The outskirts of Ecclesby, where the “quality” live in villas decorously withdrawn from the roadway, and screened from public view by the garden-trees, are as pleasant as those of any idle town given up to homing the Great Retired. The traveller by road might fancy he was entering a Midland Cheltenham or Leamington, so soothingly genteel are its approaches. But a few minutes’ walk, past smaller villas, then semidetached villas, then villas clustered together like reeds in a pan-pipe, then unpretending red-brick jerry-built cottages, would bring on a gradual disillusion, preparing him for the hopeless disenchantment of the town itself. A long black street, untidy with little shops and public-houses standing here and there amid a row of poor, dirty dwelling-houses, mounts in an undecided curve from the railway station, and suddenly, at the top of the hill, twists sharply round into the High Street, where brand-new hotels and brand-new shops try to look smugly unconscious of the world below the corner. But the shops have to supply that world’s wants, and all the bravery of window fronts cannot give the illusion of refined and luxurious patronage. There is not much pleasure to be got out of Ecclesby. Even its theatre is up a dingy side-street, and has a threepenny gallery and sixpenny pit. The fair follies and vain amenities of existence find no place there. It is given over to labour grim, absorbing, inevitable. At certain periods of the day the High Street, Market Square, and Union Street, which cuts laterally through its heart, at the top of the rise, are quite deserted. The great bells ring, and the gaunt countless-windowed factories situated all around in labyrinthine tangle of mean streets disgorge into the main thoroughfare the pale work-grimed population they had swallowed up. The town becomes a swarming hive. The shops are thronged. From the ever-swinging doors of public-houses comes the roar of voices, borne upon gusts of air saturated with alcohol and shag-tobacco. There is little diversity of type or costume. The town exists for one industry. The population drifts from the grim Board School inevitably, unquestioningly into the grim factory. If the next transition is not into the grimmer workhouse by the railway station, they account themselves happy. Each man acts, dresses, eats, hopes, thinks, and, at last, looks like his neighbour. And the girls and women work in the factories too. The streets are alive with them. They march along in knots of three or four, bareheaded, bare-armed, red-shawled, shrill, nonreticent of speech. The doorways of hundreds of dwellings in squalid by-streets are dissonant with the clamour and picturesque with the dirt-encrusted chubbiness of children.

This is Ecclesby when the factories are working, and the hum of strange machinery strikes the ear on passing by the yawning gateways. But when Goddard went there a blight had fallen on the town. The factories for the most part were silent, the streets depressing with unjoyous idleness. The fact that the strikers had gone in procession the day before with a brass band that played the Dead March in “Saul” before the employers’ villas had not produced lasting exhilaration. The very deadly boredom of leisure, apart from anxiety as to issues, was wearing down the adult population. To lean against a street corner, pipe in mouth, hands in pockets, in taciturn converse with one’s mates, is pleasant enough for a few hours on Saturday afternoons; but to persist in it all day long, and day after day, induces considerable lassitude of the flesh and infinite weariness of the spirit. What the deputation had told Goddard was true. The men were growing sick of the struggle. Whispers of submission already floated in the air. The Trades Union officials were steadily losing their influence. The employers’ agents had been busy among them, spreading nerve-shaking reports as to the impregnable position of the firms. The Union was small, poor, badly organised. The strike pay was scanty. Much of it was spent, almost unwillingly, in drink.

Severe distress already began to make itself felt.

Goddard brought a practised intelligence to grasp the situation, and realised how fully his were victory, if it were gained; also how great a responsibility rested upon his shoulders in urging the continuance of the strike. It meant the extravagant love or execration of a teeming town.

“If you advise us to give in, we’ll do so,” said the secretary of the Union, a careworn man with iron-grey hair and lantern-face. They had been discussing affairs in the office. The fire had gone out in the tiny grate, and the dimness of a gathering wet evening crept in through the uncleaned panes. Goddard was silent a moment. The man’s tone was so hopeless.

Then the joy of battle rose within him, and was mingled strangely with the radiance of Lady Phayre—a thrilling sense of his own strength, trebled by the wine of her influence—and he leapt from his chair and brought his two great hands down on the secretary’s timorous shoulders.

“We’ll win this, mate. We’ll carry it through, and have the firms on their knees. Ruin is staring them in the face. They will have to climb down. Man, we are not fighting machinery. If we were, I would say ‘throw it up.’ Man has never bested a machine yet, and never will. It’s mere brute force—who can hold out longest. And they can’t hold out longer than we. I’ll stake my soul upon it.”

“But the capital behind them,” murmured the secretary.

“That’s a pack of damned lies!” cried Goddard. “You can take it from me!”

A glow appeared on the grey face as Goddard’s splendid assurance gained upon him.

“We’ll follow your lead past starvation, sir,” he said in a voice hoarse with new-born hope.

The knowledge of Goddard’s arrival had quickened the general apathy. His visible presence in the streets was a draught of strength. The brave words he spoke to casual knots of men turned their sullenness to hope, and were passed from lip to lip after he had gone by. Before the great meeting in the afternoon, he had already lifted the tone of the strikers. They were conscious of a new force among them.

When he mounted the platform in the densely packed market-place, a spontaneous cheer arose to greet him. When he retired, after a long, vigorous speech, he knew that he had accomplished the first and all-important part of his task—the winning of the men’s confidence.

And then began a period of intense, unremitting work. For beyond the commonplaces of strike organisation, picketing, fund-distribution, speech-making, and the like, the continuous maintenance of the moral strength of a whole community by sheer force of will involved infinite devotion. He had to carry things with a high hand. The Employers’ Federation invited a conference. For a while he had high hopes. The hour came, and the whole town awaited the issue in breathless suspense. Goddard sat alone in the little office of the Union, chafing at his necessary exclusion from the discussion. At last the representatives of the Union returned, the secretary bearing a paper in his hand.

“Shall we agree?” he asked, giving it to Goddard.

He glanced over it, and his face darkened.

“Can I make this public?”

“Certainly, if you think it best,” replied the secretary, with a sigh.

“Thank God, it’s over, any way,” said one of the representatives.

But Goddard did not hear. He flung open the window and brandished the paper before the crowd assembled in the street.

“Men! listen to the result of the conference.”

He read the document in a loud, even voice. The employers had offered a few trivial concessions, a slight rise in skilled wages; but the principles were untouched. He hurried through the last clause; and before there was time for a cry to come from below, he tore the paper across and across with a passionate gesture, and scattered the pieces on the heads of the crowd. The men, who had listened in silent submission to what they thought were the final terms agreed upon, burst into a great cheer. The dramatic touch had quickened the revulsion of feeling.

“There, gentlemen,” said Goddard, turning round to the representatives. “I have burned your ships for you.”

A day or two afterwards Lady Phayre appeared upon the scene. She was coming on business—not pleasure, she had informed her friends, and accordingly laid house, carriages, and servants under requisition. Mr. Christopher Wentworth, her host, was the leading member of the Progressive League in the neighbourhood, and a humble vassal of Lady Phayre. His wife’s interests in life extended from her husband’s throat, which was delicate, to his digestive organs, which were dainty.

“So long as you don’t take Christopher to open-air meetings, Rhodanthe,” she said to Lady Phayre, “and give him bronchitis, or make him late for dinner, you can do exactly what you like.”

“Oh, I don’t want Christopher. He would be sadly in the way,” said Lady Phayre, reassuringly. “I’ll make him stay at home and write letters and collect funds.”

She summoned Goddard to wait upon her. He had already received two or three daintily penned letters from London, and had been eagerly looking forward to this one from Ecclesby itself.

He found her alone in the bright morning-room, radiant as Romney’s Bacchante head of Lady Hamilton that hung on the wall, and wearing the simplest of elegantly-cut blue serge costumes. Her sunniness almost dazed his eyes, accustomed lately to the gloom of sordid homes and pinched faces. She was eager to hear all the details of the situation; drew from him an exhaustive report. Her presence lifted him into a sanguine mood, filled him with a vague sweet sense of the triumph of life.

“Now let me tell you something,” she said when he had finished. “Don’t say I am not a woman of character. I have been bursting with it since you came into the room, and I have waited patiently. I have arranged a surprise for you. I am going to institute at once a children’s halfpenny tea-house. Haven’t you heard anything about it?”

“Not a word.”

“I am so glad.” She laughed, and clapped her hands. “It has all been going on under your very nose. My own idea. It is the children that suffer so. They don’t know why they should bear with hunger. So I am going to give them a great breakfast or tea, with as much bread and butter as they can eat, for a halfpenny.”

“But the funds?” asked Goddard.

“That is the greatest stroke of all,” replied Lady Phayre enthusiastically. “I have inveigled a grant out of the League, and the Evening Chronicle has promised me to start a subscription list to-night. I am negotiating for the use of the Salvation Army Barracks, and Evans and Williams are going to contract for the meals. Haven’t I been industrious?”

“You have,” said Goddard. “It will be a tremendous help to us.”

“You don’t mind my having kept it a secret from you?” she asked after some further discussion; “I wanted it to come as a surprise to you—to cheer you with a little unexpected help.”

She put her hands in her lap, and bent forward with a pretty air of humility. A faint note of wistfulness in her voice increased its charm.

All Goddard could say was that the scheme had been perfect. He tried to say more, but his unaccustomed brain refused to formulate in words subtleties of emotion. But before leaving he had a sudden inspiration.

“I feel a different man since I have seen you,” he said abruptly; “I was inclined to be harassed and despondent. Now—— ‘Strange how a smile of God can change the world.’ That’s what you seem to be.”

Lady Phayre turned away her head and blushed. She knew it was like a school-girl, but she could not help it. No one had ever told her quite that before. The glimpse into spiritual things rather frightened her. She did not know whether to be angry or pleased at being enraptured. Like a wise woman, she decided upon indefiniteness. But she could not hide a certain softness in her eyes as she bade him good-bye.

“I shall be in the Salvation Army Barracks at nine this evening. If you could help me just a little—unless you are too busy?”

He promised, delighted, and went away on house-to-house visits in the dark byways of the town, spreading everywhere, with great voice and hearty gestures, the overflow of his happiness. He felt himself filled with the spirit of victory. One man refused to be comforted.

“Strikes never did no good,” he said.

Goddard drew himself up, towered over him, and rated him for pusillanimity. If he could have spoken his inmost heart, he would have shouted—

“Man, don’t you see that I am unconquerable!”

And so for the next few days the men were held together and lifted by the one man’s happiness.

Meanwhile the Children’s Tavern was a great success. Lady Phayre worked indefatigably, serving herself, with other helpers, behind the trestles ranged round the great bare hall and creaking beneath the load of great tea-ums, mountains of bread and butter, and, in the morning, steaming pans of porridge. Goddard loved to make his way through the crowd of clamorous unwashed children to the place where Lady Phayre, deliciously fresh in white bib-apron and turned-back cuffs, was busily dispensing viands, receiving pence and halfpence from grubby little hands, and paying for countless moneyless urchins from a great private store of coppers by her side. And after the press was over, she would emerge from behind the trestles and walk up and down the hall with him discussing affairs.

Never had she seemed so near to him as now when a common interest united them. But in Goddard’s fresh, newly-awakened idealism, it was not her arm that brushed his on a common level, but it was her wings that touched his head.

Sometimes he would meet her in the streets, on a round of visits among such homes as she knew; sometimes he would see her sitting in the dog-cart, with her host, on the outskirts of a crowd he was addressing. Once she even persuaded him to accept a dinner invitation at the Wentworths’. She grew more into his life daily.

The strain of his position, as arbiter of the struggle, grew more intense. Rumours of the larger firms being backed up by the great capitalist Rosenthal were gaining hopeless credence. At another fruitless conference, one of the employers boasted that they could maintain a lockout for a couple of years. Goddard summoned a great mass-meeting of operatives, and gave the manufacturer the lie with passionate vehemence. Once more he imposed his will upon them.

He was fighting this battle as he had never fought before. Every aim of his life seemed to be merged in the issue. Not only were the great principles of the rights of labour at stake, not only the present and future happiness of this great community, but his own career seemed to hang in the balance, and, in a strange, uncomprehended way, his credit with Lady Phayre.

At last the London world began to clamour for Lady Phayre. A rift was threatening to appear in the Progressive lute. “You only can put things straight,” wrote Aloysius Gleam. “Fenton and Hendrick have bumped each other’s heads in the dark, and they are angry with one another, and we are all taking sides. You must bring them to kiss and make friends over your dinner-table.” So Lady Phayre deliberated. She had one very good reason for remaining at Ecclesby; but, on the other hand, she had fifty little feminine ones for leaving it. The work she had taken in hand, the Children’s Tavern, was in capital going order. She had already found her own services, as attendant, superfluous. She was free to resign the charge of it into competent hands. Why should she stay? It was not often that Lady Phayre did not know her own mind. At last she compromised. She would pay a visit to London, to effect the desired reconciliation, and then return to Ecclesby.

“I don’t like leaving you at all,” she said to Goddard, the evening before her departure. “It seems as if I am deserting you. But I shall make haste back.”

“Ah, do!” said Goddard pleadingly. “The people have grown so fond of you. And you are such a help to me.”

To atone for her defection, she had dismissed the carriage, and allowed him to see her home after the tea at the Salvation Army Barracks. It was already night, but the moon had risen, and lent a tenderness to things. Lady Phayre was glad of its aid, for it was on her conscience to leave Goddard with comfortable impressions.

“I have done very little,” she replied.

“You have advised me at every turn,” said Goddard.

“You have advised yourself while talking to me.”

“Anyhow, I could not have got on without you.”

“Believe it then, if it pleases you,” she said softly. “You can write me a daily account of things, if you like—and I will go on ‘advising’ you. Will that do?”

“You are too good to me,” he said fervently.

They walked on a little in silence. Then she asked him how much longer he thought the strike would last.

“Another fortnight must see the end of the employers’ resources,” he said with conviction. “The game of bluff can’t last longer.”

“And are you sure that the Rosenthal story is a myth?”

“As sure as I am that the moon is shining on your face.”

Upon the word, the moon disappeared behind a cloud. Lady Phayre started, and touched his sleeve.

“Oh, what a bad omen!”

But Daniel laughed. Omens had no place in his downright philosophy.

“Well, Juliet calls the moon inconstant,” said Lady Phayre gaily. “So we won’t believe it.”

“I only have to keep the men up till then,” said Goddard.

“And you will do it, Mr. Goddard,” she replied. “It will be a great victory, and we shall all be so proud of you.”

So Goddard went to sleep that night with hope thrilling through his dreams. And he woke up the next morning and went about his work, and longed for Lady Phayre. She might be back in five days.

But before the five days were up, Rosenthal’s support of the Employers’ Association became a matter of public certainty.

“I will not believe it,” shouted Goddard to the grey-faced secretary. “Nothing but the sight of Rosenthal’s cheque would convince me. If you give in now, you’ll be throwing up the most glorious victory labour ever won in this country. You are fools—wretched, cowardly, credulous fools.”

But the tide of conviction had set in. He was powerless against it. He strove with the passionate rage of his nature, exhausted himself in wild, furious effort. The end came with overwhelming rapidity. Goddard felt that he had lost his Waterloo.