Tom Pinder, Foundling: A Story of the Holmfirth Flood

by D. F. E. Sykes

It was a glorious feast and a happy gathering, and happy folk those whose faces shone in the dancing rays of the glowing fire; but happiest of all the happy there was Workh’us Jack when Ben and Tom offered him the post of teamer and handy man at Co-op Mill, for Co-op Mill, the low grey mill at Hinchliffe Mill, had been christened without informal ceremony.

“Aw’d ha’ come mysen an’ helped i’th mill,” confided Aleck to Tom, as he walked a part of the homeward way with him and Ben. “But yo’ see aw’m th’ only one ’at stan’s atween th’ mester an’ ower mich liquor. It’s his only failin’. Nivver thee tak’ to sperrits Tom. Be teetotal off them. Stick to ale an’ nivver sup more nor five quarts at a sittin’. Tha’ll nooan get fur wrang on that if th’ ale’s saand. Gooid neet, lad.”

CHAPTER XI

THAT was a grand moment for Ben and Tom when the shuttle of the goit at Co-op Mill was drawn, and the water from the dam began to stream into the wheel-race and catch the buckets of the great wheel, transmitting its revolutions to the main shafting and machines. Little enough stock of wool and dye wares had they, and few indeed the engines for transforming by multiple processes the greasy, clotted fleeces into warp and weft and good broad pieces. But both knew every branch of the manufacturer’s art, and each was more than willing to take his part, and more than his part, at scouring, dyeing, scribbling, or weaving. They employed very few hands, and each of these thoroughly understood that he was to be paid not only a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, but also a share of the profits; and it did not take long for Yorkshire shrewdness to discover that the better, the more thoroughly, each one worked, the better for one and all. There was no scamping the work, no idling. And there was no breaking time for sprees, no “laiking” because a chap felt Mondayish, and wanted an off-day or two to get over the effects of Saturday’s and Sunday’s debauch. Every hand at Co-op Mill began in a very brief time to shake off the enervating consciousness of the subservience of a hired labourer. He would not only not idle himself, he would tolerate no idling in a fellow labourer. There are tricks in every trade, or every trade is solely maligned. There are ways of shirking work, of making time pass in merely seeming labour that one would think one as irksome in the long run to the operative as they are undoubtedly unjust to the employer. There was none of that at Co-op Mill. Set a thief to catch a thief, and a man who shirks and dawdles at his work steals the time that is indeed money. But let the man who works by your side be personally interested in the work you do, and the way you do it; there is no room there for shirking and dawdling. The lever of labour is, after all, self-interest, and so ingrained is self-interest that the only thing that can be asked of average human nature is that self-interest should not impinge on the self-interests of another.

Now matters were so arranged at Co-op Mill that self interest was necessarily and unavoidably altruistic, and when this great truth was once fairly grasped and assimilated by the hands a spirit prevailed from scouring house to pressing-room that secured ready, willing abundant and thorough work, and the quality and the quantity of the work soon made themselves manifest in the final output. The finished pieces were a delight to the eye and to the touch. There was no occasion to employ a traveller to push their goods. The goods sold themselves. It had been resolved that suit-lengths might be bought at the mill at a little below ordinary retail prices. This was to contravene the commercial code; but Tom did not see why a man should be compelled to go to a tailor and the tailor to a merchant and pay the profits to two middlemen because of a commercial code that chiefly benefited the middlemen and never the consumer. No, the difficulty did not consist in finding purchasers; the difficulty was in putting out goods enough to supply the demand. But as Ben had predicted, so soon as the system began to be understood, and especially after the first “divvy” had been declared and actually taken home by the men and handed to their wives, there was no lack of proffers of service from men who were able, ready, and willing to put their “bit” into Co-op Mill. At present there was some demur to terms—bare interest on invested capital, no participation in profits over that limit. On this point Ben and Tom were inexorable, adamantine. “It shall not be a capitalists’ concern, it shall be a workers’.”

And it was wonderful too, and heartening to note the harmony, the goodwill, the general sense of brotherhood that prevailed from counting-house downwards. There was no cringing, no toadying, no tale-hearing. There was the very presence, spirit, and revelation of a moral resolution. Nothing so ennobles a man as to feel that, so far as man can ever be in this network of human organism in which no thread is self-sufficient and self-dependent, he is his own man, with need to go cap in hand to no other. It is a feeling that, in Yorkshire is perhaps apt to run to truculence and the very savagery of self-assertion; but even so it is better than the cringing, fawning self-abasement of the rural districts of the midland villages where squire and priest are gods of earth and heaven.

A man who threw in at the Co-op was a marked and envied man. The pick of the operatives were willing to take the looms as fast as they could be put up. It was Lucy who suggested that the new concern should go into the making of shawls. Everyone who knows the manufacturing districts of Yorkshire and Lancashire knows the shawl of the mill girl. It is to her what the cloak is to the Irish butter-woman, the plaid to the Scotch shepherd, or the mantilla to the Spanish donna. It was Dorothy who designed the pattern for the first shawl and, as time went on, the warm, bright-coloured covering might be seen over the head and shoulders of the women and girls in every mill in the Valley of the Holme. There was no need to be concerned about the texture or the fastness of the colours. It was a Co-op shawl. That was guarantee enough.

Tom and Ben worked early and late. Tom indeed had had a bed fixed up in a small room of the lower story of the mill. Many a night, indeed often for weeks together every night except Saturday and Sunday, he slept in the mill. He was the one to open the mill-gate in the morning and greet the hands as they streamed into the yard and hand them their time checks. His was the hand that, when the long day, yet all too short for his endless round of duties, lagged to its weary close, fastened the gate upon the last of the toilers; and oft and oft, far into the silent hours, he would bend over stock-book and ledger or, when the moon shone high above the mill, would walk round the mill dam and up the rugged hank of the babbling stream that fed it. His constant companion was Jack, no longer Workh’us Jack, but Jack, plain Jack, or Jack o’ th’ Co-op, or Tom Pinder’s Jack, anything but Workh’us Jack; a new, transformed Jack, wearing his corduroys and smock as proudly as if they had been a Field Marshal’s uniform. Sometimes a wag, further learned than others, would dub him “Man Friday;” but it was all one to Jack. He was Tom’s body servant, his dog, if need be, to fetch and carry. And who so popular all through that beautiful valley and who so welcome at the hill-side farms and cottages as cheery, smiling, cherry-faced Jack with his kindly jest and merry quip and crank? Why, he was worth a dozen commercial travellers rolled into one. When he led the cart from the mill to the coal-shoots and back, or went his round with the great red-coloured barrel on wheels in quest of the ammonia laden refuse of the house-hold it was a sorry day for Jack when he did not bring back two or three orders for the pretty, taking shawls, and what insight into the delightful vanities of lovely maiden Jack did not acquire on his rounds was really not worth noticing.

But it was on a shawl for Lucy that Jack spent his first week’s earnings at Co-op Mill, a dainty, modest shawl of softest fleece, a shawl, Jack declared, you could draw through a finger ring, and perhaps one might if the finger were one of Jack’s. The rosy-cheeked, brown-eyed lasses of the little farms and homesteads, and the more forward wenches of the valley mills wasted their becks and nods and wreathed smiles on Jack. He took them all as a matter of course; but a look from Lucy’s soft warm eyes, from which the pathetic wistfulness of long suffering had not yet worn away, would set Jack “all of a dither.” It was for Lucy, when the season came, that he ransacked the hill sides for the peeping snowdrop, and the hedge-bottoms for the shy primrose; for Lucy that he bore home the nodding blue-bells and the blushing fox-glove, or the rare wild rose; for Lucy that he searched the brambles for the luscious blackberry, and bent his back o’er the purple heather for the nestling bilberry; for Lucy that he brought the thrilling thrush; for Lucy that he nearly broke his neck down the steps of the church belfry the day he secured the wild young jackdaw; and for Lucy that he weaned the perverse bird of its natural addition to choleric speech and general bad language. In Jack’s eyes Lucy was fair and beautiful as any angel—and indeed her pale face was very sweet to look upon—and for him Lucy’s lightest word—nay, such is the divination of affection—Lucy’s unspoken thought was as law. And who so surely as Jack could rouse Lucy from the sad reveries into which her thoughts would sometimes stray, and bring back to her lips the pleasant smile and the gentle repartee that had neither sting nor lash? Who was it but Jack that nearly killed the barman at the Rose and Crown because he soiled his lips with an unseemly jest involving both Tom and Lucy; who but Jack that, however urgent his business errands might be, never passed Ben’s cottage without solicitous enquiry as to Lucy’s health, and what sort of a night she had had, and how she had felt that day; and for whom but Lucy did Jack forswear cakes and ale?

But now the last wild rose of the summer has blushed in the hedgerows, and the bracken of the moors is greying to sickly death; the brooks and rivulets fall from the heights in fuller stream and muttering a gloomier song and the long nights are at hand when men-folk of a social mind seek the creature comforts and the good-fellowship of taproom and bar. And this was the season which Ben and Tom deemed fitting for the launching of still another experiment. They had resolved of a Saturday night— that most dangerous of nights, when the wages in the breeches’ pockets seem as if they would stand any inroad for the quenching pint throughout the winter months to have night classes at the mills for their own hands, and for as many of their friends as liked to come. There were to be first of all lessons in English History, and with history was to be taught in the only way it can be effectively taught, the geography of the wide, wide world. And the lessons in history were to be enlivened and made the more seductive by the reading of books of fiction and romance, of fable and poem dealing with the period under study, so that by the light of such heroes as Hereward the Wake, and The Last of the Saxon Kings, and The Last of the Barons, by the deathless pages of Avon’s Swan, by the muse of Chaucer, of Spenser, and of Milton, the ages of the past lived before the eyes of these eager sons of toil, and they dwelt in the stately company of kings and warriors, cloistered saints and beautiful sinners, and saw, as in a waking dream, the stately drama of their country’s making.