As Christopher was preparing to leave the works one Saturday afternoon
he was told that a man had just arrived from Birmingham who refused to
give his name, but who asked for him. Christopher hung for a moment on
the step of his car and then descending again went straight to the
room where his unknown visitor was waiting. He proved to be a spare,
stooping man, with lips so thin and white as to be almost invisible.
His eyes, which he hardly raised from the floor, were bright with the
fire of fever, and his shaking hands, one of which held a cap,
concealing the other, were narrow, and the knuckles stood out with
cruel prominence.
"What do you want with me?" Christopher demanded shortly.
The man looked at him sideways and did not move, but he spoke in an
uncertain, quavering voice.
"You are Masters' son, ar'n't you?"
Christopher turned on him with fierce amazement, and checked himself.
"Answer my question, if you have anything to say to me, and leave my
private affairs alone," he said sternly.
"There you are," grinned the man, the thin mouth widening to a
distorted semblance of a smile, "seems to me, seems to my mates
'tain't such a private affair, neither, leastways we pay for it."
Christopher's instinct to turn the man out struggled with his
curiosity to know what it all meant. He stood still, therefore, with
his eyes fixed on the weirdly displeasing face and neglected to look
at the twitching hands.
"It were bad enough when Masters were alive, curse him, with his
'system' and his 'single chance,' and his sticking to his word,
but we knew where we was then. Now, none of us knows. Here's one
turned off cos he broke some rule he'd never heard of; another for
telling a foreman what he thought of him; my mate's chucked out for
fighting--_outside the Mill Gate_, look you--What concern be it of
yours what we do outside? It's a blessed show you do for us outside,
isn't it? I tell you it don't concern you anyhow, you lazy
bloodsucker--and look at me--I've worked for your father fifteen
year, and you turn me off--you and your precious heads of
departments,--because I was a day behind with my job. Well, what if I
was? Hadn't I a wife what was dying with her sixth baby, and not a
decent soul to come to her? We've been respectable people, we
have, till we came to live in the blooming gaudy houses at Carson."
"That's the Steel Axle Company's works, isn't it?" put in Christopher
quietly. He had not moved; he was intent on picking up the clue to the
mad indictment that lay in the seething flow of words.
"Yah. Don't know your own purse-strings," spluttered the denouncer,
growing incoherent with rising fury; "sit at home with your little
play-box of a works down here, with fancy hutches for your rabbits of
workmen, clubs, toys, kitchen ranges, hot and cold laid on. Oh, I've
seen it all. Who pays for it, that's what I want to know? who pays for
your blooming model works and houses?"
"I pay for it," said Christopher still quietly, "or rather the company
does. It comes out of working expenses."
The man gave an angry snarl of disbelief. "You pays, does you? I tell
you it's we who pays. You take our money and spend it on this toy of
yours here. I'll----"
Christopher put up his hand. "You are utterly mistaken," he said, "I
have no more to do with the late Peter Masters' works or his money
than the men in the yards out there."
The black ignorance, the fierce words interlarded with unwritable
terms, the mad personal attack, filled him with a shame and pity that
drowned all indignation. There had been injustice and wrong somewhere
that had whipped this poor mind to frenzy, to an incoherent claim to
rights he could not define.
"Why do you come to me?"
The man gave almost a scream of rage.
"Come to you? Ain't you his son? Don't it all belong to you, whether
you takes it or whether you don't? Are you going to skulk behind them
heads in Birmingham and leave us at their mercy, let 'em grind us to
powder for their own profit and no one to say them yea or nay? There
was a rumour of that got about, how you was going to shunt us on to
them, you skulking blackguard. I wouldn't believe it. I told 'em as
how Masters' son, if he had one, wouldn't be a damned scoundrel like
that. He'd see to his own rights."
What was that in the shaking hands beneath the cap? Christopher's
eyes, still on the tragically foul face, never dropped to catch the
metallic gleam; his whole mind lay in dragging out the truth entangled
in the wild words. The voice quivered more and more as if under spur
of some mental effort that urged the speaker to a climax he could not
reach but on the current of the crazy syllables.
"So it ain't no concern of yours if we lives or dies, if we work or be
turned off without so much as a word to carry us on again? 'Tain't
nothing to you we've got fifty masters instead of one, so long as you
gets your money. I tell you I won't serve fifty of 'em. One as we
could reckon on was bad enough, but fifty of 'em to battle flesh and
blood and make their own food out of us, and no one what we can call
to account as it were, I tell 'ee we won't have it. I won't serve
'em." The poor wretch had forgotten he was already dismissed from such
service. "If you won't be their master, then by God, you shan't be
master anywhere else."
His hand with the revolver he had clutched under cover of his cap flew
up. The report was followed by a splitting of glass and a cry
without.
For a brief second that was like a day of eternity, Christopher and
the man continued to face each other; the swaying blue-grey barrel of
the smoking weapon acted like a magnetic point on which their numbed
minds met and mingled in confusion, with that independence of time we
ascribe to dreams. For the echo of the report had not died from the
room when those outside rushed in. The would-be assassin instantly
crumpled up on the floor, a mere heap of grimy clothes, unconscious
even of his failure.
The men clamoured round Christopher with white faces and persistent
inquiries as to whether he were hurt.
He reassured them of that as soon as it appeared to him his voice
could sound across the deafening echo of the shot.
"Not hurt in the least," he said dully, looking down at the huddled
form. "Is he dead?"
They straightened out the poor creature they would gladly have
lynched, and one of them shook his head.
"A fit, I think. Let him be."
A new-comer rushed in with horror-stricken face, and stopped his
tongue at sight of Christopher.
"How's it outside?" whispered one to him.
"Dead." The word was hardly breathed, but Christopher spun round on
his heel.
"Who's dead?"
They looked at him uneasily, and at one another.
He moved to the door mechanically, when an old man, a north-countryman
and a Methodist preacher of some note, laid his hand on his arm.
"Don't 'ee take on, lad. 'Tis the Lord's will which life He'll take
home to him. Maybe He's got bigger work for you than for the little
'un."
"Who is it?" His dry lips hardly framed the words.
"It's Ann Barty's little chap as was passing. We thought 'twere but
the glass."
"Better a boy than a man," muttered another.
Christopher paid no heed. He went out with the old Methodist beside
him. A group of men stood round something under the window which one
of them had covered with a coat. They made way for the master, and not
one of them, fathers and sons as they were, but felt a throb of
thankfulness the small life had been taken in preference to his. But
Christopher knelt down and raised the coat.
"One shall be taken, the other left."
It was old Choris who said it. A little murmur of assent went up from
the circle, bareheaded now, like Christopher. He looked up with
fierce, unspoken dissent to their meek acceptance of this cruel thing,
and then replacing the coat very gently, stood up.
"Has anyone gone to Ann Barty?" he asked quietly.
Someone had gone, it appeared. Someone else had gone for a doctor.
Christopher ordered them to carry the little form into the
waiting-room, where it was laid on the table. Someone fetched a flag
from the office and laid it over the boy.
Without direct orders all work in the mill had ceased, little knots
of men had gathered in the yard and there was a half-suppressed
unanimous murmur from two hundred throats when a group of men came out
of the room with the shattered window, carrying the still conscious
form of the author of the outrage. It rose and fell and rose again
threateningly. Christopher came out of the waiting-room and at sight
of him it fell again.
"They must go back to work," he said to the head foreman, who waited
uneasily. "They can do nothing, and if we stop work there will be
trouble."
"Where are you going, sir?"
The foreman ventured this much on sheer necessity.
"To Ann Barty."
"What shall I say to them?" Again he eyed the men uneasily.
"Tell them I wish it," returned Christopher simply. "It's only an hour
to closing time, but it will steady them down."
He went back to the motor car he had been on the point of entering not
fifteen minutes ago, and they made a lane for him to pass through,
following him with their eyes till the gate closed behind him. The
foreman stood on the steps of the office and gave the order to resume
work. Not a man moved.
"It's Mr. Aston's wish," he shouted, "if you've got any heart in you
to show him what you feel, you'll attend to it."
The crowd swayed and broke up, melted once more into units, who
disappeared their several ways. The head foreman wiped his forehead
and went into the office.
Outside the ante-room to Christopher's private office the glass was
strewn on the pathway, and that was the only sign in the mill yard of
what had occurred.
Christopher found a group already assembled round
Ann Barty's cottage. They drew back from him with curious eyes.
"Is anyone with her?" he asked, his hand on the latch.
"Mrs. Toils and Jane Munden, what's her sister," said a woman, eagerly
seizing a chance of a speaking part in this drama of life and death.
Christopher went in. The mother was sitting dry-eyed and staring, her
hands twisted in her coarse apron. She swayed to and fro with
mechanical rhythm, and paid no heed at all to the two weeping women
who kept up a flow of low-uttered sentences of well-meant but
inadequate comfort. Christopher bent over her and took both her hands,
neither remembering the other nor seeing aught but the mother with a
burden of grief slowly dropping on her.
"Ann," he whispered, "Ann, there was no choice for me. Forgive me if
you can, for being alive."
The strained, ghastly face twitched and she stopped swaying and looked
at him uncomprehendingly as he knelt before her.
"They say he's dead, he's dead. My boy Dick," she moaned.
Christopher put his arm round her. "God help mothers," he gasped,
under his breath, as the poor, shaking woman dropped her head on his
shoulder with an outbreak of fierce weeping.