Inheritance

by Phyllis Bentley

  “No, no! I didn’t!” cried Mary in distress. “Will,” she went on earnestly, seizing his hand between both hers, and raising her dark eyes pleading to his: “Don’t, don’t have them frames i’ Syke Mill. It’ll bring misery on the valley. There’s many a one clemming now because on ’em. Don’t have them. Give them up. Leave them be.”

  “You don’t want to be my wife, then?” demanded Will perversely.

  “Tha knows I do, Will,” whispered Mary, turning away her head. “But . . .” She was quite unable to explain, or even to understand, her own feeling that for her to gain her heart’s desire through the suffering of others would be the greatest misery she could imagine. She only knew that to marry Will while the frames starved the Mellors would be an agony to her; she repeated vaguely: “Tha knows I do . . . But. . . .”

  “Don’t you worry, my lass,” said Will, regaining his confident Oldroyd tone, and throwing up his head: “The frames will be running at Syke Mill within a month, and within another month we’ll be man and wife.”

  Mary sighed deeply. “I don’t know what to think on it,” she murmured, thinking of Joe.

  “Don’t think at all,” cried Will. “Just love me.” He laughed into her eyes, drew her to him, and kissed her on the mouth as they stood there in the sunshine.

  “Don’t have the frames, Will,” murmured Mary against his shoulder.

  “Pshaw!” said Will, enjoying the sensation of having a superior masculine intellect, and gently stroking her hair. He told her that he might not be able to see much of her till the frames were in, stifled her further protests with kisses, and strode away.

  During the next month Mary saw him little, but thought of him much. She thought of him laughing, talking in the assured determined way which made her smile, catching her wrist with his fingers, kissing her or taking her in a more ardent embrace, swinging away down the road, looking at her with that bright eager conquering glance. At such times she paused in her work about the house, leaned on her broom or let her hands sink into the water where she was washing clothes; her eyes grew large and vague, the clouds rolled by unseen as she stared through the window, dreaming. Sometimes she returned to reality with a start to find tears in her eyes; she brushed them away with the back of her hand and murmured: “Nay, Will!”—blaming him for them yet loving him |the more for them, for they were pleasant tears. But alas! scarcely had she thus returned to herself than her tears ceased and her eyes grew dry and burning, for she immediately began to think about Joe and the Luddites, and felt wretched. Lizzie Mellor brought worse tales of the cloth trade every day; George’s stepfather was at his wits’ end for work, he had sent Tom Thorpe away, and one of the younger Thorpe children was ill from some filth he had picked up in the road and gobbled down frantically in sheer uncontrollable hunger; George was bringing home only half his usual earnings, and Lizzie felt so weak she could hardly keep the house clean. “You two are lucky,” she often ended wistfully. Mary felt this as a reproach, slipped something beneath Lizzie’s shawl when she left, and starved herself so that Joe should not have to go short. But that was so little; what else could she do? All through the long hours when Joe was out Mary thus tormented herself with involved worryings as to how she could help the wives and children of the croppers. But of course she could do nothing in it, nothing; she hardly even knew what she would wish to do, for there was Will; though rather than help to starve the Mellors, she felt, she would part from Will and never see him again. But that would be no use; nothing was any use.

  Meanwhile Joe never spoke to her of the Luddites, for there was his oath, and he kept it; but he was often out at night, and came back looking tired and haggard; when he was in he was always writing, and never read out what he wrote; while as the Oldroyds’ precautions became more and more secure, both Joe and Mellor seemed to feel more and more distressed.

  For Will, of course, went straight from Mary’s door to his father in the mill, drew him out to the dam where they would be out of the men’s hearing, and told him that Luddism was more widely spread in the valley than they had any idea of. “There may even be some Ludders in the mill,” he said.

  “What!” bellowed Mr. Oldroyd, the vein down his forehead swelling. “Who told you that tale?”

  “Mary Bamforth,” replied Will firmly.

  “Did you ask her who they were?” demanded Mr. Oldroyd.

  “No, I didn’t,” said Will grimly. “I didn’t think she’d tell me if I did.”

  Mr. Oldroyd seemed amused by this, smacked his son on the back, laughed heartily, and exclaimed “Women! Women!” After a while, however, he grew suddenly sober, and said with great determination: “Well, this means soldiers.” Will agreed. “And never speaking of our plans in the mill,” continued Mr. Oldroyd. At this thought of treachery in his own, actually his own, mill, he abruptly lost his temper. “Damn them!” he bellowed. “Bringing bad feeling into the valley like this!” Here he was interrupted by Joe, who came out to say that a piece which had had to be re-milled was just off the stocks, and would he come and look at it. Stamping back into the mill, Mr. Oldroyd continued to rave in a loud voice against the Luddites, and repeated that phrase about riding through Luddites’ blood up to his saddle-girths which he had invented the day before.

  As the days went on he used the phrase so often and so violently that even Will began to be tickled by its repetition, and sympathised with the men when they bent down to hide their faces. He watched them shrewdly to see if any of them showed signs of special irritation when the frames were mentioned, but the only one who looked distressed at Mr. Oldroyd’s tempers seemed to be Joe, and he of course was out of the question—he looked distressed, surmised Will, because others present, known to him, were feeling so. That was just like Joe. Will noticed, too, that Joe had found a new tune, brisk, and stirring, to whistle, and that some of the men were picking it up; but then Joe was always picking up new tunes from somewhere, and this was a good tune; Will liked it. Meanwhile Mr. Oldroyd, who did nothing by halves, made such a fuss to the magistrates, both in the Ire Valley and in Annotsfield, that both infantry and cavalry were promptly sent up to Marthwaite and quartered at the Red Lion. Every night they paraded in the market place, and then divided to guard Enoch Smith’s, Syke Mill, and any other cloth-dressers or frame-makers who happened to be feeling timid at the moment. Their officers grumbled considerably at Mr. Oldroyd’s excess of zeal; what on earth was the use, they demanded, of guarding a mill before there were any frames there to guard? “More use than shutting a stable door when the horse is gone,” replied Mr. Oldroyd, who, perverse man that he was, was made the fiercer by the scarcely concealed ridicule of the soldiers. And besides, thought Will, he was right to take precautions; for the Luddites were certainly growing daily more bold. Twice in one week mills not far from Annotsfield were attacked; once the Luddites were successful and the frames destroyed. Piteous though rather comic tales—or so it seemed to Will’s young blood—were told of people hauled from their beds at dead of night by men in masks, and forced to give up money and weapons in the name of General Ludd. (Will quite thirsted for them to come and try this at Dean Head House, but the Luddites evidently had too much sense for that.) Somebody who resisted was shot in the eye, and somebody else got his arm broken; none of these happenings took place actually in the Ire Valley, but they crept nearer as the days went on. At last one morning early in April an ill-written note appeared on Mr. Oldroyd’s table in Syke Mill, saying that Ned Ludd would lay the building in ashes if he persisted in using the frames. Will, who was putting up the horses—the father and son had just arrived—first learned of the appearance of this note by an appalling roar which sounded all over the mill; he rushed within, and found his father shouting and dancing about the place, shaking the paper aloft, almost mad with fury. Will thought the note written in a forced, disguised hand, and looking round sharply asked how it had come there, but none of the men admitted to knowing anything about it, and this evidence of treachery within the mill ha
rdened Mr. Oldroyd’s rage. After this, to the disgust of the officer in charge, he insisted on having a cannon brought to the mill; a wall at the top end of the mill yard, which commanded the whole front of the building, could be built up a bit and pierced with openings, he said, and with a cannon behind it they would be bold Luddites who walked in front. After several hot passages with the officer this was done, and the cannon installed; the fortifications at Syke Mill became the talk of the Ire Valley, and many a man brought his wife and children to look at them on the following Sunday afternoons. (Joe, however, did not bring Mary, as Will had suggested and hoped. Will longed to be able to say frankly to Joe: “Mary and I are to be wed,” but he had promised his father to leave it till the frames were in, and as an Oldroyd he must keep his word—the more so because what had happened at Scape Scar that February morning must be kept from both his father and Joe. So though he chafed at the delay, Will said nothing.) Mr. Oldroyd’s obsession with Luddites became an Ire Valley joke, if rather a grim one; the very children skipped about in the road in front of his horse, crying: “I’m General Ludd, I’m General Ludd!” with intent to tease. At this Mr. Oldroyd, crimson with laughter and rage, was wont to shout violently: “Ye young scoundrels!” and strike out vehemently at them with his whip—taking good care, of course, not to hit any of them. The frames meanwhile were finished, and stood waiting at Enoch Smith’s.

  “When do you mean to fetch them to the mill, father?” demanded Will, thinking restlessly of Mary.

  “I don’t mean anyone but myself and Enoch to know that till the day after, my boy,” replied Mr. Oldroyd.

  Will, fuming for his love, grumbled that the Annotsfield cloth-dressers who were already using frames would take all the trade before they started, if they didn’t take care, “Armitages are pulling work in” he urged.

  “That’s why I don’t mean to have the frames smashed and have to wait another month,” said Mr. Oldroyd fiercely. “Besides,” he added, a line of care appearing on his brow, “I couldn’t afford it. If those frames get smashed, it’s good-bye to Syke Mill for us, Will.”

  2

  A good many other people beside Will who lived in the Ire Valley just then would have liked to know the answer to his question. The anger of Mellor and his friends, when they found, only two days after Joe’s “twissing,” that Mr. Oldroyd had brought redcoats up to Marthwaite, was deep and fierce; and it seemed to Joe that they rather blamed him for the occurrence; though what connection there was between him and the appearance of the soldiers, he could not see. Walker quite often insultingly bade him remember his oath; the others, though they said nothing, seemed to agree that the reminder was necessary; and this, when he knew himself so firm and devoted in their cause, harassed and saddened him. They usually became reconciled to him by the end of the evening, however, for he whistled most excellently the croppers’ song which some of the Liversedge Luddites had invented; they all agreed he had improved the tune and added several telling words. Then too, he made many copies of the Luddite oath, and wrote their threatening letters for them in a lofty scholarly style which they much admired; so, though he was not much good at the drills which they performed, now the weather was growing milder, on the moor of a night, and shrank so from the arms-collecting expeditions that after once taking him Mellor forbore to send him on them again, he was regarded in some sense as a leader. He had a very quick ear, and was often commanded by Mellor to take charge of the party which lounged, the hammer Enoch leaning against the wall beside them, on the darkest side of a house near to Enoch Smith’s foundry (as it was beginning to be called now he was building a new shed) every night, and listened tensely for any stir there. For it was agreed on all sides among the Luddites that it would be best, considering the way Syke Mill and the foundry were now guarded, to attack the frames on their way from one place to the other, just as they turned off the road into the newly made lane leading down to the mill. The corner was awkward and the surface rough, and the wood which sloped up the hill on the other side of the road just there would afford excellent cover. Just a rush in the dark, a bout of fisticuffs with the confused soldiers, a few smashing blows with Enoch, a swift retreat through the wood, and the thing would be done. Once Mr. Oldroyd’s frames were smashed, argued Mellor, nobody else in the valley would dare to use them, no other cloth-dresser in the Ire Valley had half as much spirit as he. It was therefore essential not to miss the transit of the frames, and of great importance to learn in advance, if they could, when they were to make the journey; and it seemed to Joe that every man he met in the valley asked him if Mr. Oldroyd had fixed the day yet. Joe longed with his whole soul for the day to be fixed and over, the frames smashed, and life back in its ordinary quiet course; at present he lived in a kind of nightmare. After long days at the mill, the long nights drilling on the moor or watching in Marthwaite wore him out; he was troubled by pity for the Oldroyds, who were to lose so great a sum—but perhaps it was Enoch Smith who would lose it? He did not know; there seemed so many things he did not know—and the excitement of the secret meetings, of reading in the newspaper about bands of desperate men united by illegal oaths and knowing he was one of them, so wrought upon his nerves that everything seemed lurid and abnormal. He worked feverishly, tossed and dreamed through the short hours which were left for sleep, and felt his heart race with anguish at any sign of the croppers’ wrongs—at the look of Tom Thorpe’s face, say, which since he had lost his work had grown so pinched, hollow and wild that one could scarcely recognise him for the lively cheerful soul who had assisted at Joe’s oath-taking.

  It was therefore with real relief and joy that Joe heard Mr. Oldroyd one rainy Tuesday after his return from Annotsfield announce in a loud cheerful tone: “Well, lads! The frames are coming in next Saturday night, and I shall expect you all to be here to help.” They would all be there, thought Joe, but not all of them would help, and he could not but be rather tickled by Mr. Oldroyd’s complete unconsciousness, as he thought, of the joke. Things were now so slack at Mellor’s shop that George almost always got home a good time before Joe, and sometimes set off for wherever that night’s Luddite rendezvous happened to be before Joe even reached Scape Scar. This happened to-night, so Joe flew after him through the rain to the Moorcock, delighted that at last the long time of waiting was over, and soon the whole tiresome business would be finished and the Ire Valley Luddites disbanded. He burst into the room tingling with excitement, and cried out his news at once. It was received with acclamation.

  “Well done, Joe!” cried Thorpe, slapping him on the back with an eager hand, then breathing deeply as though the effort had been almost too much for him. “Now we’ll show them! Now we’ll teach them!” he went on in a thin high voice, his eyes gleaming fanatically. “George! Let me have Enoch o’ Saturday!”

  Mellor demurred, and Walker said with brutal frankness: “Tha hasn’t strength, Tom.”

  “Does tha want Enoch?” demanded Thorpe fiercely, turning his haggard face fiercely towards him.

  “Nay!” said Walker, shrinking a little. “It’d better be somebody taller nor either you nor me.”

  Thorpe was somewhat mollified by this, and the discussion went on. The time and place of meeting for Saturday night was arranged, and it was decided to send Thorpe (who unfortunately had only too much leisure) round as messenger to all the Luddites in the district—there were strong centres in Annotsfield, in Halifax and Liversedge, and their members would all be needed.

  “There mun be no hanging back!” declaimed Mellor, his pale eyes glowing. “We mun all be there, every twissed brother on us, shoulder to shoulder!”

  The men stamped their feet and shouted in applause, and Joe shivered with excitement. Every twissed brother! Yes, that was what he wanted them all to be, all twissed brothers.

  “Lads!” he shouted suddenly. “No bloodshed now! Them Oldroyds have, been good to me and mine.”

  There were laughs and jeers at this, but they were not unkindly, and a voice from the shadows
said: “All right, Joe; we’ll leave Will to thee.”

  “We mun be as good as gold Wednesday, Thursday and Friday,” interrupted Thorpe, with some of his old spirit, “So’s they’ll suspect nowt.”

  “Ay! We’ll go to bed at eight,” said Walker. “Wi’ a lass if we can find one.”

  “Joe hasn’t got a lass,” laughed the same man as had spoken of Will.

  “Let him take the one here, then,” suggested Walker. “She’s willing.”

  “Oh, hold your tongues!” cried Joe, vexed, but at the same time trying to remember what the girl of the inn looked like.

  “Don’t be so squeamish, Joe,” urged Mellor with a grin.

  The Luddites, who were mostly of an age when such talk was highly agreeable, wore the jest threadbare, till at last Joe, to distract them, fell to whistling the croppers’ song.

  “Begin again, Joe,” cried Mellor, jumping up; he stood by the hearth and rang out a verse—he had a fine tenor voice, and was noted for his singing at Scape Scar Chapel of a Sunday—to Joe’s whistled accompaniment.

  “Come, cropper lads of high renown,

  Who love to drink good ale that’s brown,

  And strike each haughty tyrant down,

  With hatchet, pike and gun!”

  The men thundered out the chorus in their hearty Yorkshire voices, some singing seconds, and Tom Thorpe taking a falsetto version of his own which made them all laugh.

  “Oh, the cropper lads for me,

  Who with lusty stroke,

  The sheer frames broke,

  The cropper lads for me.”

  Mellor rang out again:

  “What though the specials still advance,

  And soldiers nightly round us prance,

  The cropper lads still lead the dance,

  With hatchet, pike and gun!”

  “Quietly, George, quietly this next verse,” pleaded Joe, as the chorus thundered to its end.