Chapter VIII

OLIVER’S PROCLAMATION IN THE MILL AND THE BAKEHOUSE.

OLD Peter Constable had been a good master in more senses than one—a better master, inasmuch as he and his servants understood each other, than his son seemed likely to prove. Peter had kept his men long in his service, but it so happened that at this date, from death and other weeders-out of grey-headed workpeople, the men in the mill were comparatively young. The head man, who had been promoted recently, was not older than Oliver himself, and as yet supported such dignity as he had to maintain in a sheepish fashion, while his trumpet still gave forth an uncertain sound. Accordingly, the new master’s announcement, though it excited a good deal of curiosity, drew forth no protest, not even a private one, in this quarter.

Oliver’s little speech was made with a great effort in a pause of the drowsy hum of the machinery and the equally lulling splash of the water—churned into the likeness of foaming milk by the rapid revolutions of the mill-wheel. In the middle of the self-consciousness and confusion which beset him, and disturbed the clear sequence of his best thoughts and ideas, Oliver made it be heard and understood that he was to keep on the mill and take the chief management in the room of his father. He succeeded in saying that he expected the men to do him faithful service, while he would try his best to make their close connection the mutual benefit it ought to be. He hoped that each man of them, as well as himself, saw only one interest between master and servant, and would be ready to back him in trying to do his duty. Therefore, as he would not stint them in their wages, without a good cause which he should put plainly before them, or ask them to make bricks without straw—that is, to grind corn without sufficient water power, mechanical power, reasonable time and competent guidance—so he trusted they would be prepared to play their part in furnishing the due amount of labour, and not demean themselves to any of the tricks of palming off bad, slovenly, half-completed work, for good and thorough work, which were bringing labour into general disrepute, and threatening to become the curse and ruin of the integrity and prosperity of England, where employers and employed were concerned. Oliver told them frankly that for their sake—no less than for his own, he would not consent to take scamped work, or any known lazy, knavish substitute for honest work, from the best and most skilled workmen, in other respects, among them.

In return, his workpeople had a right to require from him not only punctual payment of their wages, but intelligent consideration of their position, helpful sympathy with their efforts, forbearance for their blunders, as he should claim tolerance from them for his mistakes. Although he had thought it advisable to begin by warning them of what he could not and ought not to permit in their relation, he also told them what they were not called upon to bear from him—heartless indifference to their welfare, and unprincipled gambling with flesh and blood, as the means of keeping up the game of speculation rather than fair trade. He was ready to trust them for the loyal discharge of their obligations, till they were put to the proof. He asked them in return to trust his father’s son till they learned to know him better as their master.

If it was a strain upon Oliver Constable to make such a speech except to his cronies, and he only made it by a kind of mental and physical convulsion, it was also a strain upon the young men in the mill to listen properly. They could not compose themselves to catch half the words, far less their meaning. They grinned and gaped at each other, and every man looked how his immediate neighbour was conducting himself, rather than attended to Oliver. Yet they did not fail to develop instantly keen criticism of what might be called Oliver’s style of public speaking. ‘Goin’ to school and college hain’t made him speak out, or thump with his fist in the right place, like old Sam Snuffles the Methody, as roars hisself hoarse, and lashes all around him so that a chap has to duck his head for safety. Old Sam beats the young master, old Sam does, hout and hout,’ reflected one lad, in a vein of class conceit and agreeable superciliousness. Another promising youth, who had been reared at a seaport, made an apt comparison in his mind between the speaker and a heavily-laden vessel, sailing against the wind, labouring and tacking; ‘and if I was only near him, I would lay you any odds but I’d hear his timbers groaning,’ the ingenious youngster silently pursued the simile which he was reserving for future use.

But Ted Green, the head man in the mill, never got beyond the news that ‘the concern’ was not to stand still or be transferred to other ownership, which might have endangered Ted’s late rise in the world. He pondered throughout the whole of the remaining sentences, on the substance of the introductory remark. He wished he could go home to his wife and repeat to her the welcome assurance. Wishes were useless in the present case, they could not even free Ted from the responsibility of acting as the mouthpiece of the men under him in replying to the address. Naturally, Ted only replied to what had gone into his ears and taken hold of his mind. Still, as the intelligence grasped by him had been of a pleasant sort, one might have expected that there would have been warmth, at least, in the partial response. But Ted was stolid as well as stupid—a large, heavy-looking, fair-complexioned young man, with the fairness increased to positive pallor by such a plentiful application of flour to the skin as would have put to shame the thick powdering preceding the thicker painting of the fine ladies of the last century. Ted leant against the door-post with that hopeless incapacity to stand upright which is mostly shown by sailors on firm ground. ‘You aire, sir,’ said Ted, abruptly and concisely, with idiotic vagueness and apparently the utmost phlegm.

Oliver had to knit his brows and think for a moment before he recognised that the two words replied concisely to the single statement that he was to keep on the mill, while they were totally irrelevant to what he considered the gist of the speech which he had pumped up by a severe struggle out of the depth of the temporary chaos of his mind. It sounded as if Ted and his fellows dismissed that with cynical contempt and only troubled themselves to grapple with the bit of information which was practical in their eyes.

‘Well, I take it, since there is no question of parting company, me and my mates here don’t object to present terms—not at present,’ Ted resumed and ended with stiff and wary, but unmistakable condescension, the moment the decision had, in his judgment, passed over to the men. ‘Not at present, sir,’ the young millers confirmed their leader’s opinion with one voice, as if it were worked by the mill machinery, and rendered a little husky and obscure by the pervading dust.

Oliver’s gravity was nearly upset. At the same time, he was aware of a slight sense of repulse, and consequent disappointment, which he said to himself proved him to be the inveterately sanguine and hasty beggar with whose foolish traits he ought at this date to have been familiar enough to overcome them, and set their reactionary influence at defiance.

But he could not help looking forward to receiving a little more encouragement in the bakehouse, were it only in an indignant apprehension of some of his inferences, and a dogged assertion of a working baker’s rights, including that of testing the quality of his work, and of dealing with his master, in the full bloom of class prejudice, as his natural enemy. It was all very well to speak of the superior comfort and general agreeability of a miller’s life over that of a baker. The former had the advantage in the matter of picturesqueness like the toil of the day labourer in the fields over the artisan’s—above all the petty tradesman’s occupations. Yet there could be no comparison—taking the two trades _en masse_—of which was the more intelligent of the two.

There were honourable exceptions of ploughmen-poets and young shepherds, among the lowly pastoral hills, who had lived to become—like David, king of Israel—leaders of men. But the exceptions only proved the rule.

In the same line of argument the sallow-faced journeymen bakers, with their complexions bleached by so much of their lives spent in the atmosphere of the oven, even the forward lads who, after the ancient fashion of Pharaoh’s chief baker, poised on their heads baskets full of ‘all manner of baked meats’ or more ponderous loaves, and traversed the streets of Friarton, had their minds and their very faces sharpened by contact, at once wider and closer, with their fellows. And the bakers were as far in intellectual advance of the manly young louts of millers whose employment consisted chiefly in heaving up and down sacks of corn and flour, and mechanically feeding the mill, as the millers were before ordinary farm servants.

Oliver counted, too, on Jim Hull, his father’s old factotum and right-hand man, such a long-established ‘institution’ in the bakehouse and shop, that Peter Constable had been wont to say, Jim was not only a great deal better acquainted with the details of the business than he, Peter, had been able to continue, so that he should not like to venture on any step without Jim’s concurrence, but that, in fact, he would hardly consent to such a liberty taken with him and his position. He knew his own importance, and while he had the interest of the master as much at heart as any Constable of them all could have it, Jim was just a trifle inclined to take the rule into his own hands and reign on his own account.

Oliver had compared Jim Hull to those mayors of the palace who had founded the Carlovingian dynasty in the west of Europe; but while Oliver himself felt by no means inclined to act the lackadaisically sentimental part of the long-haired monarchs of France, he believed he might reckon on his man for something shrewd and telling, whether on his master’s side or against him. And Oliver secretly sighed for a foeman worthy of his steel, for the stimulus of the sharpest opposition to balance the enervating languor induced by his sister Fan’s despairing acquiescence, and Ted Green and his companions’ mortifying indifference where Oliver’s will was concerned.

The Constables’ extensive bakehouse and shop at Friarton bore no resemblance in any respect to Friarton Mill. In place of being a venerable structure—half superannuated, it was a comparatively new building furnished with every modern improvement, in full activity. Indeed it had been erected by Peter Constable’s enterprise when he began to flourish greatly in his twin trades. The large and somewhat staring shop had an intimation inscribed over the door, ‘Peter Constable, Baker and Confectioner,’ and the pledge was fulfilled in the display of every description of British bread within the windows. The shop and its double sign stood out boldly and with perfect confidence among the shops in the old-fashioned High Street where the weekly corn market was still held, on the pavement before the door of the Ayott Arms Inn. Old Peter Constable had attended the corn market with the regularity of clock-work, and had enjoyed the opportunity afforded him, in the intervals between inspecting samples of grain, of looking over the way with entire complacency at the handsome shop and bakehouse which were among the fruits of his industry and enterprise. The immediate vicinity of the shop had also enabled Peter to entertain hospitably select little parties of his customers among the farmers, in the back-shop, and to conclude bargains with them there in greater privacy than could be found in the street, or in the commercial room of the inn. Fan Constable, in walking up Friarton High Street, had not looked upon the great bake-shop with the same favourable eyes. But she was a true and high-spirited woman. She had never gone out of her way or got up an excuse to avoid passing her father’s shop-door. She had walked straight by it, though she might not have been able to prevent her foolish colour from rising, in company with Mrs. Fremantle, and while Fan saw Clara Houghton advancing in the opposite direction. Fan would have risked meeting Clara on the doorstep, and if the vicar’s daughter had declined to own acquaintance with a valuable ally and an old school-fellow to boot because of the fire of half-mischievous, half-malicious eyes which Fan knew so well were watching the encounter, then let the friendship come to a violent end on the spot, the miller and baker’s daughter would have said without hesitation, though its destruction must undoubtedly have proved a blow to Fan. She had never failed her father or even betrayed any repugnance to joining him at the shop when she was in town with him on market days, and he was to drive her home in the pony phaeton, which to please Fan had superseded a gig, just as the gig had in its time, to please Fan’s mother, taken the place of a spring cart.

Fan had only not been equal to getting up an enthusiasm for the contents of pans and trays, in well-raised loaves and crisp biscuits, and she did not see that she was called upon—good housekeeper though she was—to be one of the severely initiated in the inner mysteries of bread made with or without yeast, steamed or not steamed. She was guilty of greater wilful ignorance in the matter of bread than in any other domestic question; though of course she was acquainted with such an A B C piece of knowledge as how to distinguish a cottage from a pan loaf when she saw them, while she was perfectly aware that the Polley girls had a joke among them and their companions, of her affected ignorance in this particular.

It had certainly vexed Fan when her father, in his satisfaction with his bread, would illustrate its excellence by lightly patting the crust or gently pinching the crumb. She confessed to herself she hated to see him on an emergency, when he had sent the shopman out and no other man or boy was in the way, quietly step behind the counter, and in the innocence of his heart, sell a twopenny loaf to a working woman or a halfpenny biscuit to a child. And Fan had the conviction that rather than witness Oliver, with his college breeding, and the gentleman-like character impressed on his very twists and grimaces, demean himself to dispense the staff of life, as his father had done before him, to his fellow-townspeople, she would herself go behind the counter and wait on the mocking public. It is to be feared that Fan would have offered cakes and buns with a tragedy air which would have repelled all save the most persistent buyer.

Oliver had assured himself that he had long ago got over the boyish weakness—barely excusable in a boy, and the paltriest of all follies in a man—which, to do men justice, a large proportion of them cast off with the growth of their beards, of wincing under the knowledge that his father had been in trade—in the primitive trade—of a baker. Oliver had fancied he had well-nigh forgotten the sneaking sense of affront at the pit whence he had been dug. But it seemed the sillier and more Jeames-like a social definition was, the more it stuck in the consciousness of its victim. Oliver, to his disgust, experienced a sensation of personal discomfort, an inclination to avoid public attention, when he walked into the Friarton bake-shop in the light of the heir come to take possession. He had to relieve his self-disgust by defying his self-consciousness, standing up as large as life and lounging purposely in the sight of the bystanders for a few minutes. He had to sit down in the retirement of the back-shop and smoke a pipe to recover his equanimity as he meditated on the manliness of Thackeray’s Philip on his way through the world, bowing with perfect nonchalance and satisfaction from the ‘knife-board’ of an omnibus, to his fashionable friends in their carriages. Oliver ended by recalling the occasion when as a small boy he was led by his father through the same premises, then in the process of building. Little Oliver had enjoyed the inspection at least as much as his father had enjoyed making it with him, and had listened with pride while the owner of the place told the child—when there was no thought of Oliver’s developing into a scholar—a gentleman far above such low aims as baking and selling bread—that the buildings would be his one day—he should get the chief good out of them after they had paid their cost to the builder. ‘And you’ll make something worth while out of them, Nolly? You’ll be up to all the new improvements that ain’t mere catchpennies? You’ll bake and sell the best and cheapest bread in the county—won’t you now, my little chap?’

‘Yes, Far’er,’ little Oliver had answered, with unhesitating cheerfulness, as children will undertake without doubt or fear to conquer kingdoms.

After that recollection, Oliver had only to rise and perform a pantomime of freeing his arms from an encumbrance, to get rid of what shreds remained of that parti-coloured garment of the conventional fool, which we have most of us considerable difficulty to escape from wearing, each in his turn.

Oliver was fit to go to the bakehouse, and, in the sweat of his brow, deliver his speech a second time—in this instance to his bakers. They were a set of men both young and middle-aged, some portly, some lean, all more or less yellow rather than white-skinned—like the millers, for these were not the lads who spent a large part of their day in the open air distributing the bread. These were journeymen who had not their time at their own disposal, and even if they had, would not, unless in perhaps one exceptional case, have devoted their leisure with the enthusiasm of genius to the pursuit of any branch of natural history, taking the student out into the fields and woods like the famous baker whose book was the iron-bound coast and the bleak moors of Caithness.

The sallow complexions of the bakers were brought out in relief by their white caps as they stood with their shirt sleeves rolled up to their elbows. The men had left their baking boards for the day, but still had to keep a vigilant eye on the ovens in the background. As the party came forward to listen to the new owner of the business, they fell naturally into the attitude of a deputation, with one man representing their leader pushed well into the foreground, who instinctively caught up his apron under his left arm as a sign in character. But he was not Jim Hull.

Jim Hull was in a white suit like the rest. But his suit was conspicuously shrunk at the wrists and ankles as if he had grown away from the original fit in his growing days and yet had adhered to the measurement in anticipation of the time when he should begin to grow down, not up, to bend nearer the earth instead of raising his head high above it. Jim stood a little apart from the group of bakers and their future master, as Oliver addressed his views to his workmen. Contrary to Oliver’s anticipations, Jim preserved at least the attitude of neutrality in the encounter.

Jim Hull was an elderly man with a compact face, as if his rather neat and regular features had been compressed so as to take up the least room. He had a remarkably clear, keen eye under the grizzled hair which hung low on his square forehead, for a man approaching threescore. He had been a faithful servant in the Constables’ service from youth to approaching age. He was not without a kind of feudal sentiment both to the family and the business. It gave him a certain amount of gratification that they should still remain united—that Master Oliver had not cut the whole concern and turned his back on it as if it were a disgrace. On the other hand, Jim had his own deeply rooted prejudices and his own schemes, and he was capable, as his former master had foreseen, of becoming factious and troublesome if he were thwarted in his opinions, and mortified in his conceit.

Jim had not in the least anticipated the course Oliver Constable was taking; so far from it, Jim had entertained a project of risking his bachelor savings and enabling a favourite nephew who was already a tolerably successful master baker in a neighbouring village, to buy the Constables’ business, and carry it on in Friarton with the further help of Jim’s experience.

But, to do the old man justice, he would have resigned this private plan with less reluctance if he had been satisfied with Oliver Constable’s rearing, or with the young man personally.

Jim listened and reflected, standing all alive and vigilant with his hands clasped behind him. ‘Peter Constable kneaded his batch by my side, many’s the day, when we were lads. He could set the sponge better than I could, when we were fellow-apprentices to his father. Peter’s mind was in the baking business from the first. Now young Oliver has been bred different, and his mind has been in his books—that’s what makes me mistrustful of his proposal, and not altogether agreeable to it, though it comes from his father’s son and does him no discredit—I’m bound to say,’ thought Jim. ‘’Arry Reddock can look out for himself, and I’m not pledged to take him up, if I were sure of this turn of affairs. But young Oliver’s an amature—that’s what he is—and no good comes of amatures. He’ll make ducks and drakes of as fine and solid a business as ever three generations got together; and he’s a crotchety lad, too. Hear to him, what he’s telling the lads! about everything being above-board—as if there ever was a trade without its secrets—and of his not passing over a man’s shirking his work and disobeying orders, as if any tradesman—be he ever so flourishing—can afford in them times to quarrel with his best hand, maybe, because he has a mind of his own, or will go on the spree nows and thens, or is not careful to make his batches every bit as light and sweet as they may be. Master Oliver has to find this is a world in which a man must live and let live and act conformable to circumstances.

‘He ought to be rare and perfect as a master that demands a perfect servant, and them is not the days for that uncommon commodity when the servants are like to have the ruling of the masters—instead of the masters the picking and choosing of the servants. This young fellow has to learn life out of college, and he had as well learn his trade at the same time before he takes upon him to be a master baker.’

But Jim Hull kept his counsel in the meanwhile. It was the foremost man of the group of bakers who spoke out in reply to Oliver. ‘Do you mean to say, sir,’ said the man, not disrespectfully, but with a flavour of offence in his tone, ‘that there are to be a set of fresh arrangements made here, and that we are to consent beforehand—without knowing what we are doing—to a whole lot of new-fangled ways?’ And there was a murmur of assent to the objection from the men behind him.

‘I don’t see the obligation, Webster,’ said Oliver, who simply knew the man by name.

Webster was a young man of not more than five-and-twenty, though he was put prominently forward by his fellows. He had bushy sandy-coloured hair, and a large up-turned nose with deep lion-like lines drawn from its base to the corners of his mouth.

Oliver spoke calmly, but he felt in some degree taken aback and ruffled by the commentary on his words. ‘The business has been conducted on the same principles all along. But if I see it advisable to make alterations, I shall let you know, when you must be prepared to agree to them, or quit my employment.’

‘All right, sir,’ said Webster, promptly. ‘Of course you are entitled to say that much, while you will not refuse to allow that there are two at a bargain-making.’

So the brief colloquy, which was only ‘feeling the way’ on the part of both master and man, came to an abrupt conclusion.

Oliver returned to the back-shop, taking Jim Hull with him.

‘Sit down, Jim, and make yourself comfortable,’ said Oliver, bringing out a bottle of ale and glasses from the familiar cupboard and taking the second armchair. ‘Now, what about that lad Webster who spoke up for the others?’

‘He’s a good baker when he likes, which is more than can be said of most of your speechifiers and politicians,’ said Jim.

‘Then he’ll like to bake well for me, or he’ll turn out of the bakehouse,’ said Oliver, holding up his glass to the light.

‘Stop a bit, not so fast,’ said Jim, putting down his glass for a moment, after a testing sip. ‘Your father always kept good ale in cask and in bottle because he gave it time to clear and ripen, so he did. You had better think—if I’m at liberty to speak,’—he paused, and Oliver nodded. ‘You see, I was afraid new men might mean new manners,’ went on Jim, clearing his throat. ‘What I was going to say comes to this, where are you to get a better man to put in Sam Webster’s place? You must consider that, sir, before you speak of dismissing Sam hot and sharp. Good bakers, in a country town in especial, ain’t as plentiful as blackberries, now-a-days, Master Oliver; and if Sam go and stump the neighbourhood—that, and reading, and holding forth on them newspapers is second nature to the fellow—if he tell everywhere what an oonreasonable master young Constable is like to be, why you may have to whistle long enough for a new baker fit to stand in the shoes of Sam, though he do be off and on troublesome.’

‘You and Sam had better wait and find if I am an unreasonable master,’ said Oliver, with a smile. ‘Who is letting his imagination go ahead, I should like to know? I made no unreasonable stipulation. I did not bid the men do by me what I am not willing to do by them. If I am to be a master baker I shall not feed my customers on husks and worse, Sam Webster and his allies may rest assured of that—and in order that I may be honest in all my dealings, I will have proper work out of my men.’

Jim looked dubious. ‘Excuse me, sir, but do you know what proper work of this sort is, and what are the conditions of work in general at this date? You don’t mean to be oonreasonable, but a man’s intentions and his deeds don’t always square.’

‘Granted. But do you mean there are trades-unions and strikes among the Friarton bakers, and that we may be reduced any day—not as a matter of eccentric taste, or in obedience to a doctor’s prescription, but as a case of necessity—to eat unleavened bread like the Jews in the Passover week, or to bake at home, a lost art where housewives and maid-servants are concerned?’

‘It ain’t a laughing matter,’ Jim rebuked the young man’s levity; ‘and if the things themselves ain’t here—and I have not heard tell yet of trades-unions and strikes among the bakers in Friarton—do you think their spirit ain’t about in the air? Do you think the bakers alone of working men,’ continued Jim, with an accent of injured _esprit de corps_, ‘will be content to remain without a voice, ay, and a precious influential voice, in all that concerns them nearly—their hours of work, their mode of work, and mode of pay, and all the rest of it? Are the bakers to be left behind when every other specie of working man is having his say? I should not have consented to that myself, when I was a young baker; now, I am nigh an old man,’ Jim cooled down at the recollection, ‘and I’m free to admit that I don’t see much good comes of speechifying and vapouring,’ ended Jim, drinking off his ale and drawing a long sigh after the refreshment.

‘Well hit at me, old “specie,”’ thought Oliver, while he said, quietly, ‘Nobody is preventing any man from having his say in what particularly concerns him. It is one of the privileges that living in the present generation has given him. I should be the last person to object to it. I intended the men to take what I said to them into consideration; only I can’t, for the life of me, see what just and rational argument they have to bring against it; I touched on no debatable point. If they are worth their salt in morals as in ability, they are surely willing to give a fair exchange of work for wages. And if the men have a grain of common sense, they must grant that no organised system of work can be maintained without one person in authority to enforce discipline on those under him.’

‘The capital and labour question ain’t so easily settled as you suppose, Master Oliver,’ said Jim, shaking his head doggedly if somewhat evasively. ‘At the best it is a very ticklish matter, and I only hope you won’t burn your fingers meddling with it.’

‘I can guess you are of opinion that I am not setting about the task in the proper fashion; but wait till you see how I get on, Jim,’ said Oliver, good-humouredly; ‘don’t damp my spirits by forecasting evil.’

‘I wouldn’t wish to do that,’ said Jim, more formally than heartily or cheerfully. ‘That don’t belong to my place. But I’m nigh an old man, about as old as your father, and grown grey with the Constables: if putting my experience at your service could have been of any use, it belonged to my dooty.’

‘Thanks,’ said Oliver, quickly. ‘You are quite right to ease your conscience. But I am afraid I must earn my experience like the rest of the world—I must have my fling—try to work out my theories, and when they break down, then begin to mend them—do you take me, Jim?’

‘Oh, ay, sir,’ said Jim with polite dryness, ‘and I had as well say good morning to you, and go about my own business in the bake-shop.’

Oliver let him go, and sat alone twisting his stalwart body in his armchair. ‘The game would not be worth the candle,’ he reflected, ‘if one paid heed only to these clods in the mill and cheeky swaggerers in the bakehouse; and there is old Jim, conservative to the backbone, even while he is full to the tongue of class prejudice and jealousy. He feels the world turning upside down with him; yet he sets his face against the only hope of control for the new spirit. But the principles of right and wrong are eternal and as capable of being fought out in a mill and a bakehouse as on any other battle-field.’