by H. G. Wells
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.
With his soft felt hat at the back of his head, his rather heavy,
rather mottled face, his rationally thick boots and slouching tweed-
clad form, a little round-shouldered and very obstinate looking, he
strolls through all my speculations sucking his teeth audibly, and
occasionally throwing out a shrewd aphorism, the intractable
unavoidable ore of the new civilisation.
Essentially he was simple. Generally speaking, he hated and
despised in equal measure whatever seemed to suggest that he
personally was not the most perfect human being conceivable. He
hated all education after fifteen because he had had no education
after fifteen, he hated all people who did not have high tea until
he himself under duress gave up high tea, he hated every game except
football, which he had played and could judge, he hated all people
who spoke foreign languages because he knew no language but
Staffordshire, he hated all foreigners because he was English, and
all foreign ways because they were not his ways. Also he hated
particularly, and in this order, Londoner's, Yorkshiremen, Scotch,
Welch and Irish, because they were not "reet Staffordshire," and he
hated all other Staffordshire men as
insufficiently "reet." He
wanted to have all his own women inviolate, and to fancy he had a
call upon every other woman in the world. He wanted to have the
best cigars and the best brandy in the world to consume or give away
magnificently, and every one else to have inferior ones. (His
billiard table was an extra large size, specially made and very
inconvenient.) And he hated Trade Unions because they interfered
with his autocratic direction of his works, and his workpeople
because they were not obedient and untiring mechanisms to do his
bidding. He was, in fact, a very naive, vigorous human being. He
was about as much civilised, about as much tamed to the ideas of
collective action and mutual consideration as a Central African
negro.
There are hordes of such men as he throughout all the modern
industrial world. You will find the same type with the slightest
modifications in the Pas de Calais or Rhenish Prussia or New Jersey
or North Italy. No doubt you would find it in New Japan. These men
have raised themselves up from the general mass of untrained,
uncultured, poorish people in a hard industrious selfish struggle.
To drive others they have had first to drive themselves. They have
never yet had occasion nor leisure to think of the state or social
life as a whole, and as for dreams or beauty, it was a condition of
survival that they should ignore such cravings. All the distinctive
qualities of my uncle can be thought of as dictated by his
conditions; his success and harshness, the extravagances that
expressed his pride in making money, the uncongenial luxury that
sprang from rivalry, and his self-reliance, his contempt for broad
views, his contempt for everything that he could not understand.
His daughters were the inevitable children of his life. Queer girls
they were! Curiously "spirited" as people phrase it, and curiously
limited. During my Cambridge days I went down to Staffordshire
several times. My uncle, though he still resented my refusal to go
into his business, was also in his odd way proud of me. I was his
nephew and poor relation, and yet there I was, a young gentleman
learning all sorts of unremunerative things in the grandest manner,
"Latin and mook," while the sons of his neighhours, not nephews
merely, but sons, stayed unpolished in their native town. Every
time I went down I found extensive changes and altered relations,
and before I had settled down to them off I went again. I don't
think I was one person to them; I was a series of visitors. There
is a gulf of ages between a gaunt schoolboy of sixteen in unbecoming
mourning and two vividly self-conscious girls of eighteen and
nineteen, but a Cambridge "man" of two and twenty with a first and
good tennis and a growing social experience, is a fair contemporary
for two girls of twenty-three and twenty-four.
A motor-car appeared, I think in my second visit, a bottle-green
affair that opened behind, had dark purple cushions, and was
controlled mysteriously by a man in shiny black costume and a flat
cap. The high tea had been shifted to seven and rechristened
dinner, but my uncle would not dress nor consent to have wine; and
after one painful experiment, I gathered, and a scene, he put his
foot down and prohibited any but high-necked dresses.
"Daddy's perfectly impossible," Sybil told me.
The foot had descended vehemently! "My own daughters!" he had said,
"dressed up like -"-and had arrested himself and fumbled and
decided to say-"actresses, and showin' their fat arms for every
fool to stare at!" Nor would he have any people invited to dinner.
He didn't, he had explained, want strangers poking about in his
house when he came home tired. So such calling as occurred went on
during his absence in the afternoon.
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. A
number 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 popula
r
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 I
came 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 I
entered 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.