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.