D. F. E. Sykes

“ Edward Beaumont, as we have seen, was dreaming love’s young dream, than which we are all convinced there is nothing sweeter in this brief life of ours, and seeing visions of a glorious future rounded by the woolsack, and I know not what other suggestions of a lively imagination. Sam Storth, the partner whom he was fool enough to at the same time trust implicitly and regard with a sort of good-humoured contempt, was essaying the gentle art, desipere in loco, after a fashion of his own, in a word, combining business with pleasure. ”

“ Look here, brother Beaumont, I should have thought by this time you’d learned which side your bread’s buttered on, and who spreads the butter. You know I’m a Liberal, as good a Liberal as you are yourself, if it comes to that; you know when there’s a fight to be fought my cheque’s always been ready, and not a little cheque at that; and you’re vastly mistaken if you think you’ve got a monopoly of zeal for the working-class. But what the deuce, man alive, do you want poking your finger into this pie for? ”

“ I do not judge others, Eleanor, God forbid that I should. It may not be sinful for others, but it would for me, seeing as I see and thinking and feeling as I think and feel. And, indeed, it is no sacrifice for me to be without fine apparel and costly jewels. I take neither pride nor pleasure in them. A bit of coloured glass is to me as beautiful as the rarest gem, and a rose or a violet more beautiful than either. I often think people value jewels not for what they see in them, but from a curious sense that their costliness denies them to others. ”

“ For one thing, the surrounding hills are so lofty, and the moors on their summits so extensive, that the breezes sweep down the valleys or over our heads, and of a summer day you can stand in the main street of the town and see above your head sky as blue and as little obscured by smoke as looks down upon your fat pastures and rustling cornfields. You must go to Sheffield for smoke, not Huddersfield. ”

“ But I’ve been told on high authority that when poverty comes in at the door, love flies out at the window. Fancy me, Eleanor St. Clair, living in a cheap villa, with a horrid garden patch in front and a yard for drying clothes at the back; a slip-shod servant-maid with a sniffing nose, doing my own laundry work, cooking my own meals and my lord’s, cold mutton and rice pudding most days. I don’t think I could bear it for the best man living, and that’s flat!”
“Perhaps it won’t be so bad as all that, Eleanor. Does Mr. Beaumont know how you look at things?” ”

“ Well, I’m not having any, thank you, Beaumont. I pass this deal. I’ve no sort of fancy for passing a week in a country vicarage with a parson double-distilled or diluted. I know the kind of thing; family prayers at eight, croquet with the parsonettes till luncheon, cold mutton and rice pudding and small beer, inspection of the village school at three, yawn yourself to death till dinner, heavy joint, sodden pudding, cheap claret, family prayers again at ten, no beer, no baccy, no cards, unless its back-gammon or whist for penny points and no grog. ”

“ That fellow Bradlaugh, as you are pleased to call him, is worth half-a-dozen such respectabilities as either you or I, Sam. In mere ability as a lawyer he is worth a round dozen of us lumped together. But he is more than that, he is a very fair scholar, though entirely self-educated. He has done more for his brains and with his brains than many do who have had hundreds of pounds spent upon their education by fond parents. He has not only brains but a conscience; he might have earned a fat living as a lawyer or a parson. ”

“ His whole attitude to the capitalist class, as embodied for him in the Masters’ Union, was determined by a consuming sense of the rank injustice of things, the gross iniquity that he and his fellows should be cursed rather than born into the world, foredoomed to moil and toil for a pittance to lead a hard life of endless work, with long hours and paltry pay, to live a dun, colourless existence, a life of carking care and ceaseless struggle, with the prospect at its close, of the Workhouse, unless he should be so happy as to drop at his loom ”

“ Edward Beaumont to the dust, I shall be none the less pleased on that account. Make a position that is your own. I know you’ve brains. Perhaps not of the highest order, but still good enough for the work you have to do. Use them to lift you up from the shadow by which you are now obscured, the shadow of another man’s personality. And then come to me. And, meanwhile, don’t forget what I said about your precious Mr. Edward Beaumont.”
“Then it’s a promise, Amelia?” asked Storth eagerly, his face lit up with the joy of triumph.” ”

“ Clair was glad that Edward’s stay at the Vicarage should be made pleasant to him, and that his daughter should find a visit that might have developed into a visitation an agreeable break in the monotony of rural life. It was, of course, eminently satisfactory that the stranger whom he had been advised to consult and to trust in a matter of the very gravest importance should turn out to be not only a sound and reliable lawyer and a shrewd business man, but also a well-educated, well-read man, with the manners of a gentleman. ”

“ Is it to be endured for ever that the miner should toil in the bowels of the earth—shut out from God’s sunshine and daring all the perils of a sudden and awful death, whilst the mine-owner rolls lordly in his carriage and cossets himself on partridge and champagne? Is it to be endured that so long as this earth shall last the owners of the soil may live in pampered luxury upon the earnings of the harassed farmer and the sweating and sweated hind? ”

“ Why, somebody said to him the other day, ‘How is it you never take your seat on the Borough Bench when you’re in town?’ ‘Pas si bete,’ replied Leatham; ‘every time I fine a man or send one down I make at least one enemy, and they count at elections.’ So it is with your informal spouting, Beaumont. You make a lot of admirers, perhaps, among a lot of greasy, dirty, unwashed mill-hands, who shout themselves hoarse about a policy they don’t understand, and they bring you a dirty, greasy guinea or so if they get into trouble with an equally dirty, greasy mill-girl. ”

“ All, all alike—Whig and Tory, Conservative, Liberal, and Radical stand in solid phalanx, confronting an abandoned, impassioned mob, conscious only of its wrongs and its betrayal. The men know the masters’ scale means robbery, but how shall they, unlettered, unskilled, with hands that can ply a shuttle but unused to pen, with brains to think and know and feel, with tongues little used to ordered speech, how shall they plead their cause? ”

“ It is soothing, no doubt, to see other people soundly trounced, to hear vices we haven’t got, and imagine we are never likely to have, scathingly lashed. But I think we’ll let the poor sinner have a rest to-night. There are sins in high as well as in low places, and first and foremost I count the sin and folly of setting all your heart and all your mind on the mad haste to be rich, caring to stand well with the world, to have the seat of honour at the feast, to surround yourself with all the garb and trappings of wealth—in a word, to get on. ”

“ Is it a law of Nature that one should spend his toil and another enjoy its fruits? Is it an immutable decree of heaven that there should be for ever and for aye the inordinately rich and the abjectly poor? Is it marked down in holy Writ that Dives should always be clad in purple and fine linen and fare sumptuously every day, whilst Lazarus lies at his gates and the dogs lick his sores? ”

“ What’s a young fellow like you want cooped up in a garret reading that rubbish, beautiful rubbish, if you like, but still rubbish, and making matters ten thousand times worse by drinking liquid damnation at three-and-six a bottle; up here, I say, in a garret, mooning over a lot of verses and soaking yourself with poison, when all around you there’s work to be done, man’s work, God’s work, and none too many to do it. What’s wrong with you, Beaumont, what’s wrong, say? ”

“ Clair, as I have often stood, of a dark and wintry night on the ridge of one of our valleys, and looked down upon the great mills, their windows all glowing with light, and heard from within the deep voices of the men, and the sweet, pure, trained notes of the women and the girls, blended in some well-known hymn, or even taking their parts in some familiar and more complex song, you would not think the weaver’s lot a very wretched one. ”

“ The State intervenes between me and my client because it knows it would be a sad day for the client if he were left to the tender mercies of the lawyer, or, as you would put it, to the law of supply and demand on which you employers claim to rest the rate of wages. Now the workman has nothing to help him against you but this very right of combination and the clumsy, often futile, boomerang-like device of a strike. A poor weapon, but better than none at all. ”

“ Woe in that day to the man, aye, though he boast the blood of the Plantagenets, who owes his pride and station, his pomp and luxury, to the rentals of common land stolen from the peasant; woe in that day to the capitalist who grinds the faces of the poor; woe in that day to all who sit at the feast they have not spread and quaff the goblet they have not filled. But glad, glad that day for all who give unstinting of brain or muscle and by honest toil add their measure to the common wealth and win thereby the right to share to the full in the generous bounty of Nature’s ungrudging hand. ”

“ It does not seem to matter to him that the price of his wealth is the abject misery of many whom in church on Sundays he calls his brothers. So have I seen a greedy pig snouting in the trough long after he has eaten his fill, and pushing aside some half-starved weakling of the same litter. The vaunted brotherhood of man is like that. Do you think that you have solved all problems when you have spoken glibly of supply and demand, or this new doctrine of the survival of the fittest? ”

“ Mind you don’t carry your head so high in the clouds, Master Edward, that you trip and fall over a very little obstacle, and if that obstacle’s Sam Storth thank your own infernal folly. I’ll back common-sense against ideals any day, and if you’ll allow me the one. ”

“ Where now is the Liberal merchant, where now the Radical manufacturer, where now your reforming councillors and aldermen who have risen to their paltry place and gimcrack power on the popular vote, where now the editors of facile pen who have been so fluent in their vows of fidelity to the people’s cause? ”

“ It is a wild night, and the wild and blustering month of March, 1883, and the New Street of Huddersfield is swept by a gale that comes tearing, roaring, wuthering down the Come Valley right from Standedge top; a wind laden with pelting rain that dashes into your face, blinds your eyes, and makes as though to rend the very garments from your back, whirl them sky high, and sport with them among the scurrying, glowering clouds. ”

“ True; and the miners haven’t a vote. They’ll crowd round your meetings, and carry you shoulder high, shout themselves harse, and wring the hands off you in their grimy fists, and sing ‘See the conquering hero comes’ till you feel you can’t fail to head the poll. And when the polling day comes, where are they? No more use than a row of skittles. And while they’re roaring, your quiet comfortable farmer draws up in his gig from his quiet comfortable farm, has a quiet and comfortable glass at his favourite hostelry, and then quietly and comfortably pills you in the polling-booth. ”

“ There was not much talk of Socialism in those days; Socialism was vaguely supposed to be a milder form of Nihilism, having something to do with dynamite and secret societies. Had there been any Socialists in Huddersfield, Clough would have been in their midst; but his Socialism would have been based not so much upon a divine compassion for others as upon a fierce pity for himself. ”

“ No, by heavens, gentlemen, if I am to be your candidate I shall stand for measures that will humble the pride of those in high places, measures that will strip the coronetted peers of the power they now possess to thwart the people’s will, measures that will humble the bishop’s bench and strip the haughty hierarchy of its ungodly privileges, measures that will give back to the people the wealth the people earn by their sinews and their brain. ”

“ Thus, whilst at this period we may safely conceive of Edward Beaumont as reflecting with some complacency on the enjoyment of a lucrative practice, anticipating the delights of a keen contest for a seat in Parliament, with visions belike of at least a junior lordship, and sweet imaginings of bridal veils and orange wreaths; it is none the less true that the doings of some half-dozen not over cultured millhands, whose very names were unknown to him, were fated to leave on his life a mark eternity itself would perchance not suffice to efface. ”

“ But ere ever the masses enter into their kingdom of economic justice, ere ever they win the full heritage of their toil, I pray and labour that they may be worthy of that kingdom and of that heritage, that they may learn the right use of wealth; else will all their gains be but added curses.”
And Beaumont went into the slums, and their teaching sank deep into his soul. And in his goings he met time after time that sweet and winsome maiden whom he had first seen, years ago, in circumstances how different, in his office in Huddersfield—Gertrude Fairfax, Sister Gertrude. ”

“ But if the men were so obtuse that they could not see that a raising rather than a lowering at all events and certainly no lowering, would result; why not put the whole question to the arbitrament of one or two competent men conversant with the intricacies of the textile trade, men able to unravel the somewhat tangled and bewildering skein of the new scale—and let them say, aye or nay, would it be, as the weavers so passionately persisted, a grievous weekly diminution, not of their earnings, not of their work and output, but of the guerdon of their toil. ”