A queer family, these Robertsons of Belfast, very solid, very stubborn. In five generations there has been but one son to the family, and no daughters. "The Scottish weaver-bird, laying but one egg," some dry doctor dubbed them. So they be. They are a tall, solid dynasty, marrying toward middle age a bride solid as themselves. Young Aleck, red-bearded and rangy, could remember his father, as tall and rangy as he, and bearded, too, as his grandfather was, both silent, speculative men, students of the Shorter Catechism, and shrewd observers of life, possessors of the trust of glossy linen. They had their duties: to mind their own business; to take care of the mill, and to make fine cloth.
"They can see the linen in the flax, they Robertsons!" a workman of theirs once boasted, and it was true.
At Portrush golf-club you may hear about him. "The championship of Ireland," they tell me, "Captain Macneill got it then and he held it for three years and then your Uncle Simon for a year, and then Mr. Campbell o' Kilkee, and then—who was it, then?—the linen man of Belfast—what the deuce is his name? Robson? Robinson? Robertson, that's it! You'd hardly remember him; he was not a showy player, not an affable man, but sound! Ah, damned sound!"
At his school they have difficulty in recalling him. The president remembers him vaguely as a solemn youth with freckles and gigantic hands.
They seem to have gone through life, he and his mill, with one object in the world—to produce linen that is the pride of Ulster. They have each their worthy, definite place in the world. On him there rests the mill, a legacy as important and dynastic in its way as one of the former German principalities. He toured Ireland studying flax. He saw it raise its bluish green stems in spring, soft as down. He saw it rise and the wind ruffle and bend it, like still water. He saw the strange blue flower break out on it, as blue as a near star. It was plucked from the ground in summer time, acres and acres of it plucked carefully by a numerous population, and stacked like corn. And the nights after the flax-pulling there would be great joy-making in the villages, dancing and singing and drinking and love-making under the inscrutable Irish stars. It was taken then to the dikes and left rotting in the water, while mephitic gases rolled over the country-side. It was then scutched in the scutch-mills, where wheels run by water, by men with querulous dispositions and hacking consumptive coughs. To him and his like it came then, in soft, glossy, whitish strands, like the hair of Scandinavian women. He turned it over to his operatives, weavers and throwsters and pickers, men hunchbacked from bending over their looms, and women very free in their ways and not often pretty. Now it covered the stubborn hills of Ulster and soon it covered the groaning tables of kings.
"It's an unco thing, the flax!" his Scots-Irish workmen used to say. Aleck Robertson had the same thought, when he considered, though he never phrased it, that the prosperity and good fame and management of his linen-mill was his religion.
Life for him flowed by in a groove as regular and as well fitting as one of the bands on his own looms. Since his father died, ten years ago, he had been following the same routine, getting up in the morning, in the club where he stayed, and going to work, taking a street-car—though the Robertson firm was famous, it was not rich—attending to the work, and coming back in the evenings to spend the time with a few friends over a tumbler of Scotch.
"Why for do you no' take a wife and settle down, Aleck?" an occasional friend asked him.
"Och, I 'm all right as I am," he would answer.
Life at thirty-eight had become for Aleck Robertson a succession of minor hedonisms. He liked the sting of the shower-bath in the morning, the goodly taste of breakfast. He liked to hear the bustle and rumble of the works as he entered. He liked his lunch. He enjoyed his game of golf, and his occasional holidays in Scotland, or France, where he patronized the bathing-beaches, and played for small stakes at petits chevaux. Every week he attended a music-hall, and occasionally he was seen as escort to a minor actress.