To Hughie the nylon invasion presented special problems. There were too many dyeing jobs on the vats. In the old days there were always two or three vats standing idle. Now each vat was in operation every hour of the day. The skilled vat hands were drifting away. It was almost a full-time job supervising the vats alone.
But the skill and joy of the job lay in the mixing of the dyes, the weighing-up, the measuring of the chemicals.
In the laboratory, with the condensation dripping from the ceiling, the experimental vat clacking, the bunsen burner and the pipettes, Hughie was happy. In the damp little laboratory, away from the demanding vats, he experimented with patches of cloth, sometimes producing a new shade and eagerly testing it for colour fastness—to water, cold, warm, hot; to sunlight.
All around the bunsen burner were little snippets of colour wrapped in white. Every so often Hughie pressed them with his fingers, unrolled them and examined them for bleeding. Sometimes after the lights were out in the warehouse Hughie stayed on, stirring his squares of cloth in the metal beakers, lifting them lovingly to the light with the glass rod; nodding in satisfaction or flinging them down in disgust.
Hughie had learned his trade in the Dyehouse. He lacked Renshaw’s education in theory, but there was little on the practical side that he did not know, and it would have paid Renshaw to help him keep abreast of new techniques. But Renshaw guarded his knowledge. Hughie made a good whipping-boy when things went wrong.
On the third floor, Mr Mayers, the engineer, was getting the burrs off the nylon setter. Preliminary runs had been disappointing. The lead was too short. A feeding table became necessary. Mayers joked with the patient women working in the fumes, guiding the cloth onto the teeth of the endless chain. Unlike Renshaw he rarely panicked, but with stolid Welsh patience tackled problems, isolating them and straightening them out.
There were weeks of hard work ahead for him before the nylon would be coming steadily off the setter.
When the setter was in operation the fumes stole down the stairway to the office where Miss Merton and Patty Nicholls, the blonde junior, were writing up the tickets, the dyebooks, the PG cards, and the general records. In the winter, the girls on the setter closed the doors to keep out the freezing draughts that rushed up from the loading well. Here the hoist hung over the well, surrounded by a low wire barricade. A notice stating that the undersigned were authorized to operate it was posted on the wall. The notice was only four months old but none of the people named were now employed at the Dyehouse. They had drifted on.
At first it had been fun on the setter. There was nothing to do. Some of the more intelligent watched the gauges and worked out the setting heats. The younger women talked. Boy and girl talk. Husband and wife talk. Nearly always intimate and mostly uninhibited.
Others sat silent, mechanically feeding the cloth, eyes lacklustre; sweating in the summer, freezing in the winter.
There had been a stir over the 569812 cloth that was ruined in the vats. It was a special weave and Larcombe had arranged to take it to Best-Yet Sportswear. The management had been wooing Best-Yet for some time, hoping to present them with an alternative to the cloth being used in their sports- and swim-wear. The knitting division had come up with a smooth, satin-finished elasticized fabric. Hughie had worked on the experimental swatches of deep maroon, royal blue and green.
When the dyers’ instructions went to the lab, Hughie rang through to the office.
Miss Merton, entering the tickets, looked up. She lifted the receiver from the hook and continued entering up her figures.
Knitted weight. Returned weight. Yards. Strings. Net yardage. And in brackets, the weight lost between the knitted weight and the returned weight.
‘Hullo,’ she said.
She could hear the clacking of the experimental vat over the phone and then Hughie’s voice.
‘Laboratory here,’ Hughie said. ‘I’ve had the instructions for the 569812. The new cloth. Looks wrong.’
Miss Merton put down the phone and called through to Patty for the dyebook. One roll of cloth. She checked it carefully. She checked the weight against the production sheet. She checked the number.
‘Weight seems all right,’ she said at last.
‘Instructions look wrong. Screwy. Proportions must be wrong. It says ounces. Renshaw in his office?’
‘No,’ said Miss Merton. ‘I’ll take a look round and let you know later.’
She put down the receiver and walked out to the greige warehouse. The truck was in, unloading rolls onto the dock. The tally had been wrong and Renshaw was supervising a recount. Miss Merton waited patiently. The driver leaned against his truck, confident of his count.
When the rolls had been restacked Miss Merton handed the dyebook to Renshaw.
‘Hughie rang through from the lab, about that roll for Best-Yet. He says the instructions look wrong.’
‘He does?’ said Renshaw. ‘Well—what a bloody waste of talent!’
His face hardened as he handed the book back to Miss Merton. He had not glanced at it.
‘Hughie’s job here is to do as he’s told. He’s got his instructions in black and white, written down. What’s on the instruction is what we want. Blokes get paid good money here to think, and Hughie’s not one of them.’ He went quickly through to the mangles.
Miss Merton looked at the book. It wasn’t often that Hughie was wrong about the dyeing.
She stood in the storeroom outside the laboratory door thinking of what she would say to Hughie.
Glauber salts were piled here in stacks. The dense-soda-ash stack had fallen over and some of the bags had burst open. There was hydrosulphite in drums, peracetic acid in tall-necked carboys, muriatic and sulphuric acids in squat two-gallon jars; softeners, bleachers, fixing agents. Their smells—sour, bitter, sickly-sweet—mingled here and spread outward to every corner of the Dyehouse.
Miss Merton opened the door.
Hughie was sliding the glass up from the delicate balances. Miss Merton watched him as he lifted the tiny weights from the box. Then he slid the glass carefully down.
All along the bench the weighing-up was ready for the vats. No. 6, No. 8, No. 12. Hughie was waiting for a confirmation on No. 10, the new elasticized cloth.
‘Must of been a mistake,’ Hughie said. ‘Seems funny for a bloke to write ounces. Renshaw always writes pounds or grammes.’
‘He does,’ Miss Merton said, smiling. ‘But he says this instruction is right. It’s what he wants.’
Hughie weighed up carefully.
‘Just the same,’ he said, ‘I’d take a hundred to one that it’s wrong.’
When Hughie saw the cloth after the dyeing he knew that something was really amiss. He had followed Renshaw’s instructions carefully, and with the cloth still in the vat he left Bluey in charge and went in search of Renshaw.
‘I told you the instructions were wrong,’ Hughie said.
He, as well as Renshaw, knew the importance of this roll. The cloth would not strip. The dyeing needed to be accurate.
In the damp laboratory Renshaw picked up the dyeing instructions. So much this, so much that. And suddenly ‘28 oz’ leapt off the paper at him. 28 oz! How the hell had he ever written it? 28 oz! Why, any numskull would know it should be 28 grammes. He put the book down.
‘You bloody ignorant son of a bitch,’ he said. ‘And you call yourself a dyer!’
‘I knew it was wrong,’ Hughie said. ‘I rang through. I got your OK on it.’
‘O-bloody-K! You should have pulled the roof off the place.’
Later, with the roll dried, pressed and in the office Renshaw prepared to face Larcombe.
The contract was important, and Larcombe would be difficult.
‘I don’t know,’ Larcombe said. He was exasperated. He would have to make explanations to Harvison. Go into all the details of the thing, make excuses. Bad work at the Dyehouse always reflected unfavourably on himself. It was one thing to lose a contract because they didn’t like the clo
th, and another to lose it because of faulty workmanship.
‘Couldn’t you doctor it up?’ he asked Renshaw, not too hopefully. ‘Strip it? Looks like you put a teaspoon too much in.’
Bloody teaspoon, Renshaw thought. How the hell do they get to be General Manager?
Larcombe leant over the cloth. His face had the look of a frustrated child’s.
In a matter of seconds, Renshaw came to a decision. He had been toying with the idea for a long time. He had been on the lookout for a likely-looking boy ever since his first clash with Hughie. Now, with the cloth drab and unlovely in Larcombe’s hand, the idea clarified.
‘I’ve been thinking of replacing Hughie,’ he said suddenly.
He raised his eyes and looked squarely at Larcombe.
‘We’ve been carrying him for a long time. You can’t teach old dogs new tricks. I’m not blaming him. You know yourself that Peters was no more than a trial-and-error man. He trained Hughie up that way. But it won’t wash today.’
‘He’s been with us a long time,’ Larcombe said doubtfully. He was used to Renshaw firing and replacing men. ‘He started with us straight from school. I reckon he’d be well over thirty years with the firm. I think I’d wait awhile. Think it over.’
‘He’s no dyer,’ Renshaw said shortly. ‘I plan to put him over the vats. I’m going to take young Jimmy Collins and train him up for the lab. I’ll supervise the work myself. There’ll be no more of this kind of thing.’
‘What’ll Hughie think about that?’ Larcombe asked.
Renshaw’s face was blank, his eyes averted.
‘He can bloody well think what he likes. Most blokes would have fired him over this. He’s still got his job. Same pay. No thinking to do. Anyway, I want him out of the lab. These trial-and-error days are over. We just can’t afford mistakes. They’re too costly.’
He patted the roll of elasticized cloth.
‘We can’t stand too much of this and continue to attract business.’
‘I suppose so,’ Larcombe said.
Now that the decision was made, it seemed wise enough. His mind flew back to the cloth. He would take the roll over. The cloth was good. He picked up the swatches, so lovingly dyed by Hughie. The deep maroon was a champion, the green rich and velvety, the blue royal and clear.
‘I’ll take the roll and swatches over.’
He picked up the roll and went swiftly to his waiting car.
Renshaw whistled in his office. It was easier than he had thought. As easy as that.
Tomorrow he would talk to Hughie. Nothing tough. Nothing offensive. He would arrange to send young Collins to Tech.
He had leapt a hurdle and felt pleased.
CHAPTER SIX
Often at lunchtime Mr Mayers would carry his billy of tea from the machine shop to Miss Merton’s office.
Mr Mayers had one foot still in the Rhondda Valley. As they talked, Miss Merton glimpsed the home of his youth; the little Welsh town on the river, the tall houses with apples ripening in the attics and home-made wines in the cellars.
Listening to him, she felt the quickening of her own lost youth. His voice, soft and burred, beat out the tread of the miners’ feet, pictured the closed mines and the poverty that lay like a pall over the village.
It reminded her of the Depression, of Stephen, and of that day in summer when Stephen had looked at her.
He had come down the road one day when the Monaro, shorn of frosts, smiled with wildflowers, and the pale fronds of the willows dappled the water. Miss Merton met him, walking, at the spot where the back road crossed the creek. She was walking, too, and leading a pony by its bridle. There were many men on the road in those days, drifting from town to town, picking up a day’s work now and then, checking in for the dole at the next town.
Stephen intended washing for gold.
It had been cool in the sitting-room of her old home. The chairs were deep and comfortable; the door opened onto a wide verandah and the shrubbery ended in a small apple orchard before the land fell away to the creek.
In the evenings Stephen tramped down from his hut at the crossing to talk with her father. The Government was paying a meagre subsidy to men fossicking for gold, and Stephen, washing on the river, eked out a living.
Miss Merton, sitting in the dim sitting-room of her memory, picked up her needle. She was making a Venetian supper-cloth. She scarcely raised her head as the men talked.
Everyone was talking politics now. Stephen, hunched in his chair, his long legs shot out before him, his head resting on his chest, talked politics too.
Stephen was rotting. He said he was rotting. Deprived of the right to work, all men would rot, Stephen said.
There was far too much dangerous talk, Miss Merton’s father said. But Stephen laughed; a peculiar, bitter laugh.
‘The wheel turns,’ Stephen said. ‘Our time will come.’
‘Thesis,’ Stephen said. ‘Antithesis, synthesis.’
‘Environment.’
What did Stephen mean? Miss Merton knew little of philosophy.
Environment? That meant the river, the dim sitting-room and the chairs, the bread baking in the brick oven in the kitchen, and the secure knowledge that God made every man in His image.
Miss Merton’s father walked restlessly to the window. From here he could see the belt of pine-trees, the solid box posts and the white painted gate that marked Hagan’s homestead. There was an air of permanency about Hagan’s place, just as there was about his own. But less than two months ago Hagan had gone walking down the river, and close to the spot where willows screened the water had bent his head onto the muzzle of his gun, pulling the trigger with his foot.
The Banks, acting quickly, had taken Hagan’s place over.
Miss Merton’s father, resenting change, moved at the window. He thought of the labour that old man Hagan had put into the property. Wastage, he thought bitterly. He looked suddenly at Stephen slouched in his chair; at the dark, handsome face, the bitter twist of the mouth.
Here was wastage, too. And plenty of others like him were being wasted.
But—‘He’s a revolutionary,’ Miss Merton’s father informed her. ‘Paid to go about stirring up trouble, no doubt. Change! Who wants to change the system?’
Who wants to change the dim sitting-room of the past? The apple orchard, the fowls strutting in the barnyard, the turkeys?
‘Stephen,’ Miss Merton called one evening. It was the last of the summer days. The poplars by the gate were yellowing, but the willows were green. In the shallows the water goannas dozed, nose to nose. Occasionally one flopped from the branch of a tree into the river. The water was clear, the sand visible on the bottom.
Stephen was sitting beside Miss Merton.
In the hills behind Hagan’s a kangaroo drive was in progress. Now and then the full cries of the drivers were carried on the wind.
Stephen had not joined the hunters. The war had sickened him of killing. Even the sound of a rabbit crying in one of the traps along the river flayed his nerves. The kangaroos were not a menace in the district, Stephen said. It was almost like murder to shoot one.
She sat beside Stephen.
Her hair was down, hanging almost to her waist. Tomorrow was her birthday. Then she would coil it into the neat, firm bun that was to stay with her all the days of her life.
It was almost sunset, and with it came that sadness that seems part of sunset in the bush.
Stephen had stopped speaking. His tormented face was turned to the west.
Then suddenly he turned towards her, and she knew that he was really looking at her for the first time. He watched her steadily, and suddenly a smile like a fleeting ghost touched his lips. He put out his hand and caught her by the arm. Not gently. He held her thus, looking at her.
Stephen!
He was gone. Miss Merton sat listening to the noises in the trees, the last calling and twittering of the birds.
Then she began to run. Down the bush track skirting the briars, over the
hill to the bend that cradled Stephen’s hut. It was dark now, but Miss Merton, flying on towards Stephen, cared little for it.
The door was open.
Stephen had lit a hurricane lamp and was putting tea into a black billy. A bed was in the corner, two chaff bags strung between forked legs. He put down the billy and for a moment he lifted her in his arms, running his rough chin over her silky hair.
Behind him lay the bitter road from the Great War, the closed doors of the factories, the insistent voices of authority, ‘Move on’.
He put her down gently. He had nothing to offer her. The dark roads straggling from town to town; little tents huddled on friendly land.
He poured tea from the billy into the two pannikins.
Tea? She looked at Stephen and Stephen looked at her across the table. The hurricane lamp threw a glow over her long, soft hair.
She was trembling a little. She took the tea and raised it to her lips. In the silence she could hear the lapping of the water on the stones.
‘I’ll be moving on soon,’ Stephen said. There was no emotion in his voice. Moving on? Away from the river? From her? What would life be without Stephen?
And suddenly he began talking again. Not of love, not of her. He was talking politics.
Useless to tell him how much she loved him.
She put her head down on the rim of the pannikin and wept.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was late when the car turned the corner.
Most of Wentworth Parade was dark, but a light was still burning in Barrington Terrace. The light would be in the bedroom-cum-kitchen that Patty Nicholls shared with her invalid mother.
Now, well after midnight with the moon high, the drab outlines of the terrace were softened. A tree, hardy survivor of an avenue planted years since by the Council, thrust its shadowy arms almost to the lighted window.
The clatter and noise of the day were over and the familiar sounds from the railway-yards scarcely disturbed the night.
Renshaw lit a cigarette. He was feeling satiated and weary.
The Dyehouse Page 3