The Spinners Part 48

"They're restless."

"Yes; they're reaching out for more happiness, like everybody else."

"I wouldn't back the next generation of capitalists to hold the fort against labour."

"Perhaps the next generation won't want to," she said. "Perhaps by that time we shall be educated up to the idea that rich people are quite as anti-social as poor people. Then we shall do away with both poverty and riches. To us, educated on the old values, it would come as a shock, but the generation that is born into such a world would accept it as a matter of course and not grumble."

He laughed.

"Don't believe it, Chicky. Every generation has its own hawks and eagles as well as its sheep. The strong will always want the fulness of the earth and always try to inspire the weak to help them get it. With great leaders.h.i.+p you must have equivalent rewards."

"Why? Cannot you imagine men big enough to work for humanity without reward? Have there not been plenty of such men--before Christ, as well as since?"

"Power is reward," he answered. "No man is so great that he is indifferent to power, for his greatness depends upon it; and if power was dissipated to-morrow and diluted until none could call himself a leader, we should have a reaction at once and the sheep would grow frightened and bleat for a shepherd. And the shepherd would very soon appear."

They stood where the cliffs broke and Bride ended her journey at the sea. She came gently without any splendid nuptials to the lover of rivers. Her brief course run, her last silver loop wound through the meadows, she ended in a placid pool amid the sand ridges above high-water mark. The yellow cliffs climbed up again on either side, and near the chalice in the grey beach whence, invisible, the river sank away to win the sea by stealth, spread Estelle's sea garden--an expanse of stone and sand enriched by many flowers that seemed to crown the river pool with a garland, or weave a wreath for Bride's grave in the sand. Here were pale gold of poppies, red gold of lotus and rich lichens that made the sea-worn pebbles s.h.i.+ne. Sea thistle spread glaucous foliage and lifted its blue blossoms; stone-crops and thrifts, tiny trefoils and couch gra.s.ses were woven into the sand, and pink storks-bill and silvery convolvulus brought cool colour to this harmony spread beside the purple sea. The day was one of shadow and suns.h.i.+ne mingled, and from time to time, through pa.s.sages of grey that lowered the glory of Estelle's sea garden, a sunburst came to set all glittering once more, to flash upon the river, lighten the ma.s.ses of distant elm, and throw up the red roofs and grey church tower of Bridetown and her encircling hills.

"What a jolly place it is," he said taking out his cigar case.

Then they sat in the shadow of a fis.h.i.+ng boat, drawn up here, and Raymond lamented the unlovely end of the river.

While he did so, the girl regarded him with affection and a secret interest and entertainment. For it amused her often to hear him echo thoughts that had come to her in the past. In a lesser degree her father did the like; but he belonged to a still older generation, and it was with Raymond that she found herself chiefly concerned, when he announced, as original, ideas and discoveries that reflected her own dreams in the past. Sometimes she thought he was catching up; sometimes, again, she distanced him and felt herself grown up and Raymond still a boy. Then, sometimes, he would flush a covey of ideas outside her reflections, and so remind her of the things that interested men, in which, as yet, women took no interest. When he spoke of such things, she strove to learn all that he could teach concerning them. But soon she found that was not much. He did not think deeply and she quickly caught him up, if she desired to do so.

Now he uttered just the same, trivial lament that she had uttered when she was a child. She was pleased, for she rather loved to feel herself older in mind than Raymond. It added a l.u.s.tre to friends.h.i.+p and made her happy--why, she knew not.

"What a wretched end--to be choked up in the s.h.i.+ngle like that," he said, "instead of das.h.i.+ng out gloriously and losing yourself in the sea!"

She smiled gently to herself.

"I thought that once, then I was ever so sorry for poor little Bride."

"A bride without a wedding," he said.

"No. She steals to him; she wins his salt kisses and finds them sweet enough. They mate down deep out of sight of all eyes. So you needn't be sorry for her really."

"It's like watching people try ever so hard to do something and never bring it off."

"Yes--even more like than you think, Ray; because we feel sad at such apparent failures, and yet what we are looking at may be a victory really, only our dull eyes miss it."

"I daresay many people are succeeding who don't appear to be," he admitted.

"Goodness can't be wasted. It may be poured into the sand all unseen and unsung; but it conquers somehow and does something worth doing, even though no eye can see what. Plenty of good things happen in the world--good and helpful things--that are never recorded, or even recognised."

"Like a stonewaller in a cricket match. The people cuss him, but he may determine who is going to win."

She laughed at the simile.

They went homeward presently, Estelle quietly content to have shown Raymond the flower-sprinkled strand, and he well pleased to have pleasured her.

CHAPTER III

A TWIST FRAME

Raymond Ironsyde grumbled sometimes at the Factory Act and protested against grandmotherly legislation. Yet in some directions he antic.i.p.ated it. He went, for example, beyond the Flax Mill Ventilation Regulations.

He loved fresh air himself, and took vast pains to make his works sweet and wholesome for those who breathed therein. Even Levi Baggs could not grumble, for the exhaust draught in his hackling shop was stronger than the law demanded, and the new cyclone separators in the main buildings served to keep the air far purer than of old.

Ironsyde had established also the Kestner System of atomising water, to regulate temperature and counteract the electrical effects of east wind, or frost, on the light slivers. He was always on the lookout for new automatic means to regulate the drags on the bobbins. He had installed an automatic doffing apparatus, and made a departure from the usual dry spinning in a demi-sec, or half-dry, spinning frame, which was new at that time, and had offered excellent results and spun a beautifully smooth yarn.

These things all served to a.s.sist and relieve the workers in varying degree, but, as Raymond often pointed out, they were taken for granted and, sometimes, in his gloomier moments, he accused his people of lacking grat.i.tude. They, for their part, were being gradually caught up in the growing movements of labour. The unintelligent forgot to credit the master with his consideration; while those who could think, were often soured by suspicion. These ignorant spirits doubted not that he was seeking to win their friends.h.i.+p against the rainy days in store for capital.

Ironsyde came to the works one morning to watch a new Twist Frame and a new operator. The single strand yarn for material from the spinners was coming to the Twist Frame to be turned into twines and fis.h.i.+ng lines.

Four full bobbins from the spinning machine went to each spindle of the Twist Frame, and from it emerged a strong 'four-ply.' It was a machine more complicated than the spinner; and, as only a good billiard player can appreciate the cleverness of a great player, so only a spinner might have admired the rare technical skill of the woman who controlled the Twist Frame.

The soul of the works persisted, though the people and the machines were changed. The old photographs and old verses had gone, but new pictures and poems took their places in the workers' corners; and new fas.h.i.+on-plates hung where the old ones used to hang. The drawers, and the rovers, the spreaders and the spinners still, like bower-birds, adorned the scenes of their toil. A valentine or two and the portrait of a gamekeeper and his dog hung beside the carding machine; for Sally Groves had retired and a younger woman was in her place. She, too, fed the Card by hand, but not so perfectly as Sally was wont to do.

Estelle had come to see the Twist Frame. She cared much for the Mill women and spent a good portion of her hours with them. A very genuine friends.h.i.+p, little tainted with time-serving, or self-interest, obtained for her in the works. On her side, she valued the goodwill of the workers as her best possession, and found among them a field for study in human nature and, in their work, matter for poetry and art. For were not all three Fates to be seen at their eternal business here? Clotho attended the Spread Board; the can-minders coiling away the sliver, stood for Lachesis; while in the spinners, who cut the thread when the bobbin was full, Estelle found Atropos, the G.o.ddess of the shears.

Mr. Best, grown grizzled, but active still and with no immediate thoughts of retirement, observed the operations of the new spinner at the Twist Frame. She was a woman from Bridport, lured to Bridetown by increase of wages.

John, who was a man of enthusiasms, turned to Estelle.

"The best spinner that ever came to Bridetown," he whispered.

"Better than Sabina Dinnett?" she asked; and Best declared that she was.

So pa.s.sage of time soon deadens the outline of all achievement, and living events that happen under our eyes, offer a statement of the quick and real with which beautiful dead things, embalmed in the amber of memory, cannot cope.

"Sabina, at her best, never touched her, Miss Waldron."

"Sabina braids still in her spare time. n.o.body makes better nets."

"This is a cousin of Sarah Roberts," explained the foreman. "Spinning runs in the Northover family, and though Sarah is a spreader and never will be anything else, there have been wondrous good spinners in the clan. This girl is called Milly Morton, and her mother and grandmother spun before her. Her father was Jack Morton, one of the last of the old hand spinners. To see him walking backwards from his wheel, and paying out fibre from his waist with one hand and holding up the yarn with the other, was a very good sight. He'd spin very nearly a hundred pounds of hemp in a ten hours' day, and turn out seven or eight miles of yarn, and walk every yard of it, of course. The rope makers swore by him."

"I'm sure spinning runs in the blood!" agreed Estelle. "Both Sarah's little girls are longing for the time when they can come into the Mill and mind cans; and, of course, the boy wants to do his father's work and be a lathe hand."

Best nodded.

"You've hit it," he declared. "It runs in the blood in a very strange fas.h.i.+on. Take Sabina's child. By all accounts, his old grandmother did everything in her power to poison his mind against the Mill as well as the master. She was a lot bitterer than Sabina herself, as the years went on; and if you could look back and uncover the past, you'd find it was her secret work to make that child what he is. But the Mill draws him like cheese draws a mouse. I'll find him here a dozen times in a month--just popping in when my back's turned. Why he comes I couldn't say; but I think it is because his mother was a spinner and the feeling for the craft is in him."

"His father is a spinner, too, for that matter," suggested Estelle.

"In the larger sense of owners.h.i.+p, yes; but it isn't that that draws him. His father's got no great part in him by all accounts. It's the mother in him that brings him here. Not that she knows he comes so often, and I dare say she'd be a good deal put about if she did."

"Why shouldn't he come, John?"

He shrugged his shoulders.