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