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
worked 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