And he looked behind him complacently at his neat cottage and well-clothed children.
But George walked away, impatient.
"His wages won't go down, anyway," he said to himself—for the wages of the "firemen," whose work is of the nature of superintendence, hardly vary with the state of trade. "And what suspicious idiocy about the accounts!"
His last visit was the least fortunate of any. The fireman in question, Mark Dowse, Macgregor's chief rival in the village, was a keen Radical, and George found him chuckling over his newspaper, and the defeat of the Tory candidate in a recently decided County Council election. He received his visitor with a surprise which George thought not untinged with insolence. Some political talk followed, in which Dowse's Yorkshire wit scored more than once at his employer's expense. Dowse, indeed, let himself go. He was on the point of taking the examination for an under-manager's certificate and leaving the valley. Hence there were no strong reasons for servility, and he might talk as he pleased to a young "swell" who had sold himself to reaction. George lost his temper somewhat, was furiously ashamed of himself, and could only think of getting out of the man's company with dignity.
He was by no means clear, however, as he walked away from the cottage, that he had succeeded in doing so. What was the good of trying to make friends with these fellows? Neither in agreement nor in opposition had he any common ground with them. Other people might have the gifts for managing them; it seemed to him that it would be better for him to take up the line at once that he had none. Fontenoy was right. Nothing but a state of enmity was possible—veiled enmity at some times, open at others.
What were those voices on the slope above him?
He was walking along a road which skirted his own group of pits. To his left rose a long slope of refuse, partly grown over, ending in the "bank" whereon stood the engine-house and winding-apparatus. A pathway climbed the slope and made the natural ascent to the pit for people dwelling in the scattered cottages on the farther side of it.
Two men, he saw, were standing high up on the pathway, violently disputing. One was Madan, his own manager, an excellent man of business and a bitter Tory. The other was Valentine Burrows.
As Tressady neared the road-entrance to the pathway the two men parted.
Madan climbed on towards the pit. Burrows ran down the path.
As he approached the gate, and saw Tressady passing on the road, the agent called: