CHAPTER XXI
THE PROTEST
At one end of the glazing house—a lofty and bright workroom at the top story of the Mill—stood the dry press, to which the choice papers demanding extra finish came after glazing. Here they were piled between heavy slabs of hot metal and subject to great pressure; but the primal business of glazing had already been done between metal rollers. A range of these presented the principal object in this workshop.
Girls prepared the paper for the rollers, and Medora had once been of this cheerful and busy throng. Hither came the paper from its final drying after the size bath, and the workers stood with a heap of sheets on one side of them and a little stack of polished zinc plates on the other. With her left hand each girl snatched a sheet of paper, with her right a plate of zinc; and then she inter-leaved the paper with the metal until a good wad rose in her crib. The paper was now ready for the glazing rollers, and men, who tended these massive machines, ran the sheets and zinc wads between the steel rollers, backward and forward twice and thrice under tremendous strain. Then what was dim and lustreless reappeared with a bright and shining surface, and the sheets returned again to the girls, who separated zinc and paper once more.
Mr. Pinhey had often preached on this text—indeed his simile was worn threadbare, though he repeated it to every new-comer in the glazing house and rolling room.
“With paper as with humans,” he would say, “nothing like a sharp pinch to bring out the polish; that is if a man’s built of stuff good enough to take a polish. Of course some are not; we know that only too well.”
The distinctive sounds in this great shop were three and did he hear them, a paper maker with his eyes shut would know exactly where he was. First, the steady thud of the plates on the side of the wooden cribs; next, the ceaseless rustle and hiss of the paper flying between the girl’s hands as it is laid upon the zinc or snatched off it; and lastly the rumble of the rolling machines sounding a bass as they grip the piles of paper and metal and squeeze them up and down.
The very precious papers went to the dry press; but the mass of them passed directly to the sorters, who graded all stock into three qualities—perfect, less perfect, and inferior. No inferior paper ever left Dene Mill. It was pulped again; but could not aspire to the highest standard having once sunk beneath it.
And lastly it came to Mr. Pinhey—the finisher—who seemed a figure conceived and planned for this lofty purpose. Spick and span in his snowy apron, with delicate hands and quick eyes behind their shining glasses, he moved spotless through the mountains and masses of the finished article; he passed amid the ordered blocks magisterially—a very spirit of purity who reigned over the reams and called them by their names. Wove and laid Imperial, Super-royal, Medium, Demy, Foolscap and Double Foolscap were all included. Here towered orange and old rose sections; here azure and ultramarine; here sea green, here opaline pink and every delicate shade of buff and cream, to the snowy whiteness of the great papers and mightiest sheets. From fairy note to “double elephant” ranged Mr. Pinhey’s activity. He worked among the papers, great and small, and put the last touch of perfection and completeness before they passed away into the larger world.
But to-day Nicholas was concerned with a little affair outside the province of the finisher. On a sheet of palest pink, a sheet that seemed actually itself to blush at the delicacy of its task, Mr. Pinhey had written a few sentences in his happiest manner and was handing it round the shop, that men and women might set their names thereto. He told everybody that he much disliked such an appeal and protest, but that his sense of propriety made it necessary, for conscience sake, to proceed. He was honest in this assurance and did not deceive himself. Some of his co-workers, who declined to sign, thought that Mr. Pinhey was conducting his cathartic mission from private motives, not of the highest, and frankly told him so; but they were wrong. The man steadfastly believed that religion demanded his action. He had debated the problem for many weeks and at last come to the conclusion that a strong step must be taken.