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