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Four men were at work in the carpenter’s shop.

Two large windows facing south let the sunlight in upon the benches and the shavings littering the floor. In a corner four coats hung upon pegs.

The windows of the shop looked out upon the yard of Messrs. Samson & Hoad, Builders, of Kingham, and this yard was full of building material: yellow bricks, red bricks, flettons, tiles, drain-pipes, sand, ballast. An old blue door, taken from some dismantled house, stood leaning against a black tarred fence.

The names of the four men were Tower, Smith, Woodward, and Scudder. Tower and Smith were busy at the benches. Woodward, a sallow man, baldish and with a sneering nose, was honing a chisel. Young Scudder, the shop’s lout, had got hold of a broom and was preparing to sweep up the shavings. Both he and Woodward, while ostensibly at work, were waiting for the hooter of Royal’s Carriage Works to set them free.

It was a Saturday in May, and above the tarred fence enclosing the yard a lilac showed its purple spikes. Tower, the foreman, would pause in the cutting of his mortise holes and look at the lilac bush. At sixty-five he liked to look at such things with some of the gentleness of a man who realized that life did not last for ever. Keir Smith, with his dark head bent over a piece of oak, might glance occasionally at the lilac bush, but his gaze was different. It was swift and cursory like that of a man lifting his head momentarily to look at a flame, something that was both near and far, like a sunset beyond a factory chimney. His work absorbed him. For the moment his consciousness was constrained to follow the grain of the oak, and the purple flame of the flower belonged to tomorrow.

The facetious lad with the broom, finding himself close to the man who was sharpening the chisel, nudged him and then levelled the broom handle at the worker in oak. Their glances were pointed at the other man’s figure, with its rather rounded shoulders and thin neck. It was an unusual figure both in its concentration and in its colour. It wore grey flannel trousers and a blue pull-over with a pattern of yellow zigzags. Its hair had a black intensity. The glances of the broom-squire and the chisel-sharpener met and mingled in a little sneer.

The lad winked. He resumed his sweeping, pushing the broom under the oak-worker’s bench. It played challengingly round Keir Smith’s feet.

“Don’t mind me, old lad.”

And then, since no notice was taken of the playful provocation, he clipped Keir’s ankle with the head of the broom.

Keir turned his head sharply. He smiled, but the smile was willed, and at the back of his eyes other scorns were concealed. He knew that it was easier to shrug off the provocation than to challenge it.

“Doing the job thoroughly—aren’t you, Scudder?”

He moved to one side so that the broom’s progress should not be impeded, but he had been guilty of irony, and the delicate flavour of the product may not mingle with the smell of sawdust. The head of the broom was proposing to try a second flick at Keir’s ankles, but at that moment Royal’s hooter blew. The broom was pitched into a corner. The man with the chisel tossed it up, caught it deftly by the handle, and began to whistle.

They went to the corner of the shop where their coats and hats hung. Keir was at work again on his oak door, and old Tower was looking at the lilac bush, but he had not put down his tools. Hooter or no hooter, he would finish cutting that mortise, but old Tower was grey-headed and beyond redemption. He did not matter. Keir did matter.

As they passed down the shop, he of the broom addressed the worker in oak. He too could be ironical.

“Haven’t you heard the—hooter—Mr.—Smith?”

Yes, Keir had heard it, but being of a different fibre from those others, he did not regard it as the voice of his god. If he dreamed dreams—and he did dream them—they were not the negation of all ardour and all effort. If he had visions of some magic beanstalk up which he would clamber, he had cause to know that there were other men who would rush to catch him by the legs and pull him down. He did not turn his head to answer the broomster, and had he listened to the two voices in the doorway, he might have heard the sallow fellow with the sneering nose refer to him as a sulky swine.

Mr. Tower had laid down his chisel and mallet and was wiping his hands on the swell of his apron. It was a characteristic gesture. Old Tower’s hands were always clean. He turned to look at Keir, and his look at him was kindly. He could have said: “You’re not on the jump for the whistle. You haven’t got a girl or a garden waiting for you.” But, being wise in his generation, he understood the unusualness of Keir.

He said: “I’m going to stick a row of peas,” and with a last glance at the lilac bush he took off his apron and hung it up, then put on his coat and his old grey felt hat, and somehow the brim of it fitted his round, mild face like a halo.

Keir straightened his back and smiled at Mr. Tower.

“That doesn’t go on the time-sheet, Tom.”

Old Tom let out a faint belch.

“Life isn’t all time-sheet, my lad.”

But Keir knew that as well as old Tom did.

With the shop to himself, he went and extracted a small parcel of sandwiches from his coat pocket, and, sitting on one of the benches, he made his meal and looked at the lilac bush flagging him over the top of the black fence. Tomorrow—Sunday—would be his lilac time, and he sat and thought of the downs above the Shere valley with the whitethorns in flower, and the windings of the Pilgrims’ Way. He would be out on his bicycle at nine o’clock with a haversack on the handlebars, and in it a book and the day’s rations.

Someone had come to the door of the shop and was watching him, an old man with the head of a Roman, Mr. Samson of Samson & Hoad. His hair, like a brilliant white cap, made his high colour seem all the more vivid. He looked at Keir as though the young man’s figure was as provocative as his name, for an unusual father somehow glorying in the undistinguished name of Smith had christened the boy Keir Hardie.

Mr. Samson gazed and reflected. The original Smith had been a bit of a character, one of those intense and fervidly swarthy men who must preach, and wear with their oratory either a red tie or a white one. The original Smith had preferred the red. He had been a firebrand, spluttering with windy woe. But the boy was different. With that ruff of very black hair and the smoulder of his eyes he too should have worn a red tie and the aggressive glow of a Glaswegian. But Keir—Keir’s urge was somehow separative and personal. It set out and climbed the hills instead of mounting the soap-box. Its ambition was not to count heads, but to transcend them.

Mr. Samson had very bright, dark eyes and an air of jocund vigour. There was very little that he missed, nor had he missed his opportunities. He knew that old Tower would soon be on the shelf, and that as a foreman old Tom was too mild and easy. Inevitably, Keir was the man for the job, but Keir would never be popular. He set too hot a pace. He was unusual, and the world distrusts the unusual, for it casts a shadow over the plains.

Mr. Samson walked into the shop. Kingham knew him without a hat in all weather and in all places, and said that old Samson was foolishly proud of his white hair and boyish skin, and that the old rascal still had an eye for the women. It was possible, for his handsome head and jocund eyes were very noticeable, even in a crowd. But if Mr. Samson had looks, Keir had manners. He got off the bench and stood, not like an employee on parade, but because there was that in him which respected the older man. Mr. Samson noticed the act. He knew that most men would have remained perched and munching, not necessarily to show their independence, but because they were made that way.

He nodded at Keir.

“Taking it out of me in overtime, what?”

It was their joke, like some facetious reference to the English weather, but if Keir took time and a quarter or time and a half out of Samson & Hoad, he was worth it.

“Get on with your lunch, lad.”

Mr. Samson crossed to the bench by the window and, putting out two large hands, lifted down the door that Keir had left leaning against the wall. He held it to the light and looked at the fine texture of the wood. Being English, he loved the stark simplicity of oak. Walnut was all very well, but too mottled and tricky. As for mahogany, Mr. Samson loathed it.

He laid the door on the bench and ran the tips of his fingers over it.

“She won’t shrink, Keir.”

“No, sir.”

“Been in store five years. That’s one of the things you can’t hurry even in these cut-and-come-quick days.”

Keir stood looking at his work, and his dark face seemed to catch the diffused sunlight.

“That’s the last but one of the six. They’re up to the Darvels standard. Couldn’t put cheap stuff in a house like that. Mr. Lugard understands.”

Mr. Samson raised his white eyebrows, and for the moment his expression was whimsical. Mr. Lugard was a difficult man to please, and Mr. Samson had assured him that he had one craftsman in his shop.

“Well, you haven’t let me down, Keir.”

Keir looked thoughtful.

“Mr. Lugard knows what he wants. Well, that’s all right. It’s—beauty.”

Mr. Samson, out again in the sunlight, wondered not so much at those words as at their implication. Keir’s father would have grown furious over a thing of beauty produced for the benefit of the idle rich, but Keir did not react in the same way. He saw further than his father. Possibly he understood that beauty is an abstraction and not to be contained in wranglings upon surplus value. Because a thing was beautiful and belonged to some other man Keir did not want to smash it.

Mr. Samson chuckled.

“Idle rich? What rot!”