Inheritance

by Phyllis Bentley

  He was therefore as astonished as if a thunderbolt had fallen at his feet when one morning Mellor entered the office—the elder Brigg was away at Old Mill—and, bristling all over with excitement, announced that one of the weavers had just finished the piece he was on, or, as he put it, “felled his warp.” Brigg stared at him.

  “I’m very glad to hear it,” he said in a surprised tone. “Butterworth’s been asking for that piece for the last week. Get it off to Old Mill as fast as you can. But why did you tell me? Is there something wrong with it?” he concluded, his brow clouding.

  “Nay,” said Mellor: “It’s right enough. But he wants to know what you’re going to do about them new rates of pay.”

  “We’re going to pay them, of course,” said Brigg, still more surprised. “What does he think? The notice has been up more than a week; hasn’t he read it?”

  “Aye—well!” said Mellor in his high excited tones: “If you’re going to pay them rates he’ll go on strike. They’ll all go on strike as fast as they fell their warps. They won’t start fresh warps, they’ll strike.”

  “The fools!” exclaimed Brigg with conviction. “What on earth are they going to do that for?”

  “Weavers’ Union has decided not to accept them rates,” said Mellor.

  “Well, upon my soul!” said Brigg haughtily. “They take a lot upon themselves, I must say.”

  Mellor’s restless eyes darted fire and his pointed moustache quivered. “It don’t become me to bandy words wi’ you about Union, Mester Brigg,” he said in a quick angry tone: “I’m on Committee.”

  “What!” cried Brigg.

  “We passed a resolution last night that all weavers in the least affected by them new rates do strike at once,” continued Mellor stubbornly. “And of course we shall all stand to it. I were just waiting till one on ’em should fell his warp, to see what you’d say.”

  “Do you mean you’re going on strike too?” cried Brigg.

  “Aye!” said Mellor fierily.

  The blood rushed to Brigg’s head; for a moment red sparks danced before his eyes, and he could have struck the man. He thought of Janie and the circumstances of Mellor’s employment at Syke Mill, of what his father would say when he heard that Mellor was actually on the Committee of the hated Union, of his own disappointment at this rejection of his beautiful well-prepared scheme, of the trouble and anxiety and loss which the strike would bring. And he felt that he had been duped by the Bamforths; a tide of bitterness engulfed his heart. He said savagely:

  “Then clear out now and don’t come back.”

  “Just as you like, Mester Brigg,” said Mellor in a fury. He swung round and marched off—his very back seemed to bristle—and a few minutes later Brigg saw him crossing the mill yard.

  When his first rage had died down Brigg began to feel really wretched at the thought of his father’s just reproaches; after an hour or so he could bear it no longer, but sent a message up across the river to Syke House for his dogcart, and drove himself at a furious rate up to Old Mill. There he seized upon his father, and saying anxiously that he must speak to him, dragged him out into the yard.

  “Well, what’s the matter?” demanded his father with rough sarcasm. “Has Janie got toothache, or what?”

  Brigg, inwardly raging at the thought of Janie, poured out the whole story of Mellor, the Union and the strike, not without some confused expressions of contrition. To his great surprise his father seemed to take the matter calmly.

  “It’s a nuisance about Mellor,” he said. “The silly fool! Doesn’t know which side his bread’s buttered. He had the makings of a good foreman. I suppose,” he added sharply: “You didn’t know he was a Union man when you got me to take him on?”

  “No, father, I didn’t,” said Brigg, scarlet. “But what about the strike?” he asked, his eyes wide with trouble. “It seems such a dreadful thing.”

  “Pooh!” said his father calmly. “I expected we should have a bit of trouble with them.”

  “Did you?” said Brigg, impressed.

  “When you’re as old as I am, my boy,” said his father, “You’ll know that working-men never like anything new. They fight against everything new that comes in—out of ignorance, you know. But they’ll soon give in,” he added cheerfully. “They can’t hold out long.”

  “They were out a month at Emsley a year or two ago,” said Brigg.

  “Aye!” said his father. “But it was only at one mill—they thought they had the master in a band; his competitors were taking his trade. Now we’re all joined together it’ll be different.”

  “They’re joined together, too,” muttered Brigg.

  “Aye—but this’ll break them apart,” said his father.

  “Shall I drive you down, father?” offered Brigg.

  “What, in yon dogcart?” said his father. “Nay, I’ve more respect for my neck.” At this Brigg, in spite of his wretchedness, slightly sniggered. “And what will your Janie say to your sacking Mellor?” demanded his father in a tone of boyish glee. “Eh?”

  Brigg, who thought he had something to say to Janie about Mellor, made no reply.

  By the end of the afternoon the strike was general in Annotsfield, and Brigg arrived at Eastgate House in the evening with wrath in his heart. To his disappointment there was no light in the front room, but glancing upwards he saw a strip of light coming from between the blinds of a second-floor window, and he surmised that Helena, who had been feeling the cold spring winds very much lately, was perhaps ill and confined to bed. There was a pause after his ring, then steps came running downstairs and along the hall, and Janie opened the door.

  “Henry wants to see you,” she said quickly, hurrying back through the hall. “Come along.”

  She glanced impatiently over her shoulder to see if he was following, and opened a door through which Brigg had never penetrated—he knew, however, that it led to the newspaper part of the establishment. Before he could say a word Janie hurried him into a small, hot, brightly-lighted room where Henry sat behind a large table strewn with papers of every sort and size in considerable disorder. An intermittent whirring noise came from below, and the sound of men’s voices. Henry looked tired and rather harassed, but authoritative, and Brigg understood at once that Jonathan, busy with his many School Board and other educational committees, now left the newspaper largely to his son.

  “Good evening, Brigg,” said Henry, rising and offering him a chair. “We go to press to-night, you know, and I wondered if you would care to tell me anything about the manufacturers’ side of the strike.”

  “Yes, do, Brigg,” said Janie in a very cold tone, perching herself on the edge of Henry’s table. “But don’t say anything about picks and strings,” she added quickly: “Because I don’t understand a word of them.”

  “Then you’ve no right to judge,” said Brigg, hot and angry.

  “I wasn’t judging,” protested Janie mutinously, but Henry said: “A good answer, Brigg,” in an approving tone. “I should really be very much obliged if you would give me your views,” he added, taking up a pencil.

  In spite of himself Brigg felt mollified, and indeed flattered, by this request from a representative of the press. He began to explain that picks were threads of weft, and a string a measure of length, and that the idea of the new scale of pay was to introduce uniformity of cost, so that a manufacturer could estimate prices in advance, far more accurately.

  “And what effect will it have upon the wages of the operatives?” enquired Henry, who was taking notes.

  “Some will find their wages lowered, and some increased, but the great majority will remain just about the same,” said Brigg.

  “Charley Mellor says it will drop the wages of nearly all of them, by from three shillings to three-and-six a week,” threw out Janie in a rapid severe tone.

  “Nonsense!” said Brigg, who nevertheless wished that there had not been quite so much disagreement among the manufacturers over the figures. But three shillings a week! “
Absurd!” he said. “Father says,” he added, “that working people are always against everything new. This new scale is for the good of the industry as a whole, I am sure of it.”

  “I hear you’ve discharged Charley Mellor,” said Janie with her head in the air.

  “I really don’t see why you bother so much about Charley Mellor, Janie,” objected Brigg. He thought he saw in Henry’s eye that Henry was rather of the same opinion, and continued more easily: “Yes—we had a bit of a row and I told him to clear out.”

  Janie gave a sharp sigh, and Henry said he was afraid he must ask them to go. “I’ll bring you a proof across before you leave, Brigg,” he continued, “of what I shall give as the manufacturers’ side of the case. Then if you think I’ve not stated it fairly, you can let me know.”

  “Oh, but Brigg’s going now” said Janie, airily. “Uncle and I cannot leave Aunt Helena.”

  “Then I’ll send it up to Syke House,” said Henry. “Good night, Brigg.”

  “I’ll show you the way out from this side, Cousin Brigg,” said Janie, and she at once ushered him out of a door, bearing a brass plate inscribed Annotsfield Pioneer, which led into a side street.

  As Brigg stumbled down the steps he noticed the lighted windows of a cellar at the side, reaching to the level of his knees. The window was open, and from the cellar came the whirring sound he had noticed while in Henry’s room.

  “Is that where the paper is printed?” demanded Brigg curiously, stooping.

  To Janie he sounded suddenly so naive, so young, so inexperienced, he was so definitely out of his own world and lost in someone else’s, so devoid of his usual self-complacent assurance, so completely in Henry’s hands, that she was touched; for the first time she saw the little boy in him, and her lovely compassion flew out and wrapped him in a protective love.

  “I’m afraid I shan’t be able to go to Halifax to the roller-skating on Saturday, Brigg,” she said in a kind friendly tone, referring to a previous promise. “I shan’t be able to leave Aunt Helena, I fear.”

  Brigg heard the difference in her voice at once, stepped back to her, and asked eagerly: “But when she’s better you will?”

  “Perhaps,” said Janie sweetly, closing the door.

  Brigg, taking his way home, felt very much lighter at heart than when he had entered Eastgate House. The Bamforths were evidently neutrals, not enemies, about the strike; he no longer felt duped; and he would have Janie yet. The excitement of seeing his own remarks in print, on a scrap of rough paper, as the statement of “a member of a leading Annotsfield manufacturing firm,” was very agreeable; his father actually condescended to put on his spectacles to read it, and was suitably impressed.

  Brigg was not so well pleased next morning, however, when, on eagerly opening the Annotsfield Pioneer and finding the proper column, he perceived the views of the Weavers’ Union expressed above his own.

  2

  Charley Mellor had not enjoyed a very happy life. He and his numerous brothers and sisters, when young, had suffered the extremes of poverty and wretchedness, for his father, now dead, had been a reckless, angry man, bitter of tongue, always at loggerheads with his employers, able to keep no place long and given to solacing his uneasy spirit with drink.

  The elder Mellor had indeed suffered in his own childhood enough to explain his embitterment. The Annotsfield poorhouse in 1813 was not a particularly pleasant place for a pauper child; moreover, the little Mellors had to suffer the taunts of the other children and adults there, who never allowed them to forget that their father was a murderer. The Poor Law Overseers had perhaps a kindly motive in sending the Mellor children to different parts of the county where their history would not be known; but Mellor, fatherless and motherless, and now required to part from the only people in the world who held him dear, could hardly be expected to appreciate that, and he hated the Poor Law authorities, and Bradford, and his employer, with a bitter, lasting hate. He survived the rigours of his childhood, and as he grew up and guessed from men’s talk the true circumstances of his father’s death, learned to hold his tongue about his family; he was a woolcomber by trade, and a skilful workman; he married a decent girl and might have been moderately happy. But there were pictures in his mind which made festering sores there. In one picture his mother, with wild staring eyes, clutched him to her breast and cried: “They’ve tekken him! They’ve tekken thy father!” over and over again in a mad wail. (In this picture they were standing outside a cottage in the cold dim light of dawn; behind his shoulder a woman’s gentle voice urged him to be a brave lad and comfort his mother.) In another picture he was being marched down a road away from a grey building; the road was the road out of Annotsfield, the building was Annotsfield poorhouse, he was leaving his poor little sisters behind, and he felt as though his heart would crack with pain. There were other very disagreeable pictures, too, in his early life in Bradford; and the result of their ever-present bitterness was two-fold. It was to his social advantage to conceal his father’s fate, and he concealed it, but in the secret places of his heart he was proud of it, yes, proud, proud that his father had murdered one of those cruel oppressors, those hateful tyrants, the masters. Mellor was against the masters with all his heart and soul, he hated the rich bitterly; wherever there was a movement against them he joined it; he was a great Oastlerite, and so desperate a Chartist that he twice found himself in prison for seditious conspiracy. The other result was that by a natural reaction Marthwaite appeared to Mellor as a kind of forbidden paradise; in his stormy confused life he never found time and means to visit it again—besides, there was always that fear of being recognised as a murderer’s son to hold him back—but he was always on the point of going; and in his best hours, when he had just got a new place and had not yet turned against his master, and it was Sunday afternoon and the house was clean and quiet and he had not been drinking lately, he would describe Marthwaite and Scape Scar to his children with loving exaggeration.

  His children naturally shared his views, both as to the tyranny of the rich and the injury of their banishment from the Ire Valley. Young Charley, who was one of the youngest of the family, imagined Marthwaite as a wonderful place where justice was done to the poor and everything was lovely. His aunts lived there, noble and kind women for certain; and some day he would go there and find them. His father’s death—which was due half to his own carelessness and half to his employer’s callousness, for he was caught in some insufficiently protected woolcombing machinery and torn to pieces—broke up the family, and young Charley, set against the Bradford masters more than ever by his father’s end, decided to tramp to Marthwaite and try his luck there. But though there were plenty of Mellors in the Ire Valley, none of them seemed to be kin to him; the older people whom he asked did not seem to remember his father—unless indeed, they suggested, Charley was the grandson of the murderer? Charley indignantly repudiated any such insinuation, and was left without discoverable relatives. He discovered, however, that masters in the Ire Valley were just the same as they were in Bradford. The breaking of his childish dreams completely embittered him, and he was a wild, rebellious, unbalanced youth, out of work as fast as he got in, beginning to drink too much, heading fast for crime and prison, when Jonathan, who was in the habit of going out into the highways and hedges and compelling lads, by the sheer force of his personality to come into his night school, seized upon him. Charley was a tough customer, and most unwilling to be reformed, but the fact that Jonathan had worked in a mill and been lamed by if compelled his reluctant respect and attention, and before he knew where he was he found himself in the Mechanics’ Institute, learning arithmetic from a fresh-faced boy about his own age, who proved to be Jonathan’s son Henry. The Bamforths gave him clothes and boots and friendship, found him a job at his own work, got him to take the teetotal pledge and inspired him with the courage to stick to it. They were doing the same thing for a score of other lads, and Charley Mellor thought Jonathan the noblest man who had ever lived. He was ra
ther afraid of Helena, but he admired all Jonathan’s sons, especially Henry, terrifically, while as for his feelings towards the little Janie, then about nine years old—well!

  Charley’s bitterness towards the masters and the rich was too deep to be uprooted, but under Jonathan’s fostering care the feeling behind it was turned in another direction, and Charley became an enthusiastic worker for his fellow working-men. He taught in the night schools, he taught in the Eastgate Sunday School, he rejoiced tremendously with the Bamforths, bristling all over his restless person with glee, when the Education Act became law. He knew exactly what he wanted for the working classes; he wanted them all to have homes like the Bamforths’ home. He wanted their fathers to be noble and great, like Jonathan; he wanted their mothers to be refined and good, like Helena; he wanted their sons and husbands to be upright, intelligent, happy and free, like Richard and Henry; he wanted their daughters and wives to be lovely and bright and joyous, like sunshine and flowers, like sweet music, like Miss Janie. Charley was an emotional fellow, and sometimes when he thought of the difference between the lovely Janie and his own sisters whom he had left in Bradford, he trembled all over, and tears came into his eyes. He had a hopeless adoration for Janie; he knew it was hopeless, but still it had kept him from marrying, all these years. If Janie wanted a stall decorated for a Chapel bazaar, or a sledge made, or some chairs moved, Charley was always there to do it, his little moustache bristling with eagerness, his restless eyes snapping. On these occasions, when Janie, radiant, her lovely eyes beaming down into his—for she was much the taller—asked him sweetly for his help and he had smiled consent, Charley had sometimes murmured, in a very low tone and with downcast eyes: “I’d do anything for you, Miss Janie”—but he did not intend it to be heard. Janie, however, had heard it and knew what it meant; and she had an exquisitely soft place in her heart for poor Charley, who was too old for her and in any case not the kind of man she could ever marry. She divined exactly how he felt about all the other young men—glossy and rich and well-born—who courted her, and would pause in the middle of anything, however exciting, to give Charley her lovely smile and a cheering word. Yes! The Bamforths and Janie were Charley’s ideals; and he was prepared for any labour, any sacrifice, which would bring that ideal nearer to the homes of the people. Better homes and better food, better wages, better education—all these would be needed, and Charley was prepared, nay he was eager, to fight for them. He regarded the manufacturers’ new scale of pay as an abominable attempt on their part to lower the weavers’ wages and raise their own profits—their talk of “uniformity” and “regulation,” he thought, was made up later when they found the men wouldn’t swallow the scale without some explanation. If their intention had been fair towards the men, they would have consulted the new Union before posting the notices. So Mellor voted joyously for the strike; he wrung his fellow-Unionsts’ hands and panted congratulations when the vote went in its favour; when he was elected to the strike committee and made treasurer he could hardly speak for emotion; the cause of the people was a righteous cause, and here was he working for it.