'Thee dars' na'!'
'I dare,' was the drawled, smiling answer.
'I tell thee thee dars' na'!'
'I tell thee I dare.' And thereupon he slowly but resolutely set out for the slip-house door and Mr. Machin.
Eli Machin was beyond doubt the most considerable employé on Clarke's 'bank' (manufactory). Even Henry Clarke approached him with a subtly-indicated deference, and whenever Silas Emery, the immensely rich and miserly sleeping partner in the firm, came up to visit the works, these two old men chatted as old friends. In a modern earthenware manufactory the engine-room is the source of all activity, for, owing to the inventive genius of a famous and venerable son of the Five Towns, steam now presides at nearly every stage in the long process of turning earth into ware. It moves the pug-mill, the jollies, and the marvellous batting machines, dries the unfired clay, heats the printers' stoves, and warms the offices where the 'jacket-men' dwell. Coal is a tremendous item in the cost of production, and a competent, economical engine-man can be sure of good wages and a choice of berths; he is desired like a good domestic servant. Eli Machin was the prince of engine-men. His engine never went wrong, his coal bills were never extravagant, and (supreme virtue!) he was never absent on Mondays. From his post in the slip-house he watched over the whole works like a father, stern, gruff, forbidding, but to be trusted absolutely. He was sixty years old, and had been 'putting by' for nearly half a century. He lived in a tiny villa-cottage with his bed-ridden, cheerful wife, and lent small sums on mortgage of approved freeholds at 5 per cent.—no more and no less. Secure behind this rampart of saved money, he was the equal of the King on the throne. Not a magnate in all the Five Towns who would dare to be condescending to Eli Machin. He had been a sidesman at the old church. A trades-union had once asked him to become a working-man candidate for the Bursley Town Council, but he had refused because he did not care for the possibility of losing caste by being concerned in a strike. His personal respectability was entirely unsullied, and he worshipped this abstract quality as he worshipped God.
There was only one blot—but how foul!—on Eli Machin's career, and that had been dropped by his daughter Miriam, when, defying his authority, she married a scene-shifter at Hanbridge Theatre. The atrocious idea of being connected with the theatre had rendered him speechless for a time. He could but endure it in the most awful silence that ever hid passionate feeling. Then one day he had burst out, 'The wench is no better than a tiddy-fol-lol!' Only this solitary phrase—nothing else.
What a tiddy-fol-lol was no one quite knew; but the word, getting about, stuck to him, and for some weeks boys used to shout it after him in the streets, until he caught one of them, and in thirty seconds put an end to the practice. Thenceforth Miriam, with all hers, was dead to him. When her husband expired of consumption, Eli Machin saw the avenging arm of the Lord in action; and when her boy grew to be a source of painful anxiety to her, he said to himself that the wrath of Heaven was not yet cooled towards this impious daughter. The passage of fifteen years had apparently in no way softened his resentment.
The challenged lad in Mynors' yard slowly approached the slip-house door, and halted before Eli Machin, grinning.
'Well, young un,' the old man said absently, 'what dost want?'
'Tiddy-fol-lol, grandfeyther,' the child drawled in his silly, irritating voice, and added: 'They said I darena say it to ye.'