Volume I Part 25 (1/2)

”You will oblige me, mother, by not trying it again too soon,” was George's ironical reply as he put her into the carriage.

In the afternoon Letty was languid and depressed. She would not talk on general topics, and George shrank in nervous disgust from reopening the subjects of the morning. Finally, she chose to be tucked up on the sofa with a novel, and gave George free leave to go out.

It surprised him to find as he walked quickly down the hill, delighting in the April sun, that he was glad to be alone. But he did not in the least try to fling the thought away from him, as many a lover would have done. The events, the feelings of the day, had been alike jarring and hateful; he meant to escape from them.

But he could not escape from them all at once. A fresh and unexpected debt of somewhere about four thousand pounds does not sit lightly on a comparatively poor man. In spite of his philosophy for Letty's benefit, he must needs hara.s.s himself anew about his money affairs, planning and reckoning. How many more such surprises would his mother spring upon him--and how was he to control her? He realised now something of the life-long burden his dull old father had borne--a burden which the absences of school, college, and travel had hitherto spared himself. What was he to appeal to in her? There seemed to be nothing--neither will nor conscience. She was like the women without backs in the fairy-tale.

Then, with one breath he said to himself that he must kick out that singer-fellow, and with the next, that he would not touch any of his mother's crew with a barge-pole. Though he never pleaded ideals in public, he had been all his life something of a moral epicure, taking ”moral” as relating rather to manners than to deeper things. He had done his best not to soil himself by contact with certain types--among men especially. Of women he was less critical and less observant.

As to this ugly feud opening between his mother and his wife, it had quite ceased to amuse him. Now that his marriage was a reality, the daily corrosion of such a thing was becoming plain. And who was there in the world to bear the brunt of it but he? He saw himself between the two--eternally trying to make peace--and his face lengthened.

And if Letty would only leave the thing to him!--would only keep her little white self out of it! He wished he could get her to send away that woman Grier--a forward second-rate creature, much too ready to meddle in what did not concern her.

Then, with a shake of his thin shoulders, he pa.s.sionately drove it all out of his thoughts.

Let him go to the village, sound the feeling there if he could, and do his employer's business. His troubles as a pit-owner seemed likely to be bad enough, but they did not canker one like domestic miseries. They were a man's natural affairs; to think of them came as a relief to him.

He had but a disappointing round, however.

In the first place he went to look up some of the older ”hewers,” men who had been for years in the employ of the Tressadys. Two or three of them had just come back from the early s.h.i.+ft, and their wives, at any rate, were pleased and flattered by George's call. But the men sat like stocks and stones while he talked. Scarcely a word could be got out of them, and George felt himself in an atmosphere of storm, guessing at dangers, everywhere present, though not yet let loose--like the foul gases in the pits under his feet.

He behaved with a good deal of dignity, stifling his pride here and there sufficiently to talk simply and well of the general state of trade, the conditions of the coal industry in the West Mercian district, the position of the masters, the published accounts of one or two large companies in the district, and so on. But in the end he only felt his own auger rising in answer to the sullenness of the men. Their sallow faces and eyes weakened by long years of the pit expressed little--but what there was spelt war.

Nor did his visits to what might be called his own side give him much more satisfaction.

One man, a brawny ”fireman,” whom George had been long taught to regard as one of the props of law and order in the district, was effusively and honestly glad to see his employer. His wife hurried the tea, and George drank and ate as heartily as his own luncheon would let him in company with Macgregor and his very neat and smiling family. Nothing could be more satisfactory than Macgregor's general denunciations of the Union and its agent. Burrows, in his opinion, was a ”drunken, low-livin scoundrel,”

who got his bread by making mischief; the Union was entering upon a great mistake in resisting the masters' proposals; and if it weren't for the public-house and idleness there wasn't a man in Perth that couldn't live _well_, ten per cent. reduction and all considered. Nevertheless, he did not conceal his belief that battle was approaching, and would break out, if not now, at any rate in the late summer or autumn. Times, too, were going to be specially bad for the non-society men. The members.h.i.+p of the Union had been running up fast; there had been a row that very morning at the pit where he worked, the Union men refusing to go down in the same cage with the blacklegs. He and his mates would have to put their backs into it. Never fear but they would! Bullying might be trusted only to make them the more ”orkard.”

Nothing could have been more soothing than such talk to the average employer in search of congenial opinions. But George was not the average employer, and the fastidious element in him began soon to make him uncomfortable. Sobriety is, no doubt, admirable, but he had no sooner detected a teetotal cant in his companion than that particular axiom ceased to matter to him. And to think poorly of Burrows might be a salutary feature in a man's character, but it should be for some respectable reason. George fidgeted on his chair while Macgregor told the usual c.o.c.k-and-bull stories of monstrous hotel-bills seen sticking out of Burrows's tail-pockets, and there deciphered by a gaping populace; and his mental discomfort reached its climax when Macgregor wound up with the remark:

”And _that_, Sir George, is where the money goes to!--not to the poor starving women and children, I can tell yer, whose husbands are keepin him in luxury. I've always said it. _Where's the accounts?_ I've never seen no balance-sheet--_never!_” he repeated solemnly. They do say as there's one to be seen at the 'lodge'--”

”Why, of course there is, Macgregor,” said George, with a nervous laugh, as he got up to depart; ”all the big Unions publish their accounts.”

The fireman's obstinate mouth and stubbly hair only expressed a more p.r.o.nounced scepticism.

”Well, I shouldn't believe in em,” he said, ”if they did. I've niver seen a balance-sheet, and I don't suppose I ever shall. Well, good-bye to you, Sir George, and thank you kindly. Yo take my word, sir, if it weren't for the public-house the men could afford to lose a trifle now and again to let the masters make their fair profit!”

And he looked behind him complacently at his neat cottage and well-clothed children.

But George walked away, impatient.

”_His_ wages won't go down, anyway,” he said to himself--for the wages of the ”firemen,” whose work is of the nature of superintendence, hardly vary with the state of trade. ”And what suspicious idiocy about the accounts!”

His last visit was the least fortunate of any. The fireman in question, Mark Dowse, Macgregor's chief rival in the village, was a keen Radical, and George found him chuckling over his newspaper, and the defeat of the Tory candidate in a recently decided County Council election. He received his visitor with a surprise which George thought not untinged with insolence. Some political talk followed, in which Dowse's Yorks.h.i.+re wit scored more than once at his employer's expense. Dowse, indeed, let himself go. He was on the point of taking the examination for an under-manager's certificate and leaving the valley. Hence there were no strong reasons for servility, and he might talk as he pleased to a young ”swell” who had sold himself to reaction. George lost his temper somewhat, was furiously ashamed of himself, and could only think of getting out of the man's company with dignity.

He was by no means clear, however, as he walked away from the cottage, that he had succeeded in doing so. What was the good of trying to make friends with these fellows? Neither in agreement nor in opposition had he any common ground with them. Other people might have the gifts for managing them; it seemed to him that it would be better for him to take up the line at once that he had none. Fontenoy was right. Nothing but a state of enmity was possible--veiled enmity at some times, open at others.

What were those voices on the slope above him?