Anyhow, he’d got his impudence back and Sir Philip, knowing the massive impressiveness of the mills, was glad of it. He wanted his boy to bear himself well that day, and he was not afraid of levity or over-confidence when he confronted him with Hepplestall’s. He had, he admitted to himself, feared timidity; he had, at any rate, diagnosed acute nervousness in Rupert’s breakfast-table appearance, and feeling that the attack was vanished now, he rang for the car with his mind easy.
The site of old Reuben’s “Dorothy” factory was still the center whose extended perimeter held the mills known to Lancashire, and nearly as well known to dealers in Shanghai, or in the Malji Jritha market, Bombay, as Hepplestall’s, but the town of Staithley Bridge lay in the valley, extending down-stream away from the mills, so that there was country still, smoky but pleasant, between the Hall and the town. Electric trams bumped up the inclines through sprawling main-streets off which ran the rows upon uniform rows of cell-like houses, back-to-back, airless, bathless, insanitary, in which the bulk of the workers lived. Further afield, there were better, more modern houses, costing no more than those built before the age of sanitation—and these were more often to be let than the houses of the close-packed center. It may have been considered bumptious in Staithley to demand a bath, and a back-garden; it may have been held that, if one lived in Staithley, one should do the thing thoroughly; or it may have been that cleanliness too easily attained was thought equivalent to taking a light view of life. In their rooms, if not in their persons, they were clean in Staithley, even to the point of being “house-proud” about their cleanliness; but medicine that does not taste foul is suspect, and so is cleanliness in a house when it is attained without the greatest possible mortification of female flesh. You didn’t, anyhow, bribe a Staithley man by an electric tram and a bright brick house with a bath to “flit” from his gray stone house in an interminable row when that house was within reasonable walking distance of the mills or the pits. No decentralization for him, if he could help it: he was townbred, in a place where coal was cheap and fires extravagant, and a back garden was a draughty, shiversome idea.
But all this compress of humanity, and the joint efforts of the municipality and the jerry-builder to relieve it, lay on the side of the mills remote from the Hall—old Reuben had seen far enough to plant the early Staithley out of his sight, and where he planted it, it grew—and the short drive through dairy farm-land and market-gardens was not distressing to eyes accustomed to the pseudo-green, sobered by smoke, of Lancashire. Nor had the private office of the Hepplestalls any eyesores for the neophyte. He had been in less comfortable club-rooms.
Indeed, this office, with its great fireplace, its Turkey carpet, its shapely bureau that had been Reuben’s, and its chairs, authentically old, chosen to be on terms with the historic bureau, its padded leather sofa and the armchairs before the fire, and above all, the paintings on the wall, had all the appearance of a writing-room in a wealthy club.
“This is where I work, Rupert,” said Sir Philip, and Rupert wondered if “work” was quite the justifiable word. He thought the room urbane and almost drowsily urbane, he thought of work rather as the Staithley people thought of cleanliness, as a thing that went with mortification of the flesh, and things looked very easy in this room. But he reserved judgment. Sir Philip was apt to come home looking very tired. Perhaps the easiness was deceptive.
A telephone rang, and his father went to the instrument with an apology. “This is your day, Rupert, but I must steal five minutes of it now.” He spoke to his broker in Liverpool, and there were little jokes and affabilities mingled with mysterious references to “points on” and other technicalities. There was an argument about the “points on,” and Sir Philip seemed very easily to get the better of it, and then, having bought a thousand bales of raw cotton futures, he put the telephone down and said, “That’s the end of business for to-day.” An insider would have known that something rather important had happened, that the brain of Sir Philip had been very active indeed in those few minutes when he lingered over the market-reports at the breakfast-table, that trained judgment had decided a largish issue and that a brilliant exhibition of the art of buying had been given on the telephone. Rupert’s impression was that some enigmatic figures had casually intruded while Sir Philip passed the time of day with a friend in Liverpool who had rather superfluously rung him up. At Harrow, veneration of the business man was at a discount, and he believed Harrow was right. To write Greek verse was a stiffer job than to be a cotton-lord—on the evidence so far before the court.
“Well,” said Sir Philip, “I’m going to try to show you what Hepplestall’s is, and the portraits on these walls make as good a starting-point as I can think of. That is Reuben, our Founder. There are a few extant businesses in Lancashire founded so long ago as ours; there are even older firms. But such age as ours is rare. It’s been an in-and-out business, the cotton trade. You know the proverb here that ‘It’s three generations from clogs to clogs.’ That is, some fine fellow born to nothing makes a mark in life, rises, fights his way, and beginning as man ends as master, giving the business he founded such momentum as carries it along for the next generation. His son is born to boots, not clogs, but he hasn’t as a rule the strength his father had. He’s lived soft and his stock degenerates through softness. The business of the old man doesn’t go to pieces in the son’s time, but it travels downhill as the momentum given it by its founder loses force. And the grandson of the founder is apt to be born to boots and to die in clogs; he begins as master and ends as man. That is the cycle of three generations on which that proverb is founded, and not unjustly founded. It’s one of the points about the cotton trade that a strong man could force his way out of the ranks, but it’s the fact that his successors were more likely to lose what he left them than to keep it or improve upon it. I’ll go so far as to say that making money is easier than keeping it.
“We Hepplestalls have had the gift of keeping it. What a father won, a son has not let go. The sons have been fighters like their fathers before them and with each son the battleground has grown. Well, that might terrify you if I don’t explain that long ago, in your great-grandfather’s time indeed, the firm had outgrown the power of any one man to control it utterly. There were partnerships and a share of the responsibility for the younger sons. More recently, in fact when my father died, we made a private limited company of it. Two of your uncles, Tom and William, in charge in Manchester, have great authority, though mine is the final word. What I am seeking to tell you is that while it is a tremendous thing—tremendous, Rupert—to be the Head of Hepplestall’s, the burden is not one which you will ever be called upon to bear single-handed. The day of the complete autocrat went long ago. But this is true, that the Head of Hep-plestall’s has been the general in command, the chief-of-staff, the man who guarded what his ancestors had won and who increased the stake. That is the Hepplestall tradition in its minimum significance.”
Rupert started. In spite of his boyish skepticism he was already seeing himself as the Lilliputian changeling in a house of the Brobdingnagians, and if this were the minimum tradition, what, he wondered, was the maximum?
“We have the tradition of trusteeship,” Sir Philip proceeded. “And the trusteeship’ of Hepplestall’s is an anxious burden. It includes what I have spoken of already; it includes our family interests, but they are the smallest portion of the whole. We are trustees for our workpeople: we do not coddle them, but we find them work. That is a serious matter, Rupert. I have of course become accustomed to it as you will become accustomed to it, but the thought is never absent from my mind that on us, ultimately on me alone, is laid the burden of providing work for our thousands of employees. Trade fluctuates and my problem is, as far as is humanly possible, to safeguard our people against unemployment.”