“My mills! The mills my father had before me! The men I’ve employed regularly in good times and bad! It’s outrageous. Parliament ought to deal with such things. The country is at the mercy of the Labour party.”
“I always was against this general education,” cried Lady Currey, examining a new piece of Sèvres she had just acquired. “Why, one of Robson’s children is a school-teacher.”
Robson was the ringleader in the strike, and a few months before had come to loggerheads with Sir John. One of his daughters—not the school-teacher—had gone away from the village some four years previously, and had recently returned with two children and no husband, and Sir John had refused her application for an empty cottage or to take her back again in the mill. Sir John said, “One must uphold the principle of the thing.” But as Claudia gradually learned, Sir John had never been popular, and though Robson’s grievance had inflamed the workmen, they had been in a state of ferment for some time—partly because they had become infected with the strike fever, and partly because Sir John refused to replace some old machinery with the modern which is used in most big paper mills. He was a strictly just employer and landlord, but he did not err on the side of leniency.
“I won’t give way. I won’t be intimidated by these scoundrels. You agree with me, don’t you, Gilbert?”
“Yes.” Gilbert’s lower lip protruded pugnaciously. “Give way now, and you’ll have no more peace. After all, you can afford to shut down for a time; then they’ll come to their senses.”
This went on every day in different forms, explanations to visitors all sympathetic to the Curreys, accounts in the daily papers, until Claudia was glad to go over to Rockingham and see Fay and her strange guests.
For they were very strange, according to Rockingham ideas. Fay had asked them indiscriminately, the only qualification being that they needed a holiday and could not afford one. Old Joey Robins was there, watching over Fay like a grotesque old clown in a wonderful medley of garments that he imagined were suitable to the country. He had obtained from somewhere a pair of white flannel trousers, very much shrunk and yellow through washing, a brown velvet coat and a grey Trilby hat much too large for him. There was often a little mishap with the glazed white front which would pop out of the black waistcoat, but his celluloid collar was always spotless. A girl who did sand-dancing and had broken down in health, a once famous comedienne who had lost her popularity, an acrobat who had injured his foot, and a woman with a young baby, who had been deserted by her husband, were her other guests on this particular morning when Claudia went over. Fay, who was getting very thin and hollow-eyed, gave them of her best, for she had insisted on paying for the venture herself, and had, for that purpose, sold all her much-loved jewellery. “I shall never want it again,” she had said to Claudia, biting her lips to keep back the tears.
Claudia had helped her to furnish the big old house with simple, comfortable furniture, and had procured a staff of servants to run it. And because of their liking and pity for their odd little mistress with her extraordinary ideas the servants stayed, though the vagaries of the guests, the conflicting orders of Polly—“head cook and bottle-washer,” Fay called her—and the nurses nearly sent them distracted occasionally. When things got in too much of a tangle Claudia’s presence was urgently demanded.
On this particular morning Fay was lying out under one of the big trees, the comedienne, a stout woman in her sixties, with the most obvious toupée Claudia had ever seen, sitting beside her doing “a bit of crochy.” A little way off was the dancer, a thin, white-cheeked girl, engaged in making a pink muslin blouse from a pattern out of a penny journal, and snipping the bits over the lawn. The acrobat, in full view of them all, was doing amazing stunts on the grass for their amusement.