“Oh, aren’t we all in prison?” he asked. “The larger, the smaller—does it matter?”
This was philosophy, and Mary wanted the practicalities. “Are you seeing me as jailer? Is that what you mean?”
“Resenting you?” he asked. “You!” and left it so with luminous emphasis. “No. Life’s the jailer. For four years I was every day afraid of death. I’m afraid of life to-night. What shall I make of Staithley? Those mills, to which each Hepplestall since the first who built there has added something great. Those milestones of my race. I meant to run away, I meant to dodge and shirk and make belief. You’ve steered me back and I thank you for it, Mary. But it’s a mouthful that I’ve bitten off. Hepplestall’s! What shall I add? I don’t know. I’m overpowered. It’s so solemn. It’s so big.”
“You’re big, Rupert.”
He seemed not to hear or to feel her hand on his. “‘On me, ultimately on me alone rests the responsibility.’ That is what my father, who was Head of Hepplestall’s, said to me. Look at those mills, then look at me. They’re big. They’re terrifying in their bigness.”
“No. Worth while in their bigness.”
“I don’t know what you were thinking as we drove round the mills. I was wondering,” he smiled a little, “if they speak of a cliff as beetling because it makes one feel the size of a beetle under it. And I thought of a machine I remembered seeing in the works that they call a beetle. It’s got great rollers with weights that clump and thump the cloth till it shines and the noise of it splits your ears. Each huge wall of the mills, God knows how many stories high, seemed to fall on me like so many successive blows from a beetling machine. I was under Hepplestall’s, as people talk of being under the weather, and it’s always Hepplestall’s weather in Staithley. I wasn’t lying when I spoke to those fellows in the yard, I had some confidence then, but it’s oozed, it’s oozed. Look at the size of it all.”
“I’m looking,” said Mary, “and from Staithley Edge it’s in perspective. Rupert, this air up here! I’m not afraid. Not here. Not now. You... you’ve got growing pains, and they say they’re imaginary, but I know they’re good. You’re a bigger man already than you were.”
“I’m a hefty brute for a growing child,” he smiled down at her.
“You can take it smiling, though,” she approved.