They believed it blindly and perhaps none of them were eager to have their eyes opened because other people’s eyes might have been opened at the same time and, as things usefully were, it was romantic to be the wronged heirs to Hepplestall’s. It excused so much, it invited compassion for the victims of injustice, it extorted charity for these martyrs to foul play. Details were conspicuously lacking, but the legend had life and won sympathy for the view the Bradshaws took of themselves—that they couldn’t be expected to go to work in the mills of the usurping Hepplestalls. As a family, they were professional cadgers whose stock-in-trade was their legend, and Staithley held enough people who were credulous or who were “agin the government” on principle (whether they took the Bradshaw claim seriously or not) to make the legend a profitable asset. Repetition is infallible, as the advertiser knows, and these ragged Ortons of the Staithley slums had plenty of adherents.
There were several scores of ways of earning a livelihood in Staithley without working at Hepplestall’s, but the average Bradshaw pretended that as a natural pride prevented him from serving the despoiler, he was barred from work entirety, though he did not object to his children working for him, and Tom began as a half-timer in the mills. A bad time he had of it too at first. He did not say it for himself, but the other half-timers said it for him: he was the “lad as owned Hepplestall’s,” and if there was any dirty work going, the owner did it, nursing anger against his family and coming young to a judicious opinion of their pretensions.
He had his handicap in life, but soon gave proof that if he was a Bradshaw it was an accident which other people would be wise to forget, fighting his way from the status of a butt till he was cock of the walk amongst the half-timers. There is much to be said for a wiry physique as the basis of success, but Tom shed blood and bruised like any other boy and the incidents of his battling career amongst the half-timers at Hepplestall’s did nothing to disturb that first lesson of his life, “’A ’ate th’ ’epple-stalls.”
Hatred is a motive, like any other, and a strong one. It resulted in Tom’s conceiving the ambition, while he was a “little piecer,” that he would some day be secretary of the Spinners’ Union and in that office would lead labor against the Hepplestalls. He was his own man now, living not at home but in lodgings, hardily keeping himself on the wages of a “little piecer” of eighteen, reading the Clarion, and presently startling a Sunday School debating society with the assertion that he read Marx and Engels in the original. It was not long after that astonishing revelation of his secret studies that he became unofficial assistant to the local secretary of the spinners, and might regard himself as launched on a career which was to take him in 1906 to the House of Commons.
An election incident accounted chiefly for Sir Philip’s good opinion of Tom Bradshaw. Tom might forget the legend, but the legend could not forget a candidate, and it was thrown into the cockpit by some zealous supporter who imagined that Tom would ride that romantic horse and win in a canter. Tom thought otherwise; a story obscurely propagated amongst Staithley’s tender-hearted Samaritans was one thing, emerging into the fierce light which beats upon a candidate it was another. He was out to win on the merits of his case, not by means of a sentimental appeal which, anyhow, might be a boomerang if the other side took the matter up with the concurrence of the Hepplestalls.
But it was not that afterthought, it was purely his resolution that the issues should not be confused, that took him straight to Sir Philip. Sir Philip looked a question at him.
“It might be Union business,” said Tom, “but it isn’t. It’s the election and I’m here, which is the other camp, to make you an appeal. There’s a thing being said in Staithley that touches you and me. I haven’t said it, but it was said by folk that thought they spoke on my behalf. You’ll have heard tell of it?”
“I’ve heard,” said Sir Philip.
“Well,” said Tom, “there’s always a lot of rubbish shot at elections, but the less the better. Will you help me to get rid of this particular load of rubbish? Will you help me to tell the truth?”
“Is there question of the truth?”