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Functional Programming in JavaScript
 Functional
Programming
in JavaScript
LUIS ATENCIO

MANNING
SHELTER ISLAND
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ISBN: 9781617292828
Printed in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 – EBM – 21 20 19 18 17 16
 To my wonderful wife, Ana.
Thank you for your unconditional support
and for being the source of passion and inspiration in my life.
 brief contents
PART 1 THINK FUNCTIONALLY ..................................................1
1 ■ Becoming functional 3
2 ■ Higher-order JavaScript 23

PART 2 GET FUNCTIONAL........................................................55

3 ■ Few data structures, many operations 57
4 ■ Toward modular, reusable code 84
5 ■ Design patterns against complexity 117

PART 3 ENHANCING YOUR FUNCTIONAL SKILLS ......................151

6 ■ Bulletproofing your code 153
7 ■ Functional optimizations 180
8 ■ Managing asynchronous events and data 205

vii
 contents
preface xv
acknowledgments xvii
about this book xix

PART 1 THINK FUNCTIONALLY .......................................1

1 Becoming functional
1.1
3
Can functional programming help? 5
1.2 What is functional programming? 5
Functional programming is declarative 7 Pure functions and
■

the problem with side effects 9 Referential transparency and

■

substitutability 13 Preserving immutable data 15

■

1.3 Benefits of functional programming 16

Encouraging the decomposition of complex tasks 16
Processing data using fluent chains 18 Reacting to the
■

complexity of asynchronous applications 19

1.4 Summary 22

ix
x CONTENTS

2 Higher-order JavaScript 23
2.1 Why JavaScript? 24
2.2 Functional vs. object-oriented programming 24
Managing the state of JavaScript objects 31 Treating objects ■

as values 32 Deep-freezing moving parts 34 Navigating

■ ■

and modifying object graphs with lenses 37

2.3 Functions 38
Functions as first-class citizens 39 Higher-order functions
■ 40
Types of function invocation 43 Function methods 44
■

2.4 Closures and scopes 45

Problems with the global scope 47 JavaScript’s function
■

scope 48 A pseudo-block scope 49 Practical applications

■ ■

of closures 50
2.5 Summary 53

PART 2 GET FUNCTIONAL ............................................55

3 Few data structures, many operations 57

3.1 Understanding your application’s control flow 58
3.2 Method chaining 59
3.3 Function chaining 60
Understanding lambda expressions 61 Transforming data ■

with _.map 62 Gathering results with _.reduce 65

■

Removing unwanted elements with _.filter 68

3.4 Reasoning about your code 70
Declarative and lazy function chains 71 ■
SQL-like data:
functions as data 75
3.5 Learning to think recursively 77
What is recursion? 77 Learning to think recursively
■
77
Recursively defined data structures 79
3.6 Summary 83

4 Toward modular, reusable code 84

4.1 Method chains vs. function pipelines 85
Chaining methods together 86 ■
Arranging functions
in a pipeline 87
 CONTENTS xi

4.2 Requirements for compatible functions 88

Type-compatible functions 88 ■ Functions and arity:
the case for tuples 89
4.3 Curried function evaluation 92
Emulating function factories 95 ■
Implementing reusable
function templates 97
4.4 Partial application and parameter binding 98
Extending the core language 100 ■
Binding into
delayed functions 101
4.5 Composing function pipelines 102
Understanding composition with HTML widgets 102
Functional composition: separating description from
evaluation 104 Composition with functional libraries 107
■

Coping with pure and impure code 109 Introducing point-free

■

programming 111
4.6 Managing control flow with functional combinators 112
Identity (I-combinator) 112 Tap (K-combinator) 113
■

Alternation (OR-combinator) 113 Sequence (S-combinator) 114

■

Fork (join) combinator 115

4.7 Summary 116

5 Design patterns against complexity 117

5.1 Shortfalls of imperative error handling 118
Error handling with try-catch 118 Reasons not to throw
■

exceptions in functional programs 119 Problems with ■

null-checking 121
5.2 Building a better solution: functors 121
Wrapping unsafe values 122 ■ Functors explained 124
5.3 Functional error handling using monads 127
Monads: from control flow to data flow 128 Error handling with
■

Maybe and Either monads 132 Interacting with external

■

resources using the IO monad 141

5.4 Monadic chains and compositions 144
5.5 Summary 150
xii CONTENTS

PART 3 ENHANCING YOUR FUNCTIONAL SKILLS ..........151

6 Bulletproofing your code 153

6.1 Functional programming’s influence on unit tests 154
6.2 Challenges of testing imperative programs 155
Difficulty identifying and decomposing tasks 155
Dependency on shared resources leads to inconsistent results 157
Predefined order of execution 158
6.3 Testing functional code 159
Treating a function as a black box 159 Focusing on business
■

logic instead of control flow 160 Separating the pure from

■

the impure with monadic isolation 161 Mocking external

■

dependencies 164
6.4 Capturing specifications with property-based testing 166
6.5 Measuring effectiveness through code coverage 172
Measuring the effectiveness of testing functional code 173
Measuring the complexity of functional code 177
6.6 Summary 179

7 Functional optimizations 180

7.1 Under the hood of function execution 181
Currying and the function context stack 183 ■
Challenges of
recursive code 186
7.2 Deferring execution using lazy evaluation 188
Avoiding computations with the alternation functional
combinator 189 Taking advantage of shortcut fusion
■ 190
7.3 Implementing a call-when-needed strategy 191
Understanding memoization 192 Memoizing computationally
■

intensive functions 192 Taking advantage of currying and

■

memoization 196 Decomposing to maximize memoization 196

■

Applying memoization to recursive calls 197

7.4 Recursion and tail-call optimization (TCO) 199
Converting non-tail calls to tail calls 201
7.5 Summary 203
 CONTENTS xiii

8 Managing asynchronous events and data 205

8.1 Challenges of asynchronous code 206
Creating temporal dependencies among functions 207
Falling into a callback pyramid 208 Using continuation-
■

passing style 210

8.2 First-class asynchronous behavior with promises 214
Future method chains 216 Composing synchronous and
■

asynchronous behavior 221

8.3 Lazy data generation 224
Generators and recursion 226 ■ The Iterator protocol 228
8.4 Functional and reactive programming with RxJS 229
Data as observable sequences 229 Functional and reactive
■

programming 230 RxJS and promises 233

■

8.5 Summary 234

appendix JavaScript libraries used in this book 235

index 239
 preface
When I was in college and graduate school, my class schedule was focused on object-
oriented design as the sole methodology for planning and architecting software sys-
tems. And, like many developers, I began my career writing object-oriented code and
building entire systems based on this paradigm.
Throughout my development career, I’ve learned and followed programming lan-
guages closely, not only because I want to learn something cool, but also because I’m
intrigued by the design decisions and philosophy that each language fosters. Just as a
new language provides a different perspective on how to approach software problems,
a new paradigm can achieve the same effect. Although the object-oriented approach
continues to be the modus operandi of software design, learning about functional
programming will open your eyes to new techniques that you can use on their own or
in parallel with any other design paradigm that fits your application.
Functional programming has been around for years, but to me it was only a minor
distraction. I had heard and read about the benefits of Haskell, Lisp, Scheme, and,
more recently, Scala, Clojure, and F# in terms of expressiveness and being highly pro-
ductive platforms; even Java, which has traditionally been known as a verbose language,
has functional artifacts that make code more succinct. Eventually, the minor distrac-
tion became impossible to avoid. And guess what? JavaScript, that object-oriented
language everyone uses, can be turned around 180 degrees and used functionally. It
turns out that this is the most powerful and effective way to use JavaScript. It took me
a long time to discover this, and in this book I want to make you aware of it so you
don’t have go on wondering why your JavaScript code is becoming so complex.

xv
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
 CHAPTER VII—THE EARLY LIFE OF
JOHN BRADSHAW

O
NCE upon a time, a West Indian slave owner was in
conversation with three master-spinners and they spoke of
labor conditions in the North of England. “Well,” he said, “I
have always thought myself disgraced by being the owner of slaves,
but we never in the West Indies thought it possible for any human
being to be so cruel as to require a child of nine years old to work
twelve and a half hours a day, and that, you acknowledge, is your
regular practice.”
That, and worse, was the early life of John Bradshaw, son of
Reuben Hepplestall. Peter went into Reuben’s factory: he took the
meatless bone Reuben contemptuously threw to a dog: he became
an overlooker. Once he had been a fighter, when he was raising
himself from the ranks into the position of a small factory owner:
then contentment had come upon him and fighting power went out
of him. Whom, indeed, should he fight? He was not encountering a
man but a Thing, a System, which at its first onslaught seemed to
crush the spirit of a people.
The later Hepplestalls looked back to Reuben, their founder, and
saw him as a figure of romance. The romance of Lancashire is rather
in the tremendous fact that its common people survived this System
that came upon them from the unknown, that, so soon, they were
hitting back at the Thing which stifled life. Capital, unaggravated,
had been tolerable; capital, aggravated by steam, made the Factory
System and the System was intolerable.
Reuben might have chosen to make exceptions of the Bradshaws,
but he did not choose it. They had to be nothing to the husband of
Dorothy Hepplestall, they had to go, with the rest, into the jaws of
the System. So Peter lost his liberties and found nothing in the
steam machines to parallel the easy-going familiarities between
master and man which had humanized his primitive factory. A bell
summoned him into the factory, and he left it when the engines
stopped, which might be twelve and a half or might be fifteen hours
later. He gave good work for bad pay and his prayer was that the
worst might not happen. The worst was that Phoebe might be driven
with him into the factory, and the worst beyond the worst was that
Phoebe’s son might be driven with her. So he gave of his best and
tried with a beaten man’s despair to hold off the worst results of the
creeping ruin that came upon his home.
Reuben was guiltless of personal malignancy. He had decided that
the Bradshaws must not be favorites, that they must do as others
did, which was a judgment, not a spite, and Reuben did not control
the system, but was controlled by it. He, like the Bradshaws, must
do as others did. He could, of course, have got out: his difference
from them was that he could abjure cotton. But he did not do that,
and so long as he stayed in, a competitor with other manufacturers,
he was obliged, if he would survive commercially, to use the
methods of the rest. They may or may not have been methods that
revolted him by their barbarity, and it is probable that, even in that
callous age, what of the true gentleman was left in him was, in fact,
revolted. That is, at least, to be deduced from the completely
isolating veil he hung between Dorothy and the factory. His house
was the old home of the Hepplestalls, near the factory but not, like
many manufacturers’ houses, adjacent to it. It was sufficiently far
away for him, practically, to live two lives which did not meet. He
was a manufacturer and he was the husband of Dorothy’
Hepplestall; in the factory one man and at home another, not lying
at home about steam because there he never spoke of it, preserving
her romantic illusions about his work by keeping her remote from it.
She might have had her curiosities, but she loved Reuben, she
consented at his will to be incurious and the habit remained. It
might have remained even if love had faded, but their love was not
to fade. And the county took it that if Dorothy Verners had married a
manufacturer, the factory was not to be mentioned before her. In the
presence of ladies they did not mention it to Reuben, though, in the
bad times, when the poor-rate rose and half the weavers came upon
the parish, Reuben was roasted to his face with indignant heat after
the ladies had left the table.
He was neither of the best nor of the worst. He was not
patriarchal like the Strutts and the Gregs who, while conforming to
the System, qualified it with school-houses and swimming baths, nor
did he go to the extreme of ordering his people into the cottages he
built and compelling them to pay rent for a cottage whether they
occupied it or not. He didn’t run shops, charging high prices, at
which his people had to buy or where they had to take goods in part
payment of wages. Such devices, though general, seemed to him
petty and extraneous to the factory; but in the factory he was a
keen economist and one of the results of the System was that the
masters looked on wages not as paid to individuals but to families.
That was so much the normal view that a weaver was not allowed to
go on the parish unless he proved that his wife and children worked
in the mills and that the whole family wage was inadequate for their
support.
Phoebe had to go and, when he was old enough, that is to say at
five, John also went. The legal age for apprentices was seven—they
were workhouse children bound to the master till they were twenty-
one—but John was a “free” laborer, so, until the Act of 1819, which
made nine years and twelve working hours the minimum, John was
“free” to work at five, to be a breadwinner, to add his magnificent
contribution to the family wage which kept the Bradshaws from the
workhouse.
The factory bell was the leit motif of his life, but the Bradshaws
had a relic of their past which made them envied. They had a clock,
and the clock told them when it was time to get up to go to the
factory. Others, clockless, got up long before they needed and
waited in the chill of early morning, at five o’clock, for the door to
open. The idea of ringing the bell as a warning half an hour before
working hours began had not occurred to any one then, and people
rose in panic and went out, cutting short sleep shorter, stamping in
snow (or, if snow is sentimental, is it ever particularly joyous to rise,
with a long day’s work ahead, at five and earlier?), waiting for the
doors to let them in to warmth. No one was ever late. The fines
made it expensive to be late, and the knocker-up, the man who
went round and for a penny or tuppence a week rattled wires at the
end of a clothes-prop against your bedroom window till you opened
the window and sang out to him—the knocker-up was a late
Victorian luxury. In John’s day, there was only the factory bell, and
one was inside the factory when it rang. The bell was the symbol of
the system, irritating the weavers especially, as the power-loom
increased in efficiency, and drove more and more of them to the
factories. The spinners, indeed, had had the interregnum of the
water-factory: it was not, for them, a straight plunge into the
tyranny of the system. The old hand-weaver, whose engine was his
arms, began and stopped work at will, which is not to say that he
was a lazy fellow, but is to say that he had time to grow potatoes in
a garden, to take a share in country sports and, on the whole, to
lead a reasonable life: and his wife had the art and the time to cook
food for him. When she worked in the factory, she had no time to
cook, and there was nothing to cook, either, and if she had worked
from childhood, she had never learned how to cook, and there was
no need. They lived on bread and cheese, with precious little
cheese. They rarely lived to see forty.
John, son of Reuben (though he did not know that), came to the
factory at five in the morning and left it, at earliest, at seven or eight
at night, being the while in a temperature of 75 to 85. As to meal-
times, why, adults got their half hour or so for breakfast and their
hour for dinner and the machinery was stopped so that was just the
time for the children to nip under and over it, snatching their food
while they cleaned a machine from dust and flue. Bad for the lungs,
perhaps, but the work was so light and easy. John, who was small
when he was five, crawled under the machines picking up cotton
waste.
 There was a school of manufacturers who held, apparently
without hypocrisy, that this was a charming way to educate an infant
into habits of industry: a sort of work in play, with the cotton waste
substituted for a ball and the factory for the nursery. And they called
the work light and easy.
John was promoted to be a piecer—he pieced together threads
broken in the spinning machines, and, of course, the machine as a
whole didn’t stop while he did it, and it was really rather skilled
work, done very rapidly with a few exquisitely skilled movements:
and that was hardly work at all, it was more amusement than toil.
Only one Fielden, an employer who, many years later, tried the
experiment for himself, found that in following the to-and-fro
movements of a spinning machine for twelve hours, he walked no
less than twenty miles! Fielden was a reformer; he didn’t call this
light and easy work for a child, but others did.
It would happen that—one knows how play tires a child—John
would feel sleepy towards evening. He didn’t go to sleep on a
working machine, or he would have died, and John did not die that
way: he didn’t go to sleep at all. He was beaten into wakefulness.
Peter often beat him into wakefulness, and Peter did it not because
he was cruel to John but because he was kind. If Peter had not
beaten him lightly, other overseers would have beaten him heavily,
not with a ferule, but with a billy-roller, which is a heavy iron stick.
John also beat himself and pinched himself and bit his tongue to
keep awake. As the evening wore on it became almost impossible to
keep awake on any terms: sometimes, they sang. Song is the
expression of gladness, but that was not why they sang. And they
sang—hymns. It would have been most improper to sing profane
songs in a factory.
As to John’s home life, he went to bed: and if it hadn’t been for
Phoebe or Peter who carried him, he would often not have reached
bed. He would have gone to sleep in the road, and because he had
never known any other life than this, it was reasonable in him to
suppose that the life he led, if not right, was inevitable.
 He did not suppose it for long. You can spring surprises on human
nature, you can de-humanize it for a time, but if you put faith in the
permanent enslavement of men and women, you shall find yourself
mistaken. Even while John was passing from a wretched childhood
to a wretched adolescence, the reaction was preparing, and mutely,
hardly consciously at all, he was questioning if the things that were,
were necessarily the things that had to be. There was the death of
Peter, in the factory, stopping to live as a machine stops functioning
because it is worn out, and there was the drop in their family wages,
though John was earning man’s pay then. And there was the human
stir in the world, the efforts of workers to combine for better
conditions, for Trade Unions, for Reformed Parliaments, and the
efforts of the ruling classes, qualified by the liberalism of a Peel or
the insurgency of a Cobbett, to repress. There were riots, machine-
breaking, factory-burning, Peterloo, the end of a great war, peace
and disbanded soldiery, people who starved and a panic-stricken
Home Secretary who thought there was a revolution.
Most of it mattered very little to John, growing up in Hepplestall’s
factory, which escaped riot. It escaped not because its conditions
were not terrible but because conditions were often more terrible. As
employer, Reuben trod the middle way, and it was the extreme men,
the brutes who seemed to glory in brutality, at whom riots were
aimed. John knew that there were blacker hells than his, which was
a sort of mitigation, while mere habit was another. If life has never
been anything but miserable, than misery is life, and you make the
best of it. One of the ways by which John expected to make the best
of it was to marry. He married at seventeen, but when it is in the
scheme of things to be senile at forty, seventeen is a mature age.
The family wage was also in the scheme of things: the exploitation
of children was the basis of the cotton trade: and though love laughs
at economics as heartily as at locksmiths, marriage and child-bearing
were not discouraged by misery, but encouraged by it. John did not
think of these things, nor of himself and Annie as potential providers
of child-slaves. He thought, illogically, of being happy.
 And, considering Annie, not without excuse. She was of the few’
who stood up straight, untwisted by the factory, though it had
caught her young and tamed her cruelly. There was gypsy blood in
her. She, of a wandering tribe, had been taught “habits of industry,”
and the lesson had been a rack which, still, had not broken her. It
hadn’t quenched her light, though, within him, John had the fiercer
fire. With him, the signs of the factory hand were hung out for all to
see. Pale-faced and stunted, with a great shock of hair and weak,
peering eyes, he was more like some underground creature than a
man living by the grace of God and the light of the sun—he had
lived so much of life by the artificial light of the factory in the long
evenings and the winter mornings; but he had a kind of eagerness,
a sort of Peeping Tom of a spirit refusing to be ordered off, and a
suggestion of wiriness both of mind and body, which announced that
here was one whose quality declined obliteration by the System.
Lovers had a consolation in those days. Bone-tired as the long
work-hours left them, it was yet possible by a short walk to get out
of the town that Hepplestall had made. These two were married,
and a married woman had no manner of business to steal away from
her house when the factory had finished with her for the day, but
that was what Phoebe made Annie do. That was Phoebe’s tribute to
youth, and a heavy tribute, too. She, like them, had labored all day
in the factory and at night she labored in the home, sending them
out to the moors as if they were careless lovers still—at their age!
Phoebe kept her secret, and she had the sentiment of owing John
reparation. It was not much that she could do, but she did this—
growing old, toil-worn, she took the lion’s share of housework, she
set them free, for an hour or so, to go upon the moors. And Annie
was grateful more than John. Already, he was town-bred, already he
craved for shelter, already the overheated factory seemed nature’s
atmosphere to John.
She threw herself on the yielding heather, smelling it, and earth
and air in ecstasy, then rolled on her back and looked at the stars.
“Lad, lad,” she cried, “there’s good in life for all that.”
 “Aye, wench,” he said, “there’s you.”
“Me? There’s bigger things than me. There’s air and sky and a
world that is no beastly reek and walls and roofs.”
“It’s cold on the moor to-night,” he said, shivering.
She threw her shawl about him. “You’re clemmed,” she said,
drawing him close to the generous warmth of her. “Seems to me I
come to life under the stars. Food don’t matter greatly to me if
there’s air as I can breathe.”
“We’re prisoned in yon factory, Annie. Reckon I’m used to the
prison. There’s boggarts on the moor.”
She laughed at his fears. “Aye, you may laugh,” he said, “but there
was a gallows up here, and boggarts of the hanged still roam.”
The belief in witches, ghosts and supernatural visitants of all kinds
was a common one and it was not discouraged by educated people
who hoped, probably, to reconcile the ignorant to the towns by
allowing terrifying superstitions of the country to remain in
circulation. But Annie’s gypsy strain kept her immune from any such
fears: her ancestors had traded in superstition. “And,” he went on
seriously, “when the Reformers tried to meet on Cronkey-shaw Moor,
it’s a known fact that there were warlocks seen.” What was seen was
a body of men grotesquely decked in the semblance of the popular
notion of a wizard, with phosphorescent faces and so on. Somebody
was using a better way to scotch Reform than soldiers, but the trick
was soon exposed and meetings and drillings on the moors were
phenomena of the time.
“You make too much o’ trouble o’ all sorts, John,” she said.
“I canna keep fro’ thinking, Annie,” he apologized. “I’m thinking
now.”
“Aye, of old wives’ tales,” she mocked.
 “No. I’m thinking of my grandfer and of Hepplestall’s factory.”
“I’m in the air,” she said. “That’s good enough for me.” She was
slightly jealous of John, who had known his grandfather. Very
soundly established people had known two grandfathers: John had
known one, but Annie none. However, he was not to be prevented
from speaking his thought.
“I’ve heard my grandfer tell o’ times that were easier than these.
He had a factory o’ his own—what they called a factory them days.
Baby to Hepplestall’s it were. I’ll show you its ruin down yonder by
the stream some day. He’s dead now, is grandfer. Sounds wonder-ful
to hear me talk of a grandfer wi’ a factory o’ his own.”
“Fine lot of good to thee now, my lad. I never had no grandfer
that I heard on, but I don’t see that it makes any difference atween
thee and me to-day.”
“I’m none boasting, Annie,” he said. “I’m nobbut looking back to
the times that used to be. Summat’s come o’er life sin’ then, summat
that’s like a great big cloud, on a summer’s day.”
“Well,” said Annie, “we’ve the factory. But there’s times like this
when I’ve my arms full of you and my head full of the smell of
heather. And there’s times like mischief-neet”—that is, the night of
the first of May—“and th’ Bush-Bearing in August. I like th’ Wakes,
lad... oh, and lots of times that aren’t all factory. There’s Easter and
Whitsun and Christmas.” There were: there were these survivals of a
more jocund age, honored still, if by curtailed celebrations. The
trouble was that the curtailments were too severe, that neither of
cakes nor ale, neither of bread nor circuses was there sufficient
offset against the grinding hardships of the factories. Both John and
Annie had so recently emerged from the status of child-slavery that
the larger life of adults might well have seemed freedom enough; to
Annie, aided by Phoebe’s sacrifice, to Annie, living more physically
than John, to Annie, who rarely looked beyond one short respite
unless it was to the next, the present seemed not amiss. Except the
life of the roads and the heaths, to which she saw no possibility of
return, from which the factory had weaned her, she had no
traditions, while he had Peter Bradshaw for tradition. He had slipped
down the ladder, and there was resentment, usually dormant, of the
fact that he saw no chance to climb again.
“Things are,” was her philosophy. “I’m none in factory now, and
I’m none fretting about factory and you’d do best to hold your hush
about your grandfer, John. His’n weren’t a gradely factory.”
That was it. She accepted Hepplestall’s, while John accepted the
habit of Hepplestall’s, dully, subterraneously resenting it. She almost
took a pride in the size of Hepplestall’s. “And,” she said, good
Methodist as she was, “there’s a better life to come.”
He had no reply to make to that. The Methodist was the working
class religion, as opposed to the Church of the upper classes and, at
first, the rulers had seen danger in it, and in an unholy alliance of
Methodism with Reform. There was something, but not a great deal
in their fear. There was the fact, for instance, that in the Methodist
Sunday Schools reading and writing were taught. “The modern
Methodists,” says Bamford in his ‘Early Days,’ “may boast of this feat
as their especial work. The church party never undertook to instruct
in writing on Sundays.” That far, but not much farther, the
Methodists stood for enlightenment. Cobbett gave them no credit at
all. He said, in 1824, “the bitterest foes of freedom in England have
been, and are, the Methodists.” Annie had “got religion”: the
sufferings and the hardships of this life were mere preparations for
radiant happiness to come, and a religion of this sort was not for
citizens but for saints; it gave no battle to the Devil, Steam.
John stirred uncomfortably in her arms. He had an aching sense of
wrong, beyond expression and beyond relief. If he tried to express it,
his fumbling words were countered by her opportunism and, in the
last resort, by her religion. Things were, and there was nothing to be
done about them.
 CHAPTER VIII—THE LONELY MAN

A
MAN with a foot in two camps is likely to be welcomed in
neither and to be lonely in his life. The cotton manufacturers
had grown rich, they were established, they were a new order
threatening to rival in wealth and power the old order of the land
interest, and they were highly self-conscious about it. Land had no
valid cause to be resentful of the new capitalists. Land was hit by
the increase in the poor rates, but handsomely compensated for that
by the rise in land values. But a new power had arisen and land was
jealous of its increasing influence in the councils of the nation.
Reuben never forgot that he belonged to the old order, was of it,
and had married into it. In business affairs, it was necessary to have
associations with other manufacturers, but he had no hospitalities at
home for them on the occasions when they met to discuss measures
of common policy. He entertained them at the factory, he kept home
and affairs in separate water-tight compartments, and was loved of
none. He was his own land-owner and his own coal-owner, both long
starts in the race, and he was at least as efficient and enterprising as
his average competitor. A gentleman had come into trade and had
made a great success of it. More galling still, he insisted that he
remained a gentleman in the old sense, a landed man, “county.” Not
in words but by actions and inactions which bit deeper than any
words he proclaimed his superiority.
And why not? He was superior, he was the husband of Dorothy
Hepplestall and it was that fact—the fact that he had married
Dorothy and made a success of their marriage—which counted
against him with the county far more than his having gone into trade
and having made a success of that. They would have welcomed a
failure somewhere, and he had failed at nothing. So though he had
their society, he had it grudgingly.
 He was then driven back, not unwillingly, on Dorothy. She was, for
Reuben, the whole of friendship, the whole of companionship, the
whole of love; after all, she was Dorothy and certainly he made no
complaint that he had no other friends and that he was a tolerated,
unpopular figure in society. His days were for the factory, his
evenings for Dorothy and their children and, when the children had
gone to bed, for Dorothy and his books. Books, though they were
not unduly insisted upon in the country districts of Lancashire, went
then with gentlemanliness and Reuben was not idiosyncratic, but
normal, in becoming bookish in middle-age. In Parliament they
quoted the classics in their speeches, and the Corinthian of the
Clubs, whatever his sporting tastes, spared time to keep his classics
in repair. Bookishness, in moderation, was part of the make-up of a
man of taste, and for Reuben it had become a recourse not for
fashion’s sake but for its own.
Life for Reuben had its mellowness; he had struggled and he had
won; he was owner and despot, hardly bound by any law but that of
his will, of the several factories contained within the great wall, of a
coal-mine, of the town of cottages and shops about. The conditions
of labor were the usual conditions and they did not trouble his
conscience. Things were, indeed, rather smoother for Hepplestall’s
workers than for some others; he was above petty rent exactions
and truck shops, as, being his own coal supplier, he could very well
afford to be.
What drawbacks there were to his position were rather in matters
of decoration than reality, but it was decided proof of his
unpopularity in both camps of influence that Hepplestall was not a
magistrate. Other great manufacturers, to a man, were on the bench
and took good care to be, because administration of the law was
largely in the hands of the magistrates and the manufacturers
wanted the administration in trusty hands—their own. It was a
permanent rebuff to Reuben that he was not a magistrate; there
were less wealthy High Sheriffs.
 It was a puny irritation, symptomatic of their spite, and it didn’t
matter much to Reuben, who was sure of his realities, sure, above
all, of the reality of Dorothy’s love. No love runs smooth for twenty
years and probably it would not be love if it did, but only a bad habit
masquerading as love, so that it would not be true to say of Reuben
and Dorothy that they had never had a difference. They had had
many small differences, and in this matter of love what happens is
that which also happens to a tree. Trees need wind; wind forces the
roots down to a stronger and ever stronger hold upon the earth. And
so with love, which cannot live in draughtless hothouse air, but
needs to be wind-tossed to prove and to increase its strength.
Impossible to be a pacifist in love! Love is a tussle, a thing of storms
and calms: like everything in life it cannot stand still but must either
grow or decay, and for growth, it must have strife. Sex that is placid
and love that is immovable are contradictions in terms. Love has to
interest or love will cease to be, and to interest it cannot stagnate.
The children came almost as milestones in the road of their love;
each marked the happy ending of a period of stress. They were not
results of a habit, but the achievements of a passion, live symbols of
a thing itself alive. These two hearts did not beat all the time as one,
and the restlessness of their love was as essential as its harmony.
But the shadow of a difference that might grow into a disaster
was being cast upon them. In a way, it was extraneous to their love,
and in another way was part and parcel of it. The question was the
future of Edward, the eldest son.
Dorothy lived in two worlds, in Reuben and in the county, and
Reuben lived in three, Dorothy, the factory and the county. He put
the factory second to Dorothy and she put it nowhere. There was a
bargain between them, unspoken but understood, that she should
put it nowhere and yet he was assuming, tacitly, that Edward was as
a matter of course to succeed him as controller of the factory and
the mine: of these two he always thought first of the factory and
second of the mine.
 She might have reconciled herself to the mine. There were Dukes,
like the Duke of Bridgewater, who owned coal-mines and her Edward
might have gained great honor, like that Duke, by developing canals.
But she had not moved with the times about factories, nor, indeed,
had the times, that is, her order of the old gentry, moved very far.
The Secombes were still exceptional, the Luke Verners still trimmers,
land was still land and respectable, steam was steam and
questionable, and it is to be supposed that though the coal of the
Duke was used to make steam, coal was land and therefore on the
side of the angels, whatever the devils did with it afterwards.
Prejudice, in any case, has nothing to do with consistency. She had
no prejudice against Reuben’s connection with the factory; he was
her “steam-man” still, but she did not want Edward to be her steam-
son.
Edward himself was conscious of no talent for factory owning and
hardly of being the son of a factory owner.
The management of her children’s lives was in Dorothy’s hands,
involving no mention of the factory, and in her hands Reuben was
content to leave their lives until his sons had had the ordinary
education of gentlemen, until they were down from their
Universities. He had not suffered himself as a manufacturer because
he was educated as a gentleman and saw no reason to bring up his
sons any differently from himself. Throw them too young into the
factory, and they would become manufacturers and manufacturers
only: he had the wish to make them gentlemen first and
manufacturers afterwards.
Edward had ideas of his own about his future, and it came as a
surprise to be invited at breakfast to visit the factory one day during
vacation from Oxford. Instinctively he glanced, not at his mother, but
at his clothes. He was not precisely a dandy, but had money to burn
and burned a good deal of it at his tailor’s.
“The factory, I said, not the coal-mine,” Reuben said, noting his
son’s impulse. “You have looked at your clothes. Now let us go and
look at the first cause of the clothes. As a young philosopher you
should be interested in first causes.”
“Oh, is it necessary, Reuben?” pleaded Dorothy.
“Sparks should know where the flames come from,” said Reuben.
“I have great curiosity to see the factory, sir,” said Edward. “I
showed surprise, but that was natural. You have hidden the factory
from us all as if it were a Pandora’s box and if you judge the time
now come when I am to see the place from which our blessings
come, I assure you I am flattered by your confidence. But I warn
you I am not persuaded in advance to admire the box.”
Reuben smiled grimly at his hinted opposition. “If you look with
sense, you will admire,” he said. “Factories run to usefulness, not
beauty. Shall we go?”
They went, and Reuben exhibited his factory with thoroughness,
with the zest of a man who had created it, but now and then with
the impatience of the expert who does not concede enough to the
slow-following thought of the lay mind. Edward began with every
intention to appreciate, but as Reuben explained the processes,
found nothing but antipathy grow within him.
He breathed a foul, hot, dust-laden air, he hadn’t a mechanical
turn of mind and was mystified by operations which Reuben
imagined he expounded lucidly. Once the thread was lost, the whole
affair was simply puzzlement and he had the feeling of groping in a
fog, a hideously noisy fog, where wheels monotonously went round,
spinning mules beat senselessly to and fro and dirty men and
women looked resentfully at him. It seemed to him a hell worse than
any Dante had described, with sufferers more hopeless, bound in
stupid misery. He was not thinking of the sufferers with any great
humanitarianism: they were of a lower order and this no doubt was
all that they were fit for. He was thinking of them with disgust,
objecting to breathe the same air, revolted by their smells, but he
was conscious of, at least, some sentiment of pity. If he had
understood the meaning of it all, he felt that he would have seen
things like these in true perspective, but he missed the keys to it,
was nauseated when he ought to have been interested and his
attempted queries grew less and less to the point.
Reuben perceived at last that he was lecturing an inattentive
audience. “Come into the office,” he said, and in that humaner place,
with its great bureau, its library of ledgers and its capacious chairs
for callers, where the engine throbbed with a diminished hum,
Edward tried to collect his thoughts. “This,” Reuben emphasized, “is
where I do my work. I go through the factory twice a day,
otherwise, I am to be found in here. A glass of wine to wash the
dust out of your throat?”
Edward was grateful: but wine could not wash his repugnance
away. “Well, now,” asked Reuben, “what do you think?”
“Frankly, sir, I am hardly capable of thought.”
“No,” said Reuben meditatively. “No. Its bigness takes the breath
away.”
But Edward was not thinking of bigness. “If I say anything now
which appears strange to you, I hope you will attribute it to my
inexperience. I am thinking of those people I have seen. To spend so
many hours a day in such conditions seems to me a very dreadful
thing.”
“Work has to be done, Edward, and they are used to it. You will
find that there are only two sorts of people in this world, the drivers
and the driven.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Which are you going
to be?”
“I?” The personal application caught him unawares, then he
mentally pulled himself together. If he was in for it, he could meet it.
“I did not bring you here as an idle sight-seer. At first blush you
dislike the factory, but it is my belief that you will come to like it as
well as, I do.” Edward stared at his father who was, he saw, serious.
He veritably “liked” the factory. “In fact,” Reuben was saying, “I can
go further. I love this place. I made it; it is my life’s work; and I am
proud of it. Hepplestall’s is a great heritance. When I hand it on to
you, it will be a great possession, a great trust. How great you do
not know and if I showed you now the figures in those books you
would be no wiser. As yet you do not understand. Even out there in
the works where things are simple you missed my meaning, but
there is time to learn it all before I leave the reins to you.”
“I am to decide now?”
“Decide? Decide? What is there to decide? You are my eldest son.”
Edward made an effort: Reuben was assuming his consent to
everything. “May I confess my hope, sir? My hope was that when I
had finished at Oxford, you would allow me to go to the bar.”
“The bar? A cover for idleness.” Sometimes, but Edward had not
intended to be idle. The bar was an occupation, gentlemanly, settling
a man in London amongst his Oxford friends; it seemed to Edward
that the bar would meet his tastes. If it had been land that he was
to inherit, naturally he would have taken a share in its management,
but there was no land: there was a factory, and he felt keen jealousy
of Tom, his younger brother. It was settled that Tom should follow
his uncle, Tom Verners, who was Colonel Verners now, into the
Army, while he, the eldest son, who surely should have first choice,
he was apparently destined will he, nill he, for this detestable
factory!
“I will have no son of mine a loafer. You would live in London?”
“I should hope to practice there.”
“I’ll have no idlers and no cockneys in my family, Edward.
Hepplestall’s! Hepplestall’s! and he sneers at it.”
“Oh, no, sir. Please. Not that. I feel it difficult to explain.”
“Don’t try.”
 “I must. I think what I feel is that if we were speaking of land I as
your eldest son should naturally come into possession. I should feel
it, in the word you used, as a trust. But we are not speaking of
land.”
Reuben gripped his chair-arms till his hands grew white and
recovered a self-control that had nearly slipped away. The boy was
ready to approve the law of primogeniture so long as he could be
fastidious about his inheritance, so long as the inheritance was land.
As it was not land, he wanted to run away. He deprecated steam. He
dared, the jackanapes! “No,” said Reuben, “we are not speaking of
land. We are speaking of Hepplestall’s.”
“If it were land,” Edward went on ingenuously, “however great the
estate, you would not find me shirking my responsibility.”
“I see. And as it is not land? As it is this vastly greater thing than
land?” Then suavity deserted him. “Boy,” he cried, “don’t you see
what an enormous thing it is to be trustee of Hepplestall’s?”
“Oh,” said Edward, “it is big. But let me put a case.”
“What? Lawyering already?” scoffed Reuben. “Suppose one
dislikes a cat. Fifty cats don’t reconcile one.”
“You dislike the factory?”
“I may not fully understand—”
“Then wait till you do. Come here and learn.”
“That would be the thin end of the wedge.”
“It is meant to be,” said Reuben, and on that their conversation
was, not inopportunely, interrupted. A clerk knocked on the door and
announced Mr. Needham. “Don’t go, Edward,” said Reuben, “this can
figure as a detail in your education,” and introduced his son to the
caller.
 Edward looked hopelessly at the visitor. Reuben had told him that
the office was the place where his business life was spent and
therefore Edward’s contacts, if he came to the factory, would not be
with the squalid people he had seen at work, but with people who
visited the office. He looked at Mr. Needham, and decided that he
had never seen a coarser or more brutal man in his life. There were
certain fellows of his college justly renowned for grossness; there
was the riffraff of the town, there were hangers-on at the stables,
there were the bruisers he had seen, but in all his experience he had
seen nothing comparable with the untrammeled brutishness of Mr.
Richard Needham. If this was the company he was asked to keep,
he preferred—what did one do in extremis? Enlist? Well, then, he
preferred enlistment to the factory.
Needham was, however, not quite the usual caller, who was a
merchant come to buy, or a machinist come to sell, rather than, as
Needham was, a manufacturer and a notorious one at that. By this
time, the repeal of the Combination Acts had given Trade Unionism
an opportunity to develop in the open, and manufacturers who had
known very well how to deal with the earlier guerilla warfare of the
then illegal Unions were seriously alarmed by its progress. There
was a strong movement to force the reënactment of the
Combination Laws. Contemporaneously, the growth and proved
efficiency of the power-loom drove the weavers to extremes.
Needham was self-appointed leader of the reactionaries amongst the
manufacturers: a man who had risen by sheer physical strength to a
position from which he now exercised considerable influence over
the more timid of the masters.
He had the curtest of nods for Edward. “My God, Hepplestall,
we’re in for a mort of trouble,” he said, mopping his brow with a
huge printed handkerchief and putting his beaver hat on the desk.
He sank into a stout chair which groaned under his weight, and
Edward thought he had never seen anything so indecent as the
swollen calves of Mr. Needham.
Reuben silently passed the wine. It seemed a good answer.
 Warts are a misfortune, not a crime: but the wart on Mr.
Needham’s nose struck Edward as an obscenity—and his father loved
the factory! He didn’t know that he was unduly sensitive, but
certainly Needham on top of his view of the workpeople made him
queasy.
Needham emptied and refilled a glass. “I’d hang every man who
strikes,” he said. “Look at ‘em here,” he went on, producing a hand-
bill which he offered to Reuben.
“After the peace of Amiens,” it read, “the wages of a Journeyman
Weaver would amount to 2/7 1/2 per day or 15/9 per week, and this
was pretty near upon a par with other mechanics and we maintained
our rank in society. We will now contrast our present situation with
the past, and it will demonstrate pretty clearly the degraded state to
which we have been reduced.
“During the last two years our wages have been reduced to so low
an ebb that for the greatest part of that time we have... the
Journeyman’s Wages of 9d or 10d a day or from 4/6 to 5/—per
week, and we appeal to your candor and good sense, whether such
a paltry sum be sufficient to keep the soul and body together.”
“What do you think of that?” asked Needham. “Printing it, mind
you, spreading sedition and disaffection like that. Not a word about
their wives and children all taken into the factories and all taking
good wages out. If commerce isn’t to be unshackled and free of the
attacks of a turbulent and insurrectionary spirit, I ask you, where are
we? Where’s our chance of keeping law and order when the law
permits weavers to combine and yap together and issue bills like
yond? It’s fatal to allow ‘em to feel their strength and communicate
with each other without restraint. Allow them to go on uninterrupted
and they become more licentious every day. What do you say,
Hepplestall?”
“Why, sir, it’s you who are making a speech, and I may add a
speech containing many very familiar phrases.”
 “Aye, I’ve said it before, and to you. I might have spared my
breath. But hast heard the latest? Dost know that the strikers in
Blackburn destroyed every power-loom within six miles of the town
and... and...” Mr. Needham drew in breath... “and they’ve been
syringing cloth wi’ vitriol. Soft sawder in yond hand-bill, ‘appeal to
your candor and good sense,’ aye and vitriol on good cloth when it
comes to deeds.”
“Yes, I heard of that. A nasty business, though I understand the
authorities have dealt strongly with the outbreak.”
“Aye, you’re a philosopher, because it happened at a distance from
you. It’s some one else’s looms that’s smashed, and some one else’s
cloth that’s rotted. What if it were youm, Hepplestall?”
“We don’t have Luddites here.”
“You allays think you’re out of everything. Now I’ve brought you
the facts and you know as well as I do what’s the cause of this
uppishness of the lower orders. It’s Peel, damn him. One of us, and
ought to know better. Sidmouth’s the man for my money. Sidmouth
and Castlereagh. There was sense about when they were in charge.
Now, we let the spinners combine and the weavers combine and
they’re treading on our faces. Well, are you standing by your
lonesome as usual or are you in it with the rest of us to petition
against workmen’s combinations? That’s a straight question,
Hepplestall.”
“I shall take time to answer it, Mr. Needham. I have acted with
you in the past and I have taken leave to doubt the wisdom of your
actions and I have on such occasions acted neither with you nor
against you. This time—”
“This time, there’s no chance of doubt.”
“But I do doubt, sir. I doubt whether a factory, controlled by a
strong hand, has anything to fear from Workmen’s Combinations.”
“Damn it, look at Blackburn!”
 “You shall have my decision when it is ready. At this moment, I tell
you candidly I do not incline to join you.”
“But union is strength. They’ve combined. So must we.”
“We always have, in essentials. I promise you I will give this
matter every thought.”
Needham looked angry, and then a cunning slyness passed across
his face. “I’m satisfied with that,” he said. “Aye, I’m satisfied, though
you may tell me I’ve come a long road to be satisfied wi’ so little at
the end o’ it.” Reuben rose, bowing gravely. “I am glad to have
satisfied you, Mr. Needham,” he said, blandly ignoring the hint that
an invitation to dinner was the natural expectation of a traveled
caller.
“Aye,” said Needham, “Aye.” He finished the bottle, since nothing
more substantial was forthcoming, and rose to go. “Then I’ll be
hearing from you?”
“Yes,” Reuben assured him. “I will see you to your horse.”
“Nay, you’ll not. They don’t breed my make of horse. I’ve a coach
at door, and extra strong, too.”
“Then I will see you to your coach.” Needham nodded to the silent
Edward, and went out with Reuben. There was no strategical issue
between Needham and Hepple-stall. Needham, when he spoke, used
phrases taken from the writings of manufacturers more literate than
himself, and so stated, by such a man, his point of view sounded
preposterously obscurantist. But it was, in essence, Reuben’s view
also, with the difference that Reuben looked on attempts to combat
the principle of Unionism as tactical error. The Combination Acts, he
felt, had gone for ever, and the common policy of the masters
should not be in the direction of reviving those Acts but of meeting
the consequences of their repeal.
He was, indeed, habitually averse from open association with his
fellow manufacturers because of his self-conscious social difference,
and, where such a man as Needham led, was apt to pick more holes
in his policy than were reasonable. It was quite likely in the present
case that he would come round to Needham’s view, but certainly he
would not hurry. The troubles at Blackburn were remote from him
and he felt his own factory was out of the danger zone, and that if
he threw in his weight with the Needham petition it would be
altruistically, and perhaps a waste of influence which could have
found better employment. His own people were showing no signs of
restiveness, and he didn’t think Unionism was making much
headway amongst them. Reason and self-interest seemed allied with
his native individualism to resist Needham’s policy.
He returned to find Edward staring gloomily at his boots. “Well,
Edward?” he asked cheerily. “Did you like your lesson?”
“The thing I liked, sir, the only thing I liked, is that you are not to
act with Mr. Needham.”
“Am I not?”
“It did not sound so. Tell me, is that a fair specimen of the type of
man you meet in business?”
“No. In many ways he is superior to the most.”
“Superior! That fat elephant!”
“Needham is one of the strongest men in the cotton trade,
Edward.”
“Oh, I called him elephant. Elephants have strength.”
“And strength is despicable?”
“No. But—”
“But Needham is a gross pill to swallow. Well, if it will ease your
mind, I do not propose to act with him on this issue. You need not
swallow this pill, Edward. But I am not looking to a son of mine to
be a runaway from duty, to be a loiterer in smooth places. You have
Oxford which is, I hope, confirming you as a gentleman and you
have the factory which will confirm you as a man. I could make you
an appeal. I could first point out that I am single-handed here in a
position which grows beyond the strength of any single pair of
hands. I could dub you my natural ally at a time when I have need
of an ally. But I shall make you neither an appeal nor a command.
Hepplestall’s is a greater thing than I who made it or than you who
will inherit it, and there is no occasion for pressure. You are,
naturally, inevitably, in its service.” Edward felt rather than saw that
somewhere at the opening of the well down which this plunged him
there was daylight. “I do not perceive the inevitability,” he cried.
“You doom me to a monstrous fate.”
“You are heroical,” said Reuben, “but as to the inevitability, take
time, and you will perceive it.”
“Daylight! Give me the daylight!” was what Edward wanted to say,
but he repressed that and hardly more happily he asked, “Is there
no beauty in life?”
“There is beauty in Hepplestall’s,” said Reuben, and meant it. He
had created Hepplestall’s.
 CHAPTER IX—THE SPY

E
DWARD’S “fat elephant” drove from Hepplestall’s meditating
his retort to Reuben’s intransigeancy. He held that it was
necessary to weld the manufacturers into a solid phalanx of
opposition to the legalizing of Trade Unions, and that if Reuben were
allowed to stand out, other masters, whom Needham regarded as
weak-kneed, would stand out with him. Needham was obstinate and
unscrupulous, with a special grudge against “kid-gloved” Hepplestall,
and if there were no overt manifestations of discontent in
Hepplestall’s factory, his business was to provoke them. There was
surely latent discontent there as everywhere else and the good days
of Sidmouth and Castlereagh had shown what could be achieved in
the way of manufacturing riot by the use of informers. Informers
were paid to inform, and lost their occupation if no information were
forthcoming; they did not lose their occupation; they were agents
provocateurs, and Gentleman Hepplestall was, if Needham knew
right from left, to be thwacked into line by the activities of an
informer.
He hadn’t much difficulty—he was that sort of man—in laying
hands upon a suitable instrument. The name of the instrument was
Thomas Barraclough, and it was, indeed, in Needham’s hands
already working as a weaver in his factory, not, to be sure, for the
purpose of provoking unrest there but merely for decent spying.
There is honesty in spying as in other things and the decent spy is
the observer and reporter of what others do spontaneously; the
indecent spy is he who instigates the deeds he afterwards reports.
Barraclough was quite willing, for a higher fee, to undertake to prove
to Hepplestall that Trade Unions were murder clubs.
The affair was not stated, even by blunt Needham to his spy, with
quite such candor as this, but, “If tha’ sees signs o’ trouble yonder,
tell me of ’em; and if tha’ sees no signs tha’s blinder than I tak’ thee
for,” was a sufficiently plain direction to an intelligent spy, and
Barraclough nodded comprehendingly as he went off to begin his
cross-country tramp to Hepplestall’s.
A spy who looks like a spy is disqualified at once, but what are the
symptoms of spying? What signs does spying hang out on a man
that we shall know him for a spy? Is he bent with a life spent in
crouching at key holes? A keen-eyed, large-eared ferret of a man?
The fact is that Barraclough was small and bent, and ferretty, that he
looked like your typical spy and yet did not look, in the Lancashire of
those days, any different from a famished weaver. They were “like
boys of fifteen and sixteen and most of them cannot measure more
than 5 feet 2 or 3 inches.”
Steam fastened on this generation, stunting it, twisting it, blasting
it, and if Barraclough had been reasonably tall, reasonably well-
made and nourished he would have been marked at once as
something different from the workers who were to accept him as
one of themselves. So, in spite of looking like a spy, he was qualified
to be a spy in Hepplestall’s because he looked like any other
undergrown, underpaid, underfed weaver lad.
And there is good in all things, though Hepplestall was not
thinking of the Blackburn riots as good when he was cavalier about
them with Needham. There was the good, for Hepplestall’s, that the
destruction of the Blackburn looms and their products brought an
exceptional rush of orders to Reuben; and Thomas Barraclough,
applying for work when he ended his tramp at the factory gates,
found himself given immediate employment.
He found, too, that as an honest spy he had no occupation in this
place. He could report distress, sullen suffering and patient
suffering; he could report the ordinary things and would have to say,
in honesty, that here the ordinary things had extraordinary
mitigations; and he found nothing of the violent flavor expected by
Needham. It remained for him to take the initiative and to provide
against disappointing his master’s expectations, but the mental
sketch he had made of himself as an effective explosive did not
seem likely to be justified in any hurry. The Blackburn riots had not
been followed by such ferocity of punishment as had befallen the
Luddites a few years previously, but there had been men killed by
soldiers during the riots: there were ten death sentences at
Lancaster Assizes, reduced afterwards to transportation for life: and
thirty-three rioters were sent to prison. That was fairly impressive, as
it was meant to be, but much more impressive was the appalling
distress which quite naturally fell upon the Blackburn people who
had destroyed the looms, and if all this was salutary from the point
of view of law and order it was excessively inopportune from the
special point of view of Mr. Barraclough.
Here he was, under orders to raise tumult, in a place where not
only were there no symptoms of tumult, but where those who might
possibly be tumultuously disposed were cowed by the tales, many
true and many exaggerated, of Blackburn’s sufferings. The malignant
irony of the uses of the agent provocateur was never better
exemplified, but it wasn’t for Needham’s trusty informer to chew
upon that, but, whatever his difficulties, to get on with his
incitements. And he soon decided that Hepplestall’s people, in the
mass, were “windbags,” that is, they would listen to him and they
would, in conversation, be as vehement as he, but their vehemence
was in words not deeds and only deeds were of any use to
Barraclough. The method of the Luddites, machinery-smashing, was
discredited for ever by the Blackburn example and he gave up hope
of any large-scale demonstration at Hepple-stall’s. What was left was
the possibility of finding some individual who was capable of being
influenced to violent action.
Then, just as he was despairing of finding the rightly malleable
material, Annie Bradshaw’s second son was born and Annie
Bradshaw died. She had been almost luxuriously careful about the
birth of her first child: she had left the factory three days before his
birth and had not returned, with the child at her breast, for a full
week afterwards; but second babies were said to come more easily,
wages were needed and she had lifted heavy beams before. The
child was born on the factory floor, it lived and Annie died. There
was no extraordinary pother made about her death, because women
were continually defying steam in this way and most of them
survived it. Annie did not survive. She was unlucky. That was all.
“Don’t fret for me, lad,” she gasped to John. “I’m going through
the Golden Gates. Tak’ care o’ the childer.” The engine did not stop—
guns do not cease fire because a soldier falls on the battlefield—and
to John Bradshaw, nineteen, widower with two infant sons, it beat a
devil’s tattoo of stunning triumph. There were women gathered
around her body, somewhere a woman was washing his son, but he
was seeing nothing of them, nothing of the life that had come
through death. Annie was gone from him, his glorious Annie of the
winds and the moors, lying white and silent on the oily floor of a
stinking factory, and already the women were leaving her, already
they were returning to their several places. If they gave him
sympathy, they took bread out of their mouths and sympathy must
be so brief as to appear callosity. It was not callosity, and he knew
it; knew, too, that he did not want long-winded condolences or any
condolences at all, yet their going so quickly from that white body
seemed to him a stark indecency adding to the monstrous debt
Steam owed him.
He was thinking of the small profanities of this death rather than
of the death itself. He hadn’t realized that yet, he was probing his
way through the attendant circumstances to the depths of his
tragedy. He knew that he would never lie beneath the stars again
with Annie while the breeze soughed through the heather and she
crooned old songs of the roads in his ear: he knew, but he did not
believe it yet. She had been so utterly protective of him. If she took
down her hair, and held it from her, and he crept beneath its curious
warmth, what had mattered then? He had loved her and by the
grace of Phoebe—though he was not thinking of Phoebe now—they
had been given leave to love and to enjoy each other in the hours
which were not the factory’s.
The engine, thumped horribly on his ear and a gust of passionate
hatred struggled to make itself articulate. “You fiend!” he cried.
“Curse you, curse you!”
When an overseer came to tell him that a hand-cart was at the
gates to take Annie’s body and the baby home, and that Phoebe
might go with him, he was lying, dazed, on the floor and
mechanically did what he was told to do. He had no volition in him,
and Mr. Barraclough, professional observer, noting both his hysteria
and his stupor decided that he had found his man at last. Providence
had ordained that Annie should die to make an instrument for
Richard Needham’s emissary.
In the days of her youth, Phoebe had her follies as she had her
prettiness; now, schooled by adversity, an old woman of forty, she
was without illusions as she was without comeliness; she had
nothing but her son, and, hidden like a miser’s gold, her hatred of
the Hepplestalls, of Reuben who betrayed her, of Dorothy whom he
married, of his sons who stood where her son should have stood.
For two seconds she was weakened now, for two seconds: as she
folded Annie’s baby in her shawl and held him closely to her she had
the thought that she must go to Reuben with a plea for help, then
put that thought away.
“Don’t worry your head about the childer, lad,” she said, “I’ll
manage.” She would work in the factory, she would order their
cottage, she would rear the babies, she would pay some older
woman who was past more active work a small sum (but the
accepted rate) to look after the babies while she was in the factory.
She would take this burden off his shoulders as she had taken the
burden of housework off Annie’s. She had permitted John and Annie
to enjoy the luxury of love and now she was permitting John the
luxury of woe. She said that she would “manage,” he knew the
enormous implications of the word, but knew, because she said it,
that she would keep her promise. There was no limit to his faith in
Phoebe and he touched her shoulder gently, undemonstratively,
saying in that simple gesture all his unspeakable gratitude, accepting
what she gave not because he underrated it, not because he did not
understand, but because it was the only thing to do.
For her his touch and his acceptance were abundance of reward.
Go to Hepplestall! Take charity, when this sustaining faith was
granted her? Oh, she would manage though her body cracked. It
was a soiling and a shameful thought that these babes were
Reuben’s grandchildren.
They were not his and John, please God, would never know who
was his father; they were hers and John’s and they two would keep
them for their own.
It wasn’t bravado either. It wasn’t a brief heroical resolution
begotten of the emotions caused by Annie’s death. She counted the
cost and chose her fight, spurning the thought of Hepplestall as if
the justice he might do her were an obscenity. She knew what she
undertook to do and, providing only that she had ten more years of
life, she would do it.
John, mourning for Annie, was not too sunk in grief to be unaware
of the fineness of his mother. Would Annie—she who loved her life—
have said “Things are,” if she had foreseen how soon the things
which were bad were to be so infinitely worse? The factory had
killed her, it had taken his Annie from him, it had put upon his
mother in her age the burden she took up with a matter of fact
resignation that seemed to him the ultimate impeachment of the
system which made heroism a commonplace. “Mother!” he cried.
“Mother!”
“Eh, lad,” she said, “we’ve got to take what comes.”
She did not, at least, as Annie did, answer his inarticulate revolt
with religion, but she had fundamentally the same resignation to the
things of this world, and for the same reason. She, too, looked
forward to a radiant life above: she saw in her present troubles the
hand of God justly heavy upon one who had been a light woman.
John, knowing nothing of that secret source of her humility,
attributed all to the one cause, to the Factory which crushed and
maimed and killed in spirit as in body. He refused his acceptance, his
resignation. There was, there must be, something to be done. But
what? What?
First, at any rate, Annie had to be buried with the circumstance
which seemed to make for decency and for that they had provided
through the Benefit Society. This—-decent burial—was the first
thought behind the weekly contributions paid, heaven knows at what
sacrifice, to the Society and they were rewarded now in the fact that
Annie was not buried at the expense of the parish. That was all,
bare decency, not the flaunting parody with plumes and gin of the
slightly less poor: nor were there many mourners. Leave was given
to a select few to be absent for an hour from the factory, and the
severe fines for unauthorized absence kept the numbers strictly, with
one exception, to the few the overseer chose to privilege. Phoebe
and John were granted the full day, without fine, and, of course,
without wage, and so, it appeared, was Mr. Barraclough. But Mr.
Barraclough was on business, and the fine that he would have to
pay would figure in the expenses he would charge Mr. Needham.
One or two old women—old in fact if not in years, incapacitated by
the factory, for the factory—had been at the graveside and were
going home with Phoebe, and it was natural that John should hold
out his hand to Barraclough, this unexpected, this so self-sacrificing
sympathizer and that they should fall into step as they moved away
together.
“Man, I had to come. I’m that sorry for thee. Coming doan’t mean
much for sure, but—”
“It means a day’s wages, choose how,” said John, who knew that
Barraclough was not of the few who had been granted an hour’s
leave to come.
 Barraclough nodded. “And a fine, an’ all,” he said, “but that all
counts somehow. Seems to me if it weren’t costing me summat, it
u’d not be the same relief it is to my feelings. I didna come for thy
sake, I came to please masel’, selfish like. I had to get away from
yond damned place that murdered her. I couldna’ stand the sight o’
it to-day.”
“Murdered her!” said John. He had, no doubt, used that word in
thought, but it had seemed to him audacious, a thought to be
forbidden utterance. And here, shaming him for his mildness was
one, an outsider, a stranger, who, untouched intimately by Annie’s
death, yet spoke of it outright as murder. John felt that he was
failing Annie, that he had not risen to his occasion, that it was this
other, this fine spirit, who could not “stand the sight” of the factory
on the day of her funeral, who had risen to the occasion more
worthily than John, who was Annie’s husband. “Aye,” he said
somberly, “it was murder.”
“You never doubted that, surely,” said Barraclough.
“Oh,” said John, “when a woman dies in childbirth—”
“Aye, but fair treated women don’t. What art doing now? I mean
for the rest of the day. Looking at it from my point of view, I might
as well tak’ the chance to get out o’ sight o’ yond hell-spot. I’m
going on moors for a breath of air. Wilt come? Better nor settin’ to
hoam brooding, tha’ knows.”
His point was simply to get John in his emotional crisis to himself,
but luck was with him in his proposal further than he knew. For
John, the moors were a reminder of Annie at her sunniest, but for
the moment all that he was thinking of was that strange instinct for
the sympathetic stranger rather than for the sympathy, too poignant
to be borne, of his mother. And he did not wish to see his sons that
day.
“‘Tis better nor brooding,” he agreed, and went. There was virtue,
he thought, in talking. Phoebe was all reserve and action, and on
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