“People have sent them to you?” he guessed.
“No. I bought them. If in the short years that I’ve been Head I have left my mark on Hepplestall’s, it is in this direction. Your father, as perhaps you know, was against what he called coddling the men. I would not coddle, but I have encouraged Welfare Societies and I have instituted Works Committees.”
Rupert had the sensation of deflation. He had called William of “the old gang,” and here was William’s contribution to the march of Hepplestall’s. Rupert was to add humanity, was he? Well, William had added it first. “I did these things with hope,” William was saying. “I pinned my faith to them, and what are they worth? There were two Hepplestalls hissed in Staithley Mills today. That is the reply to what I have tried to do. Can you wonder that I feel I’ve shot my bolt and missed my aim? The detail of my Works Committees scheme took me a year to evolve. I thought it was accepted and welcomed; and I was hissed to-day in Staithley Mills.”
For a moment even Mary was daunted, not by the thing she had brought Rupert here to do but by the realization of what release had meant to William.
“Not you, uncle,” Rupert cried. “They hissed me for being a laggard.”
“We’re Hepplestalls. That’s why they hissed. They hissed the Service.”
It had seemed solemn enough on Staithley Edge, but that was childish levity compared with this. What should one answer back to men who hissed the Service which served them? Gertrude’s pig with a grunt seemed justified in the light of William’s revelation of his progressive efforts.
“And you,” William said, “you spoke, and they cheered you for it. Well, it’s in those books. Co-Partnership. No: I’ve not done that. Limitation of profits—I’ve thought the Government was doing that drastically. I don’t know. You went too far for me, but they didn’t hiss you when you’d done, You sav you’re here to learn. Well, I can’t teach you. The technical side and the ordinary business side—oh, yes, we’ll teach you those. But what Labor wants, what, short of something catastrophic on the Russian scale, will satisfy Labor, I cannot tell you for I do not know.”
Once, unimaginably long ago, Rupert had found the beginnings of a solution in his wife’s appearance on the screen in a Staithley cinema. It was so long ago that he thought he must have grown stupendously since then.
Perhaps he had; it was a far cry from that uninformed optimism to this throttling doubt.