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Roy Glashan's Library
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"IS Mr. Cotton at home?" The butler opened the door and gazed in some perplexity at the figure on the doorstep. Her voice was commanding, while her face and form bore marks of breeding, and even of elegance, but her clothing was cheap and shabby. After a moment's pause he looked down at her boots, and noting that they were thickly coated with the free while dust of the king's highway, he resolved to bar her entrance.
"What name?" he asked mincingly.
"It would convey no meaning," was the answer.
What is your business?"
"My business is private."
The man continued to stare. He gained boldness from the slight quiver perceptible in the woman's voice.
"Well, be off then," he said sharply. "You can't see the master if you haven't an appointment."
The woman's eyes flashed at the insult. "How dare you speak to me in that manner? Go this instant to your master and say I wish to see him."
There was a penetrating quality in her voice that impelled obedience, and the servant sullenly admitted the intruder within the massive doors,and hurried off with his message.
The woman gazed around the great pillared hall apprehensively. The reaction from her fit of indignation had left her listless and inert, and the luxury and wealth that were visible everywhere overwhelmed her with a sense of oppression. Apparently of some thirty years of age, her personal charms were expressed in a wealth of hair and slightly Semitic features.
"Inside!" she murmured. "So much for bluff:"
Her almond eyes roving restlessly round were attracted by the portrait of an old man with white hair and blue eyes which was embellished by a tarnished gilt frame. It was the likeness of Christopher Cotton, the Quaker founder of the great house of Christopher Cotton & Co. Ostensibly trading in cottons and printed calicoes, the ships that formerly sailed from the port of Bristol brought in a more lucrative business to the benevolent-looking ancestor, for they dealt in profitable black wares—slaves. The firm was proud of its long pedigree, and every advertisement boldly recorded the date of its establishment. And nobly to preserve all the old traditions, the slaves still played an important part in the destinies of the trading-house, although, as a tribute to more advanced civilisation, their colour had been changed to white.
Rebecca Pheasant, who now stood in the hall, was one of the many who were being ground to powder between the millstones of the huge sweating system in force at the workrooms of Cotton & Co. For months she had laboured there, sitting shoulder to shoulder with anaemic work-girls, weaving in common with them the rounded shoulders and the roughened forefinger. But there was a barrier that separated her from her companions, whose existence was betrayed by the mute evidence of such trifles as the crescent moon at the base of her finger-nails, and a voice whose only accent was the accent of hopelessness.
Ill-fortune of a peculiarly malignant type had placed her there. When her father, Owen Pheasant, M A., of Cambridge, who was careful to miserliness, took the cheapest ride of his life—for, irrespective of fare, it began at Euston Station and ended in the Great Beyond—the same cab that shot him into the road with a broken neck cast his daughter into a world that was not in the least anxious to receive her. A total lack of preparation, ill health, nerves, and pure bad luck, had ended by leading her, through a strange chain of circumstances, into the sweating-dens of Christopher Cotton & Co.
As Peters walked reluctantly in the direction of his master's private room, he gave a slight sniff, and a faint, familiar odour stole on his nostrils, which caused the man to give instantly a louder sniff of disgust. It was the penetrating smell of unbleached calico. Not daring to return to the black-browed intruder, he sought his master, his fat cheeks wobbling like jellies.
At his entrance, the head of the firm, the great Christopher Cotton himself, faced abruptly from the window, where he stood reading a paper.
A few years over thirty, his shaven cheeks were as smooth and his eyes as blue as those of a boy. His wholesome and pleasant face bore a marked resemblance to the benevolent-looking ancestor in the gill frame. A close observer might trace in the face of the living man an expression that had been omitted from the portrait by the tactful painter. In a greedy glitter of the young man's eye and a vice-like grip of the teeth peeped out a faint resemblance to a shark.
"Well?" he asked abruptly.
Peters paused before speaking, then deciding to endow the visitor with the grace of youth, in order to make his announcement the more crushing, he spluttered out:
"A young person wishes to see you. It's my belief she is one of the hands from the factory."
Cotton tilted back his chin, and threw down the report of his own speech. Although keenly interested in his attempt to enter the House of Commons by the medium of a by-election, his first energies were centred on anything that remotely concerned his business.
"Show her in," he said.
When the fat butler returned, the woman following in his train, he received a shock, for at first sight of his visitor. Cotton's face changed.
"Miss Pheasant!" he exclaimed. "Please sit down."
The woman also staggered slightly at Cottons recognition, and a wave of crimson beautified her face.
"I never expected to find you here," she said. "Are you any connection of Christopher Cotton?"
Cotton bowed proudly. "I am the firm," he said. "Ichanged my name when my uncle took me into the concern."
There was a moment's silence. Rebecca's fine dark eyes were roving over the details of the magnificent room, while Cotton scanned her shabby garments with a cold, apprising eye, noting as he did so with a thrill of wonder that she had patronised his own cheap wares.
"To what am I honoured?" he began; but the girl cut him short.
"You are anything but honoured," she said bitterly. "I have no doubt you will feel you are insulted by this visit. You will remember the last time we met. I believe then I wounded your self-respect. Now let me administer balm to that wound by assuring you that the position has been righted. Briefly, then, I am one of your factory hands."
Cotton whistled softly. In his college days he, an uncouth undergraduate, had fallen in love with the black-browed daughter of his coach. He had only succeeded in inspiring her with a strong sense of aversion.
Every scornful look, and every slighting word, culminating with the crowning-point of her refusal of his offer of marriage, came back to him, and he looked at her sunken cheeks and worn boots with a sudden gleam of malice in his eve.
"The firm is honoured," he said suavely, "in possessing a lady of your abilities. Well, I was often impertinent in the past, so I will not be guilty now of the impertinence of curious questions, or of offering sympathy, although I am tempted on both points. To be brief, then, what is your business? The woman's eyes flashed, and she unrolled something she held tightly screwed up in her hand. Shaking it out, she displayed a lightly run-up blouse, of a flimsy red material.
"Do you recognise this?" she asked grimly.
"Certainly," was the prompt answer. "One of the firm's leading lines of blouses. One and eleven-pence halfpenny. Excellent value,"
"Then listen to me," went on the girl. "For months I have sat in a crowded room stitching at these garments, and watching others stitch at them, until my eyes have failed me. I have seen them finished by the dozen, by the gross, by the hundred. But to-day, something stronger than I am, something stirred inside me to Stan in protest for myself and the others. I thought that perhaps the grinding-process and the starvation scale of the wage might be due to the dishonesty of some manager or overseer, and I determined to take my appeal right to the head of the firm. And I find you here, ChristopherChadwick, whose character I probed only too well in the old days at Cambridge."
Cotton's mouth twitched.
"I imagine you are lodging some i plaint against your scale of wage," he said. "Well, Miss Pheasant, I have had much experience in the past of your personal charm and of your powers of repartee, but I have no knowledge of your capabilities as a worker. However, on purely sentimental grounds, and for old associations' sake, I shall be pleased to increase your wages as a mark of my deep respect."
Rebecca's face distorted with fury at the sneering words. In this one speech alone, bristling with mean malice, Cotton had taken his full measure of revenge.
"Your generosity comes too late," she said. "I have done my Last stitch for your firm. What I did before was in ignorance of your connection with it. But I have one word to add. You say this blouse is a cheap line. I say you are wrong. I say it is one of the dearest articles ever placed before the public—put together in tears, and sapping the youth and energy of the helpless women on whom you are trading. And I say more," she added, her voice suddenly rising—"I say there is a curse on it."
She threw the blouse on the table and swept from the room.
Cotton stood for a few minutes biting his nails. Even in her humiliation Rebecca Pheasant possessed the power of making him feel small.
With a shrug of his shoulders he resumed his reading.
But he was destined to be interrupted. No knock heralded the advent of his second visitor. She rustled in, sweet and dark as a ripe mulberry, and fresh as the morning, in a dainty, embroidered gown.
Cotton's brow cleared as his wife snatched the paper from him.
"Put down that stupid stuff!" she demanded, "and let the future Prime Minister attend to his wife. I want to know who was that majestic young person who nearly knocked me over in the corridor just now."
"Merely one of the hands."
Stella arched her brows.
"Dear me! what a grand scale the firm works on. I thought she was a duchess, Good gracious! What a curious thing! Did she bring it?"
Her eye, attracted by the vivid red, had swooped down on the blouse, and she examined it with amused curiosity.
"Whatever is it meant to be?" she inquired. "Surely not a blouse?"
"It is a blouse," said Cotton gravely, ""equal in finish and material to any Bond Street product, and its price is one and elevenpence halfpenny. You should encourage home industries, Stella, and buy from the firm. As it is, you cost me a small fortune in clothes."
Then they both burst out laughing, for Cotton's pride in his wife's appearance was even stronger than her own love of finery: and in that laugh the memory of the morning's episode passed away.
FEW men crammed more energy into twenty-four hours than Cotton. At the present time, in addition to directing the destinies of his business, his electioneering campaign took every spare moment.
Success was vital to him, for Stella, when she deserted her titled relatives by marrying into trade, had insisted that he should atone for the lack of a prefix to his name by tacking on a couple of letters after it.
As Conservative candidate his chance was regarded as a dead one, but his marvellous powers of organisation and his strong personality soon changed the position of affairs, and a close fight was generally anticipated.
It was a week before the election, and a Saturday afternoon, and Cotton stood in his library, in company with his agent, waiting for the motor that was to convey them to Wakeley, a part of his constituency.
"Well, Bean, what is the prospect for this afternoon?" he asked absently, as he glanced over his notes. "A soft job, I take it."
Bean shook his head despondently. He was an irritable slip of a man, with upward-bristling eyebrows and wispy moustache that imparted to his face an odd resemblance to a prawn.
"I'm afraid it won't be such a picnic as we imagined," he said despondently. "I foresee trouble."
Cotton stopped in his task of checking his typewritten notes.
"How's that? " he queried sharply.
"I've just had a 'phone from Wakeley that a discharged hand of yours means to start a row and queer your pitch."
"Rebecca Pheasant?"
Cotton spoke involuntarily, and was annoyed to see the inquisitive twist of Bean's eyebrows at his indiscreet remark.
"That was the name. It seems that she's been hanging round there for a week or so past."
"Well, and what is my formidable opponent going to do? Hurry up, man, the car will be round in a minute."
The impatient scorn in Cotton's voice roused the agent to defend his position.
"It doesn't do to look down one's nose at trifles," he asserted. "This election will be a close fight, and we are reckoning on the weight of the Wakeley vote to secure your seat. You calculate you have your hand on these votes: large employer of British labour, improved condition of your factories, recreation clubs for your employees, and the rest of the bag of tricks. But these factory hands are as restive as a young colt at the first smell of powder. They hang together, and their true sympathies are all with the Labour candidate. If this girl gets up to-night and heckles you with leading questions about the scale of wage you pay, unless you have an answer ready there will be no end of a rag."
Cotton buttoned up his leather coat impatiently.
"My good man," he said, "I must admit I can't feel absolutely scared by this enterprising young woman. There is a professional humourist at every election nowadays. At the worst she will give my audience a good laugh."
But Bean stuck to his point doggedly.
"This is a different affair to a suffragette scrimmage," he said. "You will find that the sympathies of the men will all be with this girl. She is a handsome piece, too, and, I'm told, not badly educated. Depend on it, some one else is behind her, and it is a put-up affair."
"Doubtless," answered Cotton stiffly.
But as he stepped into the Panhard his thoughts reverted to his last meeting with Rebecca Pheasant. He saw her face distorted with fury, and her brooding eyes.
Instinctively he knew that this was no piece of electioneering finesse. It was the outcome of personal antipathy on the part of the girl—the first phase in the elemental mutiny of the oppressed against the tyrant.
"Con—found the girl," he said softly, as the car sped forward.
Bean turned his goggles inquiringly towards Cotton.
"The girl will know what to say," he remarked. "I suppose when she begins to bait you, you have your figures ready."
"That's all right," answered Cotton suavely. "Considering it is a month since that girl was sacked, and she hasn't troubled to do a stroke of work since, it looks as if she had done pretty well out of the firm."
But the tight set of the candidate's mouth betokened keener tension than the legitimate amount exacted by the steering of the Panhard.
The car hummed along, past the redbrick suburbs, till the brand-new villas met the green wave of cabbage-fields crested with the white foam of flowering beans. As the beautiful Surrey country stretched before them Cotton increased his speed until they seemed to stand still while the leafy roads rushed up to meet them.
With the fleetness of forty horses they passed an old Elizabethan house, creeper-bound, and buried up to its chimneys in trees, and to Bean's astonishment Cotton's grim mouth relaxed in a smile. From an invitation card stuck up in her looking-glass, to refresh Stella's memory, he knew that a garden-party was in full swing behind those ivied walls, and that his wife in her daintiest finery was perhaps trying to urge a croquet ball through its appointed hoop.
Patch by patch the green began to wear from the ground as the chalky shoulder-bone of the hill forced itself through its grassy covering. On the other side of the rise, in the hollow, lay Wakeley. the theatre of Cotton's conflict for Parliamentary honours.
Cotton's face grew grave as they drew near the town. His confidence in a successful meeting died away as Bean's warning words revolved in his head. He was not a man to underrate the importance of petticoat influence when exercised in the right quarter, for he was fully aware of the plastic nature of his own iron character under his wife's light touch. Regarded as a woman, Rebecca Pheasant was no more to him than a fly. but a fly wedged over his goggles would be enough to account for an accident fraught with gravest consequences if it chose the critical moment. It resolved itself into a question of the point of view.
Cotton thought of the close hall packed with factory employees, swayed by every passing gust, and he saw already the precious votes trickling between his fingers.
"Confound the girl," he muttered again.
The car shot round a corner, scraping a sharp curve with a warning hoot of the horn.
A group of people gathered on the road stampeded like a flock of geese and scuttled to either side of the track.
There was one exception to the sudden flight, for a shabbily-gowned woman plodded on stolidly alone. Without slackening his pace Cotton again sounded the warning note. The summons was shrill and imperative, but the girl heeded it no more than the pipe of a grasshopper With a muttered oath Cotton slowed up slightly, still hooting furiously The bystanders now added their shrill voices to the clamour, and one of them rushed forward and attempted to drag the obstinate woman from the path.
The next minute the motor was close on the girl. It seemed to Cotton that there was something familiar about the resolute bearing and the proudly held head. His business instinct swooped down on the red blouse that the girl was wearing, and he unconsciously pronounced it a product of his own firm.
"What's the girl's name?" he asked angrily. "Who is she? I have seen her before. Does she mean to make me pull up?"
Bean nodded.
"That's the ticket," he said. Then he added in sudden excitement: "Isn't it the girl Pheasant? Or I'm a Dutchman!"
Cotton instantly remembered the defiant figure in the ready-made clothes.
The next minutes passed in a whirl. Cotton steered to one side, in a desperate effort to scrape past the girl. The pace was too great to admit of brakes, and it needed expert judgment to pass in the narrow space between the high curb and the reckless pedestrian. The Panhard swept by, and at the same moment something fell and collapsed on the dusty road.
Then with a final jarring of brakes the car stopped dead. The candidate ran back to the group of people who had collected round the prostrate form. Bean followed more leisurely, and the chauffeur spoke to him as he jumped from the car.
"Never knew the guv'nor an inch off his driving before," he said. "This election business has made him jumpy."
Bean nodded. He arrived at the scene of the accident in time to see Cotton thrust his card into the hand of the nearest workman.
"I cannot possibly stop," he said, "I am due to address my constituents at Wakeley. I cannot express my sorrow for what has happened. You must all of you have seen that it was the purest accident."
"That it was, sir," was the answer. "You did everything in mortal power to stop."
"Mind, everything is to be done that money can do," continued Cotton. "Though I disclaim all responsibility, at the same time I mean to make the amplest compensation.
He hurried back to his motor, followed by a hum of approval.
"That's one of the right sort," was the freely voiced verdict. "'E ain't the kind to run over a body and then scorch off afore you can tike his number."
Cotton grasped the steering-wheel again and the car leaped on.
"We must make up for lost time," he said briskly. "One of the men there has a knowledge of first-aid, and he believes the wretched girl has broken her leg."
Bean looked at him keenly.
"I begin to have hopes of a quiet meeting now," he said. "What a wonderful stroke of luck to wing that particular girl."
Only the merest flicker of satisfaction, totally remote from a smile, swept for the friction of a second around Cotton's cleanly cut mouth: but in that glance the agent reverted to his original good opinion of the candidate's power of driving.
Bean proved himself to be a true prophet, for the meeting was a complete success. Backed with intelligent artisans, who followed every word of Cotton's clever address with keen attention, there was hardly a dissentient voice raised against the capitalist, who left the building amidst the cheers he had evoked ringing in his head. Crossing over to the "Stag," he stopped there to refresh himself before his homeward drive. An hour slipped quickly away, and when Bean returned from a tour of the town he saw Cotton, flushed and eager, standing on the hotel steps surrounded by a knot of his supporters.
It was plain that the agent was alive with some unwonted excitement. His eyebrows and moustache worked convulsively, as if in obedience to hidden springs, and he elbowed the crowd unceremoniously in his haste.
His appearance did not escape Cotton's eye. He sprang down the steps towards him.
"You've something to tell me, Bean?" he asked rapidly. "What is it? Quick ! "
"You're right! That girl—Pheasant—I have heard—"
"Well?"
"She's dead! Struck her head, I believe. They've taken the body to the Police Station."
Cotton's face blanched.
"How will it affect me?" he asked quickly.
The agent's eyebrows worked.
"Not adversely," he answered briskly. "Everywhere the deepest sympathy is being expressed for you. They all agree that your behaviour was beyond reproach, and it is my belief"—he dropped his voice impressively— "that if you shell out handsomely it may turn out a gilt-edged security."
"Hush!" said Cotton sharply. "A promising young life ended. But she brought it on herself," he added.
He closed his mouth with a snap, and as Bean caught the relentless glitter of his eye he had a visionary glimpse of the swollen form of the mammoth capitalist englutting into its bulk all the small tradesmen who had also stood in the way.
"We will just go round to the station," resumed Cotton. "I wish to identify the body as the girl's. There was a crowd on the road, and—I was not keen on details—so I didn't look."
Arrived at the station, they were received by the Superintendent with every mark of respectful sympathy, and two minutes later were piloted down a stone-flagged passage into the mortuary.
Cotton did not flinch before the ordeal. Two shrouded forms lay side by side, keeping each other chilly company as they lay in their last sleep.
"Two bodies!" commented Cotton softly to the Superintendent. "Very sad! Is the other another accident?"
"I fear not, sir. This is the poor young thing they pulled out of the river to-day."
As he spoke he whisked back the sheet. Cotton's eyes bulged out of his head as he gazed at the miserable figure exposed, from whose garments the water still oozed in dark drops. Dank of hair, pinched of feature, with the grim lips just beginning to set in the sphinx-like smile of death, the face that challenged his startled gaze was that of Rebecca Pheasant.
He started back in horror. The next minute his business instinct warned him that he had made an unnecessary investment
"But—there is some mistake!" he stammered. "Who is this?"
"Name unknown, sir. Was driven to it very likely, for she looks half-starved. Fine-looking young woman, too. Ah me, there will surely be a reckoning!" sighed the Superintendent, filled with the sympathy attendant on a hearty meal.
"About the other poor young thing that had the accident," he continued briskly. "I understand you wish to make it up to her relations. Ah well! there's no doubt the money will do a lot to soften the blow *
As the man spoke he whisked away the covering, and then he started back in alarm, terrified by the expression of the candidate's face. It worked convulsively, in horrible spasms of agony.
Cotton had caught a glimpse of the other corpse, laid out in its scarlet blouse. The reckoning had met with swift settlement
Thrice the candidate strove to speak, but no breath whistled up through his dry lips. But when at last his voice came it was dull and even.
"This is not a case for compensation," he said quietly. "That is—my wife! "
His unnatural calm remained with him on his homeward journey. In the midst of the dreadful excitement that reigned in the great house, he alone seemed unmoved. Even his wife's maid, when she poured out her story, found her sobs checked by the rigid face of her master.
"It was all along of the blouse," she declared. "The poor mistress took it for a joke. She said you had chaffed her about not patronising the firm, and she meant to get even with you. She borrowed my skirt to go with it, and she intended to go to hear you speak at the meeting. 'It will be fun if he doesn't recognise me,' she said, 'seeing as it will be because I'm wearing his goods!'"
"That will do!" said Cotton hoarsely.
The maid shrank out of the room at the sight of his face.
Later in the evening he telephoned for his manager. The man arrived, ferret-faced and curious. He began to stammer out his condolences, but Cotton cut him short
"Enough of that! I wish to speak to you on a matter of business."
The manager stared. What manner of man was this who could speak of business while that stiff figure lay in the darkened room upstairs? But he felt relieved at the words.
"Yes, sir? "he said briskly.
"About the work-hands. See that their wages are raised."
The man jotted down the figure, then waited for further instructions. None came, so he timidly dared to jog his employer's memory.
"Of course, you wish to reduce the number of hands?" he asked.
"No."
The manager stared in surprised. He feared that the shock of his bereavement had turned Cotton's brain.
"But, sir, the profits," he stammered.
Profit! Cotton's overtaxed brain responded to the goad of the familiar word as to the prick of a spur. He snatched at it eagerly in his answer, but somehow the words got twisted and tangled into the current of an unfamiliar formula.
"What shall it profit a man," he asked wearily, "if he gain the whole world, and lose his—"
The last word was lost.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.