THAT evening when dinner ended, Mrs. Ansell, with a glance through the tall dining-room windows, had suggested to Bessy that it would be pleasanter to take coffee on the verandah; but Amherst detained his wife with a glance.
"I should like Bessy to stay," he said.
The dining-room being on the cool side the house, with a refreshing outlook on the garden, the men preferred to smoke there rather than in the stuffily-draped Oriental apartment destined to such rites; and Bessy Amherst, with a faint sigh, sank back into her seat, while Mrs. Ansell drifted out through one of the open windows.
The men surrounding Richard Westmore's table were the same who nearly three years earlier had gathered in his house for the same purpose: the discussion of conditions at the mills. The only perceptible change in the relation to each other of the persons composing this group was that John Amherst was now the host of the other two, instead of being a subordinate called in for cross-examination; but he was so indifferent, or at least so heedless, a host--so forgetful, for instance, of Mr. Tredegar's preference for a "light" cigar, and of Mr. Langhope's feelings on the duty of making the Westmore madeira circulate with the sun--that the change was manifest only in his evening-dress, and in the fact of his sitting at the foot of the table.
If Amherst was conscious of the contrast thus implied, it was only as a restriction on his freedom. As far as the welfare of Westmore was concerned he would rather have stood before his companions as the assistant manager of the mills than as the husband of their owner; and it seemed to him, as he looked back, that he had done very little with the opportunity which looked so great in the light of his present restrictions. What he _had_ done with it--the use to which, as unfriendly critics might insinuate, he had so adroitly put it--had landed him, ironically enough, in the ugly _impasse_ of a situation from which no issue seemed possible without some wasteful sacrifice of feeling.
His wife's feelings, for example, were already revealing themselves in an impatient play of her fan that made her father presently lean forward to suggest: "If we men are to talk shop, is it necessary to keep Bessy in this hot room?"
Amherst rose and opened the window behind his wife's chair.
"There's a breeze from the west--the room will be cooler now," he said, returning to his seat.
"Oh, I don't mind--" Bessy murmured, in a tone intended to give her companions the full measure of what she was being called on to endure.
Mr. Tredegar coughed slightly. "May I trouble you for that other box of cigars, Amherst? No, _not_ the Caba?as." Bessy rose and handed him the box on which his glance significantly rested. "Ah, thank you, my dear. I was about to ask," he continued, looking about for the cigar-lighter, which flamed unheeded at Amherst's elbow, "what special purpose will be served by a preliminary review of the questions to be discussed tomorrow."
"Ah--exactly," murmured Mr. Langhope. "The madeira, my dear John? No--ah--_please_--to the left!"
Amherst impatiently reversed the direction in which he had set the precious vessel moving, and turned to Mr. Tredegar, who was conspicuously lighting his cigar with a match extracted from his waist-coat pocket.
"The purpose is to define my position in the matter; and I prefer that Bessy should do this with your help rather than with mine."
Mr. Tredegar surveyed his cigar through drooping lids, as though the question propounded by Amherst were perched on its tip.
"Is not your position naturally involved in and defined by hers? You will excuse my saying that--technically speaking, of course--I cannot distinctly conceive of it as having any separate existence."
Mr. Tredegar spoke with the deliberate mildness that was regarded as his most effective weapon at the bar, since it was likely to abash those who were too intelligent to be propitiated by it.
"Certainly it is involved in hers," Amherst agreed; "but how far that defines it is just what I have waited till now to find out."
Bessy at this point recalled her presence by a restless turn of her graceful person, and her father, with an affectionate glance at her, interposed amicably: "But surely--according to old-fashioned ideas--it implies identity of interests?"
"Yes; but whose interests?" Amherst asked.
"Why--your wife's, man! She owns the mills."
Amherst hesitated. "I would rather talk of my wife's interest in the mills than of her interests there; but we'll keep to the plural if you prefer it. Personally, I believe the terms should be interchangeable in the conduct of such a business."
"Ah--I'm glad to hear that," said Mr. Tredegar quickly, "since it's precisely the view we all take."
Amherst's colour rose. "Definitions are ambiguous," he said. "Before you adopt mine, perhaps I had better develop it a little farther. What I mean is, that Bessy's interests in Westmore should be regulated by her interest in it--in its welfare as a social body, aside from its success as a commercial enterprise. If we agree on this definition, we are at one as to the other: namely that my relation to the matter is defined by hers."
He paused a moment, as if to give his wife time to contribute some sign of assent and encouragement; but she maintained a puzzled silence and he went on: "There is nothing new in this. I have tried to make Bessy understand from the beginning what obligations I thought the ownership of Westmore entailed, and how I hoped to help her fulfill them; but ever since our marriage all definite discussion of the subject has been put off for one cause or another, and that is my reason for urging that it should be brought up at the directors' meeting tomorrow."
There was another pause, during which Bessy glanced tentatively at Mr. Tredegar, and then said, with a lovely rise of colour: "But, John, I sometimes think you forget how much has been done at Westmore--the Mothers' Club, and the play-ground, and all--in the way of carrying out your ideas."
Mr. Tredegar discreetly dropped his glance to his cigar, and Mr. Langhope sounded an irrepressible note of approval and encouragement.
Amherst smiled. "No, I have not forgotten; and I am grateful to you for giving my ideas a trial. But what has been done hitherto is purely superficial." Bessy's eyes clouded, and he added hastily: "Don't think I undervalue it for that reason--heaven knows the surface of life needs improving! But it's like picking flowers and sticking them in the ground to make a garden--unless you transplant the flower with its roots, and prepare the soil to receive it, your garden will be faded tomorrow. No radical changes have yet been made at Westmore; and it is of radical changes that I want to speak."
Bessy's look grew more pained, and Mr. Langhope exclaimed with unwonted irascibility: "Upon my soul, Amherst, the tone you take about what your wife has done doesn't strike me as the likeliest way of encouraging her to do more!"
"I don't want to encourage her to do more on such a basis--the sooner she sees the futility of it the better for Westmore!"
"The futility--?" Bessy broke out, with a flutter of tears in her voice; but before her father could intervene Mr. Tredegar had raised his hand with the gesture of one accustomed to wield the gavel.
"My dear child, I see Amherst's point, and it is best, as he says, that you should see it too. What he desires, as I understand it, is the complete reconstruction of the present state of things at Westmore; and he is right in saying that all your good works there--night-schools, and nursery, and so forth--leave that issue untouched."
A smile quivered under Mr. Langhope's moustache. He and Amherst both knew that Mr. Tredegar's feint of recognizing the justice of his adversary's claim was merely the first step to annihilating it; but Bessy could never be made to understand this, and always felt herself deserted and betrayed when any side but her own was given a hearing.
"I'm sorry if all I have tried to do at Westmore is useless--but I suppose I shall never understand business," she murmured, vainly seeking consolation in her father's eye.
"This is not business," Amherst broke in. "It's the question of your personal relation to the people there--the last thing that business considers."
Mr. Langhope uttered an impatient exclamation. "I wish to heaven the owner of the mills had made it clear just what that relation was to be!"
"I think he did, sir," Amherst answered steadily, "in leaving his wife the unrestricted control of the property."
He had reddened under Mr. Langhope's thrust, but his voice betrayed no irritation, and Bessy rewarded him with an unexpected beam of sympathy: she was always up in arms at the least sign of his being treated as an intruder.
"I am sure, papa," she said, a little tremulously, "that poor Richard, though he knew I was not clever, felt he could trust me to take the best advice----"
"Ah, that's all we ask of you, my child!" her father sighed, while Mr. Tredegar drily interposed: "We are merely losing time by this digression. Let me suggest that Amherst should give us an idea of the changes he wishes to make at Westmore."
Amherst, as he turned to answer, remembered with what ardent faith in his powers of persuasion he had responded to the same appeal three years earlier. He had thought then that all his cause needed was a hearing; now he knew that the practical man's readiness to let the idealist talk corresponds with the busy parent's permission to destructive infancy to "run out and play." They would let him state his case to the four corners of the earth--if only he did not expect them to act on it! It was their policy to let him exhaust himself in argument and exhortation, to listen to him so politely and patiently that if he failed to enforce his ideas it should not be for lack of opportunity to expound them.... And the alternative struck him as hardly less to be feared. Supposing that the incredible happened, that his reasons prevailed with his wife, and, through her, with the others--at what cost would the victory be won? Would Bessy ever forgive him for winning it? And what would his situation be, if it left him in control of Westmore but estranged from his wife?
He recalled suddenly a phrase he had used that afternoon to the dark-eyed girl at the garden-party: "What risks we run when we scramble into the chariot of the gods!" And at the same instant he heard her retort, and saw her fine gesture of defiance. How could he ever have doubted that the thing was worth doing at whatever cost? Something in him--some secret lurking element of weakness and evasion--shrank out of sight in the light of her question: "Do _you_ act on that?" and the "God forbid!" he had instantly flashed back to her. He turned to Mr. Tredegar with his answer.
Amherst knew that any large theoretical exposition of the case would be as much wasted on the two men as on his wife. To gain his point he must take only one step at a time, and it seemed to him that the first thing needed at Westmore was that the hands should work and live under healthier conditions. To attain this, two important changes were necessary: the floor-space of the mills must be enlarged, and the company must cease to rent out tenements, and give the operatives the opportunity to buy land for themselves. Both these changes involved the upheaval of the existing order. Whenever the Westmore mills had been enlarged, it had been for the sole purpose of increasing the revenues of the company; and now Amherst asked that these revenues should be materially and permanently reduced. As to the suppression of the company tenement, such a measure struck at the roots of the baneful paternalism which was choking out every germ of initiative in the workman. Once the operatives had room to work in, and the hope of homes of their own to go to when work was over, Amherst was willing to trust to time for the satisfaction of their other needs. He believed that a sounder understanding of these needs would develop on both sides the moment the employers proved their good faith by the deliberate and permanent sacrifice of excessive gain to the well-being of the employed; and once the two had learned to regard each other not as antagonists but as collaborators, a long step would have been taken toward a readjustment of the whole industrial relation. In regard to general and distant results, Amherst tried not to be too sanguine, even in his own thoughts. His aim was to remedy the abuse nearest at hand, in the hope of thus getting gradually closer to the central evil; and, had his action been unhampered, he would still have preferred the longer and more circuitous path of practical experiment to the sweeping adoption of a new industrial system.
But his demands, moderate as they were, assumed in his hearers the consciousness of a moral claim superior to the obligation of making one's business "pay"; and it was the futility of this assumption that chilled the arguments on his lips, since in the orthodox creed of the business world it was a weakness and not a strength to be content with five per cent where ten was obtainable. Business was one thing, philanthropy another; and the enthusiasts who tried combining them were usually reduced, after a brief flight, to paying fifty cents on the dollar, and handing over their stock to a promoter presumably unhampered by humanitarian ideals.
Amherst knew t............