“Oh!” Rupert protested.
“Yes. I expect to have my fight with you. It’s the march of progress. Look at old Reuben there and Edward his son. Reuben was a fighter for steam when he was young. Other people thought steam visionary then if they didn’t think it flat blasphemy. But he grew old and he couldn’t rise to railways. Edward brought the railway to Hepplestall’s, right into the factory yard, in the teeth of Reuben’s opposition and when Reuben saw railway trains actually doing what Edward said they would do, carrying cotton in and goods out and coal out from the pit-mouth, he retired. He gave Edward best and went, and Edward lit the factory with gas, made here from his own coal, and Reuben prophesied fire and sudden death and the only death that came was his own.
“That portrait is of William, Edward’s son. Their fight was over the London warehouse. William did not see why we sold to London merchants who re-sold to shops; and William had his way, and later quarreled with his son Martin over so small a thing as the telegraph. That was before telephones, and you had an alphabetical switchboard and slowly spelt out sentences on it. William called it a toy, and Martin was right and saved thousands of valuable hours. But I had the honor of telling my father, who was Martin, that he had an intensive mind and that lighting the mills by electricity, and rebuilding on the all-window design to save artificial light and installing lifts and sprinklers (to keep the insurance low) were all very useful economies but they didn’t extend the trade of Hepplestall’s. I went round the world and I established branches in the East. I didn’t see why the Manchester shipping merchants should market Hepplestall’s Shirtings in Shanghai and Calcutta. My father told me I had bitten off more than I could chew, but he let me have the money to try with. Well, there’s your uncle Hubert in charge at Calcutta now, and your uncle Reuben Bleackley at Shanghai, you’ve cousins at Rio and Buenos Aires and Montreal and on the whole I can claim my victory. I wonder,” he looked quizzically at Rupert, “what your victory over me will be? To run our own line of steamers? To work the mills by electricity? I give you warning here and now that I’m against both. Oil—oil’s a possibility; but we needn’t go into those things now.
“I hope I shall never oppose you, sir,” said Rupert.
“Then you’ll be no true Hepplestall—and you are going to be. You’ll go through it as the rest of us went through it, and you’ll come out tried and true. I’ll tell you what I mean by going through it. That’s no figure of speech. We are practical men, we Hepplestalls, every man of us. We’ve diverse duties and responsibilities, but we’ve a common knowledge, and an exact one, of the processes of cotton manufacture. We all got it in the same way, and the only right way—not by theory, not by looking on, but by doing with our own hands whatever is done in these mills—or nearly everything. You’re going to be a carder and a spinner and a doubler and a weaver. You’re going to come into the place at six in the morning with the rest of the people and the only difference between you and them is that when you’ve learned a job you’ll be moved on to learn another. You’ll come to it from your university and you’ll hate it. You’ll hate it like hell, and it’ll last two years. Then you’ll have a year in Manchester and then you’ll go round the world to every branch of Hepplestalls. In about five years after you come here, you’ll begin to be fit to work with me, and if you don’t make a better Head than I am, you’ll disappoint me, Rupert.”
Rupert was conscious of mutinous impulses as his father forecasted the rigorous training he was expected to undergo. How cruel a mockery was that suave office of Sir Philip! And Sir Philip himself, and all the Hepplestalls—they had all submitted to the training. They had all been “through it.” And they called England a free country! Well, he, at any rate—
He felt his father’s hand upon his knee, and looked up from his meditations. “It is a trust, Rupert,” said Sir Philip.
Rupert began to hate that word and perhaps his suppressed rebellion hung out some signs, for Sir Philip added, almost, but not quite, as if he were making an appeal, “always the eldest son has been the big man of his time amongst the Hepplestalls. It hasn’t been position that’s made us; each eldest son has made himself, each has won out by merit, My brothers were a tough lot, but I’m the toughest. And you. You won’t spoil the record. You’ll be the big man, Rupert. And now we’ll go through the mill,” he went on briskly, giving Rupert no opportunity to reply.
Rupert was shown cotton from the mixing room where the bales of raw material were opened, through its processes of cleaning, combing, carding to the spinning-mill whence it emerged as yarn to go through warping and sizing to the weaving sheds and thence to the packing rooms where the pieces were made up and stamped for the home or the foreign markets. Hepplestall’s had their side-lines but principally they were concerned with the mass production of cotton shirtings and Rupert was given a kinematographic view of the making of a shirting till, stamped in blue with the world-famous “Anchor” brand, it was ready for the warehouse, which might be anywhere from Manchester to Valparaiso or Hongkong; and as they went through the rooms he was introduced to managers, to venerable overseers who had known his grandfather, fine loyalists who shook his hand as if he were indeed a prince, and everywhere he was conscious of eyes that bored into his back, envious, hostile sometimes, but mostly admiring and friendly. He was the heir.
He walked, literally, for miles amongst these men and women and these children (there were children still in the mills of Lancashire, “half-timers,” which meant that they went to the factory for half the day, and to school the other half, and much good school did them after that exhilarating morning!), and he bore himself without confessing openly his consciousness that he was not so much inspecting the factory as being inspected by it. All that he saw, he loathed, and he couldn’t rid his mind of the thought that he was condemned to hard labor in these surroundings. But there were mitigations.