ON THE BANK
Anna began to receive her July interest and dividends. During a
fortnight remittances, varying from a few pounds to a few hundred of
pounds, arrived by post almost daily. They were all addressed to her,
since the securities now stood in her own name; and upon her, under the
miser's superintendence, fell the new task of entering them in a book
and paying them into the Bank. This mysterious begetting of money by
money--a strange process continually going forward for her benefit, in
various parts of the world, far and near, by means of activities of
which she was completely ignorant and would always be completely
ignorant--bewildered her and gave her a feeling of its unreality. The
elaborate mechanism by which capital yields interest without suffering
diminution from its original bulk is one of the commonest phenomena of
modern life, and one of the least understood. Many capitalists never
grasp it, nor experience the slightest curiosity about it until the
mechanism through some defect ceases to revolve. Tellwright was of
these; for him the interval between the outlay of capital and the
receipt of interest was nothing but an efflux of time: he planted
capital as a gardener plants rhubarb, tolerably certain of a particular
result, but not dwelling even in thought on that which is hidden. The
productivity of capital was to him the greatest achievement of social
progress--indeed, the social organism justified its existence by that
achievement; nothing could be more equitable than this productivity,
nothing more natural. He would as soon have inquired into it as Agnes
would have inquired into the ticking of the grandfather's clock. But
to Anna, who had some imagination, and whose imagination had been
stirred by recent events, the arrival of moneys out of space, unearned,
unasked, was a disturbing experience, affecting her as a conjuring
trick affects a child, whose sensations hesitate between pleasure and
apprehension. Practically, Anna could not believe that she was rich;
and in fact she was not rich--she was merely a fixed point through
which moneys that she was unable to arrest passed with the rapidity of
trains. If money is a token, Anna was denied the satisfaction of
fingering even the token: drafts and cheques were all that she touched
(touched only to abandon)--the doubly tantalising and insubstantial
tokens of a token. She wanted to test the actuality of this apparent
dream by handling coin and causing it to vanish over counters and into
the palms of the necessitous. And moreover, quite apart from this
curiosity, she really needed money for pressing requirements of Agnes
and herself. They had yet had no new summer clothes, and Whitsuntide,
the time prescribed by custom for the refurnishing of wardrobes, was
long since past. The intercourse with Henry Mynors, the visit to the
Suttons, had revealed to her more plainly than ever the intolerable
shortcomings of her wardrobe, and similar imperfections. She was more
painfully awake to these, and yet, by an unhappy paradox, she was even
less in a position to remedy them, than in previous years. For now,
she possessed her own fortune; to ask her father's bounty was
therefore, she divined, a sure way of inviting a rebuff. But, even if
she had dared, she might not use the income that was privately hers,
for was not every penny of it already allocated to the partnership with
Mynors! So it happened that she never once mentioned the matter to her
father; she lacked the courage, since by whatever avenue she approached
it circumstances would add an illogical and adventitious force to the
brutal snubs which he invariably dealt out when petitioned for money.
To demand his money, having fifty thousand of her own! To spend her
own in the face of that agreement with Mynors! She could too easily
guess his bitter and humiliating retorts to either proposition, and she
kept silence, comforting herself with timid visions of a far distant
future. The balance at the bank crept up to sixteen hundred pounds.
The deed of partnership was drawn; her father pored over the blue
draft, and several times Mynors called and the two men discussed it
together. Then one morning her father summoned her into the front
parlour, and handed to her a piece of parchment on which she dimly
deciphered her own name coupled with that of Henry Mynors, in large
letters.
'You mun sign, seal, and deliver this,' he said, putting a pen in her
hand.
She sat down obediently to write, but he stopped her with a scornful
gesture.
'Thou 'lt sign blind then, eh? Just like a woman!'
'I left it to you,' she said.
'Left it to me! Read it.'
She read through the deed, and after she had accomplished the feat one
fact only stood clear in her mind, that the partnership was for seven
years, a period extensible by consent of both parties to fourteen or
twenty-one years. Then she affixed her signature, the pen moving
awkwardly over the rough surface of the parchment.
'Now put thy finger on that bit o' wax, and say; "I deliver this as my
act and deed."'
'I deliver this as my act and deed.'
The old man signed as witness. 'Soon as I give this to Lawyer Dane,'
he remarked, 'thou'rt bound, willy-nilly. Law's law, and thou'rt
bound.'
On the following day she had to sign a cheque which reduced her
bank-balance to about three pounds. Perhaps it was the knowledge of
this reduction that led Ephraim Tellwright to resume at once and with
fresh rigour his new policy of 'squeezing the last penny' out of Titus
Price (despite the fact that the latter had already achieved the
incredible by paying thirty pounds in little more than a month), thus
causing the catastrophe which soon afterwards befell. What methods her
father was adopting Anna did not know, since he said no word to her
about the matter: she only knew that Agnes had twice been dispatched
with notes to Edward Street. One day, about noon, a clay-soiled urchin
brought a letter addressed to herself: she guessed that it was some
appeal for mercy from the Prices, and wished that her father had been
at home. The old man was away for the whole day, attending a sale of
property at Axe, the agricultural town in the north of the county,
locally styled 'the metropolis of the moorlands.' Anna read:--'My dear
Miss Tellwright,--Now that our partnership is an accomplished fact,
will you not come and look over the works? I should much like you to
do so. I shall be passing your house this afternoon about two, and
will call on the chance of being able to take you down with me to the
works. If you are unable to come no harm will be done, and some other
day can be arranged; but of course I shall be disappointed.--Believe
me, yours most sincerely, HY. MYNORS.'
She was charmed with the idea--to her so audacious--and relieved that
the note was not after all from Titus or Willie Price: but again she
had to regret that her father was not at home. He would be capable of
thinking and saying that the projected expedition was a truancy,
contrived to occur in his absence. He might grumble at the house being
left without a keeper. Moreover, according to a tacit law, she never
departed from the fixed routine of her existence without first
obtaining Ephraim's approval, or at least being sure that such a
departure would not make him violently angry. She wondered whether
Mynors knew that her father was away, and, if so, whether he had chosen
that afternoon purposely. She did not care that Mynors should call for
her--it made the visit seem so formal; and as in order to reach the
works, down at Shawport by the canal-side, they would necessarily go
through the middle of the town, she foresaw infinite gossip and rumour
as one result. Already, she knew, the names of herself and Mynors were
everywhere coupled, and she could not even enter a shop without being
made aware, more or less delicately, that she was an object of piquant
curiosity. A woman is profoundly interesting to women at two periods
only--before she is betrothed and before she becomes the mother of her
firstborn. Anna was in the first period; her life did not comprise the
second. When Agnes came home to dinner from school, Anna said nothing
of Mynors' note until they had begun to wash up the dinner-things, when
she suggested that Agnes should finish this operation alone.
'Yes,' said Agnes, ever compliant. 'But why?'
'I'm going out, and I must get ready.'
'Going out? And shall you leave the house all empty? What will father
say? Where are you going to?'
Agnes's tendency to anticipate the worst, and never to blink their
father's tyranny, always annoyed Anna, and she answered rather curtly:
'I'm going to the works--Mr. Mynors' works. He's sent word he wants me
to.' She despised herself for wishing to hide anything, and added, 'He
will call here for me about two o'clock.'
'Mr. Mynors! How splendid!' And then Agnes's face fell somewhat. 'I
suppose he won't call before two? If he doesn't, I shall be gone to
school.'
'Do you want to see him?'
'Oh, no! I don't want to see him. But--I suppose you'll be out a long
time, and he'll bring you back.'
'Of course he won't, you silly girl. And I shan't be out long. I
shall be back for tea.'
Anna ran upstairs to dress. At ten minutes to two she was ready.
Agnes usually left at a quarter to two, but the child had not yet gone.
At five minutes to two, Anna called downstairs to her to ask her when
she meant to depart.
'I'm just going now,' Agnes shouted back. She opened the front door
and then returned to the foot of the stairs. 'Anna, if I meet him down
the road shall I tell him you're ready waiting for him?'
'Certainly not. Whatever are you dreaming of?' the elder sister
reproved. 'Besides, he isn't coming from the town.'
'Oh! All right. Good-bye.' And the child at last went.
It was something after two--every siren and hooter had long since
finished the summons to work--when Mynors rang the bell. Anna was
still upstairs. She examined herself in the glass, and then descended
slowly.
'Good afternoon,' he said. 'I see you are ready to come. I'm very
glad. I hope I haven't inconvenienced you, but just this afternoon
seemed to be a good opportunity for you to see the works, and, you
know, you ought to see it. Father in?'
'No,' she said. 'I shall leave the house to take care of itself. Do
you want to see him?'
'Not specially,' he replied. 'I think we have settled everything.'
She banged the door behind her, and they started. As he held open the
gate for her exit, she could not ignore the look of passionate
admiration on his face. It was a look disconcerting by its mere
intensity. The man could control his tongue, but not his eyes. His
demeanour, as she viewed it, aggravated her self-consciousness as they
braved the streets. But she was happy in her perturbation. When they
reached Duck Bank, Mynors asked her whether they should go through the
market-place or along King Street, by the bottom of St. Luke's Square.
'By the market-place,' she said. The shop where Miss Dickinson was
employed was at the bottom of St. Luke's Square, and all the eyes of
the marketplace was preferable to the chance of those eyes.
Probably no one in the Five Towns takes a conscious pride in the
antiquity of the potter's craft, nor in its unique and intimate
relation to human life, alike civilised and uncivilised. Man hardened
clay into a bowl before he spun flax and made a garment, and the last
lone man will want an earthen vessel after he has abandoned his ruined
house for a cave, and his woven rags for an animal's skin. This
supremacy of the most ancient of crafts is in the secret nature of
things, and cannot be explained. History begins long after the period
when Bursley was first the central seat of that honoured manufacture:
it is the central seat still--'the mother of the Five Towns,' in our
local phrase--and though the townsmen, absorbed in a strenuous daily
struggle, may forget their heirship to an unbroken tradition of
countless centuries, the seal of their venerable calling is upon their
foreheads. If no other relic of an immemorial past is to be seen in
these modernised sordid streets, there is at least the living legacy of
that extraordinary kinship between workman and work, that instinctive
mastery of clay which the past has bestowed upon the present. The
horse is less to the Arab than clay is to the Bursley man. He exists
in it and by it; it fills his lungs and blanches his cheek; it keeps
him alive and it kills him. His fingers close round it as round the
hand of a friend. He knows all its tricks and aptitudes; when to coax
and when to force it, when to rely on it and when to distrust it. The
weavers of Lancashire have dubbed him with an obscene epithet on
account of it, an epithet whose hasty use has led to many a fight, but
nothing could be more illuminatively descriptive than that epithet,
which names his vocation in terms of another vocation. A dozen decades
of applied science have of course resulted in the interposition of
elaborate machinery between the clay and the man; but no great vulgar
handicraft has lost less of the human than potting. Clay is always
clay, and the steam-driven contrivance that will mould a basin while a
man sits and watches has yet to be invented. Moreover, if in some
coarser process the hands are superseded, the number of processes has
been multiplied tenfold: the ware in which six men formerly
collaborated is now produced by sixty; and thus, in one sense, the
touch of finger on clay is more pervasive than ever before.
Mynors' works was acknowledged to be one of the best, of its size, in
the district--a model three-oven bank, and it must be remembered that
of the hundreds of banks in the Five Towns the vast majority are small,
like this: the large manufactory with its corps of jacket-men,[1] one
of whom is detached to show visitors round so much of the works as is
deemed advisable for them to see, is the exception. Mynors paid three
hundred pounds a year in rent, and produced nearly three hundred pounds
worth of work a week. He was his own manager, and there was only one
jacket-man on the place, a clerk at eighteen shillings. He employed
about a hundred hands, and devoted all his ingenuity to prevent that
wastage which is at once the easiest to overlook and the most difficult
to check, the wastage of labour. No pains were spared to keep all
departments in full and regular activity, and owing to his judicious
firmness the feast of St. Monday, that canker eternally eating at the
root of the prosperity of the Five Towns, was less religiously observed
on his bank than perhaps anywhere else in Bursley. He had realised
that when a workshop stands empty the employer has not only ceased to
make money, but has begun to lose it. The architect of 'Providence
Works' (Providence stands godfather to many commercial enterprises in
the Five Towns) knew his business and the business of the potter, and
he had designed the works with a view to the strictest economy of
labour. The various shops were so arranged that in the course of its
metamorphosis the clay travelled naturally in a circle from the
slip-house by the canal to the packing-house by the canal: there was no
carrying to and fro. The steam installation was complete: steam once
generated had no respite; after it had exhausted itself in vitalising
fifty machines, it was killed by inches in order to dry the unfired
ware and warm the dinners of the workpeople.
Henry took Anna to the canal-entrance, because the buildings looked
best from that side.
'Now how much is a crate worth?' she asked, pointing to a crate which
was being swung on a crane direct from the packing-house into a boat.
'That?' Mynors answered. 'A crateful of ware may be worth anything.
At Minton's I have seen a crate worth three hundred pounds. But that
one there is only worth eight or nine pounds. You see you and I make
cheap stuff.'
'But don't you make any really good pots--are they all cheap?'
'All cheap,' he said.
'I suppose that's business?' He detected a note of regret in her voice.
'I don't know,' he said, with the slightest impatient warmth. 'We make
the stuff as good as we can for the money. We supply what everyone
wants. Don't you think it's better to please a thousand folks than to
please ten? I like to feel that my ware is used all over the country
and the colonies. I would sooner do as I do than make swagger ware for
a handful of rich people.'
'Oh, yes,' she exclaimed, eagerly accepting the point of view, 'I quite
agree with you.' She had never heard him in that vein before, and was
struck by his enthusiasm. And Mynors was in fact always very
enthusiastic concerning the virtues of the general markets. He had no
sympathy with specialities, artistic or otherwise. He found his
satisfaction in honestly meeting the public taste. He was born to be a
manufacturer of cheap goods on a colossal scale. He could dream of
fifty ovens, and his ambition blinded him to the present absurdity of
talking about a three-oven bank spreading its productions all over the
country and the colonies; it did not occur to him that there were yet
scarcely enough plates to go round.
'I suppose we had better start at the start,' he said, leading the way
to the slip-house. He did not need to be told that Anna was perfectly
ignorant of the craft of pottery, and that every detail of it, so stale
to him, would acquire freshness under her naïve and inquiring gaze.
In the slip-house begins the long manipulation which transforms raw
porous friable clay into the moulded, decorated and glazed vessel. The
large whitewashed place was occupied by ungainly machines and
receptacles through which the four sorts of clay used in the common
'body'--ball clay, China clay, flint clay and stone clay--were
compelled to pass before they became a white putty-like mixture meet
for shaping by human hands. The blunger crushed the clay, the sifter
extracted the iron from it by means of a magnet, the press expelled the
water, and the pug-mill expelled the air. From the last reluctant
mouth slowly emerged a solid stream nearly a foot in diameter, like a
huge white snake. Already the clay had acquired the uniformity
characteristic of a manufactured product.
Anna moved to touch the bolts of the enormous twenty-four-chambered
press.
'Don't stand there,' said Mynors. 'The pressure is tremendous, and if
the thing were to burst----'
She fled hastily. 'But isn't it dangerous for the workmen?' she asked.
Eli Machin, the engineman, the oldest employee on the works, a moneyed
man and the pattern of reliability, allowed a vague smile to flit
across his face at this remark. He had ascended from the engine-house
below in order to exhibit the tricks of the various machines, and that
done he disappeared. Anna was awed by the sensation of being
surrounded by terrific forces always straining for release and held in
check by the power of a single wall.
'Come and see a plate made: that is one of the simplest things, and the
batting-machine is worth looking at,' said Mynors, and they went into
the nearest shop, a hot interior in the shape of four corridors round a
solid square middle. Here men and women were working side by side, the
women subordinate to the men. All were preoccupied, wrapped up in
their respective operations, and there was the sound of irregular
whirring movements from every part of the big room. The air was laden
with whitish dust, and clay was omnipresent--on the floor, the walls,
the benches, the windows, on clothes, hands and faces. It was in this
shop, where both hollow-ware pressers and flat pressers were busy as
only craftsmen on piecework can be busy, that more than anywhere else
clay was to be seen 'in the hand of the potter.' Near the door a stout
man with a good-humoured face flung some clay on to a revolving disc,
and even as Anna passed a jar sprang into existence. One instant the
clay was an amorphous mass, the next it was a vessel perfectly
circular, of a prescribed width and a prescribed depth; the flat and
apparently clumsy fingers of the craftsman had seemed to lose
themselves in the clay for a fraction of time, and the miracle was
accomplished. The man threw these vessels with the rapidity of a Roman
candle throwing off coloured stars, and one woman was kept busy in
supplying him with material and relieving his bench of the finished
articles. Mynors drew Anna along to the batting-machines for plate
makers, at that period rather a novelty and the latest invention of the
dead genius whose brain has reconstituted a whole industry on new
lines. Confronted with a piece of clay, the batting-machine descended
upon it with the ferocity of a wild animal, worried it, stretched it,
smoothed it into the width and thickness of a plate, and then desisted
of itself and waited inactive for the flat presser to remove its victim
to his more exact shaping machine. Several men were producing plates,
but their rapid labours seemed less astonishing than the preliminary
feat of the batting-machine. All the ware as it was moulded
disappeared into the vast cupboards occupying the centre of the shop,
where Mynors showed Anna innumerable rows of shelves full of pots in
process of steam-drying. Neither time nor space nor material was
wasted in this ant-heap of industry. In order to move to and fro, the
women were compelled to insinuate themselves past the stationary bodies
of the men. Anna marvelled at the careless accuracy with which they
fed the batting-machines with lumps precisely calculated to form a
plate of a given diameter. Everyone exerted himself as though the
salvation of the world hung on the production of so much stuff by a
certain hour; dust, heat, and the presence of a stranger were alike
unheeded in the mad creative passion.
'Now,' said Mynors the cicerone, opening another door which gave into
the yard, 'when all that stuff is dried and fettled--smoothed, you
know--it goes into the biscuit oven: that's the first firing. There's
the biscuit oven, but we can't inspect it because it's just being
drawn.'
He pointed to the oven near by, in whose dark interior the forms of
men, naked to the waist, could dimly be seen struggling with the weight
of saggars[2] full of ware. It seemed like some release of martyrs,
this unpacking of the immense oven, which, after being flooded with a
sea of flame for fifty-four hours, had cooled for two days, and was yet
hotter than the Equator. The inertness and pallor of the saggars
seemed to be the physical result of their fiery trial, and one wondered
that they should have survived the trial. Mynors went into the place
adjoining the oven and brought back a plate out of an open saggar; it
was still quite warm. It had the _matt_ surface of a biscuit, and
adhered slightly to the fingers: it was now a 'crook'; it had exchanged
malleability for brittleness, and nothing mortal could undo what the
fire had done. Mynors took the plate with him to the
biscuit-warehouse, a long room where one was forced to keep to narrow
alleys amid parterres of pots. A solitary biscuit-warehouseman was
examining the ware in order to determine the remuneration of the
pressers.
They climbed a flight of steps to the printing-shop, where, by means of
copper-plates, printing-presses, mineral colours, and transfer-papers,
most of the decoration was done. The room was filled by a little crowd
of people--oldish men, women and girls, divided into printers, cutters,
transferors and apprentices. Each interminably repeated some trifling
process, and every article passed through a succession of hands until
at length it was washed in a tank and rose dripping therefrom with its
ornament of flowers and scrolls fully revealed. The room smelt of oil
and flannel and humanity; the atmosphere was more languid, more like
that of a family party, than in the pressers' shop: the old women
looked stern and shrewish, the pretty young women pert and defiant, the
younger girls meek. The few men seemed out of place. By what trick
had they crept into the very centre of that mass of femineity? It
seemed wrong, scandalous that they should remain. Contiguous with the
printing-shop was the painting-shop, in which the labours of the former
were taken to a finish by the brush of the paintress, who filled in
outlines with flat colour, and thus converted mechanical printing into
handiwork. The paintresses form the _noblesse_ of the banks. Their
task is a light one, demanding deftness first of all; they have
delicate fingers, and enjoy a general reputation for beauty: the wages
they earn may be estimated from their finery on Sundays. They come to
business in cloth jackets, carry dinner in little satchels; in the shop
they wear white aprons, and look startlingly neat and tidy. Across the
benches over which they bend their coquettish heads gossip flies and
returns like a shuttle; they are the source of a thousand intrigues,
and one or other of them is continually getting married or omitting to
get married. On the bank they constitute 'the sex.' An infinitesimal
proportion of them, from among the branch known as ground-layers, die
of lead-poisoning--a fact which adds pathos to their frivolous charm.
In a subsidiary room off the painting-shop a single girl was seated at
a revolving table actuated by a treadle. She was doing the
'band-and-line' on the rims of saucers. Mynors and Anna watched her as
with her left hand she flicked saucer after saucer into the exact
centre of the table, moved the treadle, and, holding a brush firmly
against the rim of the piece, produced with infallible exactitude the
band and the line. She was a brunette, about twenty-eight: she had a
calm, vacuously contemplative face; but God alone knew whether she
thought. Her work represented the summit of monotony; the regularity
of it hypnotised the observer, and Mynors himself was impressed by this
stupendous phenomenon of absolute sameness, involuntarily assuming
towards it the attitude of a showman.
'She earns as much as eighteen shillings a week sometimes,' he
whispered.
'May I try?' Anna timidly asked of a sudden, curious to experience what
the trick was like.
'Certainly,' said Mynors, in eager assent. 'Priscilla, let this lady
have your seat a moment, please.'
The girl got up, smiling politely. Anna took her place.
'Here, try on this,' said Mynors, putting on the table the plate which
he still carried.
'Take a full brush,' the paintress suggested, not attempting to hide
her amusement at Anna's unaccustomed efforts. 'Now push the treadle.
There! It isn't in the middle yet. Now!'
Anna produced a most creditable band, and a trembling but passable
line, and rose flushed with the small triumph.
'You have the gift,' said Mynors; and the paintress respectfully
applauded.
'I felt I could do it,' Anna responded. 'My mother's mother was a
paintress, and it must be in the blood.'
Mynors smiled indulgently. They descended again to the ground floor,
and following the course of manufacture came to the 'hardening-on'
kiln, a minor oven where for twelve hours the oil is burnt out of the
colour in decorated ware. A huge, jolly man in shirt and trousers,
with an enormous apron, was in the act of drawing the kiln, assisted by
two thin boys. He nodded a greeting to Mynors and exclaimed, 'Warm!'
The kiln was nearly emptied. As Anna stopped at the door, the man
addressed her.
'Step inside, miss, and try it.'
'No, thanks!' she laughed.
'Come now,' he insisted, as if despising this hesitation. 'An ounce of
experience----' The two boys grinned and wiped their foreheads with
their bare skeleton-like arms. Anna, challenged by the man's look,
walked quickly into the kiln. A blasting heat seemed to assault her on
every side, driving her back; it was incredible that any human being
could support such a temperature.
'There!' said the jovial man, apparently summing her up with his
bright, quizzical eyes. 'You know summat as you didn't know afore,
miss. Come along, lads,' he added with brisk heartiness to the boys,
and the drawing of the kiln proceeded.
Next came the dipping-house, where a middle-aged woman, enveloped in a
protective garment from head to foot, was dipping jugs into a vat of
lead-glaze, a boy assisting her. The woman's hands were covered with
the grey, slimy glaze. She alone of all the employees appeared to be
cool.
'That is the last stage but one,' said Mynors. 'There is only the
glost-firing,' and they passed out into the yard once more. One of the
glost-ovens was empty; they entered it and peered into the lofty inner
chamber, which seemed like the cold crater of an exhausted volcano, or
like a vault, or like the ruined seat of some forgotten activity. The
other oven was firing, and Anna could only look at its exterior,
catching glimpses of the red glow at its twelve mouths, and guess at
the Tophet, within, where the lead was being fused into glass.
'Now for the glost-warehouse, and you will have seen all,' said Mynors,
'except the mould-shop, and that doesn't matter.'
The warehouse was the largest place on the works, a room sixty-feet
long and twenty broad, low, whitewashed, bare and clean. Piles of ware
occupied the whole of the walls and of the immense floorspace, but
there was no trace here of the soilure and untidiness incident to
manufacture; all processes were at an end, clay had vanished into
crock: and the calmness and the whiteness atoned for the disorder,
noise and squalor which had preceded. Here was a sample of the total
and final achievement towards which the thousands of small, disjointed
efforts that Anna had witnessed, were directed. And it seemed a
miraculous, almost impossible, result; so definite, precise and regular
after a series of acts apparently variable, inexact and casual; so
inhuman after all that intensely inhuman labour; so vast in comparison
with the minuteness of the separate endeavours. As Anna looked, for
instance, at a pile of tea-sets, she found it difficult even to
conceive that, a fortnight or so before, they had been nothing but
lumps of dirty clay. No stage of the manufacture was incredible by
itself, but the result was incredible. It was the result that appealed
to the imagination, authenticating the adage that fools and children
should never see anything till it is done.
Anna pondered over the organising power, the forethought, the wide
vision, and the sheer ingenuity and cleverness which were implied by
the contents of this warehouse. 'What brains!' she thought, of Mynors;
'what quantities of all sorts of things he must know!' It was a humble
and deeply-felt admiration.
Her spoken words gave no clue to her thoughts. 'You seem to make a
fine lot of tea-sets,' she remarked.
'Oh, no,' he said carelessly. 'These few that you see here are a
special order. I don't go in much for tea-sets: they don't pay; we
lose fifteen per cent. of the pieces in making. It's toilet-ware that
pays, and that is our leading line.' He waved an arm vaguely towards
rows and rows of ewers and basins in the distance. They walked to the
end of the warehouse, glancing at everything.
'See here,' said Mynors, 'isn't that pretty?' He pointed through the
last window to a view of the canal, which could be seen thence in
perspective, finishing in a curve. On one side, close to the water's
edge, was a ruined and fragmentary building, its rich browns reflected
in the smooth surface of the canal. On the other side were a few grim,
grey trees bordering the towpath. Down the vista moved a boat steered
by a woman in a large mob-cap. 'Isn't that picturesque?' he said.
'Very,' Anna assented willingly. 'It's really quite strange, such a
scene right in the middle of Bursley.'
'Oh! There are others,' he said. 'But I always take a peep at that
whenever I come into the warehouse.'
'I wonder you find time to notice it--with all this place to see
after,' she said. 'It's a splendid works!'
'It will do--to be going on with,' he answered, satisfied. 'I'm very
glad you've been down. You must come again. I can see you would be
interested in it, and there are plenty of things you haven't looked at
yet, you know.'
He smiled at her. They were alone in the warehouse.
'Yes,' she said; 'I expect so. Well, I must go, at once; I'm afraid
it's very late now. Thank you for showing me round, and explaining,
and--I'm frightfully stupid and ignorant. Good-bye.'
Vapid and trite phrases: what unimaginable messages the hearer heard in
you!
Anna held out her hand, and he seized it almost convulsively, his
incendiary eyes fastened on her face.
'I must see you out,' he said, dropping that ungloved hand.
It was ten o'clock that night before Ephraim Tellwright returned home
from Axe. He appeared to be in a bad temper. Agnes had gone to bed.
His supper of bread-and-cheese and water was waiting for him, and Anna
sat at the table while he consumed it. He ate in silence, somewhat
hungrily, and she did not deem the moment propitious for telling him
about her visit to Mynors' works.
'Has Titus Price sent up?' he asked at length, gulping down the last of
the water.
'Sent up?'
'Yes. Art fond, lass? I told him as he mun send up some more o' thy
rent to-day--twenty-five pun. He's not sent?'
'I don't know,' she said timidly. 'I was out this afternoon.'
'Out, wast?'
'Mr. Mynors sent word to ask me to go down and look over the works; so
I went. I thought it would be all right.'
'Well, it was'na all right. And I'd like to know what business thou
hast gadding out, as soon as my back's turned. How can I tell whether
Price sent up or not? And what's more, thou know's as th' house hadn't
ought to be left.'
'I'm sorry,' she said pleasantly, with a determination to be meek and
dutiful.
He grunted. 'Happen he didna' send. And if he did, and found th'
house locked up, he should ha' sent again. Bring me th' inkpot, and
I'll write a note as Agnes must take when her goes to school to-morrow
morning.'
Anna obeyed. 'They'll never be able to pay twenty-five pounds,
father,' she ventured. 'They've paid thirty already, you know.'
'Less gab,' he said shortly, taking up the pen. 'Here--write it
thysen.' He threw the pen towards her. 'Tell Titus if he doesn't pay
five-and-twenty this wik, us'll put bailiffs in.'
'Won't it come better from you, father?' she pleaded.
'Whose property is it?' The laconic question was final. She knew she
must obey, and began to write. But, realising that she would perforce
meet both Titus Price and Willie on Sunday, she merely demanded the
money, omitting the threat. Her hand trembled as she passed the note
to him to read.
'Will that do?'
His reply was to tear the paper across. 'Put down what I tell ye,' he
ordered, 'and don't let's have any more paper wasted.' Then he
dictated a letter which was an ultimatum in three lines. 'Sign it,' he
said.
She signed it, weeping. She could see the wistful reproach in Willie
Price's eyes.
'I suppose,' her father said, when she bade him 'Good-night,' 'I
suppose if I hadn't asked, I should ha' heard nowt o' this
gadding-about wi' Mynors?'
'I was going to tell you I had been to the works, father,' she said.
'Going to!' That was his final blow, and having delivered it, he
loosed the victim. 'Go to bed,' he said.
She went upstairs, resolutely read her Bible, and resolutely prayed.
[1] _Jacket-man_: the artisan's satiric term for anyone who does not
work in shirt-sleeves, who is not actually a producer, such as a clerk
or a pretentious foreman.
[2] _Saggars_: large oval receptacles of coarse clay, in which the ware
is placed for firing.