Success
satisfaction; he knew that, say what he would, his father would
estimate it very differently from what he himself did, and far above
what he knew it to be really worth. However, at length he told it; he
must, if for no other reason than that it would prevent his visits
home, since it would take him away from London. It was a definite
offer of engineering work definitely accepted at a salary of five
hundred pounds a year.
The offer was made by the same great steamship company who had
approached him in the spring and afterwards had withdrawn—he very well
knew why. He knew why they approached him again now. The question of
internal combustion engines for use on big ships was as important as
ever to them, more important rather than less. And the difficulty of
finding any man equal to such work as they wanted in connection with
it, and also willing to undertake it, was as great. It was something
more than a difficulty, it was very like an impossibility; men of that
experience and with brains of such calibre are not to be hired like
journeymen. Michael was to be hired. Michael, it was pretty generally
suspected in some well-informed quarters, had the required brains. He
had also a damaged reputation and a very ugly suspicion against him—if
he had not, he would not have been for hire. The one thing weighed
with the other: no doubt the directors weighed them very carefully;
and, having spent much, and advanced no whit with the engine problem,
they came to the conclusion that the lesser evil was to employ a man
who could help them, even at the risk of having valuable processes
and inventions stolen. At all events, the secretary wrote to Michael,
saying the directors were again considering the matter of internal
combustion engines, and would be glad, if he were of the same mind as
earlier, if he would call at the offices of the company.
Michael called. He did not want to; he and Nan talked it over some
time first. He realised the situation perfectly, the reasons which lay
behind this letter as well as those which lay behind the others; and
human nature, mere ordinary pride, prompted a curt refusal. But common
sense and wisdom prompted otherwise; here, surely, was the chance of
retrieving something of his name, and establishing his reputation. To
refuse curtly because of a former, not unexpected, slight were mere
childish vanity, even though accepting would entail unpleasant things,
besides pocketing pride. He saw this last as plainly as the first; so
did Nan, but she reminded him that he was in a position to make some
sort of terms.
He called at the offices as requested, and once again found himself in
the palatial quarters of a great firm: a place of polished mahogany and
many well-dressed clerks; of complicated inter-telephone system and
quiet, luxurious private rooms, where keen-eyed men with suave manners
complimented those received with a few minutes’ exclusive attention,
and afterwards dismissed them as cabinet ministers might. Michael
received very undivided attention, and more of it than fell to the lot
of some people. The coming to terms took time, for if he laboured under
a disadvantage, so did the company, the disadvantage of finding it very
difficult to get anyone else: and he knew their situation fully as well
as they did his; and at the game of steadfastly keeping such things
in mind whilst diplomatically omitting them in speech and dealing
accordingly, he was bad to beat. Nevertheless, he came away from the
interview depressed. The familiarity of the atmosphere affected him,
in part with a morbid shrinking, as a burnt animal from the fire; in
part with a sort of homesick sense of what was lost. He came away with
a feeling of weariness and age, and a renewed recognition of the great
gap set between himself and not only his former place but his former
self too.
“I have agreed to go,” he said to Nan when he got back. “Oh, yes, I
couldn’t do anything else; it would have been sheer folly to refuse,
I know that, I never seriously thought of it, but I don’t know how it
will work out. I’m to have five hundred a year, more when I make a
success—that last is only a verbal promise, and they may slip out of
it, or try to, though I shall do what I can to safeguard myself——” The
old gleam shot up for a moment here, and the old fighting set, which
had made so much difficulty for Galhardy’s, came about his jaw.
Nan saw it, and saw it go again. “That is not bad,” she said.
“No,” he answered. “It’s less, of course, than it’s worth, but more a
good deal than they need have paid me. But I am not at all sure how the
arrangement will answer; they won’t give me anything like a free hand.
I could not nail them down to anything: they would only say they should
wish for very full reports; that one of the directors, Mr. McFarline,
had the keenest interest in the subject, and would look forward to
following my work with great attention.”
“That means?”
“It means they won’t trust me an inch—I suppose one can hardly blame
them—and will want everything reported, and signed, and countersigned;
and every scrap of work done under somebody’s eye and recorded in
somebody’s notes. I am not at all sure it will be possible to work that
way.”
“Perhaps not. Still you can try, and if you can’t, you can’t. At the
worst, you can always come back here.”
“No, I can’t. If I go, I can’t come creeping back to you and your
father.”
“You can always come,” she said. “You must always come. Promise me you
will. But you need not, I know you will without that; there is always
the mouse-hole here and me, the mouse, inside it. You must always come
when you want to.”
Michael said “no,” and meant it; nevertheless, they were good words to
carry with him when he went to the Clyde on a doubtful venture.
CHAPTER XIV
Old Milligen had the gout: not suppressed gout, or gouty indigestion,
or any of the forms which are fashionable to-day, but the old original
complaint, such as Chatham and the great men of his time knew. Like
them Milligen had it, and like theirs his temper suffered; also his
wife—he had no family at home to suffer, his daughters being married
and his sons dead. The gout, while it was at its acutest, prevented
him from attending to anything much besides itself; when it lessened a
little he attended, so far as he was able, to his own business. Later
he attended to that of the town council. He was still more or less of a
prisoner to the house; indeed, he had only got so far as his own works
once or twice, and with great difficulty, much bad language, and, the
doctor said, some risk. Consequently, even when he turned his attention
to the council, he was not able to go personally to the offices, nor
yet to the private residences or business premises of any of the
members. He was consequently driven to writing to the body, although
pen and ink were not the medium in which he felt at home.
His letter, which began “_Dear Misters_,” and concluded “_and may the
devil take the lot of you for scabs.—Yours obedtly, James Milligen_,”
contained matter which, in some parts of England, would have been
considered more than grounds for a libel action. In this town such a
remedy occurred to no one; town councillors, and old Milligen too,
were not far enough removed from the time when such differences were
settled with coats off in the yard—a simpler, and, on the whole,
pleasanter as well as cheaper remedy. One cannot, of course, settle it
in that way with a man suffering from gout; nor can one with credit do
it if one is a town councillor. Those concerned laboured under this
disadvantage, also they were rather too old and too well-to-do; they
merely replied in kind, abused Milligen roundly to all who would carry
word back to him, and, unofficially, to himself too, and officially
wrote and advised him, in polite language, to mind his own business.
“My business!” he roared when he read it. He did not mind the abuse at
all, but he did object to the official advice, also his foot gave him a
sudden twinge at the moment. “I’ll see to the business, my lads! I’ll
make your ears tingle for as mean a set of scrogs as ever built shoddy
and winked at it! Maria! Maria, woman! D’ye hear! Fetch me that paper!”
Maria fetched it, a newspaper of large local circulation: an issue now
some weeks old, which contained a report of the affair at the council
power station. Old Milligen had been taken ill the day the account
appeared, and so had not read it till some time after, and had not
been well enough to take any steps in the matter for some time after
that; and when he had written the council had not been in any hurry to
acknowledge his letter. What with one thing and another the matter was
already a thing of the past in local interest. Not so in Milligen’s.
He read the report all over again, flushing as he did so, and rolling
a sentence on his tongue now and again—“An unforeseen accident,”
“providentially, the damage was comparatively small, the matter never
assuming alarming proportions,” “the council’s employees, ably directed
by Mr. William Heath, rose splendidly to the occasion: the thanks of
the community are due to them and to a gentleman from a neighbouring
factory, who, with considerable presence of mind, turned off the
dynamos.”
“‘Due to ’em!’ Due to Willy Heath! Yes, and there’s something else due
to you, Willy, and that’s a piece of my mind, and you’ll have it, my
lad, when I’m about again! ‘A gentleman from a neighbouring factory’!
Maria, tell Turner to look in this evening, I’d like another chat with
Turner; he’ll be pleased with these ——’s letter.”
“Yes,” Maria said, although she knew another chat with Turner would
further excite the gout and her irascible lord. But she never attempted
to interfere with him in what she deemed men’s matters; and he never
thought of interfering in what was reckoned women’s. When their
interests were mutual and clashed, as had sometimes happened when
the children were at home, they settled it in a verbal bout slightly
reminiscent of the backyard days.
Turner came that evening and read the council’s letter, and told again,
as he had told before, what had happened at the power station on the
night the chimney fell. As he was himself employed there: indeed, was
almost the first man to recover his presence of mind on that eventful
night, he was in a position to do so, and to give a further and fuller
account of Michael’s share than the paper did. It is true he repeated
on this occasion, as on others when he talked to old Milligen, that
no use was to be made of what he said; it was all in confidence, and
he could not afford to lose his job. But that did not matter; there
were too many men in the station that night, most of them more or
less acquainted with Milligen, for information to be traced to one
particularly; besides, plenty of others outside possessed it in some
form now; the thing was not done in a hole and corner, as Milligen
said to Turner. And said again when later he called at the council
offices.
When he did call there the members of the council expressed themselves
glad to see him about again. They were too, he was a fellow-townsman
with mutual interests, one of themselves, as it were; they thought no
more of his letter than they would of an explosion of abuse from one
of their own body in the heat of passing argument. He did not either;
he might have called them names, all the same they were his very good
friends, always were, and always would be, even though he had come
about the original subject now.
“About that business up at the station,” he began.
“Ah, yes, Mr. Milligen,” the chairman said, “The question of
compensation, of course——”
“Compensation be damned,” Milligen said benevolently. “What’s that