I find it hard to trace the accumulation of moods and feelings that led
Trafford and Marjorie at last to make their extraordinary raid upon
Labrador. In a week more things happen in the thoughts of such a man as
Trafford, changes, revocations, deflections, than one can chronicle in
the longest of novels. I have already in an earlier passage of this
story sought to give an image of the confused content of a modern human
mind, but that pool was to represent a girl of twenty, and Trafford now
was a man of nearly thirty-five, and touching life at a hundred points
for one of the undergraduate Marjorie's. Perhaps that made him less
confused, but it certainly made him fuller. Let me attempt therefore
only the broad outline of his changes of purpose and activity until I
come to the crucial mood that made these two lives a little worth
telling about, amidst the many thousands of such lives that people are
living to-day....
It took him seven years from his conclusive agreement with Solomonson to
become a rich and influential man. It took him only seven years, because
already by the mere accidents of intellectual interest he was in
possession of knowledge of the very greatest economic importance, and
because Solomonson was full of that practical loyalty and honesty that
distinguishes his race. I think that in any case Trafford's vigor and
subtlety of mind would have achieved the prosperity he had found
necessary to himself, but it might have been, under less favorable
auspices, a much longer and more tortuous struggle. Success and security
were never so abundant nor so easily attained by men with capacity and a
sense of proportion as they are in the varied and flexible world of
to-day. We live in an affluent age with a nearly incredible continuous
fresh increment of power pouring in from mechanical invention, and
compared with our own, most other periods have been meagre and anxious
and hard-up times. Our problems are constantly less the problems of
submission and consolation and continually more problems of
opportunity....
Trafford found the opening campaign, the operation with the plantation
shares and his explosion of Behrens' pretensions extremely uncongenial.
It left upon his mind a confused series of memories of interviews and
talks in offices for the most part dingy and slovenly, of bales of
press-cuttings and blue-pencilled financial publications, of unpleasing
encounters with a number of bright-eyed, flushed, excitable and
extremely cunning men, of having to be reserved and limited in his talk
upon all occasions, and of all the worst aspects of Solomonson. All that
part of the new treatment of life that was to make him rich gave him
sensations as though he had ceased to wash himself mentally, until he
regretted his old life in his laboratory as a traveller in a crowded
night train among filthy people might regret the bathroom he had left
behind him....
But the development of his manufacture of rubber was an entirely
different business, and for a time profoundly interesting. It took him
into a new astonishing world, the world of large-scale manufacture and
industrial organization. The actual planning of the works was not in
itself anything essentially new to him. So far as all that went it was
scarcely more than the problem of arranging an experiment upon a huge
and permanent scale, and all that quick ingenuity, that freshness and
directness of mind that had made his purely scientific work so admirable
had ample and agreeable scope. Even the importance of cost and economy
at every point in the process involved no system of considerations that
was altogether novel to him. The British investigator knows only too
well the necessity for husbanded material and inexpensive substitutes.
But strange factors came in, a new region of interest was opened with
the fact that instead of one experimenter working with the alert
responsive assistance of Durgan, a multitude of human beings--even in
the first drafts of his project they numbered already two hundred,
before the handling and packing could be considered--had to watch,
control, assist or perform every stage in a long elaborate synthesis.
For the first time in his life Trafford encountered the reality of
Labour, as it is known to the modern producer.
It will be difficult in the future, when things now subtly or widely
separated have been brought together by the receding perspectives of
time, for the historian to realize just how completely out of the
thoughts of such a young man as Trafford the millions of people who live
and die in organized productive industry had been. That vast world of
toil and weekly anxiety, ill-trained and stupidly directed effort and
mental and moral feebleness, had been as much beyond the living circle
of his experience as the hosts of Genghis Khan or the social life of the
Forbidden City. Consider the limitations of his world. In all his life
hitherto he had never been beyond a certain prescribed area of London's
immensities, except by the most casual and uninstructive straying. He
knew Chelsea and Kensington and the north bank and (as a boy) Battersea
Park, and all the strip between Kensington and Charing Cross, with some
scraps of the Strand as far as the Law Courts, a shop or so in Tottenham
Court Road and fragments about the British Museum and Holborn and
Regent's Park, a range up Edgware Road to Maida Vale, the routes west
and south-west through Uxbridge and Putney to the country, and Wimbledon
Common and Putney Heath. He had never been on Hampstead Heath nor
visited the Botanical Gardens nor gone down the Thames below London
Bridge, nor seen Sydenham nor Epping Forest nor the Victoria Park. Take
a map and blot all he knew and see how vast is the area left untouched.
All industrial London, all wholesale London, great oceans of human
beings fall into that excluded area. The homes he knew were comfortable
homes, the poor he knew were the parasitic and dependent poor of the
West, the shops, good retail shops, the factories for the most part
engaged in dressmaking.
Of course he had been informed about this vast rest of London. He knew
that as a matter of fact it existed, was populous, portentous, puzzling.
He had heard of "slums," read "Tales of Mean Streets," and marvelled in
a shallow transitory way at such wide wildernesses of life, apparently
supported by nothing at all in a state of grey, darkling but prolific
discomfort. Like the princess who wondered why the people having no
bread did not eat cake, he could never clearly understand why the
population remained there, did not migrate to more attractive
surroundings. He had discussed the problems of those wildernesses as
young men do, rather confidently, very ignorantly, had dismissed them,
recurred to them, and forgotten them amidst a press of other interests,
but now it all suddenly became real to him with the intensity of a
startling and intimate contact. He discovered this limitless, unknown,
greater London, this London of the majority, as if he had never thought
of it before. He went out to inspect favourable sites in regions whose
very names were unfamiliar to him, travelled on dirty little intraurban
railway lines to hitherto unimagined railway stations, found parks,
churches, workhouses, institutions, public-houses, canals, factories,
gas-works, warehouses, foundries and sidings, amidst a multitudinous
dinginess of mean houses, shabby back-yards, and ill-kept streets. There
seemed to be no limits to this thread-bare side of London, it went on
northward, eastward, and over the Thames southward, for mile after
mile--endlessly. The factories and so forth clustered in lines and banks
upon the means of communication, the homes stretched between, and
infinitude of parallelograms of grimy boxes with public-houses at the
corners and churches and chapels in odd places, towering over which rose
the council schools, big, blunt, truncated-looking masses, the means to
an education as blunt and truncated, born of tradition and confused
purposes, achieving by accident what they achieve at all.
And about this sordid-looking wilderness went a population that seemed
at first as sordid. It was in no sense a tragic population. But it saw
little of the sun, felt the wind but rarely, and so had a white, dull
skin that looked degenerate and ominous to a West-end eye. It was not
naked nor barefooted, but it wore cheap clothes that were tawdry when
new, and speedily became faded, discoloured, dusty, and draggled. It was
slovenly and almost wilfully ugly in its speech and gestures. And the
food it ate was rough and coarse if abundant, the eggs it consumed
"tasted"--everything "tasted"; its milk, its beer, its bread was
degraded by base adulterations, its meat was hacked red stuff that hung
in the dusty air until it was sold; east of the city Trafford could find
no place where by his standards he could get a tolerable meal tolerably
served. The entertainment of this eastern London was jingle, its
religion clap-trap, its reading feeble and sensational rubbish without
kindliness or breadth. And if this great industrial multitude was
neither tortured nor driven nor cruelly treated--as the slaves and
common people of other days have been--yet it was universally anxious,
perpetually anxious about urgent small necessities and petty
dissatisfying things....
That was the general effect of this new region in which he had sought
out and found the fortunate site for his manufacture of rubber, and
against this background it was that he had now to encounter a crowd of
selected individuals, and weld them into a harmonious and successful
"process." They came out from their millions to him, dingy, clumsy, and
at first it seemed without any individuality. Insensibly they took on
character, rounded off by unaccustomed methods into persons as marked
and distinctive as any he had known.
There was Dowd, for instance, the technical assistant, whom he came to
call in his private thoughts Dowd the Disinherited. Dowd had seemed a
rather awkward, potentially insubordinate young man of unaccountably
extensive and curiously limited attainments. He had begun his career in
a crowded home behind and above a baker's shop in Hoxton, he had gone as
a boy into the works of a Clerkenwell electric engineer, and there he
had developed that craving for knowledge which is so common in poor men
of the energetic type. He had gone to classes, read with a sort of
fury, feeding his mind on the cheap and adulterated instruction of
grant-earning crammers and on stale, meretricious and ill-chosen books;
his mental food indeed was the exact parallel of the rough, abundant,
cheap and nasty groceries and meat that gave the East-ender his spots
and dyspeptic complexion, the cheap text-books were like canned meat and
dangerous with intellectual ptomaines, the rascally encyclopaedias like
weak and whitened bread, and Dowd's mental complexion, too, was leaden
and spotted. Yet essentially he wasn't, Trafford found, by any means bad
stuff; where his knowledge had had a chance of touching reality it
became admirable, and he was full of energy in his work and a sort of
honest zeal about the things of the mind. The two men grew from an acute
mutual criticism into a mutual respect.
At first it seemed to Trafford that when he met Dowd he was only meeting
Dowd, but a time came when it seemed to him that in meeting Dowd he was
meeting all that vast new England outside the range of ruling-class
dreams, that multitudinous greater England, cheaply treated, rather out
of health, angry, energetic and now becoming intelligent and critical,
that England which organized industrialism has created. There were
nights when he thought for hours about Dowd. Other figures grouped
themselves round him--Markham, the head clerk, the quintessence of
East-end respectability, who saw to the packing; Miss Peckover, an
ex-telegraph operator, a woman so entirely reliable and unobservant that
the most betraying phase of the secret process could be confidently
entrusted to her hands. Behind them were clerks, workmen, motor-van men,
work-girls, a crowd of wage-earners, from amidst which some individual
would assume temporary importance and interest by doing something
wrong, getting into trouble, becoming insubordinate, and having
contributed a little vivid story to Trafford's gathering impressions of
life, drop back again into undistinguished subordination.
Dowd became at last entirely representative.
When first Trafford looked Dowd in the eye, he met something of the
hostile interest one might encounter in a swordsman ready to begin a
duel. There was a watchfulness, an immense reserve. They discussed the
work and the terms of their relationship, and all the while Trafford
felt there was something almost threateningly not mentioned.
Presently he learnt from a Silvertown employer what that concealed
aspect was. Dowd was "that sort of man who makes trouble," disposed to
strike rather than not upon a grievance, with a taste for open-air
meetings, a member, obstinately adherent in spite of friendly
remonstrance, of the Social Democratic Party. This in spite of his clear
duty to a wife and two small white knobby children. For a time he would
not talk to Trafford of anything but business--Trafford was so
manifestly the enemy, not to be trusted, the adventurous plutocrat, the
exploiter--when at last Dowd did open out he did so defiantly, throwing
opinions at Trafford as a mob might hurl bricks at windows. At last they
achieved a sort of friendship and understanding, an amiability as it
were, in hostility, but never from first to last would he talk to
Trafford as one gentleman to another; between them, and crossed only by
flimsy, temporary bridges, was his sense of incurable grievances and
fundamental injustice. He seemed incapable of forgetting the
disadvantages of his birth and upbringing, the inferiority and disorder
of the house that sheltered him, the poor food that nourished him, the
deadened air he breathed, the limited leisure, the inadequate books.
Implicit in his every word and act was the assurance that but for this
handicap he could have filled Trafford's place, while Trafford would
certainly have failed in his.
For all these things Dowd made Trafford responsible; he held him to that
inexorably.
"_You_ sweat us," he said, speaking between his teeth; "_you_ limit us,
_you_ stifle us, and away there in the West-end, _you_ and the women you
keep waste the plunder."
Trafford attempted palliation. "After all," he said, "it's not me so
particularly----"
"But it is," said Dowd.
"It's the system things go upon."
"You're the responsible part of it. _You_ have freedom, _you_ have power
and endless opportunity--"
Trafford shrugged his shoulders.
"It's because your sort wants too much," said Dowd, "that my sort hasn't
enough."
"Tell me how to organize things better."
"Much you'd care. They'll organize themselves. Everything is drifting to
class separation, the growing discontent, the growing hardship of the
masses.... Then you'll see."
"Then what's going to happen?"
"Overthrow. And social democracy."
"How is that going to work?"
Dowd had been cornered by that before. "I don't care if it _doesn't_
work," he snarled, "so long as we smash up this. We're getting too sick
to care what comes after."
"Dowd," said Trafford abruptly, "_I'm_ not so satisfied with things."
Dowd looked at him askance. "You'll get reconciled to it," he said. "It's
ugly here--but it's all right there--at the spending end.... Your sort
has got to grab, your sort has got to spend--until the thing works out
and the social revolution makes an end of you."
"And then?"
Dowd became busy with his work.
Trafford stuck his hands in his pockets and stared out of the dingy
factory window.
"I don't object so much to your diagnosis," he said, "as to your remedy.
It doesn't strike me as a remedy."
"It's an end," said Dowd, "anyhow. My God! When I think of all the women
and shirkers flaunting and frittering away there in the West, while here
men and women toil and worry and starve...." He stopped short like one
who feels too full for controlled speech.
"Dowd," said Trafford after a fair pause, "What would you do if you were
me?"
"Do?" said Dowd.
"Yes," said Trafford as one who reconsiders it, "what would you do?"
"Now that's a curious question, Mr. Trafford," said Dowd, turning to
regard him. "Meaning--if I were in your place?"
"Yes," said Trafford. "What would you do in my place?"
"I should sell out of this place jolly quick," he said.
"_Sell!_" said Trafford softly.
"Yes--sell. And start a socialist daily right off. An absolutely
independent, unbiassed socialist daily."
"And what would that do?"
"It would stir people up. Every day it would stir people up."
"But you see I can't edit. I haven't the money for half a year of a
socialist daily.... And meanwhile people want rubber."
Dowd shook his head. "You mean that you and your wife want to have the
spending of six or eight thousand a year," he said.
"I don't make half of that," said Trafford.
"Well--half of that," pressed Dowd. "It's all the same to me."
Trafford reflected. "The point where I don't agree with you," he said,
"is in supposing that my scale of living--over there, is directly
connected with the scale of living--about here."
"Well, isn't it?"
"'Directly,' I said. No. If we just stopped it--over there--there'd be
no improvement here. In fact, for a time it would mean dislocations. It
might mean permanent, hopeless, catastrophic dislocation. You know that
as well as I do. Suppose the West-end became--Tolstoyan; the East would
become chaos."
"Not much likelihood," sneered Dowd.
"That's another question. That we earn together here and that I spend
alone over there, it's unjust and bad, but it isn't a thing that admits
of any simple remedy. Where we differ, Dowd, is about that remedy. I
admit the disease as fully as you do. I, as much as you, want to see the
dawn of a great change in the ways of human living. But I don't think
the diagnosis is complete and satisfactory; our problem is an intricate
muddle of disorders, not one simple disorder, and I don't see what
treatment is indicated."
"Socialism," said Dowd, "is indicated."
"You might as well say that health is indicated," said Trafford with a
note of impatience in his voice. "Does any one question that if we
could have this socialist state in which every one is devoted and every
one is free, in which there is no waste and no want, and beauty and
brotherhood prevail universally, we wouldn't? But----. You socialists
have no scheme of government, no scheme of economic organization, no
intelligible guarantees of personal liberty, no method of progress, no
ideas about marriage, no plan--except those little pickpocket plans of
the Fabians that you despise as much as I do--for making this order into
that other order you've never yet taken the trouble to work out even in
principle. Really you know, Dowd, what is the good of pointing at my
wife's dresses and waving the red flag at me, and talking of human
miseries----"
"It seems to wake you up a bit," said Dowd with characteristic
irrelevance.