“It were bad enough when Masters were alive, curse him, with his ‘system’ and his ‘single chance,’ and his sticking to his word, but we knew where we was then. Now, none of us knows. Here’s one turned off cos he broke some rule he’d never heard of; another for telling a foreman what he thought of him; my mate’s chucked out for fighting—outside the Mill Gate, look you—What concern be it of yours what we do outside? It’s a blessed show you do for us outside, isn’t it? I tell you it don’t concern you anyhow, you lazy bloodsucker—and look at me—I’ve worked for your father fifteen year, and you turn me off—you and your precious heads of departments,—because I was a day behind with my job. Well, what if I was? Hadn’t I a wife what was dying with her sixth baby, and not a decent soul to come to her? We’ve been respectable people, we have, till we came to live in the blooming gaudy houses at Carson.”
“That’s the Steel Axle Company’s works, isn’t it?” put in Christopher quietly. He had not moved; he was intent on picking up the clue to the mad indictment that lay in the seething flow of words.
“Yah. Don’t know your own purse-strings,” spluttered the denouncer, growing incoherent with rising fury; “sit at home with your little play-box of a works down here, with fancy hutches for your rabbits of workmen, clubs, toys, kitchen ranges, hot and cold laid on. Oh, I’ve seen it all. Who pays for it, that’s what I want to know? who pays for your blooming model works and houses?”
“I pay for it,” said Christopher still quietly, “or rather the company does. It comes out of working expenses.”
The man gave an angry snarl of disbelief. “You pays, does you? I tell you it’s we who pays. You 358 take our money and spend it on this toy of yours here. I’ll––”
Christopher put up his hand. “You are utterly mistaken,” he said, “I have no more to do with the late Peter Masters’ works or his money than the men in the yards out there.”
The black ignorance, the fierce words interlarded with unwritable terms, the mad personal attack, filled him with a shame and pity that drowned all indignation. There had been injustice and wrong somewhere that had whipped this poor mind to frenzy, to an incoherent claim to rights he could not define.
“Why do you come to me?”
The man gave almost a scream of rage.
“Come to you? Ain’t you his son? Don’t it all belong to you, whether you takes it or whether you don’t? Are you going to skulk behind them heads in Birmingham and leave us at their mercy, let ’em grind us to powder for their own profit and no one to say them yea or nay? There was a rumour of that got about, how you was going to shunt us on to them, you skulking blackguard. I wouldn’t believe it. I told ’em as how Masters’ son, if he had one, wouldn’t be a damned scoundrel like that. He’d see to his own rights.”