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
poisoning was a frequent and virulent evil, and people had
generalised from these exceptional cases. The small shops, he
hazarded, looking out of the cracked and dirty window at distant
chimneys, might be advantageously closed…
"But what's the good of talking?" said my uncle, getting off the
table on which he had been sitting. "Seems to me there'll come a
time when a master will get fined if he don't run round the works
blowing his girls noses for them. That's about what it'll come to."
He walked to the black mantelpiece and stood on the threadbare rug,
and urged me not to be misled by the stories of prejudiced and
interested enemies of our national industries.
"They'll get a strike one of these days, of employers, and then
we'll see a bit," he said. "They'll drive Capital abroad and then
they'll whistle to get it back again."…
He led the way down the shaky wooden steps and cheered up to tell me
of his way of checking his coal consumption. He exchanged a
ferocious greeting with one or two workpeople, and so we came out of
the factory gates into the ugly narrow streets, paved with a
peculiarly hard diapered brick of an unpleasing inky-blue colour,
and bordered with the mean and squalid homes of his workers. Doors
stood open and showed grimy interiors, and dirty ill-clad children
played in the kennel.
We passed a sickly-looking girl with a sallow face, who dragged her
limbs and peered at us dimly with painful eyes. She stood back, as
partly blinded people will do, to allow us to pass, although there
was plenty of room for us.
I glanced back at her.
"THAT'S ploombism " said my uncle casually.
"What?" said I.
"Ploombism. And the other day I saw a fool of a girl, and what
d'you think? She'd got a basin that hadn't been fired, a cracked
piece of biscuit it was, up on the shelf over her head, just all
over glaze, killing glaze, man, and she was putting up her hand if
you please, and eating her dinner out of it. Got her dinner in it!
"Eating her dinner out of it," he repeated in loud and bitter tones,
and punched me hard in the ribs.
"And then they comes to THAT-and grumbles. And the fools up in
Westminster want you to put in fans here and fans there-the Longton
fools have… And then eating their dinners out of it all the
time!"…
At high tea that night-my uncle was still holding out against
evening dinner-Sibyl and Gertrude made what was evidently a
concerted demand for a motorcar.
"You've got your mother's brougham," he said, that's good enough for
you." But he seemed shaken by the fact that some Burslem rival was
launching out with the new invention. "He spoils his girls," he
remarked. "He's a fool," and became thoughtful.
Afterwards he asked me to come to him into his study; it was a room
with a writing-desk and full of pieces of earthenware and suchlike
litter, and we had our great row about Cambridge.
"Have you thought things over, Dick?" he said.
"I think I'll go to Trinity, Uncle," I said firmly. "I want to go
to Trinity. It is a great college."
He was manifestly chagrined. "You're a fool," he said.
I made no answer.
"You're a damned fool," he said. "But I suppose you've got to do
it. You could have come here-That don't matter, though, now…
You'll have your time and spend your money, and be a poor half-
starved clergyman, mucking about with the women all the day and
afraid to have one of your own ever, or you'll be a schoolmaster or
some such fool for the rest of your life. Or some newspaper chap.
That's what you'll get from Cambridge. I'm half a mind not to let
you. Eh? More than half a mind…"
"You've got to do the thing you can," he said, after a pause, "and
likely it's what you're fitted for."
4
I paid several short visits to Staffordshire during my Cambridge
days, and always these relations of mine produced the same effect of
hardness. My uncle's thoughts had neither atmosphere nor mystery.
He lived in a different universe from the dreams of scientific
construction that filled my mind. He could as easily have
understood Chinese poetry. His motives were made up of intense
rivalries with other men of his class and kind, a few vindictive
hates springing from real and fancied slights, a habit of
acquisition that had become a second nature, a keen love both of
efficiency and display in his own affairs. He seemed to me to have
no sense of the state, no sense and much less any love of beauty, no