Part 14 (1/2)

”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 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 a.s.sociated 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 compet.i.tors 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s, 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 motor-car.

”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, d.i.c.k?” 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 d.a.m.ned 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.”

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