Mr. Knox had won permanent employment without difficulty. Indeed he proved a paper maker of the first rank, and while Mr. Trood deprecated Knox’s very unusual stroke, he admitted that the result was as good as possible.
Of this matter they were now speaking.
“Ernest Trood is a great formalist,” said Kellock. “He believes in what you may call tradition and a sort of stroke that you’d say was the perfection of the craft. But you can’t make a man to a model. You can show him another man who works on a good pattern—no more.”
“The stroke comes just like every other stroke, whether it’s cricket, or billiards, or shooting, I reckon,” said Ned Dingle. “It comes, or else it don’t come. Take me: I’ve tried a score of times to make paper; but I can’t do it. I can’t get the stroke. But you might have an apprentice new to it and find, after a month or two, he’d prove himself in the way to be a paper maker.”
Mr. Knox, who had already won a friendly greeting from his new associates, in virtue of an amiable character and humorous disposition, admitted that the vatman was born, not made.
“And you may very near say as much for the beaterman,” he added. “I never want to see better pulp than you send down to the vat room, Ned Dingle.”
“’Tis the life and soul of the paper to have such pulp as yours, Ned,” confirmed Kellock, and the beater was pleased. Praise always excited Ned and made him chatter.
“I don’t know what there is to it—just thoroughness no doubt and a keen eye and no scamping of the tests. I take a lot more tests than most beaters I reckon,” he said.
They discussed their craft and Ned told how for the purposes of the new water-mark pictures destined for a forthcoming exhibition, extraordinary pulp would be necessary.
“Soft as milk it will have to be,” he declared.