“Step inside, miss, and try it.”
“No, thanks!” she laughed.
“Come now,” he insisted, as if despising this hesitation. “An ounce of experience—” The two boys grinned and wiped their foreheads with their bare skeleton-like arms. Anna, challenged by the man’s look, walked quickly into the kiln. A blasting heat seemed to assault her on every side, driving her back; it was incredible that any human being could support such a temperature.
“There!” said the jovial man, apparently summing her up with his bright, quizzical eyes. “You know summat as you didn’t know afore, miss. Come along, lads,” he added with brisk heartiness to the boys, and the drawing of the kiln proceeded.
Next came the dipping-house, where a middle-aged woman, enveloped in a protective garment from head to foot, was dipping jugs into a vat of lead-glaze, a boy assisting her. The woman’s hands were covered with the grey, slimy glaze. She alone of all the employees appeared to be cool.
“That is the last stage but one,” said Mynors. “There is only the glost-firing,” and they passed out into the yard once more. One of the glost-ovens was empty; they entered it and peered into the lofty inner chamber, which seemed like the cold crater of an exhausted volcano, or like a vault, or like the ruined seat of some forgotten activity. The other oven was firing, and Anna could only look at its exterior, catching glimpses of the red glow at its twelve mouths, and guess at the Tophet, within, where the lead was being fused into glass.
“Now for the glost-warehouse, and you will have seen all,” said Mynors, “except the mould-shop, and that doesn’t matter.”
The warehouse was the largest place on the works, a room sixty-feet long and twenty broad, low, whitewashed, bare and clean. Piles of ware occupied the whole of the walls and of the immense floorspace, but there was no trace here of the soilure and untidiness incident to manufacture; all processes were at an end, clay had vanished into crock: and the calmness and the whiteness atoned for the disorder, noise and squalor which had preceded. Here was a sample of the total and final achievement towards which the thousands of small, disjointed efforts that Anna had witnessed, were directed. And it seemed a miraculous, almost impossible, result; so definite, precise and regular after a series of acts apparently variable, inexact and casual; so inhuman after all that intensely inhuman labour; so vast in comparison with the minuteness of the separate endeavours. As Anna looked, for instance, at a pile of tea-sets, she found it difficult even to conceive that, a fortnight or so before, they had been nothing but lumps of dirty clay. No stage of the manufacture was incredible by itself, but the result was incredible. It was the result that appealed to the imagination, authenticating the adage that fools and children should never see anything till it is done.
Anna pondered over the organising power, the forethought, the wide vision, and the sheer ingenuity and cleverness which were implied by the contents of this warehouse. “What brains!” she thought, of Mynors; “what quantities of all sorts of things he must know!” It was a humble and deeply-felt admiration.
Her spoken words gave no clue to her thoughts. “You seem to make a fine lot of tea-sets,” she remarked.
“Oh, no,” he said carelessly. “These few that you see here are a special order. I don’t go in much for tea-sets: they don’t pay; we lose fifteen percent of the pieces in making. It’s toilet-ware that pays, and that is our leading line.” He waved an arm vaguely towards rows and rows of ewers and basins in the distance. They walked to the end of the warehouse, glancing at everything.
“See here,” said Mynors, “isn’t that pretty?” He pointed through the last window to a view of the canal, which could be seen thence in perspective, finishing in a curve. On one side, close to the water’s edge, was a ruined and fragmentary building, its rich browns reflected in the smooth surface of the canal. On the other side were a few grim, grey trees bordering the towpath. Down the vista moved a boat steered by a woman in a large mobcap. “Isn’t that picturesque?” he said.
“Very,” Anna assented willingly. “It’s really quite strange, such a scene right in the middle of Bursley.”
“Oh! There are others,” he said. “But I always take a peep at that whenever I come into the warehouse.”
“I wonder you find time to notice it—with all this place to see after,” she said. “It’s a splendid works!”
“It will do—to be going on with,” he answered, satisfied. “I’m very glad you’ve been down. You must come again. I can see you would be interested in it, and there are plenty of things you haven’t looked at yet, you know.”
He smiled at her. They were alone in the warehouse.
“Yes,” she said; “I expect so. Well, I must go, at once; I’m afraid it’s very late now. Thank you for showing me round, and explaining, and—I’m frightfully stupid and ignorant. Goodbye.”
Vapid and trite phrases: what unimaginable messages the hearer heard in you!
Anna held out her hand, and he seized it almost convulsively, his incendiary eyes fastened on her face.
“I must see you out,” he said, dropping that ungloved hand.
It was ten o’clock that night before Ephraim Tellwright returned home from Axe. He appeared to be in a bad temper. Agnes had gone to bed. His supper of bread-and-cheese and water was waiting for him, and Anna sat at the table while he consumed it. He ate in silence, somewhat hungrily, and she did not deem the moment propitious for telling
