The next afternoon George's invincible energy took both himself and the
great bearded man, Edwin, to a certain spot on the hollow confines of
the town towards Turnhill, where there were several pits of marl and
clay. They stared in silence at a vast ochre's-coloured glistening
cavity in the ground, on the high edges of which grew tufts of grass
amid shards and broken bottles. In the bottom of the pit were laid
planks, and along the planks men with pieces of string tied tight round
their legs beneath the knees drew large barrows full or empty, sometimes
insecurely over pools of yellow water into which the plank sagged under
their weight, and sometimes over little hillocks and through little
defiles formed in the basin of the mine. They seemed to have no aim.
The whole cavity had a sticky look which at first amused George, but on
the whole he was not interested, and Edwin gathered that the clay-pit in
some mysterious way fell short of expectations. A mineral line of
railway which, near by, ambled at random like a pioneer over rough
country, was much more successful than the pit in winning his approval.
"Can we go and see the saggers now?" he suggested.
Edwin might have taken him to the manufactory in which Albert Benbow was
a partner, but he preferred not to display to the father of Clara's
offspring his avuncular patronage of George Cannon, and he chose the
works of a customer down at Shawport for whom he was printing a somewhat
ambitious catalogue. He would call at the works and talk about the
catalogue, and then incidentally mention that his young friend desired
to see saggers.
"I suppose God put that clay there so that people could practise on it
first, before they tried the white clay," George observed, as the pair
descended Oldcastle Street.
Decidedly he had moments of talking like an infant, like a baby of
three. Edwin recalled that Hilda used to torture herself about
questions of belief when she was not three but twenty-three. The scene
in the garden porch seemed to have happened after all not very long ago.
Yet a new generation, unconceived on that exciting and unforgettable
night, had since been born and had passed through infancy and was now
trotting and arguing and dogmatising by his side. It was strange, but
it was certainly a fact, that George regarded him as a being
immeasurably old. He still felt a boy.
How ought he to talk to the child concerning God? He was about to make
a conventional response, when he stopped himself. "Confound it! Why
should I?" he thought.
"If I were you I shouldn't worry about God," he said, aloud, in a casual
and perhaps slightly ironic tone.
"Oh, I don't!" George answered positively. "But now and then He comes
into your head, doesn't He? I was only just thinking." The boy ceased,
being attracted by the marvellous spectacle of a man perilously balanced
on a crate-float driving a long-tailed pony full tilt down the steep
slope of Oldcastle Street: it was equal to a circus.
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