<SPAN name="vol_1_chap_12"></SPAN>
<h3>Volume One--Chapter Twelve.</h3>
<h4>Machinery.</h4>
<p>Rather more than a week later, Edwin had so far entered into the life of his
father’s business that he could fully share the excitement caused by an impending
solemnity in the printing office. He was somewhat pleased with himself, and especially
with his seriousness. The memory of school was slipping away from him in the most
extraordinary manner. His only school-friend, Charlie Orgreave, had departed, with all the
multitudinous Orgreaves, for a month in Wales. He might have written to the Sunday; the
Sunday might have written to him: but the idea of writing did not occur to either of them;
they were both still sufficiently childlike to accept with fatalism all the consequences
of parental caprice. Orgreave senior had taken his family to Wales; the boys were thus
separated, and there was an end of it. Edwin regretted this, because Orgreave senior
happened to be a very successful architect, and hence there were possibilities of getting
into an architectural atmosphere. He had never been inside the home of the Sunday, nor the
Sunday in his—a schoolboy friendship can flourish in perfect independence of
home—but he nervously hoped that on the return of the Orgreave regiment from Wales,
something favourable to his ambitions—he knew not what—would come to pass. In
the meantime he was conscientiously doing his best to acquire a business training, as his
father had suggested. He gave himself with an enthusiasm almost religious to the study of
business methods. All the force of his resolve to perfect himself went for the moment into
this immediate enterprise, and he was sorry that business methods were not more complex,
mysterious, and original than they seemed to be: he was also sorry that his father did not
show a greater interest in his industry and progress.</p>
<p>He no longer wanted to ‘play’ now. He despised play. His unique wish was to
work. It struck him as curious and delightful that he really enjoyed work. Work had indeed
become play. He could not do enough work to satisfy his appetite. And after the work of
the day, scorning all silly notions about exercise and relaxation, he would spend the
evening in his beautiful new attic, copying designs, which he would sometimes rise early
to finish. He thought he had conquered the gross body, and that it was of no account. Even
the desolating failures which his copies invariably proved did not much discourage him;
besides, one of them had impressed both Maggie and Clara. He copied with laborious ardour
undiminished. And further, he masterfully appropriated Maggie’s ticket for the Free
Library, pending the preliminaries to the possession of a ticket of his own, to procure a
volume on architecture. From timidity, from a singular false shame, he kept this volume in
the attic, like a crime; nobody knew what the volume was. Evidence of a strange trait in
his character; a trait perhaps not defensible! He argued with himself that having told his
father plainly that he wanted to be an architect, he need do nothing else aggressive for
the present. He had agreed to the suggestion about business training, and he must be loyal
to his agreement. He pointed out to himself how right his father was. At sixteen one could
scarcely begin to be an architect; it was too soon; and a good business training would not
be out of place in any career or profession.</p>
<p>He was so wrapped up in his days and his nights that he forgot to inquire why
earthenware was made in just the Five Towns. He had grown too serious for
trifles—and all in about a week! True, he was feeling the temporary excitement of
the printing office, which was perhaps expressed boyishly by the printing staff; but he
reckoned that his share of it was quite adult, frowningly superior, and in a strictly
business sense justifiable and even proper.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Two.</h4>
<p>Darius Clayhanger’s printing office was a fine example of the policy of makeshift
which governed and still governs the commercial activity of the Five Towns. It consisted
of the first floor of a nondescript building which stood at the bottom of the irregularly
shaped yard behind the house and shop, and which formed the southern boundary of the
Clayhanger premises. The antique building had once been part of an old-fashioned
pot-works, but that must have been in the eighteenth century. Kilns and chimneys of all
ages, sizes, and tints rose behind it to prove that this part of the town was one of the
old manufacturing quarters. The ground-floor of the building, entirely inaccessible from
Clayhanger’s yard, had a separate entrance of its own in an alley that branched off
from Woodisun Bank, ran parallel to Wedgwood Street, and stopped abruptly at the back gate
of a saddler’s workshop. In the narrow entry you were like a creeping animal amid
the undergrowth of a forest of chimneys, ovens, and high blank walls. This ground-floor
had been a stable for many years; it was now, however, a baker’s storeroom. Once
there had been an interior staircase leading from the ground-floor to the first-floor, but
it had been suppressed in order to save floor space, and an exterior staircase constructed
with its foot in Clayhanger’s yard. To meet the requirement of the staircase, one of
the first-floor windows had been transformed into a door. Further, as the staircase came
against one of the ground-floor windows, and as Clayhanger’s predecessor had
objected to those alien windows overlooking his yard, and as numerous windows were anyhow
unnecessary to a stable, all the ground-floor windows had been closed up with oddments of
brick and tile, giving to the wall a very variegated and chequered appearance. Thus the
ground-floor and the first-floor were absolutely divorced, the former having its entrance
and light from the public alley, the latter from the private yard.</p>
<p>The first-floor had been a printing office for over seventy years. All the machinery in
it had had to be manoeuvred up the rickety stairs, or put through one of the windows on
either side of the window that had been turned into a door. When Darius Clayhanger, in his
audacity, decided to print by steam, many people imagined that he would at last be
compelled to rent the ground-floor or to take other premises. But no! The elasticity of
the makeshift policy was not yet fully stretched. Darius, in consultation with a jobbing
builder, came happily to the conclusion that he could ‘manage,’ that he could
‘make things do,’ by adding to the top of his stairs a little landing for an
engine-shed. This was done, and the engine and boiler perched in the air; the shaft of the
engine went through the wall; the chimney-pipe of the boiler ran up straight to the level
of the roof-ridge, and was stayed with pieces of wire. A new chimney had also been pierced
in the middle of the roof, for the uses of a heating stove. The original chimneys had been
allowed to fall into decay. Finally, a new large skylight added interest to the roof. In a
general way, the building resembled a suit of clothes that had been worn, during four of
the seven ages of man, by an untidy husband with a tidy and economical wife, and then
given by the wife to a poor relation of a somewhat different figure to finish. All that
could be said of it was that it survived and served.</p>
<p>But these considerations occurred to nobody.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Three.</h4>
<p>Edwin, quite unaware that he was an instrument in the hands of his Auntie Clara’s
Providence, left the shop without due excuse and passed down the long blue-paved yard
towards the printing office. He imagined that he was being drawn thither simply by his own
curiosity—a curiosity, however, which he considered to be justifiable, and even
laudable. The yard showed signs that the unusual had lately been happening there. Its
brick pavement, in the narrow branch of it that led to the double gates in Woodisun Bank
(those gates which said to the casual visitor, ‘No Admittance except on
Business’), was muddy, littered, and damaged, as though a Juggernaut had passed that
way. Ladders reclined against the walls. Moreover, one of the windows of the office had
been taken out of its frame, leaving naught but an oblong aperture. Through this aperture
Edwin could see the busy, eager forms of his father, Big James, and Chawner. Through this
aperture had been lifted, in parts and by the employment of every possible combination of
lever and pulley, the printing machine which Darius Clayhanger had so successfully
purchased in Manchester on the day of the free-and-easy at the Dragon.</p>
<p>At the top of the flight of steps two apprentices, one nearly ‘out of his
time,’ were ministering to the engine, which that morning did not happen to be
running. The engine, giving glory to the entire establishment by virtue of the imposing
word ‘steam’, was a crotchety and capricious thing, constant only in its
tendency to break down. No more reliance could be placed on it than on a pampered donkey.
Sometimes it would run, and sometimes it would not run, but nobody could safely prophesy
its moods. Of the several machines it drove but one, the grand cylinder, the last triumph
of the ingenuity of man, and even that had to be started by hand before the engine would
consent to work it. The staff hated the engine, except during those rare hours when one of
its willing moods coincided with a pressure of business. Then, when the steam was
sputtering and the smoke smoking and the piston throbbing, and the leathern belt
travelling round and round and the complete building a-tremble and a-clatter, and an
attendant with clean hands was feeding the sheets at one end of the machine and another
attendant with clean hands taking them off at the other, all at the rate of twenty copies
per sixty seconds—then the staff loved the engine and meditated upon the wonders of
their modern civilisation. The engine had been known to do its five thousand in an
afternoon, and its horse-power was only one.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Four.</h4>
<p>Edwin could not keep out of the printing office. He went inconspicuously and, as it
were, by accident up the stone steps, and disappeared into the interior. When you entered
the office you were first of all impressed by the multiplicity of odours competing for
your attention, the chief among them being those of ink, oil, and paraffin. Despite the
fact that the door was open and one window gone, the smell and heat in the office on that
warm morning were notable. Old sheets of the “Manchester Examiner” had been
pinned over the skylight to keep out the sun, but, as these were torn and rent, the sun
was not kept out. Nobody, however, seemed to suffer inconvenience. After the odours, the
remarkable feature of the place was the quantity of machinery on its uneven floor. Timid
employés had occasionally suggested to Darius that the floor might yield one day
and add themselves and all the machinery to the baker’s stores below; but Darius
knew that floors never did yield.</p>
<p>In the middle of the floor was a huge and heavy heating stove, whose pipe ran straight
upwards to the visible roof. The mighty cylinder machine stood to the left hand. Behind
was a small rough-and-ready binding department with a guillotine cutting machine, a
cardboard-cutting machine, and a perforating machine, trifles by the side of the cylinder,
but still each of them formidable masses of metal heavy enough to crush a horse; the
cutting machines might have served to illustrate the French Revolution, and the
perforating machine the Holy Inquisition.</p>
<p>Then there was what was called in the office the ‘old machine,’ a relic of
Clayhanger’s predecessor, and at least eighty years old. It was one of those
machines whose worn physiognomies, full of character, show at once that they have a
history. In construction it carried solidity to an absurd degree. Its pillars were like
the piles of a pier. Once, in a historic rat-catching, a rat had got up one of them, and a
piece of smouldering brown paper had done what a terrier could not do. The machine at one
period of its career had been enlarged, and the neat seaming of the metal was an ecstasy
to the eye of a good workman. Long ago, it was known, this machine had printed a Reform
newspaper at Stockport. Now, after thus participating in the violent politics of an age
heroic and unhappy, it had been put to printing small posters of auctions and
tea-meetings. Its movement was double: first that of a handle to bring the bed under the
platen, and second, a lever pulled over to make contact between the type and the paper. It
still worked perfectly. It was so solid, and it had been so honestly made, that it could
never get out of order nor wear away. And, indeed, the conscientiousness and skill of
artificers in the eighteenth century are still, through that resistless machine, producing
their effect in the twentieth. But it needed a strong hand to bestir its smooth
plum-coloured limbs of metal, and a speed of a hundred an hour meant gentle perspiration.
The machine was loved like an animal.</p>
<p>Near this honourable and lumbering survival stood pertly an Empire treadle-machine for
printing envelopes and similar trifles. It was new, and full of natty little devices. It
worked with the lightness of something unsubstantial. A child could actuate it, and it
would print delicately a thousand envelopes an hour. This machine, with the latest
purchase, which was away at the other end of the room near the large double-pointed
case-rack, completed the tale of machines. That case-rack alone held fifty different
founts of type, and there were other case-racks. The lead-rack was nearly as large, and
beneath the lead-rack was a rack containing all those “furnitures” which help
to hold a forme of type together without betraying themselves to the reader of the printed
sheet. And under the furniture rack was the ‘random,’ full of galleys. Then
there was a table with a top of solid stone, upon which the formes were bolted up. And
there was the ink-slab, another solidity, upon which the ink-rollers were inked. Rollers
of various weightiness lay about, and large heavy cans, and many bottles, and metal
galleys, and nameless fragments of metal. Everything contributed to the impression of
immense ponderosity exceeding the imagination. The fancy of being pinned down by even the
lightest of these constructions was excruciating. You moved about in narrow alleys among
upstanding, unyielding metallic enormities, and you felt fragile and perilously soft.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Five.</h4>
<p>The only unintimidating phenomena in the crowded place were the lye-brushes, the dusty
job-files that hung from the great transverse beams, and the proof-sheets that were
scattered about. These printed things showed to what extent Darius Clayhanger’s
establishment was a channel through which the life of the town had somehow to pass.
Auctions, meetings, concerts, sermons, improving lectures, miscellaneous entertainments,
programmes, catalogues, deaths, births, marriages, specifications, municipal notices,
summonses, demands, receipts, subscription-lists, accounts, rate-forms, lists of voters,
jury-lists, inaugurations, closures, bill-heads, handbills, addresses, visiting-cards,
society rules, bargain-sales, lost and found notices: traces of all these matters, and
more, were to be found in that office; it was impregnated with the human interest; it was
dusty with the human interest; its hot smell seemed to you to come off life itself, if the
real sentiment and love of life were sufficiently in you. A grand, stuffy, living,
seething place, with all its metallic immobility!</p>
<hr>
<h4>Six.</h4>
<p>Edwin sidled towards the centre of interest, the new machine, which, however, was not a
new machine. Darius Clayhanger did not buy more new things than he could help. His delight
was to ‘pick up’ articles that were supposed to be ‘as good as
new’; occasionally he would even assert that an object bought second-hand was
‘better than new,’ because it had been ‘broken in,’ as if it were
a horse. Nevertheless, the latest machine was, for a printing machine, nearly new: its age
was four years only. It was a Demy Columbian Press, similar in conception and movement to
the historic ‘old machine’ that had been through the Reform agitation; but how
much lighter, how much handier, how much more ingenious and precise in the detail of its
working! A beautiful edifice, as it stood there, gazed on admiringly by the expert eyes of
Darius, in his shirt-sleeves, Big James, in his royally flowing apron, and Chawner, the
journeyman compositor, who, with the two apprentices outside, completed the staff! Aided
by no mechanic more skilled than a day-labourer, those men had got the machine piecemeal
into the office, and had duly erected it. At that day a foreman had to be equal to
anything.</p>
<p>The machine appeared so majestic there, so solid and immovable, that it might ever have
existed where it then was. Who could credit that, less than a fortnight earlier, it had
stood equally majestic, solid, and immovable in Manchester? There remained nothing to show
how the miracle had been accomplished, except a bandage of ropes round the lower pillars
and some pulley-tackle hanging from one of the transverse beams exactly overhead. The
situation of the machine in the workshop had been fixed partly by that beam above and
partly by the run of the beams that supported the floor. The stout roof-beam enabled the
artificers to handle the great masses by means of the tackle; and as for the floor-beams,
Darius had so far listened to warnings as to take them into account.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Seven.</h4>
<p>“Take another impress, James,” said Darius. And when he saw Edwin, instead
of asking the youth what he was wasting his time there for, he good-humouredly added:
“Just watch this, my lad.” Darius was pleased with himself, his men, and his
acquisition. He was in one of his moods when he could charm; he was jolly, and he held up
his chin. Two days before, so interested had he been in the Demy Columbian, he had
actually gone through a bilious attack while scarcely noticing it! And now the whole
complex operation had been brought to a triumphant conclusion.</p>
<p>Big James inserted the sheet of paper, with gentle and fine movements. The journeyman
turned the handle, and the bed of the machine slid horizontally forward in frictionless,
stately silence. And then Big James seized the lever with his hairy arm bared to the
elbow, and pulled it over. The delicate process was done with minute and level exactitude;
adjusted to the thirty-second of an inch, the great masses of metal had brought the paper
and the type together and separated them again. In another moment Big James drew out the
sheet, and the three men inspected it, each leaning over it. A perfect impression!</p>
<p>“Well,” said Darius, glowing, “we’ve had a bit o’ luck in
getting that up! Never had less trouble! Shows we can do better without those Foundry
chaps than with ’em! James, ye can have a quart brought in, if ye’n a mind,
but I won’t have them apprentices drinking! No, I won’t! Mrs Nixon’ll
give ’em some nettle-beer if they fancy it.”</p>
<p>He was benignant. The inauguration of a new machine deserved solemn recognition,
especially on a hot day. It was an event.</p>
<p>“An infant in arms could turn this here,” murmured the journeyman, toying
with the handle that moved the bed. It was an exaggeration, but an excusable, poetical
exaggeration.</p>
<p>Big James wiped his wrists on his apron.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Eight.</h4>
<p>Then there was a queer sound of cracking somewhere, vague, faint, and yet formidable.
Darius was standing between the machines and the dismantled window, his back to the
latter. Big James and the journeyman rushed instinctively from the centre of the floor
towards him. In a second the journeyman was on the window sill.</p>
<p>“What art doing?” Darius demanded roughly; but there was no sincerity in
his voice.</p>
<p>“Th’ floor!” the journeyman excitedly exclaimed.</p>
<p>Big James stood close to the wall.</p>
<p>“And what about th’ floor?” Darius challenged him obstinately.</p>
<p>“One o’ them beams is a-going,” stammered the journeyman.</p>
<p>“Rubbish!” shouted Darius. But simultaneously he motioned to Edwin to move
from the middle of the room, and Edwin obeyed. All four listened, with nerves stretched to
the tightest. Darius was biting his lower lip with his upper teeth. His humour had swiftly
changed to the savage. Every warning that had been uttered for years past concerning that
floor was remembered with startling distinctness. Every impatient reassurance offered by
Darius for years past suddenly seemed fatuous and perverse. How could any man in his
senses expect the old floor to withstand such a terrific strain as that to which Darius
had at last dared to subject it? The floor ought by rights to have given way years ago!
His men ought to have declined to obey instructions that were obviously insane. These and
similar thoughts visited the minds of Big James and the journeyman.</p>
<p>As for Edwin, his excitement was, on balance, pleasurable. In truth, he could not kill
in his mind the hope that the floor would yield. The greatness of the resulting
catastrophe fascinated him. He knew that he should be disappointed if the catastrophe did
not occur. That it would mean ruinous damage to the extent of hundreds of pounds, and
enormous worry, did not influence him. His reason did not influence him, nor his personal
danger. He saw a large hook in the wall to which he could cling when the exquisite crash
came, and pictured a welter of broken machinery and timber ten feet below him, and the
immense pother that the affair would create in the town.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Nine.</h4>
<p>Darius would not loose his belief in his floor. He hugged it in mute fury. He would not
climb on to the window sill, nor tell Big James to do so, nor even Edwin. On the subject
of the floor he was religious; he was above the appeal of the intelligence. He had always
held passionately that the floor was immovable, and he always would. He had finally
convinced himself of its omnipotent strength by the long process of assertion and
reassertion. When a voice within him murmured that his belief in the floor had no
scientific basis, he strangled the voice. So he remained, motionless, between the window
and the machine.</p>
<p>No sound! No slightest sound! No tremor of the machine! But Darius’s breathing
could be heard after a moment.</p>
<p>He guffawed sneeringly.</p>
<p>“And what next?” he defiantly asked, scowling. “What’s amiss
wi’ ye all?” He put his hands in his pockets. “Dun ye mean to tell me
as—”</p>
<p>The younger apprentice entered from the engine-shed.</p>
<p>“Get back there!” rolled and thundered the voice of Big James. It was the
first word he had spoken, and he did not speak it in frantic, hysteric command, but with a
terrible and convincing mildness. The phrase fell on the apprentice like a sandbag, and he
vanished.</p>
<p>Darius said nothing. There was another cracking sound, louder, and unmistakably beneath
the bed of the machine. And at the same instant a flake of grimy plaster detached itself
from the opposite wall and dropped into pale dust on the floor. And still Darius
religiously did not move, and Big James would not move. They might have been under a
spell. The journeyman jumped down incautiously into the yard.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Ten.</h4>
<p>And then Edwin, hardly knowing what he did, and certainly not knowing why he did it,
walked quickly out on to the floor, seized the huge hook attached to the lower pulley of
the tackle that hung from the roof-beam, pulled up the slack of the rope-bandage on the
hind part of the machine, and stuck the hook into it, then walked quickly back. The
hauling-rope of the tackle had been carried to the iron ring of a trap-door in the corner
near Big James; this trap-door, once the outlet of the interior staircase from the ground
floor, had been nailed down many years previously. Big James dropped to his knees and
tightened and knotted the rope. Another and much louder noise of cracking followed, the
floor visibly yielded, and the hindpart of the machine visibly sank about a quarter of an
inch. But no more. The tackle held. The strain was distributed between the beam above and
the beam below, and equilibrium established.</p>
<p>“Out! Lad! Out!” cried Darius feebly, in the wreck, not of his workshop,
but of his religion. And Edwin fled down the steps, pushing the mystified apprentices
before him, and followed by the men. In the yard the journeyman, entirely self-centred,
was hopping about on one leg and cursing.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Eleven.</h4>
<p>Darius, Big James, and Edwin stared in the morning sunshine at the aperture of the
window and listened.</p>
<p>“Nay!” said Big James, after an eternity. “He’s saved it!
He’s saved th’ old shop! But by gum—by gum—”</p>
<p>Darius turned to Edwin, and tried to say something; and then Edwin saw his
father’s face working into monstrous angular shapes, and saw the tears spurt out of
his eyes, and was clutched convulsively in his father’s shirt-sleeved arms. He was
very proud, very pleased, but he did not like this embrace; it made him feel ashamed. He
thought how Clara would have sniggered about it and caricatured it afterwards, had she
witnessed it. And although he had incontestably done something which was very wonderful
and very heroic, and which proved in him the most extraordinary presence of mind, he could
not honestly glorify himself in his own heart, because it appeared to him that he had
acted exactly like an automaton. He blankly marvelled, and thought the situation agreeably
thrilling, if somewhat awkward. His father let him go. Then all Edwin’s feelings
gave place to an immense stupefaction at his father’s truly remarkable behaviour.
What! His father emotional! He had to begin to revise again his settled views.</p>
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