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.