THE RUSSET-COATED CAPTAIN
Joe Burt had been born at Rochdale of a mother whose favourite saying
was:
"With a rocking-chair and a piece o celery a Lancasheer lass is aw
reet."
At eight, she had entered the mill, doffing. Joe had entered the same
mill at about the same age, doffing too. He worked bare-footed in the
ring-room in the days when overlookers and jobbers carried straps and
used them.
When he was fifteen his mother died, and his father married again.
"Thoo can fend for self," his step-mother told him straightway, with
the fine directness of the North.
Joe packed his worldly possessions in a chequered handkerchief,
especially his greatest treasure--a sixpenny book bought off a
second-hand bookstall at infinite cost to the buyer and called _The
Hundred Best Thoughts_. Then he crossed the common at night, falling
into a ditch on the way, to find the lodging-house woman who was to be
his mother for the next ten years drinking her Friday pint o beer. He
was earning six shillings a week at the time in a bicycle-shop. Later
he entered a big engineering firm and, picking up knowledge as he went
along, was a first-class fitter when he was through his time.
Those were the days when George Barnes was Secretary of the Amalgamated
Society of Engineers, and leading the great engineers' strike of the
early nineties. Labour was still under the heel of Capital, but
squealing freely. Socialism, apart from a few thinkers, was the gospel
of noisy and innocuous cranks; and advanced working-men still called
themselves Radicals.
Young Joe woke up sooner than most to the fact that he was the slave of
an environment that was slowly throttling him because it denied him
opportunity to be himself--which is to say to grow. He discarded
chapel for ever on finding that his step-mother was a regular
worshipper at Little Bethel, and held in high esteem amongst the
congregation. He read Robert Blatchford in the _Clarion_, went to hear
Keir Hardie, who with Joey Arch was dodging in and out of Parliament
during those years, heralds of the advancing storm, and took some part
in founding the local branch of the newly-formed Independent Labour
Party. When his meditative spirit tired of the furious ragings of the
Labour Movement of those early days, he would retire to the Friends'
Meeting-house on the hill and ruminate there over the plain tablet set
in the turf which marks appropriately the resting place of the greatest
of modern Quakers.
The eyes of the intelligent young fitter were opening fast now; and the
death of the head of his firm completed the process and gave him sight.
"Started from nothing. Left £200,000. Bequeathed each of his servants
£2 for every year of service; but nothing for us as had made the money."
Joe was now a leading man in the local A.S.E. His Society recognised
his work and sent him in the early years of our century to Ruskin
College, Oxford. The enemies of that institution are in the habit of
saying that it spoils good mechanics to make bad Labour leaders. The
original aim of the College was to take men from the pit, the mill, the
shop, pour into them light and learning in the rich atmosphere of the
most ancient of our Universities, and then return them whence they came
to act amongst their fellows as lamps in the darkness and living
witnesses of the redeeming power of education. The ideal, noble in
itself, appealed to the public; but like many such ideals, it foundered
on the invincible rock of human nature. The miners, weavers, and
engineers, who were the students, after their year amid the towers and
courts of Oxford, showed little desire to return whence they came.
Rather they made their newly-acquired power an instrument to enable
them to evade the suffocating conditions under which they were born;
and who shall blame them? They became officials in Labour Bureaux,
Trade Union leaders, Secretaries of Clubs, and sometimes the hangers-on
of the wealthy supporters of the Movement.
Burt was a shining exception to the rule. At the end of his academic
year he returned to the very bench in the very shop he had left a year
before, with enlarged vision, ordered mind, increased conviction;
determined from that position to act as Apostle to the Gentiles of the
Old Gospel in its new form.
He was the not uncommon type of intellectual artisan of that day who
held as the first article of his creed that no working-man ought to
marry under the economic conditions that then prevailed; and that if
Nature and circumstance forced him to take a wife that he was not
morally justified in having children. This attitude involving as it
inevitably must a levy on the only capital that is of enduring value to
a country--its Youth--was thrust upon thoughtful workers, as Joe was
never tired of pointing out, by the patriotic class, who refused their
employees the leisure, the security, the material standards of life
necessary to modern man for his full development.
Joe practised what he preached, and was himself unmarried. Apart,
indeed, from an occasional fugitive physical connection as a youth with
some passing girl, he had never fairly encountered a woman; never
sought a woman; never, certainly, heard the call that refuses to be
denied, spirit calling to spirit, flesh to flesh, was never even aware
of his own deep need. Women for him were still a weakness to be
avoided. They were the necessaries of the feeble, an encumbrance to
the strong. That was his view, the view of the crude boy. And he
believed himself lucky to be numbered among the uncalled for he was in
fact a sober fanatic, living as selflessly for his creed as ever did
those first preachers of unscientific Socialism, the Apostles and
Martyrs of the first centuries of our era. Even in the shop he had his
little class of students, pouring the milk of the word into their ears
as he set their machines, and the missionary spirit drove him always on
to fresh enterprise.
The Movement, as he always called it, was well ablaze by the second
decade of the century in the Midlands and the North, but in the South
it still only smouldered. And when Hewson and Clarke started their
aeroplane department at Beachbourne, and began to build machines for
the Government, Joe Burt, a first-rate mechanic, leapt at the chance
offered him by the firm and crossed the Thames with his books, his
brains, his big heart, to carry the Gospel of Redemption by Revolution
to the men of Sussex as centuries before, his spiritual ancestor, St.
Wilfrid, he too coming from the North, had done. In that strange land
with its smooth-bosomed hills, its shining sea, its ca-a-ing speech, he
found everything politically as he had expected. And yet it was in the
despised South that he discovered the woman who was to rouse in him the
fierce hunger of which till then he had been unaware except as an
occasional crude physical need.
As on Saturday or Sunday afternoons at the time the revelation was
coming to him he roamed alone, moody and unmated, the rogue-man, amid
the round-breasted hills he often paused to mark their resemblance to
the woman who was rousing in his deeps new and terrible forces of which
he had previously been unaware. In her majestic strength, her laughing
tranquillity, even in her moods, grave or gay, the spirit mischievously
playing hide-and-seek behind the smooth appearance, she was very much
the daughter of the hills amid which she had been bred.
Ruth was as yet deliciously unaware of her danger. She was, indeed,
unaware of any danger save that which haunts the down-sitting and
up-rising of every working woman throughout the world--the abiding
spectre of insecurity.
She liked this big man, surly and self-conscious, and encouraged his
visits. Not seldom as she moved amid her cups and saucers in the
back-ground of the kitchen, she would turn eye or ear to the powerful
stranger with the rough eloquence sucking his pipe by the fire and
holding forth to Ernie on his favourite theme. It flattered her that
he who notoriously disliked women should care to come and sit in her
kitchen, lifting an occasional wary eyelid as he talked to look at her.
And when she caught his glance he would scowl like a boy detected
playing truant.
"I shan't hurt you then, Mr. Burt," she assured him with the caressing
tenderness that is mockery.
His chin sunk on his chest.
"A'm none that sure," he growled.
Ernie winked at Ruth.
"Call him Joe," he suggested. "Then hap he'll be less frit."
"Wilta?" asked Ruth, daintily mimicking the accent of her guest.
"Thoo's mockin a lad," muttered Joe, delighted and relapsing into
broader Lancashire.
"Nay, ma lad," retorted Ruth. "A dursena. A'm far ower scared."