第52章 THE FIRST(6)

One of the peculiarities of the life of these ascendant families of the industrial class to which wealth has come, is its tremendous insulations.There were no customs of intercourse in the Five Towns. All the isolated prosperities of the district sprang from economising, hard driven homes, in which there was neither time nor means for hospitality.Social intercourse centred very largely upon the church or chapel, and the chapels were better at bringing people together than the Establishment to which my cousins belonged.Their chief outlet to the wider world lay therefore through the acquaintances they had formed at school, and through two much less prosperous families of relations who lived at Longton and Hanley.Anumber of gossiping friendships with old school mates were "kept up," and my cousins would "spend the afternoon" or even spend the day with these; such occasions led to other encounters and interlaced with the furtive correspondences and snatched meetings that formed the emotional thread of their lives.When the billiard table had been new, my uncle had taken to asking in a few approved friends for an occasional game, but mostly the billiard-room was for glory and the girls.Both of them played very well.They never, so far as I know, dined out, and when at last after bitter domestic conflicts they began to go to dances, they went with the quavering connivance of my aunt, and changed into ball frocks at friends'

houses on the way.There was a tennis club that formed a convenient afternoon rendezvous, and I recall that in the period of my earlier visits the young bloods of the district found much satisfaction in taking girls for drives in dog-carts and suchlike high-wheeled vehicles, a disposition that died in tangled tandems at the apparition of motor-car's.

My aunt and uncle had conceived no plans in life for their daughters at all.In the undifferentiated industrial community from which they had sprung, girls got married somehow, and it did not occur to them that the concentration of property that had made them wealthy, had cut their children off from the general social sea in which their own awkward meeting had occurred, without necessarily opening any other world in exchange.My uncle was too much occupied with the works and his business affairs and his private vices to philosophise about his girls; he wanted them just to keep girls, preferably about sixteen, and to be a sort of animated flowers and make home bright and be given things.He was irritated that they would not remain at this, and still more irritated that they failed to suppress altogether their natural interest in young men.The tandems would be steered by weird and devious routes to evade the bare chance of his bloodshot eye.My aunt seemed to have no ideas whatever about what was likely to happen to her children.She had indeed no ideas about anything; she took her husband and the days as they came.

I can see now the pathetic difficulty of my cousins' position in life; the absence of any guidance or instruction or provision for their development.They supplemented the silences of home by the conversation of schoolfellows and the suggestions of popular fiction.They had to make what they could out of life with such hints as these.The church was far too modest to offer them any advice.It was obtruded upon my mind upon my first visit that they were both carrying on correspondences and having little furtive passings and seeings and meetings with the mysterious owners of certain initials, S.and L.K., and, if I remember rightly, "the R.

N." brothers and cousins, I suppose, of their friends.The same thing was going on, with a certain intensification, at my next visit, excepting only that the initials were different.But when Icame again their methods were maturer or I was no longer a negligible quantity, and the notes and the initials were no longer flaunted quite so openly in my face.

My cousins had worked it out from the indications of their universe that the end of life is to have a "good time." They used the phrase.That and the drives in dog-carts were only the first of endless points of resemblance between them and the commoner sort of American girl.When some years ago I paid my first and only visit to America I seemed to recover my cousins' atmosphere as soon as Ientered the train at Euston.There were three girls in my compartment supplied with huge decorated cases of sweets, and being seen off by a company of friends, noisily arch and eager about the "steamer letters" they would get at Liverpool; they were the very soul-sisters of my cousins.The chief elements of a good time, as my cousins judged it, as these countless thousands of rich young women judge it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and to feel that you are looking well and attracting attention.Shopping is one of its leading joys.You buy things, clothes and trinkets for yourself and presents for your friends.Presents always seemed to be flying about in that circle; flowers and boxes of sweets were common currency.My cousins were always getting and giving, my uncle caressed them with parcels and cheques.They kissed him and he exuded sovereigns as a stroked APHIS exudes honey.It was like the new language of the Academy of Lagado to me, and I never learnt how to express myself in it, for nature and training make me feel encumbered to receive presents and embarrassed in giving them.But then, like my father, I hate and distrust possessions.

Of the quality of their private imagination I never learnt anything;I suppose it followed the lines of the fiction they read and was romantic and sentimental.So far as marriage went, the married state seemed at once very attractive and dreadfully serious to them, composed in equal measure of becoming important and becoming old.Idon't know what they thought about children.I doubt if they thought about them at all.It was very secret if they did.