WORK
Sarah Northover and another young woman were tending the Spread Board.
To this came the 'long line' from the hackler--those strides of amber
hemp and lint-white flax that Mr. Baggs prepared in the hackler's shop.
The Spread Board worked upon the long line as the Carder on the tow.
Over its endless leathern platform, or spreading carriage, the long
fibre was drawn into the toothed gills of the machine and converted into
sliver for the Drawing Frames.
With swift and rhythmic flinging apart of her arms over her head, Sarah
separated the stricks into three and laid them overlapping on the
carriage. The ribbon thus created was never-ending and wound away into
the torture chambers of wheels and teeth within, while from the rear of
the Spreader trickled out the new-created sliver. Great scales hung
beside Sarah and from time to time she weighed fresh loads of long line
and recorded the amount.
Her arms flashed upwards, the divided stricks came down to be laid in
rotation on the running carriage, and ceaselessly she and her fellow
worker chattered despite the din around them.
"My Aunt Nelly's coming to see me this morning," said Sarah. "She's
driving over to talk to Mister Waldron about his apple orchard and have
a look round. Last year she bought the whole orchard for cider; and if
she thinks well of it, she'll do the same this year."
"I wonder you stop here," answered the other girl, "when you might go to
your aunt and work in her public-house. I'd a long sight sooner be there
than here."
"You wouldn't if you was engaged to Mister Roberts," answered Sarah.
"Of course seeing him every day makes all the difference. And as to
work, there's nothing in it, for everybody's got to work at 'The Seven
Stars,' I can tell you, and the work's never done there."
"It's the company I should like," declared the other. "I'd give a lot to
see new people every day. In a public they come and go, before you've
got time to be sick of the sight of 'em. But here, you see the same
people and hear the same voices every day of your blessed life; and
sometimes it makes me feel right down wicked."
"It's narrowing to the mind I dare say, unless you've got a man like
Mister Roberts with a lot of general ideas," admitted Sarah. "But you
know very well for that matter you could have a man to-morrow. Benny
Cogle's mate is daft for you."
The other sniffed.
"It's very certain he ain't got no general ideas, beyond the steam
engine. He can only talk about the water wheel to-day and the boilers
to-morrow. When I find a chap, he'll have to know a powerful lot more
about life than that chap--and shave himself oftener also."
"He'd shave every day if you took him, same as Mister Roberts does,"
said Sarah.
Elsewhere Mr. Best was starting a run of the Gill Spinner, a machine
which took sliver straight from the Drawing Frames and spun it into a
large coarse yarn. A novice watched him get the great machine to work,
make all ready and then, at a touch, connect it with the power and set
it crashing and roaring. Its voice was distinctive and might be heard by
a practised ear above the prevailing thunder.
Then came Mrs. Nelly Northover to this unfamiliar scene, peeped in at a
door or two and failed to see Sarah, who laboured at the other end of
the Mill. But the hostess of 'The Seven Stars' knew Sabina Dinnett and
now shook hands with her and then stood and watched in bewildered
admiration before a big frame of a hundred spindles.
Sabina was spinning with a heart very full of happiness. On the previous
evening she had promised to wed Raymond Ironsyde, and her thoughts
to-day were winged with over-mastering joy. For life had turned into a
glorious triumph; the man who had asked her to marry him was not only a
gentleman, but far above the power of any wrong-doing. She knew in the
very secret places of her soul, that he could never act away from his
honest and noble character; that he was a knight above reproach,
incapable of wronging any living thing. There was an element of risk for
most girls who fell in love with those better born than themselves; but
none for her. Other men might deceive and abuse, and suffer outer
influences to chill their love, when the secret of it became known; but
not this man. His rare nature had been revealed to her; he desired the
welfare of all people; he was moved with nothing but the purest
principles and loftiest feeling. He would not willingly have brought
sorrow to a child. And she had won this unique spirit! He loved her with
the love that only such a man was great enough to show; and she echoed
it and knew that such a passion must be unchanging, everlasting, built
not only to make their united lives unspeakably happy and gloriously
content, but to run over also into the lives of others, less blessed,
and leave the sad world happier for their happiness. There was not a
cloud in the sky of her romance and she shared with him for the moment
the joy of secrecy. But that would not be long. They had determined to
hug their delicious knowledge for a little while and then proclaim the
great tidings to the world.
So she followed the old road, along which her sisters had tramped from
immemorial time, and would still tramp through the generations to come,
when her journey was ended and the wonderful country of man's love
explored--its oases visited, its antres endured.
Now Sabina played priestess to the Spinning Machine--a monster reared
above her, stupendous and insatiable.
Along the summit of the Spinning Frame, just within reach of tall
Sabina's uplifted hand, there perched a row of reels from which the
finished material descended through series of rollers. The retaining
roller aloft gave it to the steel delivery roller which drew the thin,
sad-looking stuff with increased speed downward. And here at its moment
of most shivering tenuity, when the perfected and purified material
seemed reduced to an extremity of weakness, came the magic change.
Unseen in the whirring complexity of the spinner, it received the
momentous gift that translates fibre to yarn. In a moment it changed
from stuff a baby's finger could break to thread capable of supporting
fifteen pounds of pressure. For now came the twist--that word of mighty
significance--and the tiny thread of new-born yarn descended to the
spindle, vanished in the whirl of the flier and reappeared, an
accomplished miracle, winding on the bobbin beneath.
Upon the spindle revolved the flier--a fork of steel with guide eye at
one leg of the fork--and through the guide eye came the twisted yarn to
wind on the bobbin below. There, as the bobbin frame rose and fell, the
thread was perfectly delivered to the reel and coiled off layer by layer
upon it.
Mrs. Northover stared to see the nature of a Spinner's duties and the
ease with which she controlled the great, pulsing, roaring frame of a
hundred spindles. Sabina's eyes were everywhere; her hands were never
still; her feet seemed to dance a measure to the thunder of the Frame.
Now she marked a roving reel aloft that was running out, and in a moment
she had broken the sliver, swept away the empty reel and hung up a full
one. Then she drew the new sliver down to the point of the break and, in
a moment, the two merged and the thread ran on. Now her fingers touched
the spindles, as a musician touches the keys, and at a moment's pressure
the machine obeyed and the yarn flew on its way obedient. Now she
cleared a snarl, or catch, where a spindle appeared to have run amuck or
created hopeless confusion; now she readjusted the weights that kept a
drag on the humming bobbins. Her twinkling hands touched and calmed and
fed the monster. She knew its whims, corrected its errors, brought to
her insensate machine the complement of brain that made it trustworthy.
And when the bobbins were all full, she hastened along the Frame, turned
off the driving power and silenced the huge activity in a moment. Then,
like lightning, she cut her hundred threads and lifted the bobbins from
their spindles until she had a pile upon her shoulder. In a marvellously
short time she had doffed the bobbins and set up a hundred empty ones.
Then the cut threads were readjusted, the power turned on and all was
motion again.
Sabina had never calculated her labours, until Raymond took the trouble
to do so; then she learned a fact that astonished her. He found that it
took a hundred and fifty minutes to spin one thousand and fifty yards;
and as each spindle spun two and a half miles in ten hours, her daily
accomplishment was two hundred and fifty miles of yarn.
"You spin from seventy to eighty thousand miles of single yarn a year,"
he told her, and the fact expressed in these terms amazed her and her
sister spinners.
Now Nelly Northover praised the performance.
"To think that you slips of girls can do anything so wonderful!" she
said. "We talk of the spinners of Bridport as if they were nobodies; but
upon my conscience, Sabina, I never will again. I've always thought I
was a pretty busy woman; but I'd drop to the earth I'm sure after an
hour of your job, let alone ten hours."
Sabina laughed.
"It's use, Mrs. Northover. Some take to it like a duck to water. I did
for one. But some never do. If you come to the Frame frightened, you
never make a spinner. They're like humans, the Spinning Frames; if they
think you're afraid of them, they'll always bully you, but if you show
them you're mistress, it's all right. They have their moods and whims,
just as we have. They vary, and you never know how the day will go.
Sometimes everything runs smoothly; sometimes nothing does. Some days
you're as fresh at the end as the beginning; some days you're dog-tired
and worn out after a proper fight."
"There's something hungry and cruel and wicked about 'em to my eye,"
declared Mrs. Northover.
"We're oftener in fault than the Frames, however. Sometimes the
spinner's to blame herself--she may be out of sorts and heavy-handed and
slow on her feet and can't put up her ends right, or do anything right;
and often it's the fault of the other girls and the 'rove' comes to the
spinner rough; and often, again, it's just luck--good or bad. If the
machine always ran perfect, there'd be nothing to do. But you've got
to use your wits from the time it starts to the time it stops."
"The creature would best me every time," said the visitor, regarding
Sabina's machine with suspicion and something akin to dislike.
The spinner stopped a fouled spindle and rubbed her hand.
"Sometimes the yarn's always snarling and your drag weights are always
burning off and the stuff is full of kinks and the sliver's badly pieced
up--that's the drawing minder's fault--and a bad drawing minder means
work for me. Your niece, Sarah, is a very good drawing minder, Mrs.
Northover. Then you'll get ballooning, when the thread flies round above
the flier, and that means too little strain on the jamb and the bobbin
has got to be tempered. And often it's too hot, or else too cold, for
hemp and flax must have their proper temperature. But to-day my machine
is as good and kind as a nice child, that only asks to be fed and won't
quarrel with anybody."
Mrs. Northover, however, saw nothing to praise, for Sabina's speech had
been broken a dozen times.
"If that's what you call working kindly, I'd like to see the wretch in a
nasty mood," she said. "I lay you want to slap it sometimes."
Sabina was mending a drag that had burned off. The drags were heavy
weights hanging from strings that pressed upon the side of the bobbins
and controlled their speed. The friction often burned these cords
through and the weights had to be lifted and retied again and again.
"We want a clever invention to put this right," she said. "A lot of good
time's wasted with the weights. Nobody's thought upon the right thing
yet."
"I'm properly dazed," confessed Nelly Northover. "You live and learn
without a doubt--nothing's so true as that."
Her niece had seen her and approached, as the machinery began to still
for the dinner-hour.
"Morning, Sarah. Can you do such wonders as Miss Dinnett?" she asked.
"No, Aunt Nelly. I'm a spreader minder. But I'll be a spinner some day,
if Mr. Roberts likes for me to stop, here after I'm married."
"Sarah would soon learn to spin," declared Sabina.
Then she turned to bid Raymond Ironsyde good morning. His brother was
away from Bridport on a tour with one of his travellers, that he might
become acquainted with many of his more important customers. Raymond,
therefore, felt safe and was wasting a good deal of his time. He had
brought a basket of fruit from North Hill House--a present from
Estelle--and he began to dispense plums and pears as the women streamed
away to dinner.
They knew him very well now and treated him with varying degrees of
familiarity. Early doubts had vanished, and they took him as a good
natured, rather 'soft' young man, who meant well and was friendly and
harmless. The ill-educated are always suspicious, and Levi Baggs
declared from the first that Raymond was nothing better than his
brother's spy, placed here for a time to inquire into the ambitions and
ideas of the workers and so help the firm to combat the lawful demands
of those whom they employed; but this theory was long exploded save in
the mind of Mr. Baggs himself. The people of Bridetown Mill held Raymond
on their side, and all were secretly interested to know what would
spring of his frank friendship with Sabina.
In serious moments Raymond felt uneasy at the relations he had
established with the workers, and Mr. Best did not hesitate to warn
him again and again that discipline was ill served by such easy terms
between employer and employed; but his moments of perspicuity were rare,
for now his mind and soul were poured into one thought and one only. He
was riotously happy in his love affair and could not pretend to his
fellow creatures anything he did not feel. Always amiable and
accessible, his romance made him still more so, and he was
constitutionally unable at this moment to take a serious view of
anything or anybody.
One ray of hope, however, Mr. Best recognised: Raymond did show an
honest and genuine interest in the machines. He had told the foreman
that he believed the great problem lay there, and where machinery was
concerned he could be exceedingly intelligent and rational. This trait
in him had a bearing on the future and, in time to come, John Best
remembered its inception and perceived how it had developed.
Now, his fruit dispensed, Raymond talked with Sabina about the Spinning
Frame and instructed Mrs. Northover, who was an acquaintance of his, in
its mysteries.
"These are old-fashioned frames," he declared, "and I shan't rest till
I've turned them out of the works and got the latest and best. I'm all
for the new things, because they help the workers and give good results.
In fact, I tell my brother that he's behind the times. That's the
advantage of coming to a subject fresh, with your mind unprejudiced.
Daniel's all bound up in the past and, of course, everything my father
did must be right; but I know better. You have to move with the times,
and if you don't you'll get left."
"That's true enough, Mr. Ironsyde, whatever your business may be,"
answered Mrs. Northover.
"Of course--look at 'The Seven Stars.' You're always up to date, and why
should my spinners--I call them mine--why should they have to spin on
machines that come out of the ark, when, by spending a few thousand,
they could have the latest?"
"You've got to balance cost against value," answered the innkeeper. "It
don't do to dash at things. One likes for the new to be tried on its
merits first, and then, if it proves all that's claimed for it, you go
in and keep abreast of the times according; but the old will often be
found as good as the new; and so Mr. Daniel no doubt looks before he
leaps."
"That's cowardly in my opinion," replied Raymond. "You must take the
chances. Of course if you're frightened to back your judgment, then that
shows you're a second class man with a second class sort of mind; but if
you believe in yourself, as everybody does who is any good, then you go
ahead, and if you come a purler now and again, that's nothing, because
you get it back in other ways. I'm not frightened to chance my luck, am
I, Sabina?"
"Never was such a brave one, I'm sure," she said, conscious of their
secret.
"If you haven't got nerve, you're no good," summed up the young man;
"and if you have got nerve, then use it and break out of the beaten
track and welcome your luck and court a few adventures for your soul's
sake."
"All very well for you men," said Mrs. Northover. "You can have
adventures and no great harm done; but us women, if we try for
adventures, we come to a bad end."
"Nobody's more adventurous than you," answered Raymond. "Look at your
gardens and your teas for a bob ahead. Wasn't that an adventure--to give
a better tea than anybody in Bridport?"
"I believe women have quite as many adventures as men," declared Sarah
Northover, who was waiting for her aunt, "only we're quieter about 'em."
"We've got to be," answered Mrs. Northover. "Now come on to your
mother's, Sarah. There's Mr. Roberts waiting for us outside."
In the silent and empty mill Raymond dawdled for a few minutes with
Sabina, talked love and won a caress. Then she put on her sunbonnet and
he walked with her to the door of her home, left her at 'The Magnolias'
and went his way with Estelle's fruit basket.
A great expedition had been planned by the lovers for a forthcoming
public holiday. They were going to rise in the dawn, before the rest of
the world was awake, and tramp out through West Haven to Golden Cap--the
supreme eminence of the south coast, that towers with bright,
sponge-coloured precipices above the sea, nigh Lyme.