In spite of her losses, Mary did the same. As for Thomas Prendergast, he had come to hate the ship. He loathed the thought of her. If a man wanted dismissal or damnation he had only to mention the City of Truro in Prendergast’s hearing. She represented a lifelong humiliation. He called her “the ——— cow,” and likened her to the apocalyptic beast.
At the same time, she taught him and other experimenters a vast number of facts about stresses and pressure. And she proved conclusively that the triple-expansion engine was a practicable thing. Prendergast set to work again with a mind enormously enriched.
The same could not be said for Mary’s pocket. She showed him a flash of Mark Henry’s spirit, and refused her permission to carry out his next scheme, the building of an entire vessel, bottom plates and all, of steel.
Her refusal disappointed him bitterly. He was convinced that if steel of a trustworthy quality were used, containing only a small percentage of carbon, it would prove the perfect material for a ship, far above iron. Mary wrote him tartly to get some other dog than Garton’s to try his milk teeth on. The remark set a coldness between them that lasted for months. Mary took to writing orders through John Mempes, and for a time Prendergast confined himself to finding new markets for his steel and iron, and arranged American contracts that paid big profits and repaired the hole made in Garton’s finances by the City of Truro.
He made his peace with Mary over the contracts, after a strained interview during which he was desperately civil and Mary tried to remember what she had written to him in the fury of their late quarrel.
As did Mark Henry, she liked the man the better for having quarrelled with him. She began to take Prendergast into her counsel. She discovered him distracted by moods, a passionate childlike creature one day sweeping her aside while he told her what could be done by adopting the principle of a twin screw for ships, and the next dejectedly explaining that there was not a reliable maker of good steel castings in England and that his own experiments in that line had proved him a bungling fool. He impressed her as largely irresponsible, a casual god playing with the stuff of creation. He blundered about among the terrific forces latent in molten iron and captured heat, and sometimes failed to make any use of them, and sometimes brought off, with a delicate and miraculous precision, the most astounding success. . . .
The days that followed Mary’s arrival at the Tees were filled with a growing sense of trouble and uneasiness in all the docks and mills. The strikers held meetings at the dock gates, and the ironworkers leaving the mill stopped to listen and were adjured to join in the dispute, which every day grew more complicated and less likely to be concluded except by the exhaustion of both sides. At last there was a meeting in Garton’s mill, and the men voted to strike at the end of the week. Prendergast took the news to Mary.
“Very well,” she said, her anger flaring out at this dragging of Garton’s into a dispute that was none of her making, “we won’t wait for the end of the week. Put up lockout notices to take effect to-morrow, if the men don’t withdraw.”
“You’re sure that’s what you want?” Prendergast said. “The men are in a fighting humour.”
“Let them fight,” Mark Henry’s niece said, before Mary could have stopped her even if she had wanted to. She did not want to.
The lockout notices were posted and Garton’s was idle, except for the non-union men who fed the fires. The strikers did not interfere. They seemed glad that the fires were being tended. They stood about helpfully when the men came off work and offered advice on the eccentricities of each furnace. When Mary appeared, they were silent but entirely respectful. The end of a fortnight brought a change in their attitude, so far as it concerned her. A rumour concerning Prendergast and Mary got about, and was received with due credit. The men’s liking for him swung round to violent contempt, and they attributed the lockout notices to his influence. He was buying favour with the wanton woman by a show of implacable rage against his own kind. A crudely insulting ballad was made about them, and sung to the tune of a popular song when Mary paid her daily visit to the works. Odd copies of this curious production still occasionally turn up among the rubbish in the little Tees-side shops. Strictly speaking, only the first verse was printable, but the whole was printed and provided an outlet for the strikers’ feelings, so near the surface of the incomprehensible English character are the gross springs of laughter. The English are the only race who make good-tempered fun of their enemies. The angry hammermen and puddlers almost liked Mary again when they had sung a few dozen times the song that begins:
“See Mary spring up in her elegant shift
Prepared for a jacket to run, lads
The Cornishman runs to oblige her with his,
And our Mary is quickly undone, lads,
May angels attend on her bonny brown head,
They’ll find she’s not left them much room in her bed.”
The trouble might have stopped here and the strike ended in the exhaustion of the strikers’ funds but for Prendergast’s fit of rage. A verse of the ballad floated across the wharf as Prendergast strode down it on his way to the Works. John Mempes would have condoled with the singer on his bad rhymes, but Prendergast was in a vile temper. He hurt the man severely and threw him into an empty dock, whence he was rescued fuller of water than song by a passing body of strikers. After this episode, the strike as it affected Garton’s Iron Works became unpleasant. Some of the strikers’ rage against Prendergast got itself transferred to the non-union workers, and the very men who a few days earlier had been most profuse in friendly advice were now ripe for outrage. A shift of non-union men was attacked leaving the mill and brutally handled. The next day, a stone flying over the gate stunned a man working at the open door of a furnace. He reeled forward and was horribly burned before he slid to the ground in a grotesque attitude of surprise and horror. After this the soldiers were called in. A small red-coated group stood compactly inside the high iron fence to the left of the gate, in charge of a very young and excited little officer, who kissed Mary’s hand when she came, and expressed a wish to teach the world some lesson or other.
Mary and Prendergast walked over to the office. Prendergast was very pale and listened to Mary with a remote air of expecting some other sound. Once he roused himself to answer.
“The men are right,” he said dreamily. “No, not in fact. In the abstract. They ought to fight each other’s battles. It’s their only chance of emerging from tha.” He nodded towards the ironworkers’ cottages.
“How can you talk of abstract rights in face of this idiocy?” Mary said angrily.
He smiled with unexpected sweetness.
“Nothing is abstract for you, is it? It’s all hard and bright and definite. Ships and more ships, a husband and children. That’s your life. For me all images are blurred and unreal, except the feel of things in my hands. Iron is a glowing mass that can be moulded and bent as I choose. Wrought-iron, and steel, can be coaxed into machines that will drive heavy ships through the water. Think of iron floating. Perhaps it can be coaxed to fly in the air. Why not? My fingers tell me that nothing is impossible to the human will. They tell me that women are warm and soft and will yield in my grasp. Everything I can touch yields up its secret and is real. But the rest? What do I know of your spirit, that never speaks to me? What do I know of the spirit in iron and steel and released gas? We go on playing with these things and making ships and guns and machines, more and more, and bigger and bigger, and to what end? So that you can gratify your ambitions? So that the men who work for you can live meanly and feed coarsely and think confused, angry, gross thoughts? What is real? It would be something real if all these men said: ’We are servants and brothers and we stand together.’ But they don’t.”
Their attention was drawn by an increasing clamour outside. Standing side by side at the dusty little window of the office, Mary and Prendergast saw a ragged procession pouring itself into the works, having lifted the padlocked gate off its hinges. It was a str
aggling and undisciplined procession that seemed to have no more definite purpose than that of holding a meeting on the disputed ground. A man stood up on a barrel rolled in at the tail of the crowd and addressed the meeting. He was an odd figure, thin and undersized, with a large head sunk between his shoulder-blades and a white ravaged face. His trousers flapped against bony structures that tolerated rather than supported his misshaped body.
“That’s none of the men,” Prendergast murmured. “It’s a district delegate from one of the unions. I know the type.”
The gesticulating figure on the barrel had ceased talking, distracted by the irruption into the crowd of the little officer. The strikers handed him through from man to man with a jeering friendliness, that presently landed him, in a state of pink and agitated disorder, with his jacket unbuttoned and his head bare, at the delegate’s feet. There he delivered a brief speech, the purport of which was inaudible to Mary and Prendergast, and departed, waving his tiny fists. The crowd opened to let him through.
Mary strained her ears to follow the resumed address. A sharp movement of Prendergast’s arm directed her attention to the far side of the works, where the soldiers were busy in some operation that she could not understand.
“What is it?”
“They are going to fire,” Prendergast said.
His words were swept away by the volley. The crowd scattered wildly, the little man on the barrel doubling up and running with astonishing swiftness. A staccato rattling on the tin roof of the office startled Mary into a cry.
“The soldiers fired over their heads,” Prendergast explained.
“Oh,” Mary said, relieved. The painful excitement that had enclosed her throat when she realised the soldiers’ purpose receded. Her eyes sought the little officer. He was out of sight behind his men. The strikers were drifting back into the open again, reassured by the silence.
Mary clutched Prendergast’s arm. “They’re going to fire again.”
A ragged flight of shots followed. One man fell forward and with no more than a brief shuddering of his body lay still. Another had the air of pressing something red and strange to the side of his jaw. A third man lay in a pool of blood that widened round him. There was a distorted fragmentary look about him, as if some part of him were missing. The other men stood for a moment frozen into attitudes of amazement and arrested flight. Then a man ran away and another dropped to his knees beside the man in the widening pool. With a certain hesitation his fellows ran to help the man holding his jaw, and a dozen more of the strikers emerged into the open.
At this point, the little officer suddenly discovered that it is much easier to start firing than to stop it. His screaming order went disregarded in the mechanical activity of reloading and firing the third round. More men dropped and the space between the office and the soldiers was cleared except for certain figures, some moving oddly and some quite still.
“But this is murder,” Mary said suddenly, on a note of surprise.
She started for the door, with a confused intention of stopping any more of it by some energetic gesture. Prendergast snatched her back. He looked round thoughtfully and sighed.
“Stay here,” he said absently. “You’ll be in the way,” and vanished through the door. From the window Mary saw him stride across the littered ground, with an arm outstretched. He avoided the bodies and walked steadily toward the small active company in the far corner. It became sporadically active again when he was half-way across. There was a rattling noise in the air. Prendergast stopped, as if a sudden thought had halted him. He spun round, his hand still stretched out, and collapsed on the ground. After a paralysing moment of fear, Mary ran out. She was half-way to him, heedless of stray balls that struck the ground near her feet, when another crowd, composed this time of women, rushed through the dismantled gates. Foremost among them was Thomas Prendergast’s mother, bonnet less, with her black hair about her face. She flung herself beside the motionless figure of her son, bent to his heart, thrust a hand in his jacket and brought it away, wet. Her shriek rang above the growing confusion.
“Murderer,” she said, and shook her fist at the little officer, now prancing wildly in front of his men, as a last means of stopping their misdirected efficiency. Mary knelt beside her. “You too,” said Thomas Prendergast’s mother. “You killed him. You got him into this. My son, oh my son. Why did you do it?” She began to scold him angrily.
“Is he dead?” Mary asked. She touched the screaming woman’s hands and got some of his blood on to her own. Then she lifted his head, lolling off his mother’s knee. At that she knew he was dead. His face was white and unamazed, his eyes wide open, and his mouth parted over his clenched teeth. . . . A second ball had shattered the fingers of his right hand. It seemed an unnecessary and wanton piece of cruelty.
Mary staggered to her feet. The gyrations of the little officer caught her eye. She ran across to him and, catching him by the arm, wheeled him round.
“Are you firing any more to-day?” she demanded.
He stammered: “It was a mistake. There was only to have been one volley into the crowd.”
“Very stupid of you,” she said tonelessly. “Send your men for doctors and bandages. Some of your mistakes are only wounded.”
She took charge of the crowd, driving the frenzied women back with a white-faced fury. The uninjured strikers gave her rough help. She sent for water and began to bandage the boy whose jaw had been shot, tearing the flounce off her underskirt and talking to him in a low quick voice. His moans ceased and he submitted to her touch with a rigid courage. . . .
She sent a message to John Mempes that night, and before he arrived she went herself in search of the little district delegate who had run with such agility at the beginning of the firing. He fixed on her eyes that were hot and raw-rimmed from the fires that consumed him inwardly. Mary asked him his name.
“Robert Estill.”
An echo that was neither memory nor instinct vibrated in Mary’s mind, a vague troubling of her spirit, like a shadow passing across water.
“Your starting that meeting yesterday brought about the death of three men. What are you going to do to help me clear things up?”
The haggard creature sawed at the air with his face. He poured out a spume of words, a tale of resentment and squalor and misery among the workers with which some strain of personal resentment and tale of wrong done himself was inextricably mixed. Mary listened and could make nothing of it. It was like listening to a swell of angry water.
“I can’t understand you,” she said helplessly. “I’d like to, but I don’t seem even to hear you. Never mind that. You’re a boilermakers’ delegate. You had no right among my men. If you won’t help me, at least keep away. . . .”
Whether he would have refrained from meddling she never knew, for the next day he was summoned to headquarters, and deprived of his fiery breath, the strike collapsed like a deflated balloon. Nothing remained for Mary to do before she went back to Danesacre, leaving Mempes to find Prendergast’s successor, but to call on Thomas Prendergast’s mother.
Mrs Prendergast cowered over her fireplace, rubbing her thin hands.
“It’s the custom of Garton’s to pay a pension,” Mary said wearily.
“Then you may pay it to the young woman who was here yesterday saying Thomas was her son’s father, and so he may have been. She was that sort. A fine world it is for men, doing what they like and getting themselves killed for a show at the end of it. Why do men have wars? For vanity, and Thomas died for vanity. He thought he had only to show himself to the soldiers and they would stop firing.”
Mary’s tears dropped on to her hands.
“What are you crying for?” Mrs Prendergast said sharply. “You were not one of Thomas’ women, so far as I know, and the world’s full of finer men. You may stop to tea if you like, and I’ll let you drink out of our Thomas’s Exhibition mug. He was always at me to take him up to the Exhibition, but I didn’t care to go and he wouldn’t go with his a
unt. He won the mug in a race, and he was as pleased as a king to give it to me. ‘Here, mother,’ he says, laughing, ‘see what I’ve brought you.’ It was a pity they smashed up his hand, but as he was dead I suppose it didn’t matter. He was clever with his hands. I always said he’d come to something, if he didn’t make a fool of himself with his laughing and joking. Many’s the time I’ve lost patience with him. You can’t deny he was more of a clown than a man.”
The Lovely Ship Page 23