upon intersecting radiations has broadened the intellectual horizon of mankind for ever, and I, who am at best a hewer of intellectual wood, a drawer of living water, can smile, and he can smile, to think how I patronized and posed and jabbered over him in the darkness of those early days.
That night I was shrill and eloquent beyond measure. Rawdon was, of course, the hub upon which I went round—Rawdon and the Rawdonesque employer and the injustice of “wages slavery” and all the immediate conditions of that industrial blind alley up which it seemed our lives were thrust. But ever and again I glanced at other things. Nettie was always there in the background of my mind, regarding me enigmatically. It was part of my pose to Parload that I had a romantic love-affair somewhere away beyond the sphere of our intercourse, and that note gave a Byronic resonance to many of the nonsensical things I produced for his astonishment.
I will not weary you with too detailed an account of the talk of a foolish youth who was also distressed and unhappy, and whose voice was balm for the humiliations that smarted in his eyes. Indeed, now in many particulars I cannot disentangle this harangue of which I tell from many of the things I may have said in other talks to Parload. For example, I forget if it was then or before or afterwards that, as it were by accident, I let out what might be taken as an admission that I was addicted to drugs.
“You shouldn’t do that,” said Parload, suddenly. “It won’t do to poison your brains with that.”
My brains, my eloquence, were to be very important assets to our party in the coming revolution. . . .
But one thing does clearly belong to this particular conversation I am recalling. When I started out it was quite settled in the back of my mind that I must not leave Rawdon’s. I simply wanted to abuse my employer to Parload. But I talked myself quite out of touch with all the cogent reasons there were for sticking to my place, and I got home that night irrevocably committed to a spirited—not to say a defiant—policy with my employer.
“I can’t stand Rawdon’s much longer,” I said to Parload by way of a flourish.
“There’s hard times coming,” said Parload.
“Next winter.”
“Sooner. The Americans have been overproducing, and they mean to dump. The iron trade is going to have convulsions.”
“I don’t care. Pot-banks are steady.”
“With a corner in borax? No. I’ve heard—”
“What have you heard?”
“Office secrets. But it’s no secret there’s trouble coming to potters. There’s been borrowing and speculation. The masters don’t stick to one business as they used to do. I can tell that much. Half the valley may be ‘playing’ before two months are out.” Parload delivered himself of this unusually long speech in his most pithy and weighty manner.
“Playing” was our local euphemism for a time when there was no work and no money for a man, a time of stagnation and dreary hungry loafing day after day. Such interludes seemed in those days a necessary consequence of industrial organization.
“You’d better stick to Rawdon’s,” said Parload.
“Ugh,” said I, affecting a noble disgust.
“There’ll be trouble,” said Parload.
“Who cares?” said I. “Let there be trouble—the more the better. This system has got to end, sooner or later. These capitalists with their speculation and corners and trusts make things go from bad to worse. Why should I cower in Rawdon’s office, like a frightened dog, while hunger walks the streets? Hunger is the master revolutionary. When he comes we ought to turn out and salute him. Anyway, I’M going to do so now.”
“That’s all very well,” began Parload.
“I’m tired of it,” I said. “I want to come to grips with all these Rawdons. I think perhaps if I was hungry and savage I could talk to hungry men—”
“There’s your mother,” said Parload, in his slow judicial way.
That WAS a difficulty.
I got over it by a rhetorical turn. “Why should one sacrifice the future of the world—why should one even sacrifice one’s own future—because one’s mother is totally destitute of imagination?”
Section 5
It was late when I parted from Parload and came back to my own home.
Our house stood in a highly respectable little square near the Clayton parish church. Mr. Gabbitas, the curate of all work, lodged on our ground floor, and upstairs there was an old lady, Miss Holroyd, who painted flowers on china and maintained her blind sister in an adjacent room; my mother and I lived in the basement and slept in the attics. The front of the house was veiled by a Virginian creeper that defied the Clayton air and clustered in untidy dependent masses over the wooden porch.
As I came up the steps I had a glimpse of Mr. Gabbitas printing photographs by candle light in his room. It was the chief delight of his little life to spend his holiday abroad in the company of a queer little snap-shot camera, and to return with a great multitude of foggy and sinister negatives that he had made in beautiful and interesting places. These the camera company would develop for him on advantageous terms, and he would spend his evenings the year through in printing from them in order to inflict copies upon his undeserving friends. There was a long frameful of his work in the Clayton National School, for example, inscribed in old English lettering, “Italian Travel Pictures, by the Rev. E. B. Gabbitas.” For this it seemed he lived and traveled and had his being. It was his only real joy. By his shaded light I could see his sharp little nose, his little pale eyes behind his glasses, his mouth pursed up with the endeavor of his employment.
“Hireling Liar,” I muttered, for was not he also part of the system, part of the scheme of robbery that made wages serfs of Parload and me?—though his share in the proceedings was certainly small.
“Hireling Liar,” said I, standing in the darkness, outside even his faint glow of traveled culture. . .
My mother let me in.
She looked at me, mutely, because she knew there was something wrong and that it was no use for her to ask what.
“Good night, mummy,” said I, and kissed her a little roughly, and lit and took my candle and went off at once up the staircase to bed, not looking back at her.
“I’ve kept some supper for you, dear.”
“Don’t want any supper.”
“But, dearie———”
“Good night, mother,” and I went up and slammed my door upon her, blew out my candle, and lay down at once upon my bed, lay there a long time before I got up to undress.
There were times when that dumb beseeching of my mother’s face irritated me unspeakably. It did so that night. I felt I had to struggle against it, that I could not exist if I gave way to its pleadings, and it hurt me and divided me to resist it, almost beyond endurance. It was clear to me that I had to think out for myself religious problems, social problems, questions of conduct, questions of expediency, that her poor dear simple beliefs could not help me at all—and
