“Man, don’t you see that I am unconquerable!”
And so for the next few days the men were held together and lifted by the one man’s happiness.
Meanwhile the Children’s Tavern was a great success. Lady Phayre worked indefatigably, serving herself, with other helpers, behind the trestles ranged round the great bare hall and creaking beneath the load of great tea-ums, mountains of bread and butter, and, in the morning, steaming pans of porridge. Goddard loved to make his way through the crowd of clamorous unwashed children to the place where Lady Phayre, deliciously fresh in white bib-apron and turned-back cuffs, was busily dispensing viands, receiving pence and halfpence from grubby little hands, and paying for countless moneyless urchins from a great private store of coppers by her side. And after the press was over, she would emerge from behind the trestles and walk up and down the hall with him discussing affairs.
Never had she seemed so near to him as now when a common interest united them. But in Goddard’s fresh, newly-awakened idealism, it was not her arm that brushed his on a common level, but it was her wings that touched his head.
Sometimes he would meet her in the streets, on a round of visits among such homes as she knew; sometimes he would see her sitting in the dog-cart, with her host, on the outskirts of a crowd he was addressing. Once she even persuaded him to accept a dinner invitation at the Wentworths’. She grew more into his life daily.
The strain of his position, as arbiter of the struggle, grew more intense. Rumours of the larger firms being backed up by the great capitalist Rosenthal were gaining hopeless credence. At another fruitless conference, one of the employers boasted that they could maintain a lockout for a couple of years. Goddard summoned a great mass-meeting of operatives, and gave the manufacturer the lie with passionate vehemence. Once more he imposed his will upon them.
He was fighting this battle as he had never fought before. Every aim of his life seemed to be merged in the issue. Not only were the great principles of the rights of labour at stake, not only the present and future happiness of this great community, but his own career seemed to hang in the balance, and, in a strange, uncomprehended way, his credit with Lady Phayre.
At last the London world began to clamour for Lady Phayre. A rift was threatening to appear in the Progressive lute. “You only can put things straight,” wrote Aloysius Gleam. “Fenton and Hendrick have bumped each other’s heads in the dark, and they are angry with one another, and we are all taking sides. You must bring them to kiss and make friends over your dinner-table.” So Lady Phayre deliberated. She had one very good reason for remaining at Ecclesby; but, on the other hand, she had fifty little feminine ones for leaving it. The work she had taken in hand, the Children’s Tavern, was in capital going order. She had already found her own services, as attendant, superfluous. She was free to resign the charge of it into competent hands. Why should she stay? It was not often that Lady Phayre did not know her own mind. At last she compromised. She would pay a visit to London, to effect the desired reconciliation, and then return to Ecclesby.
“I don’t like leaving you at all,” she said to Goddard, the evening before her departure. “It seems as if I am deserting you. But I shall make haste back.”
“Ah, do!” said Goddard pleadingly. “The people have grown so fond of you. And you are such a help to me.”