第50章 THE FIRST(4)

Seventhly, he never wearied in rational (as distinguished from excessive, futile and expensive) precautions against the disease.

Eighthly, in the ill-equipped shops of his minor competitors lead poisoning was a frequent and virulent evil, and people had generalised from these exceptional cases.The small shops, he hazarded, looking out of the cracked and dirty window at distant chimneys, might be advantageously closed....

"But what's the good of talking?" said my uncle, getting off the table on which he had been sitting."Seems to me there'll come a time when a master will get fined if he don't run round the works blowing his girls noses for them.That's about what it'll come to."He walked to the black mantelpiece and stood on the threadbare rug, and urged me not to be misled by the stories of prejudiced and interested enemies of our national industries.

"They'll get a strike one of these days, of employers, and then we'll see a bit," he said."They'll drive Capital abroad and then they'll whistle to get it back again."...

He led the way down the shaky wooden steps and cheered up to tell me of his way of checking his coal consumption.He exchanged a ferocious greeting with one or two workpeople, and so we came out of the factory gates into the ugly narrow streets, paved with a peculiarly hard diapered brick of an unpleasing inky-blue colour, and bordered with the mean and squalid homes of his workers.Doors stood open and showed grimy interiors, and dirty ill-clad children played in the kennel.

We passed a sickly-looking girl with a sallow face, who dragged her limbs and peered at us dimly with painful eyes.She stood back, as partly blinded people will do, to allow us to pass, although there was plenty of room for us.

I glanced back at her.

"THAT'S ploombism " said my uncle casually.

"What?" said I.

"Ploombism.And the other day I saw a fool of a girl, and what d'you think? She'd got a basin that hadn't been fired, a cracked piece of biscuit it was, up on the shelf over her head, just all over glaze, killing glaze, man, and she was putting up her hand if you please, and eating her dinner out of it.Got her dinner in it!

"Eating her dinner out of it," he repeated in loud and bitter tones, and punched me hard in the ribs.

"And then they comes to THAT--and grumbles.And the fools up in Westminster want you to put in fans here and fans there--the Longton fools have....And then eating their dinners out of it all the time!"...

At high tea that night--my uncle was still holding out against evening dinner--Sibyl and Gertrude made what was evidently a concerted demand for a motorcar.

"You've got your mother's brougham," he said, that's good enough for you." But he seemed shaken by the fact that some Burslem rival was launching out with the new invention."He spoils his girls," he remarked."He's a fool," and became thoughtful.

Afterwards he asked me to come to him into his study; it was a room with a writing-desk and full of pieces of earthenware and suchlike litter, and we had our great row about Cambridge.

"Have you thought things over, Dick?" he said.

"I think I'll go to Trinity, Uncle," I said firmly."I want to go to Trinity.It is a great college."He was manifestly chagrined."You're a fool," he said.

I made no answer.

"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.