The Reckoning (45 page)

‘
I see,' said Sophie, though she didn't really, never having
seen a machine in operation.

‘
Well, now, I must shew you round,' Jasper resumed. He
turned to look up at the building Sophie was staring at. 'This
is what we call Number Two Mill. The old Number One is
that building over there, and the red brick structure you can
see at the end of it is what used to be the 'prentice house. Of
course we don't use 'prentices now – it's all free labour.'

‘
Is that a good thing?' Héloïse asked. 'I know we used to
send you pauper children as apprentices. It seemed a good
idea to train them to do a useful job, so that they could
support themselves honestly.’

Jasper answered evenly, though his expression was veiled.
‘It might have been a good idea, but it never really worked.
This is a much better system. The overseers didn't like
working the pauper children, and having to beat them to keep
them at their tasks. Now it's their own parents who work
them, and take responsibility for discipline and so on. A man
has the right to chastise his own child, hasn't he?'

‘Are there many children here?'

‘
About sixty – that's children under sixteen. And we have
forty-nine women and unmarried girls, and twenty-eight
adult males, not counting the overseers.'

‘So few men?' Héloïse said in surprise.

‘
They're the skilled spinners and engineers. The women
and children do all the other jobs. They take better to the
discipline. Well, shall we go in? I think I can promise you a
sight you will never forget.’

*

Half an hour later, he was helping Sophie to a chair in his
office, and hovering anxiously while Héloïse applied her
vinaigrette to her fainting daughter's nose.

‘
Some wine,' Jasper suggested anxiously. 'Shall I fetch some wine for her? Shall I send someone for a physician?
Perhaps she is ill.'

‘
No, I don't think so,' Héloïse said calmly. 'She will be
better by and by. It was very hot in the spinning-rooms.'

‘
Yes, it has to be kept hot so that the threads don't break,
but of course we get used to it and stop noticing how airless it
is. Oh dear, I am so sorry! I wouldn't have had this happen
for the world.’

Sophie was beginning to revive, enough to push the
smelling-bottle away and struggle to sit up.

‘I'm all right now, Maman.'

‘
Very well, but just sit quietly for a moment,
chérie.’

A few moments more, and Sophie was well enough to feel embarrassed. 'I'm sorry to make such a nuisance of myself –'

‘
Oh! Good Lord, no, no nuisance at all,' Jasper said at
once, reddening. The heat can be overpowering.'

‘
It wasn't the heat. It was the noise and the machines and –
and everything,' Sophie said lamely.

There were beads of perspiration on her face, but they were
nothing to do with the heat of the factory, nor even its airless
ness and strange smells. It was the machines themselves that
had affected her. Room after room of them, roaring,
grinding, thumping, throbbing, moving their inhuman arms
with such inhuman regularity, as though invested with some
ghastly purpose of their own. And amongst them the workers
had seemed dwarfed, frail creatures enslaved by the machines,
scurrying like ants to tend their abominable needs and meet
their endless demands.

Man had made the machine, she knew that as a fact – but
to be inside a manufactory at work was to feel that it was the
machine that ruled. It had taken over from its human spon
sors, and could not now be governed. A sense of unstoppable
power that threatened to blot out humanity had battered at
her sensibilities and brought her to the edge of fainting.

Jasper looked as though he understood a little of what she
was feeling. 'It can be overwhelming, the first time you see
them in action,' he nodded sympathetically. 'And yet, it's
wonderful, too, when you think what they can do! Such an
abundance can be made, where there was scarcity before; so
many goods –'

‘
The children,' Sophie said suddenly out of her own
thoughts, interrupting him, 'were so small. When I saw the
little ones crawling under those great iron things, I was so
frightened. I thought of my little brother Benedict –'

‘
Oh, but those children were not so young as Benedict, my
love,' Héloïse said. 'Consider that poor peoples' children are
always smaller.'

‘
We don't like to take them under ten years old,' Jasper
said. 'Indeed, I would never do so, except that sometimes the
spinner insists on having his whole family with him, including
a younger child.'

‘
Ah, then it is just like the mines,' Héloïse said. 'Lord
Anstey was telling me the same thing about the mines.'

‘
I wouldn't know about that, ma'am. But some mills take
them as young as seven, and I would like to see the practice
made an end of. Little ones under ten are simply too young to
understand the work, the conditions are too harsh for them,
and the hours too long. So I told the Committee last year –
Sir Robert Peel's Committee. Sir Robert is hoping to put the Ten Hours Bill before the House next year, as you probably
know –'

‘
Yes, Mr Hobsbawn, and I should very much like to discuss
it with you,' Héloïse said gently, 'but I think perhaps another
time. I would like to take Miss Morland home now.'

‘
Oh, of course – I'm so sorry. Thoughtless of me! How do
you feel now, Miss Morland?'

‘
Better, thank you. But I should be glad to go home.’

‘
I'll pass the word for your carriage at once.'

‘
I shall leave the window down a little as we drive, Sophie,
and that will revive you. Mr Hobsbawn, may we trespass
further on your time, and ask you to dine with us today?
Then perhaps after dinner we could discuss the mills in more
detail?'

‘
But of course, ma'am. And thank you – I shall be
delighted to dine.’

*

The journey back to Hobsbawn House gave Sophie much to
reflect on: the manufactory, with its locked gates and the
inhuman demands of the machines to begin with. The work,
indeed, was not so very hard, even she could see that – most
of the labour about a farm was harder, and much more
dangerous and disagreeable. And the heat inside the mill would
not be so unpleasant as the crippling cold endured by field-
workers in winter. And for the children, the kind of work they
were doing was much what they would have been doing for
their parents at home anyway.

But it was the unnaturalness, the ceaseless rhythm of the power-gigs, their massive, thoughtless regularity which she
believed would be hard to bear. She could not endure it for half an hour: what must it be like to have to work there for
twelve or thirteen hours a day with no rest or respite? A man
digging in a field might stop for a moment to ease his back, to exchange a word with his neighbour, to watch a flight of birds
pass overhead; but in the manufactory there was no stopping
while the machines ran.

And when the work was done, the hands emerged not into
the genial greenness of nature, but into grim, grey streets,
with the sky shut out by towering mills, and obscured by
bitter smoke and drizzling soot. No pleasant stream to gaze at, or to fish in, but the stinking River Irwell, sluggish with refuse, effluvia, and the foul-smelling residues pumped out
from the dye-works and tanneries along its banks. No cottage to go home to, with its own scrap of garden to grow beans aid
cabbages in, but a dark room in one of those filthy tenements
they were passing, so meanly built that a man standing
amongst the offal and rubbish in the middle of the street
could have touched the houses to either side by stretching out his hands, and could have looked into the first-floor windows
only by reaching up on tip-toe.

She remembered Mr Farraline talking about the mills, his
enthusiasm, almost rapture over the machines, and she
wondered how he could feel like that about them. It was
perhaps different for Mr Hobsbawn, she thought, for she
knew he had been born to it, had begun working in the mills
himself
(fancy!)
when he was eight years old, so it was all the
life he knew. The machines were very clever inventions, she
saw that, but how anyone who, like Mr Farraline, had the
choice, could want to be around them when they were in
operation was more than she could understand.

The carriage passed from the hideous environs of the Irwell
and the mills, through streets growing gradually wider and
more handsome, with public buildings any town would be
proud of, and grand houses belonging to wealthy people, and
pulled at last into the sweep of Hobsbawn House.

‘
How are you feeling now, my Sophie?' Héloïse asked as
they entered the hall. She turned to survey her daughter's
pale face, wondering whether it had been a good idea after all
to bring her. She had wanted to give her a change of scene,
and had hoped that the more varied social life of the town might bring her out of herself. Sophie had been mourning
Larosse for two years now, and at her age that was long
enough. It was time for her to fall in love again, and get married.
But she had not expected Sophie to be so affected by the mills,
and she had plainly been brooding on the journey back here.

‘
I'm quite all right, Maman,' Sophie said at once, and
smiled at her mother's anxious look. 'I didn't care very much
for the machines, that was all.'

‘
Hmm. Well, the air was very foul, too. You must take a
turn around the garden,
ma mie,
to refresh yourself. Ah, but
look how many cards have been left! Mr Hobsbawn was right
about that, at least. We must ask him who these people are,
and make up a dinner party. And we must ask him when the
Assembly nights are, too. I wish you to have some dancing
while you are here. And perhaps there may be a theatre, or a concert-hall.'

‘
You don't need to worry about me, Maman,' Sophie
began. 'I'm quite —’

There she stopped. As she spoke she had been watching her
mother sort through the cards which had been left on the hall table by the morning's callers, and amongst the large number
of ladies' cards, some accompanied by eldest-daughter cards
with a top corner turned down, there was one which by its
size and shape stood out as a gentleman's.