by H. G. Wells
much of the world to me. I saw her once, for an afternoon, and
circumstances so threw her up in relief that I formed a very vivid
memory of her. She was in the sharpest contrast with the industrial
world about her; she impressed me as a dainty blue flower might do,
come upon suddenly on a clinker heap. She remained in my mind at
once a perplexing interrogation and a symbol…
But first I must tell of my Staffordshire cousins and the world that
served as a foil for her.
2
I first went to stay with my cousins when I was an awkward youth of
sixteen, wearing deep mourning for my mother. My uncle wanted to
talk things over with me, he said, and if he could, to persuade me
to go into business instead of going up to Cambridge.
I remember that visit on account of all sorts of novel things, but
chiefly, I think, because it was the first time I encountered
anything that deserves to be spoken of as wealth. For the first
time in my life I had to do with people who seemed to have endless
supplies of money, unlimited good clothes, numerous servants; whose
daily life was made up of things that I had hitherto considered to
be treats or exceptional extravagances. My cousins of eighteen and
nineteen took cabs, for instance, with the utmost freedom, and
travelled first-class in the local trains that run up and down the
district of the Five Towns with an entire unconsciousness of the
magnificence, as it seemed to me, of such a proceeding.
The family occupied a large villa in Newcastle, with big lawns
before it and behind, a shrubbery with quite a lot of shrubs, a
coach house and stable, and subordinate dwelling-places for the
gardener and the coachman. Every bedroom contained a gas heater and
a canopied brass bedstead, and had a little bathroom attached
equipped with the porcelain baths and fittings my uncle
manufactured, bright and sanitary and stamped with his name, and the
house was furnished throughout with chairs and tables in bright
shining wood, soft and prevalently red Turkish carpets, cosy
corners, curtained archways, gold-framed landscapes, overmantels, a
dining-room sideboard like a palace with a large Tantalus, and
electric light fittings of a gay and expensive quality. There was a
fine billiard-room on the ground floor with three comfortable sofas
and a rotating bookcase containing an excellent collection of the
English and American humorists from THREE MEN IN A BOAT to the
penultimate Mark Twain. There was also a conservatory opening out
of the dining-room, to which the gardener brought potted flowers in
their season…
My aunt was a little woman with a scared look and a cap that would
get over one eye, not very like my mother, and nearly eight years
her junior; she was very much concerned with keeping everything
nice, and unmercifully bullied by my two cousins, who took after
their father and followed the imaginations of their own hearts.
They were tall, dark, warmly flushed girls handsome rather than
pretty. Gertrude, the eldest and tallest, had eyes that were almost
black; Sibyl was of a stouter build, and her eyes, of which she was
shamelessly proud, were dark blue. Sibyl's hair waved, and
Gertrude's was severely straight. They treated me on my first visit
with all the contempt of the adolescent girl for a boy a little
younger and infinitely less expert in the business of life than
herself. They were very busy with the writings of notes and certain
mysterious goings and comings of their own, and left me very much to
my own devices. Their speech in my presence was full of
unfathomable allusions. They were the sort of girls who will talk
over and through an uninitiated stranger with the pleasantest sense
of superiority.
I met them at breakfast and at lunch and at the half-past six
o'clock high tea that formed the third chief meal of the day. I
heard them rattling off the compositions of Chaminade and Moskowski,
with great decision and effect, and hovered on the edge of tennis
foursomes where it was manifest to the dullest intelligence that my
presence was unnecessary. Then I went off to find some readable
book in the place, but apart from miscellaneous popular novels, some
veterinary works, a number of comic books, old bound volumes of THE
ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS and a large, popular illustrated History of
England, there was very little to be found. My anut talked to me in
a casual feeble way, chiefly about my motber's last illness. The
two bad seen very little of each other for many years; she made no
secret of it that the ineligible qualities of my father were the
cause of the estrangement. The only other society in the house
during the day was an old and rather decayed Skye terrier in
constant conflict with what were no doubt imaginary fleas. I took
myself off for a series of walks, and acquired a considerable
knowledge of the scenery and topography of the Potteries.
It puzzled my aunt that I did not go westward, where it was country-
side and often quite pretty, with hedgerows and fields and copses
and flowers. But always I went eastward, where in a long valley
industrialism smokes and sprawls. That was the stuff to which I
turned by nature, to the human effort, and the accumulation and jar
of men's activities. And in such a country as that valley social
and economic relations were simple and manifest. Instead of the
limitless confusion of London's population, in which no man can
trace any but the most slender correlation between rich and poor, in
which everyone seems disconnected and adrift from everyone, you can
see here the works, the potbank or the ironworks or what not, and
here close at hand the congested, meanly-housed workers, and at a
little distance a small middle-class quarter, and again remoter, the
big house of the employer. It was like a very simplified diagram-
after the untraceable confusion of London.
I prowled alone, curious and interested, through shabby back streets
of mean little homes; I followed canals, sometimes canals of
mysteriously heated waters with ghostly wisps of steam rising
against blackened walls or a distant prospect of dustbin-fed
vegetable gardens, I saw the women pouring out from the potbanks,
heard the hooters summoning the toilers to work, lost my way upon
slag heaps as big as the hills of the south country, dodged trains
at manifestly dangerous level crossings, and surveyed across dark
intervening spaces, the flaming uproar, the gnome-like activities of
iron foundries. I heard talk of strikes and rumours of strikes, and
learnt from the columns of some obscure labour paper I bought one
day, of the horrors of the lead poisoning that was in those days one
of the normal risks of certain sorts of pottery workers. Then back
I came, by the ugly groaning and clanging steam tram of that period,
to my uncle's house and lavish abundance of money and more or less
furtive flirtations and the tinkle of Moskowski and Chaminade. It
was, I say, diagrammat
ic. One saw the expropriator and the
expropriated-as if Marx had arranged the picture. It was as
jumbled and far more dingy and disastrous than any of the confusions
of building and development that had surrounded my youth at
Bromstead and Penge, but it had a novel quality of being explicable.
I found great virtue in the word "exploitation."
There stuck in my mind as if it was symbolical of the whole thing
the twisted figure of a man, whose face had been horribly scalded-I
can't describe how, except that one eye was just expressionless
white-and he ground at an organ bearing a card which told in weak
and bitterly satirical phrasing that he had been scalded by the hot
water from the tuyeres of the blast furnace of Lord Pandram's works.
He had been scalded and quite inadequately compensated and
dismissed. And Lord Pandram was worth half a million.
That upturned sightless white eye of his took possession of my
imagination. I don't think that even then I was swayed by any crude
melodramatic conception of injustice. I was quite prepared to
believe the card wasn't a punctiliously accurate statement of fact,
and that a case could be made out for Lord Pandram. Still there in
the muddy gutter, painfully and dreadfully, was the man, and he was
smashed and scalded and wretched, and he ground his dismal
hurdygurdy with a weary arm, calling upon Heaven and the passer-by
for help, for help and some sort of righting-one could not imagine
quite what. There he was as a fact, as a by-product of the system
that heaped my cousins with trinkets and provided the comic novels
and the abundant cigars and spacious billiard-room of my uncle's
house. I couldn't disconnect him and them.
My uncle on his part did nothing to conceal the state of war that
existed between himself and his workers, and the mingled contempt
and animosity he felt from them.
3
Prosperity had overtaken my uncle. So quite naturally he believed
that every man who was not as prosperous as he was had only himself
to blame. He was rich and he had left school and gone into his
father's business at fifteen, and that seemed to him the proper age
at which everyone's education should terminate. He was very anxious
to dissuade me from going up to Cambridge, and we argued
intermittently through all my visit.
I had remembered him as a big and buoyant man, striding
destructively about the nursery floor of my childhood, and saluting
my existence by slaps, loud laughter, and questions about half
herrings and half eggs subtly framed to puzzle and confuse my mind.
I didn't see him for some years until my father's death, and then he
seemed rather smaller, though still a fair size, yellow instead of
red and much less radiantly aggressive. This altered effect was due
not so much to my own changed perspectives, I fancy, as to the facts
that he was suffering for continuous cigar smoking, and being taken
in hand by his adolescent daughters who had just returned from
school.
During my first visit there was a perpetual series of-the only word
is rows, between them and him. Up to the age of fifteen or
thereabouts, he had maintamed his ascendancy over them by simple
old-fashioned physical chastisement. Then after an interlude of a
year it had dawned upon them that power had mysteriously departed
from him. He had tried stopping their pocket money, but they found
their mother financially amenable; besides which it was fundamental
to my uncle's attitude that he should give them money freely. Not
to do so would seem like admitting a difficulty in making it. So
that after he had stopped their allowances for the fourth time Sybil
and Gertrude were prepared to face beggary without a qualm. It had
been his pride to give them the largest allowance of any girls at
the school, not even excepting the granddaughter of Fladden the
Borax King, and his soul recoiled from this discipline as it had
never recoiled from the ruder method of the earlier phase. Both
girls had developed to a high pitch in their mutual recriminations a
gift for damaging retort, and he found it an altogether deadlier
thing than the power of the raised voice that had always cowed my
aunt. Whenever he became heated with them, they frowned as if
involuntarily, drew in their breath sharply, said: "Daddy, you
really must not say -" and corrected his pronunciation. Then, at a
great advantage, they resumed the discussion…
My uncle's views about Cambridge, however, were perfectly clear and
definite. It was waste of time and money. It was all damned
foolery. Did they make a man a better business man? Not a bit of
it. He gave instances. It spoilt a man for business by giving him
"false ideas." Some men said that at college a man formed useful
friendships. What use were friendships to a business man? He might
get to know lords, but, as my uncle pointed out, a lord's
requirements in his line of faience were little greater than a
common man's. If college introduced him to hotel proprietors there
might be something in it. Perhaps it helped a man into Parliament,
Parliament still being a confused retrogressive corner in the world
where lawyers and suchlike sheltered themselves from the onslaughts
of common-sense behind a fog of Latin and Greek and twaddle and
tosh; but I wasn't the sort to go into Parliament, unless I meant to
be a lawyer. Did I mean to be a lawyer? It cost no end of money,
and was full of uncertainties, and there were no judges nor great
solicitors among my relations. "Young chaps think they get on by
themselves," said my uncle. It isn't so. Not unless they take
their coats off. I took mine off before I was your age by nigh a
year."
We were at cross purposes from the outset, because I did not think
men lived to make money; and I was obtuse to the hints he was
throwing out at the possibilities of his own potbank, not willfully
obtuse, but just failing to penetrate his meaning. Whatever City
Merchants had or had not done for me, Flack, Topham and old Gates
had certainly barred my mistaking the profitable production and sale
of lavatory basins and bathroom fittings for the highest good. It
was only upon reflection that it dawned upon me that the splendid
chance for a young fellow with my uncle, "me, having no son of my
own," was anything but an illustration for comparison with my own
chosen career.
I still remember very distinctly my uncle's talk,-he loved to speak
"reet Staffordshire"-his rather flabby face with the mottled
complexion that told of crude ill-regulated appetites, his clumsy
gestures-he kept emphasising his points by prodding at me with his
finger-the ill-worn, costly, grey tweed clothes, the watch chain of
plain solid gold, and soft felt hat thrust back from his head. He
tackled me first in the garden after lunch, and then tried to raise
me to enthusiasm by taking me to his potbank and showing me its
organisation, from the dusty grinding mills in which whitened men
wo
rked and coughed, through the highly ventilated glazing room in
which strangely masked girls looked ashamed of themselves,-"They'll
risk death, the fools, to show their faces to a man," said my uncle,
quite audibly-to the firing kilns and the glazing kilns, and so
round the whole place to the railway siding and the gratifying
spectacle of three trucks laden with executed orders.
Then we went up a creaking outside staircase to his little office,
and he showed off before me for a while, with one or two
subordinates and the telephone.
"None of your Gas," he said, "all this. It's Real every bit of it.
Hard cash and hard glaze."
"Yes," I said, with memories of a carelessly read pamphlet in my
mind, and without any satirical intention, "I suppose you MUST use
lead in your glazes?"
Whereupon I found I had tapped the ruling grievance of my uncle's
life. He hated leadless glazes more than he hated anything, except
the benevolent people who had organised the agitation for their use.
"Leadless glazes ain't only fit for buns," he said. "Let me tell
you, my boy-"
He began in a voice of bland persuasiveness that presently warmed to
anger, to explain the whole matter. I hadn't the rights of the
matter at all. Firstly, there was practically no such thing as lead
poisoning. Secondly, not everyone was liable to lead poisoning, and
it would be quite easy to pick out the susceptible types-as soon as
they had it-and put them to other work. Thirdly, the evil effects
of lead poisoning were much exaggerated. Fourthly, and this was in
a particularly confidential undertone, many of the people liked to
get lead poisoning, especially the women, because it caused
abortion. I might not believe it, but he knew it for a fact.
Fifthly, the work-people simply would not learn the gravity of the
danger, and would eat with unwashed hands, and incur all sorts of
risks, so that as my uncle put it: "the fools deserve what they
get." Sixthly, he and several associated firms had organised a
simple and generous insurance scheme against lead-poisoning risks.
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
