IN THE MILL
John Best was taking Raymond Ironsyde round the spinning mill, but the
foreman had his own theory and proposed to initiate the young man by
easy stages.
"You've seen the storehouses and the hacklers," he said. "Now if you
just look into the works and get a general idea of the scheme of things,
that's enough for one day."
In the great building two sounds deafened an unfamiliar ear: a steady
roar, deep and persistent, and through it, like a staccato pulse, a
louder, more painful, more penetrating din. The bass to this harsh
treble arose from humming belts and running wheels; the crash that
punctuated their deep-mouthed riot broke from the drawing heads of the
machines.
A lofty, open roof, full of large sky-lights, covered the operating
room, and in its uplifted dome supports and struts leapt this way and
that, while, at the height of the walls, ran rods supporting rows of
silver-bright wheels from which the power descended, through endless
bands, to the machinery beneath. The floor was of stone, and upon it
were disposed the various machine systems--the Card and Spreader, the
Drawing Frames, Roving Frames, Gill Spinners and Spinning Frames.
The general blurred effect in Raymond's mind was one of disagreeable
sound, which made speech almost impossible. The din drove at him from
above and below; and it was accompanied by a thousand unfamiliar
movements of flying bands and wheels and squat masses of machinery that
convulsed and heaved and palpitated round him. From nearly all the
machines there streamed away continuous bright ribbons of hemp or flax,
that caught the light and shone. This was the 'sliver,' the wrought,
textile material passing through its many changes before it came to the
spinners. The amber and lint-white coils of the winding sliver made a
brightness among the duns and drabs around them and their colour was
caught again aloft where whisps of material hung irregularly--lumps of
waste from the ends of the bobbins--and there were also colour notes of
warmth in the wooden wheels on many of the machines. These struck a
genial tone into the chill greys and flash of polished steel on every
side.
After the mechanical activity, movement came from the irregular actions
of the workers. Forty women and girls laboured here, and while some old
people only sat on stools by the spouting sliver and wound it away into
the tall cans that received it, other younger folk were more intensively
engaged. The massive figure of Sally Groves lumbered at her ministry,
where she fed the Carding Machine. She was subdued to the colour of the
hemp tow with which she plied it. Elsewhere Sarah Northover flashed the
tresses of long lines over her head and seemed to perform a rhythmic
dance with her hands, as she tore each strick into three and laid the
shining locks on her spread board. Others tended the drawers and rovers,
while Sabina Dinnett, Nancy Buckler and Alice Chick, whose high task it
was to spin, seemed to twinkle here, there and everywhere in a
corybantic measure as they served the shouting and insatiable monsters
that turned hemp and flax to yarn.
They, indeed, specially attracted Raymond, by the activity of their work
and the charm of their swift, supple figures, where, never still, they
danced about, with a thousand, strenuous activities of hand and foot and
eye. Their work dazed him and he wanted to stop here and ask Sabina many
questions. She looked much more beautiful while spinning than in her
black dress and white apron--so the young man thought. Her work
displayed her neat, slim shape as she twirled round, stooped, leapt up
again, twisted and stood on tip-toe in a thousand fascinating
attitudes. Never a dancer in the limelight had revealed so much beauty.
She was rayed in a brown gown with a short skirt, and on her head she
wore a grey woollen cap.
But Mr. Best forbade interest in the spinners.
"You'll not get to them for a week yet," he said. "I'll ask you to just
take in the general hang of it, Mister Raymond, please. Power comes from
the water-wheel and the steam engine and it's brought down to each
machine. Just throw your eyes round. You ain't here to look at the
girls, if you'll excuse my saying so. You're here to learn."
"You can learn more from the girls than all these noisy things put
together," laughed Raymond; while Mr. Best shook his head and proceeded
with his instructions.
"Those exhausts above each system suck away the dust and small rubbish,"
he explained. "We shouldn't be able to breathe without them."
The other looked up and saw great leaden-coloured tubes, like organ
pipes, above him. Mr. Best droned on and strove to lay a foundation for
future knowledge. He was skilled in every branch of the work, and a past
master of all spinning mysteries. His lucid and simple exposition had
very well served to introduce an attentive stranger to the complex
operations going on around him, but Raymond was not attentive. He failed
to concentrate and missed fundamental essentials from the desire to
examine more advanced and obviously interesting operations.
He apologised to John Best before the dinner-hour.
"This is only a preliminary canter," he said. "It's all Greek to me and
it will take time to get the thing clear. It looks quite different to me
from what it must to you. I'll get the general scheme into my head first
and then work out the details. A man's mind can't make order out of this
chaos in a minute."
He stood and tried to appreciate the trend of events. He enjoyed the
adventure, but at present made no effort to do more than enjoy it. He
would start to work later. He began to like the din and the dusty light
and the glitter and shine of polished metal and bright sliver eternally
winding into the cans. Round it hovered or sat the women like dull
moths. They wound the stream of hemp or flax away and snapped it when a
can was full. There was no pause or slackening, nothing but the whirl of
living hands and arms and bodies, dead wheels and teeth and pulleys and
pins operating on the inert tow. The mediators, animate and inanimate,
laboured together for its manufacture; while the masses of mingled wood
and steel, leather and brass and iron, moved in controlled obedience to
the giant forces liberated from steam and water that drove all. The
selfsame power, gleaned from sunshine and moisture and sublimated to
human flesh and blood through bread, plied in the fingers and muscles
and countless, complex mental directions of the men and women who
controlled. From sun-light and air, earth and water had also sprung the
fields of hemp and flax in far-off lands and yielded up their loveliness
to foreign scutchers. The dried death of countless beautiful herbs now
represented the textile fabric on which all this immense energy was
applied.
Thus far, along an obvious line of thought, Raymond's reflections took
him, but there his slight mental effort ended, and even this much tired
him. The time for dinner came; Mr. Best now turned certain hand-wheels
and moved certain levers. They shut off the power and gradually the din
lessened, the pulsing and throbbing slowed until the whole great
complexity came to a stand-still. The drone of the overhead wheels
ceased, the crash of the draw-heads stopped. A startling silence seemed
to grow out of the noise and quell it, while a new activity manifested
itself among the workers. As a bell rang they were changed in a
twinkling and, amid chatter and laughter, like breaking chrysalids, they
flung off their basset aprons and dun overalls, to emerge in brighter
colours. Blouses of pink and blue and red flashed out, straw hats and
sun-bonnets appeared, and all streamed away like magic to their
neighbouring houses. It was as though its soul had passed and left a
dead mill behind it.
Raymond, released for a moment from the attentions of the foreman,
strolled among the machines of the minders and spinners. Then his eyes
were held by an intimate and personal circumstance that linked these
women to this place. He found that on the whitewashed walls beside their
working corners, the girls had impressed themselves--their names, their
interests, their hopes. With little picture galleries were the walls
brightened, and with sentiments and ideas. The names of the workers were
printed up in old stamps--green and pink--and beside them one might
read, in verses, or photographs, or pictures taken from the journals,
something of the history, taste and personal life of those who set them
there. Serious girls had written favourite hymns beside their working
places; the flippant scribbled jokes and riddles; the sentimental copied
love songs that ran to many verses. Often the photograph of a maiden's
lover accompanied them, and there were also portraits of mothers and
sisters, babies and brothers. Some of the girls had hung up
fashion-plates and decorated their workshop with ugly and mean designs
for clothing that they would never wear.
Raymond found that picture postcards were a great feature of these
galleries, and they contained also, of course, many private jests and
allusions lost upon the visitor. Character was revealed in the
collections; for the most part they showed desire for joy, and
aspiration to deck the working-place with objects and words that should
breed happy thoughts and draw the mind where its treasure harboured.
Each heart it seemed was holding, or seeking, a romance; each heart was
settled about some stalwart figure presented in the picture gallery, or
still finding temporary substance for dreams in love poetry, in
representations of happy lovers at stiles, in partings of soldier and
sailor lads from their sweethearts. Beside some of the old workers the
walls were blank. They had nothing left to set down, or hang up.
Raymond was arrested by a little rhyme round which a black border had
been pasted. It was original:
"I am coiling, coiling, coiling
Into the can,
And thinking, thinking, thinking,
Of my dear man.
"He is toiling, toiling, toiling
Out on the sea,
And thinking, thinking, thinking
Only of me.
"F.H."
Mr. Best joined Ironsyde.
"These walls!" he said. "It's about time we had a coat of whitewash.
Mister Daniel thinks so too."
"Why--good lord--this is the most interesting part of the whole show.
This is alive! Who's F.H.?"
"The girls will keep that. They like it, though I tell them it would be
better rubbed out. Poor Flossy Hackett wrote that. She was going to
marry a sailor-man, but he changed his mind, and she broke her heart and
drowned herself--that's all there is to it."
"The damned rascal. I hope he got what he deserved."
Mr. Best allowed his mind to peep from the shell that usually concealed
it.
"If he did, he was one man in a thousand. He married a Weymouth woman
and Flossy went into the river--in the deep pool beyond the works. A
clever sort of girl, but a dreamer you might say."
"I'd like to have had the handling of that devil!"
"You never know. She may have had what's better than a wedding ring--in
happy dreams. Reality's not the best of life. People do change their
minds. He was honest and all that. Only he found somebody else he liked
better."
At this moment Daniel Ironsyde came into the works, and while John Best
hastened to him, Raymond pursued his amusement and studied the wall by
the spinning frame where Sabina Dinnett worked. He found a photograph of
her mother and a quotation from Shakespeare torn off a calendar for the
date of August the third. He guessed that might be Sabina's birthday.
The quotation ran:--
"To thine own self be true;
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
There was no male in Sabina's picture gallery--indeed, no other picture
but that of a girl--her fellow spinner, Nancy Buckler.
His brother approached Raymond.
"You've made a start, Ray?"
"Rather. It's jolly interesting. Best is wonderful, but he can't fathom
my ignorance yet."
"It's all very simple and straightforward. Do you like your office?"
"Yes," declared the younger. "Couldn't beat it. When I want something to
do, I can fling a line out of the window and fish in the river."
"You have plenty to do besides fish out of the window I should hope. Let
us lunch. I'm stopping here this afternoon. Aunt Jenny wanted to know
whether you'd come to Bridport to dinner on Sunday."
Daniel was entirely friendly now and he designed--if the future should
justify the step--to take Raymond into partnership. But only in the
event of very material changes in his brother's life would he do so.
Their aunt felt sanguine that Raymond must soon recognise his
responsibilities, settle to the business of justifying his existence and
put away childish things; Daniel was less hopeful, but trusted that she
might be right. Her imagination worked for Raymond and warned her nephew
not to be too exacting at first. She pointed out that it was very
improbable Daniel's brother would become a model in a moment, or settle
down to the business of fixed hours and clerical work without a few
lapses from the narrow and arduous path. So the elder was prepared to
see his brother kick against the pricks and even warned John Best that
it might be so. Brief acquaintance with Raymond had already convinced
the foreman of this probability, and he found himself liking Daniel's
brother from the first. The dangers, however, were not hid from him; but
while he perceived the youthful instability of the newcomer and his
impatience of detail, he presently discovered an interest in mechanical
contrivances, a spark of originality, and a feeling for new things that
might lead to results, if only the necessary application were
forthcoming and the vital interest aroused.
Mr. Best had a simple formula.
"The successful spinner," he often remarked, "is the man who can turn
out the best yarn from a given sample of the raw. Hand identical stuff
to ten manufacturers and you'll soon see where the best yarn comes
from."
He knew of better yarns than came from the Ironsyde mill, and regretted
the fact. That a time might arrive when Raymond would see with him
seemed exceedingly improbable; yet he felt the dim possibility by
occasional flashes in the young man, and it was a quality of Mr. Best's
mind to be hopeful and credit other men with his own aspirations, if any
excuse existed for so doing.