A MAN with a foot in two camps is likely to be welcomed in neither and to be lonely in his life. The cotton manufacturers had grown rich, they were established, they were a new order threatening to rival in wealth and power the old order of the land interest, and they were highly self-conscious about it. Land had no valid cause to be resentful of the new capitalists. Land was hit by the increase in the poor rates, but handsomely compensated for that by the rise in land values. But a new power had arisen and land was jealous of its increasing influence in the councils of the nation.

Reuben never forgot that he belonged to the old order, was of it, and had married into it. In business affairs, it was necessary to have associations with other manufacturers, but he had no hospitalities at home for them on the occasions when they met to discuss measures of common policy. He entertained them at the factory, he kept home and affairs in separate water-tight compartments, and was loved of none. He was his own land-owner and his own coal-owner, both long starts in the race, and he was at least as efficient and enterprising as his average competitor. A gentleman had come into trade and had made a great success of it. More galling still, he insisted that he remained a gentleman in the old sense, a landed man, “county.” Not in words but by actions and inactions which bit deeper than any words he proclaimed his superiority.

And why not? He was superior, he was the husband of Dorothy Hepplestall and it was that fact—the fact that he had married Dorothy and made a success of their marriage—which counted against him with the county far more than his having gone into trade and having made a success of that. They would have welcomed a failure somewhere, and he had failed at nothing. So though he had their society, he had it grudgingly.

He was then driven back, not unwillingly, on Dorothy. She was, for Reuben, the whole of friendship, the whole of companionship, the whole of love; after all, she was Dorothy and certainly he made no complaint that he had no other friends and that he was a tolerated, unpopular figure in society. His days were for the factory, his evenings for Dorothy and their children and, when the children had gone to bed, for Dorothy and his books. Books, though they were not unduly insisted upon in the country districts of Lancashire, went then with gentlemanliness and Reuben was not idiosyncratic, but normal, in becoming bookish in middle-age. In Parliament they quoted the classics in their speeches, and the Corinthian of the Clubs, whatever his sporting tastes, spared time to keep his classics in repair. Bookishness, in moderation, was part of the make-up of a man of taste, and for Reuben it had become a recourse not for fashion’s sake but for its own.

Life for Reuben had its mellowness; he had struggled and he had won; he was owner and despot, hardly bound by any law but that of his will, of the several factories contained within the great wall, of a coal-mine, of the town of cottages and shops about. The conditions of labor were the usual conditions and they did not trouble his conscience. Things were, indeed, rather smoother for Hepplestall’s workers than for some others; he was above petty rent exactions and truck shops, as, being his own coal supplier, he could very well afford to be.

What drawbacks there were to his position were rather in matters of decoration than reality, but it was decided proof of his unpopularity in both camps of influence that Hepplestall was not a magistrate. Other great manufacturers, to a man, were on the bench and took good care to be, because administration of the law was largely in the hands of the magistrates and the manufacturers wanted the administration in trusty hands—their own. It was a permanent rebuff to Reuben that he was not a magistrate; there were less wealthy High Sheriffs.

It was a puny irritation, symptomatic of their spite, and it didn’t matter much to Reuben, who was sure of his realities, sure, above all, of the reality of Dorothy’s love. 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. Impossible to be a pacifist in love! Love is a tussle, a thing of storms and calms: like everything in life it cannot stand still but must either grow or decay, and for growth, it must have strife. Sex that is placid and love that is immovable are contradictions in terms. Love has to interest or love will cease to be, and to interest it cannot stagnate.

The children came almost as milestones in the road of their love; each marked the happy ending of a period of stress. They were not results of a habit, but the achievements of a passion, live symbols of a thing itself alive. These two hearts did not beat all the time as one, and the restlessness of their love was as essential as its harmony.

But the shadow of a difference that might grow into a disaster was being cast upon them. In a way, it was extraneous to their love, and in another way was part and parcel of it. The question was the future of Edward, the eldest son.

Dorothy lived in two worlds, in Reuben and in the county, and Reuben lived in three, Dorothy, the factory and the county. He put the factory second to Dorothy and she put it nowhere. There was a bargain between them, unspoken but understood, that she should put it nowhere and yet he was assuming, tacitly, that Edward was as a matter of course to succeed him as controller of the factory and the mine: of these two he always thought first of the factory and second of the mine.

She might have reconciled herself to the mine. There were Dukes, like the Duke of Bridgewater, who owned coal-mines and her Edward might have gained great honor, like that Duke, by developing canals. But she had not moved with the times about factories, nor, indeed, had the times, that is, her order of the old gentry, moved very far. The Secombes were still exceptional, the Luke Verners still trimmers, land was still land and respectable, steam was steam and questionable, and it is to be supposed that though the coal of the Duke was used to make steam, coal was land and therefore on the side of the angels, whatever the devils did with it afterwards. Prejudice, in any case, has nothing to do with consistency. She had no prejudice against Reuben’s connection with the factory; he was her “steam-man” still, but she did not want Edward to be her steam-son.

Edward himself was conscious of no talent for factory owning and hardly of being the son of a factory owner.

The management of her children’s lives was in Dorothy’s hands, involving no mention of the factory, and in her hands Reuben was content to leave their lives until his sons had had the ordinary education of gentlemen, until they were down from their Universities. He had not suffered himself as a manufacturer because he was educated as a gentleman and saw no reason to bring up his sons any differently from himself. Throw them too young into the factory, and they would become manufacturers and manufacturers only: he had the wish to make them gentlemen first and manufacturers afterwards.

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.”

“Oh, is it necessary, Reuben?” pleaded Dorothy.

“Sparks should know where the flames come from,” said Reuben.

“I have great curiosity to see the factory, sir,” said Edward. “I showed surprise, but that was natural. You have hidden the factory from us all as if it were a Pandora’s box and if you judge the time now come when I am to see the place from which our blessings come, I assure you I am flattered by your confidence. But I warn you I am not persuaded in advance to admire the box.”

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.

He breathed a foul, hot, dust-laden air, he hadn’t a mechanical turn of mind and was mystified by operations which Reuben imagined he expounded lucidly. Once the thread was lost, the whole affair was simply puzzlement and he had the feeling of groping in a fog, a hideously noisy fog, where wheels monotonously went round, spinning mules beat senselessly to and fro and dirty men and women looked resentfully at him. It seemed to him a hell worse than any Dante had described, with sufferers more hopeless, bound in stupid misery. He was not thinking of the sufferers with any great humanitarianism: they were of a lower order and this no doubt was all that they were fit for. He was thinking of them with disgust, objecting to breathe the same air, revolted by their smells, but he was conscious of, at least, some sentiment of pity. If he had understood the meaning of it all, he felt that he would have seen things like these in true perspective, but he missed the keys to it, was nauseated when he ought to have been interested and his attempted queries grew less and less to the point.

Reuben perceived at last that he was lecturing an inattentive audience. “Come into the office,” he said, and in that humaner place, with its great bureau, its library of ledgers and its capacious chairs for callers, where the engine throbbed with a diminished hum, Edward tried to collect his thoughts. “This,” Reuben emphasized, “is where I do my work. I go through the factory twice a day, otherwise, I am to be found in here. A glass of wine to wash the dust out of your throat?”

Edward was grateful: but wine could not wash his repugnance away. “Well, now,” asked Reuben, “what do you think?”

“Frankly, sir, I am hardly capable of thought.”

“No,” said Reuben meditatively. “No. Its bigness takes the breath away.”

But Edward was not thinking of bigness. “If I say anything now which appears strange to you, I hope you will attribute it to my inexperience. I am thinking of those people I have seen. To spend so many hours a day in such conditions seems to me a very dreadful thing.”

“Work has to be done, Edward, and they are used to it. You will find that there are only two sorts of people in this world, the drivers and the driven.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Which are you going to be?”

“I?” The personal application caught him unawares, then he mentally pulled himself together. If he was in for it, he could meet it.

“I did not bring you here as an idle sight-seer. At first blush you dislike the factory, but it is my belief that you will come to like it as well as, I do.” Edward stared at his father who was, he saw, serious. He veritably “liked” the factory. “In fact,” Reuben was saying, “I can go further. I love this place. I made it; it is my life’s work; and I am proud of it. Hepplestall’s is a great heritance. When I hand it on to you, it will be a great possession, a great trust. How great you do not know and if I showed you now the figures in those books you would be no wiser. As yet you do not understand. Even out there in the works where things are simple you missed my meaning, but there is time to learn it all before I leave the reins to you.”

“I am to decide now?”

“Decide? Decide? What is there to decide? You are my eldest son.”

Edward made an effort: Reuben was assuming his consent to everything. “May I confess my hope, sir? My hope was that when I had finished at Oxford, you would allow me to go to the bar.”

“The bar? A cover for idleness.” Sometimes, but Edward had not intended to be idle. The bar was an occupation, gentlemanly, settling a man in London amongst his Oxford friends; it seemed to Edward that the bar would meet his tastes. If it had been land that he was to inherit, naturally he would have taken a share in its management, but there was no land: there was a factory, and he felt keen jealousy of Tom, his younger brother. It was settled that Tom should follow his uncle, Tom Verners, who was Colonel Verners now, into the Army, while he, the eldest son, who surely should have first choice, he was apparently destined will he, nill he, for this detestable factory!

“I will have no son of mine a loafer. You would live in London?”

“I should hope to practice there.”

“I’ll have no idlers and no cockneys in my family, Edward. Hepplestall’s! Hepplestall’s! and he sneers at it.”

“Oh, no, sir. Please. Not that. I feel it difficult to explain.”

“Don’t try.”

“I must. I think what I feel is that if we were speaking of land I as your eldest son should naturally come into possession. I should feel it, in the word you used, as a trust. But we are not speaking of land.”

Reuben gripped his chair-arms till his hands grew white and recovered a self-control that had nearly slipped away. The boy was ready to approve the law of primogeniture so long as he could be fastidious about his inheritance, so long as the inheritance was land. As it was not land, he wanted to run away. He deprecated steam. He dared, the jackanapes! “No,” said Reuben, “we are not speaking of land. We are speaking of Hepplestall’s.”

“If it were land,” Edward went on ingenuously, “however great the estate, you would not find me shirking my responsibility.”

“I see. And as it is not land? As it is this vastly greater thing than land?” Then suavity deserted him. “Boy,” he cried, “don’t you see what an enormous thing it is to be trustee of Hepplestall’s?”

“Oh,” said Edward, “it is big. But let me put a case.”

“What? Lawyering already?” scoffed Reuben. “Suppose one dislikes a cat. Fifty cats don’t reconcile one.”

“You dislike the factory?”

“I may not fully understand—”

“Then wait till you do. Come here and learn.”

“That would be the thin end of the wedge.”

“It is meant to be,” said Reuben, and on that their conversation was, not inopportunely, interrupted. A clerk knocked on the door and announced Mr. Needham. “Don’t go, Edward,” said Reuben, “this can figure as a detail in your education,” and introduced his son to the caller.

Edward looked hopelessly at the visitor. Reuben had told him that the office was the place where his business life was spent and therefore Edward’s contacts, if he came to the factory, would not be with the squalid people he had seen at work, but with people who visited the office. He looked at Mr. Needham, and decided that he had never seen a coarser or more brutal man in his life. There were certain fellows of his college justly renowned for grossness; there was the riffraff of the town, there were hangers-on at the stables, there were the bruisers he had seen, but in all his experience he had seen nothing comparable with the untrammeled brutishness of Mr. Richard Needham. If this was the company he was asked to keep, he preferred—what did one do in extremis? Enlist? Well, then, he preferred enlistment to the factory.

Needham was, however, not quite the usual caller, who was a merchant come to buy, or a machinist come to sell, rather than, as Needham was, a manufacturer and a notorious one at that. By this time, the repeal of the Combination Acts had given Trade Unionism an opportunity to develop in the open, and manufacturers who had known very well how to deal with the earlier guerilla warfare of the then illegal Unions were seriously alarmed by its progress. There was a strong movement to force the reËnactment of the Combination Laws. Contemporaneously, the growth and proved efficiency of the power-loom drove the weavers to extremes. Needham was self-appointed leader of the reactionaries amongst the manufacturers: a man who had risen by sheer physical strength to a position from which he now exercised considerable influence over the more timid of the masters.

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! He didn’t know that he was unduly sensitive, but certainly Needham on top of his view of the workpeople made him queasy.

Needham emptied and refilled a glass. “I’d hang every man who strikes,” he said. “Look at ‘em here,” he went on, producing a hand-bill which he offered to Reuben.

“After the peace of Amiens,” it read, “the wages of a Journeyman Weaver would amount to 2/7 1/2 per day or 15/9 per week, and this was pretty near upon a par with other mechanics and we maintained our rank in society. We will now contrast our present situation with the past, and it will demonstrate pretty clearly the degraded state to which we have been reduced.

“During the last two years our wages have been reduced to so low an ebb that for the greatest part of that time we have... the Journeyman’s Wages of 9d or 10d a day or from 4/6 to 5/—per week, and we appeal to your candor and good sense, whether such a paltry sum be sufficient to keep the soul and body together.”

“What do you think of that?” asked Needham. “Printing it, mind you, spreading sedition and disaffection like that. Not a word about their wives and children all taken into the factories and all taking good wages out. If commerce isn’t to be unshackled and free of the attacks of a turbulent and insurrectionary spirit, I ask you, where are we? Where’s our chance of keeping law and order when the law permits weavers to combine and yap together and issue bills like yond? It’s fatal to allow ‘em to feel their strength and communicate with each other without restraint. Allow them to go on uninterrupted and they become more licentious every day. What do you say, Hepplestall?”

“Why, sir, it’s you who are making a speech, and I may add a speech containing many very familiar phrases.”

“Aye, I’ve said it before, and to you. I might have spared my breath. But hast heard the latest? Dost know that the strikers in Blackburn destroyed every power-loom within six miles of the town and... and...” Mr. Needham drew in breath... “and they’ve been syringing cloth wi’ vitriol. Soft sawder in yond hand-bill, ‘appeal to your candor and good sense,’ aye and vitriol on good cloth when it comes to deeds.”

“Yes, I heard of that. A nasty business, though I understand the authorities have dealt strongly with the outbreak.”

“Aye, you’re a philosopher, because it happened at a distance from you. It’s some one else’s looms that’s smashed, and some one else’s cloth that’s rotted. What if it were youm, Hepplestall?”

“We don’t have Luddites here.”

“You allays think you’re out of everything. Now I’ve brought you the facts and you know as well as I do what’s the cause of this uppishness of the lower orders. It’s Peel, damn him. One of us, and ought to know better. Sidmouth’s the man for my money. Sidmouth and Castlereagh. There was sense about when they were in charge. Now, we let the spinners combine and the weavers combine and they’re treading on our faces. Well, are you standing by your lonesome as usual or are you in it with the rest of us to petition against workmen’s combinations? That’s a straight question, Hepplestall.”

“I shall take time to answer it, Mr. Needham. I have acted with you in the past and I have taken leave to doubt the wisdom of your actions and I have on such occasions acted neither with you nor against you. This time—”

“This time, there’s no chance of doubt.”

“But I do doubt, sir. I doubt whether a factory, controlled by a strong hand, has anything to fear from Workmen’s Combinations.”

“Damn it, look at Blackburn!”

“You shall have my decision when it is ready. At this moment, I tell you candidly I do not incline to join you.”

“But union is strength. They’ve combined. So must we.”

“We always have, in essentials. I promise you I will give this matter every thought.”

Needham looked angry, and then a cunning slyness passed across his face. “I’m satisfied with that,” he said. “Aye, I’m satisfied, though you may tell me I’ve come a long road to be satisfied wi’ so little at the end o’ it.” Reuben rose, bowing gravely. “I am glad to have satisfied you, Mr. Needham,” he said, blandly ignoring the hint that an invitation to dinner was the natural expectation of a traveled caller.

“Aye,” said Needham, “Aye.” He finished the bottle, since nothing more substantial was forthcoming, and rose to go. “Then I’ll be hearing from you?”

“Yes,” Reuben assured him. “I will see you to your horse.”

“Nay, you’ll not. They don’t breed my make of horse. I’ve a coach at door, and extra strong, too.”

“Then I will see you to your coach.” Needham nodded to the silent Edward, and went out with Reuben. There was no strategical issue between Needham and Hepple-stall. Needham, when he spoke, used phrases taken from the writings of manufacturers more literate than himself, and so stated, by such a man, his point of view sounded preposterously obscurantist. But it was, in essence, Reuben’s view also, with the difference that Reuben looked on attempts to combat the principle of Unionism as tactical error. The Combination Acts, he felt, had gone for ever, and the common policy of the masters should not be in the direction of reviving those Acts but of meeting the consequences of their repeal.

He was, indeed, habitually averse from open association with his fellow manufacturers because of his self-conscious social difference, and, where such a man as Needham led, was apt to pick more holes in his policy than were reasonable. It was quite likely in the present case that he would come round to Needham’s view, but certainly he would not hurry. The troubles at Blackburn were remote from him and he felt his own factory was out of the danger zone, and that if he threw in his weight with the Needham petition it would be altruistically, and perhaps a waste of influence which could have found better employment. His own people were showing no signs of restiveness, and he didn’t think Unionism was making much headway amongst them. Reason and self-interest seemed allied with his native individualism to resist Needham’s policy.

He returned to find Edward staring gloomily at his boots. “Well, Edward?” he asked cheerily. “Did you like your lesson?”

“The thing I liked, sir, the only thing I liked, is that you are not to act with Mr. Needham.”

“Am I not?”

“It did not sound so. Tell me, is that a fair specimen of the type of man you meet in business?”

“No. In many ways he is superior to the most.”

“Superior! That fat elephant!”

“Needham is one of the strongest men in the cotton trade, Edward.”

“Oh, I called him elephant. Elephants have strength.”

“And strength is despicable?”

“No. But—”

“But Needham is a gross pill to swallow. Well, if it will ease your mind, I do not propose to act with him on this issue. You need not swallow this pill, Edward. But I am not looking to a son of mine to be a runaway from duty, to be a loiterer in smooth places. You have Oxford which is, I hope, confirming you as a gentleman and you have the factory which will confirm you as a man. I could make you an appeal. I could first point out that I am single-handed here in a position which grows beyond the strength of any single pair of hands. I could dub you my natural ally at a time when I have need of an ally. But I shall make you neither an appeal nor a command. Hepplestall’s is a greater thing than I who made it or than you who will inherit it, and there is no occasion for pressure. You are, naturally, inevitably, in its service.” Edward felt rather than saw that somewhere at the opening of the well down which this plunged him there was daylight. “I do not perceive the inevitability,” he cried. “You doom me to a monstrous fate.”

“You are heroical,” said Reuben, “but as to the inevitability, take time, and you will perceive it.”

“Daylight! Give me the daylight!” was what Edward wanted to say, but he repressed that and hardly more happily he asked, “Is there no beauty in life?”

“There is beauty in Hepplestall’s,” said Reuben, and meant it. He had created Hepplestall’s.