Harold Brighouse

“ That, and worse, was the early life of John Bradshaw, son of Reuben Hepplestall. Peter went into Reuben’s factory: he took the meatless bone Reuben contemptuously threw to a dog: he became an overlooker. Once he had been a fighter, when he was raising himself from the ranks into the position of a small factory owner: then contentment had come upon him and fighting power went out of him. Whom, indeed, should he fight? He was not encountering a man but a Thing, a System, which at its first onslaught seemed to crush the spirit of a people. ”

“ It was either Lancashire with Dorothy, or London without her. Dorothy in London was not to be thought of: no countrybred wife for him unless on the exceptional terms of her bringing him a great fortune, and what she was to bring was well enough in Lancashire but a bagatelle to be lost or won at hazard in a night in London. Decidedly, she would be a blunder in London: if a man of his standing in society put his head under the yoke, it had to be for a price much greater than Dorothy could pay. ”

“ But Peter was to be surprised again, he was to find Reuben not tiring in a day, nor in a week, not to be tempted from the factory even by a cock-fight to which Peter and half his men went as a matter of course, dropping the discipline of hours and forgetting in a common sportsmanship that they ranked as master and man—oh, those gentler days before the Frankenstein, machinery, quite gobbled up man who made him!—but as time went on, still, after three months, working as spinner at Peter’s water-driven jennies and becoming as highly skilled as any man about the place. ”

“ He was regretful that he had not insisted on Robey. Robey was the skilled liaison officer between Front and Leave. Robey jerked one’s thoughts irresistibly into the right groove at once; he wouldn’t have sat under Robey wilting to the dismal conviction that his first evening on leave was turning to failure.
Then, from off-stage, a girl began to speak, and Rupert sat taut in his stall. He all but rose and stood to attention as Mary Arden appeared in the character of that inapposite Lancastrian in Granada. She did not merely salt the meat for him; there was no meat but her. ”

“ Dorothy Verners sitting her horse as if she had been cradled on it, straight, tall Dorothy whose beauty was so different from Phoebe’s soft prettiness. Dorothy had beauty like a birthright. She came of generations of women whose first duty was to be admirable, who had, as it were, experimented long ago with beauty and had fixed its lines for their successors. Where Phoebe suggested a hasty improvisation of comeliness, where, in her, comeliness was unexpected and almost an impertinence, in Dorothy it was authentic and assured. ”

“ He had the curtest of nods for Edward. “My God, Hepplestall, we’re in for a mort of trouble,” he said, mopping his brow with a huge printed handkerchief and putting his beaver hat on the desk. He sank into a stout chair which groaned under his weight, and Edward thought he had never seen anything so indecent as the swollen calves of Mr. Needham.
Reuben silently passed the wine. It seemed a good answer.
Warts are a misfortune, not a crime: but the wart on Mr. Needham’s nose struck Edward as an obscenity—and his father loved the factory! ”

“ Which of us does not know the fearful joy of mental flirtation with crime? William, restraining his first sound impulse to tear up the letter and to put its fragments where they properly belonged, in the waste-paper basket, persuaded himself that his motive was simple curiosity. It had nothing to do with Gertrude, nor with her impatience of Rupert who was prolonging a holiday into a habit, and who, if he made no signal that her reign in Staithley Hall must end, made no signal, either, that his training for the Service must begin. ”

“ There was a people enslaved by Hepplestall and there was John Bradshaw, their deliverer, John Bradshaw magnified till he was qualified for the high rôle of an avenging angel. He was without fear of himself or of any consequences, he had no doubts and no loose ends, he had simply a purpose—to kill Hepplestall. To be sane is to think and John did not think: he felt. ”

“ No love runs smooth for twenty years and probably it would not be love if it did, but only a bad habit masquerading as love, so that it would not be true to say of Reuben and Dorothy that they had never had a difference. They had had many small differences, and in this matter of love what happens is that which also happens to a tree. Trees need wind; wind forces the roots down to a stronger and ever stronger hold upon the earth. And so with love, which cannot live in draughtless hothouse air, but needs to be wind-tossed to prove and to increase its strength. ”

“ I have a foot as well as you.”
“I adore your foot, Mary. If I were a sculptor—”
“Seriously, Rupert, I’m going to fight this. You’re doing wrong, you know you’re doing wrong—”
“Fight?” he said. “My dear Mary, perhaps you own half of Hepplestall’s shares? Now I’d an idea it was I.”
“Yes, it is you. It’s the man I love, and I won’t see you do this rotten thing and raise no hand to stop you.”
“There are two things that I deny. It isn’t rotten and you can’t stop me. So, won’t you just admit that you’re a woman and that you’re out of your depth? Let’s kiss and be friends.” ”

“ Her letters from unknown men in the trenches were explicit that Mary Arden was the England they were fighting for—food, if she had cared to eat it, for the grossest conceit.
She was, by now, the leading musical comedy exponent of demureness, with Chown as her undroppable pilot; and Pate, Darley and a procession of stage managers who had steered less ably than that devoted pair were forgotten’ rungs on the ladder she had climbed. She kept her head about things more yeasty, in her microcosm more demoralizing, than the war; she kept her head about success and kept it about men. ”

“ And Dorothy was contrasting this man’s passion with Sir Harry’s, which she took justifiably, but not quite justly, to be liquor, while steam seemed romantically daring and mysterious. She knew what drink did to a man and she did not know what steam was to do. Reuben seemed to her a virile person; she was falling in love with him.
Mrs. Verners, inwardly one mark of interrogation, was taking her cue from the others who so amazingly welcomed a prodigal, swallowing a pill and hiding her judgment of its flavor behind a civil smile. “Does Mr. Hepplestall know that we have been to London?” ”

“ True, the snuffing-out of Bantison was no more reprehensible in itself than the crushing of a gnat, but who knew that the habit of manslaughter, once acquired, might not grow on a man? It wasn’t worse than gossip, and idle whisper, but the whisper reached Hepplestall and he felt that it was not good for the man who hoped to marry Dorothy Verners to be the subject of gossip, however quiet. ”

“ To marry Mary Arden would be an awfully big adventure.
She had time, while he was at Staithley, to come to terms with his disclosure. In the restaurant, when it came upon her suddenly, it had sent her, certainly, heels over head, but, soberly considered, she began to ask herself what there was in it that should disconcert her. She was Bradshaw and he a Hepplestall and she believed that without effort, merely by not discouraging him, she could make him marry her. What could be neater? What revenge more exquisite upon the Hepplestalls than Mary Ellen Bradshaw, Lady Hepplestall? ”

“ 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. ”

“ While Dorothy Verners was of the struggle, yet a man must relax sometimes, as Mr. Bantison had thought when he put Burgundy before the discretion which becomes a blackmailer. Reuben chewed upon it, not reconciled to surrendering Dorothy, not quite convinced by the most convincing of arguments he addressed to himself, unwilling, even if they had convinced, to let go any part of his full scheme, but inclining, feeling himself a bit of a fool, a bit of an apostate, and very much more a prodigy of generosity, to look upon Phoebe as one whom he might make his wife. ”

“ Dressmakers’ dummies, perruquiers’ blocks, automata directed by a dancing-master, cosmetical exteriors to vanity, greed, vice, if they were not, like some he hated most, conceited bluestockings parading an erudition that it didn’t become a woman to possess. Whereas, Dorothy! He felt from her a whiff of moorland air, and a horse between his legs and the clean rush past him of invigorating wind and all the zest of a great run behind the hounds with the tang of burning peat in his nostrils and the scent of heather coming down from, the hills. ”

“ It was little Bantison who involuntarily played the god in the machine and died that the Hepplestalls might be cotton lords in Lancashire. Bantison was not prepossessing; a short man, gross of body with a face like raw beef and hands offensively white, dressed in his clerical coat on which spatters of snuff and stains of wine smirked like a blasphemy, endowed with fine capacity for other people’s Burgundy and distinguished by an eye that earned him, by reason rather of alertness than deformity, the nickname of “Swivel-Eyed Jack.” ”

“ Advocacy has its perils for the advocate. In the heat of argument, she had felt confident of her weapon and now she doubted if it were a weapon or hers to use. In promising Rupert a fight she had Tom Bradshaw in mind; it had seemed to her that Labor had only to lift its voice in order to obtain anything it demanded, and wasn’t Tom member for Staithley? But now that Rupert had gone and she was able coolly to examine the weapon she proposed to enlist, she couldn’t imagine why she ever thought it would fight in her cause. Why should she, after so many years, have thought of Tom at all? ”

“ Most of it mattered very little to John, growing up in Hepplestall’s factory, which escaped riot. It escaped not because its conditions were not terrible but because conditions were often more terrible. As employer, Reuben trod the middle way, and it was the extreme men, the brutes who seemed to glory in brutality, at whom riots were aimed. John knew that there were blacker hells than his, which was a sort of mitigation, while mere habit was another. If life has never been anything but miserable, than misery is life, and you make the best of it. ”

“ Reuben smiled grimly at his hinted opposition. “If you look with sense, you will admire,” he said. “Factories run to usefulness, not beauty. Shall we go?”
They went, and Reuben exhibited his factory with thoroughness, with the zest of a man who had created it, but now and then with the impatience of the expert who does not concede enough to the slow-following thought of the lay mind. Edward began with every intention to appreciate, but as Reuben explained the processes, found nothing but antipathy grow within him. ”

“ It lay, this primitive factory, in a gentle valley amongst rounded hills of gritstone and limestone: a chilly country, lacking the warmth of the red earth of the South, backward in agriculture, nourishing more oats than wheat and, in the bleak uplands, incapable of tillage. Coarse grass fought there with heather, but if there was little color on the moors save when the heather flowered in royal purple and the gorse hung out its flame, there was rich green in the valleys and the polish of a humid atmosphere on healthy trees. ”

“ To challenge a Club was to invite more ridicule, while to single out Mr. Seccombe, the first cause of his discomfiture, was equally impossible; Seccombe was too old for dueling; one did not go out with a man old enough to be one’s grandfather. There was Godalming, but, again, he feared ridicule: Godalming’s special offense was that he laughed loudly, but Godalming habitually laughed loudly and one couldn’t challenge for insulting emphasis a man who was naturally emphatic.
Whitworth saw no satisfactory way out of it, till Verners, mindful of Dorothy, supplied an opportunity for retreat. ”

“ Verners was a candidate for virtue, under this definition. But the man born to be a perfect individualist is at a disadvantage when he owns an estate and feels bound by duty to marry and beget an heir: it isn’t the moderns who discovered that marriage clogs selfishness.
Mr. Verners had an heir, but not, as it happened, till Dorothy had come first. If she hadn’t come first, she would not have come at all; but she came, and dazzlingly, and if there is something agreeable in being the father of a beauty, there is also something harassing. ”

“ She brought her eyes down from Staithley Edge to the level of his face. “London’s flat,” asserted Mary Ellen.
“Not absolutely,” he assured her.
“It’s flat,” she insisted. “I’m going to miss the Staithley hills.”
It was right and proper for Mr. Chown, agent, to have his offices near Leicester Square and his beautifully furnished rooms in the Albany; but it was not right for Mary Ellen Bradshaw to adumbrate the instincts of the homing pigeon. In Mr. Chown’s opinion, home was a superstition of the middle-classes, and if an artist was not a nomad at heart, the worse artist she. ”

“ In that, more than in anything else, lay the difference between Phoebe’s world and Reuben’s. If her ladyhood was pretentious and calculated instead of instinctive, well, theirs did not go very deep either. There was culture in that age, but not, extensively, in Lancashire. Culture hugged the capital, throwing outposts in the great houses of the Home Counties. In Manchester itself there were bookish people, but in the county sport was the touchstone, and if horsemanship in the skilled sense was not expected of a woman, she must at any rate be not shy of a horse. ”

“ Steam and the factory system fell like a blight on Lancashire, but they had in them the elements of progress of a kind; they worked out, outrageously, in the course of a century to a balance where the power was not exclusively the employers’. The object of the London financiers who now perceived in Lancashire a fruitful field was to buy up mills, run them under managers for the first years of the boom, then, before new mills could be built, to show amazing profits and to unload on the guileless public before the boom collapsed. ”

“ He was a manufacturer and he was the husband of Dorothy’ Hepplestall; in the factory one man and at home another, not lying at home about steam because there he never spoke of it, preserving her romantic illusions about his work by keeping her remote from it. She might have had her curiosities, but she loved Reuben, she consented at his will to be incurious and the habit remained. It might have remained even if love had faded, but their love was not to fade. And the county took it that if Dorothy Verners had married a manufacturer, the factory was not to be mentioned before her. ”

“ Alastair Montagu, who always stayed there when his company was at the Theater Royal, was surprised to see Lexley Chown in the smoking room of the Wheatsheaf. He remembered the eminent actor-manager, and his surprise was not that Chown, being in Staith-ley, should have the discrimination to stay at the Wheatsheaf, but that Chown should be in Staithley. Chown was a figure in the profession, but emphatically a London figure.
The business of Mr. Chown was that of an “artiste’s agent.” A middleman trading in human flesh and blood? Perhaps; but Chown was a useful clearing-house. ”

“ I’m stage manager of a rotten musical comedy on a scrubby tour, but I’m a servant of the theater and I’ll prove it on you.”
He was, disinterestedly, the theater’s servant, and service purged of self-interest is rare though there is plenty of voluntary work done in the theater. An actor rehearses for weeks and performs without fee in a special production: he may have an enthusiasm for the play he is to act, he may feel that such a play must, at all costs, come to birth, but somewhere self-interest lurks. ”

“ It was a piece of luck too rare to be true. He prophesied sad fate for her, he wished she had a mother—men are handicapped—he spoke of sending for her aunt: all the time, too overawed by Hepplestall’s significance to be more effective as an obstacle than a cork bobbing on the surface of a flood. Protest to Reuben himself, or even appeal, was sheer impossibility for Bradshaw, who was almost feudal in his subservience to gentry. He saw danger, warned Phoebe, was laughed at for his pains and turned fatalist. Phoebe cared for neither his spoken forebodings nor his morose resignation. ”

“ Edward had ideas of his own about his future, and it came as a surprise to be invited at breakfast to visit the factory one day during vacation from Oxford. Instinctively he glanced, not at his mother, but at his clothes. He was not precisely a dandy, but had money to burn and burned a good deal of it at his tailor’s.
“The factory, I said, not the coal-mine,” Reuben said, noting his son’s impulse. “You have looked at your clothes. Now let us go and look at the first cause of the clothes. As a young philosopher you should be interested in first causes.” ”

“ Peter was privileged, a King Canute miraculously untouched by the tide of progress; but, for the rest of them, for Peter’s like who were unprivileged, Reuben was ruthless. He wanted their skilled laborers in his factory, and he undercut their prices, naturally, thanks to steam, and unnaturally, thanks to policy, till he drove them to ruin, filled his factory with their workpeople, sometimes flinging an overseer’s job to the manufacturer he had ruined, sometimes ignoring him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”