table, making the square boxes into parcels, and
as he tied the string he fancied that every knot secured a further mesh
in the net he was weaving round unsuspecting lives.