Thousands of little children, both male and female, from seven to fourteen years of age, are daily compelled to labour from six o’clock in the morning to seven in the evening, with only—Britons, blush while you read it!—with only thirty minutes allowed for reading and recreation. Poor infants! Would that I had Brougham’s eloquence, that I might rouse the hearts of the nation, and make every Briton swear, “These innocents shall be free!”
“Ah!” cried Jonathan. Dropping the paper on the table, he covered his face with his hands, and burst into uncontrollable sobs. So he was right, he was right, he had always been right, about the wretchedness of the little pieceners, the bitter wrong of their long hours of toil; other people thought he was right, other people were taking up the cause of the oppressed; this noble writer, whoever he was, sounded a trumpet-call to action. To arms, to arms, thought Jonathan, his soul afire, his blood thrilling through his veins; there is a God in heaven, who will not for ever forget the injured and oppressed; there are noble men on the earth, who care for their brothers and will free them. Dear shall their blood be in His sight, thought Jonathan, and it shall be dear in mine. He snatched up the paper again; there was more in the letter, more! Wilt thou not resolve that Yorkshire children shall no more be slaves? “Aye, by God I will!” breathed Jonathan; “I swear it here and now.” Now he knew what was the matter with his life, why everything always seemed poisoned for him; it was because he had escaped from the mill, with no more damage than a bent leg, and left the other children in it to grow stunted and deformed. “But what can I do?” whispered Jonathan to himself, trembling with eagerness. “What can we do?” He turned to the paper again. Why should not children working in the worsted mills be protected by legislative enactments? demanded the writer of the letter, and signed himself Richard Oastler.
“That’s it!” cried Jonathan. “An Act of Parliament!” He felt uplifted, exalted, as though there were new hope in his life, new fire in his veins; he threw up his head as though he had heard a real trumpet-call instead of a spiritual one—and found that the other three had returned to the room, and Will had his eyes fixed suspiciously upon his son’s white and working face.
“Yon fellow wants to ruin the cloth trade, seemingly,” grumbled Will, with a nod of his head towards the offending paper.
“I don’t think so, father,” said Jonathan in his clear ringing tones.
Will’s eyes flashed. “You think!” he said cuttingly. “What does a young fellow like you know about it, I’d like to know?”
“I’ve been a piecener, father,” replied Jonathan.
Will coloured, and shot his son an angry glance. “And what are mills to do that run by water power, pray?” he demanded, turning to a more favouring aspect of his theme. “You know as well as I do that some days they’re lucky if they can run an hour, and then the children play all day; then there’s rain, and the mills can run eighteen hours, and even then they’ve not made up the time lost for drought.”
“Let them run on steam, as you do, father,” persisted Jonathan. If he had left the matter there all might have been well, but he was moved and excited, and could not help going on to voice what he really felt, what he had felt, without knowing it, for years. “Besides, better a little less cloth,” he declaimed with characteristic sententiousness: “if it means a happier people.”
“What!” cried Will, revolted. “Less cloth! I never heard such twaddle in my life. Less cloth! You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Father,” said Jonathan with solemn emphasis: “Would you like Sophia to be a piecener?”
Will crimsoned. “What in God’s name has Sophia to do with it?” he said angrily. “Leave Sophia alone.”
“If you were a poor man she’d be one,” persisted Jonathan.
“Well, I’m not a poor man,” roared his father.
“No,” cried Jonathan, suddenly losing his self-control: “You’ve become rich by oppressing little children.”
“By God!” shouted Will: “You shan’t say that twice.” He rushed at his son with uplifted fist; Jonathan folded his arms, and awaited his attack contemptuously.
“Will, Will!” screamed Mary, flinging herself between them. “Don’t strike him!”
“Well, take him away, then,” cried Will, allowing her to draw down his arm. “I’ve had as much as I can stand from him to-night, by God I have.”
“Joth!” pleaded Mary, turning to her son.
“You need not be troubled, mother,” said Jonathan loftily. “I will retire.”
He walked out of the room with his head in the air, and went upstairs. As he passed his parents’ door, he heard a little voice saying: “Joth!” He paused.
“What is it, Sophia?” he demanded gravely.
“What’s father shouting for?” asked Sophia in a gleeful whisper.
Jonathan gave an impatient exclamation and passed on.
When he reached his own room he found he was trembling with emotion. His teeth quite chattered. He was ashamed of this unmanly display, repressed it firmly, lighted his lanrp—gas had been installed on the ground floor only of New House—and, arranging his writing materials on a small table, sat down and began to compose a letter to the Leeds Mercury. Rich, emphatic, high-sounding sentences flew from his pen as he informed the editor of that paper that in the Ire Valley mills the children’s hours of labour were longer than those mentioned by Mr. Oastler, and in many of them no time at all was allowed for breakfast or tea. As this last item was not true of Syke Mill he added, with a great sense of doing his father every possible justice: There are some honourable exceptions. Every Christian—every man, he went on, must blush to see the degradation to which these children are brought by the avarice of their employers. He had got so far when Brigg stuck his head round the door, and after looking awkwardly about him for a moment, came in and sat down on his brother’s bed.
“Father is mad,” he proffered presently in a half sulky, half admiring tone.
“I am sorry for that,” said Jonathan.
“Not you,” said Brigg shrewdly.
As Jonathan made no reply to this, but sat gravely considering his next sentence, Brigg lolled back on his brother’s pillows, and threw his arms above his head. From this position he remarked: “I read that fellow Oastler’s letter.”
“Did you?” said Jonathan, turning eagerly. “What did you think of it?”
“Who is he, anyway?” demanded Brigg. “I never heard of him. I bet he’s never been in a mill in his life. He dates from Fixby Hall; father says he thinks he’s somebody’s steward. I bet he’s never touched a piece of cloth in his life.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” said Jonathan angrily.
“Well, Joth!” said Brigg, quite astounded by this perversity.
Jonathan, vexed, turned back to his letter. After a while the chimes of Marthwaite Church clock, striking an hour, floated to the brothers’ ears. Brigg sat up promptly.
“I must go,” he said.
“Where to?” demanded his brother sharply, laying down his pen.
“Those that ask fewest questions get told fewest lies,” returned Brigg cheerfully.
“Brigg!” exclaimed Jonathan, much distressed. “Another girl!” Brigg winked and laughed.
“Oh, Brigg, how can you?” cried his brother sorrowfully, following him to the door. “I do wish you wouldn’t.” As Brigg continued to wear a pleased smile on his broad high-coloured face, he added: “Father will be angry.”
“I shall be sorry for that,” said Brigg, mimicking what his brother had said a few moments earlier.
“It’s all very well mocking me,” said Jonathan sternly: “But you know father will be angry, and you will be sorry.”
It was on the tip of Brigg’s tongue to say that as far as he could see, his father had done pretty much the same as Brigg, in his young days; but he remembered who Joth was in time to stop himself. Instead he remarked: “Don’t be so squeamish, Joth. If I should be a bit late,” he added
, “I’ll throw a stone up at your window, and you might come down and let me in.”
“I shall do nothing of the sort,” said Jonathan in his sternest tone.
Brigg, who knew perfectly well that his brother would let him in, and would make him pay for the accommodation only by a lecture, laughed and patted Joth’s shoulder affectionately.
“Promise me you won’t do anything you’re ashamed of,” anxiously pleaded Joth.
Brigg laughed again, and with a merry backward glance proceeded to slide down the banisters; then slipped out of the house by the back door to keep his appointment.
He had not returned two hours later, and Jonathan, his letter finished, lay awake in bed, listening for him, so that when the door of his room opened he naturally thought it was his brother come to announce his return, and starting up, said softly: “Brigg?”
“It’s me, Jonathan,” replied his mother.
She had not called him Jonathan for years, and his heart thrilled to it. “Mother!” he exclaimed. He put out his hand in the darkness and caught her sleeve, felt for her arm and drew her to him. Mary sat down on the bed and stroked his hair. It was like it used to be before her marriage, thought Jonathan, just the two of them together. A flood of memories rushed upon him: worn out by the emotional excitement of his quarrel with his father, he could not withstand them; he buried his face in the crook of his mother’s arm and kissed the soft hollow passionately. “Mother, mother!” he cried softly, and his hot tears scalded her flesh.
“Jonathan, Jonathan,” moaned Mary in her lovely voice: “I wish you wouldn’t anger your father so.”
Jonathan’s whole body stiffened. “Is that all you’ve come to say to me?” he demanded coldly.
“What’s this man Hoastler to you?” wept Mary.
“Oastler, mother,” Jonathan corrected her savagely. After a pause he went on: “I must do what my conscience tells me is right, mother. I’ve been a piecener and I know what their lives are. It’s only right to tell you,” he concluded sternly: “That I have written to the Leeds Mercury giving facts which support Mr. Oastler’s letter. I shall despatch my letter to-morrow.”
“Oh, Joth!” murmured the anguished Mary. “Whatever will your father say?”
“Whatever he says you won’t hear it, mother,” said Jonathan eagerly, his protective love reasserting itself. “You mustn’t tell him. I shall tell him; I’ll tell him to-morrow morning at the mill. There’s no need for you to be concerned in it at all.”
“Joth, Joth,” murmured Mary. She took his head between her hands and kissed him fondly. Not concerned in it! When her two dearest (for Sophia would never be as dear to her as Joth) were at war! And that Joth should think she was afraid of Will, needed protection from his anger! It struck her as strange, sad and yet somehow a little humorous, that a son should not be able to understand that his mother had known his father before he was born. Will was, after all, a prior acquaintance—she had heard Joth use that phrase once, and it came back to her now. She smiled a little over this thought, holding Joth’s head against her heart, where it had so often lain in those bad days before she was Will’s wife. But when she had kissed her son again she went away very sad, for she saw that what she had always feared had come to pass: her husband and her son had found a subject to quarrel on for which each deeply cared, which involved the deepest principles of their lives. Strike at the cloth trade, at Syke Mill, and you struck the thing which Will, after Sophia, perhaps even before Sophia, cared for most: while the poor, the injured, the oppressed, were dearest in Joth’s sight. Yes, nature had formed them to quarrel, and now they had found something to quarrel about, thought Mary; and as she lay at Will’s side, listening to his heavy breathing and the light murmur of Sophia, her gentle soul shrank in fear from the coming struggle.
3
Her forebodings were amply justified. There was a fearful scene when Joth coldly and calmly told his father that he had despatched the letter, then a period of uneasy suspense, then a more fearful scene when the next week’s issue of the Leeds Mercury proved to contain the fateful document, father and son glaring at each other with tense muscles and dilated eyes, like animals ready to spring at each other’s throats.
His son’s letter infuriated Will in a variety of ways. He thought it silly, high-flown and inaccurate in its facts, we well as treacherous to himself and Syke Mill; and he hardly knew whether to be more hurt because Jonathan had dated it from New House and thus revealed his identity, or because he had signed it Bamforth instead of Oldroyd, and thus partly concealed it. “Bamforth, forsooth!” exclaimed Will furiously, pointing out the offending word to Mary later. It had never occurred to him that Jonathan’s name was Bamforth; Jonathan was his eldest son; Will had married his mother—a little late, perhaps, but better late than never. “Bamforth, forsooth!” repeated Will, dashing away the paper irritably as he remembered that his wife could not read.
“It’s his real name, Will,” protested Mary, “after all.”
At this Will showed such a disposition to enquire from an attorney how Jonathan’s name could be altered, that the terrified Mary, who guessed how Jonathan would look on that, positively asked her husband about the contents of Joth’s letter in order to distract him from its signature. At this reminder of his wrongs Will stamped and swore, his face and neck swelling and crimson with rage; and fuming across the yard burst into the office where Jonathan sat over the Syke Mill accounts to inform him again, shaking the crumpled newspaper in his face the while, that he was the damnedest young fool in the Ire Valley, and that Will was not going to stand any nonsense of that kind and his son might as well know it. (In reality the impossibility of breaking Mary’s heart by doing anything too drastic to Jonathan held Will in an iron band, just as the impossibility of breaking his mother’s heart by leaving New House held Jonathan; both men were fretted by this obligation, which they did not consciously recognise, but it held them securely.)
Jonathan did not mind his father’s anger, which he expected, but he was surprised and deeply wounded by the unexpected attitude of Brigg. Brigg, who was not quick on the uptake about anything but dyeing, watched his father and brother raging at each other over the copy of the Mercury with a puzzled air; then he retired to a corner of the dyehouse with the paper, and slowly read the offending letter, pondering solemnly over every word. Next morning he came to Joth with a look of hurt bewilderment and reproach in his bright brown eyes, and enquired:
“Did you really write that letter, Joth?”
“Yes,” said Jonathan firmly.
Brigg gave him a look of deep reproach, shook his head and went away muttering. An hour later he came up to Joth again, and enquired in a hurt tone: “But why didn’t you say it was all right at Syke Mill?”
“Because it isn’t all right,” protested Jonathan, exasperated. “The children work thirteen or fourteen hours a day, you know they do.”
“They have time off for meals,” objected Brigg: “And anyway, it’s all right in Syke Mill. Father’s a good master. You shouldn’t have written that letter.”
This from Brigg simply amazed Jonathan, who was not accustomed to be criticised by his younger brother, and he replied hotly. Brigg looked at him doubtfully and went away; later in the day Jonathan heard him explaining the matter solemnly to Sophia as a dreadful blunder on poor Joth’s part. Sophia thought it all very vulgar; it would have been much better, she considered, if the Oldroyds had been dukes or princes or something aristocratic of that kind, and then these vulgar questions of hours and newspapers and mills would not arise. Jonathan, however, who did not know this, was unutterably hurt by Brigg’s attempt to alienate Sophia; what was Sophia to Brigg, after all? Sophia was Jonathan’s sister, not Brigg’s. Jonathan tried hard not to say anything to Sophia about the Oastler correspondence, but eventually his pride was melted by his love, and he drew her a lurid picture of the lives of the little pieceners. “You see, Sophia,” he informed her gravely: “You would be a piecener if father were a p
oor man.” Sophia, affronted, raised her voice and wept; Will of course was furious when he heard the cause of her tears, and Brigg said loudly that it was a shame to torment the poor little thing. It was now Jonathan’s turn to look at his brother reproachfully, but Brigg, though he coloured, simply turned aside his head and said nothing. That night he went off to Marthwaite without telling his brother, and when Jonathan, hearing his footsteps outside several hours later, went down to let him in, it appeared that Brigg had made other arrangements, for Jonathan met the maid servant on the stairs. Jonathan, angry and disgusted, told Brigg what he thought of him: it was bad enough, he said, to come in with one’s breath smelling of beer and that horrible look on one’s face—this referred to the sparkle which always dwelt in Brigg’s bright eyes when he had been making love—but to drag a maid out of her bed! The unkindness! The lack of consideration! (Joth refrained from dwelling on the moral dangers of the proceeding for fear of putting ideas into his brother’s head.) Formerly Brigg had borne these harangues with good-tempered meekness, but to-night he flared, up, and shouted at the top of his voice:
“Anyhow, it’s better than writing that letter!”
“Hush!” said Jonathan, with an apprehensive glance at his father’s door.
“Aye, you may well say hush!” threw out Brigg in a vindictive tone. He shouldered his brother aside and went off to his room without another word.
Jonathan, lonely and very miserable, collected the offending Mercury from the parlour and took it upstairs with him. He spread it out on the bed, and kneeling down, read his own cadences carefully through twice, not without some of the pride of the author who sees himself in print for the first time, which, however, he sternly repressed. When he had finished he struck the paper lightly with his outstretched hand.
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