William nodded sober acquiescence, but Rupert was uninformed. “Water?” he asked.
“Watered capital,” Tom explained. “Lancashire’s water-logged, but we’ll keep Staithley out of what’s coming to Lancashire. You have mills here that are the pride of the county. You wouldn’t turn them into the pride of speculators as the biggest grab they ever made in Lancashire! You wouldn’t make Staithley suffer from the rot of watered capital.”
William stirred furtively on his chair and avoided Tom’s eye with the shiftiness of a wrongdoer who is shown the results of misdeed, and then remembered that he had done no wrong and nodded approval of Tom’s words which were not addressed to him but to Rupert. Mentally he thanked Tom for saying outright things which he had himself thought. He had merely kept them in reserve, unspoken until he had entertained himself by proceeding a little further with the accountants; but that was, perhaps, not the most honorable form of entertainment, based as it would have been on the false pretense that William was prepared to sell, and he was grateful to Tom for an intrusion which cleared the air. He did not blame himself: he had not played with fire, or, if he had, it had been while wearing asbestos gloves; but what Tom said to Rupert—of course it was to Rupert—was the final argument against a sale, and he drew out notepaper and bent to write.
To Rupert, Tom was simply a nuisance. He had sighted victory, he had carried William, he had resolutely defeated such difficulties as sentiment and the frowning ponderosity of Hepplestall’s, and he saw Tom Bradshaw, with his croaking prophecies of after-effects of the sale upon some fifty thousand inhabitants of Staithley, as a monstrous impertinence. He was so busy seeing Tom as an impertinence that he did not see William writing a letter.
“I’ve heard of the tyranny of Trade Unions,” he said. “I’ve heard of what they call their rights and what most people call their privileges. But I’ve never heard of a Trade Union’s right to veto a sale. I have the right to transfer possession of my own to anubody. If you think you can engineer a strike against that elementary right of property, I tell you to go ahead and see what happens.”
“I know what will happen in this case, Sir Rupert. If we let you sell—”
“You let! You can’t prevent.”
“If you sold,” Tom went on, “some undesirable results would arise. I am dealing with them before they arise. I am dealing on the principle that prevention is better than cure.”
“Are you? Then suppose I said strike and be damned to you?”
“If you said that you would be a young man speaking in anger and I shouldn’t take you too seriously.”