Читать книгу Storm in a Teacup - Eden Phillpotts - Страница 4

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Stopping only to wash his hands and brush his hair, Kellock left his rooms and hastened up the coomb, where towered immense congeries of buildings under the slope of the hills. Evening sunshine fell over the western height which crowned the valley, and still caught the upper windows of the factory; but the huge shadow quickly climbed upward as the sun set.

A small house stood at the main gate of Dene Paper Mill, and at the door sat a man reading a paper and smoking his pipe.

It was Mr. Trood, foreman of the works.

“Guvnor’s asking for you, Kellock,” he said. “Five o’clock was the time.”

Jordan hurried on to the deserted mills, for the day was Saturday and work had ceased at noon. Threading the silent shops he presently reached a door on an upper floor, marked “Office,” knocked and was told to enter.

On the left of the chamber sat a broad-shouldered man writing at a roll-top desk; under the windows of the room, which faced north, extended a long table heaped with paper of all descriptions and colours.

The master twisted round on his office chair, then rose and lighted a cigarette. He was clean-shaved with iron-grey hair and a searching but genial expression. His face shone with intelligence and humour. It was strong and accurately declared the man, for indomitable perseverance and courage belonged to Matthew Trenchard.

His own success he attributed to love of sport and love of fun. These pursuits made him sympathetic and understanding. He recognised his responsibilities and his rule of conduct in his relations with the hundred men and women he employed was to keep in closest possible touch with them. He held it good for them and vital for himself that he should know what was passing in their minds; for only thus could he discover the beginning of grievances and destroy them in the egg. He believed that the longer a trouble grew, the more difficult it was to dissipate, and by establishing intimate relations with his staff and impressing upon them his own situation, his successes and his failures, he succeeded in fixing unusual bonds.

For the most part his people felt that Trenchard’s good was their own—not because he said so, but because he made it so; and save for certain inevitable spirits, who objected on principle to all existing conditions between capital and labour, the workers trusted him and spoke well of him.

Kellock was first vatman at Dene, and one of the best paper makers in England. Both knew their worth and each was satisfied with the other.

“I’ve heard from that South American Republic, Kellock,” said Mr. Trenchard. “They like the new currency paper and the colour suits them.”

“It’s a very fine paper, Mr. Trenchard.”

“Just the exact opposite of what I’m after for these advertisements. The public, Kellock, must be appealed to by the methods of Cheap Jack at the fair. They love a conjuring trick, and if you can stop them long enough to ask ‘how’s it done?’ you often interest them and win them. Now samples of our great papers mean nothing to anybody but the dealers. The public doesn’t know hand-made paper from machine-made. What we’ve got to do is to show them—not tip-top paper, but a bit of magic; and such a fool is the public that when he sees these pictures in water-mark, he’ll think the paper that produces them must be out of the common good. We know that it’s not ‘paper’ at all in our sense, and that it’s a special brew for this special purpose; but the public, amazed by the pictures, buys our paper and doesn’t know that the better the paper, the more impossible such sleight of hand would be upon it. We show them one thing which awakes their highest admiration and causes them to buy another!”

All this Jordan Kellock very well understood, and his master knew that he did; but Trenchard liked to talk and excelled in lucid exposition.

“That’s right,” said the vatman; “they think that the paper that can take such pictures must be good for anything; though the truth is that it’s good for nothing—but the pictures. If there was any quality to the pulp, it could never run into such moulds as these were made in.”

He began to pick up the impressions of a series of large, exhibition water-marks, and hold them to the windows, that their transparent wonders might be seen.

“Real works of art,” he said, “with high lights and deep shadows and rare half tones and colour, too, all on stuff like tissue. The beaterman must give me pulp as fine as flour to get such impressions.”

“Finer than flour, my lad. The new moulds are even more wonderful. It is no good doing what your father did over again. My father beat my grandfather; so it’s my duty to beat him—see?”

“These are wonderful enough in all conscience.”

“And for the Exhibition I mean to turn out something more wonderful still. Something more than craft—real art, my friend. I want the artists. I want them to see what our art paper for water-colour work is. They don’t know yet—at least only a handful of them.”

“But this is different. The pulp to do this sort of thing must be as thin as water,” said Kellock.

“Fibre is the first consideration for paper that’s going to be as everlasting as parchment; but these water-mark masterpieces are tours de force—conjuring tricks as I call them. And I want to give the public a conjuring trick more wonderful than they’ve ever seen in paper before; and I’m going to do it.”

“No paper maker ever beat these, Mr. Trenchard,” declared Kellock. He held up large sheets of the size known as “elephant.” They appeared to be white until illuminated; then they revealed shades of delicate duck-green, sunrise yellow, dark blue, light blue and umber.

A portrait by Romney of Lady Hamilton shone through the first, and the solidity of the dark masses, the rendering of the fabric and the luminous quality of the flesh were wonderfully translated by the daylight filtering through.

“There can be no painted pictures like these,” said Matthew Trenchard stoutly. “And why? Because the painter uses paint; I use pure daylight, and the sweetest paint that ever was isn’t a patch on the light of day. Such things as these are more beautiful than pictures, just because the living light from the sky is more beautiful than any pigment made by man.”

Kellock was too cautious to agree with these revolutionary theories.

“Certainly these things would be very fine to decorate our windows, if we didn’t want to look out of them,” he admitted.

Then he held up a portrait of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria.

“Pure ultramarine blue, you see,” commented the master, “and the light brings out its richness, though if you looked at the paper, you’d be puzzled to find any blue in it. That’s because the infinitely fine atoms of the colour would want a microscope to see their separate particles. Yet where the pulp sank to the depths of the mould, they collected in millions to give you those deep shadows.”

Kellock delayed at the copy of a statue: the Venus Victrix from Naples—a work which certainly reproduced the majesty of the original in a rounded, lustrous fashion that no reproduction on the flat could echo.

“We can’t beat that, though it is fifty years old,” declared Kellock.

“We’re going to, however; and another statue is my idea. Marble comes out grandly as you see. I’m out for black and white, not colour. I’ve an idea we can get something as fine as the old masters of engraving, and finer.”

“The vatman is nought for this work,” confessed Kellock. “He makes paper in his mould and that’s all there is to it—whether for printing, or writing, or painting. The man who matters is him who makes the mould.”

“But we can help him; we can experiment at the vat and in the beating engine. We can go one better in the pulp; and the stroke counts at the vat. I reckon your stroke will be invaluable to work the pulp into every cranny of such moulds as I’m thinking about.”

“I’ll do my best; so will Dingle; but how many men in England are there who could make such moulds as these to-day?”

“Three,” replied Trenchard. “But I want better moulds. I’m hopeful that Michael Thorn of London will rise to it. I go to see him next week, and we put in a morning at the British Museum to find a statue worthy of the occasion.”

“I can see a wonderful thing in my mind’s eye already,” declared Kellock.

“Can you? Well, I never can see anything in my mind’s eye and rest content for an hour, till I set about the way to see it with my body’s eye.”

“We all know that, Mr. Trenchard.”

“Here’s my favourite,” declared the other, holding up a massive head of Abraham Lincoln. “Now that’s a great work in my judgment and if we beat that in quality, we shall produce a water-mark picture worth talking about.”

“You ought to show all these too,” said Jordan Kellock.

“I shall—if I beat them; not if they beat me,” replied the other. “I wanted you to see what my father and grandfather could do, so that you may judge what we’re up against. But they’re going to be beaten at Dene, or else I’ll know the reason why.”

“It’s good to see such things and worth while trying to beat them,” answered the vatman.

“To improve upon the past is the business of every honest man in my opinion,” declared Trenchard. “That’s what we’re here for; and that’s what I’ve done, I believe, thanks to a lot of clever people here who have helped me to do it and share what credit there may be. But I don’t claim credit, Ned. It’s common duty for every man with brains in his head to help push the craft along.”

“And keep its head above water,” added the listener.

Matthew Trenchard eyed him doubtfully and lighted another cigarette.

“Yes,” he admitted rather reluctantly. “You’re right. Hand-made paper’s battling for its life in one sense—like a good many other hand-made things. But the machine hasn’t caught us yet and it will be a devil of a long time before it does, I hope.”

“It’s for us not to let it,” said Jordan—a sentiment the paper master approved.

“I’m fair,” he said, “and I’m not going to pretend the machine isn’t turning out some properly wonderful papers; and I’m not going to say it isn’t doing far better things than ever I thought it would do. I don’t laugh at it as my grandfather did, or shake my head at it as my father used. I recognise our craft is going down hill. But we ain’t at the bottom by a long way; and when we get there, we’ll go game and die like gentlemen.”

They talked awhile longer; then the dusk came down, Kellock departed and Trenchard, turning on an electric light, resumed his writing.