“We have,” said William superbly, “the idea of service in this firm.”
“Man,” said Tom, “if you hadn’t had, I shouldn’t be here to-day talking to you in headlines. If you hadn’t had that idea and if you hadn’t lived up to it and if I didn’t hope you’d go on living up to it, I’d have had a very different duty. Shall I tell you what that duty would have been, Sir Rupert? To keep my mouth shut and let you sell. The higher you sold the higher they’d resell when they floated their company, and the sooner they’d start squeezing the blood out of Staithley.”
Rupert turned a puzzled face. “That would have been your duty? Why?” he asked.
“Hot fevers are short,” said Tom. “It ‘ud bring the end more quickly. I don’t know if you read the Times. If you do you may have seen that they mentioned my name the other day along with some more and called us the elder statesmen of the Labor Party. Too old to hurry. Brakes on the wheels of progress. Maybe; but I’m one that looks for other roads than the road that leads to revolution and you Hepplestalls have been a sign-post on a road I like. You’ve been too busy overpaying yourselves to go far up the road yet, but you’re leaders of the cotton trade and by the Lord that ship needs captaincy. That’s why I didn’t do what lots in the Party would tell me was my duty—to let you rip, and rip another rent in the rotting fabric of capitalism.” Mary’s hand was on his arm. “Because you love the Hepplestalls,” she said.
“And me a Bradshaw?” he said indignantly. “Me a Labor Member and they capital? Did you ever hear of the two old men who’d been mortal enemies all their lives, and when one of them was killed in a railway accident, the other took to his bed and died because he’d nothing left to live for? That’s me and the Hepplestalls.”
She shook her head, smiling. “It’s not like that,” she said.
“It ought to be,” said Tom, “but it isn’t. Service, not greed, and there’s a hope for all of us in that, and if you want to know who taught me to see it, it was Sir Philip Hepplestall.”
Rupert was in distress. Why should London, his schemes, theaters, seem so incredibly remote? Why wasn’t he angry with this grizzled fellow from the Staithley stews who dared, directly and indirectly, to lecture him? Why didn’t he resent Mary, another Bradshaw, who had brought Tom there to reprimand a Hepplestall? And why weren’t ladders provided for climbing down from high horses?
“My father?” he said. “My father taught you?” It was his ancestors he declined to worship. A father was not an ancestor, and Rupert was hearing again Sir Philip’s deep sincerity as he spoke of the Samurai. “We have both learned from Sir Philip, Mr. Bradshaw. I have been near to forgetting the lesson. Did he ever speak to you of Samurai?”
“Sam who?” asked Tom.