CHAPTER I--THE SERVICE

HEPPLESTALL’S

By Harold Brighouse

New York: Robert M. McBride & Company

1922

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FOREWORD

RUMMAGING at a bargain-counter, I came across an object which puzzled

me, and, turning to the shopman, I asked him what it was. He took it up

contemptuously. “That,” he said. “Dear me, I thought I’d put it in the

dust-bin. It’s fit for nothing but destruction.”

“And you call it?” I persisted. “I call it by its name,” he said. “It’s

an outworn passion, and a pretty frayed one too. Look at that!”

I watched him pull gently at the passion and it came apart like mildewed

fabric. “There’s no interest in that,” he said. “That never led to a

murder or a divorce, a feeble fellow like that. If it ever got as far as

the First Offenders’ Court, I shall be surprised.”

“Yet it looks old,” I said. “In its youth, perhaps--”

He examined it more closely. “I don’t think it’s a love passion at all,”

he said, shaking his head. “My suppliers are getting very careless.”

“You wouldn’t care to give me their address?” I coaxed.

He threw the passion down angrily. “This is a shop,” he said. “I’m here

to sell, not to make presents of my trade secrets.”

I apologized. “Of course,” I said, “I will always deal through you. And

as to this passion, what is the price of that?”

“I’m an honest man and to tell you the truth I’d rather put that in the

dust-bin than sell it. It goes against the grain to be trading in goods

that I know won’t satisfy.”

I said things such as that I would take the risk, that I would not hold

him responsible for any disappointment the passion might cause me and

I ended by offering him sixpence. So taken was he by the generosity of

this offer that he not only accepted it, but insisted on my taking, as

discount, a piece of newspaper which, he said, would serve very well to

wrap round the passion, pointing out, truthfully, that it was a cleanish

piece of paper, neither stained, by nor stinking of fried fish.

So we struck that bargain, and leaving the shop, which I have never

found again, I carried the passion home and unwrapped it from the

paper and put it on the table in my study. After a time, when it was

accustomed to its new surroundings, it showed unmistakably that it

wished to be friendly with me. At its age, I gathered, and in its

outworn condition, it thought fit to be grateful to me for having

purchased it at so great a price. The shopman was right; it was not a

love passion, it was a hate passion, but superannuated now, and if I

cared to watch it carefully it promised that I should see from the first

all that happened: how this hate which was so very strong a hundred

years ago had died and was now turned to such corruption and kindliness

that, before it fell utterly to pieces, it was to show me its career. To

me it seems that the story of this hate falls, like the hymns, into two

parts, ancient and modern, and I think it properest to begin by telling

you the ancient part first. Hates that are to live a hundred years are

not born in a day, so I shall first tell you how Reuben Hepplestall

turned from petty squire to cotton manufacturing and you will see later

for yourselves why this hate began.

HEPPLESTALL’S

PART I

CHAPTER I--REUBEN’S SEAL

EVEN to-day a man may be a Jacobite if he likes to be a Jacobite just

as he may read the Morning Post, and in the day when Reuben Hepplestall

was young there was a variety of reasons for being Jacobite, though

most of them were romantic and sentimental rather than practical or

good sense, and Hepplestall’s reason was rank absurdity because it was

absurdity unredeemed by conviction. He was Jacobite because Sir Harry

Whitworth was Hanoverian, from hatred of Sir Harry, not from love of the

Stuarts; but Hepplestall was young and as a general principle perversity

in youth is better than perversity in age, leaving the longer time for

correction.

Certainly, Hepplestall’s was a risky game, which may have had

attractiveness for him. He was strong, even in perversity, and having

set his hand to the plow, did not rest until he found himself accepted

as a power in the inner councils of the local Jacobites; but there was

something nourishing to his self-importance in this furtive prominence

and he savored the hazards of it not only because it marked to himself

his difference from the hard drinking sportsmen of Sir Harry’s set,

but as a mental exercise. He took a gambler’s risk in a gambling age,

backing his vigilance against all comers, feeling that to touch the

fringe of intrigue lifted him above a society which exercised its gullet

more than its wits. His secret, especially a dangerous secret, flattered

lus sense of superiority.

In sober fact young Hepplestall was intellectually superior to his

contemporaries and, aware of it, resented the deference they paid to

Sir Harry, the man of acres, the Beau, the Corinthian, the frequenter

of White’s and Almack’s, leader unchallenged of local society. By his

clandestine unorthodoxy, by his perpetual balancing on a tight-rope, he

expressed to himself his opposition to Sir Harry; and there was Dorothy

Verners, predestined in the eyes of the county for Sir Harry, waiting

only for a question which would have the force of a command. Reuben had,

in secret, his own idea of the future of Dorothy Verners. He aspired

where he knew himself fitted to aspire, but the county would have

dissolved in contemptuous guffaws at the thought of Reuben Hepplestall

in the character of rival to Sir Harry. He brooded darkly in rebellion,

outwardly accepting Whitworth’s social despotism, inwardly a choked

furnace of ambition.

It was little Bantison who involuntarily played the god in the machine

and died that the Hepplestalls might be cotton lords in Lancashire.

Bantison was not prepossessing; a short man, gross of body with a face

like raw beef and hands offensively white, dressed in his clerical coat

on which spatters of snuff and stains of wine smirked like a blasphemy,

endowed with fine capacity for other people’s Burgundy and distinguished

by an eye that earned him, by reason rather of alertness than deformity,

the nickname of “Swivel-Eyed Jack.” Some vicars, like Goldsmith’s, were

content with forty pounds a year; the Reverend Mr. Bantison had that

limited stipend with unlimited desires, and contrived by the use of his

alert eye and the practice of discreet blackmail to lead a bachelor

life of reasonable amplitude. Not to be nice about the fellow, he was as

unprincipled a wolf as ever masqueraded in a sheepskin; but he is not to

infest this narrative for long.

They were at table at Sir Harry Whitworth’s, who dined at six o’clock,

latish, as became a man of fashion. There was acquiescence in that

foible, but no imitation of a habit which was held to be an arbitrary

encroachment on the right to drink. The ladies had, in strict

moderation, to be treated civilly--at any rate, the ladies had to

eat--so that Sir Harry’s guests rarely drew up to the mahogany for the

serious entertainment of the evening before eight o’clock, and a man of

a position less assured than his would have been suspected of meanness

and too great care for the contents of his cellar. But Whitworth was

Whitworth and they shrugged their shoulders. After all, with good will

and good liquor one can achieve geniality in an evening not beginning

(for serious purposes) until eight.

The ladies dismissed to tea and to whatever insipid joys the

drawing-room might hold, the men addressed themselves with brisk

resolution to the task of doing noble justice to the best cellar in the

county. They were there, candidly and purposefully, to drink, and it was

never too late to mend sobriety, but under Sir Harry’s roof the process

had formality and the unbuttoned rusticity of native debauchery must be

disciplined to the restraint of ordered toasts. A pedantic host, this

young baronet, but his wines had quality, and they submitted with what

patience they could summon to his idiosyncrasy. There were no laggards

when Sir Harry bid them to his board.

Ignoring the parson--which, mostly, was what parsons were for and

certainly made no breach of etiquette--Sir Harry himself gave the toast

of “The King” with a faintly challenging air habitual to him but démodé.

Lancashire sentiment had veered since the forty-five and there was now

no need, especially in Whitworth’s company, to emphasize a loyalty they

all shared. It was not a fervent loyalty and no one was expected to be

exuberant about the Hanoverians, but bygones were bygones, and one took

the court one found as one took the climate.

But did one? Did every one? Did, in especial, Reuben Hepplestall, whom

Mr. Bantison watched so narrowly as he drank to the King? To Bantison

the enigmatic was a provocation and a hope and as a specialist in

enigmas he had his private notion that the whole of Hepplestall was

not apparent on the surface: he nursed suspicion, precious because

marketable if confirmed, that here was one who conserved the older

loyalty, and he watched as he had watched before. Finger-glasses were on

the table, but so crude a confession of faith as to pass his wine

over the water was neither expected nor forthcoming and Hepplest all’s

gesture, except that it repeated one which Bantison had noted mentally

when “The King” had been toasted on other occasions, was so nearly

imperceptible as to seem unlikely to have significance. But it was a

repetition, and did the repetition imply a ritual? It was improbable.

The risk was high, the gain non-existent, the defiance in such company

too blunt, the whole idea of expressing, however subtly, a rebellion

in a house of loyalists was unreasonable. Still, as Reuben raised his

glass, it hovered for an instant in the air, it made, ever so slightly,

a pause and (was it?) an obeisance which seemed directed to his, fob;

and when Mr. Bantison sat down he frowned meditatively at the pools

of mellow light reflected from the candles on the table and his face

puckered into evil wrinkles till he looked like an obscene animal

snarling to its spring; but that is only to say Mr. Bantison was

thinking unusually hard.

He was thinking of young men, their follies, their unreasoning

audacities and how these things happened by the grace of Providence

to benefit their wise elders. His face at its best, when he was doing

something agreeable like savoring Burgundy or (if so innocent an action

is to be conceived of him) when he smelled a violet, was a mask of

malice; it was horrible now as he weighed his chances of dealing to

his profit with Reuben. Whether he was right or wrong in his particular

suspicion, there was plainly something of the exceptional about this

dark young man. Hepplestall, considered as prey, struck him as a tough,

tooth-breaking victim, and Mr. Bantison had not the least desire

to break his teeth. He decided not to hazard their soundness--their

whiteness was remarkable--upon what was still conjecture. He wanted many

things which money would buy, but an orange already in his blackmailing

grip was yielding good juice and every circumstance conspired with the

excellence of Sir Harry’s Burgundy to persuade him to delay. His needs

were not urgent. And yet, and yet--

But it wasn’t Bantison’s lucky night. As they sat down, Sir Harry cast

a host’s glance round the table in search of a subject with which to set

the conversational ball rolling again, and saw the spasm of malevolence

which marked Bantison’s face in the moment of irresolution. “I’gad,”

he cried to the table at large, “will you do me the favor to observe

Bantison? A gargoyle come to meat. If it isn’t the prettiest picture I

ever saw of devotion incarnate. Watch him meditating piety.”

The company gave tongue obsequiously, ready in any case to dance when

Whitworth piped, doubly ready in the case where a parson was the butt.

Their mirth happened inopportunely for Bantison, proving at that crisis

of his indecision, a turning point. Left alone, he would have remained

passive: the taunt awoke aggression.

“I crave your pardon, Sir Harry. I was in thought.”

“The pangs of it gave your face a woundy twist. Out with the harvest of

it, man! A musing that gave you so much travail should shed new light on

the kingdom of heaven.”

“I was thinking,” said Bantison, “of a kingdom more apocryphal; of the

kingdom of the Stuarts,” and his eye, called Swivel, fell accusingly on

Hepplestall.

The attack was sudden, with the advantage of surprise, but in that

company of slow-moving brains, already dulled by wine, there was none

but Reuben who saw in Bantison’s allusion and Bantison’s quick-darting

eye an attack at all. So far, the affair was easy. “They have their

place,” said Reuben gravely, “in history.”

“And--,” began Bantison combatively, but Sir Harry cut him short. “Drown

history,” he said, “and mend your thoughts, Bantison. A glass of wine

with you.” Aggression subsided in Bantison; he murmured, and felt, that

it was an honor to drink with Sir Harry. For the time, the incident was

closed.

Reuben pondered the case of Mr. Bantison, worm or adder, and admitted

to disquiet. This devil of an unconsidered parson, this Swivel-Eyed Jack

who seemed good for nothing but to suck up nourishment, and to be the

target of contemptuous and contemptible wit, had got within his guard,

had plainly detected the meaning of the obscure ritual by which he

honored the king over the water and mentally snapped his fingers at Sir

Harry even while he dined with him. And Reuben Hepplestall did not mean

to forego that mental luxury of finger-snapping at Sir Harry. He damned

Sir Harry, but damned more heartily this unexpected impediment to the

damning of Sir Harry. And if Bantison showed resolution, so much the

worse for him; of the two it was certainly not Reuben Hepplestall who

was coming to shipwreck; and how much the worse it was for Bantison

depended exactly on that reverend gentleman’s movements. The first move,

at any rate, had been a foolish one: it had warned Reuben.

The second move was still more foolish: really, Mr. Bantison’s career

as a blackmailer had lain in rosy places, and he grew careless through

success. Besides, since Sir Harry had silenced him, forgiven him, drunk

with him, Mr. Bantison, as blackmailer, was off duty and a man must have

some relaxation; but Burgundy plays the deuce with discretion and was,

all the time, brightening his wits in the same ratio as it made him

careless of Hepplestall’s resentment. An idea, that was not at all a

stupid idea, but in itself a dazzling idea, came into his mind, and the

glamor of it obscured any discretion the Burgundy might have left him.

Hanging from Hepplestall’s fob were several seals. They interested Mr.

Bantison.

By this time not a few appreciators of the Whitworth cellar had slid

from their chairs to the floor, and there was nothing exceptional about

that. For what reason were their chairs so well designed, so strongly

made and yet so excellently balanced but that a man might slide gently

from them without the danger of a nasty jar to his chin as it hit the

table? Chairs beautiful, and--adapted to their users when to be drunk

without shame was a habit. Some one was on the floor by Hepplestall,

leaving a vacant chair. Bantison, obsessed by his idea, exaggerated

slightly a drunkenness by no means imaginary, lurched from his seat on

a mission of discovery and took the empty place by Hepplestall. “What’s

the hour?” he asked.

Hepplestall gave him his shoulder, glanced at the clock on the wall

behind him and stated the time.

“You do not consult your watch,” said Bantison.

“I have the habit,” said Hepplestall, “of doing things in my own way,”

and a soberer man than Bantison would have taken warning at his menace.

Mr. Bantison was either too far gone to recognize the mettle of his

adversary or else he was merely vinous and reckless. With his notable

eye on the seal which he suspected (rightly) to be, in fact, a phial

containing water, he made a bold snatch at Hepplestall’s fob.

Sir Harry, comparatively sober, no partisan of Hep-plestall’s, but

certainly none of the vicar’s, saw the snatch and rose with a “Good

God, has Bantison taken to picking pockets?” but there was, even at that

demonstration, nothing like a sensation in the room; they were neutrally

ready to acquiesce in picking pockets, in an outraged host, in anything.

They were country gentlemen late in the evening.

The snatch, ill-timed, had failed of its objective. Mr. Bantison clawed

thin air in ludicrous perplexity and Hep-plestall, assured by Sir

Harry’s gesture of his sympathy, took his opportunity. He rose, with his

hand down Bantison’s neck, clutching cravat, coat, all that there was to

clutch, and with a polite: “You permit?” and a bow to Whitworth, carried

the parson one-handed to the window. Bantison choked speechlessly,

imprecations and accusations alike smothered by the taut neck-band round

his throat. Hepplestall opened the window, breathing heavily, lifted the

writhing sinner and dropped him through it.

“And that’s the end of him,” commented Sir Harry, more truly than he

knew. “You’re in fine condition, sir. A glass of wine with you.”

CHAPTER II--SMOKED HERRING

THAT night ended, as the nights of such gatherings were wont to

end, with some safely, others precariously horsed, others bundled

unceremoniously by Sir Harry’s servants into coaches where their wives

received them without disapproval, and the rest accommodated on the

premises. The absence of Mr. Bantison escaped their notice.

The Reverend and unregretted Bantison was absent from the leave-taking

because he had already taken leave. Mr. Bantison was dead. To the sorrow

of none, and the satisfaction of a few who had paid forced tribute to

the observation of his eye, Mr. Bantison was dead. It was agreed at the

breakfast table that he died of apoplexy and a very probable end too,

though not strictly in accordance with the evidence. Apoplexy implies

a spontaneity of termination, and Mr. Bantison’s end had lacked

spontaneity.

They were all very heartily cynical about it, taking their formidable

breakfast at Sir Harry’s, and no one more cynical than Whitworth. A

parson more or less, what did it matter? There was none of that overnice

regard for the sanctity of human life characteristic of the late

nineteenth century, to which the early twentieth brought so drastic a

corrective; but though they agreed on their collective attitude, there

was nothing to prevent stray recollections coming to mind and the facts

of the case were known to more than Whitworth and Hepple-stall. In

public, it was apoplexy; in the wrong privacy it was still apoplexy, but

in the right, there was censure of Hepplestall. True, the snuffing-out

of Bantison was no more reprehensible in itself than the crushing of a

gnat, but who knew that the habit of manslaughter, once acquired, might

not grow on a man? It wasn’t worse than gossip, and idle whisper, but

the whisper reached Hepplestall and he felt that it was not good for

the man who hoped to marry Dorothy Verners to be the subject of gossip,

however quiet. The gossip was more humorous than malicious, and it was

confined to a circle, but that circle was the one which mattered and

Reuben felt that in his rivalry with Whitworth he had suffered a rebuff

through the death of Mr. Bantison. And there was that matter of the

Stuarts. “Curse the Stuarts” was his feeling now towards that charming

race; he saw them, with complete injustice, as first cause of

his eclipse. Besides, if Bantison had detected him, there was the

possibility of other open eyes. Altogether, the symbol of his defiance

of Sir Harry seemed ill-chosen and the sooner he changed it the better.

Something, he decided, was urgently required, not to silence chatter

(for chatter in itself was good, proclaiming him exceptional), but to

set tongues wagging so briskly with the new that they would forget to

wag about the old. He felt the need of something to play the part of

red herring across the trail, and his red herring took the sufficiently

surprising shape of a cotton-mill.

It surprised and scandalized the landed gentry, his friends of

the Whitworth set, because the caste system was nearly watertight:

certainly, of the two chief divisions, the landowners and the rest,

Reuben belonged with the first, while cotton spinners were rated low

amongst the rest. They were traders, of course, and not, at that stage,

individually rich traders: the master spinners were spinners who had

been men and rose by their own efforts to the control of other men.

This was the pastoral age of cotton, going but not gone. It went, in

one sense, when they harnessed machinery to water-power, but isolated

factories on the banks of tumbling streams were related rather to the

old regime of the scattered cottage hand-spinner and hand-weaver than

to the coming era of the steam-made cotton town with its factories

concentrated on the coal-fields; and, in the eyes of the gentry, steam

was the infamy.

In Reuben’s, steam was the ideal: he knew nothing about it, had hardly

heard of Arkwright or Hargreaves, Kay or Crompton who, amongst them,

made the water-power factory; and Watt of the practicable steam-engine,

Watt who gave us force and power, Watt the father of industrial

civilization, the inventor who was not responsible for the uses others

made of his inventions, so let us be equitable to his memory, let us

not talk of him as either the world’s greatest scapegoat or its most

fruitful accident--Watt was almost news to Reuben Hepplestall when he

met Martin Everett in Manchester.

The meeting was fortuitous. Everett, an architect, one of Arkwright’s

men who had quarreled with him, was kicking his heels in the ante-room

of a Manchester lawyer’s office when Reuben was shown in. Certainly,

Reuben was not to be kept waiting by the lawyer as Everett, a suppliant,

an applicant for capital, was likely to wait, but the lawyer was engaged

and the two young men fell to talking. Everett, something of a fanatic

for steam, the new, the unorthodox, the insurgent challenge to the

landed men, at once struck fire on Hepplestall. He turned lecturer,

steam’s propagandist, condemning waterpower as an archaism, and when

Reuben admitted he had come to his lawyer for the very purpose of giving

instructions for the sale of land and the initiation of plans for

a factory on, he suggested, the banks of a river, Everett had small

difficulty in converting him to steam.

“I meant to bury Bantison,” said Reuben. “Now we’ll boil him.” Everett

was puzzled.

“You burn wood in your house, sir?” he asked.

“And coal. Is it to the point?”

“The coal is. You get it--where?”

“There is a seam.”

“Then that is the site of your factory.”

“God!” said Hepplestall, “it will be a monstrous sight.” He spoke as if

that gladdened him.

“The building, sir, will have dignity,” the architect reproved him.

“Aye? But I’m thinking of the engine. The furnace. The coal. A red

herring? A smoked herring!”

He relished the thought again. By steam (Lord, was he ever in the camp

of those fantastical reactionaries, the Jacobites?), by steam he would

symbolize his opposition to Whitworth and the Bloods. He was going into

trade and so would be, anyhow, ostracized, but more than that, into

steam, gambling on the new, the hardly tried, the strange power that the

Bloods had only heard of to deride it; going into it blindly, on general

hearsay, and the particular _ipse dixit_ of a young enthusiast who might

be (except that Reuben trusted his insight and knew better) a charlatan

or a deluded fool; and for Reuben there was the attraction of taking

chances, of the impudent, audacious challenge to fortune and to the

outraged Bloods.

“Do you know, Everett,” he said, “a man might turn atheist expecting

less stricture than I expect who make the leap from land to steam.” It

came into his mind that Dorothy Verners was further off than ever

now. “Everett,” he said, “extremes meet. We’ll call that factory the

‘Dorothy.’ Gad, if we win! If we win!” He gripped Martin’s hand with

agonizing strength and went into the lawyer’s room, leaving Everett to

wonder what sort of an eccentric he had hooked.

The lawyer, who had been asked by letter to be prepared with advice,

found all that brushed curtly aside: he was to take instructions from a

client who knew what he wanted, not to minister to a mind in doubt, and

very definite and remarkable instructions he found them. “The whole of

your land to be sold, excepting where the presence of coal is, or will

be within a week, known? And all for a steam-driven factory! Sir, I

advised your father. I believe he trusted me. It is my duty to warn you

and--”

“Thankee, sir,” Reuben interrupted him. “I may tell you I looked for

this from you, but I don’t appreciate it the less because I expected it.

You advised my father, you shall continue to advise me.”

“That you may do the opposite?”

“No. That when I go driving through new country I may have a brake on my

wheels.”

“Well... am I to lock your wheels this time?”

“I’m going driving,” said Reuben resolutely, “but you shall find me some

one to teach me to handle the reins. I must learn my trade, sir. Find

me some factory owner who will sell me his secrets cheap, near my

coal-lands if that’s possible, that I may watch Everett at work.”

“If a Hepplestall condescends to trade,” said the lawyer without

conscious flattery, “he will be welcomed by the traders. There will be

no difficulty about that. Indeed you have one on your own land, Peter

Bradshaw, with a factory on a stream of yours and I believe he has both

spinning jennies and weaving-looms. Go and hear what Peter thinks of

steam.”

“His disapproval will be a testimony to it. I’ll see Peter,” said

Reuben, and was away before the lawyer had opportunity to voice the

score of stock arguments that age keeps handy for the correction of

rash youth. He had then the more to say to Everett, the corrupter,

the begetter in Reuben of his mad passion for steam, and it’s little

satisfaction he got out of that. Young Everett was to realize a dream,

he was to be given, he thought, a free hand to build a steam-driven

factory as he thought a steam-driven factory ought to be built, and the

prudent lawyer’s arguments, accusations, menaces, were no more to him

than the murmurings a man hears in his sleep when what he sees is a

vision splendid: it was only some time afterwards that Everett woke up

to find in Hepplestall not the casual financier of his dream in stone,

but a highly informed, critical collaborator who tempered zeal for

steam with disciplined knowledge and contributed as usefully as Everett

himself to make the “Dorothy” the finest instrument of its day for the

manufacture of cotton.

He got the knowledge chiefly from Bradshaw, partly from others who had

carried manufacture beyond the narrow methods of Bradshaw’s water-wheel.

It lay, this primitive factory, in a gentle valley amongst rounded hills

of gritstone and limestone: a chilly country, lacking the warmth of the

red earth of the South, backward in agriculture, nourishing more oats

than wheat and, in the bleak uplands, incapable of tillage. Coarse grass

fought there with heather, but if there was little color on the moors

save when the heather flowered in royal purple and the gorse hung out

its flame, there was rich green in the valleys and the polish of a humid

atmosphere on healthy trees. A spacious rolling country, swelling to

hills which, never spectacular, were still considerable: a clean country

of wide views and lambent distances in those days before the black smoke

came and seared.

Not many miles away, sheltered amongst old elms, was Hepplestall’s own

house; above it the hill known to be coal-bearing, where Everett was

to build, on the hill top, the steam-driven factory, a beacon and

a challenge to the old order. So, aptly to Reuben’s purpose, lay

Bradshaw’s factory and house, the two in one and the whole as little

intrusive on the scene as a farmhouse.

When he came in that first day, Peter was in the factory and if

Reuben had had any doubts of making this the headquarters of his

apprenticeship, the sight of Phoebe Bradshaw would have removed them.

To one man the finest scenery is improved by a first-class hotel in the

foreground; to another, a stiff task is made tolerable by the presence,

in his background, of a pretty woman. Phoebe had prettiness in her

linsey-woolsey gown with the cotton print handkerchief about her

shoulders; she was small and she was soft of feature. You could not

look at her face and say, of this feature or of that, that it had

shapeliness, but in a sort of gentle improvisation, she had her placid

charm. She sat at needlework, at something obscurely useful, but her

pose, as he entered, was that of a lady at leisure, amusing herself with

the counterfeit of toil.

Bradshaw’s daughter, had Bradshaw not thrived and lifted himself out of

the class of the employed, would have been in the factory, at work like

the other girls; but she aspired to ladyhood and, fondly, he abetted

her. He was on the up-grade, and let the fact be manifest in the

gentility of his daughter! There was pride in it, and somehow there

was the payment of a debt due to her dead mother who had worked at home

spinning while Peter wove the yarn she spun in a simpler day than this.

What the late Mrs. Bradshaw would have thought of a daughter who aped

the fine lady, or of a father who encouraged her, is not to the point:

Peter idolized Phoebe, and she sat in his house to figure for Reuben as

an unforeseen mitigation in his job of learning manufacture.

He proceeded to address himself with gallantry to the pleasing

mitigation. She rose, impressed, at the coming to that house of an

authentic Olympian. “Pray be seated, Miss Bradshaw,” he said. “For it

_is_ Miss Bradshaw?” he added, implying surprise to find her what she

was.

“I am Phoebe Bradshaw,” she told him. “You would see my father? He is in

the factory. Will you not sit while I go and call him?”

For a man intent upon stern purpose, Reuben felt remarkably unhurried.

“My business can wait,” he said, gesturing her again to her chair. “It

has no such urgency that you need disturb yourself for me and turn a

lady into a message-bearer.” He noted the quick flush of pleasure which

rose to her cheeks on the word “lady.”

“Indeed,” he went on, “I find myself blame-worthy and unaccountably a

laggard that this is the first time I have made your acquaintance.”

“Oh! I... I am not much in the world, sir.”

“The world is the loser, Miss Bradshaw. But it is not too late to find

a remedy for that. They tell us the North is poor soil for flowers and

with an answer like you to their lies it would be criminal to hide it.”

Crude flattery, but it hit the target. “I? A flower? Oh, sir--”

“Why call me sir? If you were what--well, to be frank, what I expected

to find you, a spinner’s wench, no more than that, why then your sirring

me would be justifiable. There are social laws. I don’t deny it.”

“We have no position,” she assented.

“What’s position when there’s beauty? You have that which cuts across

the laws. Beauty, and not rustic beauty either, but beauty that’s been

worked on and refined... I go too fast, I say too much. Excuse a man in

the heat of making a discovery for being frank about what he’s found and

forget my frankness and forgive it. I spoke only to convince you that a

‘sir’ from you to me is to reverse the verities.”

“But you are Mr. Hepplestall?”

“Then call me so. I mount no pedestal for you.” Then Peter came in, and

Hepplestall retired his thoughts of Phoebe to some secondary brain-cell

that lay becomingly remote from Dorothy Verners and from his immediate

plan of picking up knowledge from Peter. The lawyer had been right:

there was no question of Peter’s setting a price upon his trade secrets,

he was ravished by the interest his ground-landlord was pleased to

take in his little factory and if he was puzzled to find Hepplestall

intelligent and searching in his questions, there was none more pleased

than Peter to answer with painstaking elaboration. Once Reuben asked,

“Are there not factories driven by steam?”

And Peter was wonderfully shrewd. “There are fools in every trade,” he

said, “hotheads that let wild fancies carry off their commonsense.”

“Steam is a fancy, then? It does not work?”

“I have never seen it work,” said Peter, which was true; but he had

not gone to look as, presently, Reuben went, sucking up experience

everywhere with a bee-like industry. Meantime, he astonished Peter by

proposing himself as paying guest while he worked side by side with the

men and women in the factory.

“I have the whim,” said Reuben and saw astonishment fade from Peter’s

face. They had their whims, these gentry, and indulged them, and if

Hepplestall’s was the eccentric one of wishing to experience in his own

person the life of a factory hand, why, it wasn’t for Bradshaw to oppose

him. And Peter smiled aside when Reuben said that he would try it for a

week. A week! A day of such toil would cure any fine gentleman of such a

caprice. But Peter was to be surprised again, he was to find Reuben not

tiring in a day, nor in a week, not to be tempted from the factory even

by a cock-fight to which Peter and half his men went as a matter of

course, dropping the discipline of hours and forgetting in a common

sportsmanship that they ranked as master and man--oh, those gentler

days before the Frankenstein, machinery, quite gobbled up man who made

him!--but as time went on, still, after three months, working as spinner

at Peter’s water-driven jennies and becoming as highly skilled as

any man about the place. Even when the truth was out, when most of

Hepplestall’s acres had gone to the hammer, and one could see from

Bradshaw’s window the nascent walls of Reuben’s factory, Peter was still

obtuse, still happy at the thought of the honor done to cotton by the

Olympian, still blind to the implications of the coming into spinning,

so near to him, of a capitalist on the greater scale. He was to be cured

of that blindness, but what, even if he had foreseen the future from

the beginning, could he have done? In the matter of Phoebe, no doubt, he

could have acted, he could have sent her away; but Hepplestall in other

matters was not so much mere man as the representative of steam. What

could he have done to counter steam? Bradshaw was doomed and steam was

his undoing, and, though the particular instrument, Hepplestall, was to

have, for him, a peculiar malignancy, the seeds of his ruin were sown in

his own obstinate conservatism. He had seen visions of a great progress

when water-power superseded arm-power, but his vision stopped short of

steam. Peter was growing old.

CHAPTER III--PHOEBE BRADSHAW

IF Hepplestall calculated much, which is a damnable vice in youth, it

is possibly some consolation to know that he miscalculated the effect

upon the county of his plunge, for at this stage his eclipse was

total and he had not anticipated that. They did not forget Bantison

in remembering the rising walls of his factory, and still less in the

thought that Reuben who had sat at their tables was working with his

hands as a spinner. They added offense to offense; if he was seen he was

cut; and their chatter reached him even at Bradshaw’s where, as he knew

very well, gentry talk must be loud indeed to penetrate.

He had overestimated his strength to resist public opinion. He was a

proud man and he was outcast and, set himself as he did with ferocious

energy to his task, he fell short of forgetfulness. Dorothy Verners was

at the end of a stony, tortuous road; it would be, at the best, a long

time before he reached the end of that road and the chances that she

would still be there, that Whitworth, carelessly secure as he was, would

wait long enough to leave her there for Hepplestall, seemed to him, in

these days of despondency, too remote for reason. He would never bridge

the gulf in time and his patience ebbed away. Not that he ever doubted

that, in the end, in money, position, reputation, he would outdistance

Whitworth, but Dorothy Verners, as a symbol of his ascendancy, was

dwindling to the diminished status of an ambition now seen to be too

sanguine. He had not realized how much he would be irked by the contempt

of the county. If, at the end of all, he had them at his feet! Aye,

so he would, but wouldn’t it be more humbling for them if they came

licking, along with his, the feet of a wife of his who was not of their

order? Wouldn’t he so triumph the more exultantly? He argued the case

against his first intentions, seeking justification for falling honestly

in love with Phoebe Bradshaw.

Honest love was, at first, very far from his purpose. A gentleman didn’t

seduce his host’s daughter, but that rule of conduct postulated that

the host be equally a gentleman and Bradshaw seemed, when Reuben came,

un-fathomably his inferior, and Bradshaw’s daughter, for all her airs,

the sort of flower hung by the roadside to be plucked by any grand

seigneur. Nor did he ever, at the back of his mind, move far from that

attitude. His tolerant association with these people was an immense

condescension, justified only by ulterior purpose. But if marriage with

Phoebe fitted his purpose, as in his first reaction from the disdain

of the county it seemed to do, why, then, though he never thought of

himself as belonging with the manufacturers, it might in the long run

prove a famous score against the county.

Phoebe had advantages. She was at hand, he saw her every day at meals

and was ready to believe that she revealed every day some new, shy

prettiness, she was tractable, malleable in the future and his without

effort in the present, and it was comforting to think of her softness

when all his else was harsh endeavor and wounded pride and a long stern

struggle to success. While Dorothy Verners was of the struggle, yet

a man must relax sometimes, as Mr. Bantison had thought when he put

Burgundy before the discretion which becomes a blackmailer. Reuben

chewed upon it, not reconciled to surrendering Dorothy, not quite

convinced by the most convincing of arguments he addressed to himself,

unwilling, even if they had convinced, to let go any part of his full

scheme, but inclining, feeling himself a bit of a fool, a bit of an

apostate, and very much more a prodigy of generosity, to look upon

Phoebe as one whom he might make his wife.

Thus (on the whole) well-intentioned towards her, he proposed one

summer’s morning to take her out walking, which was partly a gesture

addressed to his hesitations, and partly a deliberate means to a closer

acquaintance than he could compass indoors in the single living-room

where Peter hampered by too faithful attendance on his pupil. He

mentioned his wish, a little too grandly, a little too much like a royal

command.

Phoebe had her wisdom and the weeks of their intercourse had rubbed away

the first bloom of his divinity: he ate like other mortals, and, like

the sort of mortals she despised in her pose of ladyhood, he labored

in the factory. She had conceived ambition which, as he seemed to level

himself down to her, looked not impossible to realize, if she sustained

in his eyes her quality of ladyhood. And to go out had its perils. She

flowered indoors and her little graces withered in the open air, when

she knew she reverted to type, walked freely with great strides and

swung across the moors like any weaver’s lass hurrying to work. These

things, she thought, were discounts off her value: but they might, just

possibly, be a winning card. They might announce that she had variety.

“To walk,” she said, “with you?”

“Oh, not too far for a lady,” he assured her, “and not too fast.”

“You,” she retorted, “ride too much. I’ll walk you off your legs.” So

she challenged him, with wisdom.

If they were to make a walking match of it, at least they were not to be

philanderers, they were not going out only as far as the first heather,

there to sit together in a solitude that might spell danger. And she

announced spirit to a man who would (she knew) appreciate it, she

declared that if her inches were few they had vigor, that if she had

ladyhood it was skin-deep, that she wasn’t a one-volume abridgment of

imbecility, not his for the beckoning; and she went defiantly, to put

on a bonnet and a shawl which would have been a violent and successful

assault on any complexion less admirable than hers. She was, indeed,

playing her gambling card.

And, to his surprise, he liked it. This, if it were not mere flicker, if

it were not instinctive counterfeiting of a feminine move in a

sex-game, was a spirit which would serve her well, and him too, in the

drawing-rooms of the county in the future he was contemplating for them

both. Wasn’t it fact that my Lord Montacute had married his cook and

that she had made him a notable Lady? And he wasn’t a lord nor Phoebe a

cook.

Small Phoebe kept her promise, too. She came of hardy stock, and she

hadn’t spent the day, as he had, standing at a spinning-jenny. He had to

cry her mercy, flinging himself exhausted on the heather.

“I said you ride too much,” she exulted, secure that he did not feign

fatigue, standing over him while the blood raced happily through

tingling limbs.

“And you,” he retorted, “too little.”

“I? I do not ride at all. You know we have no horses.”

“It will be necessary for you to ride,” he said.

“Why so?” she asked him. “Haven’t I proved that I can walk?”

“Still,” he said, “I shall have horses brought tomorrow. Will you have

me for riding master?”

“To ride I should need a habit.”

“Which I provide.”

She held her breath. For what was it “necessary” for her to ride if not

that he was thinking of a future for her that jumped giddily with her

ambition? Still, she kept her head; still, she sensed the value of

offering this man persistent opposition, and all she said was “Are you

rested now?”

He rose, to find himself aware of strange tremblings, not to be

accounted for by tiredness, of a dampness on his brow, and, when he

spoke, of a thickened voice. “You shall have the habit to-morrow,” he

promised her.

“They burned warlocks once,” she mocked him. A warlock is a wizard.

“Habits do not come in a day except by magic.”

“Yours will come by road, from Manchester. I ride in for it to-morrow.”

“Neglecting your work?”

“I choose my work,” he said, and strode off, leaving her to follow as

she might, but if he thought to outdistance her, he reckoned without

the grit of Phoebe. As a lady, he could find a dozen chinks a day in her

Brummagen armor; as a country lass she had a native energy that all her

vanities left unimpaired, and set what hot pace he could, she kept level

with him like a taunt which refuses to stop ringing in a man’s ears. If

this was a duel, Phoebe was scoring winning points that night. “But a

horse will test your mettle, my wench,” he was thinking savagely, and

with relief that the idea of a horse had come to him.

“When I go driving through new country,” he had told the lawyer, “I like

a brake on my wheels,” and he was feeling very urgently the need of

a brake on his wheels in the new country through which he suddenly

discovered himself to be driving now. He put it to himself in phrases

that may or may not be paradoxical.

“Damn her, I love her,” he said aloud as he undressed that night.

Phoebe, in her room across the passage, mingled fear with triumph.

If one is not born to horses, horses terrify. In that, more than in

anything else, lay the difference between Phoebe’s world and Reuben’s.

If her ladyhood was pretentious and calculated instead of instinctive,

well, theirs did not go very deep either. There was culture in that

age, but not, extensively, in Lancashire. Culture hugged the capital,

throwing outposts in the great houses of the Home Counties. In

Manchester itself there were bookish people, but in the county sport

was the touchstone, and if horsemanship in the skilled sense was not

expected of a woman, she must at any rate be not shy of a horse. It was

almost the test of gentry.

When the thought came to him as he panted on the heather it had not,

indeed, been as a test of her quality. At first, he was more generous

than that. To be his wife, she must ride; she did not ride; and he must

teach her. Only later did he see it as a trial of her fitness, as she,

at once, saw it, gathering courage for an ordeal. If she must ride to

win this husband, then, cost what it might, she would ride.

He kept his word, taking for the first time a full day off from his

education as a spinner, demanded measurements of her at breakfast, rode

with them into Manchester, was back by early evening with a habit

and, from his stables, a horse used to a side-saddle: doing all with

characteristic concentration of energy that brooked no opposition from

any such bombastical pleader for delay as the outraged habit-maker.

Hepplestall commanded, and Hepplestall received.

There are degrees in habits? Then this was a habit of high degree.

Whether it was a lover’s free-handed gift or the circumstance of a trial

by ordeal, it was the best it could be, and Phoebe’s prettiness was

equal to it. Indeed, she trended by choice to a fluffiness of dress and

a cheapness in taste that Reuben, who was not fastidious, had not failed

to note. You have seen, perhaps, a modern hospital nurse in uniform and

the same nurse in mufti? That was the difference between Phoebe in her

habit and Phoebe as he had seen her hitherto. More than ever, he felt

conviction that no ill-judged passion was leading him astray, that here,

when good dressmakers had clothed her, was his match and the match for

the county. He tried to be skeptical, to criticize, and found, at the

end of a scrutiny too frank to be well-mannered, that there was nothing

here to criticize.

She smiled, bravely, aware from her glass that what he saw was good,

aware that he could not see how big a thing her horse appeared to her,

how far above the ground the saddle was, how shrunken small she felt.

But it was consoling to know that if she was going to break her neck,

she was to do it in the finest clothes she had ever worn. His look of

candid admiration was a tonic.

“This is your horse,” he said. “We called him Hector.” She made

Hector’s acquaintance prettily, but, plainly, she missed his point, and

he made it more definitely. “Of course, you may rename him now that he

is your own.”

“Mine? My horse? But, Mr. Hepplestall--”

“Have you your salts?” he asked, cutting short her cry of surprise. A

horse more or less, he would have her think, was triviality when Reuben

Hepplestall was in the mood to give.

“Salts?” she repeated, puzzled.

“In case you swoon,” he said gravely, and not ironically either. It was

the swooning age.

But not for Phoebe. Did ladies swoon at a first riding-lesson? She

doubted it: they took that lesson young, as children, in the years

before they were modish and swooning, and, in any case, it wasn’t her

ladyhood that was in question now; it was her courage. “I shall not

swoon,” she said, and he relished the bravado of it.

Spirit? Aye, she had spirit to be wife of his, and it behoved him not to

break it. If he had had thoughts, brutally, of making this test of

her as harsh as he could, that was all altered now by the sight of

her adorning the habit instead of overwhelmed by it, caressing Hector

instead of shrinking from him, and he saw tenderness as the prime virtue

of a riding-master. She wasn’t going to take a fall if he could prevent

it.

Between them, between Reuben and Hector, a sober animal who had carried

Reuben’s mother and hadn’t forgotten his manners in the years since her

death, and between these two and Phoebe’s pluck, they managed a lesson

which gave her confidence for later lessons when the instructor’s mood

was less indulgent. Reuben hadn’t tenderness as a habit. Neither had

she very staunchly the habit of courage, but all the courage she had was

wrought up for these occasions and, thanks to the sobriety of the good

Hector, it served. She took a toss one day, but fell softly into heather

and rose smiling before he had leaped to the ground. His last doubts

that he loved her fled when she smiled that day. “’Fore Gad,” he cried,

“you’re thoroughbred.” It was the sweetest praise.

That was a moment of supreme exaltation, but, all the time, Phoebe was

living now in upper air. For her, manifestly and openly for her, he was

neglecting what had seemed the only thing he lived for; he spent long

days riding with Phoebe instead of laboring to learn in the factory.

Once or twice when he had the opportunity of inspecting some

steam-driven works not too remote, he took her with him, leaving her in

state obsequiously served in an inn while he studied the engine-house

and the driving bands and the power-looms of the factory, refusing the

manufacturer’s invitation to dinner and offending a host to come back

where she waited for him at the inn. Peter might croak, and Peter did

croak like any raven and shake his head, and Peter was told he was

old-fashioned, and was put in his place as parents have always been

put in their place when young love takes the bit between its teeth.

Hepplestall, and his lass? It was a piece of luck too rare to be true.

He prophesied sad fate for her, he wished she had a mother--men are

handicapped--he spoke of sending for her aunt: all the time, too

overawed by Hepplestall’s significance to be more effective as an

obstacle than a cork bobbing on the surface of a flood. Protest to

Reuben himself, or even appeal, was sheer impossibility for Bradshaw,

who was almost feudal in his subservience to gentry. He saw danger,

warned Phoebe, was laughed at for his pains and turned fatalist. Phoebe

cared for neither his spoken forebodings nor his morose resignation.

Phoebe was happy, she tasted victory, she was sure of Reuben now and so

sure that she began to look beyond the fact that she had got him and was

holding him, she began to concede herself the luxury of loving him.

Phoebe was a sprinter, capable of effort if the effort need not be

sustained. She had attracted Reuben, and in the doing it had submitted

to severe self-discipline, to a vigilance and a courage which went

beyond those of the normal Phoebe. Accomplishment went to her head like

wine; she wasn’t prudent Phoebe on a day when, as their horses were at

the door, a message came from Everett asking Reuben to go at once to

discuss some detail of equipment of the now nearly completed factory.

She wasn’t prudent or she would never have taken such an occasion to

plead that he had promised her that day for riding. She knew what his

factory meant to him, knew, too, how jealous he was of his hard-won

knowledge, how keen to match it against Everett’s older experience;

yet she asked him to imply, by keeping a promise to ride, that she came

before the factory. And he loved her. Whatever the depth of his love,

whatever the chances that this was the love that lasts, he loved her

then. “Tell Mr. Everett,” he said to the messenger, “that I authorize

him to use his own judgment.”

Which Everett very gladly did, promptly and, he thought, irremediably.

It was a point on which he had his own ideas, differing from Reuben’s,

and carte blanche at this stage, after the endless controversies, of

Reuben’s obstinate collaboration, was a godsend that Everett wasn’t

going to throw away by being dilatory.

It resulted that when Reuben next visited the works, he was confronted

by a _fait accompli_, and by Everett’s hardly concealed smirk of glee.

“The thing, as you see, is done now. I had your authority to do as I

thought best,” said Everett.

“Then undo and re-do,” said Reuben, sourly.

“Pull down!” gasped Everett. “But--”

“You heard me,” growled Reuben, turning on his heel from a disgruntled

architect who had been too previous with self-congratulations on getting

his own way for once.

And Phoebe was triumphing at home, secure of her Reuben, in ecstasy at

her tested power over him.

Reuben, too, was thinking of that power, of how he had yielded to it, of

Samson and Delilah and of the dry-rot that sets in in a man’s strength

when he delivers his will into a woman’s keeping. It was a dark,

inscrutable Reuben who came home that night to Bradshaw’s; beyond

Phoebe’s skill to smooth away the irritation furrows from that brow. She

used her artless remedy; she fed him well, and persuaded herself that

no more was wrong than that he came in hungry. He was watching her that

night with critical eyes and she was aware of nothing but that his gaze

never left her: its fidelity rejoiced her.

He flung himself vigorously at work, after that. There was woman, a

snare, and work, the sane alternative, there was the zest of it, the

mere exercise of it to sweat evil humors out of a man. By now he knew

all that Bradshaw’s factory could teach him, and, by his inspections of

modern factories, much more; but his own place was not quite ready, his

organization was complete on paper and till the day came for applying

his knowledge, time had to be filled somehow and as well at Bradshaw’s

as anywhere else. Phoebe found herself neglected. He did not ride, or,

if he did, it was alone. It came to her that she had made too sure of

him; he hadn’t mentioned marriage, he was drifting from her. What could

she do to bind him to her?

Then he relented. She was suffering and he thought, in a tender mood,

that it hurt him to see her suffer. Wasn’t he making a mountain of a

molehill, wasn’t he unjust to blame her for the consequences of his

weakness? He was a most chivalrous gentleman when he next invited her

to ride with him, and she accepted, meekly. There lay the difference

between the then and the now. Then they were comrades, now he

condescended and he did not know it. But it was still his thought that

Phoebe was to be his wife, and in the comfortable glow of forgiveness,

in horse-exercise on a pleasant afternoon with one whose complexion was

proof against any high light, who was a plucky rider and his accustomed

fellow on these rides, they achieved again a genuine companionship.

His doubts and her fears alike dissolved in what seemed the mellowed

infallibility of that perfect afternoon.

Two other riders came in sight, meeting them, along the road--a lady,

followed by her groom. Dorothy Verners sitting her horse as if she had

been cradled on it, straight, tall Dorothy whose beauty was so different

from Phoebe’s soft prettiness. Dorothy had beauty like a birthright. She

came of generations of women whose first duty was to be admirable, who

had, as it were, experimented long ago with beauty and had fixed its

lines for their successors. Where Phoebe suggested a hasty improvisation

of comeliness, where, in her, comeliness was unexpected and almost an

impertinence, in Dorothy it was authentic and assured.

Had Reuben, seeing Phoebe in the magic vision of his love, called her

a thoroughbred because she took a fall without blubbering? It was

a compliment, and he had meant it. He had meant it because she had,

surprisingly, not flinched. But of the real thoroughbreds, of those who

were, without compliment, thoroughbred, one would take for granted that

they did not flinch and the surprise would be not that they did not

flinch, but if they did. He had not been seeing Dorothy Verners lately;

he had been forgetting her authenticity; and he hadn’t the slightest

doubt, watching her approach, that he belonged with her order, that

he was an aristocrat who, if he stooped to trade, stooped only to rise

again. He saw himself through his own eyes.

And Dorothy looked at him through hers, seeing a dark man, not

unhandsome, who was of good stock, but a nonentity until he had brought

unpleasant notoriety upon himself by too summary a method of dealing

with Mr. Bantison and, after that, had stepped down to association with

the manufacturers. No doubt it was a manufacturer’s daughter with whom

he took his ride. Some of them she had heard, upstarts, did ride. A

man who had lost caste, a man to be ignored. Would it hurt him to be,

emphatically, ignored by her? He deserved to be hurt, but probably his

skin was thick and, in any case, why was she wasting thought on him? He

was cut by the county: she had not to create a precedent. She did what

she knew others did. She cut him dead, and it came, unreasonably, as a

shock to Hepplestall.

He was used to the cut direct, he didn’t even tighten his lips now when

one of his former acquaintance passed him by without a glance. But he

hadn’t anticipated this, he hadn’t included Dorothy, and her contempt

struck at him like a blow. It wasn’t what Dorothy stood for, it wasn’t

that she was the reigning toast, and that to carry her off was to have

been his splendid score off Whitworth. It was, simply, that she was the

one woman, and, yes, he admitted her right to be contemptuous; he had

permitted her to see him in demeaning company. He looked at Phoebe with

intolerable hatred in his eyes, he could have found satisfaction in

lashing her with his whip till he was exhausted. Well, he didn’t do

that.

But Phoebe comprehended something of his thought. She tried--God knows

she tried--to win him back to her as they rode home. She chattered

gayly, keeping it up bravely while jealousy and fear gnawed her heart,

and Hepplestall stared glumly straight ahead with never a word for

Phoebe. Her words were like sea foam breaking idly on granite.

Words didn’t do. Then, what would? Desperately, she came to her

decision. He was slipping from her, there was wreck, but there was

still the possibility of rescue. When she said “Good night,” there was

invitation in her eye; and something, not love, took him, later, across

the passage to her room. Phoebe’s last gambling card was played.

CHAPTER IV--ALMACK’S CLUB

MR. LUKE VERNERS put on his boots in his lodging in Albemarle Street,

St. James, in a very evil mood. He was in London, and ordinarily liked

to be in London although it was a place where a man must remember his

manners, where he wasn’t a cock crowing on his dung-hill, but a mighty

small atom in a mighty big crowd; but London with his wife and his

daughter was a cruel paradox. Why the plague did a man cramp his legs

in a coach for all those miles from Lancashire to London if it wasn’t

to get away from wife and daughter? And here he was tied to the family

petticoats, in London. It was enough to put any man into bad temper.

As a rule, Mr. Verners was a tolerant person. In a squat little volume

published in the year 1822 and called “A Man of the World’s Dictionary,”

a Virtuous Man is defined as “a being almost imaginary. A name given

to him who has the art of concealing his vices and shutting his eyes to

those of others,” and so long as the vices of others did not interfere

with his own, and so long as the others were of his own order, Mr.

Verners was a candidate for virtue, under this definition. But the man

born to be a perfect individualist is at a disadvantage when he owns an

estate and feels bound by duty to marry and beget an heir: it isn’t the

moderns who discovered that marriage clogs selfishness.

Mr. Verners had an heir, but not, as it happened, till Dorothy had come

first. If she hadn’t come first, she would not have come at all; but she

came, and dazzlingly, and if there is something agreeable in being the

father of a beauty, there is also something harassing. A wife, after

all, is only a wife, but with a monstrous fine lady of a daughter about

the house a man has to mind his p’s and q’s. Mr. Verners was a sort of

a gentleman and he minded his p’s and q’s, but he wasn’t above admitting

that he looked forward to the day when, Dorothy well and truly married,

he could relax to reasonable carelessness at home.

And not only did Dorothy not get married, not only did Whitworth

procrastinate and play card games in London instead of the love-game in

Lancashire, but Dorothy, instead of waiting patiently, became strangely

restive. The queer thing is that her discontent began to show itself

soon after she had met Reuben Hepplestall riding in the road one day

now a year ago. She hadn’t mentioned the meeting at home. Why should she

mention a creature who was outcast? Why give him a second thought? What

possible connection could there be between the meeting and this change

in her hitherto entirely submissive habit of waiting for Whitworth?

None, to be sure, and no doubt Luke was perfectly right when he said it

was all the vapors.

“But the vapors,” said Mrs. Verners, “come from Sir Harry’s absence.”

And “Tush,” said Mr. Verners, who was not without his envious sympathy

of that rich bachelor in London, and there, for that time, they left it.

But the vapors came again, they turned endemic while Sir Harry continued

a parishioner of St. James’, a gay absentee from his estates and his

plain duty of marrying Dorothy, and Mr. Verners’ sympathy wore thin. A

tolerant man, but a daughter who (he held) moped and a wife who (he told

her in set terms) nagged, played the deuce with his tolerance and so,

finally, against his better judgment, they were come to London, “To dig

the fox out of his earth,” he said. “Aye, but do you fancy the fox will

relish it?”

He knew how he, in the character of fox, would have received this hunt.

“But we come naturally to London, for clothes for Dorothy and me,” said

Mrs. Verners.

“Do we?” he growled. “It’s heads I win and tails you lose every time

with a woman. What the hangment do I get except an empty purse?”

If the gods smiled, he got rid of Dorothy, but that wasn’t to be

emphasized now any more than was his very firm intention to spend on

himself the lion’s share of the contents of that purse. These things

were not to be mentioned because it was good to have a grievance against

his wife, to throw responsibility for their enterprise on her shoulders,

to seem wholly, when he was only half, convinced that they were doing an

unwise thing.

“Dorothy must come to London sometimes,” said Mrs. Verners placidly,

“and Sir Harry is hardly to be reminded by letter of his negligence,

whereas the sight of Dorothy--”

“Well, well,” said Luke, “you’re proud of your poppet.” Secretly, he

would have backed the looks of his daughter against those of any woman

in the land. “But,” he went on, “we’re in London now, and London’s full

of pretty women. Your wench may be the pride of Lancashire, but you’re

pitting her here against the full field of the country--”

“Mr. Verners, you are vulgar.”

“I’m stating facts,” he said. “We’re here to catch Whitworth and I am

indicating to your woman’s intelligence and your motherly prejudice that

the bait you’re offering may not look so juicy here as it did at home

where it hadn’t its peer.”

So he insured himself against failure, and the particular source of his

ill-humor as he prepared to go out on the day after their arrival in

town was not mental but physical. To jam gouty feet, used to roomy

riding boots, into natty gear ought to be nothing. In the past it had

been nothing, when he had drunk in the London air and found it the well

of youth, but, this time, remarkably, the boots pinched unforgettably,

and the realization that he hadn’t the resilience of youth, that he

was in London yet hipped, in a play-ground yet grave, disheartened

Mr. Verners, and it wasn’t till that skilled diplomat, the porter at

Almack’s, recognized him instantly with a salute that Mr. Verners felt

petulance oozed from him. It was a wonderful salute; it indicated the

porter’s joy at seeing Mr. Verners, his regret that Mr. Verners was only

an occasional visitor, his personal feeling that, but for the occasional

visits of Mr. Verners, the life of the porter of Almack’s Club would not

be worth living; it welcomed him home with a captivating, deferential

flattery and the mollified gentleman was to meet with further balm

inside the club, where play was not running spectacularly high and there

were idle members eager for the simple distraction to be had from

any face not wearisomely familiar. Besides, Mr. Verners came from

Lancashire; London had heard of Lancashire recently and was willing to

hear more.

He came in without much assurance, but hesitation fled when he found

himself the center of an interest not at all languid.

“Damme, it’s Luke Verners come to town. Business for locksmiths here,”

was the coarse-witted welcome of a lord.

“Locksmiths?” asked Verners.

“Ain’t it locksmiths one employs to put bolts and bars on one’s wife’s

bedroom?”

“You flatter me, my lord,” said Verners.

The dandy eyed him appraisingly. “Perhaps I do, Verners, perhaps I do.

You are past your prime.”

“Does your lordship care to give me opportunity to prove otherwise, with

pistols, swords or--her ladyship?” A hot reception? Music in the ears of

Mr. Verners, who relished it for its coarseness, for what seemed to him

the authentic note of London Town, a greeting spoken propitiously by

a lord. And if this was a good beginning, better was to follow. Mr.

Seccombe rose from the chair where he was drowsing, recognized

Verners with a start and came up to him interestedly. “Rot your chaff,

Godalming,” he said. “Verners will give you as good as he gets any day.

Tell us the news of the North, man. Are things as queer as they say?”

“What do they say?” asked Luke.

“They speak of steam-engines.”

“Oh, Lord,” groaned Godaiming. “Old Seccombe’s on his hobby-horse.”

“Of steam-engines,” repeated Mr. Seccombe severely, “and of workers

whose bread is taken out of their mouths by machinery, so that they are

thrown upon the poor-rates that the landlords must pay.”

“Gospel truth, Mr. Seccombe,” said Luke feelingly, “and yond fellow

Arkwright, that began it, made a knight and a High Sheriff for doing us

the favor of ruining us. What’s the country coming to?”

“Corruption and decay,” said his lordship.

“Is that so sure?” queried Seccombe. “What is your word on that,

Verners?”

“Beyond doubt, it is the end of all things when landlords are milked

through the poor-rates,” said Luke.

“Yet steam would appear to have possibilities?”

“Oh, Seccombe’s a hopeless crank,” said Godalming.

“Possibilities for whom, Mr. Seccombe?” asked Vemers. “For a barber like

this Arkwright? Yes, he throve on steam, but what is that to us? Will

steam grow corn?”

“Steam is an infamy,” stated a gentleman called Collinson.

“You do not agree, Seccombe? No, why should you? You own houses in

London. Easy for you to play the philosopher. Those of us with land

are beginning to watch the trading classes closely, and steam has the

appearance of an ally to trade and enemy to us.”

“Then let the alliance be with us, Mr. Collinson,” said Seccombe.

“Indeed, I am making no original suggestion. We have had the cases

mentioned here of more than one man of our own order who--”

“Traitors! Outcasts!” cried Godalming.

“Or, perhaps, wise men, my lord. I do not know.”

“You don’t know if it is wise to sell your soul to the devil?”

“Personally,” said Mr. Seccombe, “I should regard that transaction

as precarious, but not to the present point. There was mentioned the

example of one Hepplestall.”

“You have heard of him--here?” Mr. Verners was astonished.

“We were interested to hear,” said Mr. Collinson.

“Of a perversion,” said Godalming.

“Godalming withholds from Mr. Hepplestall the light of his approval,”

said Mr. Seccombe, “but--”

“Approve a turn-coat that was once a gentleman? Why, he has dined at

Brooks’ and now blacks his sweaty hands with coal. Is there defense for

him?” asked Godalming.

“I am prepared to defend him,” said Seccombe.

“Then you’re a Jacobin.” Godalming turned an outraged back.

“Verners will correct me if I am wrong,” said Collinson, “but we hear of

Mr. Hepplestall that he has a great steam-driven factory, with a small

town at its feet, and by his steam is driving out of trade the older

traders in his district. Is that true?”

“Entirely,” said Mr. Verners, “though it staggers me that news of so

small a matter has traveled so far and so fast.”

“Some of us have our eyes on steam,” said Seccombe, “and some of us,” he

eyed Godalming with severity, “some of us prefer that a power like steam

should be in the hands of men of our order.”

“But they cannot be of our order,” protested Verners, scandalized. “They

cease, of their own conduct, to be of our order.”

“You do not dispute the facts about Hepplestall?”

“No. It’s your conclusions I find amazing.”

“Oh,” said Godalming, “this isn’t Almack’s Club at all. We’re in France,

and Mr. Collinson is wearing a red cap, and Mr. Seccombe has no breeches

and--rot me if I ever expected to hear such damned revolutionary

sentiments from an Englishman.”

“Will you do me the favor, my lord, to consider the picture Mr. Verners

has assented to be veracious?” Mr. Seccombe said, leaning back in his

chair and looking like nothing so much as Maclise’s Talleyrand in the

Fraser Portraits; elbows on the arms of his chair, hands caressing his

stomach, knees wide apart, the sole of one shoe rubbing against the

other, a look of placid benignity on his face. “That large factory,

dominating a town of cottages where its workers live, under the

owner’s eye, and that owner a gentleman who has extinguished the small

lower-class manufacturers of his neighborhood. I ask you to consider

that picture and to tell me what there is in it that you feel

undesirable. To me, my lord, it is an almost feudal picture. The Norman

Keep, with a village clustered around its walls, is to my mind the

precedent of Mr. Hepplestall’s factory with its workers in their

cottages about it. I confess to an admiration of this Hepplestall,

whom you regard as a traitor to our order and I as a benefactor to

that order. You will hardly assert that our order is unshaken by the

deplorable events in France, you will hardly say that, even before that

unparalleled outbreak of ruffianism, our order had maintained the high

prestige of the Feudal days. A man in whose action I see possibilities

of restoring in full our ancient privileges is a man to be approved and

to be supported by us. If we do not support him, and others like him,

what results? Abandoned by us, he must consort with somebody and he will

consort naturally with other steam-power manufacturers, adding to their

strength and weakening ours. It seems to me that this steam is a notable

instrument for keeping in their places those classes who might one day

follow the terrible French example: and the question is whether it

is better for us ourselves, men of our order, directly to handle

this instrument, or whether we are to trust it in the hands of the

manufacturing class. For my own part, I distrust that class, I like a

man who grasps his nettles boldly and I applaud Mr. Hepplestall.”

Several men had joined the circle by now, and Mr. Seecombe ended to find

himself the center of an attention close but hostile. Phrases such as

“rank heresy” and “devil’s advocate” made Mr. Collinson feel heroic

when he said, “Speaking for myself, I stand converted by your argument,

Seecombe.”

At which Godalming gave the theorist and his supporter the name of “a

brace of begad trucklers to Satan,” and such a whoop of applause went up

as caused Mr. Seccombe to look round quickly for cover. It was clear

that to touch steam was not condoned as an attempt to revitalize the

Feudal system: to touch steam was to defile oneself and to propose a

defense of a gentleman who stooped to steam was to be unpopular. Mr.

Seccombe liked his views very well, but liked popularity better and,

catching sight of Whitworth in the crowd, saw in him a means of

distracting attention from himself.

“Have you a word on this, Whitworth?” he asked. “You come from

Lancashire.”

“My word on this,” he said, “is Mr. Verners’ word. Like him I am the

victim of these steaming gentlemen, and I have only to remember my

bailiff’s accounts to know how much I am mulcted in poor-rates.”

“Imagine Harry Whitworth perusing an account!” said Godalming.

“One has one’s duties, I believe,” said Sir Harry. “But I have been too

long away from Lancashire to be a judge of this matter. I can tell you

nothing of Hepplestall and his factory, for this is the first I heard

of it, but I can tell you of Hepplestall and a parson.” And he told the

tale of Mr. Bantison.

“This is the stuff your hero is made of, Seccombe,” jeered Godalming.

“Not bad stuff,” Seccombe heard an unexpected ally say. “The stuff, as

Seccombe put it, that grasps a nettle firmly.”

“Oh,” conceded Sir Harry, “Bantison was nettle enough. But as to

steam--!” He shrugged his shoulders, and gave Mr. Seccombe the opening

for which he angled.

“It does not appeal to you to go to Lancashire and better Hepplestall’s

example?” he asked blandly.

“Good God!” said Sir Harry, and the Club was with him.

“There might be wisdom in a visit to your estates,” said Mr. Seccombe,

and the Club was, vociferously, with him. Mr. Seccombe smiled secretly:

he had, gently but thoroughly, accomplished his purpose of turning the

volatile thought of the Club away from his argument. He had raised a

laugh at Whitworth’s expense, a brutal laugh, a “Vae Victis” laugh: he

had focused attention on the case of Sir Harry Whitworth.

It was not an unusual case. This society had a leader known, with

grotesque inappropriateness, as the First Gentleman in Europe and the

First Gentleman in Europe had invented a shoe-buckle. Whitworth tripped

over the buckle; he criticized it in ill-chosen company and news of his

traitorous disparagement was carried to the Regent. Whitworth was in

disgrace.

The usual thing and the discreet thing was to efface oneself for a time,

but Harry Whitworth had the conceit to believe himself an ornament that

the Prince could not dispense with. He stayed in town, daily expecting

to be recalled to court: and the frank laughter of Almack’s was a

galling revelation of what public opinion thought of his prospects of

recall.

It was a humiliation for a high-spirited gentleman, and an

embarrassment. To challenge a Club was to invite more ridicule, while

to single out Mr. Seccombe, the first cause of his discomfiture, was

equally impossible; Seccombe was too old for dueling; one did not go out

with a man old enough to be one’s grandfather. There was Godalming,

but, again, he feared ridicule: Godalming’s special offense was that he

laughed loudly, but Godalming habitually laughed loudly and one couldn’t

challenge for insulting emphasis a man who was naturally emphatic.

Whitworth saw no satisfactory way out of it, till Verners, mindful of

Dorothy, supplied an opportunity for retreat.

“I may be able to give Sir Harry some little information about his

estates. They are in good hands, and though naturally we in Lancashire

would welcome amongst us the presence of so notable a landowner, the

estate itself is well managed by his people.” Which was quite a pretty

effort in tact from one unaware of Sir Harry’s misfortune, and puzzled

by the laughter.

Whitworth snatched at the opportunity, meager as it was. “I will come

with you to hear of it, Verners.” Then as he turned, a feeling that he

was making a poor show of it tempted him to say, “Gentlemen, I heard you

laugh. Next time we meet, next time I visit Almack’s, the laugh will be

upon the other side. Godalming, will you wager on it?” He could issue

that simulacrum of a challenge, at any rate. Men betted upon anything.

“A thousand guineas that you never come back,” suggested Godalming.

“A thousand that I am back--back, you understand me--in a month.”

“Agreed,” said Godalming. “I back Prinny’s resolution for a thousand for

a month.”

“Shall we go, Mr. Verners?” said Sir Harry to the mystified squire, and

“Gad, they’re betting on a weather-vane,” murmured Mr. Seccombe in the

ear of his friend, Mr. Collinson.

CHAPTER V--SIR HARRY WOOS

TO know one’s duty and to do it are often different things. Sir Harry’s

duty, as he knew, was to regard his wild oats as sown, to marry Dorothy,

and to go home quietly to Lancashire. In London, he competed on equal

terms with men far richer than himself at a pace disastrously too hot

for his means, but the competition had been, socially, a triumph for him

and to go back now of all times, when temporarily he was under a cloud,

was a duty against which his pride fought hard.

He hadn’t compromise in him and compromise, in this case was

unthinkable. It was either Lancashire with Dorothy, or London without

her. Dorothy in London was not to be thought of: no countrybred wife for

him unless on the exceptional terms of her bringing him a great fortune,

and what she was to bring was well enough in Lancashire but a bagatelle

to be lost or won at hazard in a night in London. Decidedly, she would

be a blunder in London: if a man of his standing in society put his head

under the yoke, it had to be for a price much greater than Dorothy could

pay. He would lose caste by such a marriage.

There remained the sensible alternative, the plan to be good and

dutiful, to abandon London, ambition, youth, and to become a dull and

rustic husband. Long ago, his father and Luke Vcrners had come to an

understanding on the matter, eminently satisfying to themselves, and he

had let things remain, vaguely, at that. Certainly he broke no promise

of his own making if he avoided Dorothy for ever: and here he was going

under escort (and it seemed to him a subtly possessive escort) of Luke

Verners to call on Dorothy, to, it was implied, clarify the situation

and, he supposed, to declare himself. Well, that was too cool and

however things happened they were not going to happen quite like that.

He didn’t mind going to survey Dorothy: indeed, Almack’s being closed to

him just now by his own action, he must have some occupation; but this

Dorothy--positively he remembered her obscurely through a haze of other

women--this Dorothy must needs be extraordinary if she were to reconcile

him to a duty he resented. It might be necessary to teach these good

people their place. Luke seemed to Sir Harry uninstructed in the London

perspective and in the importance of being Whitworth.

It was unfortunate that Mrs. Verners clucked over him like a hen who has

found a long-lost chicken. Her inquiries after his health seemed to

him even more assured in their possessiveness than Luke’s attitude of a

keeper. Mrs. Verners was the assertion of motherhood, and on every score

but that of hard duty, he was prepared to depreciate Dorothy, when she

came in, to the limits of justice and perhaps beyond them. Dorothy might

be a miracle, but Mrs. Verners as a mother was a handicap that would

discount anything.

Then Dorothy came in, carrying in her arm a kitten with an injured paw.

From her room she had heard it crying in Albemarle Street, had run out

and for the last ten minutes had been doctoring it somewhere at the back

of the house. Mrs. Verners was alarmed: Dorothy was still flushed with

running, or, perhaps, with tenderness; her hair was riotous; she was

thinking of the kitten, she had the barest curtsy for Sir Harry, she

was far from being the great lady her mother would have had her in this

moment of meeting with him. And he incontinently forgot that he was

there on a sort of compulsion, he nearly forgot that it was his duty to

like her. Emotionally, he surrendered at sight to a beautiful unkempt

girl who caressed a kitten and, somehow, brought cleanliness into the

room. “Good God!” said Sir Harry, his manners blown to pieces along with

his hesitations by one blast of honesty.

If they could have been married there and then, it was not Whitworth

who would have been backward. All that was best in him was devotedly and

immediately hers, and that best was not a bad best either: if he could

forget London and his craving to be a figure in the town, a courtier and

a modish rake, he had the making of a faithful husband to such a woman,

satisfied with her, with country sports and the management of his

estate, a good father, and a hearty, genial, eupeptic, hard drinking

but hard exercising representative of the permanent best in English

life--the outdoor gentleman.

If he could forget--and just now he utterly forgot, with one swift

backward glance at London women. What were they to her? Dressmakers’

dummies, perruquiers’ blocks, automata directed by a dancing-master,

cosmetical exteriors to vanity, greed, vice, if they were not, like some

he hated most, conceited bluestockings parading an erudition that it

didn’t become a woman to possess. Whereas, Dorothy! He felt from her a

whiff of moorland air, and a horse between his legs and the clean rush

past him of invigorating wind and all the zest of a great run behind the

hounds with the tang of burning peat in his nostrils and the scent of

heather coming down from, the hills. It wasn’t quite--it wasn’t yet, by

years--the case of the roué worn by experience who seeks a last piquant

emotion in religion or (what seems to him almost its equivalent) in a

fresh young girl, but his situation had those elements, with the

added glamor of discovering that his duty was not merely tolerable but

delicious.

“Good God,” he said again, quite irrepressibly in the spate of his

emotion, then realizing that he was guilty of breach of decorum,

lapsed to apologetic amenities from which they were to gather that his

ejaculations referred to the kitten.

His polite murmur roused Dorothy to self-consciousness. “What a hoyden

Sir Harry must be thinking me,” she said confusedly.

“They are wrong,” said Sir Harry, “who call red roses the flower of

Lancashire. That flower is the wild heather. That flower is you.”

“Yes,” said Dorothy with whimsical resignation, “the commonest flower

that blooms.”

“But a rarity in London,” he said, “and, bloom like yours, rare

anywhere. In London, Madam, we have a glass-house admiration for

glass-house flowers that wilt to ruin at a breath of open air. I have

been guilty of the bad taste to share that admiration. I have been

unpardonably forgetful of the flower of Lancashire.” And he bowed to

Dorothy in as handsome apology as a laggard lover could make. “We heard

a word at the club, Mr. Verner, which, as you observed, had the faculty

of annoying me. It annoyed me because in a club one thinks club-wise and

club-wisdom is opaque. I should not be annoyed now.”

“Are we to know what the word was?” asked Mrs. Verners not too

discreetly.

Sir Harry raised his eyebrows slightly. Decidedly, he thought again, a

clucking hen, but his management of her could wait: this was his hour of

magnanimity. “At the club, Madam,” he said, “we were allowed to hear a

Mr. Seccombe recommending me to visit my estates.” Sir Harry looked at

Dorothy. “And it is in my mind that Seceombe counseled well.”

Considering the man and remembering the wager with Godalming, that was

an admission even more handsome than his apology. It fell short, but

only short, of actual declaration and perhaps that might have come had

not Mrs. Verners attempted to force a pace which was astonishingly fast.

She saw her expedition turning in its first engagement to triumphant

victory, but she wanted the spoils of victory, she wanted a spade to be

called unmistakably a spade, she wanted his declaration in round terms

before he left that room.

“We are to see you back in Lancashire?” she said insinuatingly.

Sir Harry shuddered at her crude persistence, but, gallantly, “I have

good reason to believe so,” he replied, scanning the reason with an

admiration qualified now by wonder if she would become like her mother.

“And you will come to stay?”

“That I cannot say,” he was goaded to reply. Damn the woman! She was

arousing his worst, she was reawakening his rebellion to the thought

that he had had his fling, she was tempting him to continue it in the

hope that when his fling was ended, Mrs. Verners would have, mercifully,

also ended. He took his leave with some abruptness, treading a lower air

than that of his expectancy.

But Dorothy held her place with him. For wife of his, this was the

one woman and Mrs. Verners, in retrospect, diminished to the disarmed

impotence to hurt of a spikeless burr.

He weighed alternatives--Dorothy, heather, the moors, domesticity,

estates, his place in the county against the stews of St. James, the

excitement of gambling on a horse, a prizefighter or the dice, the hot

perfumes of balls, Ranelagh, the clubs, women. He even threw in Prinny

and his place at Court, and against all these Dorothy, and what she

stood for, held the balance down. He formed a resolution which he

thought immutable.

He assumed, and Mrs. Verners had fed that assumption, that there were to

be no difficulties about Dorothy and, fundamentally, she meant to make

none. She had looked away from Hepplestall when she met him on a road,

and many times since then she had looked back in mind to Hepplestall,

but Sir Harry was her fate and she did not quarrel with it. He had,

though, been bearishly slow in accepting her as his fate and she saw no

reason in that to smooth his passage to the end now that, clearly,

he was in the mood to woo. His careless absence had been one long

punishment for her: let her now see how he would take the short

punishment of being impaled for a week or two on tenterhooks about her.

He came again, heralded by gifts, with hot ardor to his wooing. He

brought passion and buttressed that with his self-knowledgeable desire

to force the issue, to make a contract from which there could be

no retreat: and thereby muddied pure element with lower motive. He

complimented her upon a new gown.

“It pleases you?” she asked.

“Much less than the wearer.”

“You are a judge of ladies’ raiment, are you not, Sir Harry?”

“No more than becomes a man of taste.”

“One hears,” she said, “of Lady Betty Standish who was at choosing

patterns with her dressmaker, and of a gentleman shown into the room

that chose her patterns for her, and of the bills that Lady Betty sent

to the gentleman, and of how he paid them.”

“You have heard of that?” he said. “Well, there are women in town

capable of such bad taste as that.”

“The bad taste of allowing you to choose her gowns? But were you not

competent to choose?”

“The bad taste,” he said, “of sending the bills to me. Would you have

had me decline to pay them?”

“Again,” she said, passing no judgment, “there is a story of a merchant

that lived in Hampstead and drove one night with a plump daughter in a

coach to eat a dinner in the City. The coach was stopped on the Heath by

a highwayman who wanted nothing of the merchant, but was most gallant to

his daughter.”

“I kissed the girl,” said Sir Harry. “It was done for a wager and I won

it. A folly, and a harmless one,” but he wondered, if she had heard

of these, if there were less innocent escapades that she had heard

of. There was no lack of them, nor, it appeared, of babblers eager to

gossip, to his disservice, about a man on whom the Regent frowned.

“One hears again,” she said, “that at Drury Lane Theater,”--he blushed

in good earnest: would she have the hardihood to mention a pretty

actress who--? and then he breathed again as she went on--“there was

once an orange wench--”

“That was a bet I lost,” he said. “I was to dress as a woman and stand

with my basket like the rest, and I was not to be identified. I was

identified and paid. But what are these but the freaks we all enjoy in

London? Vain trifles, I admit it, in the telling. Not feats to boast

of, not incidents that I take pleasure in hearing you refer to, but, I

protest, innocent enough and relishable in the doing.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “And while you relished them in London, did you

give thought to what I did at home?”

“You? To what you did? What did you do?” Sir Harry was flabbergasted at

her question.

“I was at home, Sir Harry.” She spoke without bitterness, without

emphasis, and when he looked sharply at her, she seemed to interpret

the look as an invitation and rose. “My mother, I think, is ready to

accompany us if you care to take me walking in the Park.”

Decidedly a check to a gentleman who proposed to make up for past delays

by a whirlwind wooing. She was at home, while he ruffled it in London.

And where else should she be? What did she imply? At any rate, she had

embarrassed him by the unexpectedness of her attack. Of course she

was at home, and of course he was a reveler in London. He was man, she

woman, and he hoped she recognized the elementary distinction. Whatever

her object, whether she had the incredible audacity to accuse him--him,

open-handed Harry--of something only to be defined as meanness, or

whether she was only being witty with him, she had certainly discouraged

the declaration he came to make.

Mrs. Vemers found him a moody squire of dames in the Park, while his

sudden puzzlement gave Dorothy a mischievously happy promenade. He

brought them, after the shortest of walks, to their door.

“You have been very silent, Sir Harry,” Mrs. Verners told him, with her

incurable habit of stating the obvious. “Are you not well to-day?”

“Perfectly, I thank you, Madam.”

“Oh, Lud, mother, it is but that you do not appreciate Sir Harry’s

capacity for disguise. In the past, he has been--many things. To-day we

are to admire him in the character of a thunderstorm.”

“Indeed?” he said. “Thunderstorms break.”

“But not on me,” said Dorothy, and ran into the house.

Sir Harry turned away with the scantest bow to Mrs. Verners. This was a

new flavor and he wanted to taste it well, to make sure that he approved

a Dorothy who could be a precipitate hoyden rushing out-of-doors to an

injured kitten and a woman of wit that stabbed him shrewdly. She had

variety, this Dorothy; she wasn’t the makings of a dull, complacent

wife. Well, and did he want dullness and complacency? He was going

to Lancashire, to a life that a Whitworth must live as an example to

others: there was to be nothing to demand a wife’s complacency. And

as to dullness, heaven save him from it--and heaven seemed, by making

Dorothy Verners, to have answered that prayer. He decided to be more in

love with Dorothy than before--which, as she wasn’t willing to fly into

his arms when he crooked a beckoning finger, was only natural; and

went into a shop from which he might express to her the warmth of his

sentiment at an appropriate cost. She should see if he was mean!

In the shop he found my Lord Godalming who was turning over some bright

trinkets intended for a lady who was not his wife. Godalming was surly,

eyeing Whitworth as he called for the best in necklaces that the shopman

had to show. “Oh, yes,” said his lordship, “bring out the best for Sir

Harry Whitworth. Jewels for Sir Harry and paste for me. I am only a

lord.”

“What’s put you out, Godalming?”

“Ain’t the sight of your radiant face enough to put me out? I hate

happiness in others.”

“Then I can offer you the consolation of knowing that my happiness will

not be visible to you long. I propose very shortly to go North, my lord,

and to stay there.” Godalming flopped back against the counter like a

fainting man who must support himself and, indeed, his astonishment was

genuine enough. “Go North?” he gasped. “Are you gone stark mad?”

“I have flattered myself to the contrary,” said Sir Harry, with

complacency. “I have believed that I have recovered my senses.”

“Rot me if I understand you,” said his lordship.

“Yet you find me in the article of choosing a necklace.”

“Damme, Whitworth, are there no women nearer than the North Pole? Is

there no difference between gallantry and lunacy?”

“I am thinking of marriage, my lord.”

“Oh, Lud, yes, we’ve all to come to that. But we don’t come to it

happily. We don’t think of it with our faces like the August sun. I’m

the last man to believe your smirking face covers thoughts of marriage.

I know too well what it does cover.”

“Indeed? And what?”

“What? Burn me if you are not the most exasperating man alive. Have you

no recollections of a wager?”

“I am bound to make you an admission, Godalming. Occupied with other

matters, I had for the moment forgot our wager. But you need have no

fears. I pay my debts.”

“Pay? Where in the devil’s name have you been hiding yourself if you

don’t know you’ve won the wager?”

“Won it?” cried Sir Harry.

“What else are you happy for?”

“I give you my word I did not know of this, Godalming.”

“The news has been about the town these last two hours. A courier has

ridden in from Brighton summoning you to Prinny’s table to-morrow. He is

tired of his shoe buckle and vows that you are right about it. They say

he wrote you the recall with his own gouty hand. There’s condescension,

damn you, and you let me be the one to tell you news of it, me that

loses a thousand by it!”

“I have been some hours absent from my rooms,” apologized Sir Harry.

“But this! This!” And if his face glowed before, it blazed now in the

intoxication of a great victory. He wasn’t thinking of the wager he had

won, and still less of the lady who was his to win: he was thinking of

a fat, graceful, capricious Prince who used his male friends as he used

his female, like dirt, who drove a coach with distinction and hadn’t

another achievement, who had taken Harry Whitworth back into a favor

that was a degradation; and Harry Whitworth thought of his restoration

to that slippery foothold as a triumph and a glimpse of paradise! The

Regent had forgiven him and nothing else mattered.

He savored it a while, then became conscious of a shopman with a tray of

jewels, and of why he came into the shop. He had the grace to lower his

voice from Godaiming’s hearing as he said, “You must have finer ones

than these. I desire the necklace to be of the value of one thousand

guineas.”

He chose, while Godalming bought his pretentious trifle, and gave

Dorothy’s address. Then, “I believe that I am now entitled to the

freedom of Almack’s Club, my lord,” he said. “Do you go in that

direction?” And Godalming, who was not a good loser, was too sensitive

to the social ascendency of the man whom the Regent forgave to decline

his proffered company. The wind blowing South for Whitworth, it wasn’t

desirable that word of Godalming’s wagering on its remaining North

should be carried to royal ears: he had better, on all counts, make

light of his loss and be seen companionably with this child of fortune.

Not to mention the simpler fact that Godalming was a thirsty soul and

that such a reversal of fortune as had come to Harry was only to be

celebrated with high junketing. Indirectly, in his person of loser of

the wager, Godalming was the host and it wasn’t proper for a host to be

absent from his own table.

Intrinsically, a wager of a thousand guineas was nothing to lift

eyebrows at: Mr. Fox once played for twenty-two hours at a sitting and

lost £500 an hour, and the celebration of a victory was what the victor

cared to make it. Sir Harry had more than the winning of a bet

to celebrate, he had a rehabilitation and proposed to himself the

considerable feat of making Almack’s drunk. It was afternoon, but any

time was drinking time, and only the darkness of mid-winter lasted long

enough to cloak their heroic debauchery. Men were not rare who kept

their wits and were steady on their legs after the sixth bottle, and why

indeed cloak drunkenness at all, if at the seventh bottle a gentleman

succumbed? There was no shame in falling in a good fight: the shame

was to the shirker and the unfortunate born with a weak head, a puny

three-bottle man.

This is to generalize, which, perhaps, is better than a particular

description in this squeamish day of the occasion when Harry Whitworth

made his re-appearance at Almack’s resolved to write his name large in

the Bacchanalian annals of the Club. He was to dine in the Pavilion at

Brighton with his Royal Highness next night, and, by the Lord, Almack’s

was to remember that he had come into his own again.

Some crowded hours had passed when the memorialist at the table’s head

unsteadily picked up a glass and saying mechanically, “A glass of wine

with you, sir,” found himself isolating from a ruddy haze the flushed

face of Mr. Verners.

“Verners!” he cried. “Verners! What’s the connection? Dorothy, by Gad!

Going Brighton kiss Prinny’s hand to-morrow, Verners. Going your house

kiss Dorothy’s hand to-night. Better the night, better the deed. Dorothy

first, Prinny second. Gentlemen, Dorothy Verners!”

There wasn’t more sobriety in the whole company than would have sufficed

to add two and two together, and nobody noticed, let alone protested,

when the host reeled from the table, linked his arm in that of Mr.

Verners and left the room. Mr. Verners’ mind was a blessed blank gently

suffused with joy. Incapable of thought, he felt that he had on his arm

a prisoner whose capture was to do him great honor. The servants put

them tenderly in a coach for the short drive to Albemarle Street.

“I shall call you Father,” said Sir Harry, and the singular spectacle

might have been observed, had the night been light and the coach open,

of an elderly gentleman endeavoring to kiss the cheek of a younger, his

efforts frustrated by the jolting of the coach, so that the pair of them

pivoted to and fro on their bases like those absurd weighted toy eggs

the pedlars sell, and came, swaying in ludicrous rhythm, to the Verners’

lodging.

During the afternoon the necklace had been delivered, and if Dorothy was

no connoisseur of jewels she was sufficiently informed to know that here

was a peace-offering of royal value. She had twitted Sir Harry with his

follies, she had watched him draw the right conclusion from her recital

of some of them--the conclusion that she resented his preference for

such a life to coming, long ago, to where she and duty and she and love

were waiting for him--she had mocked him at her door, and had mocked his

sullen face when she compared him with a thunderstorm: and she wondered

if she had not gone too far, been too severe. Mrs. Verners lectured her

unsparingly on her waywardness, and Dorothy inclined to think that she

deserved the lecture. Then the necklace came and if a gift like that was

not as plain a declaration as anything unspoken could be, Dorothy was

no judge, or her mother either. The lecture ended suddenly, turned to

a gush of admiration of such magnificence. Harry had won forgiveness,

Dorothy decided, and if he came next day in wooing vein it wasn’t

she who would check his ardor a second time. One need not be called a

materialist because a symbol that is costly convinced at once, when a

cheap symbol would be ineffective.

She was ready for Sir Harry, but not for this Sir Harry. The giver of

princely gifts should live up to his princedom, not in the sense of

His Royal Highness, George, but in the romantic sense. She had been

idealizing Harry since the precious token came and he came--like this,

lurching, thick-voiced, beastly. True, a gentleman lost nothing of

gentlemanliness by appearing flushed with wine before ladies; but there

were degrees and his was a condition beyond the most indulgent pale. Old

husbands--Mr. Verners is the example--might have no surprises for their

wives, but to come a-wooing in his cups was outrage.

Mrs. Verners made an effort. “Dorothy,” she whispered, “remember the

necklace. Don’t be too nice.” Dorothy remembered nothing but that this

beast that had been a man was reeling towards her, making endearing

noises, with the plain intention of kissing her. Her whole being seemed

to concentrate itself to defeat his intention: she hit him, and hit

hard, upon the face and Sir Harry sat stupidly on the floor. Then,

defying her mother with her eye, she remembered the necklace.

His man, undressing him that night, found an exceptional necklace round

his neck beneath his ruffles. He thought of Sir Harry and his condition,

of the obliterating effect of much alcohol, of theft and of the hanging

that befell a convicted thief and, after balancing these thoughts, he

stole the necklace. There were no inquiries made.

CHAPTER VI--THE MAN WHO WON

IT is said that the Chinese use a form of torture consisting in the

uninterrupted dripping, drop by drop, of water on the head of a victim

who eventually goes mad. Mrs. Verners, though not Chinese, used a

similar form of torture as they drove North from London in the coach,

but Dorothy did not go mad under the interminable flow of bitter

comment. Instead, she watched the milestones and, as each was passed,

made and kept the resolution not to scream, or to jump out or to strike

her mother until they reached the next, and so, by a series of mile-long

constraints, disciplined herself to bear the whole.

After Mrs. Verners had said that Dorothy was a graceless girl who had

made them all into laughing-stocks and an affected prude whose nicety

was monstrous, and a conceited, pedantic, prim ignoramus who had the

bumkinly expectation that men were saints, and a pampered milksop who

had made her unfortunate parents the jest of the town, there really was

not much more to say, but the lady had suffered disappointment and did

not suffer it silently.

Occasionally, for a change, she turned her batteries on Mr. Verners who,

poor man, was paying by an attack of gout for his London indulgences and

couldn’t sleep the miles away. There was some justice in her attacks on

Mr. Verners. He was first cause of Dorothy’s conduct to Sir Harry: he

had brought Sir Harry home to them that night: he was accessory to their

disaster.

“Well, well, but it is over,” he said a dozen times.

“But--,” and she began again with stupid and stupefying iteration.

Mr. Verners, after a trip to town, was matter apt for stupefaction. It

would need days of hard riding on penitential diet at home to sweat the

aches out of him, but even while Mrs. Verners was elaborating the theme

that all was lost, he was conscious of a reason, somewhere at the back

of his mind, for believing that all was not lost. He couldn’t dredge

the reason to the surface, and he couldn’t imagine what grounds for

cheerfulness there were, but he felt sure that something had happened in

London, or that something had been said in London which offered new hope

to a depressed family. For three days he fished vainly in the muddied

waters of his recollection for that bright treasure-trove, then, when

they were reaching their journey’s end and were within a few miles of

home, he saw Hepplestall’s factory crowning the hill-top, with its stack

belching black smoke, and remembered how unexpectedly significant this

Hepplestall had loomed in a conversation at Almack’s Club.

He didn’t at first associate that strange significance of Hepplestall

with his sense that he had brought hope with him from London. True,

there was this difference between his wife’s motives and his--that she

had wanted to see Dorothy married to Whitworth, and he wanted to see

Dorothy married. Dorothy in any man’s home, within reason; but his was

the ideal of the father who felt in her presence a cramping necessity

to restraint, and, if any man’s, why should he think of Hepplestall’s

in particular, when, since Sir Harry was out of the running, there was

a host of sufficiently eligible young men and when now he watched his

wife’s resentful glare as she looked at that unsightly chimney?

It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her at once that Whitworth was

not their only neighbor to be spoken of respectfully, but on second

thoughts that had better wait till Dorothy was not present to hear her

mother’s inevitable first pungencies. He wanted Dorothy married, and it

was easy to marry her to almost any bachelor in the county; yet here was

Luke Verners settling it obstinately in his mind that Hepplestall was

the husband he wished for her. Hepplestall had been heard of in London,

which was one wonder, and had been the subject of a serious discussion

at a gaming club, which was a greater wonder, and Verners, who

had helped to dig the gulf between Reuben and the county, was now

considering how the gulf was to be bridged. Was steam atrocious, when

it gained a man the commendation of Mr. Seccombe? He recalled Seccombe’s

comparison of the factory and its surrounding cottages with the feudal

chieftain’s keep, and as he looked again at Hepplestall’s creation, he

saw how apt the comparison was, he saw alliance with Reuben as an astute

move that might give him footing on the winning side, as, emphatically,

a “deep” thing. If steam were a success, it couldn’t be an atrocity.

Whether it were atrocity or not, there was no question but that steam,

in Reuben’s hands, was a success. He was working with a tigerish energy

that left no stone unturned in the consolidation of his position. As yet

he was a monopolist of steam in the district, but that was an advantage

that couldn’t last and he meant when he had to meet more up-to-date

competition than that of the water-power manufacturers to be impregnably

established to meet it. He hadn’t time to think of other things--such as

women, or the county, or Dorothy Verners or even Phoebe Bradshaw.

Phoebe had borne him a son. Reuben had not decided--he had not had time

to decide--but he didn’t think that mattered. If he was going to marry

her--to silence her he had promised marriage and, so far as he knew,

intended to keep his promise--it was because he had a fondness for her

but, beyond that, because he hoped to see the county cringe to his wife,

and if it was going to please him to watch them cringe to a Mrs. Reuben

Hepplestall who was Peter Bradshaw’s daughter, it was going to please

him more to watch them cringe to a woman who was the mother of his son

before he married her. That was his present view, and because of it he

permitted Peter to jog on at his little factory, he didn’t starve Peter

out of existence as he was starving the other water-power manufacturers

of the neighborhood, he wasn’t forcing Peter’s workpeople into the steam

factory by the simple process of leaving them no other place in which

to find employment. Peter was privileged, a King Canute miraculously

untouched by the tide of progress; but, for the rest of them, for

Peter’s like who were unprivileged, Reuben was ruthless. He wanted

their skilled laborers in his factory, and he undercut their prices,

naturally, thanks to steam, and unnaturally, thanks to policy, till he

drove them to ruin, filled his factory with their workpeople, sometimes

flinging an overseer’s job to the manufacturer he had ruined, sometimes

ignoring him. He was building a second factory now, out of the profits

of the first. He had to rise, to rise, to go on rising till he dominated

the county, till the gentry came to pay court to the man they had

flouted. That was the day he lived for, the day when they would fawn and

he would show them--perhaps with Phoebe by his side--what it meant to be

a Hepplestall in Lancashire. In his mine there were hewers of coal,

in the factory men, women and children, laboring extravagant hours for

derisory pay to the end that Hepplestall might set his foot upon the

county’s neck.

All this was background; motive, certainly, but motive so covert beneath

the daily need to plan fresh enterprise, to produce cotton yarn by

the thousand pounds and cloth by the mile as never to obtrude into his

conscious thought at all. This was his interim of building and till

he had built securely he could not pause to think of other issues. The

county, for example: he wasn’t speculating as to where he stood with

the county now: the time for the county’s attention would come when he

stood, a grown colossus, over it and he was only growing yet. He didn’t

anticipate that the county would make advances at this stage, that to

some of them this stage might seem already advanced while to him, with

his head full of plans for development, the stage was elementary. He

didn’t anticipate Luke Verners.

Mr. Verners, diplomat, came into the factory-yard leading a horse which

had shed a shoe, and called to a passing boy to know if Mr. Hepplestall

were in. Reuben was in, in the office, in his shirt-sleeves, and though

Verners did not know this, it was a score for the bridge-builder that

Reuben, on hearing of his presence, placed his pen on his desk instead

of behind his ear and put on his coat before going out.

“I deem this good fortune and not bad since it happened at your gates,

Hepplestall,” said Luke. “If you have a forge here, can I trouble you?

If not there’s a smithy not a mile away.” He gave Reuben a choice: his

advance was to be accepted or rejected as Reuben decided.

“I have the means to shoe my wagon horses,” said Reuben, indicating

at once that his was a self-supporting and a trading organization. If

Verners cared to have his horse shod on Reuben’s premises, the shoeing

would be good, but it would bring Luke into contact with trade.

Luke nodded as one who understood the implications. “I shall take it as

a favor, Hepplestall,” he said, and Reuben gave his orders, then, “I can

offer you a glass of wine,” he said, “but it will be in the office of a

manufacturer.” And the astonishing Mr. Verners bowed and said, “Why not?

Although an idle man must not waste your time.”

“I turned manufacturer,” said Reuben, “not slave,” and led the way into

the office. Followed amenities, and the implicit understanding that

there had never been a breach, that for Hepplestall to set up a factory

was the most natural thing in the world and when, presently, his horse

was announced to be ready, “When,” asked Luke, “are we to see you at

dinner, Hepplestall?”

Reuben felt that the olive branch oozed oil. “I have not dined much

from home of late,” he said, doubtfully. “Then let me make a feast to

celebrate your return.”

“To what fold, Mr. Verners?”

“Well,” said Luke, “if you are doubtful, let me tempt you. Let me tell

you of my wife and of my daughter but new returned from London with the

latest modes.”

“Thankee, Mr. Verners,” said Reuben, “it is not in my recollection that

I ever met you face to face and that you did not know me. But it

is firmly in my mind that Mistress Dorothy Verners gave me the cut

direct.”

“I did not know of this,” said Luke, truthfully.

“No? Yet she acted as others have acted. You will do me the justice to

note that if I find your invitation remarkable, I have reason.”

“Then I repeat it, Hepplestall. I press it. Dorothy shall repent her

discourtesy. I--” (he drew himself up to voice a boast he devoutly hoped

he could make good) “I am master in my house.”

“No,” said Reuben, “No, Mr. Verners, I will not come to dinner when my

appearance has been canvassed and prepared for. But I will ride home

with you now, if you are willing, and you shall tell me as we go what,

besides purchasing the latest modes, you did in London.”

Luke was regretting many things, the impulse which brought him riding

in that direction and made him loosen a horse-shoe up a lane near

the factory, and the cowardice that had prevented his mentioning his

intention to Mrs. Verners who had not _yet_ been given an opportunity

to look at Reuben Hepplestall through the sage eyes of Mr. Seccombe of

Almack’s Club. To take Reuben home now was to introduce a bolt from the

blue and Mr. Verners shuddered at the consequences. He couldn’t trust

his wife, taken by surprise, to be socially suave, and Dorothy, whom he

thought he could trust, had been rude to Reuben--naturally, inevitably,

in those circumstances quite properly, but, in these, how disastrously

inaptly! By Luke’s reading of the rules of the game, Reuben should have

been grateful for recognition on any terms, and, instead, the confounded

fellow was aggressive, dictating terms, impaling Mr. Verners on the

horns of dilemma. He had said, “If you are willing,” but that, it

seemed, was formal courtesy, for Reuben was calmly ordering his horse to

be saddled.

Had he no mercy? Couldn’t he see how the sweat was standing out on Mr.

Verners’ face? Was this another example like the case of Mr. Bantison

of doing what Seccombe admired, of grasping a nettle boldly? Mr. Verners

objected to be the nettle, but didn’t see how he was to escape the

grasp. The grasp of Reuben Hepplestall seemed inescapable.

He committed himself to fate, with an awful sinking feeling that he

whose fate it is to trust to women’s tact is lost.

“And in London,” asked Reuben as they rode out of the yard. “You did?”

Luke chatted with a pitiful vivacity of all the noncommittal things

he could, while Reuben listened grimly and said nothing. Did ever a

sanguine gentleman set out to condescend and come home so like a captive

and a criminal? He had the impression of being not only criminal but

condemned when Reuben said, dismounting at Verners’ door, “So far I have

not found the answer to this riddle, sir. Perhaps it is to be found in

your drawing-room?”

Mrs. Verners and Dorothy were to be found in the drawing-room, and if

Luke had been concerned about his wife’s attitude he might have spared

himself that trouble. She gave a little cry and looked helplessly at

Reuben as if he were a ghost, and he gave a little bow and that was

the end of her. She could have fainted or gone into hysterics or made a

speech as long as one of Mr. Burke’s and Reuben would have cared for the

one as little as the other. He was looking at Dorothy.

“I have brought Mr. Hepplestall home with me,” was Luke’s introduction.

“And,” said Reuben to Dorothy, “is Mr. Hepplestall visible?”

“Perfectly,” she said and bowed.

“I rejoice to hear,” he said gravely, “of the restoration of your

eyesight. You see me better than on a day a year ago?”

“I see you better,” said Dorothy, meeting his eye, “because I see you

singly,” and he had to acknowledge that a spirited reply to his attack.

It put him beautifully in the wrong, it suggested that he had permitted

himself to be seen by a lady when in the company of one who was not a

lady, it implied that the cut was not for him but his companion,

that there was no fault in Dorothy but in him who carried a blazing

indiscretion like Phoebe Bradshaw into the public road, and that he was

tactless now to remind Dorothy of her correct repudiation of him when he

paraded an impropriety.

She flung Phoebe to the gutter, she made a debating point and showed him

how easy it was to pretend that he had never been refused recognition.

All that was necessary for his acceptance of her point was his agreement

that Phoebe was, in fact, of no importance.

And Reuben concurred. “I have to apologize for an indiscretion,” he

said, deposing Phoebe from her precarious throne, and giving her the

disreputable status latent in Dorothy’s retort.

So much for Phoebe, whereas he, wonderfully, was being smiled upon by

Dorothy Verners. The gracious bow with which she accepted his apology

was an accolade, it was a sign that if he was a manufacturer he was

nevertheless a gentleman, that for him manufacturing was, uniquely,

condoned. But he thought it needful to make sure of that.

“There is a greater indiscretion,” he said, “for which I do not

apologize. I am a trader and trader I remain, unrepentant, Miss Verners,

unashamed.”

“I have heard of worse foibles,” said Dorothy, thinking of Sir Harry.

But he couldn’t leave it at that: he couldn’t be light and accept

lightness about steam. “A foible is a careless thing,” he said. “I am

passionate about my steam-engines.”

“Indeed, you have a notable great place up there,” said Luke.

“It will be greater,” said Reuben. “I am to grow and it with me.” Then

some sense either that he was knocking at an open door or merely of the

convenances made him add, “My hobby-horse is bolting with me, but I felt

a need to be definite.”

He was not, he meant, to be bribed out of his manufacturing by being

countenanced. He wanted Dorothy, but he wanted, too, his leadership in

cotton. And Dorothy was contrasting this man’s passion with Sir Harry’s,

which she took justifiably, but not quite justly, to be liquor, while

steam seemed romantically daring and mysterious. She knew what drink did

to a man and she did not know what steam was to do. Reuben seemed to her

a virile person; she was falling in love with him.

Mrs. Verners, inwardly one mark of interrogation, was taking her cue

from the others who so amazingly welcomed a prodigal, swallowing a pill

and hiding her judgment of its flavor behind a civil smile. “Does Mr.

Hepplestall know that we have been to London?” she asked.

Luke felt precipices gape for him; this was the road to revelations

of his motives, but Reuben turned it to a harmless by-path. “So I have

heard,” he said. “I was promised news of the fashions.” And fashions,

and the opinions of Mrs. Verners on fashions, gently nursed to

its placid end a call of which Luke had expected nothing short

of catastrophe. Reuben was sedulously attentive to Mrs. Verners,

wonderfully in agreement with her views, and Luke, returning from seeing

him to his horse, had the unhoped for satisfaction of hearing her say,

“What a pleasant young man Mr. Hepplestall is, after all.”

He took time by the forelock then. “His enterprise,” he said, “is the

talk of the London clubs. We have not been seeing what lies beneath our

noses. They think much of Hepplestall in London. They watch him with

approval.”

“I confess I like the way his hair grows,” said Mrs. Verners, and

Dorothy said nothing.

While as to Reuben, there is only one word for the mood in which he rode

home--that it was religious. Sincerely and reverently, he thanked his

God for Dorothy Verners, and to the end he kept her in his mind as

one who came to him from God. A miracle had happened--Luke was God’s

instrument bringing him to that drawing-room where Dorothy was--and

Reuben had a simple and a lasting faith in it.

Not that in the lump it softened him, not that he wasn’t all the same a

devil-worshiper of ambition and greed and hatred, for he was all these

things, besides being the humbly grateful man for whom God wrought the

miracle of Dorothy Verners. She was on one side, in her place apart, and

the rest was as it had been.

It may be that his conduct to Bradshaw resulted from this religious

mood. Religion is associated with the idea of sacrifice and if the

suffering was likely to be Peter’s rather than Reuben’s, Reuben

sacrificed, at least, the contemptuous kindliness he felt towards Peter.

His first action was to set in motion against Bradshaw the machinery by

which he had crushed other small manufacturers out of trade.

In those days, the power-loom had not become a serious competitor of the

hand-loom and the hand-weavers chiefly worked looms standing in sheds

attached to their cottages or (for humidity’s sake, not health’s) in a

cellar below them; but they used by now power-spun yarn which was

issued to them by the manufacturers. Reuben had permitted Peter to go

on spinning in his factory: he now sent round to the weavers the message

that Peter’s yarn was taboo and that if they dealt with Peter they would

never deal with Hepplestall. It was enough: the weavers were implicitly

Reuben’s thralls, for without his yarn they could no longer rely on

supplies at all. Peter was doomed. Reuben had not even, as had been

necessary at first, to go through the process of undercutting his

prices; he had only to tell the weavers that Peter was banned and they

had no alternative but to obey.

So far Peter had been allowed, by exception, to remain in being as a

factory-owner, which placed him on a sort of equality with Reuben, as

a little, very little brother, and now brotherliness between a Bradshaw

and the man on whom Dorothy Verners smiled was a solecism. Reuben could

not dictate in other districts--yet--but, in his own, there were to be

no people of Bradshaw’s caliber able to say of themselves that they,

like Hepplestall, had factories. There would be consequences for

Phoebe. He did not give them a second thought. They were what followed

inevitably from the placing of Phoebe by Dorothy Verners, they were

neither right nor wrong, just nor unjust, they had to be--because of

what Dorothy had said when she made, lightly, a dialectical score off

Reuben.

He left that fish to fry and went (miraculously directed) to dine with

the Verners. He dined more than once with the Verners, he was made to

feel that he was at home in the Verners house, so that one suave summer

evening, after he had had a pleasantly formal and highly satisfactory

little tête-à-tête with Luke as they sat together at their wine, he led

Dorothy through the great window on to the lawn and found an arbor in

a shrubbery. There was no question of her willingness, and it hardly

surprised him that there should be none, for he was growing accustomed

to his miracle as one grows accustomed to anything.

“Still, there is a thing which puzzles me,” he said. “You were in

London. Did you see Sir Harry Whitworth there?”

Dorothy made a hole in the gravel with her toe, and the hole seemed to

interest her gravely. Then she looked up slowly and met Reuben’s eye.

“Sir Harry Whitworth is nothing to me,” she said.

And he supposed Sir Harry to have proposed and to have been refused,

which was broad truth if it wasn’t literal fact.

Refused Sir Harry? And why? For him! The miracle increased.

“This is the crowning day of my life,” he said. “It is a day for which

I lived in hope. I saw this day, I saw you like golden sun on a far

horizon. That the day has come so soon is miracle.” He took her hand.

“Dorothy Verners, will you marry a manufacturer?”

“I will marry you, Reuben,” she said, and his kiss was sacramental.

He kissed her as man might kiss an emblem, or the Holy Grail, with a

sort of dispassionate passion that was all very well for a symbol or a

graven image, but not good enough for Dorothy, who was flesh and blood.

“No, no!” she cried. “Reuben, what are you thinking me? I am not like

that.”

“Like what?” he said. “I think you miracle.”

“Yes, but I’m not. I’m a woman--I’m not a golden sun on a far horizon.

I’m nearer earth than that.”

“Never for me,” he protested.

“Yes, always, please. Oh, must you drag confession from me? I love you,

Reuben, you, your straight clean strength. I went in shadows and in

doubt, I waded in muddied waters until you came and rescued me. You

touch me, and you kiss me now as if I were a goddess--”

“You are my goddess, Dorothy.”

“I want us to be honest in our love. You’ve shown me a great thing,

Reuben. You have shown me that there is a man in the world. My man, and

not my god, and, Reuben, don’t worship me either. Don’t let there be

fine phrases and pretense between us two.”

“Pretense?”

“The pretense that I am more than a woman and you more than a man.”

“You are the most beautiful woman in the world.”

She was looking at him quaintly. “Yes, if you please,” she said. So long

as it was admitted she was human, she liked to be lifted in his

eyes above the rest of feminine humanity. This was right, this was

reasonable, this wasn’t the fantastic blossom of love-making that must

needs wither in the chilly air of matrimony, this gave them both a

chance of not having to eat indigestible words afterwards, of not having

to allow in the future that they began their life together in a welter

of lies. She was a woman and she was beautiful and it was no more than

right that he should think her woman’s beauty was unique. “And I’ve

told you what I think of you,” she said. “I shall not change my mind on

that.”

“I shall never give you need,” he said, but he was finding this the

ultimate surprise of all. “I had supposed that women liked to be wooed.”

“I think they do. I’m sure I do, but I’m a plain-dealer, Reuben.”

“I find you very wonderful,” he said, and kissed her now as she would

have him kiss, with true and honest passion that had respect in it but

wasn’t bleached with reverence--and very sweetly and sincerely, she

kissed him back.

That was their mating and she brought it at once from the extravagant

heights where he would have carried it, into deep still waters. It came

quickly, it was to last permanently. These two loved, and the coming and

the lasting of their love had no more to do with reason than love

ever has. If Mr. Verners had the impression that he was a guileful

conspirator who had made this match, he flattered himself; at the most

he had only accelerated it. Inside, he sat looking forward to the

quick decline in his table manners which would follow upon the going of

Dorothy from his house; outside, two lovers paced the lawn in happiness,

and they did not look forward then. To look forward is to imply that

one’s present state can be improved.

Two months ago, they were in London; two months ago the idea that they

should entertain Hepplestall, the manufacturer, the gentleman who was,

in that tall Queen Anne Verners house which stood on the site of a

Verners house already old when the Stuarts came to reign, would have

seemed madness; the house itself would fall in righteous anger on such

a guest. Now he was coming into the drawing-room with Dorothy’s hand in

his, accepted suitor, welcomed son. Something of this was in Dorothy’s

mind as she led him, solemn-faced and twinkling-eyed round the room. On

the walls in full paintings or in miniatures, old dead Verners looked at

her, and to each she introduced him. “And not one of them changed their

color,” she announced.

Mrs. Verners had a last word to say. “But there is Tom.” Young Tom

Verners was with his regiment in the Peninsula.

“Tom!” cried Dorothy. “I’ll show you what Tom thinks of this.” She

raised a candlestick to light the face of her grandfather’s portrait on

the wall. Tom, they said, was the image of his grandfather who had been

painted in his youth in the uniform of a cornet of horse when he brought

victory home with Marlborough. She waved the candle and as she knew very

well it would, the minx, its flicker brought to the portrait the sudden

appearance of a smile. “That,” she said, “is what Tom thinks,” and

Mrs. Verners wept maudlin tears and felt exceedingly content. There was

happiness that night in the Verners house.

When he had mounted his horse, and had set off, she came running down

the steps after him. “Stop!” she cried. “No, don’t get off. Just listen.

My man, my steam-man, I love you, I love you,” and ran into the house.

In his own house, when he reached it, he found Peter and Phoebe Bradshaw

waiting for him, sad sights the pair of them, with drawn, suffering

faces and the sense of incomprehensible wrong gnawing at their hearts.

They couldn’t understand, they couldn’t believe; hours ago they had

talked themselves to a standstill, and waited now in silent apprehensive

misery.

“Well?” asked Reuben.

“The weavers tell me of an order of yours. I can’t believe--there must

be some mistake.”

“I gave an order.”

“But--”

“I gave an order. It closes your factory? Come into mine. You shall have

an overlooker’s job.” Peter was silent. He was to lose his factory,

his position, his independence. He who had been master was to turn man

again, to go back, in the afternoon of life, to the place from which as

young man he had raised himself. What was Hepplestall saying? “You had

no faith in steam, Bradshaw. This is where disbelief has brought you. I

did not hear your thanks.”

“Thanks?” repeated Peter.

“I offer you an overlooker’s job in my factory.”

“But Reuben,” said Phoebe, “Reuben!”

He turned upon her with a snarl. She used his Christian name. She dared!

“Reuben!” she said. “The boy. Our boy. Our John?”

“He will be--what--five months old?”

“Yes,” she said.

“At five years old, I take children into the factory. Good-night.”

CHAPTER VII--THE EARLY LIFE OF JOHN BRADSHAW

ONCE upon a time, a West Indian slave owner was in conversation with

three master-spinners and they spoke of labor conditions in the North

of England. “Well,” he said, “I have always thought myself disgraced by

being the owner of slaves, but we never in the West Indies thought it

possible for any human being to be so cruel as to require a child of

nine years old to work twelve and a half hours a day, and that, you

acknowledge, is your regular practice.”

That, and worse, was the early life of John Bradshaw, son of Reuben

Hepplestall. Peter went into Reuben’s factory: he took the meatless bone

Reuben contemptuously threw to a dog: he became an overlooker. Once he

had been a fighter, when he was raising himself from the ranks into the

position of a small factory owner: then contentment had come upon him

and fighting power went out of him. Whom, indeed, should he fight? He

was not encountering a man but a Thing, a System, which at its first

onslaught seemed to crush the spirit of a people.

The later Hepplestalls looked back to Reuben, their founder, and saw

him as a figure of romance. The romance of Lancashire is rather in the

tremendous fact that its common people survived this System that came

upon them from the unknown, that, so soon, they were hitting back at

the Thing which stifled life. Capital, unaggravated, had been tolerable;

capital, aggravated by steam, made the Factory System and the System was

intolerable.

Reuben might have chosen to make exceptions of the Bradshaws, but he

did not choose it. They had to be nothing to the husband of Dorothy

Hepplestall, they had to go, with the rest, into the jaws of the System.

So Peter lost his liberties and found nothing in the steam machines to

parallel the easy-going familiarities between master and man which had

humanized his primitive factory. A bell summoned him into the factory,

and he left it when the engines stopped, which might be twelve and a

half or might be fifteen hours later. He gave good work for bad pay

and his prayer was that the worst might not happen. The worst was that

Phoebe might be driven with him into the factory, and the worst beyond

the worst was that Phoebe’s son might be driven with her. So he gave

of his best and tried with a beaten man’s despair to hold off the worst

results of the creeping ruin that came upon his home.

Reuben was guiltless of personal malignancy. He had decided that the

Bradshaws must not be favorites, that they must do as others did, which

was a judgment, not a spite, and Reuben did not control the system, but

was controlled by it. He, like the Bradshaws, must do as others did.

He could, of course, have got out: his difference from them was that he

could abjure cotton. But he did not do that, and so long as he stayed

in, a competitor with other manufacturers, he was obliged, if he would

survive commercially, to use the methods of the rest. They may or may

not have been methods that revolted him by their barbarity, and it is

probable that, even in that callous age, what of the true gentleman was

left in him was, in fact, revolted. That is, at least, to be deduced

from the completely isolating veil he hung between Dorothy and the

factory. His house was the old home of the Hepplestalls, near the

factory but not, like many manufacturers’ houses, adjacent to it. It was

sufficiently far away for him, practically, to live two lives which

did not meet. He was a manufacturer and he was the husband of Dorothy’

Hepplestall; in the factory one man and at home another, not lying at

home about steam because there he never spoke of it, preserving her

romantic illusions about his work by keeping her remote from it. She

might have had her curiosities, but she loved Reuben, she consented at

his will to be incurious and the habit remained. It might have remained

even if love had faded, but their love was not to fade. And the county

took it that if Dorothy Verners had married a manufacturer, the factory

was not to be mentioned before her. In the presence of ladies they did

not mention it to Reuben, though, in the bad times, when the poor-rate

rose and half the weavers came upon the parish, Reuben was roasted to

his face with indignant heat after the ladies had left the table.

He was neither of the best nor of the worst. He was not patriarchal like

the Strutts and the Gregs who, while conforming to the System, qualified

it with school-houses and swimming baths, nor did he go to the extreme

of ordering his people into the cottages he built and compelling them

to pay rent for a cottage whether they occupied it or not. He didn’t

run shops, charging high prices, at which his people had to buy or where

they had to take goods in part payment of wages. Such devices, though

general, seemed to him petty and extraneous to the factory; but in the

factory he was a keen economist and one of the results of the System

was that the masters looked on wages not as paid to individuals but to

families. That was so much the normal view that a weaver was not allowed

to go on the parish unless he proved that his wife and children worked

in the mills and that the whole family wage was inadequate for their

support.

Phoebe had to go and, when he was old enough, that is to say at five,

John also went. The legal age for apprentices was seven--they were

workhouse children bound to the master till they were twenty-one--but

John was a “free” laborer, so, until the Act of 1819, which made nine

years and twelve working hours the minimum, John was “free” to work at

five, to be a breadwinner, to add his magnificent contribution to the

family wage which kept the Bradshaws from the workhouse.

The factory bell was the _leit motif_ of his life, but the Bradshaws had

a relic of their past which made them envied. They had a clock, and the

clock told them when it was time to get up to go to the factory. Others,

clockless, got up long before they needed and waited in the chill

of early morning, at five o’clock, for the door to open. The idea of

ringing the bell as a warning half an hour before working hours began

had not occurred to any one then, and people rose in panic and went

out, cutting short sleep shorter, stamping in snow (or, if snow is

sentimental, is it ever particularly joyous to rise, with a long day’s

work ahead, at five and earlier?), waiting for the doors to let them in

to warmth. No one was ever late. The fines made it expensive to be late,

and the knocker-up, the man who went round and for a penny or tuppence

a week rattled wires at the end of a clothes-prop against your bedroom

window till you opened the window and sang out to him--the knocker-up

was a late Victorian luxury. In John’s day, there was only the factory

bell, and one was inside the factory when it rang. The bell was

the symbol of the system, irritating the weavers especially, as the

power-loom increased in efficiency, and drove more and more of them

to the factories. The spinners, indeed, had had the interregnum of the

water-factory: it was not, for them, a straight plunge into the tyranny

of the system. The old hand-weaver, whose engine was his arms, began and

stopped work at will, which is not to say that he was a lazy fellow, but

is to say that he had time to grow potatoes in a garden, to take a share

in country sports and, on the whole, to lead a reasonable life: and his

wife had the art and the time to cook food for him. When she worked in

the factory, she had no time to cook, and there was nothing to cook,

either, and if she had worked from childhood, she had never learned how

to cook, and there was no need. They lived on bread and cheese, with

precious little cheese. They rarely lived to see forty.

John, son of Reuben (though he did not know that), came to the factory

at five in the morning and left it, at earliest, at seven or eight at

night, being the while in a temperature of 75 to 85. As to meal-times,

why, adults got their half hour or so for breakfast and their hour for

dinner and the machinery was stopped so that was just the time for

the children to nip under and over it, snatching their food while they

cleaned a machine from dust and flue. Bad for the lungs, perhaps, but

the work was so light and easy. John, who was small when he was five,

crawled under the machines picking up cotton waste.

There was a school of manufacturers who held, apparently without

hypocrisy, that this was a charming way to educate an infant into habits

of industry: a sort of work in play, with the cotton waste substituted

for a ball and the factory for the nursery. And they called the work

light and easy.

John was promoted to be a piecer--he pieced together threads broken in

the spinning machines, and, of course, the machine as a whole didn’t

stop while he did it, and it was really rather skilled work, done very

rapidly with a few exquisitely skilled movements: and that was hardly

work at all, it was more amusement than toil. Only one Fielden, an

employer who, many years later, tried the experiment for himself, found

that in following the to-and-fro movements of a spinning machine for

twelve hours, he walked no less than twenty miles! Fielden was a

reformer; he didn’t call this light and easy work for a child, but

others did.

It would happen that--one knows how play tires a child--John would feel

sleepy towards evening. He didn’t go to sleep on a working machine, or

he would have died, and John did not die that way: he didn’t go to

sleep at all. He was beaten into wakefulness. Peter often beat him

into wakefulness, and Peter did it not because he was cruel to John

but because he was kind. If Peter had not beaten him lightly, other

overseers would have beaten him heavily, not with a ferule, but with a

billy-roller, which is a heavy iron stick. John also beat himself and

pinched himself and bit his tongue to keep awake. As the evening wore on

it became almost impossible to keep awake on any terms: sometimes, they

sang. Song is the expression of gladness, but that was not why they

sang. And they sang--hymns. It would have been most improper to sing

profane songs in a factory.

As to John’s home life, he went to bed: and if it hadn’t been for Phoebe

or Peter who carried him, he would often not have reached bed. He would

have gone to sleep in the road, and because he had never known any other

life than this, it was reasonable in him to suppose that the life he

led, if not right, was inevitable.

He did not suppose it for long. You can spring surprises on human

nature, you can de-humanize it for a time, but if you put faith in

the permanent enslavement of men and women, you shall find yourself

mistaken. Even while John was passing from a wretched childhood to a

wretched adolescence, the reaction was preparing, and mutely, hardly

consciously at all, he was questioning if the things that were, were

necessarily the things that had to be. There was the death of Peter, in

the factory, stopping to live as a machine stops functioning because it

is worn out, and there was the drop in their family wages, though John

was earning man’s pay then. And there was the human stir in the world,

the efforts of workers to combine for better conditions, for Trade

Unions, for Reformed Parliaments, and the efforts of the ruling classes,

qualified by the liberalism of a Peel or the insurgency of a Cobbett, to

repress. There were riots, machine-breaking, factory-burning, Peterloo,

the end of a great war, peace and disbanded soldiery, people who starved

and a panic-stricken Home Secretary who thought there was a revolution.

Most of it mattered very little to John, growing up in Hepplestall’s

factory, which escaped riot. It escaped not because its conditions

were not terrible but because conditions were often more terrible. As

employer, Reuben trod the middle way, and it was the extreme men, the

brutes who seemed to glory in brutality, at whom riots were aimed.

John knew that there were blacker hells than his, which was a sort

of mitigation, while mere habit was another. If life has never been

anything but miserable, than misery is life, and you make the best of

it. One of the ways by which John expected to make the best of it was to

marry. He married at seventeen, but when it is in the scheme of things

to be senile at forty, seventeen is a mature age. The family wage was

also in the scheme of things: the exploitation of children was the basis

of the cotton trade: and though love laughs at economics as heartily

as at locksmiths, marriage and child-bearing were not discouraged by

misery, but encouraged by it. John did not think of these things, nor

of himself and Annie as potential providers of child-slaves. He thought,

illogically, of being happy.

And, considering Annie, not without excuse. She was of the few’ who

stood up straight, untwisted by the factory, though it had caught her

young and tamed her cruelly. There was gypsy blood in her. She, of a

wandering tribe, had been taught “habits of industry,” and the lesson

had been a rack which, still, had not broken her. It hadn’t quenched

her light, though, within him, John had the fiercer fire. With him, the

signs of the factory hand were hung out for all to see. Pale-faced and

stunted, with a great shock of hair and weak, peering eyes, he was more

like some underground creature than a man living by the grace of God

and the light of the sun--he had lived so much of life by the artificial

light of the factory in the long evenings and the winter mornings; but

he had a kind of eagerness, a sort of Peeping Tom of a spirit refusing

to be ordered off, and a suggestion of wiriness both of mind and body,

which announced that here was one whose quality declined obliteration by

the System.

Lovers had a consolation in those days. Bone-tired as the long

work-hours left them, it was yet possible by a short walk to get out

of the town that Hepplestall had made. These two were married, and a

married woman had no manner of business to steal away from her house

when the factory had finished with her for the day, but that was what

Phoebe made Annie do. That was Phoebe’s tribute to youth, and a heavy

tribute, too. She, like them, had labored all day in the factory and at

night she labored in the home, sending them out to the moors as if they

were careless lovers still--at their age! Phoebe kept her secret, and

she had the sentiment of owing John reparation. It was not much that she

could do, but she did this--growing old, toil-worn, she took the lion’s

share of housework, she set them free, for an hour or so, to go upon the

moors. And Annie was grateful more than John. Already, he was town-bred,

already he craved for shelter, already the overheated factory seemed

nature’s atmosphere to John.

She threw herself on the yielding heather, smelling it, and earth and

air in ecstasy, then rolled on her back and looked at the stars. “Lad,

lad,” she cried, “there’s good in life for all that.”

“Aye, wench,” he said, “there’s you.”

“Me? There’s bigger things than me. There’s air and sky and a world that

is no beastly reek and walls and roofs.”

“It’s cold on the moor to-night,” he said, shivering.

She threw her shawl about him. “You’re clemmed,” she said, drawing him

close to the generous warmth of her. “Seems to me I come to life under

the stars. Food don’t matter greatly to me if there’s air as I can

breathe.”

“We’re prisoned in yon factory, Annie. Reckon I’m used to the prison.

There’s boggarts on the moor.”

She laughed at his fears. “Aye, you may laugh,” he said, “but there was

a gallows up here, and boggarts of the hanged still roam.”

The belief in witches, ghosts and supernatural visitants of all kinds

was a common one and it was not discouraged by educated people who

hoped, probably, to reconcile the ignorant to the towns by allowing

terrifying superstitions of the country to remain in circulation. But

Annie’s gypsy strain kept her immune from any such fears: her ancestors

had traded in superstition. “And,” he went on seriously, “when the

Reformers tried to meet on Cronkey-shaw Moor, it’s a known fact that

there were warlocks seen.” What was seen was a body of men grotesquely

decked in the semblance of the popular notion of a wizard, with

phosphorescent faces and so on. Somebody was using a better way to

scotch Reform than soldiers, but the trick was soon exposed and meetings

and drillings on the moors were phenomena of the time.

“You make too much o’ trouble o’ all sorts, John,” she said.

“I canna keep fro’ thinking, Annie,” he apologized. “I’m thinking now.”

“Aye, of old wives’ tales,” she mocked.

“No. I’m thinking of my grandfer and of Hepplestall’s factory.”

“I’m in the air,” she said. “That’s good enough for me.” She was

slightly jealous of John, who had known his grandfather. Very soundly

established people had known two grandfathers: John had known one,

but Annie none. However, he was not to be prevented from speaking his

thought.

“I’ve heard my grandfer tell o’ times that were easier than these. He

had a factory o’ his own--what they called a factory them days. Baby to

Hepplestall’s it were. I’ll show you its ruin down yonder by the stream

some day. He’s dead now, is grandfer. Sounds wonder-ful to hear me talk

of a grandfer wi’ a factory o’ his own.”

“Fine lot of good to thee now, my lad. I never had no grandfer that I

heard on, but I don’t see that it makes any difference atween thee and

me to-day.”

“I’m none boasting, Annie,” he said. “I’m nobbut looking back to the

times that used to be. Summat’s come o’er life sin’ then, summat that’s

like a great big cloud, on a summer’s day.”

“Well,” said Annie, “we’ve the factory. But there’s times like this when

I’ve my arms full of you and my head full of the smell of heather. And

there’s times like mischief-neet”--that is, the night of the first of

May--“and th’ Bush-Bearing in August. I like th’ Wakes, lad... oh, and

lots of times that aren’t all factory. There’s Easter and Whitsun and

Christmas.” There were: there were these survivals of a more jocund age,

honored still, if by curtailed celebrations. The trouble was that the

curtailments were too severe, that neither of cakes nor ale, neither

of bread nor circuses was there sufficient offset against the grinding

hardships of the factories. Both John and Annie had so recently emerged

from the status of child-slavery that the larger life of adults might

well have seemed freedom enough; to Annie, aided by Phoebe’s sacrifice,

to Annie, living more physically than John, to Annie, who rarely looked

beyond one short respite unless it was to the next, the present seemed

not amiss. Except the life of the roads and the heaths, to which she saw

no possibility of return, from which the factory had weaned her, she had

no traditions, while he had Peter Bradshaw for tradition. He had slipped

down the ladder, and there was resentment, usually dormant, of the fact

that he saw no chance to climb again.

“Things are,” was her philosophy. “I’m none in factory now, and I’m none

fretting about factory and you’d do best to hold your hush about your

grandfer, John. His’n weren’t a gradely factory.”

That was it. She accepted Hepplestall’s, while John accepted the habit

of Hepplestall’s, dully, subterraneously resenting it. She almost took

a pride in the size of Hepplestall’s. “And,” she said, good Methodist as

she was, “there’s a better life to come.”

He had no reply to make to that. The Methodist was the working class

religion, as opposed to the Church of the upper classes and, at first,

the rulers had seen danger in it, and in an unholy alliance of Methodism

with Reform. There was something, but not a great deal in their fear.

There was the fact, for instance, that in the Methodist Sunday Schools

reading and writing were taught. “The modern Methodists,” says Bamford

in his ‘Early Days,’ “may boast of this feat as their especial work. The

church party never undertook to instruct in writing on Sundays.” That

far, but not much farther, the Methodists stood for enlightenment.

Cobbett gave them no credit at all. He said, in 1824, “the bitterest

foes of freedom in England have been, and are, the Methodists.” Annie

had “got religion”: the sufferings and the hardships of this life were

mere preparations for radiant happiness to come, and a religion of this

sort was not for citizens but for saints; it gave no battle to the

Devil, Steam.

John stirred uncomfortably in her arms. He had an aching sense of wrong,

beyond expression and beyond relief. If he tried to express it, his

fumbling words were countered by her opportunism and, in the last

resort, by her religion. Things were, and there was nothing to be done

about them.

CHAPTER VIII--THE LONELY MAN

A MAN with a foot in two camps is likely to be welcomed in neither and

to be lonely in his life. The cotton manufacturers had grown rich, they

were established, they were a new order threatening to rival in wealth

and power the old order of the land interest, and they were highly

self-conscious about it. Land had no valid cause to be resentful of the

new capitalists. Land was hit by the increase in the poor rates, but

handsomely compensated for that by the rise in land values. But a new

power had arisen and land was jealous of its increasing influence in the

councils of the nation.

Reuben never forgot that he belonged to the old order, was of it, and

had married into it. In business affairs, it was necessary to have

associations with other manufacturers, but he had no hospitalities at

home for them on the occasions when they met to discuss measures of

common policy. He entertained them at the factory, he kept home and

affairs in separate water-tight compartments, and was loved of none. He

was his own land-owner and his own coal-owner, both long starts in the

race, and he was at least as efficient and enterprising as his average

competitor. A gentleman had come into trade and had made a great success

of it. More galling still, he insisted that he remained a gentleman in

the old sense, a landed man, “county.” Not in words but by actions and

inactions which bit deeper than any words he proclaimed his superiority.

And why not? He was superior, he was the husband of Dorothy Hepplestall

and it was that fact--the fact that he had married Dorothy and made a

success of their marriage--which counted against him with the county far

more than his having gone into trade and having made a success of that.

They would have welcomed a failure somewhere, and he had failed at

nothing. So though he had their society, he had it grudgingly.

He was then driven back, not unwillingly, on Dorothy. She was, for

Reuben, the whole of friendship, the whole of companionship, the whole

of love; after all, she was Dorothy and certainly he made no complaint

that he had no other friends and that he was a tolerated, unpopular

figure in society. His days were for the factory, his evenings for

Dorothy and their children and, when the children had gone to bed, for

Dorothy and his books. Books, though they were not unduly insisted upon

in the country districts of Lancashire, went then with gentlemanliness

and Reuben was not idiosyncratic, but normal, in becoming bookish in

middle-age. In Parliament they quoted the classics in their speeches,

and the Corinthian of the Clubs, whatever his sporting tastes, spared

time to keep his classics in repair. Bookishness, in moderation, was

part of the make-up of a man of taste, and for Reuben it had become a

recourse not for fashion’s sake but for its own.

Life for Reuben had its mellowness; he had struggled and he had won; he

was owner and despot, hardly bound by any law but that of his will, of

the several factories contained within the great wall, of a coal-mine,

of the town of cottages and shops about. The conditions of labor were

the usual conditions and they did not trouble his conscience. Things

were, indeed, rather smoother for Hepplestall’s workers than for some

others; he was above petty rent exactions and truck shops, as, being his

own coal supplier, he could very well afford to be.

What drawbacks there were to his position were rather in matters of

decoration than reality, but it was decided proof of his unpopularity

in both camps of influence that Hepplestall was not a magistrate. Other

great manufacturers, to a man, were on the bench and took good care to

be, because administration of the law was largely in the hands of the

magistrates and the manufacturers wanted the administration in trusty

hands--their own. It was a permanent rebuff to Reuben that he was not a

magistrate; there were less wealthy High Sheriffs.

It was a puny irritation, symptomatic of their spite, and it didn’t

matter much to Reuben, who was sure of his realities, sure, above all,

of the reality of Dorothy’s love. No love runs smooth for twenty years

and probably it would not be love if it did, but only a bad habit

masquerading as love, so that it would not be true to say of Reuben and

Dorothy that they had never had a difference. They had had many small

differences, and in this matter of love what happens is that which also

happens to a tree. Trees need wind; wind forces the roots down to a

stronger and ever stronger hold upon the earth. And so with love, which

cannot live in draughtless hothouse air, but needs to be wind-tossed to

prove and to increase its strength. Impossible to be a pacifist in love!

Love is a tussle, a thing of storms and calms: like everything in life

it cannot stand still but must either grow or decay, and for growth,

it must have strife. Sex that is placid and love that is immovable are

contradictions in terms. Love has to interest or love will cease to be,

and to interest it cannot stagnate.

The children came almost as milestones in the road of their love; each

marked the happy ending of a period of stress. They were not results

of a habit, but the achievements of a passion, live symbols of a thing

itself alive. These two hearts did not beat all the time as one, and the

restlessness of their love was as essential as its harmony.

But the shadow of a difference that might grow into a disaster was

being cast upon them. In a way, it was extraneous to their love, and in

another way was part and parcel of it. The question was the future of

Edward, the eldest son.

Dorothy lived in two worlds, in Reuben and in the county, and Reuben

lived in three, Dorothy, the factory and the county. He put the factory

second to Dorothy and she put it nowhere. There was a bargain between

them, unspoken but understood, that she should put it nowhere and yet he

was assuming, tacitly, that Edward was as a matter of course to succeed

him as controller of the factory and the mine: of these two he always

thought first of the factory and second of the mine.

She might have reconciled herself to the mine. There were Dukes, like

the Duke of Bridgewater, who owned coal-mines and her Edward might have

gained great honor, like that Duke, by developing canals. But she had

not moved with the times about factories, nor, indeed, had the times,

that is, her order of the old gentry, moved very far. The Secombes were

still exceptional, the Luke Verners still trimmers, land was still

land and respectable, steam was steam and questionable, and it is to be

supposed that though the coal of the Duke was used to make steam, coal

was land and therefore on the side of the angels, whatever the devils

did with it afterwards. Prejudice, in any case, has nothing to do with

consistency. She had no prejudice against Reuben’s connection with the

factory; he was her “steam-man” still, but she did not want Edward to be

her steam-son.

Edward himself was conscious of no talent for factory owning and hardly

of being the son of a factory owner.

The management of her children’s lives was in Dorothy’s hands, involving

no mention of the factory, and in her hands Reuben was content to leave

their lives until his sons had had the ordinary education of gentlemen,

until they were down from their Universities. He had not suffered

himself as a manufacturer because he was educated as a gentleman and saw

no reason to bring up his sons any differently from himself. Throw them

too young into the factory, and they would become manufacturers and

manufacturers only: he had the wish to make them gentlemen first and

manufacturers afterwards.

Edward had ideas of his own about his future, and it came as a surprise

to be invited at breakfast to visit the factory one day during vacation

from Oxford. Instinctively he glanced, not at his mother, but at his

clothes. He was not precisely a dandy, but had money to burn and burned

a good deal of it at his tailor’s.

“The factory, I said, not the coal-mine,” Reuben said, noting his son’s

impulse. “You have looked at your clothes. Now let us go and look at

the first cause of the clothes. As a young philosopher you should be

interested in first causes.”

“Oh, is it necessary, Reuben?” pleaded Dorothy.

“Sparks should know where the flames come from,” said Reuben.

“I have great curiosity to see the factory, sir,” said Edward. “I showed

surprise, but that was natural. You have hidden the factory from us all

as if it were a Pandora’s box and if you judge the time now come when

I am to see the place from which our blessings come, I assure you I

am flattered by your confidence. But I warn you I am not persuaded in

advance to admire the box.”

Reuben smiled grimly at his hinted opposition. “If you look with sense,

you will admire,” he said. “Factories run to usefulness, not beauty.

Shall we go?”

They went, and Reuben exhibited his factory with thoroughness, with the

zest of a man who had created it, but now and then with the impatience

of the expert who does not concede enough to the slow-following thought

of the lay mind. Edward began with every intention to appreciate, but as

Reuben explained the processes, found nothing but antipathy grow within

him.

He breathed a foul, hot, dust-laden air, he hadn’t a mechanical turn of

mind and was mystified by operations which Reuben imagined he expounded

lucidly. Once the thread was lost, the whole affair was simply

puzzlement and he had the feeling of groping in a fog, a hideously

noisy fog, where wheels monotonously went round, spinning mules beat

senselessly to and fro and dirty men and women looked resentfully at

him. It seemed to him a hell worse than any Dante had described, with

sufferers more hopeless, bound in stupid misery. He was not thinking of

the sufferers with any great humanitarianism: they were of a lower order

and this no doubt was all that they were fit for. He was thinking of

them with disgust, objecting to breathe the same air, revolted by their

smells, but he was conscious of, at least, some sentiment of pity. If

he had understood the meaning of it all, he felt that he would have seen

things like these in true perspective, but he missed the keys to it,

was nauseated when he ought to have been interested and his attempted

queries grew less and less to the point.

Reuben perceived at last that he was lecturing an inattentive audience.

“Come into the office,” he said, and in that humaner place, with its

great bureau, its library of ledgers and its capacious chairs for

callers, where the engine throbbed with a diminished hum, Edward tried

to collect his thoughts. “This,” Reuben emphasized, “is where I do my

work. I go through the factory twice a day, otherwise, I am to be found

in here. A glass of wine to wash the dust out of your throat?”

Edward was grateful: but wine could not wash his repugnance away. “Well,

now,” asked Reuben, “what do you think?”

“Frankly, sir, I am hardly capable of thought.”

“No,” said Reuben meditatively. “No. Its bigness takes the breath away.”

But Edward was not thinking of bigness. “If I say anything now which

appears strange to you, I hope you will attribute it to my inexperience.

I am thinking of those people I have seen. To spend so many hours a day

in such conditions seems to me a very dreadful thing.”

“Work has to be done, Edward, and they are used to it. You will find

that there are only two sorts of people in this world, the drivers and

the driven.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Which are you going to

be?”

“I?” The personal application caught him unawares, then he mentally

pulled himself together. If he was in for it, he could meet it.

“I did not bring you here as an idle sight-seer. At first blush you

dislike the factory, but it is my belief that you will come to like it

as well as, I do.” Edward stared at his father who was, he saw, serious.

He veritably “liked” the factory. “In fact,” Reuben was saying, “I can

go further. I love this place. I made it; it is my life’s work; and I

am proud of it. Hepplestall’s is a great heritance. When I hand it on to

you, it will be a great possession, a great trust. How great you do not

know and if I showed you now the figures in those books you would be no

wiser. As yet you do not understand. Even out there in the works where

things are simple you missed my meaning, but there is time to learn it

all before I leave the reins to you.”

“I am to decide now?”

“Decide? Decide? What is there to decide? You are my eldest son.”

Edward made an effort: Reuben was assuming his consent to everything.

“May I confess my hope, sir? My hope was that when I had finished at

Oxford, you would allow me to go to the bar.”

“The bar? A cover for idleness.” Sometimes, but Edward had not intended

to be idle. The bar was an occupation, gentlemanly, settling a man in

London amongst his Oxford friends; it seemed to Edward that the bar

would meet his tastes. If it had been land that he was to inherit,

naturally he would have taken a share in its management, but there was

no land: there was a factory, and he felt keen jealousy of Tom, his

younger brother. It was settled that Tom should follow his uncle, Tom

Verners, who was Colonel Verners now, into the Army, while he, the

eldest son, who surely should have first choice, he was apparently

destined will he, nill he, for this detestable factory!

“I will have no son of mine a loafer. You would live in London?”

“I should hope to practice there.”

“I’ll have no idlers and no cockneys in my family, Edward.

Hepplestall’s! Hepplestall’s! and he sneers at it.”

“Oh, no, sir. Please. Not that. I feel it difficult to explain.”

“Don’t try.”

“I must. I think what I feel is that if we were speaking of land I as

your eldest son should naturally come into possession. I should feel it,

in the word you used, as a trust. But we are not speaking of land.”

Reuben gripped his chair-arms till his hands grew white and recovered a

self-control that had nearly slipped away. The boy was ready to approve

the law of primogeniture so long as he could be fastidious about his

inheritance, so long as the inheritance was land. As it was not land, he

wanted to run away. He deprecated steam. He dared, the jackanapes!

“No,” said Reuben, “we are not speaking of land. We are speaking of

Hepplestall’s.”

“If it were land,” Edward went on ingenuously, “however great the

estate, you would not find me shirking my responsibility.”

“I see. And as it is not land? As it is this vastly greater thing than

land?” Then suavity deserted him. “Boy,” he cried, “don’t you see what

an enormous thing it is to be trustee of Hepplestall’s?”

“Oh,” said Edward, “it is big. But let me put a case.”

“What? Lawyering already?” scoffed Reuben. “Suppose one dislikes a cat.

Fifty cats don’t reconcile one.”

“You dislike the factory?”

“I may not fully understand--”

“Then wait till you do. Come here and learn.”

“That would be the thin end of the wedge.”

“It is meant to be,” said Reuben, and on that their conversation

was, not inopportunely, interrupted. A clerk knocked on the door and

announced Mr. Needham. “Don’t go, Edward,” said Reuben, “this can figure

as a detail in your education,” and introduced his son to the caller.

Edward looked hopelessly at the visitor. Reuben had told him that the

office was the place where his business life was spent and therefore

Edward’s contacts, if he came to the factory, would not be with the

squalid people he had seen at work, but with people who visited the

office. He looked at Mr. Needham, and decided that he had never seen a

coarser or more brutal man in his life. There were certain fellows of

his college justly renowned for grossness; there was the riffraff of the

town, there were hangers-on at the stables, there were the bruisers he

had seen, but in all his experience he had seen nothing comparable with

the untrammeled brutishness of Mr. Richard Needham. If this was

the company he was asked to keep, he preferred--what did one do _in

extremis?_ Enlist? Well, then, he preferred enlistment to the factory.

Needham was, however, not quite the usual caller, who was a merchant

come to buy, or a machinist come to sell, rather than, as Needham was,

a manufacturer and a notorious one at that. By this time, the repeal of

the Combination Acts had given Trade Unionism an opportunity to develop

in the open, and manufacturers who had known very well how to deal with

the earlier guerilla warfare of the then illegal Unions were seriously

alarmed by its progress. There was a strong movement to force the

reënactment of the Combination Laws. Contemporaneously, the growth

and proved efficiency of the power-loom drove the weavers to extremes.

Needham was self-appointed leader of the reactionaries amongst the

manufacturers: a man who had risen by sheer physical strength to a

position from which he now exercised considerable influence over the

more timid of the masters.

He had the curtest of nods for Edward. “My God, Hepplestall, we’re in

for a mort of trouble,” he said, mopping his brow with a huge printed

handkerchief and putting his beaver hat on the desk. He sank into a

stout chair which groaned under his weight, and Edward thought he had

never seen anything so indecent as the swollen calves of Mr. Needham.

Reuben silently passed the wine. It seemed a good answer.

Warts are a misfortune, not a crime: but the wart on Mr. Needham’s nose

struck Edward as an obscenity--and his father loved the factory! He

didn’t know that he was unduly sensitive, but certainly Needham on top

of his view of the workpeople made him queasy.

Needham emptied and refilled a glass. “I’d hang every man who strikes,”

he said. “Look at ‘em here,” he went on, producing a hand-bill which he

offered to Reuben.

“After the peace of Amiens,” it read, “the wages of a Journeyman Weaver

would amount to 2/7 1/2 per day or 15/9 per week, and this was pretty

near upon a par with other mechanics and we maintained our rank in

society. We will now contrast our present situation with the past, and

it will demonstrate pretty clearly the degraded state to which we have

been reduced.

“During the last two years our wages have been reduced to so low an

ebb that for the greatest part of that time we have... the Journeyman’s

Wages of 9d or 10d a day or from 4/6 to 5/--per week, and we appeal to

your candor and good sense, whether such a paltry sum be sufficient to

keep the soul and body together.”

“What do you think of that?” asked Needham. “Printing it, mind you,

spreading sedition and disaffection like that. Not a word about their

wives and children all taken into the factories and all taking good

wages out. If commerce isn’t to be unshackled and free of the attacks of

a turbulent and insurrectionary spirit, I ask you, where are we? Where’s

our chance of keeping law and order when the law permits weavers to

combine and yap together and issue bills like yond? It’s fatal to allow

‘em to feel their strength and communicate with each other without

restraint. Allow them to go on uninterrupted and they become more

licentious every day. What do you say, Hepplestall?”

“Why, sir, it’s you who are making a speech, and I may add a speech

containing many very familiar phrases.”

“Aye, I’ve said it before, and to you. I might have spared my breath.

But hast heard the latest? Dost know that the strikers in Blackburn

destroyed every power-loom within six miles of the town and... and...”

Mr. Needham drew in breath... “and they’ve been syringing cloth wi’

vitriol. Soft sawder in yond hand-bill, ‘appeal to your candor and good

sense,’ aye and vitriol on good cloth when it comes to deeds.”

“Yes, I heard of that. A nasty business, though I understand the

authorities have dealt strongly with the outbreak.”

“Aye, you’re a philosopher, because it happened at a distance from you.

It’s some one else’s looms that’s smashed, and some one else’s cloth

that’s rotted. What if it were youm, Hepplestall?”

“We don’t have Luddites here.”

“You allays think you’re out of everything. Now I’ve brought you the

facts and you know as well as I do what’s the cause of this uppishness

of the lower orders. It’s Peel, damn him. One of us, and ought to know

better. Sidmouth’s the man for my money. Sidmouth and Castlereagh.

There was sense about when they were in charge. Now, we let the spinners

combine and the weavers combine and they’re treading on our faces. Well,

are you standing by your lonesome as usual or are you in it with the

rest of us to petition against workmen’s combinations? That’s a straight

question, Hepplestall.”

“I shall take time to answer it, Mr. Needham. I have acted with you in

the past and I have taken leave to doubt the wisdom of your actions and

I have on such occasions acted neither with you nor against you. This

time--”

“This time, there’s no chance of doubt.”

“But I do doubt, sir. I doubt whether a factory, controlled by a strong

hand, has anything to fear from Workmen’s Combinations.”

“Damn it, look at Blackburn!”

“You shall have my decision when it is ready. At this moment, I tell you

candidly I do not incline to join you.”

“But union is strength. They’ve combined. So must we.”

“We always have, in essentials. I promise you I will give this matter

every thought.”

Needham looked angry, and then a cunning slyness passed across his face.

“I’m satisfied with that,” he said. “Aye, I’m satisfied, though you may

tell me I’ve come a long road to be satisfied wi’ so little at the end

o’ it.” Reuben rose, bowing gravely. “I am glad to have satisfied you,

Mr. Needham,” he said, blandly ignoring the hint that an invitation to

dinner was the natural expectation of a traveled caller.

“Aye,” said Needham, “Aye.” He finished the bottle, since nothing more

substantial was forthcoming, and rose to go. “Then I’ll be hearing from

you?”

“Yes,” Reuben assured him. “I will see you to your horse.”

“Nay, you’ll not. They don’t breed my make of horse. I’ve a coach at

door, and extra strong, too.”

“Then I will see you to your coach.” Needham nodded to the silent

Edward, and went out with Reuben. There was no strategical issue between

Needham and Hepple-stall. Needham, when he spoke, used phrases taken

from the writings of manufacturers more literate than himself, and

so stated, by such a man, his point of view sounded preposterously

obscurantist. But it was, in essence, Reuben’s view also, with the

difference that Reuben looked on attempts to combat the principle of

Unionism as tactical error. The Combination Acts, he felt, had gone

for ever, and the common policy of the masters should not be in the

direction of reviving those Acts but of meeting the consequences of

their repeal.

He was, indeed, habitually averse from open association with his fellow

manufacturers because of his self-conscious social difference, and,

where such a man as Needham led, was apt to pick more holes in his

policy than were reasonable. It was quite likely in the present case

that he would come round to Needham’s view, but certainly he would not

hurry. The troubles at Blackburn were remote from him and he felt his

own factory was out of the danger zone, and that if he threw in his

weight with the Needham petition it would be altruistically, and perhaps

a waste of influence which could have found better employment. His

own people were showing no signs of restiveness, and he didn’t think

Unionism was making much headway amongst them. Reason and self-interest

seemed allied with his native individualism to resist Needham’s policy.

He returned to find Edward staring gloomily at his boots. “Well,

Edward?” he asked cheerily. “Did you like your lesson?”

“The thing I liked, sir, the only thing I liked, is that you are not to

act with Mr. Needham.”

“Am I not?”

“It did not sound so. Tell me, is that a fair specimen of the type of

man you meet in business?”

“No. In many ways he is superior to the most.”

“Superior! That fat elephant!”

“Needham is one of the strongest men in the cotton trade, Edward.”

“Oh, I called him elephant. Elephants have strength.”

“And strength is despicable?”

“No. But--”

“But Needham is a gross pill to swallow. Well, if it will ease your

mind, I do not propose to act with him on this issue. You need not

swallow this pill, Edward. But I am not looking to a son of mine to be

a runaway from duty, to be a loiterer in smooth places. You have Oxford

which is, I hope, confirming you as a gentleman and you have the factory

which will confirm you as a man. I could make you an appeal. I could

first point out that I am single-handed here in a position which grows

beyond the strength of any single pair of hands. I could dub you my

natural ally at a time when I have need of an ally. But I shall make you

neither an appeal nor a command. Hepplestall’s is a greater thing than

I who made it or than you who will inherit it, and there is no occasion

for pressure. You are, naturally, inevitably, in its service.” Edward

felt rather than saw that somewhere at the opening of the well down

which this plunged him there was daylight. “I do not perceive the

inevitability,” he cried. “You doom me to a monstrous fate.”

“You are heroical,” said Reuben, “but as to the inevitability, take

time, and you will perceive it.”

“Daylight! Give me the daylight!” was what Edward wanted to say, but he

repressed that and hardly more happily he asked, “Is there no beauty in

life?”

“There is beauty in Hepplestall’s,” said Reuben, and meant it. He had

created Hepplestall’s.

CHAPTER IX--THE SPY

EDWARD’S “fat elephant” drove from Hepplestall’s meditating his retort

to Reuben’s intransigeancy. He held that it was necessary to weld the

manufacturers into a solid phalanx of opposition to the legalizing

of Trade Unions, and that if Reuben were allowed to stand out, other

masters, whom Needham regarded as weak-kneed, would stand out with him.

Needham was obstinate and unscrupulous, with a special grudge against

“kid-gloved” Hepplestall, and if there were no overt manifestations of

discontent in Hepplestall’s factory, his business was to provoke them.

There was surely latent discontent there as everywhere else and the

good days of Sidmouth and Castlereagh had shown what could be achieved

in the way of manufacturing riot by the use of informers. Informers

were paid to inform, and lost their occupation if no information were

forthcoming; they did not lose their occupation; they were agents

provocateurs, and Gentleman Hepplestall was, if Needham knew right from

left, to be thwacked into line by the activities of an informer.

He hadn’t much difficulty--he was that sort of man--in laying hands

upon a suitable instrument. The name of the instrument was Thomas

Barraclough, and it was, indeed, in Needham’s hands already working as

a weaver in his factory, not, to be sure, for the purpose of provoking

unrest there but merely for decent spying. There is honesty in spying as

in other things and the decent spy is the observer and reporter of what

others do spontaneously; the indecent spy is he who instigates the deeds

he afterwards reports. Barraclough was quite willing, for a higher

fee, to undertake to prove to Hepplestall that Trade Unions were murder

clubs.

The affair was not stated, even by blunt Needham to his spy, with quite

such candor as this, but, “If tha’ sees signs o’ trouble yonder, tell me

of ’em; and if tha’ sees no signs tha’s blinder than I tak’ thee

for,” was a sufficiently plain direction to an intelligent spy,

and Barraclough nodded comprehendingly as he went off to begin his

cross-country tramp to Hepplestall’s.

A spy who looks like a spy is disqualified at once, but what are the

symptoms of spying? What signs does spying hang out on a man that we

shall know him for a spy? Is he bent with a life spent in crouching at

key holes? A keen-eyed, large-eared ferret of a man? The fact is that

Barraclough was small and bent, and ferretty, that he looked like your

typical spy and yet did not look, in the Lancashire of those days, any

different from a famished weaver. They were “like boys of fifteen and

sixteen and most of them cannot measure more than 5 feet 2 or 3 inches.”

Steam fastened on this generation, stunting it, twisting it, blasting

it, and if Barraclough had been reasonably tall, reasonably well-made

and nourished he would have been marked at once as something different

from the workers who were to accept him as one of themselves. So,

in spite of looking like a spy, he was qualified to be a spy in

Hepplestall’s because he looked like any other undergrown, underpaid,

underfed weaver lad.

And there is good in all things, though Hepplestall was not thinking

of the Blackburn riots as good when he was cavalier about them with

Needham. There was the good, for Hepplestall’s, that the destruction of

the Blackburn looms and their products brought an exceptional rush of

orders to Reuben; and Thomas Barraclough, applying for work when he

ended his tramp at the factory gates, found himself given immediate

employment.

He found, too, that as an honest spy he had no occupation in this place.

He could report distress, sullen suffering and patient suffering; he

could report the ordinary things and would have to say, in honesty, that

here the ordinary things had extraordinary mitigations; and he found

nothing of the violent flavor expected by Needham. It remained for him

to take the initiative and to provide against disappointing his master’s

expectations, but the mental sketch he had made of himself as an

effective explosive did not seem likely to be justified in any hurry.

The Blackburn riots had not been followed by such ferocity of punishment

as had befallen the Luddites a few years previously, but there had been

men killed by soldiers during the riots: there were ten death sentences

at Lancaster Assizes, reduced afterwards to transportation for life: and

thirty-three rioters were sent to prison. That was fairly impressive, as

it was meant to be, but much more impressive was the appalling distress

which quite naturally fell upon the Blackburn people who had destroyed

the looms, and if all this was salutary from the point of view of law

and order it was excessively inopportune from the special point of view

of Mr. Barraclough.

Here he was, under orders to raise tumult, in a place where not only

were there no symptoms of tumult, but where those who might possibly

be tumultuously disposed were cowed by the tales, many true and many

exaggerated, of Blackburn’s sufferings. The malignant irony of the uses

of the agent provocateur was never better exemplified, but it wasn’t

for Needham’s trusty informer to chew upon that, but, whatever his

difficulties, to get on with his incitements. And he soon decided that

Hepplestall’s people, in the mass, were “windbags,” that is, they would

listen to him and they would, in conversation, be as vehement as he, but

their vehemence was in words not deeds and only deeds were of any use

to Barraclough. The method of the Luddites, machinery-smashing, was

discredited for ever by the Blackburn example and he gave up hope of

any large-scale demonstration at Hepple-stall’s. What was left was

the possibility of finding some individual who was capable of being

influenced to violent action.

Then, just as he was despairing of finding the rightly malleable

material, Annie Bradshaw’s second son was born and Annie Bradshaw died.

She had been almost luxuriously careful about the birth of her first

child: she had left the factory three days before his birth and had not

returned, with the child at her breast, for a full week afterwards; but

second babies were said to come more easily, wages were needed and she

had lifted heavy beams before. The child was born on the factory floor,

it lived and Annie died. There was no extraordinary pother made about

her death, because women were continually defying steam in this way and

most of them survived it. Annie did not survive. She was unlucky. That

was all.

“Don’t fret for me, lad,” she gasped to John. “I’m going through the

Golden Gates. Tak’ care o’ the childer.” The engine did not stop--guns

do not cease fire because a soldier falls on the battlefield--and to

John Bradshaw, nineteen, widower with two infant sons, it beat a devil’s

tattoo of stunning triumph. There were women gathered around her body,

somewhere a woman was washing his son, but he was seeing nothing of

them, nothing of the life that had come through death. Annie was gone

from him, his glorious Annie of the winds and the moors, lying white

and silent on the oily floor of a stinking factory, and already the

women were leaving her, already they were returning to their several

places. If they gave him sympathy, they took bread out of their mouths

and sympathy must be so brief as to appear callosity. It was not

callosity, and he knew it; knew, too, that he did not want long-winded

condolences or any condolences at all, yet their going so quickly from

that white body seemed to him a stark indecency adding to the monstrous

debt Steam owed him.

He was thinking of the small profanities of this death rather than of

the death itself. He hadn’t realized that yet, he was probing his way

through the attendant circumstances to the depths of his tragedy. He

knew that he would never lie beneath the stars again with Annie while

the breeze soughed through the heather and she crooned old songs of the

roads in his ear: he knew, but he did not believe it yet. She had been

so utterly protective of him. If she took down her hair, and held it

from her, and he crept beneath its curious warmth, what had mattered

then? He had loved her and by the grace of Phoebe--though he was not

thinking of Phoebe now--they had been given leave to love and to enjoy

each other in the hours which were not the factory’s.

The engine, thumped horribly on his ear and a gust of passionate hatred

struggled to make itself articulate. “You fiend!” he cried. “Curse you,

curse you!”

When an overseer came to tell him that a hand-cart was at the gates to

take Annie’s body and the baby home, and that Phoebe might go with him,

he was lying, dazed, on the floor and mechanically did what he was told

to do. He had no volition in him, and Mr. Barraclough, professional

observer, noting both his hysteria and his stupor decided that he had

found his man at last. Providence had ordained that Annie should die to

make an instrument for Richard Needham’s emissary.

In the days of her youth, Phoebe had her follies as she had her

prettiness; now, schooled by adversity, an old woman of forty, she was

without illusions as she was without comeliness; she had nothing but her

son, and, hidden like a miser’s gold, her hatred of the Hepplestalls,

of Reuben who betrayed her, of Dorothy whom he married, of his sons who

stood where her son should have stood. For two seconds she was weakened

now, for two seconds: as she folded Annie’s baby in her shawl and held

him closely to her she had the thought that she must go to Reuben with a

plea for help, then put that thought away.

“Don’t worry your head about the childer, lad,” she said, “I’ll manage.”

She would work in the factory, she would order their cottage, she would

rear the babies, she would pay some older woman who was past more active

work a small sum (but the accepted rate) to look after the babies while

she was in the factory. She would take this burden off his shoulders

as she had taken the burden of housework off Annie’s. She had permitted

John and Annie to enjoy the luxury of love and now she was permitting

John the luxury of woe. She said that she would “manage,” he knew the

enormous implications of the word, but knew, because she said it, that

she would keep her promise. There was no limit to his faith in Phoebe

and he touched her shoulder gently, undemonstratively, saying in that

simple gesture all his unspeakable gratitude, accepting what she gave

not because he underrated it, not because he did not understand, but

because it was the only thing to do.

For her his touch and his acceptance were abundance of reward. Go to

Hepplestall! Take charity, when this sustaining faith was granted her?

Oh, she would manage though her body cracked. It was a soiling and a

shameful thought that these babes were Reuben’s grandchildren.

They were not his and John, please God, would never know who was his

father; they were hers and John’s and they two would keep them for their

own.

It wasn’t bravado either. It wasn’t a brief heroical resolution begotten

of the emotions caused by Annie’s death. She counted the cost and chose

her fight, spurning the thought of Hepplestall as if the justice he

might do her were an obscenity. She knew what she undertook to do and,

providing only that she had ten more years of life, she would do it.

John, mourning for Annie, was not too sunk in grief to be unaware of the

fineness of his mother. Would Annie--she who loved her life--have said

“Things are,” if she had foreseen how soon the things which were bad

were to be so infinitely worse? The factory had killed her, it had taken

his Annie from him, it had put upon his mother in her age the burden

she took up with a matter of fact resignation that seemed to him the

ultimate impeachment of the system which made heroism a commonplace.

“Mother!” he cried. “Mother!”

“Eh, lad,” she said, “we’ve got to take what comes.”

She did not, at least, as Annie did, answer his inarticulate revolt with

religion, but she had fundamentally the same resignation to the things

of this world, and for the same reason. She, too, looked forward to

a radiant life above: she saw in her present troubles the hand of God

justly heavy upon one who had been a light woman. John, knowing nothing

of that secret source of her humility, attributed all to the one cause,

to the Factory which crushed and maimed and killed in spirit as in body.

He refused his acceptance, his resignation. There was, there must be,

something to be done. But what? What?

First, at any rate, Annie had to be buried with the circumstance which

seemed to make for decency and for that they had provided through the

Benefit Society. This---decent burial--was the first thought behind the

weekly contributions paid, heaven knows at what sacrifice, to the

Society and they were rewarded now in the fact that Annie was not buried

at the expense of the parish. That was all, bare decency, not the

flaunting parody with plumes and gin of the slightly less poor: nor were

there many mourners. Leave was given to a select few to be absent for an

hour from the factory, and the severe fines for unauthorized absence

kept the numbers strictly, with one exception, to the few the overseer

chose to privilege. Phoebe and John were granted the full day, without

fine, and, of course, without wage, and so, it appeared, was Mr.

Barraclough. But Mr. Barraclough was on business, and the fine that he

would have to pay would figure in the expenses he would charge Mr.

Needham.

One or two old women--old in fact if not in years, incapacitated by the

factory, for the factory--had been at the graveside and were going home

with Phoebe, and it was natural that John should hold out his hand to

Barraclough, this unexpected, this so self-sacrificing sympathizer and

that they should fall into step as they moved away together.

“Man, I had to come. I’m that sorry for thee. Coming doan’t mean much

for sure, but--”

“It means a day’s wages, choose how,” said John, who knew that

Barraclough was not of the few who had been granted an hour’s leave to

come.

Barraclough nodded. “And a fine, an’ all,” he said, “but that all counts

somehow. Seems to me if it weren’t costing me summat, it u’d not be the

same relief it is to my feelings. I didna come for thy sake, I came to

please masel’, selfish like. I had to get away from yond damned place

that murdered her. I couldna’ stand the sight o’ it to-day.”

“Murdered her!” said John. He had, no doubt, used that word in thought,

but it had seemed to him audacious, a thought to be forbidden utterance.

And here, shaming him for his mildness was one, an outsider, a stranger,

who, untouched intimately by Annie’s death, yet spoke of it outright as

murder. John felt that he was failing Annie, that he had not risen to

his occasion, that it was this other, this fine spirit, who could not

“stand the sight” of the factory on the day of her funeral, who had

risen to the occasion more worthily than John, who was Annie’s husband.

“Aye,” he said somberly, “it was murder.”

“You never doubted that, surely,” said Barraclough.

“Oh,” said John, “when a woman dies in childbirth--”

“Aye, but fair treated women don’t. What art doing now? I mean for the

rest of the day. Looking at it from my point of view, I might as well

tak’ the chance to get out o’ sight o’ yond hell-spot. I’m going

on moors for a breath of air. Wilt come? Better nor settin’ to hoam

brooding, tha’ knows.”

His point was simply to get John in his emotional crisis to himself, but

luck was with him in his proposal further than he knew. For John, the

moors were a reminder of Annie at her sunniest, but for the moment all

that he was thinking of was that strange instinct for the sympathetic

stranger rather than for the sympathy, too poignant to be borne, of his

mother. And he did not wish to see his sons that day.

“‘Tis better nor brooding,” he agreed, and went. There was virtue, he

thought, in talking. Phoebe was all reserve and action, and on this

which resolved itself into a day off from the factory, she would be very

active in her house. He was quite sure that he did not want to go

home. Exercise for his legs, air for his lungs and the conversation,

comprehending but naturally not too intimate, of this kindly

stranger--these were the things to get him through the day.

But the conversation of Mr. Barraclough was not calculated to be an

anodyne.

“Thank God, we’ve gotten our backs to it. We’re walking away from yond

devilry, we’ve our faces to summat green.” How often had he not heard

something like that from Annie! “It beats me to guess what folks are

made of, both the folk that stand factories and t’other folks that drive

‘em into factories. I know I’ve gotten an answer to some of this under

my bed where I lodge and I’ll mak’ the answer speak one of these days

an’ all.”

“An answer? What answer? I’ve looked and found no answer.”

“No? They looked at Blackburn and found th’ wrong answer an’ all,

th’ould answer that the Luddites found and failed wi’. Smashing

machines! Burning factories! What’s, the good o’ that? They nobbut

put up new factories bigger and more hellish than before and mak’ new

machines that’ll do ten men’s work instead of two. Aye, they were on

wrong tack in them days. They were afraid to get on right tack.”

“Is there a tack that’s right?” he asked.

“There’s shooting,” said Barraclough.

“Shooting? Tha’ canna shoot an engine, nor a factory.”

“No, and that’s the old mistake. Trying to hit back at senseless brick

and iron. There’s men behind the factories, men that build and men that

manage. Men that own and tak’ the profits of our blood and death. For

instance, who killed thy wife?”

“Why... why...” hesitated John, who was still intrigued obscurely with

the idea that he, the father of her child, was author of her death.

“She died o’ th’ conditions o’ Hepplestall’s factory and yo’ canna’

bring yer verdict o’ willful murder against conditions. Yo’ bring it

against the fiend that made the conditions. Yo’ bring it against Reuben

Hepplestall.”

“Maister Hepplestall!”

“Aye, Maister. Maister o’ us fra’ head to heel. Maister o’ our lives and

deaths, and gotten hissel’ so high above us that I can see tha’s scared

to hear me talk that road of him.” That was true, Barraclough seemed to

John almost blasphemous. Hepplestall _was_ high above them, so that to

make free with his name in this manner was something outrageous. “Aye,

the spunk’s scared out of thee by the name of Hepplestall as if tha’

were a child and him a boggart. But I tell thee this, he isna a boggart.

He’s a man and if my bullet gets him, he’ll bleed and if it gets him in

the right place, he’ll die, and there’ll be one less in the world o’

the fiends that own factories and murder women to mak’ a profit for

theirselves.”

“You’d do that! You!”

“Some one must do the job. Th’ gun’s to hoam under my bed, loaded an’

all. Execution of a murderer, that’s what it’ll be. Justice on the

man that killed thy wife.” John halted abruptly. “What’s to do?” asked

Barraclough. “Let’s mak’ th’ most of this day out o’ factory. Folks like

thee and me mustna’ think too much of causes o’ things. The cause of

this day off was thy wife’s death, but we’ve agreed tha’s not to brood.

So come on into sunshine and mak’ the most of what we’ve gotten.”

“We’ll mak’ the most of it by turning to hoam,” said John.

“Thy hoam’s no plaice for thee to-day.”

“No. But thy hoam is,” said John. “I want to see yon gun. I’m thinkin’

that’ll be a better sight for me nor all the heather in Lankysheer.”

“For thee?” Mr. Barraclough was greatly surprised. “Nay, I doubt I was

wise to mention my secret to thee.”

“Art coming?” John was striding resolutely homewards.

“Well, seeing I have mentioned it, I suppose there’s no partiklar harm

in showing it. O’ course, tha’ canna’ use a gun?”

“Can’t I? No, you’re reight there. I’m not much of a man, am I? As tha’

told me, I’ve gotten no spunk, but I’ve spunk enough now. It weren’t

more than not seeing clear and tha’s cleared things up for me

wonnerful.”

“I have? How?”

“Tha’ can shoot, if I canna’, Barraclough.” Which was disappointing to

the spy, who thought things were going better than this.

Still he could bide his time and “Aye, I can shoot,” he said. “I’ve been

in militia.”

“Then tha’ can teach me,” said John, to Mr. Barraclough’s relief. “I’ll

be a quick learner.”

“Well, as tha’s interested, I’ll show thee how a trigger’s pulled,”

and Barraclough was, in fact, not intending to go further than that in

musketry instruction. Hepplestall killed might, indeed, encourage

the others, it might array the manufacturers solidly under Needham’s

reactionary standard, but Barraclough read murder as going beyond his

directions, and supposed that if Reuben were fired on and missed (as

he would be by an amateur marksman), the demonstration of unrest at

Hepplestall’s would have been satisfyingly made.

He was, therefore, sparing in his tutorship when they had come into his

room and handled the gun together. “We munna call the whole neighborhood

about our ears by the sound of a shot,” he said.

“No,” said John, “but if tha’ll lend me this, I’ll find a plaice for

practicing up on moors.”

“Lend thee my gun! Nay, lad, tha’s asking summat. It wenna do to carry

that about in daylight.”

“I’ll tak’ it to-neight, and bring un back to-morrow neight.”

“To-neight? Tha’ canna’ practice in the dark.”

“Maybe I’ll ha’ no need to practice. Maybe there’s justice and summat

greater nor me to guide a bullet home. I can nobbut try and I’m bound to

try to-neight--the neight o’ the day I buried her, the neight when I’m

hot. I’m poor spirited and I know it, and I’m wrought up now. To-morrow

I’ll be frit.”

Barraclough balanced the gun in his hands. “I had my own ideas o’ this,”

he said--the idea in particular, he might have added, had this been an

occasion for candor, that such precipitancy was contrary to the best

interests of an informer. Before an event occurred, a sagacious spy

should have prophesied it and here was this ardent boy in so desperate

a hurry for action that Barraclough was like to be cheated of the

opportunity of proving to Needham that he was dutifully accessory before

the fact.

But, he reflected, he had not found Hepplestall’s a fertile earth for

his seeds, and if he played pranks with this present opportunity, if he

attempted delay with a boy like John, a temperamentalist now in the

mood to murder, he might very well lose his only chance of justifying

himself. Besides, he could yet figure as a prophet and at the same time

establish a sound alibi for himself if immediately after handing the

gun over to John, he set off to report to Needham. On the whole, he saw

himself accomplishing the object of his mission satisfactorily enough.

“Who’s gotten the better right?” John was saying. “Thou that’s not had

nobhut a month o’ the plaice, or me that buried a wife this day killed

by Hepplestall?”

Barraclough bowed his head. He thought it politic to hide his face just

then, and the motion had the seeming of a reverent assent. “I’ve no

reply to that,” he said.

“Thy claim is strongest. Come when it’s dark, and tha’ shall have the

gun.”

John moved to the door.

“Where’st going now?” asked Barraclough, apprehensive of the slackening

of the spring he had wound up.

“To her grave,” said John, and Barraclough nodded approvingly. He

trusted Annie’s grave; there would be no slackening of the spring and

mentally he thanked John for thinking of a grave-side vigil. Barraclough

had not thought of anything so trustworthy; he had thought of an inn, to

which the objections were that he had no wish to be seen in company with

John, and that alcohol is capricious in effect.

Barraclough had given him a goal, and an outlet for all his pent-up

emotion. There was his dreadful childhood in the factory, then the

splendid mitigation whose name was Annie, and the tearing loss of her:

behind all that, there was the System and above it now was Hepple-stall.

He had an exaltation by her grave. There was a people enslaved by

Hepplestall and there was John Bradshaw, their deliverer, John Bradshaw

magnified till he was qualified for the high rôle of an avenging angel.

He was without fear of himself or of any consequences, he had no doubts

and no loose ends, he had simply a purpose--to kill Hepplestall. To be

sane is to think and John did not think: he felt.

There was some reason why he could not kill Hepplestall till it was

dark. Once or twice he tried, vaguely, to remember what the reason was,

then forgot that he was trying to remember anything. When it was dark

he was to go to Barraclough’s for the gun with which he would kill

Hepplestall. He was cold and hungry, shivering violently and aware of

nothing but that he was God’s executioner.

When dusk came he left the grave and went, dry-lipped, stumbling like

a man walking in a dream, to Barra-clough’s. At the sight of him,

Barraclough had more than doubt. Of what use a gun in these palsied

hands? What demonstration, other than one palpably insane, could this

trembling instrument effect?

But Bradshaw was the one hope of the agent and since there was nothing

else to trust, he must trust his luck.

“The gun! The gun!”

Barraclough placed it in his hands without a word and John turned with

it and was gone. The canny Barraclough, taking his precautions in case

the worst (or the best) happened, slept that night in a public-house

midway between Needham’s and Hepplestall’s. He had made himself pleasant

to several passers-by on the road; he had asked them the time; he had

established his alibi.

CHAPTER X--DOROTHY’S MOMENT

WHEN Edward came home on the day of his introduction to the factory,

Dorothy met him with an anxious, “Well, Edward?” and, “Oh, Mother,” he

had said, “I have to think of this. Pray do not ask me now.”

That was all and, if she liked, she could consider herself snubbed for

attempting an unwomanly inquisitiveness into the affairs of men, but he

intended no snub nor did she interpret him as side-tracking her. It was,

simply, that he refused to involve Dorothy in this trouble.

He might be forced to take some desperate measure--nothing more hopeful

than his first thought of enlistment had yet occurred to him--and if

things were to come to an ugly pass like that he wasn’t going to have

his mother concerned in them. He declined the factory, and discussion

would not help.

Reuben felt no surprise at Edward’s silence. The boy was, no doubt,

considering his situation and would come in time to the right

conclusions about it; he would see that this was not a thing to be

settled now, but one which had been settled twenty years ago by the fact

that Edward was Reuben’s firstborn son. No: he was not anxious about

Edward, with his jejune opinions, his young effervescence, his failure,

from the polities of Oxford, to perceive that life was earnest. Edward

wanted, did he, to play at being a lawyer: so had Reuben once played

at being a Jacobite. Youth had its green sickness. But Dorothy was

different: he couldn’t disembarrass himself so easily about Dorothy.

They were all putting a barrier between their thoughts and their words,

but marriage had not blunted, it had increased, his sensitiveness to

Dorothy’s moods, and he was aware that she was troubled now more deeply

than he had ever known her moved before. She seemed to him to be badly

missing the just perspective, to be making a mountain of a mole-hill, to

be making tragedy out of the commonplace comedy of ingenuous youth,

to be too much the mother and too little the wife, to be, by unique

exception, unreasonable: but all this counted for nothing with him when

Dorothy was pained. Yet he couldn’t, in justice, blame Edward as first

cause of her grief when the cause was not Edward, or Edward’s youth,

but the universal malady of youth. He reminded himself again of that

fantastic folly of his own youth, Jacobitism, and it was notably

forebearing in him to remember it now and to decide that his own green

sickness had been less excusable than Edward’s.

What it came to was that some one must clear the air, some one must

break this painful silence they were, by common consent, keeping about

the subject uppermost in their minds. In a few days now Edward

would return to Oxford for his last term and it must be understood,

explicitly, that when he came home it was to begin his apprenticeship at

the factory. Get this thing finally settled, get it definitely stated in

terms on both sides, and Dorothy would cease to make a grief of it. It

was the inconclusiveness, he thought, which perturbed her.

Edward had a Greek text on his knee when Reuben went into the

drawing-room: he might or he might not have been reading it. He might

have been conscious that Dorothy had suddenly got up and thrown the

curtains back from the window and had opened it and stood there now as

if she needed air. Reuben had the tact to make no comment.

He sat down. Then he said, “Edward, I have been thinking of the time

when I was your age and it came into my mind that had I then been shown

a factory such as I showed you the other week, I should have thought it

a very atrocious sight. I couldn’t, of course, actually have been shown

such a place when I was your age, for there were no such places. Steam

was in its infancy. But I put the matter as I do to show you that I

understand the feelings you did not trouble to conceal.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Edward. “I have to acknowledge that I was not

complimentary to your achievement. I was not thinking of it as an

achievement, but I, too, have been thinking and I see how cubbishly I

failed in my appreciation.”

“Come,” said Reuben, “this is better.”

“As far as it goes, sir, yes. But I am not to go much further. In the

shock of seeing the ugliness of that place, I believe that I forgot my

manners--more than my manners. I forgot your mastery of steam. I forgot

that having turned manufacturer, you became a great manufacturer. I--”

he hesitated. “I am not trying to be handsome. I am trying to be just.”

“Just?”

“And, believe me, trying not to be smug. I only plead, sir, that I am

old enough to know my own tastes.”

“Are you? I can only look back to myself, Edward, and I am certain that

when I was your age, I had no taste for work.”

“A barrister’s is a busy life, sir. That is what I seek to persuade

you.”

“And I grant you that it may be. I will grant even that you may have a

taste for work, and work of a legal kind. And I have still to ask you if

you think it right to put selfish tastes in front of plain duty.”

“Oh, why did you send me to Oxford, sir? Why, if you destined me for the

factory, did you first show me the pleasantness of the world?”

“I wished my son to be an educated gentleman. You have seen Richard

Needham. He is a product, extreme, but still a product, of the factories

and nothing but the factories. He is, as I told you, an able man. But he

is coarse. He is a manufacturer who has no thought beyond manufacturing.

That is why I sent you to Oxford, where you went knowing that you were

heir to Hepplestall’s. You have treated this subject now as if the

factory was a surprise that I have sprung upon you.”

“In theory, sir, I suppose I knew what you expected of me. But I had

never seen the factory and the factory, in practice, after Oxford, after

some education, some glimpse of the humanities, is--”

“I, too,” Reuben warned him, “had my education.”

“Yes,” said Edward. “Yes,” and looked at his father with something like

awe. It was true that Reuben was educated--if Edward wanted proof,

there was that bookishness of his which bordered at least on

scholarliness--and he had stomached the factory; he had stomached it and

remained a gentleman! He impressed Edward by his example: he had had the

cleverness, in this conversation, to suggest that Edward, young, was in

the same case as Reuben, young, had been.

As a fact, their cases were not parallel at all. Circumstances such as

Mr. Bantison had pressed Reuben into manufacturing: he had discovered,

almost at once, his enthusiasm for steam: he had surrendered himself

with the imaginative glamor of the pioneer and if the road was stony, if

once he had strayed down the by-path whose name was Phoebe, he had, at

the end of it, Dorothy, that bright objective. Edward had none of these.

Edward came from Oxford, with his spruce ambition to cut a figure at

the bar, and was confronted with the menacing immensity of the great

factory, full-grown in naked ugliness. He was without motive, other than

the commands of his father, to do outrage on his prejudices.

But it was not for Reuben to point out these differences, nor, it

seemed, for Dorothy to intervene with word of such of them as she

perceived. She was all with Edward in this struggle, but she was loyal

to Reuben and he did her grave injustice if he thought she had made

alliance with her son against her husband. She had kept silence and she

meant to keep silent to the end--if she could, if, that is, Reuben did

not drive too hard: and she had to acknowledge that, so far, he had

not used the whip. As for her private sufferings, she hoped she had the

courage to keep them private. That was the badge of women.

“Then I can only admire,” Edward was saying. “I can only give you best.

I can only say you are a stronger man than I.”

Reuben thought so too, but “Pooh,” he said, “an older man.”

“But you were young when you took up manufacturing. I--I cannot take it

up. Let me be candid, sir. I abhor the factory.”

“We spoke just now of tastes. Will it help you to think of the factory

as an acquired taste? You are asked to make a trial of it and it is not

usual to refuse things that are known to be acquired tastes--olives, for

example--without making fair trial of them.”

“No,” said Edward, meeting his father’s eye. “But it is usual to eat

olives. It is not usual for a gentleman to turn manufacturer.”

“Edward!” Dorothy broke silence there.

“Oh!” said Reuben, “this is natural. Our limb of the law has ambitions.

Already he is fancying himself a judge--my judge.”

“I apologize, sir,” said Edward. “I acknowledge, I have never doubted,

that you are both manufacturer and gentleman. But I cannot hope to

repeat that miracle myself.”

“You can try.”

“I have the law very obstinately in my mind, sir. I could, as you say,

try to become a manufacturer. One can try to do anything, even things

that are contrary to one’s inclinations and beyond one’s strength.”

“I will lend you strength.”

“You could do that and I am the last to deny you have abundance of

strength. But I believe in spite of your aid that I should fail, and the

failure would not be a single but a double one. After failing here as

manufacturer, I could hardly hope to succeed elsewhere as a barrister. I

should have wasted my most valuable years in demonstrating to you what

I know for myself without any necessity of trial, that I am unfitted for

trade.”

“You believe yourself above it. That is the truth, Edward.”

It was the truth. Reuben had stooped and Edward did not intend to

perpetuate the stoop. Edward was a wronged man cheated of his due,

robbed by the unintelligible apostasy of his father of his birthright

of land ownership and if the attitude and the language with which he

now confronted Reuben were unfilially independent, they were, at least,

reticent and considerate expressions of what he actually thought. Reuben

imagined him youthfully extravagant: he was, on the contrary, a model of

self-restraint, he was a dam unbreakable, withstanding an urgent flood.

The indictment he could fling at his father! The resentments he could

voice! And, instead, he was doing no more than refusing to go into a

disreputable factory. Above it? He should think he was above it.

“I used the word ‘unfitted,’” he said. “Shall we let that stand?”

“Till you disprove it, it may stand. When you come down from Oxford, you

will go into the factory and disprove it.”

“No.”

“I have been very patient, Edward. I have let you talk yourself out,

but--”

“Lord, sir, the things I haven’t said!”

“Indeed? Do you wish to say them?”

Edward did, but he glanced at his mother, whose one contribution to

their discussion had been a reproof of him, of him, who had been so

splendidly restrained! Why, then, should he spare her? Why, if she

had deserted to the other side, should he not roll out his whole

impeachment? Why not, even though it implicated her, even though he must

suggest’ that she was accessory to the weaving of the web in which

he struggled? He thought she was, because of that one sharp cry, on

Reuben’s side in this.

She read that thought. She saw how wildly he who should have known

better was misunderstanding her, and it added to a suffering she had

not thought possible to increase. Was this her moment, then? Sooner or

later, she must intervene, she must throw in her weight for Edward at

whatever strain upon her loyalty to Reuben, but it must be at the right

moment and probably that moment would not come yet, when Edward was

present to confuse her by his indiscretions, but later, when she was

alone with Reuben. It was enormously, it was vitally important that she

should choose her moment well. If she spoke now, she would of course

correct the mistake that Edward was so cruelly making about her, but

that was not to the main point. She would not, if she could help it,

speak till she was sure that the favorable moment had arrived. All else

was to be subordinate to that.

Reuben followed Edward’s glance. “Yes,” he said, “you are distressing

your mother,” and, certainly, she felt her moment was escaping her. If

she spoke now she must say, “No, Reuben. You, not Edward, are the

cause of my distress,” and she could not say that. She could only wait,

feeling that to wait was to risk her moment’s never coming at all.

“I see we are distressing her,” said Edward, studiously abstaining from

putting emphasis upon the “we.”

“And the many more things that I might say shall not be said. I will

take a short cut to the end. The end is my absolute refusal to go into

the factory upon any terms whatever.”

Reuben rose, with clenched fists. He had not the intention of striking

his son, but the impulse was irresistible to dominate the slighter man,

to stand menacingly over him. How in this should she find her moment?

Where if temper rose, if Reuben did the unforgivable, if he struck

Edward, where was her opportunity to make a peace and gain her point? As

she had cried “Edward!”, so now, “Reuben!” she cried, and put a hand on

his.

He responded instantly to the sound of her voice and the touch of her

hand. “You are right, Dorothy,” he said. “We must not flatter our young

comedian by taking him gravely.”

“That is an insult, sir,” said Edward.

“In comedy,” Reuben smiled suavely at him, “it may be within the rules

for a father to insult a vaporing son. In life, such possibilities do

not exist.”

Ridicule! Edward could fight against any weapon but this. “You treat me

like a child,” he said in plaintive impotence.

“Oh, no,” said Reuben. “So far, I have given you the benefit of the

doubt. I have not whipped you yet.”

“Whipped!”

“A method of correction, Edward, used upon children and sometimes on

those whose years outstrip their sense.”

“Do you seriously picture me, sir, remaining here to be a whipping

block?”

“Children run away: and children are brought back.” Her moment! Oh, it

was slipping from her as they squabbled, Edward’s future was at stake,

and not his alone. If young Tom Hepplestall was for the army, there were

still her younger sons; there were Edward’s own unborn sons. The stake

was not Edward’s future only, it was the future of the Hepplestalls and

all her landed instincts were in revolt against the thought that her

sons were to follow Reuben in his excursion, his strange variation, from

the type she knew. Once his factory had seemed mysterious and romantic.

Now, she was facing it, she was seeing it through Edward’s outraged

eyes. Incredible mercy that she had not seen it before, but not

incredible in the light of her love for Reuben. It had been a thing

apart from her life and now, implacably, was come into it. There was no

evading the factory now; there was no facile blinking at it as a dark

place in Reuben’s life about which she could be incurious, it was

claiming her Edward, it had come, through him, into her life now.

It was crouching for her, like a beast in the jungle and what was to

happen when the beast sprang, to her, to Reuben, to their love? She had

held aloof from the factory and she had kept Reuben’s love. Were these

cause and effect and was her aloofness a condition of his love? Was her

hold on him the hold of one consenting to be a decoration, and no more

than a decoration in his life? Had she shied from facts all these years,

and was retribution at hand?

These were desperate questionings, but Edward was her son and she must

take her risks for him, even this risk imperiling her all, this so much

greater risk than the life she risked for him when he was born. But when

to speak? When to put all to the test? Surely not just now when this

pair of men, one calling the other “child,” both, one as bully, the

other as Gasconader, were behaving like children. She groped helplessly

for her moment.

Then, suddenly, as she seemed to drown in deep water and to clutch

feebly upwards, she knew that her moment was come. She had not heard the

sound of the shot coming from the shrubbery and felt no pain. She only

knew that she was weak, that her moment, safely, surely, was come, and

that she must use it quickly.

Because she was lying on the floor and Reuben and Edward were bending

over her, she was looking up into their faces. That seemed strange to

her, but everything was strange because everything was right. In this

moment, there was nothing jeopardous; she had only to speak, indeed

she need not actually trouble to put her message into words, and Reuben

would infallibly agree with her. There were no difficulties, after all.

She had felt that it was only a question of the right moment, and here

was her moment, exquisitely, miraculously, compellingly right.

Her hand seemed very heavy to lift but, somehow, she lifted it, somehow

she was holding Reuben’s hand and Edward’s, somehow she was joining them

in friendship and forgiveness. It was right, it was right beyond all

doubt. Reuben would never coerce Edward now, and she smiled happily up

at them.

“Reuben,” she said, then “Edward,” that was all. Her hand fell to the

floor.

Edward looked up from Dorothy’s dead face to see his father disappearing

through the window, but Reuben need not have hurried. John Bradshaw was

standing in the shrubbery twenty yards from the window, making no effort

to run. There was no effort left in him. He was the spring wound up by

Mr. Barraclough; now he had acted and he was relaxed; he was relaxed and

happy. A life for a life, and such a life--Hepplestall’s! He had led his

people out of slavery. He had shot Hepplestall.

And in the light from the window, he saw rushing at him the man who was

dead. There was no Annie now to laugh his superstitious fears away and

to fold him in her protective arms: there was no one to tell him that

the silent figure was not Hepplestall’s ghost. He believed utterly that

a “boggart” was leaping at him.

True, there was a leap, and a blow delivered straight at his jaw with

all the force of Reuben’s passionate grief behind it, and the blow met

empty air. John, felled by a mightier force than Reuben’s, felled by

his ghostly fear, lay crumpled on the ground and Hepplestall, recovering

balance, flung him over his shoulder like a sack and was carrying him

into the house before the servants, alarmed by the shot, had reached the

room.

Edward met him. “I am riding for the doctor, sir,” he said.

“Doctor?” said Reuben. “It’s not a doctor that is needed now, it’s a

hangman. Lock that in the cellar,” he said to the servants, dropping his

sprawling burden on the floor, “and go for the constables.” Then, when

they were gone, when he had silenced by one look their cries of horror

and they had slunk out of the door as if they and not the senseless boy

they carried were the murderers, “Leave me, Edward, leave me,” he said.

Edward stretched out his hand. There was sympathy in his gesture and

there was, too, a claim to a share in the sorrow that had come to them.

Dorothy was Edward’s mother.

“Go,” said Reuben fiercely; and Edward left him with his dead.

The beast had made his spring. Dorothy had not gone to the factory, and

the factory had come to her.

CHAPTER XI--THE HATE OF THE HEPPLESTALLS

PHOEBE made all reasonable, and a few indulgent, allowances for the

weaknesses of manflesh, but when she awoke to the knowledge that

John had not been home all night, she was downright angry with him. A

bereaved husband might accept the consolation offered by his friends on

the day of his wife’s funeral, and might go on accepting it late into

the night. She had left the door on the latch for him with the thought

that it wasn’t like John to drown his sorrow, but men were men, even the

best of them, and she had put a lot of housework behind her that day. He

would have been constantly getting in her way with his clumsy efforts to

help, and if he had found forgetfulness, no matter how, they had both of

them come through the day very well.

But he had not come home at all; he had forgotten too thoroughly, and

Phoebe intended to give him “the rough side of her tongue” the moment

she came across him in the factory. It never occurred to her that he

would not be in the factory. To be out all night was a departure from

his custom, and on such a night a departure from decency, but to be

absent from work was more than either of these; it was defiance of

necessity, a treachery to her and to his children and she knew her

John better than to suspect him of conduct like that. He might be

grief-stricken and, after that (homeopathically), ale-stricken, but the

law of nature was “Work or Clem,” and John would be at work.

He was not at work, and that was not the only thing to be remarked that

morning. Nobody appeared to have a word for her, though there was an

exceptional disposition to gossip. Even the overseers had caught the

infection and formed gossiping groups to the detriment of discipline.

She was too preoccupied at first to notice that she was their cynosure

or to wonder what it meant, but she couldn’t for long be unconscious of

their gaze.

They were looking at her, every one was looking at her, and her first

impulse was to be angry with them for staring so curiously and her

second was to conceal her awareness of their gaze. They stared? Let them

stare. She had not been at the factory on the previous day, but she had

had leave of absence. She had been burying her daughter-in-law, and if

they wanted to stare at her for that, they could stare. And then she

connected their fixed regard with John’s absence. There was something

serious then? Something about John of which they knew and she did not?

She dropped abruptly her pretense of unconsciousness.

“For God’s sake tell me what’s to do,” she cried. “If it’s John, I’m his

mother and I’ve the right to know.”

Will Aspinall, the overseer, detached himself from his group. “Get

at work,” he bawled at large, then with a rare gentleness, led Phoebe

aside. “Either tha’s gotten th’ brassiest faice i’ Lankysheer, or else

tha’ doan’t kna’,” he said.

“Is it to do with John?” she asked.

“Aye,” he said, “it’s all to do wi’ thy John.”

“I know nothing beyond that he’s not been home all night.”

“A kna’ he’s not bin hoam. He’s done wi’ coming hoam.”

“Why? Why? What has happened?”

“A’m, striving to tell thee that. Th’ job’s not easy, though.” He looked

at her. “Wilt have it straight?”

“I’m never afraid of truth.”

“Truth can hit hard. Well, I’ll tell thee. Thy John shot at th’

maister’s wife last neight an’ hit her. They’ve gotten him.” He upturned

a waste-bin. “Now, A’m real sorry for thee and it weren’t a pleasant job

for me to break th’ news. That’s over, though, and tha’ knaws now. Next

sit thee down on this. It’s in a corner, like, and folks canna watch

thee. When tha’ feels like work, come and tell me.” He left her with

rough kindliness, and relieved his feelings by cuffing a child who was

peering round a loom at them. He was paid to be brutal, and the child,

gathering himself up from the floor, might have thought that the

overseer was earning his wages: but the shrewd blow was rather a warning

to the rest and an expression of his sympathy with Phoebe than an

episode in his day’s work.

That Aspinall, and not he alone but the general sense of the workers,

should be sympathetic towards her was in its way remarkable enough. They

expected naturally that John would hang, but they had definitely

the idea that retribution for his deed would not stop at the capital

punishment of the actual malefactor. Hepplestall would “tak’ it out of

all on us,” and “We’ll go ravenous for this,” “Skin an’ sorrow--that’s

our shape,” and (from a humorist) “Famished? He’ll spokeshave us” were

some of the phrases by which they expressed their belief in the

widespread severity of Hepplestall’s vengeance.

Yet they had no bitterness against John, nor against Phoebe who, as his

mother, might be supposed to have a special responsibility. It was a

dreadful deed and the more dreadful since his bullet had miscarried and

had killed a woman; but it had fanned to quick fire their smoldering

hatred of Hepplestall and there was more rejoicing than regret that he

was, through Dorothy, cast down. They would have preferred to know that

John had hit the true target but, as it was, it was well enough and

they were not going to squeal at the price they expected to pay.

Their commiseration was not for the bereaved master, but for the

about-to-be-bereaved mother of the murderer.

Somebody moved a candle so that Phoebe in her corner should be the more

effectually screened from observation. It was a kindly act, but one

which she hardly needed. Her thoughts were with John, but not with a

John who was going to be hanged; they were with a John who was going to

be saved.

Murderers were hanged and so for the matter of that were people

convicted of far less heinous crimes. That was the law, but she had

never a doubt but that Hepplestall was above the law, that he was the

law, and that John’s fate was not with an impersonal entity called

justice but, simply, with Hepplestall. Probably two-thirds of her

fellow-workers were firmly of the same belief in his omnipotence, though

they hadn’t, as she supposed she had, grounds for thinking that he would

intervene on John’s behalf.

When Annie died she had told herself vehemently that she would never

go, a suppliant, to Hepplestall, she would never let him share in John’s

children wrho were his grandchildren; but that resolution was rescinded

now. Reuben had never hinted since the day when Peter and Phoebe went to

him, aghast at the edict which broke Peter’s factory, that he remembered

he had had a son by Phoebe. It was so long ago and perhaps he had indeed

forgotten, but she must go to him and remind him now. She must tell him

that John Bradshaw was his son. He could not hang his son.

Daylight was penetrating through the sedulously cleaned windows of

the factory. It was the hour when expensive artificial light could be

dispensed with and candles were being extinguished; it was the hour,

too, when Reuben might ordinarily be expected in his office. He had the

usual manufacturers’ habit of riding or walking to the factory for half

an hour before breakfast, and to-day word was passed through the rooms

that he had, surprisingly, arrived as usual.

The word had not reached Phoebe, but she expected nothing else. She had

to speak with Reuben, and therefore he would be there. She came from her

corner and told Aspinall what she intended.

“Nay, nay!” he said.

“Please open the door for me.”

“A canna’,” he said. “Coom, missus, what art thinking? He’ll spit at

thee.”

“I have to speak to him about John,” said Phoebe. “Open the door and let

me through.”

“It’s more nor my plaice is worth,” he said, but, nevertheless, he was

weakening. She was not making a request, she was not a weaver asking a

favor of an overseer, she was Phoebe Bradshaw, whom Peter had brought

up to be a lady, giving an order to a workman in the tone of one who

commands obedience as a habit.

He scratched his head in doubt, then turned to a fellow-overseer and

consulted with him. They murmured together with a wealth of puzzlement

and headshaking and, presently, “Now, Mrs. Bradshaw,” said Aspinall,

“tak’ heed to me. Yon door’s fast, but me an’ Joe here are goin’ to open

it on factory business, understand. If happen tha’s creeping up behind

us, it’s none likely we’ll see thee coomin’ and if tha’ slips through

door and into office while we’ve gotten door open on our business, it’s

because tha’ was too spry for us to stop thee. That’s best we can do for

thee and it’s takkin’ big risks an’ all.”

“I’m grateful,” said Phoebe.

They opened the door and made loud sounds of protest as she slipped

through, causing Reuben to look up from the bureau where he was opening

his letters and to see both Phoebe standing in his office and the actors

at the door. He waved them off and, when the door was closed, “Well?” he

said.

“Reuben!” said Phoebe.

He rose with an angry cry. How dared she, this weaver, this roughened,

withered old woman, address him by his Christian name? This gray wraith,

whose hair hung mustily about her like the jacket of lichen about a

ruined tree, she to call him by the name his Dorothy alone had used!

That morning of all mornings it was outrage of outrages.

He did not know her whom once he nearly loved. Twenty years ago he had

put her from him and had excluded her from his recollection. Long ago

the factory had outgrown the stage when an employer has knowledge of

his workpeople as individuals; he did not know her nor had the

identification of the prisoner as John Bradshaw, a spinner in the

factory, conveyed any personal significance to him. Bradshaw was a

common name, and he had never known that Phoebe had called their son

John.

“But I am Phoebe,” she said, standing her ground before his menacing

advance. “Phoebe, Reuben. Phoebe, who--Phoebe Bradshaw.”

He remembered now, he had remembered at the second “Phoebe”--and at the

second “Reuben.” He was even granting her, grimly, her right to call him

by that name when the “Bradshaw” struck upon his ear.

“Bradshaw?” he repeated. “Bradshaw?” And this second time, there was an

angry question in it.

“I came about John,” she said. “John is our son, Reuben. Of course he

did not know, but--” Reuben had covered the space between them at a

bound. He was holding her hands tightly, he was looking at her with eyes

that seared. In moments like these, thought outspaces time. John, his

wife’s murderer, was his son, and the son of Phoebe Bradshaw whom he

had--well, he supposed he had betrayed her. She had told the son, of

course. He had nursed a grievance, he had shot Dorothy in revenge.

Whether he had aimed at Reuben and hit Dorothy, or whether he lied when

he had made that statement to the constable and had, in fact, aimed at

Dorothy, they had the true motive now. Reuben might have put it that his

sin had found him out, but his thought did not run on those lines. Then,

what was she saying? “Of course, he did not know.” Oh, that was absurd,

that took them back for motive to what John had been telling the

constable--that he shot at Hepplestall to--to--(what was the boy’s

wind-bagging phrase which the constable reported?)--“to set the people

free from a tyrant.”

“Say that again,” he said.

She met his eye fearlessly. “Of course he did not know. You could not

think that I would tell of my shame. Father and I, we invented a second

cousin Bradshaw whom I married, who died before John was born.”

Yes, she was speaking the truth, and, after all, he didn’t know that

it mattered very much. Dorothy was dead, either way, but, yes, it did

matter. It mattered enormously, because of Dorothy’s sons. If John

had known, there must have been disclosures at the trial, things said

against Reuben, ordinary enough but not the things he cared to have

Dorothy’s sons know about their father.

It wasn’t criminal to have seduced a woman twenty years ago, and the

exceptional thing about Reuben was that he had seduced no more women,

that he had not abused his position as employer. Needham was known,

with grim humor, as “the father of his people.” Whereas Reuben had been

Dorothy’s husband.

He saw the trial and that disclosure insulting to Dorothy’s memory.

He heard the jeers of Needham and his kind. Hepplestall, Gentleman

Hepplestall, reduced by public ordeal to a common brutishness with the

coarse libertines he had despised! He saw Dorothy’s sons contemptuous

of their father. This, they would take occasion to think, was where

factory-owning led a man.

“You’re sure of this?” he asked. “You’re absolutely sure he did not know

he is my son?”

“Absolutely,” she said.

“Ah,” he said, “that’s good. If he had known, I believe I must have

taken measures to defeat justice. I should have done all in my power

to have spirited him away before the trial, and I believe I should have

contrived it. I feel quite keenly enough about the matter to have

done that.” Which was, to Phoebe, confirmation of her belief in his

omnipotence. “But, as it is,” he went on, “as it is, thank God, the law

can take its course.” He was back in his chair now, looking at her with

a relief that was almost a smile, if tigerish. She, he was thinking,

might still speak to his discomfiture if she were put in the box at the

trial, but he would see that she was not called. There was no need to

call her to establish John’s absence from home that night, when he had

been caught red-handed. They could do without Phoebe, and he would take

care they should.

“Can take its course,” she repeated, bewildered. What had Reuben meant

if not, incredibly, that had she told John of her “shame,” he would have

been saved now, but that, as it was, John must--“But it cannot tak’ its

course, John is your son. Your son. Reuben, he’s your son. You cannot

hang your son.”

“He killed my wife.”

“But you haven’t understood. They haven’t told you. John was not

himself. He--”

“Drunk?”

“No, no. Oh, Reuben. He was crazed with grief on account of his wife.

Don’t they tell you when the likes of that chances in the factory? Annie

Bradshaw, that was John’s wife and your daughter-in-law--she bore a

child on the floor in there and died. You must have heard of it.”

Reuben nodded. “These women,” he said, “are always cutting it too fine.”

His gesture disclaimed responsibility for the reckless greed of women.

“Yes,” she said, brazenly agreeing with his monstrous imputation, “but

John loved Annie and he’s been in a frenzy since she died and in his

mazed brain we can see how it seemed to him. We can, can’t we, Reuben?

She died in the factory and it looked to him that the factory had killed

her. And then he must have got a gun. I don’t know how, but we can see

the crazy lad with a gun in his hands and the wild thought in his mind

that the factory killed Annie. It’s your factory, it’s Hepple-stall’s,

and it ‘ud seem to him that Hepplestall killed. Annie, so he took his

gun and came to your house and tried to kill you. A daft lad and a

senseless deed and an awful, awful end to it, but we can read the

frantic thoughts in his grief-struck brain, we can understand them,

Reuben--you and I.” She sought to draw him into partnership with her, to

make him share in the plea which she addressed to him.

But “He killed my wife,” Reuben said again.

She had a momentary vision of Reuben and Phoebe twenty years ago riding

home to Bradshaw’s on the afternoon when they had met Dorothy in the

road, and Dorothy had cut him. She had talked then, she had chattered,

she had striven to be gay and her talk had rebounded, like a ball off a

wall, from the stony taciturnity of his abstraction and that night, that

very night.... It had been Dorothy then, and it was Dorothy now. “He

killed my wife.”

“But, Reuben, he was mad.”

“Still--”

She flung herself upon her knees. “Reuben, you cannot hang your son. Not

your son, Reuben.”

“Quiet,” he commanded. “Quiet.”

“Oh, I will be very quiet.” She lowered her voice obediently. “If there

are clerks through that door, they shall not hear. No one shall ever

know he is your son. You can save him and you must. He is your son and

there are babies, two little boys, your grandchildren, Reuben. What can

I do alone for them? Give John back to me and we can manage. It will be

mortal hard, but we shall do it.”

The woman was impossible. Actually she was pleading not only for the

murderer’s release, but for his return. His wife, Dorothy, lay dead at

this boy’s hands, and Phoebe was assuming that nothing was to happen!

But, by the Lord, things were going to happen. Crazy or not that phrase

of John’s stuck in his throat--“to set the people free from a tyrant.”

Where there was one man thinking that sort of thing, there were others;

it was a breeding sort of thought. Well, he’d sterilize it, he’d bleed

these thinkers white. Meantime, there was Phoebe, and, it seemed, there

were two young encumbrances. “There is the workhouse,” he said.

“Not while I live,” said Peter Bradshaw’s daughter.

“But to live, Phoebe, you must earn, and there will be no more earning

here for you.” The workhouse was a safe place for a woman with a

dangerous story and anything that escaped those muffling walls could

be set down as the frantic ravings of a hanged man’s mother. This

side-issue of Phoebe was a triviality, but he had learned the value of

looking after the pence--as well as the pounds.

“Oh, do with me what you like. You always have done. But John--John!”

He looked his unchanging answer.

“I am to go to the workhouse. Is not that enough? I to that place and

his children with me, John to--to the gallows, and why? Why? Because

through all these years I have given you a gift. The gift of my silence.

You are going to hang my son because I did not tell him he was your son.

You could save him and you don’t because he did not know. Reuben, is

there no mercy in you?” There was none. John had killed Dorothy. “Then,

if I shriek the truth aloud? If I cry out now so that your clerks can

hear me, that John is your son? If--”

“It would make this difference, Phoebe. You would go to the madhouse,

instead of to the workhouse. In the one you would be alone. In the other

you would sometimes see John’s brats.” He rang the hand-bell on his

desk.

“And teach them,” she said, “teach them to speak their first words, ‘I

hate the Hepplestalls.’”

Perhaps he heard her through the sound of the bell, perhaps not. A

well-drilled clerk came promptly in upon his summons. “This woman is to

go at once to the workhouse, with two children,” he said. “If there are

forms to go through refer the officials to me.”

In the factory they called him “Master.” He was master of them all. She

did not doubt it and she went.

Reuben finished reading his letters before he went home to breakfast. He

read attentively, doing accustomed things in his accustomed way because

it seemed that only so could he drug himself to forgetfulness of

Dorothy’s death, then gravely, with thoughts held firmly on business

affairs, he mounted his horse to where skilled hands had made death’s

aftermath a. gracious thing.

Edward had spoken to his brothers. “Give me five minutes alone with

Father when he comes in,” he said. It seemed to him this morning that

once, a prodigious while ago, he had been fatuously young and either

he had quarreled with his father or had come near to quarreling--he

couldn’t be expected to remember which across so long a time as the

night he had passed since then--about so obvious a certainty as his

going into the factory. Dorothy, in that moment when she held their

hands together, had made him see so clearly what he had to do. A moment

of reconcilement and of clarification, when she had indicated her last

wish. It was a law, indeed, and sweetly sane. “Why, of course, Mother,”

he had been telling her through the night, “Father and I must stand

together now.” He told, and she could not reply. She could not tell him

how grotesquely he misinterpreted her moment.

He met Reuben at the door. “Father,” he said, “there is something you

must let me say at once. My mother joined our hands last night. May we

forget what passed between us earlier? May we remember only that she

joined our hands last night, and that they will remain joined?”

“I hope they will,” said Reuben, not quite certain of him yet.

“The man who killed her came from the factory. I should like your

permission to omit my last term at Oxford. I want very deeply to begin

immediately at the factory.” His voice rose uncontrollably. “‘Drive or

be driven,’ sir, you said the other day. And by God, I’ll drive. I’ll

drive. That blackguard came from there.”

“Come with me after breakfast,” Reuben said, shaking the hand of his

heir. And in that spirit Edward went to Hepplestall’s to begin his

education.

Dorothy had died happy in the bright certainty of her authentic moment!

PART II

CHAPTER I--THE SERVICE

IF there is a man whose job I’ve never envied, it’s the A Prince of

Wales,” groaned Rupert Hepplestall, looking in his mirror with an air of

cynical boredom and fastening white linen round a bronzed neck. “And I’m

going to get the taste of it to-day.”

The point was that it was Rupert’s sixteenth birthday, and the sixteenth

birthday of a Hepplestall was an occasion of such moment that he had

been brought back from Harrow to spend that day at home.

On their sixteenth birthdays, the Hepplestall boys, and some others who

were favored though only their mothers were Hepplestalls, were received

in the office and from thence escorted through the mills by the Head

of the Firm with as much ceremonious aplomb as if they were Chinese

mandarins, Argentine financiers, Wall Street magnates, Russian nobles,

German professors or any of the miscellaneous but always distinguished

foreigners, who, visiting Lancashire, procured invitations: to inspect

that jewel in its crown, the mills at Staithley Bridge. For the boys

it was the formal ritual of initiation into the service of the firm.

A coming of age was nothing if not anti-climactic to the sixteenth

birthday of a Hepplestall.

Not all Hepplestalls were chosen; there were black sheep in every flock,

but if a Hepplestall meant to go black, he was expected to show symptoms

early and in Rupert’s case, at any rate, there was no question of

choice. Rupert was the eldest son.

He would return to school, he would go to a university, but to-day he

set foot in the mills, and the step was final. The Service would have

marked him for its own.

Rupert was cynical about it. “It’s like getting engaged to a barmaid in

the full and certain knowledge that you can’t buy her off,” he said and

that “Barmaid” indicated what he secretly thought of the show-mills of

Lancashire. But he was not proposing resistance; he was going into this

with open eyes; he knew what had happened to that recreant Hepplestall

who, so to speak, had broken his vows--the man who bolted, last heard

of as a hanger-on in a gambling hell in Dawson City, “combined,” the

informant had said, “with opium.” It wasn’t for Rupert. He knew on which

side his bread was buttered. But “Damn the hors d’ouvres,” he said.

“Damn to-day.” Then, “Pull yourself together. Won’t do to look peevish.

Come, be a little prince.”

He composed in front of the mirror a compromise between boyish eagerness

and an overwhelming sense of a dignified occasion, surveyed his

reflection and decided that he was hitting off very neatly the

combination of aspects which his father would expect. Then he jeered

at his efforts and the jeer degenerated into an agitated giggle: he was

uncomfortably nervous; “This prince business wants getting used to,” he

said, recapturing his calculated expression and going downstairs to the

breakfast room.

Only his father and mother were there. To-night there would be a dinner

attended by such uncles as were not abroad in the service of the firm,

but for the present he was spared numbers and it seemed a very ordinary

birthday when his mother kissed him with good wishes and his father

shook his hand and left a ten pound note in it.

He expected an oration from his father, but what Sir Philip said was

“Tyldesley’s not out, Rupert. 143. Would you like to go to Old Trafford

after lunch?”

“To-day!” he gasped. Could normal things like cricket co-exist with his

ordeal?

“Yes, I think I can spare the time this afternoon,” and so on, to

a discussion of Lancashire’s chances of being the champion

county--anything to put the boy at his ease. Sir Philip had been through

that ordeal himself. He talked cricket informally, but what he was

thinking was “Shall I tell him he’s forgotten to put a tie on or shall

I take him round the place without?” But he could hardly introduce a

tie-less heir to the departmental managers, who, if they were employees

had salaries running up to fifteen hundred a year, with bonus, and were,

quite a surprising number of them, magistrates. So he proceeded to let

the boy down gently. “Heredity’s a queer thing,” he said. “It’s natural

to think of it to-day, and I shall have some instances to tell you of

later, when we get down to the office. But what sets me on it now is

that precisely the same accident happened to me on my sixteenth birthday

as has happened to you. I forgot my tie.”

“Oh, Lord!” Rupert was aghast, feeling with twitching fingers for the

tie that wasn’t there.

“I take it as a happy omen that you should have done the same.”

“You really did forget yours, dad?”

“Really,” lied Sir Philip.

“Then I don’t mind feeling an ass,” said Rupert, and his father savored

the compliment as Rupert left the room. It implied that the boy had

a wholesome respect for him, while, as to his own diplomacy, “The

recording angel,” he said, turning to his wife, “will dip in invisible

ink.”

Lady Hepplestall touched his shoulder affectionately, and left him to

his breakfast-table study of the market reports.

The baronetcy was comparatively new. Any time these fifty years the

Hepplestalls could have had it by lifting a finger in the right room;

and they had had access to that room. But titles, especially as the

Victorian shower of honors culminated in “Jubilee Knights,” seemed

vulgar things, and Sir Philip consented to take one only when it seemed

necessary that he should consent, after much pressure from his brothers.

It seemed necessary in 1905 and the Hepplestall baronetcy, included

amongst the Resignation Honors conferred by the late Balfour

administration, was a symbol of the defeat of Joseph Chamberlain and

“Tariff Reform.” It advertised the soundness of the Unionist Party, even

in the thick of the great landslide of Liberalism, it registered the

close of the liaison with Protection. If Hepplestall of Lancashire,

Unionist and Free Trader, accepted a baronetcy from the outgoing

Government, the sign was clear for all to read; it could mean only that

Hepplestall had received assurances that the Party was going to be good,

to avoid the horrific pitfalls of “Tariff Reform.” Lancashire

could breathe again and Sir Philip, sacrificing much, immolated his

inclinations on the twin altars of Free Trade and the Party. If ever

man became baronet _pour le bon motif_, it was Sir Philip Hepplestall. A

gesture, but a gallant one.

Rupert spoke many things aloud in lurid English to his reflection in

his mirror; the banality of having so carefully studied his facial

expressions while not perceiving the absence of a tie struck him as

pluperfect, but his vituperative language was, happily, adequate to the

occasion and he successful relieved his feelings. One combination of

words, indeed, struck him as inspired and he was occupied in committing

it to memory as he went downstairs to Sir Philip.

“I feel like the kid who had too much cake and when they told him he’d

be ill, he said it was worth it,” he announced. “It was worth it to

forget my tie.”

“In what way in particular?” asked Sir Philip, mentally saluting a

spirited recovery.

“Will you ask me that next time I beat you at golf and words fail you?

I’ve got the words.”

Anyhow, he’d got his impudence back and Sir Philip, knowing the massive

impressiveness of the mills, was glad of it. He wanted his boy to

bear himself well that day, and he was not afraid of levity or

over-confidence when he confronted him with Hepplestall’s. He had, he

admitted to himself, feared timidity; he had, at any rate, diagnosed

acute nervousness in Rupert’s breakfast-table appearance, and feeling

that the attack was vanished now, he rang for the car with his mind

easy.

The site of old Reuben’s “Dorothy” factory was still the center whose

extended perimeter held the mills known to Lancashire, and nearly

as well known to dealers in Shanghai, or in the Malji Jritha market,

Bombay, as Hepplestall’s, but the town of Staithley Bridge lay in the

valley, extending down-stream away from the mills, so that there was

country still, smoky but pleasant, between the Hall and the town.

Electric trams bumped up the inclines through sprawling main-streets off

which ran the rows upon uniform rows of cell-like houses, back-to-back,

airless, bathless, insanitary, in which the bulk of the workers lived.

Further afield, there were better, more modern houses, costing no more

than those built before the age of sanitation--and these were more often

to be let than the houses of the close-packed center. It may have been

considered bumptious in Staithley to demand a bath, and a back-garden;

it may have been held that, if one lived in Staithley, one should do

the thing thoroughly; or it may have been that cleanliness too easily

attained was thought equivalent to taking a light view of life. In their

rooms, if not in their persons, they were clean in Staithley, even to

the point of being “house-proud” about their cleanliness; but medicine

that does not taste foul is suspect, and so is cleanliness in a house

when it is attained without the greatest possible mortification of

female flesh. You didn’t, anyhow, bribe a Staithley man by an electric

tram and a bright brick house with a bath to “flit” from his gray stone

house in an interminable row when that house was within reasonable

walking distance of the mills or the pits. No decentralization for him,

if he could help it: he was townbred, in a place where coal was cheap

and fires extravagant, and a back garden was a draughty, shiversome

idea.

But all this compress of humanity, and the joint efforts of the

municipality and the jerry-builder to relieve it, lay on the side of the

mills remote from the Hall--old Reuben had seen far enough to plant the

early Staithley out of his sight, and where he planted it, it grew--and

the short drive through dairy farm-land and market-gardens was not

distressing to eyes accustomed to the pseudo-green, sobered by smoke, of

Lancashire. Nor had the private office of the Hepplestalls any eyesores

for the neophyte. He had been in less comfortable club-rooms.

Indeed, this office, with its great fireplace, its Turkey carpet, its

shapely bureau that had been Reuben’s, and its chairs, authentically

old, chosen to be on terms with the historic bureau, its padded leather

sofa and the armchairs before the fire, and above all, the paintings on

the wall, had all the appearance of a writing-room in a wealthy club.

“This is where I work, Rupert,” said Sir Philip, and Rupert wondered if

“work” was quite the justifiable word. He thought the room urbane and

almost drowsily urbane, he thought of work rather as the Staithley

people thought of cleanliness, as a thing that went with mortification

of the flesh, and things looked very easy in this room. But he reserved

judgment. Sir Philip was apt to come home looking very tired. Perhaps

the easiness was deceptive.

A telephone rang, and his father went to the instrument with an apology.

“This is your day, Rupert, but I must steal five minutes of it now.”

He spoke to his broker in Liverpool, and there were little jokes and

affabilities mingled with mysterious references to “points on” and other

technicalities. There was an argument about the “points on,” and Sir

Philip seemed very easily to get the better of it, and then, having

bought a thousand bales of raw cotton futures, he put the telephone down

and said, “That’s the end of business for to-day.” An insider would have

known that something rather important had happened, that the brain of

Sir Philip had been very active indeed in those few minutes when he

lingered over the market-reports at the breakfast-table, that trained

judgment had decided a largish issue and that a brilliant exhibition of

the art of buying had been given on the telephone. Rupert’s impression

was that some enigmatic figures had casually intruded while Sir Philip

passed the time of day with a friend in Liverpool who had rather

superfluously rung him up. At Harrow, veneration of the business man was

at a discount, and he believed Harrow was right. To write Greek verse

was a stiffer job than to be a cotton-lord--on the evidence so far

before the court.

“Well,” said Sir Philip, “I’m going to try to show you what

Hepplestall’s is, and the portraits on these walls make as good a

starting-point as I can think of. That is Reuben, our Founder. There are

a few extant businesses in Lancashire founded so long ago as ours;

there are even older firms. But such age as ours is rare. It’s been an

in-and-out business, the cotton trade. You know the proverb here that

‘It’s three generations from clogs to clogs.’ That is, some fine

fellow born to nothing makes a mark in life, rises, fights his way, and

beginning as man ends as master, giving the business he founded such

momentum as carries it along for the next generation. His son is born to

boots, not clogs, but he hasn’t as a rule the strength his father had.

He’s lived soft and his stock degenerates through softness. The business

of the old man doesn’t go to pieces in the son’s time, but it travels

downhill as the momentum given it by its founder loses force. And the

grandson of the founder is apt to be born to boots and to die in

clogs; he begins as master and ends as man. That is the cycle of three

generations on which that proverb is founded, and not unjustly founded.

It’s one of the points about the cotton trade that a strong man could

force his way out of the ranks, but it’s the fact that his successors

were more likely to lose what he left them than to keep it or improve

upon it. I’ll go so far as to say that making money is easier than

keeping it.

“We Hepplestalls have had the gift of keeping it. What a father won,

a son has not let go. The sons have been fighters like their fathers

before them and with each son the battleground has grown. Well,

that might terrify you if I don’t explain that long ago, in your

great-grandfather’s time indeed, the firm had outgrown the power of any

one man to control it utterly. There were partnerships and a share of

the responsibility for the younger sons. More recently, in fact when

my father died, we made a private limited company of it. Two of your

uncles, Tom and William, in charge in Manchester, have great authority,

though mine is the final word. What I am seeking to tell you is that

while it is a tremendous thing--tremendous, Rupert--to be the Head of

Hepplestall’s, the burden is not one which you will ever be called upon

to bear single-handed. The day of the complete autocrat went long ago.

But this is true, that the Head of Hep-plestall’s has been the general

in command, the chief-of-staff, the man who guarded what his ancestors

had won and who increased the stake. That is the Hepplestall tradition

in its minimum significance.”

Rupert started. In spite of his boyish skepticism he was already seeing

himself as the Lilliputian changeling in a house of the Brobdingnagians,

and if this were the minimum tradition, what, he wondered, was the

maximum?

“We have the tradition of trusteeship,” Sir Philip proceeded. “And the

trusteeship’ of Hepplestall’s is an anxious burden. It includes what I

have spoken of already; it includes our family interests, but they are

the smallest portion of the whole. We are trustees for our workpeople:

we do not coddle them, but we find them work. That is a serious matter,

Rupert. I have of course become accustomed to it as you will become

accustomed to it, but the thought is never absent from my mind that on

us, ultimately on me alone, is laid the burden of providing work for our

thousands of employees. Trade fluctuates and my problem is, as far as is

humanly possible, to safeguard our people against unemployment.”

“I never thought of it like that,” said Rupert, whose crude ideas of

Labor were rather derived from his public school, and occasional reading

of reactionary London newspapers, than from his home. “I wonder if they

are grateful?”

“Their gratitude or their ingratitude has no bearing on my duty,” said

Sir Philip.

“But aren’t there strikes?”

“You might put it that since ’ninety-three we have bowdlerized

strikes in Lancashire. We fight with buttons on our foils, thanks to the

Brooklands agreement.”

Rupert tried to look comprehending, but he could only associate

motor-racing with Brooklands. “Still,” he said, “I don’t believe they

are grateful. There’s that Bradshaw beast.”

“Ah!” said Philip, “Bradshaw! Bradshaw!” The name pricked him shrewdly.

“But no,” he said, “he’s not a beast.”

“He’s Labor Member for Staithley,” said Rupert. “I see their gratitude

less and less.”

“Well,” said his father, “we were speaking of tradition. The Bradshaws

come into the Hepplestall tradition. A wastrel gang and queerly against

us in every period. A Bradshaw was hanged for the murder of Reuben’s

wife. There were Chartist Bradshaws, two turbulent brothers, in my

grandfather’s day. In my day, Tom Bradshaw was strike leader here in the

great strike of ’ninety-two.”

“And they sent him to Parliament for it,” said Rupert hotly.

“Tom’s not a bad fellow, Rupert. I admit he’s their masterpiece. The

rest of the Bradshaws are work-shys and some of them are worse than

that. But they do crop up as a traditional thorn in our flesh and

I daresay you’ll have your battle with a Bradshaw. Nearly every

Hepplestall has had, but if he’s no worse a chap than Tom, M. P., you’ll

have a clean fighter against you. But there’s a more serious tradition

than the Bradshaws, a fighting tradition, too, a Hepplestall against a

Hepplestall, a son against a father.”

“Oh!” Rupert protested.

“Yes. I expect to have my fight with you. It’s the march of progress.

Look at old Reuben there and Edward his son. Reuben was a fighter for

steam when he was young. Other people thought steam visionary then if

they didn’t think it flat blasphemy. But he grew old and he couldn’t

rise to railways. Edward brought the railway to Hepplestall’s, right

into the factory yard, in the teeth of Reuben’s opposition and when

Reuben saw railway trains actually doing what Edward said they would

do, carrying cotton in and goods out and coal out from the pit-mouth, he

retired. He gave Edward best and went, and Edward lit the factory with

gas, made here from his own coal, and Reuben prophesied fire and sudden

death and the only death that came was his own.

“That portrait is of William, Edward’s son. Their fight was over the

London warehouse. William did not see why we sold to London merchants

who re-sold to shops; and William had his way, and later quarreled with

his son Martin over so small a thing as the telegraph. That was before

telephones, and you had an alphabetical switchboard and slowly spelt out

sentences on it. William called it a toy, and Martin was right and saved

thousands of valuable hours. But I had the honor of telling my father,

who was Martin, that he had an intensive mind and that lighting the

mills by electricity, and rebuilding on the all-window design to save

artificial light and installing lifts and sprinklers (to keep the

insurance low) were all very useful economies but they didn’t extend

the trade of Hepplestall’s. I went round the world and I established

branches in the East. I didn’t see why the Manchester shipping merchants

should market Hepplestall’s Shirtings in Shanghai and Calcutta. My

father told me I had bitten off more than I could chew, but he let me

have the money to try with. Well, there’s your uncle Hubert in charge

at Calcutta now, and your uncle Reuben Bleackley at Shanghai, you’ve

cousins at Rio and Buenos Aires and Montreal and on the whole I can

claim my victory. I wonder,” he looked quizzically at Rupert, “what your

victory over me will be? To run our own line of steamers? To work the

mills by electricity? I give you warning here and now that I’m against

both. Oil--oil’s a possibility; but we needn’t go into those things now.

“I hope I shall never oppose you, sir,” said Rupert.

“Then you’ll be no true Hepplestall--and you are going to be. You’ll go

through it as the rest of us went through it, and you’ll come out tried

and true. I’ll tell you what I mean by going through it. That’s no

figure of speech. We are practical men, we Hepplestalls, every man

of us. We’ve diverse duties and responsibilities, but we’ve a common

knowledge, and an exact one, of the processes of cotton manufacture. We

all got it in the same way, and the only right way--not by theory, not

by looking on, but by doing with our own hands whatever is done in these

mills--or nearly everything. You’re going to be a carder and a spinner

and a doubler and a weaver. You’re going to come into the place at

six in the morning with the rest of the people and the only difference

between you and them is that when you’ve learned a job you’ll be moved

on to learn another. You’ll come to it from your university and you’ll

hate it. You’ll hate it like hell, and it’ll last two years. Then you’ll

have a year in Manchester and then you’ll go round the world to every

branch of Hepplestalls. In about five years after you come here, you’ll

begin to be fit to work with me, and if you don’t make a better Head

than I am, you’ll disappoint me, Rupert.”

Rupert was conscious of mutinous impulses as his father forecasted the

rigorous training he was expected to undergo. How cruel a mockery was

that suave office of Sir Philip! And Sir Philip himself, and all the

Hepplestalls--they had all submitted to the training. They had all been

“through it.” And they called England a free country! Well, he, at any

rate--

He felt his father’s hand upon his knee, and looked up from his

meditations. “It is a trust, Rupert,” said Sir Philip.

Rupert began to hate that word and perhaps his suppressed rebellion hung

out some signs, for Sir Philip added, almost, but not quite, as if he

were making an appeal, “always the eldest son has been the big man of

his time amongst the Hepplestalls. It hasn’t been position that’s made

us; each eldest son has made himself, each has won out by merit, My

brothers were a tough lot, but I’m the toughest. And you. You won’t

spoil the record. You’ll be the big man, Rupert. And now we’ll go

through the mill,” he went on briskly, giving Rupert no opportunity to

reply.

Rupert was shown cotton from the mixing room where the bales of raw

material were opened, through its processes of cleaning, combing,

carding to the spinning-mill whence it emerged as yarn to go through

warping and sizing to the weaving sheds and thence to the packing rooms

where the pieces were made up and stamped for the home or the foreign

markets. Hepplestall’s had their side-lines but principally they were

concerned with the mass production of cotton shirtings and Rupert was

given a kinematographic view of the making of a shirting till, stamped

in blue with the world-famous “Anchor” brand, it was ready for the

warehouse, which might be anywhere from Manchester to Valparaiso or

Hongkong; and as they went through the rooms he was introduced to

managers, to venerable overseers who had known his grandfather,

fine loyalists who shook his hand as if he were indeed a prince, and

everywhere he was conscious of eyes that bored into his back, envious,

hostile sometimes, but mostly admiring and friendly. He was the heir.

He walked, literally, for miles amongst these men and women and

these children (there were children still in the mills of Lancashire,

“half-timers,” which meant that they went to the factory for half the

day, and to school the other half, and much good school did them after

that exhilarating morning!), and he bore himself without confessing

openly his consciousness that he was not so much inspecting the factory

as being inspected by it. All that he saw, he loathed, and he couldn’t

rid his mind of the thought that he was condemned to hard labor in these

surroundings. But there were mitigations.

“And,” said a white-haired overseer as he shook Rupert’s hand, “’appen

we shall see you playing for Lanky-sheer one of these days.”

“You have ambitions for me,” he smiled back.

“Well, you’re on the road to it.”

That was the delightful thing, that they should know that he was on

the road to it. They must be keenly interested to know so much when his

place in the Harrow first eleven was only a prospect--as yet--a pretty

secure prospect, but one of those intimate securities which were

decidedly not published news. It was a reconciling touch, bracing him to

keep up his gallant show as they made their progress, but neither

this nor the self-respecting deference of the high-salaried, efficient

managers resigned him to the price he was expected to pay for being

Hepplestall. That dour apprenticeship, which Sir Philip had candidly

prophesied he would “hate like hell,” daunted him; those five years

out of his life before he “began to work.” It was a tradition of the

service, was it? Then it was a bad tradition. He didn’t object to serve,

but this was to make service into slavery.

Allowing for school and university, he wouldn’t come to it for another

six years yet, and by then he ought to be better equipped for a

rebellion. But--the infernal cunning of this sixteenth-birthday

initiation--it would be too late then. From to-day, if he let the day

pass without protest, he wore the chains of slavery, he was doomed,

marked down for sacrifice, and he was so young! He resented the

unfairness of his youth pitted in unequal conflict with his father.

“One last tradition of the Hepplestalls, Rupert,” Sir Philip said as

they returned to his office, “though I expect you’re hating the word

‘tradition.’” Oh, did his father understand everything and forestall it?

“The eldest sons have not come to it easily. Sometimes there’s been open

refusal. There’ve been ugly rows. There’s always been a feeling on the

son’s part that the terms of service were too harsh. Well, I have come

to know that they are necessary terms. We are masters of men, and we

gain mastery of ourselves in those days when we learn our trade by the

side of the tradesmen. We cannot take this great place of ours lightly,

not Hepplestall’s, not the heavy trust that is laid upon us. We cannot

risk the failure of a Hepplestall through lack of knowledge of his trade

or through personal indiscipline. Imagination, the gifts of leadership

are things we cannot give you here; either you have them in you or you

will never have them, and it is reasonable to think you have them. They

have seemed to be the birthright of a Hepplestall. But we can train you

to their use.

“There is that Japanese ideal of the Samurai. I don’t think that it is

absent from our English life, but perhaps we have not been very explicit

about our ideals. There’s money made here, and if I told some people

that what actuates me is not money but the idea of service, I should not

be believed. I should be told that I confused Mammon with God: but I am

here to serve, and money is inescapable because money is the index of

successful service in present day conditions. Service, not money, is the

mainspring of the Hepplestalls, the service of England because it is

the service of Lancashire. We lead--not exclusively but we are of the

leaders--in Lancashire. We are keepers of the cotton trade, trustees of

its efficiency, guarantors of its progress.

“I am earnest with you, Rupert. Probably I’m offending your sense of

decent reticence. Ideals are things to be private about, but let us just

for once take the wrappings off them and let us have a look at them....

Well, we’ve looked and we’ll hide them again, but we won’t forget

they’re there. I suppose we keep a shop, but the soul of the shopkeepers

isn’t in the cash-register.”

How could he reply to this that the training which had been good enough

for his father and his uncles was not good enough for him? Somewhere, he

felt certain there were flaws to be found and that Sir Philip was rather

a special pleader than a candid truth-teller, but he impressed, and

Rupert despised himself for remaining obstinately suspicious of his

father’s sincerity.

“And you’re a Hepplestall. That is not to be questioned, is it, Rupert?

In the present and in the future, in the small things and the large,

that is not to be questioned.”

It was now or never for his protest. Mentally he wriggled like a kitten

held under water by some callous child and as desperately. He would

drown if he could not reach the aid of two life-buoys, courage to

outface Sir Philip and wits to put words to his thoughts.

“No, sir, that is not to be questioned,” he heard himself, unexpectedly,

say, and Sir Philip’s warm handshake sealed the bargain. He had not

meant to say it; he did not mean to stand by what he had said, but his

hand responded heartily to his father’s and his eye met Sir Philip’s

gaze with the charming smile of frank, ingenuous youth.

He was thinking that six years were a long time and that there were men

who had come to great honor after they had broken vows.