“You're a damned fool,” he said. “But I suppose you've got to do it. You
could have come here--That don't matter, though, now... You'll have your
time and spend your money, and be a poor half-starved clergyman, mucking
about with the women all the day and afraid to have one of your own
ever, or you'll be a schoolmaster or some such fool for the rest of your
life. Or some newspaper chap. That's what you'll get from Cambridge. I'm
half a mind not to let you. Eh? More than half a mind....”
“You've got to do the thing you can,” he said, after a pause, “and
likely it's what you're fitted for.”
4
I paid several short visits to Staffordshire during my Cambridge days,
and always these relations of mine produced the same effect of hardness.
My uncle's thoughts had neither atmosphere nor mystery. He lived in
a different universe from the dreams of scientific construction that
filled my mind. He could as easily have understood Chinese poetry. His
motives were made up of intense rivalries with other men of his class
and kind, a few vindictive hates springing from real and fancied
slights, a habit of acquisition that had become a second nature, a keen
love both of efficiency and display in his own affairs. He seemed to
me to have no sense of the state, no sense and much less any love of
beauty, no charity and no sort of religious feeling whatever. He had
strong bodily appetites, he ate and drank freely, smoked a great deal,
and occasionally was carried off by his passions for a “bit of a spree”
to Birmingham or Liverpool or Manchester. The indulgences of these
occasions were usually followed by a period of reaction, when he was
urgent for the suppression of nudity in the local Art Gallery and a
harsh and forcible elevation of the superficial morals of the valley.
And he spoke of the ladies who ministered to the delights of his
jolly-dog period, when he spoke of them at all, by the unprintable
feminine equivalent. My aunt he treated with a kindly contempt and
considerable financial generosity, but his daughters tore his heart; he
was so proud of them, so glad to find them money to spend, so resolved
to own them, so instinctively jealous of every man who came near them.
My uncle has been the clue to a great number of men for me. He was an
illuminating extreme. I have learnt what not to expect from them through
him, and to comprehend resentments and dangerous sudden antagonisms I
should have found incomprehensible in their more complex forms, if I had
not first seen them in him in their feral state.
With his soft felt hat at the back of his head, his rather heavy, rather
mottled face, his rationally thick boots and slouching tweed-clad form,
a little round-shouldered and very obstinate looking, he strolls through
all my speculations sucking his teeth audibly, and occasionally throwing
out a shrewd aphorism, the intractable unavoidable ore of the new
civilisation.
Essentially he was simple. Generally speaking, he hated and despised in
equal measure whatever seemed to suggest that he personally was not
the most perfect human being conceivable. He hated all education after
fifteen because he had had no education after fifteen, he hated all
people who did not have high tea until he himself under duress gave up
high tea, he hated every game except football, which he had played and
could judge, he hated all people who spoke foreign languages because he
knew no language but Staffordshire, he hated all foreigners because he
was English, and all foreign ways because they were not his ways. Also
he hated particularly, and in this order, Londoner's, Yorkshiremen,
Scotch, Welch and Irish, because they were not “reet Staffordshire,” and
he hated all other Staffordshire men as insufficiently “reet.” He wanted
to have all his own women inviolate, and to fancy he had a call upon
every other woman in the world. He wanted to have the best cigars and
the best brandy in the world to consume or give away magnificently, and
every one else to have inferior ones. (His billiard table was an extra
large size, specially made and very inconvenient.) And he hated Trade
Unions because they interfered with his autocratic direction of his
works, and his workpeople because they were not obedient and untiring
mechanisms to do his bidding. He was, in fact, a very naive, vigorous
human being. He was about as much civilised, about as much tamed to the
ideas of collective action and mutual consideration as a Central African
negro.
There are hordes of such men as he throughout all the modern industrial
world. You will find the same type with the slightest modifications in
the Pas de Calais or Rhenish Prussia or New Jersey or North Italy. No
doubt you would find it in New Japan. These men have raised themselves
up from the general mass of untrained, uncultured, poorish people in a
hard industrious selfish struggle. To drive others they have had first
to drive themselves. They have never yet had occasion nor leisure to
think of the state or social life as a whole, and as for dreams or
beauty, it was a condition of survival that they should ignore such
cravings. All the distinctive qualities of my uncle can be thought of as
dictated by his conditions; his success and harshness, the extravagances
that expressed his pride in making money, the uncongenial luxury that
sprang from rivalry, and his self-reliance, his contempt for broad
views, his contempt for everything that he could not understand.
His daughters were the inevitable children of his life. Queer girls they
were! Curiously “spirited” as people phrase it, and curiously limited.
During my Cambridge days I went down to Staffordshire several times. My
uncle, though he still resented my refusal to go into his business, was
also in his odd way proud of me. I was his nephew and poor relation, and
yet there I was, a young gentleman learning all sorts of unremunerative
things in the grandest manner, “Latin and mook,” while the sons of his
neighhours, not nephews merely, but sons, stayed unpolished in their
native town. Every time I went down I found extensive changes and
altered relations, and before I had settled down to them off I went
again. I don't think I was one person to them; I was a series of
visitors. There is a gulf of ages between a gaunt schoolboy of sixteen
in unbecoming mourning and two vividly self-conscious girls of eighteen
and nineteen, but a Cambridge “man” of two and twenty with a first and
good tennis and a growing social experience, is a fair contemporary for
two girls of twenty-three and twenty-four.
A motor-car appeared, I think in my second visit, a bottle-green
affair that opened behind, had dark purple cushions, and was controlled
mysteriously by a man in shiny black costume and a flat cap. The high
tea had been shifted to seven and rechristened dinner, but my uncle
would not dress nor consent to have wine; and after one painful
experiment, I gathered, and a scene, he put his foot down and prohibited
any but high-necked dresses.
“Daddy's perfectly impossible,” Sybil told me.
The foot had descended vehemently! “My own daughters!” he had said,
“dressed up like--“--and had arrested himself and fumbled and decided to
say--“actresses, and showin' their fat arms for every fool to stare
at!” Nor would he have any people invited to dinner. He didn't, he had
explained, want strangers poking about in his house when he came home
tired. So such calling as occurred went on during his absence in the
afternoon.
One of the peculiarities of the life of these ascendant families of
the industrial class to which wealth has come, is its tremendous
insulations. There were no customs of intercourse in the Five Towns. All
the isolated prosperities of the district sprang from economising, hard
driven homes, in which there was neither time nor means for hospitality.
Social intercourse centred very largely upon the church or chapel,
and the chapels were better at bringing people together than the
Establishment to which my cousins belonged. Their chief outlet to the
wider world lay therefore through the acquaintances they had formed at
school, and through two much less prosperous families of relations who
lived at Longton and Hanley. A number of gossiping friendships with old
school mates were “kept up,” and my cousins would “spend the afternoon”
or even spend the day with these; such occasions led to other encounters
and interlaced with the furtive correspondences and snatched meetings
that formed the emotional thread of their lives. When the billiard table
had been new, my uncle had taken to asking in a few approved friends for
an occasional game, but mostly the billiard-room was for glory and the
girls. Both of them played very well. They never, so far as I know,
dined out, and when at last after bitter domestic conflicts they began
to go to dances, they went with the quavering connivance of my aunt,
and changed into ball frocks at friends' houses on the way. There was a
tennis club that formed a convenient afternoon rendezvous, and I recall
that in the period of my earlier visits the young bloods of the district
found much satisfaction in taking girls for drives in dog-carts and
suchlike high-wheeled vehicles, a disposition that died in tangled
tandems at the apparition of motor-car's.
My aunt and uncle had conceived no plans in life for their daughters at
all. In the undifferentiated industrial community from which they had
sprung, girls got married somehow, and it did not occur to them that
the concentration of property that had made them wealthy, had cut their
children off from the general social sea in which their own awkward
meeting had occurred, without necessarily opening any other world in
exchange. My uncle was too much occupied with the works and his business
affairs and his private vices to philosophise about his girls; he wanted
them just to keep girls, preferably about sixteen, and to be a sort
of animated flowers and make home bright and be given things. He was
irritated that they would not remain at this, and still more irritated
that they failed to suppress altogether their natural interest in young
men. The tandems would be steered by weird and devious routes to evade
the bare chance of his bloodshot eye. My aunt seemed to have no ideas
whatever about what was likely to happen to her children. She had indeed
no ideas about anything; she took her husband and the days as they came.
I can see now the pathetic difficulty of my cousins' position in life;
the absence of any guidance or instruction or provision for their
development. They supplemented the silences of home by the conversation
of schoolfellows and the suggestions of popular fiction. They had to
make what they could out of life with such hints as these. The church
was far too modest to offer them any advice. It was obtruded upon my
mind upon my first visit that they were both carrying on correspondences
and having little furtive passings and seeings and meetings with the
mysterious owners of certain initials, S. and L. K., and, if I remember
rightly, “the R. N.” brothers and cousins, I suppose, of their friends.
The same thing was going on, with a certain intensification, at my next
visit, excepting only that the initials were different. But when I
came again their methods were maturer or I was no longer a negligible
quantity, and the notes and the initials were no longer flaunted quite
so openly in my face.
My cousins had worked it out from the indications of their universe that
the end of life is to have a “good time.” They used the phrase. That
and the drives in dog-carts were only the first of endless points of
resemblance between them and the commoner sort of American girl. When
some years ago I paid my first and only visit to America I seemed to
recover my cousins' atmosphere as soon as I entered the train at Euston.
There were three girls in my compartment supplied with huge decorated
cases of sweets, and being seen off by a company of friends, noisily
arch and eager about the “steamer letters” they would get at Liverpool;
they were the very soul-sisters of my cousins. The chief elements of a
good time, as my cousins judged it, as these countless thousands of rich
young women judge it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and to feel
that you are looking well and attracting attention. Shopping is one of
its leading joys. You buy things, clothes and trinkets for yourself and
presents for your friends. Presents always seemed to be flying about
in that circle; flowers and boxes of sweets were common currency. My
cousins were always getting and giving, my uncle caressed them with
parcels and cheques. They kissed him and he exuded sovereigns as a
stroked APHIS exudes honey. It was like the new language of the Academy
of Lagado to me, and I never learnt how to express myself in it, for
nature and training make me feel encumbered to receive presents and
embarrassed in giving them. But then, like my father, I hate and
distrust possessions.
Of the quality of their private imagination I never learnt anything; I
suppose it followed the lines of the fiction they read and was romantic
and sentimental. So far as marriage went, the married state seemed at
once very attractive and dreadfully serious to them, composed in equal
measure of becoming important and becoming old. I don't know what they
thought about children. I doubt if they thought about them at all. It
was very secret if they did.
As for the poor and dingy people all about them, my cousins were always
ready to take part in a Charitable Bazaar. They were unaware of any
economic correlation of their own prosperity and that circumambient
poverty, and they knew of Trade Unions simply as disagreeable external
things that upset my uncle's temper. They knew of nothing wrong in
social life at all except that there were “Agitators.” It surprised them
a little, I think, that Agitators were not more drastically put down.
But they had a sort of instinctive dread of social discussion as of
something that might breach the happiness of their ignorance....
5
My cousins did more than illustrate Marx for me; they also undertook a
stage of my emotional education. Their method in that as in everything
else was extremely simple, but it took my inexperience by surprise.
It must have been on my third visit that Sybil took me in hand. Hitherto
I seemed to have seen her only in profile, but now she became almost
completely full face, manifestly regarded me with those violet eyes
of hers. She passed me things I needed at breakfast--it was the first
morning of my visit--before I asked for them.
When young men are looked at by pretty cousins, they become intensely
aware of those cousins. It seemed to me that I had always admired
Sybil's eyes very greatly, and that there was something in her
temperament congenial to mine. It was odd I had not noted it on my
previous visits.
We walked round the garden somewhen that morning, and talked about
Cambridge. She asked quite a lot of questions about my work and my
ambitions. She said she had always felt sure I was clever.
The conversation languished a little, and we picked some flowers for the
house. Then she asked if I could run. I conceded her various starts and
we raced up and down the middle garden path. Then, a little breathless,
we went into the new twenty-five guinea summer-house at the end of the
herbaceous border.
We sat side by side, pleasantly hidden from the house, and she became
anxious about her hair, which was slightly and prettily disarranged, and
asked me to help her with the adjustment of a hairpin. I had never in my
life been so near the soft curly hair and the dainty eyebrow and eyelid
and warm soft cheek of a girl, and I was stirred--
It stirs me now to recall it.