CHAPTER X—THE PEAK IN DARIEN
RUPERT was annoyed, and annoyed with himself for being annoyed, when he drove up to the main gate of Staithley Mills on the following afternoon and found that the gate-keeper did not know him. It was plainly the man’s duty to warn strangers off the premises, and Rupert was, by hypothesis and in fact, a stranger, but he felt it a reproach that Sir Rupert Hepplestall was forced to make himself known to Hepplestal’s gate-keeper.
The man, an old workman, who preferred this mildly honorific wardenship to a pension, made him a backhanded apology. “It’s so long sin’ we’ve seen thee,” he said. “Us had a hoam-coming ready for thee arter the war, but tha’ didno come.” No sirring and no obsequiousness from this old servant of the firm, and Rupert gave a quick, resentful glance as he pulled the car up in the yard.
Then he remembered that this was Lancashire—and he knew now what Lancashire thought of him. There was no reason why he should, and every reason why he should not, care what Lancashire thought, seeing that he came there solely to arrange his clean cut from Staithley; but an old fellow in a factory yard who did not scrape, but told him frankly that he had not come up to local expectations, had been able to thwack him shrewdly.
It was not much better after that to be treated like a prodigal, to be conducted possessively to the office entrance and to hear the gate-keeper announce in a great and genial voice, “I’ve a glad surprise for yo’, There’s th’ young maister.”
He was not and he refused to be “th’ young maister,” but he could not explain to this guide that he wasn’t what he seemed; the infernal fellow was so naively proud to be his herald. “I feel like Judas,” he thought, and tried wryly to laugh the thought away. It was a tremendous and a preposterous simile to be occasioned by the candid loyalty of one old workman, but things did not go much better with him inside the offices.
Theoretically, they should have shrunk, to his maturer gaze, from his boyish recollection of them, but they were authentically impressive. He couldn’t think lightly of this regiment of desks, nor could he pretend that the eyes which turned towards him as his loud-voiced pilot announced him, were hostile. Theory was in chancery again; all employees ought to hate all employers, but the elderly gentlemen who were hastening towards him wore on their faces expressions of genuine pleasure instead of the decent deference that might cloak a mortal hatred. Ridiculously as if he had been indeed a prince on the day when Sir Philip took him round and introduced him, he discovered a royal memory, and remembered their names. It was developing into a reception; this wasn’t at all what he had come for. He wondered what the younger clerks were thinking, men of his own age, ex-service men, but he had not the chance even to look at them. A positive guard of honor was escorting him to William’s room, that joss-house of the Hepplestalls.
If only he could laugh at their formality and at their quaint appreciativeness of his knowing their names! He felt he ought to laugh; he felt it was all something out of Dickens. Or if he could blurt out that he had come to slip the collar for ever from his neck! They would scuttle from him as though he were the plague; but he could neither laugh aloud nor tell the truth to those solemn mandarins. They were not pompous fools, or he could have laughed, he could have scattered them impishly with his truth; but they were captains in a Service where promotion went by merit, they were proven efficients in an organization whose efficiency was world-renowned, and their homage was not absurd because it was paid not to the young man, Rupert Hepplestall, but to Sir Philip’s son, to the successor to the Headship of the Service. That made it the more hypocritical in him to seem to accept their homage, but if he was going to forfeit what good opinion they retained of a truant, he was going to keep it, at any rate, until the die was unalterably cast.
It was certain to be cast, but Hepplestal’s was retorting on him with unexpected power. Mary was right: the bigness of Hepplestal’s had been escaping him. From London the sale had seemed no more than signatures on documents, and a check. Up here, confronted with Staithley Mills as so much brick, mortar and machinery, and confronted with no more than one crude loyalist in the yard and half a dozen grayboards of the Service in the office, the thing loomed colossal. Let it loom: he held its future in the hollow of his hand, and this, of all times, was no moment for second thoughts. He had to tackle William, the waverer, the fence-sitter who must be met with firmness, and not by one who was himself momentarily awed by the bigness of Hepplestal’s into being a waverer. With the air of nailing his colors to the mast, even if they were the skull and crossbones, he recovered his resolution in the moment when that ambassadorial figure, the Chief Cashier of Hepplestall’s, threw open William’s door and announced “Sir Rupert Hepplestall”; and a grave assurance, inflexible and self-reliant, seemed to enter the room with him.
William raised careworn eyes as this bright incarnation of sanguine youth came into the office in which he sat almost as if it were a condemned cell. He knew, better than Rupert who knew the Hepplestalls so little, what wrath would come when they two faced an outraged Board, and this sedate, this almost smiling confidence seemed to him as offensive as buffoonery at a funeral. “You look very cheerful,” he greeted his nephew resentfully.
“Why not?” said Rupert. “It’s a mistake to call optimism a cheap virtue. How are you, Uncle?”
“I suppose you slept last night,” was the reply from which Rupert was to gather that sleep at such a crisis was considered gross.
“Yes, thanks,” he said. “At Matlock. I drove up quietly, because I wanted to think. Really, of course, I’d decided in the first five minutes after opening your letter.”
“You decided very quickly,” said William, who had come to no decision.
“My wife made the same remark,” said Rupert. “But that’s a day and a half ago, and my first opinion stands. I’ve decided to sell.” Speaking, he gave a just perceptible jerk of the head which William remembered as a characteristic of Sir Philip when he, too, announced one of his quick decisions, and the little movement was not a grateful sight to William. Sir Philip’s son had his father’s trick and, it seemed, his father’s way of arriving rapidly at a conclusion. William, victim to irresolution as he always was, was sliding off his fence into opposition, through nothing more logical than jealousy of this boy who had the gift of making up his mind swiftly. “Am I to understand that your wife has other views?” he asked. It was hardly likely in such a wife, in an actress, but Rupert’s words seemed to suggest that Mary had given him pause, and if William was going to oppose this headstrong boy, any ally, however unlikely, would be welcome.
But, “Wives don’t count in this,” said Rupert bruskly, and, he thought, truthfully. It was true at any rate between Rupert and the wife of William; Rupert’s decision had been made before he opened Gertrude’s prompting letter. But William and William’s wife were another matter, and William shuffled uneasily on his chair as he admitted the influence in this crisis of the Service of Gertrude who was not born a Hepplestall. He must be strong.
“Quite right,” lie said firmly. “Wives don’t count. But it isn’t the case that you decide, Rupert. The Board decides.”
“I make it from your letter that for the practical purposes of this deal, you and I decide.”
“It still is not the case that you decide.”
“Oh, naturally, when I said I’d decided, I meant as regards myself. I’m here to get your views. But, even if you’re against me, Uncle, that won’t stop me from going on. I mean there may be others who aren’t romantic about Hepplestall’s. I may find others who’ll pool their shares with mine in favor of a sale.”
William inclined to tell him to go and try. He didn’t think it likely that there would be any others, but if there were, let them join with Rupert and let William be able to say that his hand was forced. It would be a comforting solution.
“You’re hoping it, Uncle. I’m perfectly aware you want to sell. Why did you write to me at all if you didn’t want to sell?”
“Is that fair, Rupert? You would have been the first to blame me if I had not told you of this.”
“I should never have known anything about it. I know nothing of lots of important things you decide.”
“And doesn’t that seem a shameful thing for your father’s son to have to say, Rupert? Suppose I sent you that letter just to make you see what sort of important things we had to decide in your absence. To arouse your sense of responsibility.”
“That cock won’t fight, Uncle. You could decide other things very well without me. You could decide this, too, if the decision were a negative. But the decision you hoped for was an affirmative and so you wrote to me. Are you going to deny that you hoped I’d want to sell?”
“You’re... you’re very headstrong, Rupert.”
“I’ve come here to get down to facts. And the flat fact is that both you and I want to sell. You want more pleasure in life than being Head of Hepplestall’s allows you. You want to get out and I don’t mean to get in. We both know that from the point of view of those old Johnnies on the wall”—William shuddered at his catastrophic levity—“it’s a crime to sell Hepplestall’s. But I’m not a Chinaman and I won’t worship my ancestors. I’ve my own view of the sort of life I mean to live. And we both know that the whole of the rest of the Board may be against us and that some of them virulently will. Very well, then we don’t tell the Board before it’s necessary. We go into the question of price, and we quote the figure to these accountants. We see what reply we draw. As to the price, that’s your affair.”
“Well,” confessed William, “tentatively, purely as a matter of curiosity, I have gone into that.”
“Uncle,” said Rupert, surprising William with a giant’s hand-grip, “you and I speak the same language. And we won’t stammer, either. These accountants wrote to you, so the reply must be from you. You have not had an opportunity to consult your Board and you speak for yourself in estimating the market value of Hepplestall’s at so much. This figure should not be regarded as the basis of negotiation, but as the minimum financial consideration on which other terms of sale could be founded. Something like that, eh? Now show me the figure and tell me how you arrived at it.”
From nephew to uncle, this did not strain courtesy; it was hot pace-making irresistibly recalling to William occasions when Sir Philip, well in his stride, had made him wonder whether such alert efficiency was quite gentlemanly. But with the figures in his pocket he had been no sloven himself, and if Rupert and he did indeed speak the same language, he hadn’t stammered.
At the same time, this production of the figures, to one so pertinacious as Rupert, advanced matters to a stage from which there was no retreat and he hesitated until a thought, sophistical but consoling, came into his mind. He had heard it rumored that the Banks were beginning to frown on the excessive speculation in mills; of course, and time, too. The Government had cried, “Trade! Trade!” and had inspired the Banks to encourage trade by lending money readily. Then it was found that too much of the money lent was being used not for sound trade but for speculation, and borrowers were faced with a decided change of front on the part of bank managers. William conveniently forgot that the type of rich man behind the accountants who had written to him would be above the caprice of bank managers, and decided happily that the whole affair had merely an academic interest; in that case, there was no harm in discussing the figures with Rupert behind the backs of the rest of the Board, and in submitting them to London. The nationally eminent accountants would have been infuriated to know that William Hepplestall imagined them capable of having to do with a mare’s-nest; but that it was all a mare’s-nest was the salve he applied to his conscience as he went to the safe to collect his data for Rupert.
Rupert had no sophistical conclusions to draw from a general situation of which he knew nothing; it was clear to him that they had passed the turning-point and were safely on the tack for home. There would be any amount of detail to be settled, but the supreme issue was decided; William and he were at one, and Hepplestal’s was to be sold! No wonder he had hectored a little. He had had to rout William and not only William but the belated hesitations in himself born of his dismay at the formidable size of Hepplestal’s; and success had justified his methods. In here, the massiveness of the mills did not oppress and a modern man whose thinking was not confused by the portraits of his ancestors could see this thing singly, stripped of sentiment, in terms of pounds, shillings and pence. If Staithley Mills were large, so would be the figure William was to declare; if the tradition was fine, it was commutable into the greater number of thousands. That was sanity, anything else was muddled-headedness, and he awaited William’s scratches on paper as one who has swept away obfuscating side-issues and concentrates on essentials.
“It makes a very considerable total, Rupert,” said William gravely.
“We’ve got used to considerable totals, haven’t we? I don’t suppose it’s more than a day’s cost of the war.”
“Then I’ve a surprise for you,” said William.
“Yes?” asked Rupert with an eager anticipation which was hardly due to greed so much as to impatience to learn what fabulous key to the pageant of life was to be his to turn. Let it only be big enough and he had no doubt that it would dazzle Mary out of her queer, old-fashioned timidities. He stood upon his peak in Darien. “Yes,” he asked again as William paused, not because he had a sense of the dramatic but because he was nervous.
There was a knock at the door, apologetic if ever knock apologized, and an embarrassed henchman of the Service came in upon William’s indignant response.
“I wouldn’t dream of disturbing you, sir, but Lady Hepplestall is here.”
“My wife?” cried Rupert, hoping against hope that it was his mother.
“Yes, Sir Rupert, and Bradshaw’s with her. Mr. Bradshaw of the spinners. The M. P. He... well, sir, he put it that he knew you didn’t want to be interrupted and he’s come to interrupt.”
“Thank you,” said William. “We will not keep Lady Hepplestall waiting.” William was very dignified as he said the only possible thing, and he hoped Rupert would perceive in his dignity a reproach to his own exhibition of crude amazement before an understrapper. Rupert was ludicrously like a boy caught in the act of robbing an orchard, and William’s eye was alight as he contrasted this crestfallen Rupert with the Rupert who had declared roundly that “Wives don’t count in this.” William had hopes of Mary, who was shown in with Tom before Rupert had time to attempt an explanation of her presence to his uncle.
Rupert recovered himself and made a tolerable show of hauteur; he wasn’t the small boy in the apple orchard but a very grand gentleman making his pained protest at her intrusion. “Mary!” he began.
“No, not now, Rupert,” she checked him. “I’m here to watch. I told Mr. Bradshaw and he is here to speak.” To watch, she did not add, with desperately anxious eyes the effect upon him both of her summons to Tom and of what Tom had to say. She thought she had saved Hep-plestall’s, she thought Tom had a medicine that would cure them of their wish to sell, but had she saved Rupert? That was her larger question and she saw no answer to it yet. She was there to watch and pray.
“Well,” said Tom, “that’s a good opening. As she says, Lady Hepplestall told me what you’re up to and we’re saved the trouble of bluffing round the point. You’re out to sell Hepplestall’s; I’m here to stop you.”
“The devil you are,” cried Rupert.
Tom turned to William. “Does Sir Rupert know I’m secretary of the Spinners’ Union?” he asked.
“Indeed?” said Rupert. “And what business may this be of the Spinners’ Union, or any other Union?”
“Vital business,” said Tom, “of theirs and every other cotton trade Union. I’m usually asked to sit down in this office, Mr. Hepplestall.”
“You are usually asked to come into it, Mr. Bradshaw. You have hardly asked to-day,” said William.
“Please yourself,” said Tom. “I’ve been sitting a long while in the train. I can stand, only I’ve a bad habit of making speeches when I’m on my feet and I’d as lief have had this friendly.”
It surprised and annoyed Rupert that William pointed to a chair with an “If you please, Mr. Bradshaw.” Himself, he would have kicked the confounded fellow into the street and when he had gone it would have been Mary’s turn for—not for kicking, certainly, but for something severe in the way of disciplinary measures. “Friendly!” he scoffed.
“What you might call a benevolent enemy, Sir Rupert,” said Tom. “If I weren’t benevolent, I’d have gone into Staithley streets and cried it aloud that Hepplestall’s was being sold to Londoners, and I’d have watched the hornets sting you. But, being benevolent, I’d rather you didn’t get stung, and I’m here till I get your assurance that all thought of a sale is off.”
“That means you’re making quite a long stay with us, Mr. Bradshaw,” said Rupert elaborately.
“I wonder how much you know of the Staithley folk, Sir Rupert,” said Tom. “They’re fighting stock. You maybe know there’s a likely chance of things coming to a big strike in the cotton trade on the wages question, but that’s not just yet and if you don’t watch it there’ll be an urgency strike in Staithley that might begin to-night. One of these wicked strikes you read about. Without notice.”
“But you... Mr. Bradshaw, you’re the chief Union official.”
“Oh, yes,” said Tom, “and officially the strike would be unofficial. But I’d be roundabout, unofficially. Rum sort of strike, eh? Striking against the Hepplestalls for the Hepplestalls, and a Bradshaw leading it. If you knew owt of Bradshaws and Hepplestalls, you’ll see the rumminess of that.”
“Against us for us. Yes, I see. One might almost conclude you like the Hepplestalls, Mr. Bradshaw.”
“Like ‘em!” said Tom. “Like ‘em!” His eyes glanced at William with the suspicion of a twinkle in it. William wondered if there was a twinkle; Sir Philip would not have wondered, he would have seen and he would have understood. He would have discounted Tom’s next words, “I take the liberty of telling you the Hepplestalls are a thieving gang of blood-sucking capitalists, but I prefer to stick to the blood-suckers I know. I know the Hepplestalls and I can talk to them. I don’t know, I won’t talk to a soulless mob of a London syndicate. You can think of it like this, Sir Rupert. There was steam, and it fastened like a vampire on Lancashire. It fastened on your sort as well as on my sort, and we’ve been working up to where we’re getting steam in its place, obeying us, not mastering us. We’re doing well against steam. Shorter hours are here, and factory work before breakfast has gone. Half-timers are going, and education’s going to get a sporting chance. And we’re not beating steam to let ourselves be ruined by water.”
William nodded sober acquiescence, but Rupert was uninformed. “Water?” he asked.
“Watered capital,” Tom explained. “Lancashire’s water-logged, but we’ll keep Staithley out of what’s coming to Lancashire. You have mills here that are the pride of the county. You wouldn’t turn them into the pride of speculators as the biggest grab they ever made in Lancashire! You wouldn’t make Staithley suffer from the rot of watered capital.”
William stirred furtively on his chair and avoided Tom’s eye with the shiftiness of a wrongdoer who is shown the results of misdeed, and then remembered that he had done no wrong and nodded approval of Tom’s words which were not addressed to him but to Rupert. Mentally he thanked Tom for saying outright things which he had himself thought. He had merely kept them in reserve, unspoken until he had entertained himself by proceeding a little further with the accountants; but that was, perhaps, not the most honorable form of entertainment, based as it would have been on the false pretense that William was prepared to sell, and he was grateful to Tom for an intrusion which cleared the air. He did not blame himself: he had not played with fire, or, if he had, it had been while wearing asbestos gloves; but what Tom said to Rupert—of course it was to Rupert—was the final argument against a sale, and he drew out notepaper and bent to write.
To Rupert, Tom was simply a nuisance. He had sighted victory, he had carried William, he had resolutely defeated such difficulties as sentiment and the frowning ponderosity of Hepplestall’s, and he saw Tom Bradshaw, with his croaking prophecies of after-effects of the sale upon some fifty thousand inhabitants of Staithley, as a monstrous impertinence. He was so busy seeing Tom as an impertinence that he did not see William writing a letter.
“I’ve heard of the tyranny of Trade Unions,” he said. “I’ve heard of what they call their rights and what most people call their privileges. But I’ve never heard of a Trade Union’s right to veto a sale. I have the right to transfer possession of my own to anubody. If you think you can engineer a strike against that elementary right of property, I tell you to go ahead and see what happens.”
“I know what will happen in this case, Sir Rupert. If we let you sell—”
“You let! You can’t prevent.”
“If you sold,” Tom went on, “some undesirable results would arise. I am dealing with them before they arise. I am dealing on the principle that prevention is better than cure.”
“Are you? Then suppose I said strike and be damned to you?”
“If you said that you would be a young man speaking in anger and I shouldn’t take you too seriously.”
“What!” cried Rupert. There was no doubt about his anger now.
“One moment,” said Tom. “I’m against a strike, but it’s a good weapon. It’s maybe a better weapon when it isn’t used than when it is. It can hit the striker as well as the struck.”
“Oh? That’s dawned on you, has it?”
“Some time before you were born. But this strike wouldn’t hurt the striker. There’s somebody ready to buy Hepplestall’s. I’ll call him Mr. B., because B stands for butcher, and a butcher will buy a bull but he won’t buy a mad bull. Mr. B. will think twice before he buys Hepplestall’s when Hepplestall’s men are on strike against being sold. No one buys trouble with his eyes open. That’s why we can stop this. That’s the public way, but I’ve still great hopes we’ll stop it privately, in this room.”
“Then you—” Rupert began hotly, but William interrupted. “You may have noticed that I was writing, Mr. Bradshaw. This letter goes to-night finally declining to treat in any way for a sale of Hepplestall’s. I have signed it and I am Head of Hepplestall’s. I hope, Sir Rupert, the future Head will sign it with me.”
“Uncle!” he said, and turned his back.
“It isn’t needful,” said Tom, “for me to add that nobody shall ever know from me that there was any question of a sale.”
“Thank you,” said William. “As a fact, Mr. Bradshaw, there never was.” He believed what he said, too. He believed he had never been influenced by Gertrude or convinced by Rupert. He believed he had merely toyed pleasantly with the idea, standing himself superior to it. “But that shall not prevent me from appreciating your actions, yours, Lady Hepplestall, and yours, Mr. Bradshaw. We Hepplestalls are all trustees, all of us,” he emphasized, looking at Rupert’s stiff back, “but you have shown to-day that you are sharer in the trust.”
Tom wondered for a moment what was the polite conversational equivalent of ironical cheers; William was escaping too easily, but the chief point was not the regent but the heir, Mary’s Rupert, and he could spare William the knowledge that he had deceived nobody.
“Sir Rupert spoke just now,” he said, “of the rights of property. They are rightful rights only when they are matched with a sense of responsibility, and capital that forgets responsibility is going to get it in the neck.”
“We have,” said William superbly, “the idea of service in this firm.”
“Man,” said Tom, “if you hadn’t had, I shouldn’t be here to-day talking to you in headlines. If you hadn’t had that idea and if you hadn’t lived up to it and if I didn’t hope you’d go on living up to it, I’d have had a very different duty. Shall I tell you what that duty would have been, Sir Rupert? To keep my mouth shut and let you sell. The higher you sold the higher they’d resell when they floated their company, and the sooner they’d start squeezing the blood out of Staithley.”
Rupert turned a puzzled face. “That would have been your duty? Why?” he asked.
“Hot fevers are short,” said Tom. “It ‘ud bring the end more quickly. I don’t know if you read the Times. If you do you may have seen that they mentioned my name the other day along with some more and called us the elder statesmen of the Labor Party. Too old to hurry. Brakes on the wheels of progress. Maybe; but I’m one that looks for other roads than the road that leads to revolution and you Hepplestalls have been a sign-post on a road I like. You’ve been too busy overpaying yourselves to go far up the road yet, but you’re leaders of the cotton trade and by the Lord that ship needs captaincy. That’s why I didn’t do what lots in the Party would tell me was my duty—to let you rip, and rip another rent in the rotting fabric of capitalism.” Mary’s hand was on his arm. “Because you love the Hepplestalls,” she said.
“And me a Bradshaw?” he said indignantly. “Me a Labor Member and they capital? Did you ever hear of the two old men who’d been mortal enemies all their lives, and when one of them was killed in a railway accident, the other took to his bed and died because he’d nothing left to live for? That’s me and the Hepplestalls.”
She shook her head, smiling. “It’s not like that,” she said.
“It ought to be,” said Tom, “but it isn’t. Service, not greed, and there’s a hope for all of us in that, and if you want to know who taught me to see it, it was Sir Philip Hepplestall.”
Rupert was in distress. Why should London, his schemes, theaters, seem so incredibly remote? Why wasn’t he angry with this grizzled fellow from the Staithley stews who dared, directly and indirectly, to lecture him? Why didn’t he resent Mary, another Bradshaw, who had brought Tom there to reprimand a Hepplestall? And why weren’t ladders provided for climbing down from high horses?
“My father?” he said. “My father taught you?” It was his ancestors he declined to worship. A father was not an ancestor, and Rupert was hearing again Sir Philip’s deep sincerity as he spoke of the Samurai. “We have both learned from Sir Philip, Mr. Bradshaw. I have been near to forgetting the lesson. Did he ever speak to you of Samurai?”
“Sam who?” asked Tom.
“Ah,” said Rupert happily. That was his secret, that intimate ideal which Sir Philip had revealed only to his son. He hadn’t, perhaps, the soundest evidence for supposing that the confidence had been uniquely to him, but in his present dilemma it seemed entirely satisfactory—a way out and a way down. And, after all, he came down by a ladder.
A great noise filled the room, ear-splitting, nerve-jarring to those who were not used to it. Rupert was not used to it, but for a moment wondered if it were external or the turmoil of his thoughts. “Only the buzzer,” William smiled.
“Staithley goes home,” said Tom.
But not yet. The Chief Cashier knocked perfunctorily on the door and came in with the bland air of one who had the entree at all times. “If Sir Rupert could speak to the workpeople,” he said. “Word was passed that he is here. This window looks upon the yard. May I open it?”
Rupert paused for one of time’s minor fractions, and his head jerked as his father’s used to jerk. “Mr. Bradshaw,” he said, “will you step to the window with us?”
It was grand; it was too grand; it was a gesture which began finely and ran to seed like rhubarb. It was florid when he wanted to be simple and he harked back in mind to a Punch cartoon of some years earlier, representing the Yellow Press as a horrible person up to the knee in mud, calling out, “Chuck us another ha’penny and I’ll wallow in it.” He felt himself up to the midriff in a mud of sentimentality; for two pins, he would with ironic grace wallow in the mud. His surrender was too loathsome and insincere: he held out his hand to Tom, feeling that he was going the whole hog, parading his humiliation before the men and women of Hepplestall’s who had the idiotic wish to salute a traitor as their prince.
Tom offered first aid here and shook his head. “No, thanks,” he said. “I’ve to be careful what company I keep in public. I’m Member for Staithley, but I’m Labor Member and you’re Capital.”
“Aren’t we to work together in the future?” asked Rupert.
“If they see me standing there with you, they’ll throw brickbats at me, and some of them will hit you. You’ve a lot to learn, Sir Rupert. Old-fashioned Labor men like me, that want to hurry slowly, are between the devil and the deep sea. If I show myself standing by the devil, the sea will come up and drown me.”
“By George,” said Rupert, feeling half clean of mud and insincerity, “by George, this is going to be interesting. I’ve... I’ve a lot to learn, haven’t I?”
“Thank God, you know it,” said Tom Bradshaw reverently.
And in another minute, Rupert knew it better still, when he moved to the window with William. The factory yard below them was packed with a cheering mass of workpeople, and every inlet to it showed a sea of heads stretching as far as the eye could reach. Not one tenth the employees of the great mills could stand within sight of the window; those who were there had gained priority of place because they worked in the departments nearest the yard, but not by any means all whose work was nearby had come and it struck William, if not Rupert, that the people here assembled were chiefly elderly or very young. The elders, like the gate-keeper who had passed the word of Rupert’s coming into the mills, had genuinely an impulse of loyalty to a Hepplestall; the very young were ready to make a noise in a crowd gathered upon any occasion; and the merely young had for the most part made no effort to struggle into the yard.
To Rupert, this was Hepplestall’s making spontaneous levy in mass to welcome him; a little absurd of them, even if their prince had been princely, but undeniably affecting. He must play up to these acclamations, he must say something gracious, and he must not condescend. He was an ass whom they lionized, but he wouldn’t bray. He offered to speak, and the hearty roar below him diminished.
It has been observed before to-day that the contemptuous noise known as “booing” is unable to assert itself against cheers, whereas a few sharp hisses cut like a whip across any but the greatest uproar. As the cheers diminished in anticipation of his speech, the appearance of unanimity was shattered by derisive hissing, drowned at once by renewed volume of cheers, but more than sufficient to indicate an opposition.
Behind him in the room he heard Mary’s quick “What’s that?” he heard Tom say “Poor lad! Poor lad!” Who was a poor lad? He? He never did like honey; he didn’t want the leadership of sheep and he began to speak without preamble.
“It’s a tremendous thing to be a Hepplestall and if you cheered just now because my name is Hepplestall I think that you were right. Some of you hissed. If that was because I am a Hepplestall, I think that you were wrong, but if it was because I’ve been a long time in coming here, then you were right. I shirked the responsibility. I had the thought to take my capital out of Hepplestall’s and to put it into something soft. But a man said to me lately that capital that failed to accept responsibility was going to get it in the neck. I agreed and my capital stops in something tough, in Hepplestall’s. And another thing. We’ve made hay of the hereditary principle as such. If I’ve no merit, I shan’t presume on being Sir Philip’s son. In the mills side by side with you, it will be discovered whether I have merit or no. Now, I am not a socialist. I shall take the wages of capital and if I rise to be your manager, I shall take the wages of management. That’s blunt and I expect some of you are taking it as a challenge. Then those are the very fellows who are going to help me most. We’ll arrive amongst us at the knowledge of what is capital’s fair wage and what is management’s fair wage. I am here to learn and I am here to serve. If you will believe that, it will help us all; it will help more than had I kept my motives to myself and simply made you a speech of thanks for the home-coming welcome you have given me. The welcome expressed some disapproval and I should not have been honest if I had pretended that I didn’t notice it. I am not out to earn your approval by methods which might be contrary to the interests of Staithley Mills. I am out to serve Hepplestall’s, not sectionally, but as a whole. I look to you to show me my way, and while I have to thank you wholeheartedly for your cheers, I am absolutely sincere in thanking you for your hisses. They are the beginning of my education. I haven’t a sweet tooth and I liked them. We’re not going to get together easily, I and those fellows who hissed. Well, strong bonds aren’t forged easily and I can’t be more than a trier. I’m Hepplestall and proud of it, and I dare say that’s enough for some of you. It isn’t enough for me until I’ve proved myself and it isn’t enough for the fellows who hissed. I’m asking them for fair play for a Hepplestall. I’m asking for a chance. I’m going to do my best and I’m keeping you from home. It’s good of you to stay and I’ve said my say. You’ve not had butter; you’ve had facts. My thanks to you for listening. Good night.”
They cheered and he stood at the window as they dispersed, trying to remember what he had said, trying to gauge its effect upon the men. There were no hisses, but that meant nothing; a demonstration of opposition had been made and needn’t be repeated. But, anyhow, he hadn’t lied; he hadn’t pretended that he had their esteem before he earned it; and he meant to earn it.
He turned from the window to Tom Bradshaw; neither to Mary nor to William, but to Tom. “Did I talk awful tosh?” he asked. “Honestly, I don’t know what I said.”
“A young speaker never does, and, some ways, he’s the better for having no tricks of the trade. You’ll do, lad. You’ll do.”
Rupert’s face was bright as he heard the approbation of a Bradshaw under the portrait of Reuben Hepplestall. “Hepplestall and proud of it! Did I say that?”
William nodded and Rupert looked at him with a puzzled face. “Damn it, it’s true,” he said wonderingly. “May I sign that letter, Uncle William?”
CHAPTER XI—STAITHLEY EDGE
RUPERT in the office had been all that Mary had dared to hope, and that was the danger of it. She watched him almost distrusting her eyes as she might have watched a sudden conversion at a Salvation Army meeting, as a spectacle that was too fantastic to be accepted at face value. She had an idea that somebody suffered when the penitent reacted from the emotion of the bench.
“Always a catch in everything,” she had thought when she avowed her origin to Rupert, though she feared to lose him by the confession, and now she was adventuring again in skepticism, she was hunting the catch, the flaw latent in human happiness. She had won a victory and she expected to pay the price.
William invited them to the Hall and Rupert deferred to her with conventional politeness which seemed to her bleak menace. He froze her by his courtesy after he had so pointedly ignored her presence except for the pained surprise with which he had welcomed her, but she tried to believe that she was hypersensitive.
She had butted in, into an affair of men, and even if he recognized that she had done the one thing possible, she could hardly expect him to applaud her meddling. Men were not grateful to meddling women. Heaven knew she did not want him to eat the leek for her; and often there were understandings which were better left unspoken. If that was it, if they were tacitly to agree that her trespass was extreme but justified, then she could do very well without more words. She could exult in his silent approbation; but silent resentment would be terrible.
It would be terrible but bearable: she was thinking too much of herself and too little of him. She loved, and what mattered in love was not what one got out of it but what one put into it. By a treachery, if he liked to take that view of her interference, she had put more into her love than she had ever put before, she had taken a greater risk and he was signally the gainer by it. He was going to Hepplestall’s, he was a greater Rupert now.
She couldn’t have it both ways and what had been wrong in London was that he had loved her too much, in the sense that he had spent his life upon her and on things which came into his life only through his relationship with her. To be beautiful, love must have proportion and his had grown unshapely. If all her loss were to be loss of superfluity, her price of victory would be low indeed. He would not in Staithley be the great lover he had been in London, but there was double edge to that phrase “great lover”: the great lovers were too often the little men. Certainly and healthily he would love her less uxoriously now, and that must be all to the good.
All, even if he loved her no more. That was the risk she had taken with open eyes, and love her sanely or love her not at all, he had come to Hepplestall’s: Rupert the man was of more importance than Rupert the husband. And the right man would not cease to love her because she had gone crusading for his soul under the banner of a Bradshaw.
She saw that she had come round to optimism and found herself in such a port with a thousand new alarms. She was crying safety when there was no safety, she...
Rupert and William were talking and she had not been listening. She must have missed clews to Rupert’s thought and forced herself to hear. It didn’t sound revealing talk, though. Lightly—and how could they be light?—they were chaffing each other about their cars.
“I’ll prove it to you now,” William was saying. “We’ll garage your crock here and I’ll drive you up to the Hall in a car that is a car.”
“No, thanks,” said Rupert, “I’ve something to do first, with Mary. We’ll follow you soon. I dare say my aunt won’t be sorry to have warning of our coming.”
William’s face fell. Gertrude could make herself unpleasant when she did not get her way, and this time her hopes had gone sadly agley. He would have liked a bodyguard when he announced to her that Rupert was coming to Staithley. “I had hoped—” he began.
Rupert nodded curtly. “Yes,” he said, surprising William by a look which seemed strangely to comprehend his dilemma, “but we shall not be long.”
Mary thrilled through all preoccupation to the heady thought that a Bradshaw was to dine at Staithley Hall, but her way there was not, it seemed, to be an easy one. Rupert chose, she supposed, to have things out with her first, and if she did not relish the anticipation, she could admire his promptitude. He had an air of grim gayety which mystified by its contradiction, but of which the grimness seemed addressed to William and the gayety to her.
“Got any luggage?” he asked her. She had quitted Staithley with a suitcase; she returned with no more outward show of possession, and they picked up her case in the ante-room where she had left it as they passed through to get the car.
“Well, Mary Ellen,” he said, using her full name which certainly was normal in Lancashire where the Mary Ellens and the John Thomases are almost double-barreled names, “this is Staithley. How well do you remember it? Is there a road round the mills?”
“I think so,” she said, “but you’ll meet cobbles.”
“It’s Staithley,” he said, and drove the circuit of the mills in silence. “Um,” he said. “London. Furthest East, which is the Aldwych Theater, to Furthest West, which is the St. James, to Furthest North, which is the Oxford, and back East by Drury Lane. We’ve driven further than that round these mills. Somebody once mentioned to me that they’re big. There’s a coal mine, too, that’s a bit of detail nobody bothers to think of. Well, is there any way of looking down on this village?”
“There’s Staithley Edge,” she said. “There’s a road up by the Drill Hall.”
“Point it out,” he said. “You understand that we’re doing this to give Aunt Gertrude time to powder her nose. It isn’t really a waste of petrol.”
Whatever it was, and certainly she found no harsh reactions here, they were doing it in the dark which fell like a benediction on Staithley. Their wheels churned up rich mud of the consistency, since for days it had been fine, of suet pudding, and the road, worn by the heavy traffic of the mills, bumped them inexorably. “Staithley!” he said. “Staithley!” but she did not detect contempt. They reached the Drill Hall and the Square, unchanged except by a War Memorial and a cinema, and turned into the street up which she had once gazed while Mr. Chown waited, ill-lighted, ill-paved, a somber channel between two scrubby rows of deadly uniform houses. “Staithley goes home,” Tom Bradshaw had said, and this was where an appreciable percentage of it had gone; but neither Rupert nor Mary were being sociological now. She did not know what he was thinking; she thought of Staithley Edge and of the moors beyond, wondering a little why she should find Staithley so good when it was so good to get out of it up here.
A tang of burning peat assailed her nostrils, indicating that they had reached the height where peat from, the moors cost less than coal from the pits, and soon the upland air blew coolly in their faces as they left the topmost house behind. The road led on, over the hill, across the moor which showed no signs, in the darkness, of men’s ravaging handiwork, but at the first rise Rupert stopped the car and got out.
“So that’s it.” He looked on Staithley, where the streets, outlined by their lamps, seemed to lead resolutely to an end which was nothing. It was not nothing; it was the vast bulk of Staithley Mills, unlighted save for a glimmer here and there, but possibly he was seeing in these human roadways which debouched on that black inhuman nullity, a symbol of futility. The gayety seemed gone from him like air from a punctured balloon, as he said again, in a dejected voice, “So that’s it. That pool of darkness. They’re a great size, the Staithley Mills.”
She was out of the car and at his elbow as she said, “A man’s size in jobs, Rupert.”
“Or in prisons,” he said bitterly.
“Prisons!” And she had been feeling so secure! Here was sheer miracle—she and Rupert were standing together on Staithley Edge; they were in her land of heart’s desire, and the Edge, her Mecca, was betraying her, the miracle was declining to be miraculous. “Prisons!” she said, in an agony of disillusionment.
“Oh, aren’t we all in prison?” he asked. “The larger, the smaller—does it matter?”
This was philosophy, and Mary wanted the practicalities. “Are you seeing me as jailer? Is that what you mean?”
“Resenting you?” he asked. “You!” and left it so with luminous emphasis. “No. Life’s the jailer. For four years I was every day afraid of death. I’m afraid of life to-night. What shall I make of Staithley? Those mills, to which each Hepplestall since the first who built there has added something great. Those milestones of my race. I meant to run away, I meant to dodge and shirk and make belief. You’ve steered me back and I thank you for it, Mary. But it’s a mouthful that I’ve bitten off. Hepplestall’s! What shall I add? I don’t know. I’m overpowered. It’s so solemn. It’s so big.”
“You’re big, Rupert.”
He seemed not to hear or to feel her hand on his. “‘On me, ultimately on me alone rests the responsibility.’ That is what my father, who was Head of Hepplestall’s, said to me. Look at those mills, then look at me. They’re big. They’re terrifying in their bigness.”
“No. Worth while in their bigness.”
“I don’t know what you were thinking as we drove round the mills. I was wondering,” he smiled a little, “if they speak of a cliff as beetling because it makes one feel the size of a beetle under it. And I thought of a machine I remembered seeing in the works that they call a beetle. It’s got great rollers with weights that clump and thump the cloth till it shines and the noise of it splits your ears. Each huge wall of the mills, God knows how many stories high, seemed to fall on me like so many successive blows from a beetling machine. I was under Hepplestall’s, as people talk of being under the weather, and it’s always Hepplestall’s weather in Staithley. I wasn’t lying when I spoke to those fellows in the yard, I had some confidence then, but it’s oozed, it’s oozed. Look at the size of it all.”
“I’m looking,” said Mary, “and from Staithley Edge it’s in perspective. Rupert, this air up here! I’m not afraid. Not here. Not now. You... you’ve got growing pains, and they say they’re imaginary, but I know they’re good. You’re a bigger man already than you were.”
“I’m a hefty brute for a growing child,” he smiled down at her.
“You can take it smiling, though,” she approved.
“It’s this modern flippancy,” he grinned. “A generation of scoffers. But you can’t get over Hepplestall’s by scoffing at it. I came up here to look down on it, and I’m only more aware than ever that it’s big. You—you’ve got your idea of me. It’s a nice idea, but it’s pure flattery.”
“No.”
“Oh, yes, it is, to-day. But it’s something to grow up to, and it’s worth while because it’s your idea. If this family gang of mine told me they believed in me I should know they were talking through their hats. They wouldn’t be believing in me, they’d be believing in who I am, they’d be believing in a tradition which declares that my father’s son must be up to standard. You’re different. You know me and they don’t, and you’ve brought me to Staithley. It’s your doing, and I want like hell not to let you down. Your idea of me’s not true. It’s too good to be true. But I mean to make it true.”
Mary looked uphill to where, a hundred feet above them, the darkling rim of the Edge was silhouetted against the sky. “Staithley Edge,” she said, “and in my mind I was calling you a cheat.” She stooped to the bank by the road, she plucked coarse grass and held it to her lips. “Staithley Edge, will you forgive me? The dreams I’ve had of you, and then the shameful doubts and now the better than all dreaming that this is. I was going to build a house on Staithley Edge, and I have built a man.”
“Of course,” said Rupert, “I knew you had a passion for hills.”
“I never told you,” Mary said.
“No. But I knew. This is a hill. It isn’t an Alp. It isn’t a mountain. It’s Staithley Edge. I wonder what they’re doing about houses in Staithley. I don’t want to rob any one, but I’d like a house up here.”
“Rupert!” she cried.
“It’s Aunt Gertrude, you know,” he seemed to apologize. “Poor old thing, she’s got the same bee in her bonnet that her nephew used to have. London. Well, William’s the Head and he ought to go on at the Hall, and if he does it should pacify Gertrude. I expect he’s going through it while we’re loafing up here. Shall we go and break the news to her that there’s no eviction on the program?”
“Oh, my dear, there are a thousand things we haven’t said.”
“There’s the point, for instance, that if I look down on Staithley Mills every morning from my bedroom I ought to feel less scared of them.”
“I don’t believe a word of it,” said Mary and, kissing him, some hundreds of the things they hadn’t said seemed lustrously expressed. She found no insincerities in him now; the gesture and the bravado and the air that it was all something he was doing for a wager—these had gone and in their place was his task acknowledged and approached with humility. It was a beginning and she thought so well of his beginning that she had time to think of herself.
He turned the car towards the Hall, and the thought that she was going there was no longer heady. He had spoken contemptuously of “this family gang”; he had said, and she adored him for it, that she was different. They had, perhaps, some comfort for Gertrude; they were going to her with a message which should reconcile her to the news she would have heard from William; but, for all that, Mary was daunted at her coming encounter with Gertrude Hepplestall.
“Rupert,” she said, “you must help me to-night. Your aunt, and all the Hepplestalls, your family—and me.”
He frowned. “Well?” he said.
“There’s the tradition, and you married me. You married into musical comedy.”
“Hasn’t it dawned on you that you’re my wife, Mary?” But that was precisely what had dawned upon her and his question made her wonder if he saw what was implied. In London, he was all but explicitly the husband of Mary Arden; in Staithley she was no longer Mary Arden, she was the wife of Sir Rupert Hepplestall. That might not mean that the foundations of their relationship had shifted, but it certainly meant a vital difference in its values above the surface. She was Cæsar’s wife and people ought not to be able to remember against Cæsar that he had married an actress.
“Yes, your wife, Rupert. Your wife who was an actress.”
“Are you making the suggestion that you are something to be ashamed of?”
“I’ve the conceit to believe I’m not. You love me and I’ve the right to be conceited. But it isn’t what I think of myself, it’s what Staithley will think of me. London’s inured to actresses. Staithley—”
“Excuse an interruption,” he said, “but if you want to know what Staithley will think to-morrow, look there.” He slowed the car and pointed to the cinema across the Square. A man on a ladder was hand-printing in large letters on a white sheet above the door “Tomorrow. Mary Arden in...”
“That’s enterprise, isn’t it? The fellow can’t have heard more than half an hour ago that I was here, then he’d to think of you and he must have been busy on the ’phone to have made sure of getting that film here tomorrow.”
“Rupert, how awful for you. They will never forget what I was now.”
“Never. Thank God.”
“Don’t you care?”
“Oh, yes, I care and if I cared cheaply, I should thank you for being my propagandist. I should thank you for making me popular because you are popular and I’m your husband. You can’t deny there’s that in it, Mary, but there’s more. There’s the bridging of a gulf. There’s a breach made in a bad tradition. We Hepple-stalls must drop being Olympian. Aloofness; that’s to go and it’ll get a shove when Lady Hepplestall is seen on the screen in Staithley. What do a thousand Gertrudes matter if we can bridge the gulf? We’ve got to get together, we’ve got to reach those men who hissed. Do you see that cinema as a cheap way? I don’t. It’s a modern way if you like and it isn’t a way I made but one you made for me. It’s a reach-me-down, and I shan’t stop at ways that are ready-made. I’ll find my own. Up on the Edge I asked what I would add to Hepplestall’s. I’ll add this if I can—I’ll add humanity.”
“And I can help. Music, for instance.”
“You’ll make me jealous soon. You have so many advantages of me. I’m not even sure if I’m good enough for Lancashire League cricket. It’s good stuff, I can tell you. Whereas you...”
“Am I to manage Staithley Mills?”
“Nor I, for years. Never, if I’m unequal to it. But you’re right. The mills are the important thing, the rest’s decoration and decoration won’t go far. Staithley won’t stand you and me as Lady and Lord Bountiful. Those hissing friends of ours—circuses won’t satisfy them and I’d think the worse of them if they would. I’ll talk to William to-night and I expect he’ll snap my head off. He’s of the old gang, William is. There’s the war between William and me, but, Lord, he’ll know, he’ll know it all and I know nothing. I’m so young.”
“Yes,” said Mary, “and you’ll stay young, please. You’ll keep your hope, my faith, your youth.”
“I’m young all right,” he said. “Listen to me if you doubt it. ‘I’ll add humanity.’ Did I say that? With a voice beautifully vibrant with earnestness? Young enough to be capable of anything. But I will add it,” he finished as he drew up at the door of the Hall.
Hope burnished them as they came into the old home of the Hepplestalls; they were the keepers of a great light lit on Staithley Edge; they had a radiance which seemed to Gertrude a personal affront to her chatelainship. They came with the insolence of conquerors into the somber scene of her defeat, but she was on guard against revealing her feelings to the actress woman who was Lady Hepplestall. She had failed, she was doomed to Staithley, she had to explain away to her friend the letter she had written announcing that she was coming to live in London, she was to be evicted from the Hall by a saucy baggage out of a musical comedy; but even if the baggage proved as bad as her worst anticipations she would not lower to her by the fraction of an inch her flag of resolutely suave politeness.
She went upstairs to change her face after a tempestuous interview with William, and, expectant of a Mary strident in jazz coloring, changed also her frock to a sedate gray which should contrast the lady with the Lady. Then Mary came, with hair wind-tossed, and round her lips were marks as if she were a child sticky with toffee (but that was because when you pluck grass on Staithley Edge and press it to your cheek and kiss it, it leaves behind traces of the smoky livery it wears), apologizing for her plain traveling dress, looking so unlike Gertrude’s idea of the beauty-chorus queen who had captured Rupert that immediately she was off on a new trail and saw in Mary a tool made for her through which to work on Rupert and after all to bring about the sale of Hepple-stall’s. She could manage this smudge-faced piece of insignificance and she could manage a Rupert who had been caught by it. Her spirits rose, and their happiness seemed to her no longer offensive but imbecile.
Later on, she wondered why she forgot that the business of an actress was to act. She meditated ruefully upon the vanity of human hopes and the fallibility of first impressions, and she had no doubt but that Mary, for some dark purpose of her own, had counterfeited insignificance.
Mary hadn’t, as a fact, acted, but she had thought of Mary Ellen Bradshaw and of Jackman’s Buildings and Staithley streets as the door of the Hall opened to her, and she had continued to think of Mary Ellen Bradshaw through the few moments when Gertrude was greeting her. She didn’t know that the mourning grass of Staithley Edge had left its mark on her face; if she had known, she would have felt more insignificant still, but she had washed since then, she had kissed Rupert in their bedroom in Staithley Hall and her effect now upon Gertrude was that of the bottle marked “Drink me” upon Alice in Wonderland. Gertrude had drunk of no magic bottle, but she dwindled before Mary. It was disconcerting to an intriguer who had so lately seen Mary as her pliant instrument, but “Pooh! some actress trick,” she thought, making an effort to believe that she dominated the table.
“I’m afraid you will find Staithley very dull,” she said, “but we shall all do our best for you.”
“Thank you,” said Mary. “It’s exciting so far.”
“Yes. It must be strangely novel to you. Of course, I never go into the town. One needn’t, living in the Hall; but I’m forgetting. I shan’t be living here.”
“Oh, you will, aunt,” said Rupert. “We went up on the Edge to have a look at it all, and we decided—it arose out of a suggestion of Mary’s—to build a house up there. You see, uncle, you’re the Head. The Hall is naturally yours and aunt’s.”
“Naturally? It’s your property, Rupert.”
“Then that settles it. We’ll get some one to run us up a cottage on the Edge quite quickly. Really a cottage, I mean. I shall be working as a workman and I ought to live as one. I shan’t do that, but it won’t be a mansion pretending to be a cottage.”
“Well!” said Gertrude. “A cottage on the Edge!”
“We have to grow, Rupert and I,” said Mary. “We aren’t big enough for the Hall yet.”
“I feel about a quarter of an inch high, uncle, when I think of those mills... those thousands of men.”
“Oh, the workpeople,” said Gertrude, putting them in their place. “Your uncle tells me some of them dared to hiss.”
“Yes, I want to talk to you about that, uncle.”
William shuffled in his chair. “Not very nice of them, was it?”
“Impertinents,” said Gertrude. “They ought to be locked up.”
Rupert stared at her. If this was the attitude of the Hall, he thought, no wonder there had been a show of resentment. But it was only Gertrude’s attitude. “Would you also lock up,” said William, “the very many who did a deadlier thing than hissing? The men who stayed away, the men who went home ignoring Rupert altogether? We’d have to close the mills for lack of labor.”
“Lord,” said Rupert, “that’s telling me something.”
“I thought it best that you should know.”
Rupert thought so too, even if it was a piece of knowledge which seemed to bring him off a high place with a bump.
“Oh, my dears,” Gertrude put in, “you’ve no idea how difficult it all is.”
“No,” said Mary, “but Rupert knows that he knows nothing and he’s here to learn.”
“Yes. I’m here to learn. Can you put your finger on this for me, uncle? Why did they hiss? Why did they stay away?”
“What do you expect from a pig but a grunt?” asked. Gertrude.
“It’s to be noted, Rupert,” said William, “that the hisses came before you spoke, not afterwards.”
“You mean I said the right thing?”
“Did you mean what you said? Look at those books over there.” Behind the glass of the old mahogany case to which he pointed, the titles looked queerly incongruous. There were books on such subjects as Welfare Societies, Works Committees, Co-Partnership, and Rupert thought them incongruous not only in connection with that bookcase but with William.
“People have sent them to you?” he guessed.
“No. I bought them. If in the short years that I’ve been Head I have left my mark on Hepplestall’s, it is in this direction. Your father, as perhaps you know, was against what he called coddling the men. I would not coddle, but I have encouraged Welfare Societies and I have instituted Works Committees.”
Rupert had the sensation of deflation. He had called William of “the old gang,” and here was William’s contribution to the march of Hepplestall’s. Rupert was to add humanity, was he? Well, William had added it first. “I did these things with hope,” William was saying. “I pinned my faith to them, and what are they worth? There were two Hepplestalls hissed in Staithley Mills today. That is the reply to what I have tried to do. Can you wonder that I feel I’ve shot my bolt and missed my aim? The detail of my Works Committees scheme took me a year to evolve. I thought it was accepted and welcomed; and I was hissed to-day in Staithley Mills.”
For a moment even Mary was daunted, not by the thing she had brought Rupert here to do but by the realization of what release had meant to William.
“Not you, uncle,” Rupert cried. “They hissed me for being a laggard.”
“We’re Hepplestalls. That’s why they hissed. They hissed the Service.”
It had seemed solemn enough on Staithley Edge, but that was childish levity compared with this. What should one answer back to men who hissed the Service which served them? Gertrude’s pig with a grunt seemed justified in the light of William’s revelation of his progressive efforts.
“And you,” William said, “you spoke, and they cheered you for it. Well, it’s in those books. Co-Partnership. No: I’ve not done that. Limitation of profits—I’ve thought the Government was doing that drastically. I don’t know. You went too far for me, but they didn’t hiss you when you’d done, You sav you’re here to learn. Well, I can’t teach you. The technical side and the ordinary business side—oh, yes, we’ll teach you those. But what Labor wants, what, short of something catastrophic on the Russian scale, will satisfy Labor, I cannot tell you for I do not know.”
Once, unimaginably long ago, Rupert had found the beginnings of a solution in his wife’s appearance on the screen in a Staithley cinema. It was so long ago that he thought he must have grown stupendously since then.
Perhaps he had; it was a far cry from that uninformed optimism to this throttling doubt.
The doubt, though, was almost as uninformed as the optimism. He could see Mary’s lips moving: what was she signaling to him? Ah, that was it. She was repeating what she had said as they turned up the drive. “You’ll stay young, please. You’ll keep your hope, my faith, your youth.”
Yes, so he would. He wouldn’t let Mary down, he wouldn’t be beaten by Staithley. Punch—queer how much he turned to memories of Punch for mental figures—had a cartoon in an Almanac during the war. A tattered soldier, beaten to the knee, represented one year; a fresh upstanding soldier, taking the standard from the first, represented the next year. Was the motto “Carry on”? Well, a good motto for peace too. William was coming to the end of his tether, and Rupert must make ready to take from his hands the standard of the Service.
He had to learn, to learn, and for this thing which mattered most he had not found a teacher, but he must keep his hope. Somewhere was light. Somewhere was illumination. Somewhere was a teacher.
A servant came into the room. “Mr. Bradshaw wishes to speak to Sir Rupert on the telephone,” he said, and a scoffing laugh from Gertrude died stillborn at a look from the ci-devant, insignificant Lady Hepplestall. Rupert went to the door, like a blind man who is promised sight; and it is permissible to hope that Phoebe Bradshaw, from the place in which she was, saw the face of Rupert Hepplestall as he answered the call to the telephone of Tom Bradshaw, his adviser.