LITMIR.BIZ

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Lads learn nothing nowadays, but how to recite poetry and play the fiddle. Have you seen his writing?” he asked of Mr. Pappleworth.

      “Yes; prime, isn't it?” replied Mr. Pappleworth indifferently.

      Mr. Jordan gave a little grunt, not unamiable. Paul divined that his master's bark was worse than his bite. Indeed, the little manufacturer, although he spoke bad English, was quite gentleman enough to leave his men alone and to take no notice of trifles. But he knew he did not look like the boss and owner of the show, so he had to play his role of proprietor at first, to put things on a right footing.

      “Let's see, WHAT'S your name?” asked Mr. Pappleworth of the boy.

      “Paul Morel.”

      It is curious that children suffer so much at having to pronounce their own names.

      “Paul Morel, is it? All right, you Paul-Morel through them things there, and then—”

      Mr. Pappleworth subsided on to a stool, and began writing. A girl came up from out of a door just behind, put some newly-pressed elastic web appliances on the counter, and returned. Mr. Pappleworth picked up the whitey-blue knee-band, examined it, and its yellow order-paper quickly, and put it on one side. Next was a flesh-pink “leg”. He went through the few things, wrote out a couple of orders, and called to Paul to accompany him. This time they went through the door whence the girl had emerged. There Paul found himself at the top of a little wooden flight of steps, and below him saw a room with windows round two sides, and at the farther end half a dozen girls sitting bending over the benches in the light from the window, sewing. They were singing together “Two Little Girls in Blue”. Hearing the door opened, they all turned round, to see Mr. Pappleworth and Paul looking down on them from the far end of the room. They stopped singing.

      “Can't you make a bit less row?” said Mr. Pappleworth. “Folk'll think we keep cats.”

      A hunchback woman on a high stool turned her long, rather heavy face towards Mr. Pappleworth, and said, in a contralto voice:

      “They're all tom-cats then.”

      In vain Mr. Pappleworth tried to be impressive for Paul's benefit. He descended the steps into the finishing-off room, and went to the hunchback Fanny. She had such a short body on her high stool that her head, with its great bands of bright brown hair, seemed over large, as did her pale, heavy face. She wore a dress of green-black cashmere, and her wrists, coming out of the narrow cuffs, were thin and flat, as she put down her work nervously. He showed her something that was wrong with a knee-cap.

      “Well,” she said, “you needn't come blaming it on to me. It's not my fault.” Her colour mounted to her cheek.

      “I never said it WAS your fault. Will you do as I tell you?” replied Mr. Pappleworth shortly.

      “You don't say it's my fault, but you'd like to make out as it was,” the hunchback woman cried, almost in tears. Then she snatched the knee-cap from her “boss”, saying: “Yes, I'll do it for you, but you needn't be snappy.”

      “Here's your new lad,” said Mr. Pappleworth.

      Fanny turned, smiling very gently on Paul.

      “Oh!” she said.

      “Yes; don't make a softy of him between you.”

      “It's not us as 'ud make a softy of him,” she said indignantly.

      “Come on then, Paul,” said Mr. Pappleworth.

      “Au revoy, Paul,” said one of the girls.

      There was a titter of laughter. Paul went out, blushing deeply, not having spoken a word.

      The day was very long. All morning the work-people were coming to speak to Mr. Pappleworth. Paul was writing or learning to make up parcels, ready for the midday post. At one o'clock, or, rather, at a quarter to one, Mr. Pappleworth disappeared to catch his train: he lived in the suburbs. At one o'clock, Paul, feeling very lost, took his dinner-basket down into the stockroom in the basement, that had the long table on trestles, and ate his meal hurriedly, alone in that cellar of gloom and desolation. Then he went out of doors. The brightness and the freedom of the streets made him feel adventurous and happy. But at two o'clock he was back in the corner of the big room. Soon the work-girls went trooping past, making remarks. It was the commoner girls who worked upstairs at the heavy tasks of truss-making and the finishing of artificial limbs. He waited for Mr. Pappleworth, not knowing what to do, sitting scribbling on the yellow order-paper. Mr. Pappleworth came at twenty minutes to three. Then he sat and gossiped with Paul, treating the boy entirely as an equal, even in age.

      In the afternoon there was never very much to do, unless it were near the week-end, and the accounts had to be made up. At five o'clock all the men went down into the dungeon with the table on trestles, and there they had tea, eating bread-and-butter on the bare, dirty boards, talking with the same kind of ugly haste and slovenliness with which they ate their meal. And yet upstairs the atmosphere among them was always jolly and clear. The cellar and the trestles affected them.

      After tea, when all the gases were lighted, WORK went more briskly. There was the big evening post to get off. The hose came up warm and newly pressed from the workrooms. Paul had made out the invoices. Now he had the packing up and addressing to do, then he had to weigh his stock of parcels on the scales. Everywhere voices were calling weights, there was the chink of metal, the rapid snapping of string, the hurrying to old Mr. Melling for stamps. And at last the postman came with his sack, laughing and jolly. Then everything slacked off, and Paul took his dinner-basket and ran to the station to catch the eight-twenty train. The day in the factory was just twelve hours long.

      His mother sat waiting for him rather anxiously. He had to walk from Keston, so was not home until about twenty past nine. And he left the house before seven in the morning. Mrs. Morel was rather anxious about his health. But she herself had had to put up with so much that she expected her children to take the same odds. They must go through with what came. And Paul stayed at Jordan's, although all the time he was there his health suffered from the darkness and lack of air and the long hours.

      He came in pale and tired. His mother looked at him. She saw he was rather pleased, and her anxiety all went.

      “Well, and how was it?” she asked.

      “Ever so funny, mother,” he replied. “You don't have to work a bit hard, and they're nice with you.”

      “And did you get on all right?”

      “Yes: they only say my writing's bad. But Mr. Pappleworth—he's my man—said to Mr. Jordan I should be all right. I'm Spiral, mother; you must come and see. It's ever so nice.”

      Soon he liked Jordan's. Mr. Pappleworth, who had a certain “saloon bar” flavour about him, was always natural, and treated him as if he had been a comrade. Sometimes the “Spiral boss” was irritable, and chewed more lozenges than ever. Even then, however, he was not offensive, but one of those people who hurt themselves by their own irritability more than they hurt other people.

      “Haven't you done that YET?” he would cry. “Go on, be a month of Sundays.”

      Again, and Paul could understand him least then, he was jocular and in high spirits.

      “I'm going to bring my little Yorkshire terrier bitch tomorrow,” he said jubilantly to Paul.

      “What's a Yorkshire terrier?”

      “DON'T know what a Yorkshire terrier is? DON'T KNOW A YORKSHIRE—” Mr. Pappleworth was aghast.

      “Is it a little silky one—colours of iron and rusty silver?”

      “THAT'S it, my lad. She's a gem. She's had five pounds' worth of pups already, and she's worth over seven pounds herself; and she doesn't weigh twenty ounces.”

      The next day the bitch came. She was a shivering, miserable morsel. Paul did not care for her; she seemed so like a wet rag that would never dry. Then a man called for her, and began to make coarse jokes. But Mr. Pappleworth nodded his head in the direction of the

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