Hepplestall's

by Harold Brighouse

CHAPTER X—THE PEAK IN DARIEN

RUPERT was annoyed, and annoyed with himself for being annoyed, when he drove up to the main gate of Staithley Mills on the following afternoon and found that the gate-keeper did not know him. It was plainly the man’s duty to warn strangers off the premises, and Rupert was, by hypothesis and in fact, a stranger, but he felt it a reproach that Sir Rupert Hepplestall was forced to make himself known to Hepplestal’s gate-keeper.

The man, an old workman, who preferred this mildly honorific wardenship to a pension, made him a backhanded apology. “It’s so long sin’ we’ve seen thee,” he said. “Us had a hoam-coming ready for thee arter the war, but tha’ didno come.” No sirring and no obsequiousness from this old servant of the firm, and Rupert gave a quick, resentful glance as he pulled the car up in the yard.

Then he remembered that this was Lancashire—and he knew now what Lancashire thought of him. There was no reason why he should, and every reason why he should not, care what Lancashire thought, seeing that he came there solely to arrange his clean cut from Staithley; but an old fellow in a factory yard who did not scrape, but told him frankly that he had not come up to local expectations, had been able to thwack him shrewdly.

It was not much better after that to be treated like a prodigal, to be conducted possessively to the office entrance and to hear the gate-keeper announce in a great and genial voice, “I’ve a glad surprise for yo’, There’s th’ young maister.”

He was not and he refused to be “th’ young maister,” but he could not explain to this guide that he wasn’t what he seemed; the infernal fellow was so naively proud to be his herald. “I feel like Judas,” he thought, and tried wryly to laugh the thought away. It was a tremendous and a preposterous simile to be occasioned by the candid loyalty of one old workman, but things did not go much better with him inside the offices.

Theoretically, they should have shrunk, to his maturer gaze, from his boyish recollection of them, but they were authentically impressive. He couldn’t think lightly of this regiment of desks, nor could he pretend that the eyes which turned towards him as his loud-voiced pilot announced him, were hostile. Theory was in chancery again; all employees ought to hate all employers, but the elderly gentlemen who were hastening towards him wore on their faces expressions of genuine pleasure instead of the decent deference that might cloak a mortal hatred. Ridiculously as if he had been indeed a prince on the day when Sir Philip took him round and introduced him, he discovered a royal memory, and remembered their names. It was developing into a reception; this wasn’t at all what he had come for. He wondered what the younger clerks were thinking, men of his own age, ex-service men, but he had not the chance even to look at them. A positive guard of honor was escorting him to William’s room, that joss-house of the Hepplestalls.

If only he could laugh at their formality and at their quaint appreciativeness of his knowing their names! He felt he ought to laugh; he felt it was all something out of Dickens. Or if he could blurt out that he had come to slip the collar for ever from his neck! They would scuttle from him as though he were the plague; but he could neither laugh aloud nor tell the truth to those solemn mandarins. They were not pompous fools, or he could have laughed, he could have scattered them impishly with his truth; but they were captains in a Service where promotion went by merit, they were proven efficients in an organization whose efficiency was world-renowned, and their homage was not absurd because it was paid not to the young man, Rupert Hepplestall, but to Sir Philip’s son, to the successor to the Headship of the Service. That made it the more hypocritical in him to seem to accept their homage, but if he was going to forfeit what good opinion they retained of a truant, he was going to keep it, at any rate, until the die was unalterably cast.

It was certain to be cast, but Hepplestal’s was retorting on him with unexpected power. Mary was right: the bigness of Hepplestal’s had been escaping him. From London the sale had seemed no more than signatures on documents, and a check. Up here, confronted with Staithley Mills as so much brick, mortar and machinery, and confronted with no more than one crude loyalist in the yard and half a dozen grayboards of the Service in the office, the thing loomed colossal. Let it loom: he held its future in the hollow of his hand, and this, of all times, was no moment for second thoughts. He had to tackle William, the waverer, the fence-sitter who must be met with firmness, and not by one who was himself momentarily awed by the bigness of Hepplestal’s into being a waverer. With the air of nailing his colors to the mast, even if they were the skull and crossbones, he recovered his resolution in the moment when that ambassadorial figure, the Chief Cashier of Hepplestall’s, threw open William’s door and announced “Sir Rupert Hepplestall”; and a grave assurance, inflexible and self-reliant, seemed to enter the room with him.