Collected works of j s f.., p.705
Collected Works of J S Fletcher, page 705
Bright knew that it was useless to attempt any stoppage of Hermie’s tongue now — her eyes were blazing and her lips quivering, not with tears, but with passion: here, indeed, delicately formed and almost fragile as she looked, was a woman whose righteous indignation could turn her into a fury. Once, when there had been a trade dispute in Haverthwaite and the local labour leaders had gone on the stump, Bright had heard Hermie, a smartly gowned and hatted figure, speak at the corner of an obscure street, and had stood amazed at the prodigality of strong and vituperative language that she had poured out in the cultured voice which she had acquired in the course of her education. Once started, she was irrepressible — and he let her go on.
“Never forget!” she repeated. “Nor forgive! Who could forget who’d ever heard the catalogue of crime that I heard from that old man’s lips? Am I not a daughter of the people? — do you think children ever forget the wrongs done to their parents, and to their parents before them? My God! — the wrongs that one has to revenge — the cruelties, iniquities, foul and abominable crimes, the harvest of evil that’s ripening, ripening! — What sort of folk should we be, the people of to-day, if we didn’t remember the vengeance that’s our right? I wish that poor old man was alive now, so that I could put him up before men and women, and let him tell in his simple and artless fashion what was done to those from whom we spring. How under the apprentice system the masters used to take pauper children, fatherless, motherless, into slavery, amongst every twenty, by arrangement, one idiot; how they worked them to skin and bone; how they tortured them, starved them, riveted irons to their ankles lest they should run away, let them die like dogs, and buried them in secret! How children dropped asleep at the devil-invented machines, and were beaten into wakefulness with the buckle-end of the overseer’s strap! How disease ran like wildfire through the squalid courts and alleys where the workers lived, brought about by long hours, poor miserable food, wretched clothing, bad ventilation, overcrowding, life in hovels that were immeasurably worse than dog-kennel or pig-stye! — while the capitalist master made his money out of blood and bone and brain and heart, and damnable hypocrites wept crocodile tears over the negro slave and hadn’t one sigh for the slaves at their own doors! How do you suppose that anybody with one scrap of human feeling is ever to forget or forgive all that?” she suddenly demanded, turning on Bright with fierce energy. “Let those forgive and forget who can! — may I never know peace or happiness if I do!”
“It’s over,” said Bright. “Over! Gone — clean gone — and done with.”
Hermie gave him a sharp look, and suddenly lapsed into one of the calm, cold moods in which, if Bright had only known it, she was infinitely more dangerous than when she became passionate and denunciatory.
“Hardly!” she said, with an enigmatic smile. “There’s the bill to pay!”
“What bill?” asked Bright.
“The bill that folk like me have been running up against folk like you, Bright,” she answered. “Don’t let’s deceive ourselves — you’re a rich man, and a capitalist, and I’m a poor girl, of the people. We’ve got an awful account to settle!”
She began to smoke again, and Bright presently lighted his pipe.
“Hermie,” he said, after a while. “I think you’re wrong in your last sentiments — What have I to do with what my forefathers did a hundred or sixty or even forty years ago? Why should I pay for their — misdeeds, if you like to call them so, though I should want to know a lot more before I did. Why, now?”
Hermie laid a hand on his arm.
“Bright!” she said. “You no doubt know by now — how much money has come to you with your father’s death? —— leaving out the mill and the business and all that? Come, now?”
Bright made a wry face. Try as he would, he could not avoid letting her see that the subject was unpleasant.
“As near as can be made out,” he answered, “I should think five or six hundred thousand pounds — can’t say exactly.”
“So that, with all the rest of it,” said Hermie, “you must be somewhere about a millionaire? They say you are, anyway.”
“I shouldn’t wonder if it is so — with one thing or another,” assented Bright. “It — it seems awful!”
“Bright!” she said, “where did it all come from! On your honour as a man, where did it all come from? Out of the labour of men and women and children! — you know it did! Sweep aside all the theories, and all the talk, and all the sophistries! — you know as well as I do that your Marrashaw money has come, during five generations, from your employment of so many fellow-creatures at wages which just enabled them to live: the profits of their labour have gone into your pockets. The enormous wealth that you’re master of doesn’t belong to you at all, Bright — it belongs to the folk who made it.”
“They couldn’t have made it without us,” said Bright.
“That’s pure and simple rot, boy!” declared Hermie. “But we’re not going into it. You know what I think about all these things. And oh! Bright, you’ve such a chance to do a real great stroke of justice! It was in your grandfather’s mill that mine worked as a mere baby — Your grandfather and his father were awful tyrants and grinders: their oppressions were iniquitous: they’re written in a big print in economic history, for anybody to read. And its their ill-gotten gains that you’re master of, Bright! Morally, you’re bound as a straight man, to right a wrong. Make restitution! Give back to the people what your family robbed them of!”
Bright drew his forehead into many wrinkles, and for a while sat gazing fixedly at the shadows flitting across the distant hills.
“You must let me work things out for myself, Hermie,” he said at last. “You’re pretty well aware of my various standpoints in politics and economics and everything. Mind you, I don’t agree with you about lots of things. I can’t undo what was done. And, honestly, I don’t know that there’s any reason whatever why restitution should be made to the people of to-day for the wrongs done to those of yesterday. But I’ll tell you this — no man, woman, or child shall ever be wronged by me!”
“Nobody doubts it, Bright,” said Hermie. She realised that enough had been said just then: already she was wondering whether she had not gone further than she had meant to go, whether, in letting her strong feelings carry her away, she had not shown her hand too plainly. “Nobody, I’m sure, has any other thought, after what you said in public, than that you mean to do well.”
But she had roused a train of thought in Bright’s mind, and now he was following it.
“It’s a terrible problem to put before a man who’s fixed as I am!” he said, after a pause. “You don’t mean to tell me — you don’t really think that the people of to-day cherish any ill-feelings, any desire for revenge because of the past?”
Hermie shook her head, and not in dissent.
“I don’t see how it could be otherwise,” she answered. “Just as I’ve heard of the things I mentioned just now, so have they, all of them: there isn’t a man or woman who doesn’t know the story of the old factory days, and how their own people suffered under their abominations. Old Ebbie used to tell me of the starvation and privation that went on amongst the workers, while the factory owners were amassing fortunes and living in luxury. Is it in human nature for people to forget? If you knew that your people had been oppressed, ill-treated, starved, dealt with as slaves never were dealt with, don’t you think it would rankle — aye, for many a generation!”
“Things are different now,” said Bright.
“In one sense, yes,” admitted Hermie. “In another sense, no. You put yourself in the place of an ordinarily intelligent working man for a moment. How would you like to see yourself kept to a wage of, at the very best, a few pounds a week, and, at the same time, watch the greater part of the profits — profits, mind! — of your labour going into the pockets of your master — hateful word! — and he, getting richer and richer thereby, every year, while you and yours never get appreciably better off? You know you wouldn’t like it? Can you wonder if such men feel pretty bitterly?”
“It’s the capitalistic system,” muttered Bright. “System!”
“Yes, but it’s men who make the system,” retorted Hermie, “and what’s more they’ll keep the system up as long as they profit by it. The whole policy of the capitalist is to keep the worker as poor as possible, as much in subjection as possible, so that he may profit by his poverty and his helplessness. And behind the system is that cursed shibboleth of competition! Why don’t we call things by their right names and call it the war of the strong against the weak? What we want in this world, all of us, is not competition but co-operation, not striving for riches at other men’s expense, but mutual help; not the aggrandisement of the few, but the comfort and well-being of the many. Competition! — it makes me sick to hear it advocated!”
“There are plenty of sound and sane reasoners who defend competition, anyhow,” said Bright. “Plenty of good men who’ll tell you that it’s made England what it is.”
Hermie turned her eyes on him with a look of astonishment.
“Yes, I can quite agree with that!” she said. “It has! And what is England? Has there ever been a time in its whole history when it was one-half as pagan, and as brutal, and as materialised and as utterly selfish as it is now? I think not, Bright — and I’ve read a fair lot of history. And this precious system of competition — which is nothing whatever but open and flagrant exploitation of the weak by the strong — will bring this country to ruin! You wait till we’ve had the big world-war that’s not so very far off, and see where we shall be after it, when we’re plunged into enormous debt, and we discover that the wealth which ought to belong to the state is in the hands of a few privileged individuals! Do you think it’ll be easy to make them disgorge? I don’t! — and then there’ll be taxation of a sort never known before, and high prices, and shortage and a putting back of everything — all because individuals have been allowed to appropriate to themselves the wealth that should have been the reserve force of the nation.”
“It’s an enormous question,” said Bright, somewhat doubtfully. “I’ve not worked it out, Hermie — Lord! I feel as if I scarcely knew anything, and here I am with all this awful responsibility! There’s a terrible lot of spade work to be done, on all sides. But, by George, I’ll try honestly to do my share — and if I fail, well, it won’t be for lack of endeavour and goodwill.”
“Nobody doubts that, either,” assented Hermie.
VI
WHEN HERMIE CLOUGH declared to Allot Howroyd that she could do anything she liked with the new master of Marrashaw’s Mill, she was talking beyond knowledge. Bright cherished a distinct admiration for Hermie’s talents and for her whole-hearted, if somewhat truculent devotion to the Labour cause. He knew that she had read and thought far more than he had, and he was content to learn from her in subjects on which she had more knowledge than he could pretend to. But he was, after all, a Marrashaw, and had all the stubborness of opinion which had characterised his forebears during many generations. And when, as on this particular Sunday afternoon, he let Hermie talk and occasionally rise into flights of denunciation, it was not with entire acceptance of her views and doctrines. Bright was one of those men who listen with close attention and give the impression of acquiescence by silence when, in reality, they either dissent entirely or secretly disagree in part. He had his own notions. They had been manufactured by himself, in seclusion. He was not the sort to walk into a political laboratory and ask to be analysed and labelled: his mind and outlook were too eclectic for that. And when he advised the Labour men at their hall to give more attention to clear thinking, unity of purpose, and greater use of the vote and the ballot-box it was not that he wished so much to identify himself actively with their cause as to tell them as a practical man what they lacked in practical politics: an enemy, Ellerthwaite, for instance might have told them the same thing, as a lesson in the art of political warfare. But he had no intention of becoming one of them; none of adopting the advice of the man from London and his chairman, to join the party and become its parliamentary candidate. Bright knew his own position — from inclination, from thought, from reading, above all from observation, his sympathies were with Labour and Democracy: he knew that the old system of things was doomed, and he was more than willing to give the slowly-expiring, wornout carcase a hearty, accelerating kick — but, as he had said to Hermie, he must do things in his own way. Somebody had once said of him, in Hermie’s presence, that he was both deep and obstinate: his obstinacy and depth were far greater than Hermie knew, and they were carefully concealed.
He was not going to say so to her — it would have been no use — but he was not, and never could be profoundly impressed by Hermie’s denunciations of the bad old days that preceded the efforts of Oastler and Sadler, and Feilden, and Shaftesbury and other pioneers to bring about reform in the working of the factory system. They were horrible days, those: he had read his fill about them in the economic histories and in the local annals. No intelligent young man or woman could possibly have been reared in that neighbourhood without hearing lurid stories such as those which had burned themselves in on Hermie’s receptive and highly-imaginative mind. But Bright knew that not all the old capitalist mill-owners were ogres and tyrants: that was unbelievable. He knew, too, that Hermie’s theory as to how wealth gradually increased in the case of families like his own was one into which too much water had better not be poured. It was all very easy to affirm on Labour platforms and at street corners that men like Charlesworth Marrashaw had amassed their great fortunes through wholesale and long-continued exploitation and spoliation of the workers, but it was not so easy to prove it. Much as he sympathised with Labour, greatly as he desired reforms which would give workers more results of their work, Bright knew well enough that families like his own do not come to be what and where they are by purely piratical practice. He was as well up in the history of the Marrashaws as Charlesworth himself. He knew how the family fortunes had begun and how they had been built, generation after generation. For a long time, in the early days, the Marrashaw policy had been crystallised in two matters — self-denial and thrift. His ancestors had lived on coarse bread and salt meat that they might save: they had never spent a penny without shifting it from right hand to left and left to right, slowly considering if it ought to be spent, and, if it must be parted with, how it could be laid out to the best advantage. And, as far as he knew, so it was with every one of the wealthy manufacturing families in the town. They had all originated in some hard-working, self-denying, thrifty ancestor, who, while his compeers were grumbling away their time and their money in the pot-house, was adding pence to pence and shilling to shilling, always with the idea of making himself a man rather than a mouse.
History repeats itself — and Bright knew that in his own time there were men and there were mice. In spite of his innate sympathy with the proletariat — a thing for which he could not account on any ground of heredity — he was not blind to the fact that there are men in this world who have no desire to better themselves, never will better themselves, and could not be bettered were a whole army of philanthropists to descend upon them. Ever since he had known anything of it, good wages had been paid in the staple trade of Haverthwaite. Taking things as a whole, the folk were comfortably off. There was a vast amount of money of theirs in the savings’ banks, the building societies, the friendly societies, the various lodges and clubs. But there was also a vast amount wasted in drink and in betting. Whoever went round the inns and taverns of a night would find them filled; on Friday and Saturday and Sunday nights they were crammed: money went in this way with a prodigality that was nothing short of criminal: it went in another with only less recklessness in the shape of half-sovereigns and half-crowns staked on horses by men who scarcely knew a thoroughbred from a roadster and had never seen a race-course in their lives. Perhaps Charlesworth had exaggerated when he had declared, in a speech which Bright heard him deliver to the workpeople, that there wasn’t a young man in all Haverthwaite who couldn’t be what he was by thrift and energy and perseverance — but, after all, there was much in it. And so Hermie, with all her fiery eloquence and her bitter denunciations, was not quite right — it was not wholly by exploitation that the Marrashaw money had been made — great qualities had gone to the making of it, and these qualities were within the grasp of any man who cared to put out his hand.
Still, when all was said and done, Bright knew that the workers, as a mass, had a distinct grievance. Here was an industrial nation of over forty millions of people, producing vast amounts of wealth, the lion’s share of which was a huge and always increasing one while the jackal’s was, relatively, a miserable remnant in which there was more bone than meat. More equitable distribution of wealth — there was the problem. But how to solve it? — Would anything that one mere man, one isolated individual, could do, go any way at all towards a solution. Example — yes, there was that, but Bright was not so sure that example is such a valuable or compelling thing as the copybook maxims would have one believe. The world, in his opinion, had been casting its eyes on examples and exemplars for a long time — and it usually either turned a contemptuous back upon them or crucified them or stoned them to death. Truly, as he had observed to Hermie, there was a terrible lot of thinking to be done by a young man suddenly pitchforked into such a position as his.
