EDWARD’S “fat elephant” drove from Hepplestall’s meditating his retort to Reuben’s intransigeancy. He held that it was necessary to weld the manufacturers into a solid phalanx of opposition to the legalizing of Trade Unions, and that if Reuben were allowed to stand out, other masters, whom Needham regarded as weak-kneed, would stand out with him. Needham was obstinate and unscrupulous, with a special grudge against “kid-gloved” Hepplestall, and if there were no overt manifestations of discontent in Hepplestall’s factory, his business was to provoke them. There was surely latent discontent there as everywhere else and the good days of Sidmouth and Castlereagh had shown what could be achieved in the way of manufacturing riot by the use of informers. Informers were paid to inform, and lost their occupation if no information were forthcoming; they did not lose their occupation; they were agents provocateurs, and Gentleman Hepplestall was, if Needham knew right from left, to be thwacked into line by the activities of an informer.

He hadn’t much difficulty—he was that sort of man—in laying hands upon a suitable instrument. The name of the instrument was Thomas Barraclough, and it was, indeed, in Needham’s hands already working as a weaver in his factory, not, to be sure, for the purpose of provoking unrest there but merely for decent spying. There is honesty in spying as in other things and the decent spy is the observer and reporter of what others do spontaneously; the indecent spy is he who instigates the deeds he afterwards reports. Barraclough was quite willing, for a higher fee, to undertake to prove to Hepplestall that Trade Unions were murder clubs.

The affair was not stated, even by blunt Needham to his spy, with quite such candor as this, but, “If tha’ sees signs o’ trouble yonder, tell me of ’em; and if tha’ sees no signs tha’s blinder than I tak’ thee for,” was a sufficiently plain direction to an intelligent spy, and Barraclough nodded comprehendingly as he went off to begin his cross-country tramp to Hepplestall’s.

A spy who looks like a spy is disqualified at once, but what are the symptoms of spying? What signs does spying hang out on a man that we shall know him for a spy? Is he bent with a life spent in crouching at key holes? A keen-eyed, large-eared ferret of a man? The fact is that Barraclough was small and bent, and ferretty, that he looked like your typical spy and yet did not look, in the Lancashire of those days, any different from a famished weaver. They were “like boys of fifteen and sixteen and most of them cannot measure more than 5 feet 2 or 3 inches.”

Steam fastened on this generation, stunting it, twisting it, blasting it, and if Barraclough had been reasonably tall, reasonably well-made and nourished he would have been marked at once as something different from the workers who were to accept him as one of themselves. So, in spite of looking like a spy, he was qualified to be a spy in Hepplestall’s because he looked like any other undergrown, underpaid, underfed weaver lad.

And there is good in all things, though Hepplestall was not thinking of the Blackburn riots as good when he was cavalier about them with Needham. There was the good, for Hepplestall’s, that the destruction of the Blackburn looms and their products brought an exceptional rush of orders to Reuben; and Thomas Barraclough, applying for work when he ended his tramp at the factory gates, found himself given immediate employment.

He found, too, that as an honest spy he had no occupation in this place. He could report distress, sullen suffering and patient suffering; he could report the ordinary things and would have to say, in honesty, that here the ordinary things had extraordinary mitigations; and he found nothing of the violent flavor expected by Needham. It remained for him to take the initiative and to provide against disappointing his master’s expectations, but the mental sketch he had made of himself as an effective explosive did not seem likely to be justified in any hurry. The Blackburn riots had not been followed by such ferocity of punishment as had befallen the Luddites a few years previously, but there had been men killed by soldiers during the riots: there were ten death sentences at Lancaster Assizes, reduced afterwards to transportation for life: and thirty-three rioters were sent to prison. That was fairly impressive, as it was meant to be, but much more impressive was the appalling distress which quite naturally fell upon the Blackburn people who had destroyed the looms, and if all this was salutary from the point of view of law and order it was excessively inopportune from the special point of view of Mr. Barraclough.

Here he was, under orders to raise tumult, in a place where not only were there no symptoms of tumult, but where those who might possibly be tumultuously disposed were cowed by the tales, many true and many exaggerated, of Blackburn’s sufferings. The malignant irony of the uses of the agent provocateur was never better exemplified, but it wasn’t for Needham’s trusty informer to chew upon that, but, whatever his difficulties, to get on with his incitements. And he soon decided that Hepplestall’s people, in the mass, were “windbags,” that is, they would listen to him and they would, in conversation, be as vehement as he, but their vehemence was in words not deeds and only deeds were of any use to Barraclough. The method of the Luddites, machinery-smashing, was discredited for ever by the Blackburn example and he gave up hope of any large-scale demonstration at Hepple-stall’s. What was left was the possibility of finding some individual who was capable of being influenced to violent action.

Then, just as he was despairing of finding the rightly malleable material, Annie Bradshaw’s second son was born and Annie Bradshaw died. She had been almost luxuriously careful about the birth of her first child: she had left the factory three days before his birth and had not returned, with the child at her breast, for a full week afterwards; but second babies were said to come more easily, wages were needed and she had lifted heavy beams before. The child was born on the factory floor, it lived and Annie died. There was no extraordinary pother made about her death, because women were continually defying steam in this way and most of them survived it. Annie did not survive. She was unlucky. That was all.

“Don’t fret for me, lad,” she gasped to John. “I’m going through the Golden Gates. Tak’ care o’ the childer.” The engine did not stop—guns do not cease fire because a soldier falls on the battlefield—and to John Bradshaw, nineteen, widower with two infant sons, it beat a devil’s tattoo of stunning triumph. There were women gathered around her body, somewhere a woman was washing his son, but he was seeing nothing of them, nothing of the life that had come through death. Annie was gone from him, his glorious Annie of the winds and the moors, lying white and silent on the oily floor of a stinking factory, and already the women were leaving her, already they were returning to their several places. If they gave him sympathy, they took bread out of their mouths and sympathy must be so brief as to appear callosity. It was not callosity, and he knew it; knew, too, that he did not want long-winded condolences or any condolences at all, yet their going so quickly from that white body seemed to him a stark indecency adding to the monstrous debt Steam owed him.

He was thinking of the small profanities of this death rather than of the death itself. He hadn’t realized that yet, he was probing his way through the attendant circumstances to the depths of his tragedy. He knew that he would never lie beneath the stars again with Annie while the breeze soughed through the heather and she crooned old songs of the roads in his ear: he knew, but he did not believe it yet. She had been so utterly protective of him. If she took down her hair, and held it from her, and he crept beneath its curious warmth, what had mattered then? He had loved her and by the grace of Phoebe—though he was not thinking of Phoebe now—they had been given leave to love and to enjoy each other in the hours which were not the factory’s.

The engine, thumped horribly on his ear and a gust of passionate hatred struggled to make itself articulate. “You fiend!” he cried. “Curse you, curse you!”

When an overseer came to tell him that a hand-cart was at the gates to take Annie’s body and the baby home, and that Phoebe might go with him, he was lying, dazed, on the floor and mechanically did what he was told to do. He had no volition in him, and Mr. Barraclough, professional observer, noting both his hysteria and his stupor decided that he had found his man at last. Providence had ordained that Annie should die to make an instrument for Richard Needham’s emissary.

In the days of her youth, Phoebe had her follies as she had her prettiness; now, schooled by adversity, an old woman of forty, she was without illusions as she was without comeliness; she had nothing but her son, and, hidden like a miser’s gold, her hatred of the Hepplestalls, of Reuben who betrayed her, of Dorothy whom he married, of his sons who stood where her son should have stood. For two seconds she was weakened now, for two seconds: as she folded Annie’s baby in her shawl and held him closely to her she had the thought that she must go to Reuben with a plea for help, then put that thought away.

“Don’t worry your head about the childer, lad,” she said, “I’ll manage.” She would work in the factory, she would order their cottage, she would rear the babies, she would pay some older woman who was past more active work a small sum (but the accepted rate) to look after the babies while she was in the factory. She would take this burden off his shoulders as she had taken the burden of housework off Annie’s. She had permitted John and Annie to enjoy the luxury of love and now she was permitting John the luxury of woe. She said that she would “manage,” he knew the enormous implications of the word, but knew, because she said it, that she would keep her promise. There was no limit to his faith in Phoebe and he touched her shoulder gently, undemonstratively, saying in that simple gesture all his unspeakable gratitude, accepting what she gave not because he underrated it, not because he did not understand, but because it was the only thing to do.

For her his touch and his acceptance were abundance of reward. Go to Hepplestall! Take charity, when this sustaining faith was granted her? Oh, she would manage though her body cracked. It was a soiling and a shameful thought that these babes were Reuben’s grandchildren.

They were not his and John, please God, would never know who was his father; they were hers and John’s and they two would keep them for their own.

It wasn’t bravado either. It wasn’t a brief heroical resolution begotten of the emotions caused by Annie’s death. She counted the cost and chose her fight, spurning the thought of Hepplestall as if the justice he might do her were an obscenity. She knew what she undertook to do and, providing only that she had ten more years of life, she would do it.

John, mourning for Annie, was not too sunk in grief to be unaware of the fineness of his mother. Would Annie—she who loved her life—have said “Things are,” if she had foreseen how soon the things which were bad were to be so infinitely worse? The factory had killed her, it had taken his Annie from him, it had put upon his mother in her age the burden she took up with a matter of fact resignation that seemed to him the ultimate impeachment of the system which made heroism a commonplace. “Mother!” he cried. “Mother!”

“Eh, lad,” she said, “we’ve got to take what comes.”

She did not, at least, as Annie did, answer his inarticulate revolt with religion, but she had fundamentally the same resignation to the things of this world, and for the same reason. She, too, looked forward to a radiant life above: she saw in her present troubles the hand of God justly heavy upon one who had been a light woman. John, knowing nothing of that secret source of her humility, attributed all to the one cause, to the Factory which crushed and maimed and killed in spirit as in body. He refused his acceptance, his resignation. There was, there must be, something to be done. But what? What?

First, at any rate, Annie had to be buried with the circumstance which seemed to make for decency and for that they had provided through the Benefit Society. This—-decent burial—was the first thought behind the weekly contributions paid, heaven knows at what sacrifice, to the Society and they were rewarded now in the fact that Annie was not buried at the expense of the parish. That was all, bare decency, not the flaunting parody with plumes and gin of the slightly less poor: nor were there many mourners. Leave was given to a select few to be absent for an hour from the factory, and the severe fines for unauthorized absence kept the numbers strictly, with one exception, to the few the overseer chose to privilege. Phoebe and John were granted the full day, without fine, and, of course, without wage, and so, it appeared, was Mr. Barraclough. But Mr. Barraclough was on business, and the fine that he would have to pay would figure in the expenses he would charge Mr. Needham.

One or two old women—old in fact if not in years, incapacitated by the factory, for the factory—had been at the graveside and were going home with Phoebe, and it was natural that John should hold out his hand to Barraclough, this unexpected, this so self-sacrificing sympathizer and that they should fall into step as they moved away together.

“Man, I had to come. I’m that sorry for thee. Coming doan’t mean much for sure, but—”

“It means a day’s wages, choose how,” said John, who knew that Barraclough was not of the few who had been granted an hour’s leave to come.

Barraclough nodded. “And a fine, an’ all,” he said, “but that all counts somehow. Seems to me if it weren’t costing me summat, it u’d not be the same relief it is to my feelings. I didna come for thy sake, I came to please masel’, selfish like. I had to get away from yond damned place that murdered her. I couldna’ stand the sight o’ it to-day.”

“Murdered her!” said John. He had, no doubt, used that word in thought, but it had seemed to him audacious, a thought to be forbidden utterance. And here, shaming him for his mildness was one, an outsider, a stranger, who, untouched intimately by Annie’s death, yet spoke of it outright as murder. John felt that he was failing Annie, that he had not risen to his occasion, that it was this other, this fine spirit, who could not “stand the sight” of the factory on the day of her funeral, who had risen to the occasion more worthily than John, who was Annie’s husband. “Aye,” he said somberly, “it was murder.”

“You never doubted that, surely,” said Barraclough.

“Oh,” said John, “when a woman dies in childbirth—”

“Aye, but fair treated women don’t. What art doing now? I mean for the rest of the day. Looking at it from my point of view, I might as well tak’ the chance to get out o’ sight o’ yond hell-spot. I’m going on moors for a breath of air. Wilt come? Better nor settin’ to hoam brooding, tha’ knows.”

His point was simply to get John in his emotional crisis to himself, but luck was with him in his proposal further than he knew. For John, the moors were a reminder of Annie at her sunniest, but for the moment all that he was thinking of was that strange instinct for the sympathetic stranger rather than for the sympathy, too poignant to be borne, of his mother. And he did not wish to see his sons that day.

“‘Tis better nor brooding,” he agreed, and went. There was virtue, he thought, in talking. Phoebe was all reserve and action, and on this which resolved itself into a day off from the factory, she would be very active in her house. He was quite sure that he did not want to go home. Exercise for his legs, air for his lungs and the conversation, comprehending but naturally not too intimate, of this kindly stranger—these were the things to get him through the day.

But the conversation of Mr. Barraclough was not calculated to be an anodyne.

“Thank God, we’ve gotten our backs to it. We’re walking away from yond devilry, we’ve our faces to summat green.” How often had he not heard something like that from Annie! “It beats me to guess what folks are made of, both the folk that stand factories and t’other folks that drive ‘em into factories. I know I’ve gotten an answer to some of this under my bed where I lodge and I’ll mak’ the answer speak one of these days an’ all.”

“An answer? What answer? I’ve looked and found no answer.”

“No? They looked at Blackburn and found th’ wrong answer an’ all, th’ould answer that the Luddites found and failed wi’. Smashing machines! Burning factories! What’s, the good o’ that? They nobbut put up new factories bigger and more hellish than before and mak’ new machines that’ll do ten men’s work instead of two. Aye, they were on wrong tack in them days. They were afraid to get on right tack.”

“Is there a tack that’s right?” he asked.

“There’s shooting,” said Barraclough.

“Shooting? Tha’ canna shoot an engine, nor a factory.”

“No, and that’s the old mistake. Trying to hit back at senseless brick and iron. There’s men behind the factories, men that build and men that manage. Men that own and tak’ the profits of our blood and death. For instance, who killed thy wife?”

“Why... why...” hesitated John, who was still intrigued obscurely with the idea that he, the father of her child, was author of her death.

“She died o’ th’ conditions o’ Hepplestall’s factory and yo’ canna’ bring yer verdict o’ willful murder against conditions. Yo’ bring it against the fiend that made the conditions. Yo’ bring it against Reuben Hepplestall.”

“Maister Hepplestall!”

“Aye, Maister. Maister o’ us fra’ head to heel. Maister o’ our lives and deaths, and gotten hissel’ so high above us that I can see tha’s scared to hear me talk that road of him.” That was true, Barraclough seemed to John almost blasphemous. Hepplestall was high above them, so that to make free with his name in this manner was something outrageous. “Aye, the spunk’s scared out of thee by the name of Hepplestall as if tha’ were a child and him a boggart. But I tell thee this, he isna a boggart. He’s a man and if my bullet gets him, he’ll bleed and if it gets him in the right place, he’ll die, and there’ll be one less in the world o’ the fiends that own factories and murder women to mak’ a profit for theirselves.”

“You’d do that! You!”

“Some one must do the job. Th’ gun’s to hoam under my bed, loaded an’ all. Execution of a murderer, that’s what it’ll be. Justice on the man that killed thy wife.” John halted abruptly. “What’s to do?” asked Barraclough. “Let’s mak’ th’ most of this day out o’ factory. Folks like thee and me mustna’ think too much of causes o’ things. The cause of this day off was thy wife’s death, but we’ve agreed tha’s not to brood. So come on into sunshine and mak’ the most of what we’ve gotten.”

“We’ll mak’ the most of it by turning to hoam,” said John.

“Thy hoam’s no plaice for thee to-day.”

“No. But thy hoam is,” said John. “I want to see yon gun. I’m thinkin’ that’ll be a better sight for me nor all the heather in Lankysheer.”

“For thee?” Mr. Barraclough was greatly surprised. “Nay, I doubt I was wise to mention my secret to thee.”

“Art coming?” John was striding resolutely homewards.

“Well, seeing I have mentioned it, I suppose there’s no partiklar harm in showing it. O’ course, tha’ canna’ use a gun?”

“Can’t I? No, you’re reight there. I’m not much of a man, am I? As tha’ told me, I’ve gotten no spunk, but I’ve spunk enough now. It weren’t more than not seeing clear and tha’s cleared things up for me wonnerful.”

“I have? How?”

“Tha’ can shoot, if I canna’, Barraclough.” Which was disappointing to the spy, who thought things were going better than this.

Still he could bide his time and “Aye, I can shoot,” he said. “I’ve been in militia.”

“Then tha’ can teach me,” said John, to Mr. Barraclough’s relief. “I’ll be a quick learner.”

“Well, as tha’s interested, I’ll show thee how a trigger’s pulled,” and Barraclough was, in fact, not intending to go further than that in musketry instruction. Hepplestall killed might, indeed, encourage the others, it might array the manufacturers solidly under Needham’s reactionary standard, but Barraclough read murder as going beyond his directions, and supposed that if Reuben were fired on and missed (as he would be by an amateur marksman), the demonstration of unrest at Hepplestall’s would have been satisfyingly made.

He was, therefore, sparing in his tutorship when they had come into his room and handled the gun together. “We munna call the whole neighborhood about our ears by the sound of a shot,” he said.

“No,” said John, “but if tha’ll lend me this, I’ll find a plaice for practicing up on moors.”

“Lend thee my gun! Nay, lad, tha’s asking summat. It wenna do to carry that about in daylight.”

“I’ll tak’ it to-neight, and bring un back to-morrow neight.”

“To-neight? Tha’ canna’ practice in the dark.”

“Maybe I’ll ha’ no need to practice. Maybe there’s justice and summat greater nor me to guide a bullet home. I can nobbut try and I’m bound to try to-neight—the neight o’ the day I buried her, the neight when I’m hot. I’m poor spirited and I know it, and I’m wrought up now. To-morrow I’ll be frit.”

Barraclough balanced the gun in his hands. “I had my own ideas o’ this,” he said—the idea in particular, he might have added, had this been an occasion for candor, that such precipitancy was contrary to the best interests of an informer. Before an event occurred, a sagacious spy should have prophesied it and here was this ardent boy in so desperate a hurry for action that Barraclough was like to be cheated of the opportunity of proving to Needham that he was dutifully accessory before the fact.

But, he reflected, he had not found Hepplestall’s a fertile earth for his seeds, and if he played pranks with this present opportunity, if he attempted delay with a boy like John, a temperamentalist now in the mood to murder, he might very well lose his only chance of justifying himself. Besides, he could yet figure as a prophet and at the same time establish a sound alibi for himself if immediately after handing the gun over to John, he set off to report to Needham. On the whole, he saw himself accomplishing the object of his mission satisfactorily enough.

“Who’s gotten the better right?” John was saying. “Thou that’s not had nobhut a month o’ the plaice, or me that buried a wife this day killed by Hepplestall?”

Barraclough bowed his head. He thought it politic to hide his face just then, and the motion had the seeming of a reverent assent. “I’ve no reply to that,” he said.

“Thy claim is strongest. Come when it’s dark, and tha’ shall have the gun.”

John moved to the door.

“Where’st going now?” asked Barraclough, apprehensive of the slackening of the spring he had wound up.

“To her grave,” said John, and Barraclough nodded approvingly. He trusted Annie’s grave; there would be no slackening of the spring and mentally he thanked John for thinking of a grave-side vigil. Barraclough had not thought of anything so trustworthy; he had thought of an inn, to which the objections were that he had no wish to be seen in company with John, and that alcohol is capricious in effect.

Barraclough had given him a goal, and an outlet for all his pent-up emotion. There was his dreadful childhood in the factory, then the splendid mitigation whose name was Annie, and the tearing loss of her: behind all that, there was the System and above it now was Hepple-stall. He had an exaltation by her grave. 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.

There was some reason why he could not kill Hepplestall till it was dark. Once or twice he tried, vaguely, to remember what the reason was, then forgot that he was trying to remember anything. When it was dark he was to go to Barraclough’s for the gun with which he would kill Hepplestall. He was cold and hungry, shivering violently and aware of nothing but that he was God’s executioner.

When dusk came he left the grave and went, dry-lipped, stumbling like a man walking in a dream, to Barra-clough’s. At the sight of him, Barraclough had more than doubt. Of what use a gun in these palsied hands? What demonstration, other than one palpably insane, could this trembling instrument effect?

But Bradshaw was the one hope of the agent and since there was nothing else to trust, he must trust his luck.

“The gun! The gun!”

Barraclough placed it in his hands without a word and John turned with it and was gone. The canny Barraclough, taking his precautions in case the worst (or the best) happened, slept that night in a public-house midway between Needham’s and Hepplestall’s. He had made himself pleasant to several passers-by on the road; he had asked them the time; he had established his alibi.