He was splendidly serious. He was as splendidly serious as a reformer.
By a single urgent act of thought he would have made himself a man, and
changed imperfection into perfection. He desired--and there was real
passion in his desire--to do his best, to exhaust himself in doing his
best, in living according to his conscience. He did not know of what he
was capable, nor what he could achieve. Achievement was not the matter
of his desire; but endeavour, honest and terrific endeavour. He
admitted to himself his shortcomings, and he did not under-estimate the
difficulties that lay before him; but he said, thinking of his father:
"Surely he'll see I mean business! Surely he's bound to give in when he
sees how much in earnest I am!" He was convinced, almost, that
passionate faith could move mountainous fathers.
"I'll show 'em!" he muttered.
And he meant that he would show the world... He was honouring the
world; he was paying the finest homage to it. In that head of his a
flame burnt that was like an altar-fire, a miraculous and beautiful
phenomenon, than which nothing is more miraculous nor more beautiful
over the whole earth. Whence had it suddenly sprung, that flame? After
years of muddy inefficiency, of contentedness with the second-rate and
the dishonest, that flame astoundingly bursts forth, from a hidden,
unheeded spark that none had ever thought to blow upon. It bursts forth
out of a damp jungle of careless habits and negligence that could not
possibly have fed it. There is little to encourage it. The very
architecture of the streets shows that environment has done naught for
it: ragged brickwork, walls finished anyhow with saggars and slag;
narrow uneven alleys leading to higgledy-piggledy workshops and kilns;
cottages transformed into factories and factories into cottages,
clumsily, hastily, because nothing matters so long as "it will do;"
everywhere something forced to fulfil, badly, the function of something
else; in brief, the reign of the slovenly makeshift, shameless, filthy,
and picturesque. Edwin himself seemed no tabernacle for that singular
flame. He was not merely untidy and dirty--at his age such defects
might have excited in a sane observer uneasiness by their absence; but
his gestures and his gait were untidy. He did not mind how he walked.
All his sprawling limbs were saying: "What does it matter, so long as we
get there?" The angle of the slatternly bag across his shoulders was an
insult to the flame. And yet the flame burned with serene and terrible
pureness.
It was surprising that no one saw it passing along the mean, black,
smoke-palled streets that huddle about Saint Luke's Church. Sundry
experienced and fat old women were standing or sitting at their cottage
doors, one or two smoking cutties. But even they, who in child-bed and
at gravesides had been at the very core of life for long years, they,
who saw more than most, could only see a fresh lad passing along, with
fair hair and a clear complexion, and gawky knees and elbows, a fierce,
rapt expression on his straightforward, good-natured face. Some knew
that it was "Clayhanger's lad," a nice-behaved young gentleman, and the
spitten image of his poor mother. They all knew what a lad is--the feel
of his young skin under his "duds," the capricious freedom of his
movements, his sudden madnesses and shoutings and tendernesses, and the
exceeding power of his unconscious wistful charm. They could divine all
that in a glance. But they could not see the mysterious and holy flame
of the desire for self-perfection blazing within that tousled head. And
if Edwin had suspected that anybody could indeed perceive it, he would
have whipped it out for shame, though the repudiation had meant
everlasting death. Such is youth in the Five Towns, if not elsewhere.