“There's a lot of chance in the making of all great businesses,” I said.
My uncle remarked that that showed how much I knew about businesses.
If chance made businesses, why was it that he always succeeded and grew
while those fools Ackroyd and Sons always took second place? He showed
a disposition to tell the glorious history of how once Ackroyd's
overshadowed him, and how now he could buy up Ackroyd's three times
over. But I wanted to get out what was in my mind.
“Oh!” I said, “as between man and man and business and business, some
of course get the pull by this quality or that--but it's forces quite
outside the individual case that make the big part of any success
under modern conditions. YOU never invented pottery, nor any process in
pottery that matters a rap in your works; it wasn't YOUR foresight that
joined all England up with railways and made it possible to organise
production on an altogether different scale. You really at the utmost
can't take credit for much more than being the sort of man who happened
to fit what happened to be the requirements of the time, and who
happened to be in a position to take advantage of them--”
It was then my uncle cried out and called me a damned young puppy, and
became involved in some unexpected trouble of his own.
I woke up as it were from my analysis of the situation to discover him
bent over a splendid spittoon, cursing incoherently, retching a little,
and spitting out the end of his cigar which he had bitten off in his
last attempt at self-control, and withal fully prepared as soon as he
had cleared for action to give me just all that he considered to be the
contents of his mind upon the condition of mine.
Well, why shouldn't I talk my mind to him? He'd never had an outside
view of himself for years, and I resolved to stand up to him. We went
at it hammer and tongs! It became clear that he supposed me to be a
Socialist, a zealous, embittered hater of all ownership--and also an
educated man of the vilest, most pretentiously superior description.
His principal grievance was that I thought I knew everything; to that he
recurred again and again....
We had been maintaining an armed truce with each other since my resolve
to go up to Cambridge, and now we had out all that had accumulated
between us. There had been stupendous accumulations....
The particular things we said and did in that bawling encounter matter
nothing at all in this story. I can't now estimate how near we came
to fisticuffs. It ended with my saying, after a pungent reminder of
benefits conferred and remembered, that I didn't want to stay another
hour in his house. I went upstairs, in a state of puerile fury, to
pack and go off to the Railway Hotel, while he, with ironical civility,
telephoned for a cab.
“Good riddance!” shouted my uncle, seeing me off into the night.
On the face of it our row was preposterous, but the underlying reality
of our quarrel was the essential antagonism, it seemed to me, in all
human affairs, the antagonism between ideas and the established method,
that is to say, between ideas and the rule of thumb. The world I hate
is the rule-of-thumb world, the thing I and my kind of people exist
for primarily is to battle with that, to annoy it, disarrange it,
reconstruct it. We question everything, disturb anything that cannot
give a clear justification to our questioning, because we believe
inherently that our sense of disorder implies the possibility of a
better order. Of course we are detestable. My uncle was of that other
vaster mass who accept everything for the thing it seems to be, hate
enquiry and analysis as a tramp hates washing, dread and resist change,
oppose experiment, despise science. The world is our battleground; and
all history, all literature that matters, all science, deals with this
conflict of the thing that is and the speculative “if” that will destroy
it.
But that is why I did not see Margaret Seddon again for five years.