Behind the training they underwent was the theory of the machine with interchangeable parts; it was assumed that the general technical knowledge they all acquired fitted each for any post to which the Service might appoint him. They did not overrate mere technique but they relied upon the quality of the Hepplestalls. If occasion called a Hepplestall, he rose to it. This occasion, the occasion of a regency, had called William Hepplestall, Sir Philip’s brother next in age to him.
William had not sought, but neither did he shirk, the burden of responsibility. “I will do my duty,” he had said. “You know me. I am not an imaginative man, and the times are difficult. But I will do my duty.”
It would, certainly, not have occurred to William in the first days of the war to convert their Dye-House from, cotton dyeing to woolen: that sort of march into foreign territory, so extraordinarily lucrative, would have occurred to none but to Sir Philip, and they understood very well that under William, or under any of them now, the control would be prudent and uninspired. They looked to Rupert as inheritor cf the Hepplestall tradition of inspiration in leadership. Calmly they made the vast assumption not only that he was coming to them but that he was coming to be, eventually, a leader to them as brilliant as Sir Philip had been.
“I shall not see it,” said old Horace, “but I do not need to see. We continue, we Hepplestalls; we serve.”
Amiably, implacably, with embarrassing deference to Sir Philip’s son, they pinned him to his doom, and in France, when he had heard of this meeting they arranged for him, he had thought of it as a comic interlude, and of himself as one who would relax from great affairs to watch these little men at play! He sat weighed down, in misery. In London he had decided that he wouldn’t argue, but he hadn’t known that he could not argue. He was oppressed to taciturnity, to speechless sulking which they took, since Rupert did everything, even sulking, pleasantly, to mean that he was overwhelmed by the renewal, through their eulogies, of his personal grief for the loss of his father. They spoke tactfully of the war, deferring to him as a soldier; they aimed with family news in gossipy vein of this and that Hepplestall in and out of the war, to put him at his ease, and soon the meeting ended. They took it as natural that he wished to spend his leave in London. It seemed they understood. They advised about trains.
Rupert escaped, miserable because he was not elated to leave that torture-chamber. He hadn’t faced the music. But he couldn’t. Altogether apart from his wish to get out of Staithley at the first possible moment, he couldn’t face that music. Their expectations of him were so massive, so serene, so sure, their line unbreakable.
In the train, he recurred to that thought of the Hepplestall line. No: he could not break it, but there might be a way round. He was going to London, where Mary was, and the point, surely the point about the training of a Hepplestall was that they caught their Hepplestalls young. They cozened them with the idea of service and sent them, willing victims, to labor with their hands in Staithley Mills—because they caught them young. Rupert was twenty-five. Cynically he “placed” that meeting now: it was a super-cozening addressed to a Hepplestall who was no longer a boy: it admitted his age and the intolerable indignities the training held for a man of his age, for a captain who had a real chance of becoming a major very soon. It was their effort, their demonstration, and he saw his way to make an effort and a counter demonstration. Clearly, they saw that it wasn’t reasonable to train a man of his years to spinning and the rest of it; then they would see the absolute impossibility of compelling a married man to undergo that training. A man couldn’t leave his wife at some Godless early morning hour to go to work with his hands, he couldn’t come home, work-stained, after a day’s consorting with the operatives, to the lady who was Lady Hepplestall.
He realized, awed by his presumptuousness, that he was thinking of Mary Arden as the lady who was Lady Hep-plestall.
He thought of her with awe because he was not seeing Mary Arden, musical comedy actress, through the elderly eyes of his uncles, still less of his aunts, but from the angle of our soldiers in France who made Mary a romantic symbol of the girls they left behind them. To marry Mary Arden would be an awfully big adventure.