plumbers or navvies or cabmen or railway porters we became
unconsciously and unthinkingly aristocrats. Our voices altered, our
gestures altered. We behaved just as all the other men, rich or
poor, swatters or sportsmen or Pinky Dinkys, behaved, and exactly as
we were expected to behave. On the whole it is a population of poor
quality round about Cambridge, rather stunted and spiritless and
very difficult to idealise. That theoretical Working Man of ours!-
if we felt the clash at all we explained it, I suppose, by assuming
that he came from another part of the country; Esmeer, I remember,
who lived somewhere in the Fens, was very eloquent about the Cornish
fishermen, and Hatherleigh, who was a Hampshire man, assured us we
ought to know the Scottish miner. My private fancy was for the
Lancashire operative because of his co-operative societies, and
because what Lancashire thinks to-day England thinks to-morrow…
And also I had never been in Lancashire.
By little increments of realisation it was that the profounder
verities of the problem of socialism came to me. It helped me very
much that I had to go down to the Potteries several times to discuss
my future with my uncle and guardian; I walked about and saw Bursley
Wakes and much of the human aspects of organised industrialism at
close quarters for the first time. The picture of a splendid
Working Man cheated out of his innate glorious possibilities, and
presently to arise and dash this scoundrelly and scandalous system
of private ownership to fragments, began to give place to a
limitless spectacle of inefficiency, to a conception of millions of
people not organised as they should be, not educated as they should
be, not simply prevented from but incapable of nearly every sort of
beauty, mostly kindly and well meaning, mostly incompetent, mostly
obstinate, and easily humbugged and easily diverted. Even the
tragic and inspiring idea of Marx, that the poor were nearing a
limit of painfulexperience, and awakening to a sense of intolerable
wrongs, began to develop into the more appalling conception that the
poor were simply in a witless uncomfortable inconclusive way-
"muddling along"; that they wanted nothing very definitely nor very
urgently, that mean fears enslaved them and mean satisfactions
decoyed them, that they took the very gift of life itself with a
spiritless lassitude, hoarding it, being rather anxious not to lose
it than to use it in any way whatever.
The complete development of that realisation was the work of many
years. I had only the first intimations at Cambridge. But I did
have intimations. Most acutely do I remember the doubts that
followed the visit of Chris Robinson. Chris Robinson was heralded
by such heroic anticipations, and he was so entirely what we had not
anticipated.
Hatherleigh got him to come, arranged a sort of meeting for him at
Redmayne's rooms in King's, and was very proud and proprietorial.
It failed to stir Cambridge at all profoundly. Beyond a futile
attempt to screw up Hatherleigh made by some inexpert duffers who
used nails instead of screws and gimlets, there was no attempt to
rag. Next day Chris Robinson went and spoke at Bennett Hall in
Newnham College, and left Cambridge in the evening amidst the cheers
of twenty men or so. Socialism was at such a low ebb politically in
those days that it didn't even rouse men to opposition.
And there sat Chris under that flamboyant and heroic Worker of the
poster, a little wrinkled grey-bearded apologetic man in ready-made
clothes, with watchful innocent brown eyes and a persistent and
invincible air of being out of his element. He sat with his stout
boots tucked up under his chair, and clung to a teacup and saucer
and looked away from us into the fire, and we all sat about on
tables and chair-arms and windowsills and boxes and anywhere except
upon chairs after the manner of young men. The only other chair
whose seat was occupied was the one containing his knitted woollen
comforter and his picturesque old beach-photographer's hat. We were
all shy and didn't know how to take hold of him now we had got him,
and, which was disconcertingly unanticipated, he was manifestly
having the same difficulty with us. We had expected to be gripped.
"I'll not be knowing what to say to these Chaps," he repeated with a
north-country quality in his speech.
We made reassuring noises.
The Ambassador of the Workers stirred his tea earnestly through an
uncomfortable pause.
"I'd best tell 'em something of how things are in Lancashire, what
with the new machines and all that," he speculated at last with red
reflections in his thoughtful eyes.
We had an inexcusable dread that perhaps he would make a mess of the
meeting.
But when he was no longer in the unaccustomed meshes of refined
conversation, but speaking with an audience before him, he became a
different man. He declared he would explain to us just exactly what
socialism was, and went on at once to an impassioned contrast of
social conditions. "You young men," he said "come from homes of
luxury; every need you feel is supplied-"
We sat and stood and sprawled about him, occupying every inch of
Redmayne's floor space except the hearthrug-platform, and we
listened to him and thought him over. He was the voice of wrongs
that made us indignant and eager. We forgot for a time that he had