“You don’t see what I see,” she said. “You see so much in the past and I so little, being young and inexperienced, that I must look ahead to fill my eyes. You think of steam as at best an expensive toy. You think steamers ugly, too, and though that ought not to weigh with Garton’s manager it does. You think I’m rushing into a long, immensely long and narrow corridor, that may, years after I have dropped by the way, open on to a new expanse. I think you’re wrong. For me the end of the corridor is so near that I can feel the new wind on my face. Call me a fool—you’ve often thought Mark Henry a fool, but he was Garton’s and you’re his manager. It’s in my bones that we’re on the immediate edge of change. This liner for Liverpool. You think a gross tonnage of 2347 tons too great for the Chinese route. I think it will do and do well for now, but that five, ten years, will see us smiling at the thought of building so small a ship for the Eastern trade.” Mary paused and fell back on her book to supplement her avowal of faith. “Thomas Prendergast’s figures convince me that we can keep the coal consumption down to twenty tons a day for every purpose. We shall improve the Garton compound engine and build a bigger. Why stick at compound! Why shouldn’t there be triple expansion? I’m putting it badly because I’m ignorant, but what I dream about, Prendergast can make.”
“Slowly, Mary, slowly.”
“No. Not slowly. Quickly. Soon. Because the world can’t wait. Can’t you feel it? Can’t you feel the pressure of change? It beats on my brain sometimes so that I can hardly bear it. Iron ships. Prendergast says there’ll be steel ships. The Mary Gray, bless her, took over three months from Foochow. The new Liverpool liner ought to do it in sixty-five days, counting stoppages at ports. Do you think the world will wait the extra thirty days for the Mary Gray to come in like a cloud of grace, ravishing all our hearts? You know it won’t. Think of all the people working in the Garton Iron Works. They weren’t there thirty years ago. They were only born because the iron wanted them. They’ve all got to be fed. There’ll have to be more ships and quicker ships, to bring them food, and iron, and to take way what they’ve made. Think of all the people born just to weave wool and spin cotton for my iron workers. There must be ships for them and more and more and faster and faster. Can’t you see? Really can’t you see? Can’t you hear it coming? Or are you just shutting your eyes and ears because you hate it?”
“Ah, stay like that, Mary.”
“Like what?”
“So young—and interested.” Mempes smiled at himself, and began all over again to fasten a drag of argument and wise counsel on Mary’s dangerous energy. . . .
The first hint of trouble in the Yard came over the Port Union. Mary had a dislike of the seamen’s and shipwrights’ unions, partly the fruit of furious warnings and denunciations dropped by Mark Henry in her ears before she knew what he was talking about, and partly a native dislike of interference. She was far from the courage to oppose them in Danesacre, but when a troublesome or unsatisfactory man was also a prominent member of the Union he soon found himself looking for work outside Garton’s. Two such dismissals coming in rapid succession resulted in a deputation to Mary.
She received it in her office, sitting stiffly upright in Mark Henry’s chair, and listened with grave courtesy while the spokesman addressed her. His speech threatened to become a dissertation on Unionism in general and she fidgeted a little with a paper-cutter on her desk. When he ended she said civilly:
“I’m at a loss to understand why you came, Mr. Burrows. These men were not dismissed as Union members, but for carelessness, and in the case of Gill, for constant absence due to a cause you know as well as I do.”
“Gill drinks no more than the rest of us,” one man observed.
“Then he has a weaker head,” Mary retorted. “I don’t see the rest of you absent every Monday morning and your wives with black eyes. I’ve no objection to Union men who behave themselves. I’ve every objection to drunkards and careless workers. That’s all.”
Her position was unassailable and the deputation withdrew, to accuse itself of moral weakness.
“You can’t talk to a girl,” Burrows said, twitching his brows over blue eyes embedded in their wrinkled pits.
“Her’ll be talked to before long,” another retorted. “Her may have yon Mempes under her thumb. Her haven’t us.”
The observation laid Mary open to a jest that came pat on his words. . . .
The following morning Mempes saw the jest scrawled on the stone gate-post of the house as he came through the Yard. He sent a lad to remove it and walked about the Yard all day in the likeness of a devouring angel, his eyes darting to detect the briefest lapse from industry and his tongue curling round offenders with scarifying effect. He was not surprised but he was a little alarmed. He told Mary that Gill was popular with the men and a good worker when not laid off by his unfortunate tastes, and suggested that she would be doing a politic thing if she took both men back. He had a very little hope that she would listen to him and his apprehension was justified. Mary refused shortly to hear any argument about it. Mempes went out to take the temperature of the Yard. He found it rising.
Two days later Gill’s companion in misfortune hanged himself after two attempts to get work at other yards where his reputation for carelessness had preceded him. In an outburst of sentimental fury, Garton’s Yard resolved to teach Mary a lesson. The men were in funds and the weather was propitious. They struck for the immediate reinstatement of Gill.
Mary refused. She sent for a guard of police and posted them at the Yard gates. Then she wrote out and had fixed to the wall a notice to the effect that all men not back at the Yard within forty-eight hours would be replaced by others. She sent John Mempes to the Tees to collect them. He tried to persuade her to wait at least a fortnight before taking such decisive measures.
“Give them time to cool down, and most of them will trickle back to work,” he said. “They have too much money now. It’s keeping them warm. Wait, Mary.”
Mary refused to wait more than two days. She ordered him off on his errand, and shrugging his shoulders over her incensed obstinacy, he went. On the second day, going out to take down her notice, Mary found it scrawled over with the now familiar jest and with crude but unmistakable drawings. It was not familiar to her. With a grim mouth she took it down and retreated to the house. Mempes returned with his recruits and she made them a speech and sent them into the Yard.
There was no possibility of getting beds for them in the town and they spent their nights in the shed rolled in blankets supplied from the house. The strikers, who had let John Mempes and his new hands pass up Harbour Street assailed by nothing worse than insults and herring heads, now crowded round the high locked gates and overturned the carts bringing supplies of food to the besieged Yard. Dispersed by the police, they retired. The strike still wore the aspect of a holiday and it was not until more than a week had gone by that they began to plan serious measures against Mary Roxby. These involved the spread of the strike to the other Yards, and Mary found herself allied with Old Smithson and the other Danesacre shipbuilders on the side of privilege against lawlessness. Characteristically, she began to dislike her position more as her isolation vanished. She did not want sympathy. She sat at their conferences, and privately thought them extraordinarily stupid, while agreeing with them on the measures to be taken for their joint safety. A proposal to ask for soldiers from York roused her to violent opposition.
“Danesacre people ought to be able to settle their disputes without that sort of pompous interference,” she said contemptuously, and all but Old Smithson, who went in terror of his neck, supporting her, the soldiers did not come.
During all this John Mempes remained cynically cool. The spectacle of the young girl riding the storm she might by compromise have averted pleased him. He loved her for her very folly. She was a gallant and picturesque fool. He had offered her prudent advice and she had rejected it, as Mark Henry himself would have done in the same circumstances, except that Mark Henry
would never have pushed the men to such extremes. Or was it that the men reached extremes more easily nowadays? Mempes gave himself up to the epicurean pleasure of watching imperious youth in action.
The strike leader, Burrows, was an oldish man with a savage tongue that he had whetted to a rough edge of perfection in the half-savage town. He visited Mary and told her bluntly that she was the best-hated woman in Danesacre.
“The women would strip your clothes from your back and drown you in the harbour if they could,” he said.
“You struck,” said Mary, “to force me to take back a man whose drunkenness is a constant loss to me and a hindrance to his fellow workers. When you were at sea, before you gave up honest work and took to earning your living by these talkers’ tricks——”
“I’m crippled,” growled Burrows. Mary took no notice of him.
“——you’d have been sharp enough on a man whose habits made him a nuisance and a danger to the rest of the ship. Yet you ask me to keep on such a man in my Yard, and draw off your men when I refuse.”
“Gill,” said the strike leader, “is a good worker. You can’t deny that. If he hadn’t been a good Union man too he’d have been in Garton’s yet.”
Mary told him coolly that she had no love for the Union and no intention of allowing any interference with her authority. Her coolness discountenanced the man, and he went away, full of a resentment that deepened as he walked down Harbour Street and heard the crying of hungry children and saw women turn listlessly back into their houses after hearing from his lips that there was no change. He was gross and uneducated. Though he paid his Union dues and saw to it that the other men paid theirs, he had no vision of any kinship between himself and the men in other ports. As for any idea that he was somehow in league with French and Dutch and American seamen and shipwrights, he would have repudiated it with the foulest violence. He was, in short, a man without vision and without aim. But as he strode down Harbour Street after his fruitless interview with Mary, in the farthest, dimmest recesses of his being, woke and stirred a vague sense that this was not merely his quarrel with the owner of Garton’s. It was part of an immense quarrel only just now beginning. There was some spirit in Mary Roxby, an insolence, a hard assurance, that his own spirit violently challenged. He was confused. Already he was conscious of defeat in this encounter. But this was not the end of the quarrel. God in heaven, no.
His perplexities and confused anger found vent in a bitter reflection.
“Mark Henry, the———, was drunk every night of his life, but there was no dismissing him.”
The following day Mary, walking down Harbour Street after a meeting of the shipbuilders, was hissed and mobbed by a crowd of women. The news was carried to the Yard and Mempes, forcing his way through the crowd, had his own clothes torn and his face scratched before he came within sight of Mary. She had her back to the wall of a house and was facing her shrieking assailants with a calm face. Her hat was off and her hair about her shoulders. As Mempes reached her a woman cried: “Here comes her man.” An obscene gibe, coming from a window above Mary’s head heralded a volley of them. Standing in front of Mary, Mempes could see no change in her white face. A stone hit her on the head and impassively she wiped away the trickle of blood with a corner of her sleeve.
Mempes caught sight of one of the strikers in the crowd.
“Here,” he called, “you there, can’t you call your women off?”
The man made a somewhat shamefaced retort and put his hand on a woman’s shoulder to drag her away. But Danesacre women were never submissive creatures and in a moment his hands were fully occupied in defending himself from the chastisement that fell on him. Other men, lounging on the steps of the houses, came to his rescue and Mempes seized the distracted moment to fight his way through the crowd, with Mary on his arm. One or two of the strikers helped him and he got her into safety behind the wall of Mark Henry’s garden. He put her hair up with his own hands. It altered her appearance strangely, making her look younger and less composed. She was trembling, but when he got her into the house she merely thanked him and went away upstairs. He watched her go, pausing on the landing to look fastidiously at her torn skirt. Then she went on, her head high and her colour too, now.
He blamed himself for the indolence that had let him acquiesce in her conduct of the strike without a more determined attempt to make her see that she must compromise. She was headstrong, but she was the merest girl, and if he had persisted she would have given way to his experience in handling men. So he told himself and cursed his fatal lack of seriousness.
Later in the day he sent to ask Mary for an interview. She gave it to him in Richard’s nursery, and the sight of her bent lovingly over the sleepy boy gave him an idea. He tried delicately to find out what she had suffered from that revelation of the hatred she had courted. She removed herself from his questions with a calm pride.
“The men are sick of this strike,” he said. “I know it. I have my own ways of getting at their thoughts. Make a generous gesture, Mary, and they’ll give way over Gill.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Offer to take them back, without conditions. I’ll arrange it that Gill doesn’t make trouble.”
“And turn off the men we fetched here from Middlesborough? No.”
“The children are hungry, Mary.”
“Their fathers should have thought of that,” she said, but he saw her wince.
He could not move her. He looked in despair at her sullen mouth, and his gaze, travelling upwards, rested on the angry cut made by the stone. She felt his eyes on it and pulled her hair down to cover the place.
“How vain you are,” he said, and smiled. Richard had fallen asleep on her knee. Standing up with an easy movement she laid the heavy child in his bed and turned to Mempes.
“Dear John,” she said, “don’t think I’m not grateful to you.”
Gratitude left him hungry and he went away, to think of her and forget the strike. He remembered, some cold hours later, that he was all but forty and that he had most signally failed to persuade Mary against her will. He recalled the grave short little girl who had followed him about the Yard, marvelling at him. He could have moulded that child to any form. Why was he not able to form the girl? “She was formed before I got her,” he exclaimed. “Oh Mary, to have something, the least of you. . . .”
When Burrows approached Mary with an offer to end the strike if she would take back all the men but Gill, she refused. Anger whitened his face and she told him that a good many of the Middlesborough men were anxious to go home. This she had from Mempes. She offered to replace these men by strikers, and to take the remainder on when and if the Yard needed them. After a last struggle with his rising fury, the strike leader agreed.
“Let the men with families come back first,” Mary stipulated. . . .
The strike was over, but Mary’s unpopularity remained. She had proofs of it on the walls of the Yard and in every walk she took down Harbour Street. She shut her eyes to most of the evidence and Mempes kept the rest from her. When later she married and had another and absorbing interest in her life, she ceased to bother about the human side of Garton’s at all. She lived in her schemes and in her husband, and if the Yard disliked and distrusted her she either did not notice or did not care.
She was unpopular in another quarter. When she succeeded to Garton’s, the two Roxbys approached her with a request for larger allowances. She was more than civil. She treated them with every mark of deference, as if they and not she were the suppliants, but she added not a penny to their income. Even when a vein of ironstone was discovered on the borders of the Roxby land, justifying her prescience in keeping that part of it, she would not allow them an increase. She made the discovery an excuse for installing her own man to look after Richard’s interests. The vein was a poor one and its distance from the railway lessened its profits. Mary soon closed it down but what she got from it was enough to put Richard’s shrunken estate in better or
der than it had enjoyed for years.
She would not put Garton money into it, but she wanted it to pay for itself and be a fit inheritance for Richard. To that end she hardened her heart against Charles and James. She was not what they said she was, as mean as be damned. She could not forget what it was like to be poor. She dreaded poverty all her life, and was never extravagant save for Richard and her second husband. She kept her daughters short of money, and her personal spending was always accounted for to its last penny.
Her treatment of Archie’s brothers was not purely calculating. It was a matter of feeling with her, too. She was not Mark Henry’s niece for nothing. James and Charles Roxby were useless and because they were she would do just enough for them to keep them alive. Nothing more. They made several attempts to move her. She was then always kindness itself, and they retired from her kindness and her polite respect two completely defeated old men, to spend their last years writing malicious letters about her to their friends. A collection of Charles Roxby’s letters came into her hands when she was an old woman, and surprised her by the depth of the resentment they revealed. She was always surprised and a little hurt when the nobility of her motives was called in question. . . .
6
The end of the sixties saw Mary’s insistence on steam a little nearer being justified. She had given way to John Mempes so far as to build on her own account five composite-built tea clippers in the six years following the strike. They were as superb sailing ships as Garton’s Yard had ever turned out, and revived in Mary all her childish adoration of beauty in a ship. They never equalled their wooden predecessors in light winds, but they could be driven into a head sea as the magnificent Mary Gray never could, and they were bigger, with more room for cargo. The first two were overmasted and paid for it, but Mempes learned his lesson and the rest were as perfectly sparred as any sailing ship on the seas. On these ships Mary lavished a love she never gave to any othes, and when the beautiful Peerless went down off Yokohama with all hands, the loss nearly broke her heart. She mourned her for months.
The Lovely Ship Page 13