“Yes: so Gaines has just telephoned. It’s most unfortunate,” Mr. Langhope grumbled. He too was already beginning to chafe at the uncongenial exile of Hanaford, and he shared his daughter’s desire to despatch the tiresome business before them.
Mr. Tredegar had meanwhile appeared, and when Amherst had been named to him, and had received his Olympian nod, Bessy anxiously imparted her difficulty.
“But how ill is Mr. Truscomb? Do you think he can take us over the mills tomorrow?” she appealed to Amherst.
“I’m afraid not; I am sure he can’t. He has a touch of bronchitis.”
This announcement was met by a general outcry, in which sympathy for the manager was not the predominating note. Mrs. Ansell saved the situation by breathing feelingly: “Poor man!” and after a decent echo of the phrase, and a doubtful glance at her father, Mrs. Westmore said: “If it’s bronchitis he may be ill for days, and what in the world are we to do?”
“Pack up and come back later,” suggested Mr. Langhope briskly; but while Bessy sighed “Oh, that dreadful journey!” Mr. Tredegar interposed with authority: “One moment, Langhope, please. Mr. Amherst, is Mrs. Westmore expected at the mills?”
“Yes, I believe they know she is coming.”
“Then I think, my dear, that to go back to New York without showing yourself would, under the circumstances, be—er—an error in judgment.”
“Good Lord, Tredegar, you don’t expect to keep us kicking our heels here for days?” her father ejaculated.
“I can certainly not afford to employ mine in that manner for even a fraction of a day,” rejoined the lawyer, always acutely resentful of the suggestion that he had a disengaged moment; “but meanwhile–-“
“Father,” Bessy interposed, with an eagerly flushing cheek, “don’t you see that the only thing for us to do is to go over the mills now—at once—with Mr. Amherst?”
Mr. Langhope stared: he was always adventurously ready to unmake plans, but it flustered him to be called on to remake them. “Eh—what? Now—at once? But Gaines was to have gone with us, and how on earth are we to get at him? He telephoned me that, as the visit was given up, he should ride out to his farm.”
“Oh, never mind—or, at least, all the better!” his daughter urged. “We can see the mills just as well without him; and we shall get on so much more quickly.”
“Well—well—what do you say, Tredegar?” murmured Mr. Langhope, allured by her last argument; and Bessy, clasping her hands, summed up enthusiastically: “And I shall understand so much better without a lot of people trying to explain to me at once!”
Her sudden enthusiasm surprised no one, for even Mrs. Ansell, expert as she was in the interpreting of tones, set it down to the natural desire to have done as quickly as might be with Hanaford.
“Mrs. Westmore has left her little girl at home,” she said to Amherst, with a smile intended to counteract the possible ill-effect of the impression.
But Amherst suspected no slight in his employer’s eagerness to visit Westmore. His overmastering thought was one of joy as the fulness of his opportunity broke on him. To show her the mills himself—to bring her face to face with her people, unhampered by Truscomb’s jealous vigilance, and Truscomb’s false explanations; to see the angel of pity stir the depths of those unfathomable eyes, when they rested, perhaps for the first time, on suffering that it was in their power to smile away as easily as they had smiled away his own distrust—all this the wonderful moment had brought him, and thoughts and arguments thronged so hot on his lips that he kept silence, fearing lest he should say too much.
IV
JOHN AMHERST was no one-sided idealist. He felt keenly the growing complexity of the relation between employer and worker, the seeming hopelessness of permanently harmonizing their claims, the recurring necessity of fresh compromises and adjustments. He hated rant, demagogy, the rash formulating of emotional theories; and his contempt for bad logic and subjective judgments led him to regard with distrust the panaceas offered for the cure of economic evils. But his heart ached for the bitter throes with which the human machine moves on. He felt the menace of industrial conditions when viewed collectively, their poignancy when studied in the individual lives of the toilers among whom his lot was cast; and clearly as he saw the need of a philosophic survey of the question, he was sure that only through sympathy with its personal, human side could a solution be reached. The disappearance of the old familiar contact between master and man seemed to him one of the great wrongs of the new industrial situation. That the breach must be farther widened by the ultimate substitution of the stock-company for the individual employer—a fact obvious to any student of economic tendencies—presented to Amherst’s mind one of the most painful problems in the scheme of social readjustment. But it was characteristic of him to dwell rather on the removal of immediate difficulties than in the contemplation of those to come, and while the individual employer was still to be reckoned with, the main thing was to bring him closer to his workers. Till he entered personally into their hardships and aspirations—till he learned what they wanted and why they wanted it—Amherst believed that no mere law-making, however enlightened, could create a wholesome relation between the two.
This feeling was uppermost as he sat with Mrs. Westmore in the carriage which was carrying them to the mills. He had meant to take the trolley back to Westmore, but at a murmured word from Mr. Tredegar Bessy had offered him a seat at her side, leaving others to follow. This culmination of his hopes—the unlooked-for chance of a half-hour alone with her—left Amherst oppressed with the swiftness of the minutes. He had so much to say—so much to prepare her for—yet how begin, while he was in utter ignorance of her character and her point of view, and while her lovely nearness left him so little chance of perceiving anything except itself?
But he was not often the victim of his sensations, and presently there emerged, out of the very consciousness of her grace and her completeness, a clearer sense of the conditions which, in a measure, had gone to produce them. Her dress could not have hung in such subtle folds, her white chin have nestled in such rich depths of fur, the pearls in her ears have given back the light from such pure curves, if thin shoulders in shapeless gingham had not bent, day in, day out, above the bobbins and carders, and weary ears throbbed even at night with the tumult of the looms. Amherst, however, felt no sensational resentment at the contrast. He had lived too much with ugliness and want not to believe in human nature’s abiding need of their opposite. He was glad there was room for such beauty in the world, and sure that its purpose was an ameliorating one, if only it could be used as a beautiful spirit would use it.
The carriage had turned into one of the nondescript thoroughfares, half incipient street, half decaying lane, which dismally linked the mill-village to Hanaford. Bessy looked out on the ruts, the hoardings, the starved trees dangling their palsied leaves in the radiant October light; then she sighed: “What a good day for a gallop!”
Amherst felt a momentary chill, but the naturalness of the exclamation disarmed him, and the words called up thrilling memories of his own college days, when he had ridden his grandfather’s horses in the famous hunting valley not a hundred miles from Hanaford.
Bessy met his smile with a glow of understanding. “You like riding too, I’m sure?”
“I used to; but I haven’t been in the saddle for years. Factory managers don’t keep hunters,” he said laughing.
Her murmur of embarrassment showed that she took this as an apologetic allusion to his reduced condition, and in his haste to correct this impression he added: “If I regretted anything in my other life, it would certainly be a gallop on a day like this; but I chose my trade deliberately, and I’ve never been sorry for my choice.”