1
I must go back a little way with my story. In the previous book I
have described the kind of education that happens to a man of my class
nowadays, and it has been convenient to leap a phase in my experience
that I must now set out at length. I want to tell in this second
hook how I came to marry, and to do that I must give something of the
atmosphere in which I first met my wife and some intimations of the
forces that went to her making. I met her in Staffordshire while I was
staying with that uncle of whom I have already spoken, the uncle who
sold my father's houses and settled my mother in Penge. Margaret was
twenty then and I was twenty-two.
It was just before the walking tour in Switzerland that opened up
so much of the world to me. I saw her once, for an afternoon, and
circumstances so threw her up in relief that I formed a very vivid
memory of her. She was in the sharpest contrast with the industrial
world about her; she impressed me as a dainty blue flower might do,
come upon suddenly on a clinker heap. She remained in my mind at once a
perplexing interrogation and a symbol....
But first I must tell of my Staffordshire cousins and the world that
served as a foil for her.
2
I first went to stay with my cousins when I was an awkward youth of
sixteen, wearing deep mourning for my mother. My uncle wanted to talk
things over with me, he said, and if he could, to persuade me to go into
business instead of going up to Cambridge.
I remember that visit on account of all sorts of novel things, but
chiefly, I think, because it was the first time I encountered anything
that deserves to be spoken of as wealth. For the first time in my life
I had to do with people who seemed to have endless supplies of money,
unlimited good clothes, numerous servants; whose daily life was made
up of things that I had hitherto considered to be treats or exceptional
extravagances. My cousins of eighteen and nineteen took cabs, for
instance, with the utmost freedom, and travelled first-class in the
local trains that run up and down the district of the Five Towns with an
entire unconsciousness of the magnificence, as it seemed to me, of such
a proceeding.
The family occupied a large villa in Newcastle, with big lawns before
it and behind, a shrubbery with quite a lot of shrubs, a coach house
and stable, and subordinate dwelling-places for the gardener and the
coachman. Every bedroom contained a gas heater and a canopied brass
bedstead, and had a little bathroom attached equipped with the porcelain
baths and fittings my uncle manufactured, bright and sanitary and
stamped with his name, and the house was furnished throughout with
chairs and tables in bright shining wood, soft and prevalently
red Turkish carpets, cosy corners, curtained archways, gold-framed
landscapes, overmantels, a dining-room sideboard like a palace with
a large Tantalus, and electric light fittings of a gay and expensive
quality. There was a fine billiard-room on the ground floor with three
comfortable sofas and a rotating bookcase containing an excellent
collection of the English and American humorists from THREE MEN IN
A BOAT to the penultimate Mark Twain. There was also a conservatory
opening out of the dining-room, to which the gardener brought potted
flowers in their season....
My aunt was a little woman with a scared look and a cap that would
get over one eye, not very like my mother, and nearly eight years her
junior; she was very much concerned with keeping everything nice, and
unmercifully bullied by my two cousins, who took after their father and
followed the imaginations of their own hearts. They were tall, dark,
warmly flushed girls handsome rather than pretty. Gertrude, the eldest
and tallest, had eyes that were almost black; Sibyl was of a stouter
build, and her eyes, of which she was shamelessly proud, were dark blue.
Sibyl's hair waved, and Gertrude's was severely straight. They treated
me on my first visit with all the contempt of the adolescent girl for a
boy a little younger and infinitely less expert in the business of life
than herself. They were very busy with the writings of notes and certain
mysterious goings and comings of their own, and left me very much to
my own devices. Their speech in my presence was full of unfathomable
allusions. They were the sort of girls who will talk over and through an
uninitiated stranger with the pleasantest sense of superiority.
I met them at breakfast and at lunch and at the half-past six o'clock
high tea that formed the third chief meal of the day. I heard them
rattling off the compositions of Chaminade and Moskowski, with great
decision and effect, and hovered on the edge of tennis foursomes
where it was manifest to the dullest intelligence that my presence was
unnecessary. Then I went off to find some readable book in the place,
but apart from miscellaneous popular novels, some veterinary works, a
number of comic books, old bound volumes of THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS
and a large, popular illustrated History of England, there was very
little to be found. My aunt talked to me in a casual feeble way, chiefly
about my mother's last illness. The two had seen very little of each
other for many years; she made no secret of it that the ineligible
qualities of my father were the cause of the estrangement. The only
other society in the house during the day was an old and rather decayed
Skye terrier in constant conflict with what were no doubt imaginary
fleas. I took myself off for a series of walks, and acquired a
considerable knowledge of the scenery and topography of the Potteries.
It puzzled my aunt that I did not go westward, where it was country-side
and often quite pretty, with hedgerows and fields and copses
and flowers. But always I went eastward, where in a long valley
industrialism smokes and sprawls. That was the stuff to which I turned
by nature, to the human effort, and the accumulation and jar of men's
activities. And in such a country as that valley social and economic
relations were simple and manifest. Instead of the limitless confusion
of London's population, in which no man can trace any but the most
slender correlation between rich and poor, in which everyone seems
disconnected and adrift from everyone, you can see here the works,
the potbank or the ironworks or what not, and here close at hand the
congested, meanly-housed workers, and at a little distance a small
middle-class quarter, and again remoter, the big house of the employer.
It was like a very simplified diagram--after the untraceable confusion
of London.
I prowled alone, curious and interested, through shabby back streets of
mean little homes; I followed canals, sometimes canals of mysteriously
heated waters with ghostly wisps of steam rising against blackened walls
or a distant prospect of dustbin-fed vegetable gardens, I saw the women
pouring out from the potbanks, heard the hooters summoning the toilers
to work, lost my way upon slag heaps as big as the hills of the south
country, dodged trains at manifestly dangerous level crossings, and
surveyed across dark intervening spaces, the flaming uproar, the
gnome-like activities of iron foundries. I heard talk of strikes and
rumours of strikes, and learnt from the columns of some obscure labour
paper I bought one day, of the horrors of the lead poisoning that was in
those days one of the normal risks of certain sorts of pottery workers.
Then back I came, by the ugly groaning and clanging steam train of that
period, to my uncle's house and lavish abundance of money and more or
less furtive flirtations and the tinkle of Moskowski and Chaminade.
It was, I say, diagrammatic. One saw the expropriator and the
expropriated--as if Marx had arranged the picture. It was as jumbled and
far more dingy and disastrous than any of the confusions of building and
development that had surrounded my youth at Bromstead and Penge, but
it had a novel quality of being explicable. I found great virtue in the
word “exploitation.”
There stuck in my mind as if it was symbolical of the whole thing the
twisted figure of a man, whose face had been horribly scalded--I can't
describe how, except that one eye was just expressionless white--and
he ground at an organ bearing a card which told in weak and bitterly
satirical phrasing that he had been scalded by the hot water from
the tuyeres of the blast furnace of Lord Pandram's works. He had been
scalded and quite inadequately compensated and dismissed. And Lord
Pandram was worth half a million.
That upturned sightless white eye of his took possession of my
imagination. I don't think that even then I was swayed by any crude
melodramatic conception of injustice. I was quite prepared to believe
the card wasn't a punctiliously accurate statement of fact, and that
a case could be made out for Lord Pandram. Still there in the muddy
gutter, painfully and dreadfully, was the man, and he was smashed and
scalded and wretched, and he ground his dismal hurdygurdy with a weary
arm, calling upon Heaven and the passer-by for help, for help and some
sort of righting--one could not imagine quite what. There he was as a
fact, as a by-product of the system that heaped my cousins with trinkets
and provided the comic novels and the abundant cigars and spacious
billiard-room of my uncle's house. I couldn't disconnect him and them.
My uncle on his part did nothing to conceal the state of war that
existed between himself and his workers, and the mingled contempt and
animosity he felt from them.
3
Prosperity had overtaken my uncle. So quite naturally he believed that
every man who was not as prosperous as he was had only himself to blame.
He was rich and he had left school and gone into his father's business
at fifteen, and that seemed to him the proper age at which everyone's
education should terminate. He was very anxious to dissuade me from
going up to Cambridge, and we argued intermittently through all my
visit.
I had remembered him as a big and buoyant man, striding destructively
about the nursery floor of my childhood, and saluting my existence by
slaps, loud laughter, and questions about half herrings and half eggs
subtly framed to puzzle and confuse my mind. I didn't see him for some
years until my father's death, and then he seemed rather smaller,
though still a fair size, yellow instead of red and much less radiantly
aggressive. This altered effect was due not so much to my own changed
perspectives, I fancy, as to the facts that he was suffering for
continuous cigar smoking, and being taken in hand by his adolescent
daughters who had just returned from school.
During my first visit there was a perpetual series of--the only word is
rows, between them and him. Up to the age of fifteen or thereabouts, he
had maintained his ascendancy over them by simple old-fashioned physical
chastisement. Then after an interlude of a year it had dawned upon them
that power had mysteriously departed from him. He had tried stopping
their pocket money, but they found their mother financially amenable;
besides which it was fundamental to my uncle's attitude that he should
give them money freely. Not to do so would seem like admitting a
difficulty in making it. So that after he had stopped their allowances
for the fourth time Sybil and Gertrude were prepared to face beggary
without a qualm. It had been his pride to give them the largest
allowance of any girls at the school, not even excepting the
granddaughter of Fladden the Borax King, and his soul recoiled from this
discipline as it had never recoiled from the ruder method of the
earlier phase. Both girls had developed to a high pitch in their mutual
recriminations a gift for damaging retort, and he found it an altogether
deadlier thing than the power of the raised voice that had always
cowed my aunt. Whenever he became heated with them, they frowned as if
involuntarily, drew in their breath sharply, said: “Daddy, you really
must not say--” and corrected his pronunciation. Then, at a great
advantage, they resumed the discussion....
My uncle's views about Cambridge, however, were perfectly clear and
definite. It was waste of time and money. It was all damned foolery.
Did they make a man a better business man? Not a bit of it. He gave
instances. It spoilt a man for business by giving him “false ideas.”
Some men said that at college a man formed useful friendships. What use
were friendships to a business man? He might get to know lords, but, as
my uncle pointed out, a lord's requirements in his line of faience were
little greater than a common man's. If college introduced him to hotel
proprietors there might be something in it. Perhaps it helped a man into
Parliament, Parliament still being a confused retrogressive corner
in the world where lawyers and suchlike sheltered themselves from the
onslaughts of common-sense behind a fog of Latin and Greek and twaddle
and tosh; but I wasn't the sort to go into Parliament, unless I meant to
be a lawyer. Did I mean to be a lawyer? It cost no end of money, and
was full of uncertainties, and there were no judges nor great solicitors
among my relations. “Young chaps think they get on by themselves,” said
my uncle. “It isn't so. Not unless they take their coats off. I took
mine off before I was your age by nigh a year.”
We were at cross purposes from the outset, because I did not think men
lived to make money; and I was obtuse to the hints he was throwing out
at the possibilities of his own potbank, not willfully obtuse, but just
failing to penetrate his meaning. Whatever City Merchants had or had
not done for me, Flack, Topham and old Gates had certainly barred my
mistaking the profitable production and sale of lavatory basins and
bathroom fittings for the highest good. It was only upon reflection that
it dawned upon me that the splendid chance for a young fellow with my
uncle, “me, having no son of my own,” was anything but an illustration
for comparison with my own chosen career.
I still remember very distinctly my uncle's talk,--he loved to speak
“reet Staffordshire”--his rather flabby face with the mottled complexion
that told of crude ill-regulated appetites, his clumsy gestures--he kept
emphasising his points by prodding at me with his finger--the ill-worn,
costly, grey tweed clothes, the watch chain of plain solid gold, and
soft felt hat thrust back from his head. He tackled me first in the
garden after lunch, and then tried to raise me to enthusiasm by taking
me to his potbank and showing me its organisation, from the dusty
grinding mills in which whitened men worked and coughed, through the
highly ventilated glazing room in which strangely masked girls looked
ashamed of themselves,--“They'll risk death, the fools, to show their
faces to a man,” said my uncle, quite audibly--to the firing kilns and
the glazing kilns, and so round the whole place to the railway siding
and the gratifying spectacle of three trucks laden with executed orders.
Then we went up a creaking outside staircase to his little office, and
he showed off before me for a while, with one or two subordinates and
the telephone.
“None of your Gas,” he said, “all this. It's Real every bit of it. Hard
cash and hard glaze.”
“Yes,” I said, with memories of a carelessly read pamphlet in my mind,
and without any satirical intention, “I suppose you MUST use lead in
your glazes?”
Whereupon I found I had tapped the ruling grievance of my uncle's
life. He hated leadless glazes more than he hated anything, except
the benevolent people who had organised the agitation for their use.
“Leadless glazes ain't only fit for buns,” he said. “Let me tell you, my
boy--”
He began in a voice of bland persuasiveness that presently warmed to
anger, to explain the whole matter. I hadn't the rights of the matter
at all. Firstly, there was practically no such thing as lead poisoning.
Secondly, not everyone was liable to lead poisoning, and it would
be quite easy to pick out the susceptible types--as soon as they had
it--and put them to other work. Thirdly, the evil effects of
lead poisoning were much exaggerated. Fourthly, and this was in a
particularly confidential undertone, many of the people liked to get
lead poisoning, especially the women, because it caused abortion.
I might not believe it, but he knew it for a fact. Fifthly, the
work-people simply would not learn the gravity of the danger, and would
eat with unwashed hands, and incur all sorts of risks, so that as my
uncle put it: “the fools deserve what they get.” Sixthly, he and several
associated firms had organised a simple and generous insurance scheme
against lead-poisoning risks. Seventhly, he never wearied in rational
(as distinguished from excessive, futile and expensive) precautions
against the disease. Eighthly, in the ill-equipped shops of his minor
competitors lead poisoning was a frequent and virulent evil, and people
had generalised from these exceptional cases. The small shops, he
hazarded, looking out of the cracked and dirty window at distant
chimneys, might be advantageously closed....
“But what's the good of talking?” said my uncle, getting off the table
on which he had been sitting. “Seems to me there'll come a time when a
master will get fined if he don't run round the works blowing his girls
noses for them. That's about what it'll come to.”
He walked to the black mantelpiece and stood on the threadbare rug, and
urged me not to be misled by the stories of prejudiced and interested
enemies of our national industries.
“They'll get a strike one of these days, of employers, and then we'll
see a bit,” he said. “They'll drive Capital abroad and then they'll
whistle to get it back again.”...
He led the way down the shaky wooden steps and cheered up to tell me
of his way of checking his coal consumption. He exchanged a ferocious
greeting with one or two workpeople, and so we came out of the factory
gates into the ugly narrow streets, paved with a peculiarly hard
diapered brick of an unpleasing inky-blue colour, and bordered with the
mean and squalid homes of his workers. Doors stood open and showed grimy
interiors, and dirty ill-clad children played in the kennel.
We passed a sickly-looking girl with a sallow face, who dragged her
limbs and peered at us dimly with painful eyes. She stood back, as
partly blinded people will do, to allow us to pass, although there was
plenty of room for us.