CHAPTER IX—THE SPY
EDWARD’S “fat elephant” drove from Hepplestall’s meditating his retort to Reuben’s intransigeancy. He held that it was necessary to weld the manufacturers into a solid phalanx of opposition to the legalizing of Trade Unions, and that if Reuben were allowed to stand out, other masters, whom Needham regarded as weak-kneed, would stand out with him. Needham was obstinate and unscrupulous, with a special grudge against “kid-gloved” Hepplestall, and if there were no overt manifestations of discontent in Hepplestall’s factory, his business was to provoke them. There was surely latent discontent there as everywhere else and the good days of Sidmouth and Castlereagh had shown what could be achieved in the way of manufacturing riot by the use of informers. Informers were paid to inform, and lost their occupation if no information were forthcoming; they did not lose their occupation; they were agents provocateurs, and Gentleman Hepplestall was, if Needham knew right from left, to be thwacked into line by the activities of an informer.
He hadn’t much difficulty—he was that sort of man—in laying hands upon a suitable instrument. The name of the instrument was Thomas Barraclough, and it was, indeed, in Needham’s hands already working as a weaver in his factory, not, to be sure, for the purpose of provoking unrest there but merely for decent spying. There is honesty in spying as in other things and the decent spy is the observer and reporter of what others do spontaneously; the indecent spy is he who instigates the deeds he afterwards reports. Barraclough was quite willing, for a higher fee, to undertake to prove to Hepplestall that Trade Unions were murder clubs.
The affair was not stated, even by blunt Needham to his spy, with quite such candor as this, but, “If tha’ sees signs o’ trouble yonder, tell me of ’em; and if tha’ sees no signs tha’s blinder than I tak’ thee for,” was a sufficiently plain direction to an intelligent spy, and Barraclough nodded comprehendingly as he went off to begin his cross-country tramp to Hepplestall’s.
A spy who looks like a spy is disqualified at once, but what are the symptoms of spying? What signs does spying hang out on a man that we shall know him for a spy? Is he bent with a life spent in crouching at key holes? A keen-eyed, large-eared ferret of a man? The fact is that Barraclough was small and bent, and ferretty, that he looked like your typical spy and yet did not look, in the Lancashire of those days, any different from a famished weaver. They were “like boys of fifteen and sixteen and most of them cannot measure more than 5 feet 2 or 3 inches.”
Steam fastened on this generation, stunting it, twisting it, blasting it, and if Barraclough had been reasonably tall, reasonably well-made and nourished he would have been marked at once as something different from the workers who were to accept him as one of themselves. So, in spite of looking like a spy, he was qualified to be a spy in Hepplestall’s because he looked like any other undergrown, underpaid, underfed weaver lad.
And there is good in all things, though Hepplestall was not thinking of the Blackburn riots as good when he was cavalier about them with Needham. There was the good, for Hepplestall’s, that the destruction of the Blackburn looms and their products brought an exceptional rush of orders to Reuben; and Thomas Barraclough, applying for work when he ended his tramp at the factory gates, found himself given immediate employment.
He found, too, that as an honest spy he had no occupation in this place. He could report distress, sullen suffering and patient suffering; he could report the ordinary things and would have to say, in honesty, that here the ordinary things had extraordinary mitigations; and he found nothing of the violent flavor expected by Needham. It remained for him to take the initiative and to provide against disappointing his master’s expectations, but the mental sketch he had made of himself as an effective explosive did not seem likely to be justified in any hurry. The Blackburn riots had not been followed by such ferocity of punishment as had befallen the Luddites a few years previously, but there had been men killed by soldiers during the riots: there were ten death sentences at Lancaster Assizes, reduced afterwards to transportation for life: and thirty-three rioters were sent to prison. That was fairly impressive, as it was meant to be, but much more impressive was the appalling distress which quite naturally fell upon the Blackburn people who had destroyed the looms, and if all this was salutary from the point of view of law and order it was excessively inopportune from the special point of view of Mr. Barraclough.
Here he was, under orders to raise tumult, in a place where not only were there no symptoms of tumult, but where those who might possibly be tumultuously disposed were cowed by the tales, many true and many exaggerated, of Blackburn’s sufferings. The malignant irony of the uses of the agent provocateur was never better exemplified, but it wasn’t for Needham’s trusty informer to chew upon that, but, whatever his difficulties, to get on with his incitements. And he soon decided that Hepplestall’s people, in the mass, were “windbags,” that is, they would listen to him and they would, in conversation, be as vehement as he, but their vehemence was in words not deeds and only deeds were of any use to Barraclough. The method of the Luddites, machinery-smashing, was discredited for ever by the Blackburn example and he gave up hope of any large-scale demonstration at Hepple-stall’s. What was left was the possibility of finding some individual who was capable of being influenced to violent action.
Then, just as he was despairing of finding the rightly malleable material, Annie Bradshaw’s second son was born and Annie Bradshaw died. She had been almost luxuriously careful about the birth of her first child: she had left the factory three days before his birth and had not returned, with the child at her breast, for a full week afterwards; but second babies were said to come more easily, wages were needed and she had lifted heavy beams before. The child was born on the factory floor, it lived and Annie died. There was no extraordinary pother made about her death, because women were continually defying steam in this way and most of them survived it. Annie did not survive. She was unlucky. That was all.