It was not long after this, on a very hot summer’s day, when Harry, coming to the mill one afternoon with a message from home for his father, found his grandfather alone in the office, looking very glum. His fresh face was strangely sunk, his round blue eyes perplexed and disconcerted. He gazed at Harry in silence for a moment and then sighed and shook his head.
“What’s the matter, Grandpa?” asked Harry practically. Without understanding why, he often felt a need to moderate his grandfather’s reactions to life. They seemed to him altogether excessive and exaggerated—like a too highly inflated balloon they urged him to apply a pin.
Before the Alderman could reply, the foreman came in and said: “They’re ready now.” John Henry Morcar rose stiffly, and taking Harry’s hand in his, led him silently through the door towards the mill.
Harry hung back. “I’ve got my white suit on, Grandpa,” he said.
“Never mind,” said his grandfather in a loud hoarse tone.
He led Harry across the first weaving shed. The door to the next shed stood open, wedged with a block of wood, and Harry felt a shock of surprise as he saw the looms within stood still and sheeted. His grandfather paused in the doorway and looked around, then stepped back, kicked away the wedge, closed the door and gave a signal to a couple of men in aprons, strangers to the mill, standing by. These joiners lifted slats of wood into position across the door and hammered them fast.
Harry’s heart quailed. To nail up looms and abandon them like that was like leaving people to starve and die alone. To watch this murder, in his white suit too, gave him an extraordinary feeling of guilt and shame.
“This is the Americans’ doing, this is,” said Alderman Morcar in the same strange loud tone. “You’ll never forget this day’s work, Harry; you’ll remember the Dingley tariff as long as you live. Won’t you, eh? Won’t you?”
He bent down so that the child’s face was on a level with his burning red-rimmed eyes.
“I thought it was the McKinley tariff, Grandpa,” said Harry stoutly.
“They took that off and now they’ve put it on again,” wailed Alderman Morcar. “Grass will grow in the streets of Annotsfield, love, you mark my words.”
Harry felt sure that this was nonsense. Nevertheless the thought of the dead cold looms lay heavy on his mind, he never forgot them all his life.