The visit to the works was a particularly brilliant success. By good
fortune an oven was just being `drawn,' and the child had sight of the
finest, the most barbaric picture that the manufacture of earthenware,
from end to end picturesque, offers to the imaginative observer. Within
the dark and sinister bowels of the kiln, illuminated by pale rays that
came down through the upper orifice from the smoke-soiled sky,
half-naked figures moved like ghosts, strenuous and damned, among the
saggers of ware. At rapid intervals they emerged, their hairy torsos
glistening with sweat, carrying the fired ware, which was still too hot
for any but inured fingers to touch: an endless procession of plates and
saucers and cups and mugs and jugs and basins, thousands and thousands!
George stared in an enchanted silence of awe. And presently one of the
Hercules's picked him up, and held him for a moment within the portal of
the torrid kiln, and he gazed at the high curved walls, like the walls
of a gigantic tomb, and at the yellow saggers that held the ware. Now
he knew what a sagger was.
"I'm glad you took me," he said afterwards, clearly impressed by the
authority of Edwin, who could stroll out and see such terrific goings-on
whenever he chose. During all the walk home he did not speak.
On the Saturday, nominally in charge of his Auntie Janet, he called upon
his chum with some water-colour drawings that he had done; they showed
naked devils carrying cups and plates amid bright salmon-tinted flames:
designs horrible, and horribly crude, interesting only because a child
had done them. But somehow Edwin was obscurely impressed by them, and
also he was touched by the coincidence that George painted in
water-colours, and he, too, had once painted in water-colours. He was
moreover expected to judge the drawings as an expert. On Monday he
brought up the most complicated box of water-colours that his shop
contained, and presented it to George, who, astounded, dazed, bore it
away to his bedroom without a single word. Their friendship was sealed
and published; it became a fact recognised by the two families.