Hepplestall's

by Harold Brighouse

He was then driven back, not unwillingly, on Dorothy. She was, for Reuben, the whole of friendship, the whole of companionship, the whole of love; after all, she was Dorothy and certainly he made no complaint that he had no other friends and that he was a tolerated, unpopular figure in society. His days were for the factory, his evenings for Dorothy and their children and, when the children had gone to bed, for Dorothy and his books. Books, though they were not unduly insisted upon in the country districts of Lancashire, went then with gentlemanliness and Reuben was not idiosyncratic, but normal, in becoming bookish in middle-age. In Parliament they quoted the classics in their speeches, and the Corinthian of the Clubs, whatever his sporting tastes, spared time to keep his classics in repair. Bookishness, in moderation, was part of the make-up of a man of taste, and for Reuben it had become a recourse not for fashion’s sake but for its own.

Life for Reuben had its mellowness; he had struggled and he had won; he was owner and despot, hardly bound by any law but that of his will, of the several factories contained within the great wall, of a coal-mine, of the town of cottages and shops about. The conditions of labor were the usual conditions and they did not trouble his conscience. Things were, indeed, rather smoother for Hepplestall’s workers than for some others; he was above petty rent exactions and truck shops, as, being his own coal supplier, he could very well afford to be.

What drawbacks there were to his position were rather in matters of decoration than reality, but it was decided proof of his unpopularity in both camps of influence that Hepplestall was not a magistrate. Other great manufacturers, to a man, were on the bench and took good care to be, because administration of the law was largely in the hands of the magistrates and the manufacturers wanted the administration in trusty hands—their own. It was a permanent rebuff to Reuben that he was not a magistrate; there were less wealthy High Sheriffs.

It was a puny irritation, symptomatic of their spite, and it didn’t matter much to Reuben, who was sure of his realities, sure, above all, of the reality of Dorothy’s love. No love runs smooth for twenty years and probably it would not be love if it did, but only a bad habit masquerading as love, so that it would not be true to say of Reuben and Dorothy that they had never had a difference. They had had many small differences, and in this matter of love what happens is that which also happens to a tree. Trees need wind; wind forces the roots down to a stronger and ever stronger hold upon the earth. And so with love, which cannot live in draughtless hothouse air, but needs to be wind-tossed to prove and to increase its strength. Impossible to be a pacifist in love! Love is a tussle, a thing of storms and calms: like everything in life it cannot stand still but must either grow or decay, and for growth, it must have strife. Sex that is placid and love that is immovable are contradictions in terms. Love has to interest or love will cease to be, and to interest it cannot stagnate.

The children came almost as milestones in the road of their love; each marked the happy ending of a period of stress. They were not results of a habit, but the achievements of a passion, live symbols of a thing itself alive. These two hearts did not beat all the time as one, and the restlessness of their love was as essential as its harmony.

But the shadow of a difference that might grow into a disaster was being cast upon them. In a way, it was extraneous to their love, and in another way was part and parcel of it. The question was the future of Edward, the eldest son.

Dorothy lived in two worlds, in Reuben and in the county, and Reuben lived in three, Dorothy, the factory and the county. He put the factory second to Dorothy and she put it nowhere. There was a bargain between them, unspoken but understood, that she should put it nowhere and yet he was assuming, tacitly, that Edward was as a matter of course to succeed him as controller of the factory and the mine: of these two he always thought first of the factory and second of the mine.

She might have reconciled herself to the mine. There were Dukes, like the Duke of Bridgewater, who owned coal-mines and her Edward might have gained great honor, like that Duke, by developing canals. But she had not moved with the times about factories, nor, indeed, had the times, that is, her order of the old gentry, moved very far. The Secombes were still exceptional, the Luke Verners still trimmers, land was still land and respectable, steam was steam and questionable, and it is to be supposed that though the coal of the Duke was used to make steam, coal was land and therefore on the side of the angels, whatever the devils did with it afterwards. Prejudice, in any case, has nothing to do with consistency. She had no prejudice against Reuben’s connection with the factory; he was her “steam-man” still, but she did not want Edward to be her steam-son.

Edward himself was conscious of no talent for factory owning and hardly of being the son of a factory owner.

The management of her children’s lives was in Dorothy’s hands, involving no mention of the factory, and in her hands Reuben was content to leave their lives until his sons had had the ordinary education of gentlemen, until they were down from their Universities. He had not suffered himself as a manufacturer because he was educated as a gentleman and saw no reason to bring up his sons any differently from himself. Throw them too young into the factory, and they would become manufacturers and manufacturers only: he had the wish to make them gentlemen first and manufacturers afterwards.