Latest / The H. G. Wells Library / The Passionate Friends Chapter 5 - The War in South Africa Parts 4-6

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The Passionate Friends Chapter 5 - The War in South Africa Parts 4-6 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Chapter five, Parts one to six of The Passionate Friends
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  Speaker 1: by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the
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  Speaker 1: public domain recording by Peter Eastman, Chapter the fifth, The
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  Speaker 1: War in South Africa four. I came back to England
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  Speaker 1: at last, when I was twenty six, after the Peace
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  Speaker 1: of Ferenegung. I worked under the Repatriation Commission, which controlled
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  Speaker 1: the distribution of returning prisoners and concentrated population to their homes.
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  Speaker 1: For the most part, I was distributing stock and grain,
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  Speaker 1: and presently maneuvering a sort of plowing flying column that
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  Speaker 1: the dearth of horses and oxen made necessary. Work that
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  Speaker 1: was certainly as hard as, if far less exciting, than war.
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  Speaker 1: That particular work of replanting the desolated country with human
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  Speaker 1: beings took hold of my imagination, and for a time
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  Speaker 1: at least seemed quite straightforward and understandable, the comfort of
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  Speaker 1: ceasing to destroy. No one has ridden anything that really
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  Speaker 1: conveys the quality of that repatriation process. The queer business
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  Speaker 1: of bringing these suspicious, illiterate, despondent people back to their
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  Speaker 1: desolated homes, reuniting swarthy fathers and stockish mothers, witnessing their
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  Speaker 1: touchingly inexpressive encounters, doing what one could to put heart
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  Speaker 1: into their resumption. Memories come back to me of great
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  Speaker 1: littered heaps of luggage, bundles, blankets, rough boxes piled newly
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  Speaker 1: purchased stores, ready made doors, window sashes heaped ready for
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  Speaker 1: the wagons, slow moving, apathetic figures, sitting and eating, an
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  Speaker 1: infernal squawking of parrots, sometimes a wailing of babies. Repatriation
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  Speaker 1: went on to a parrot obligato, and I never hear
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  Speaker 1: a parrot squawk without a flash of South Africa across
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  Speaker 1: my mind. All the prisoners, I believe brought back parrots,
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  Speaker 1: some two or three. I had to spread these people
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  Speaker 1: out over a country still grassless, with teams of war
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  Speaker 1: worn oxen mules and horses that died by the dozens
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  Speaker 1: on my hands. The end of each individual instance was
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  Speaker 1: a handshake, and one went lumbering on, leaving the children
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  Speaker 1: one had deposited behind, one already playing with old raci
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  Speaker 1: tints or hunting about for cartridge cases, while the adults
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  Speaker 1: stared at the work they had to do. There was
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  Speaker 1: something elementary in all that redistribution. I felt at times
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  Speaker 1: like a child playing in a nursery and putting out
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  Speaker 1: its bricks and soldiers on the floor. There was a
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  Speaker 1: kind of greatness too about the process, a quality of atonement,
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  Speaker 1: and the people I was taking back, the men, anyhow,
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  Speaker 1: were for the most part charming and wonderful people, very
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  Speaker 1: simple and emotional, so that once a big bearded man,
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  Speaker 1: when I wanted him, in the face of an overflowing
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  Speaker 1: wagon to abandon about half a dozen great, angular colored
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  Speaker 1: West Indian shells he had loved with him from Bermuda,
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  Speaker 1: burst into tears of disappointment. I let him take them,
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  Speaker 1: and at the end I saw them placed with joy
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  Speaker 1: and reverence in the little parlor to become the war heirlooms,
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  Speaker 1: no doubt of a long and bearded family. As we
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  Speaker 1: shook hands after our parting coffee, he glanced at them
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  Speaker 1: with something between gratitude and triumph in his eyes. Yes,
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  Speaker 1: that was a great work, more especially for a ripening
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  Speaker 1: youngster such as I was at that time. The memory
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  Speaker 1: of long rides and tramps over that limitless felt returns
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  Speaker 1: to me lonely, in spite of the creaking, lumbering wagons
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  Speaker 1: and transport riders and kaffirs that followed behind. South Africa
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  Speaker 1: is a country not only of immense spaces, but of
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  Speaker 1: an immense spaciousness. Everything is far apart, Even the grass
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  Speaker 1: blades are far apart. Sometimes, when crossed wide stony wastes,
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  Speaker 1: sometimes came stretches of tall, yellow green grass wheel high.
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  Speaker 1: Sometimes a little green patch of returning cultivation drew nearer
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  Speaker 1: for an hour or so. Sometimes the blundering, toilsome passage
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  Speaker 1: of a torrent interrupted or slow onward march, And constantly
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  Speaker 1: one saw long lines of torn and twisted barbed wire,
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  Speaker 1: stretching away and away, and here and there when found archipelagoes,
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  Speaker 1: as it were, in this dry ocean of the skeletons
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  Speaker 1: of cattle. And there were places where troops had halted,
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  Speaker 1: and their scattered ration tins shone like diamonds in the sunshine.
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  Speaker 1: Occasionally I struck talk some returning prisoner, some group of
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  Speaker 1: discharged British soldiers become carpenters or bricklayers again and making
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  Speaker 1: their pound a day by the work of rebuilding. Always
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  Speaker 1: everyone was ready to expatiate upon the situation. Usually, however,
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  Speaker 1: I was alone, thinking over this immense, now vanished tornado
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  Speaker 1: of a war, and this equally astonishing work of healing
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  Speaker 1: that was following it. I became keenly interested in all
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  Speaker 1: this great business, and thought at first of remaining indefinitely
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  Speaker 1: in Africa. Repatriation was presently done and finished. I had
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  Speaker 1: won Milner's good opinion, and he was anxious for me
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  Speaker 1: to go on working in relation to the labor difficulty
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  Speaker 1: that rose now more and more into prominence behind the
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  Speaker 1: agricultural resettlement. But when I faced that, I found myself
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  Speaker 1: in the middle of a tangle infinitely less simple than
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  Speaker 1: putting back in agricultural population upon its land. Five. For
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  Speaker 1: the first time in my life, I was really looking
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  Speaker 1: at the social fundamental of labor. There is something astonishingly
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  Speaker 1: naive in the unconsciousness with which people of our class
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  Speaker 1: float over the great economic realities. All my life I
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  Speaker 1: had been hearing of the working classes, of industrialism, of
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  Speaker 1: labor problems, and the organization of labor. But it was
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  Speaker 1: only now in South Africa, in this chaotic, crude, illuminating
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  Speaker 1: period of putting a smashed and desolated social order together again,
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  Speaker 1: that I perceived these familiar phrases represented something, something stupendously real.
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  Speaker 1: There were I began to recognize two sides to civilization.
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  Speaker 1: One traditional, immemorial, universal, the side of the homestead, the
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  Speaker 1: side I had been seeing and restoring. And there was another,
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  Speaker 1: ancient too, but never universal, as old at least as
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  Speaker 1: the mines of Syracuse and the building of the pyramids.
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  Speaker 1: The side that came into view when I emerged from
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  Speaker 1: the dusty station and sided the squat shanties and slender
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  Speaker 1: chimneys of Johannesburg, that uprooted side of social life, that
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  Speaker 1: accumulation of toilers, divorced from the soil, which is industrialism
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  Speaker 1: and labor, and which carries such people as ourselves, and
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  Speaker 1: whatever significance and possibilities we have, as an elephant carries
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  Speaker 1: its rider. Now all Johannesburg and Pretoria were discussing labor,
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  Speaker 1: and nothing but labor. Bloemfonteine was in conference thereon our
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  Speaker 1: work of repatriation, which had loomed so large on the
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  Speaker 1: southern ward Velt, became here a business at once incidental
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  Speaker 1: and remote. One felt that a little sooner or a
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  Speaker 1: little later, all that would resume and go on, as
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  Speaker 1: the rains would and the veltgrass. But this was something
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  Speaker 1: less kindred to the succession of the seasons and the soil.
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  Speaker 1: This was a hitch in the upper fabric. Here in
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  Speaker 1: the great, ugly mine scarred basin of the rant, with
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  Speaker 1: its bare hillsides, half the stamps were standing idle, machinery
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  Speaker 1: was eating its head off. Time and water were running
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  Speaker 1: to waste. Amidst an immense exasperated disputation. Something had given way.
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  Speaker 1: The war had spoiled the kaffir boy. He was demanding
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  Speaker 1: enormous wages, he was away from Johannesburg, and above all
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  Speaker 1: he would no longer go underground. Implicit in all the
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  Speaker 1: argument and suggestion about me was this profoundly suggestive fact
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  Speaker 1: that some people, quite a lot of people, scores of thousands,
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  Speaker 1: had to go underground. Implicit too, always in the discourse
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  Speaker 1: was the assumption that the talker or writer in question
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  Speaker 1: wasn't for a moment to be expected to go there.
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  Speaker 1: Those others, whoever they were, had to do that for us.
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  Speaker 1: Before the war it had been the artless Portuguese caffir.
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  Speaker 1: But he alas was being diverted to open air employment
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  Speaker 1: at Delagoa Bay. Should we raise wages and go on
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  Speaker 1: with the fatal process of spoiling the workers? Should we
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  Speaker 1: by imposing a tremendous hut tax drive the Kaffir into
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  Speaker 1: our toils. Should we carry the labor hunt across the
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  Speaker 1: Zambizi into Central Africa? Should we follow the lead of
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  Speaker 1: Lord Kitchener and mister Creswell and employ the rather dangerous,
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  Speaker 1: unskilled white labor with ideas about strikes at socialism that
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  Speaker 1: had drifted into Johannesburg. Should we do tremendous things with
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  Speaker 1: labor saving machinery or were we indeed desperate yet tempting
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  Speaker 1: resort to bring in the cheap Indian or Chinese coolly?
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  Speaker 1: Steadily things were drifting towards that last tremendous experiment. There
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  Speaker 1: was a vigorous opposition in South Africa and in England,
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  Speaker 1: growing there to an outcry. But behind that proposal was
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  Speaker 1: the one vitalizing conviction in modern initiative. Indisputably, it would pay,
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  Speaker 1: It would pay. The human mind has a much more
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  Speaker 1: complex and fluctuating process than most of those explanatory people
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  Speaker 1: who write about psychology would have us believe. Instead of
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  Speaker 1: that simple direct movement, like the movement of a point
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  Speaker 1: forward and from here to there, one's thoughts advanced like
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  Speaker 1: an army, sometimes extended over an enormous front. Sometimes in echelon,
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  Speaker 1: sometimes bunched in a column, throwing out skirmishing clouds of emotion,
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  Speaker 1: some flying and soaring, some crawling, some stopping and dying.
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  Speaker 1: In this matter of labor, for example, I have thought
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  Speaker 1: so much thought over the ground again and again come
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  Speaker 1: into it from this way and from that way, that
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  Speaker 1: for the life of me I find it impossible to
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  Speaker 1: state at all clearly how much I made of these
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  Speaker 1: questions during that Johannesburg time. I cannot get back into
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  Speaker 1: those ancient ignorances revive my old astonishments and discoveries. Certainly
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  Speaker 1: I envisaged the whole process much less clearly than I
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  Speaker 1: do now. Ignored difficulties that have since entangled me, regarded
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  Speaker 1: with a tremendous perplexity, aspects that have now become lucidly plain.
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  Speaker 1: I came back to England confused and doing what confused
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  Speaker 1: people are apt to do, clinging to an inadequate phrase
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  Speaker 1: that seemed at any rate to define a course of action.
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  Speaker 1: The word efficiency had got hold of me. All our
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  Speaker 1: troubles came one assumed from being inefficient, one turned towards
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  Speaker 1: politics with a bustling air, and was all for fault.
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  Speaker 1: Finding and renovation. I sit here at my desk, pen
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  Speaker 1: in hand and trace figures on the blotting paper, and
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  Speaker 1: wonder how much I understood at that time. I came
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  Speaker 1: back to England to work on the side of efficiency,
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  Speaker 1: that is quite certain. A little later I was writing
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  Speaker 1: articles and letters about it, So that much is documented.
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  Speaker 1: But I think I must have apprehended too by that time,
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  Speaker 1: some vague outline, at least, of those wider issues in
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  Speaker 1: the secular conflict between the new forms of human association
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  Speaker 1: and the old, to which contemporary politics and our national
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: fate are no more than transitory eddies and rufflings of
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: the surface waters. It was all so nakedly plain. There,
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  Speaker 1: on the one hand, was the primordial, on the other,
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  Speaker 1: the rankly new. The farm on the Velt stood on
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  Speaker 1: the Velt, a thing of the Velt, a thing rooted
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  Speaker 1: and established there and nowhere else. The dusty, crude, brick
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  Speaker 1: field desolation of the Rant, on the other hand, did
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  Speaker 1: not really be long with any particularity to South Africa
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  Speaker 1: at all. It was one with our camps and armies.
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  Speaker 1: It was part of something else, something still bigger. A monstrous,
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  Speaker 1: shadowy arm had thrust out from Europe and torn open
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  Speaker 1: this country, erected these chimneys, piled these heaps, and sent
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  Speaker 1: the racient tins and cartridge cases to follow them. It
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  Speaker 1: was gigantic kindred with that ancient predecessor which had built
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: the walls of Zimbabwe. And this hungry, imp patient demand
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  Speaker 1: for myriads of toilers, this threatening inundation of black or
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  Speaker 1: brown or yellow bond serfs, was just the natural voice
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  Speaker 1: of this colossal system to which I belonged, which had
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  Speaker 1: brought me hither, and which I now perceived I did
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  Speaker 1: not even begin to understand. One day, when asking my
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  Speaker 1: way to some forgotten destination, I had pointed out to
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  Speaker 1: me the Gray and Robert's Deep Mine. Some familiarity in
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  Speaker 1: the name set me thinking, until I recalled that this
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  Speaker 1: was the mine in which I had once heard Lady
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: Lattislaw confess large holdings, This mine in which gangs of
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: indentured Chinamen would presently be sweating to pay the wages
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  Speaker 1: of the gamekeepers and road menders in Burnmore Park. Yes,
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  Speaker 1: this was what I was taking in at that time,
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  Speaker 1: but it found me in expressive. What I was saying
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  Speaker 1: on my return to England gave me no intimation of
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  Speaker 1: the broad conceptions growing in my mind. I came back
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  Speaker 1: to be one of the many scores of energetic and
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: ambitious young men who were parroting efficiency, stirring up people,
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  Speaker 1: and more particularly stirring up themselves with the utmost vigor,
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  Speaker 1: and all the time within their secret hearts, more than
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  Speaker 1: a little at a loss. Six while I had been
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  Speaker 1: in South Africa, circumstances had conspired to alter my prospects
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  Speaker 1: in life. Very greatly unanticipated freedoms and opportunities had come
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  Speaker 1: to me, and it was no longer out of the
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: question for me to think of a parliamentary career. Our
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  Speaker 1: fortunes had altered. My father had ceased to be Rector
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: of Burnmore and had become a comparatively wealthy man. My
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: second cousin, Reginald Stratton, had been drowned in Finland, and
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: his father had only survived the shock of his death
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  Speaker 1: a fortnight. His sister, Arthur Mason's first wife had died
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: in giving birth to a stillborn child the year before,
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  Speaker 1: and my father found himself suddenly the owner of all
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: that large stretch of developing downland and building land which
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: Old Reginald had bought between Shattock and golding on the
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: south and west Eshire station on the north, and an
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: addition of considerable investments in northern industrials. It was an
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: odd collusion of mortality. We had had only the coldest
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: relations with our cousins, and now, abruptly, through their commercial
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: and speculative activities which we had always affected to despise
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: and ignore, I was in a position to attempt the
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: realization of my old political ambitions. My cousin's house had
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: not been to my father's taste. He had let it,
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: and I came to a new home in a pleasant,
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  Speaker 1: plain red brick house, a hundred and fifty years old, perhaps,
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: on an open and sunny hill side, sheltered by trees
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  Speaker 1: eastward and northward, a few miles to the southwest of Guildford.
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  Speaker 1: It had all the gracious proportions, the dignified simplicity, the
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  Speaker 1: roomy comfort of the good building of that time. It
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: looked sunward. We breakfasted in sunshine in the library, and
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: outside was an old wall with peach trees and a
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: row of pillar roses heavily in flower. I had a
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: little feared this place. Burnmore Rectory had been so absolutely
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: home to me, with its quiet serenities, its ample familiar garden,
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: its greenhouses, and intimately known corners. But I perceived I
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: might have trusted my father's character to preserve his essential atmosphere.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: He was so much himself as I remembered him, that
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: I did not even observe for a day or so
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: that he had not only aged considerably, but discarded the
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: last vestiges of clerical costume in his attire. He met
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: me in front of the house and led me into
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: a wide paneled hall and wrung my hand again and again,
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: deeply moved and very inexpressive. Did you have a good journey,
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: he asked again and again, with tears in his eyes.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: Did you have a comfortable journey? I've not seen the house,
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: said I. It looks fine. You're a man, he said,
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: and patted my shoulder. Of course it was at Burnmore.
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  Speaker 1: You are not changed, I said, You're not an atom changed.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: How could I, he replied, Come and have something to eat.
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: You ought to have something to eat. We talked of
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: the house and what a good house it was, and
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: he took me out into the garden to see the
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: peaches and grapevine, and then brought me back without showing
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: them to me in order to greet my cousin. It's
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: very like birdmore, he said, with his eyes devouring me,
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: very like a little more space and no services, no
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: services at all. That makes a gap. Of course, there's
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: a little chap about here. You'll find his name is Wednesday,
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: who sorts my papers and calls himself my secretary. Not necessary, perhaps,
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: but I missed the curate, he said. He was reading
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: more than he used to do, now that the parish
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: was off his hands, and he was preparing material for
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: a book. It was, he explained later, to take the
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: form of a huge essay, ostensibly on secular canons, but
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: his purport was to be no less than the complete
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: secularization of the Church of England. At first, he wanted
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: merely to throw open the cathedral chapters to distinguished laymen,
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: irrespective of their theological opinions, and to make each English
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: cathedral a center of intellectual activity, a college, as it were,
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: of philosophers and writers. But afterwards his suggestions grew bolder.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: The articles of religion were to be set aside, the
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: creeds made optional even for the clergy. His dream became
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: more and more richly picturesque, until at last he saw
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: Canterbury a realized Thelema, and Saint Paul's a new academic grove.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: He was to work at that remarkable proposal intermittently for
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: many years, and to leave it at last no more
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: than a shapeless mass of memory Miranda fragmentary essays and
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: selected passages for quotation. Yet mere patchwork and scrap book,
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: as it would be. I still have some thought of
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: publishing it. There is a large human charity about it,
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: a sun too broad and warm, a reasonableness too wide
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: and free, perhaps for the timid, convulsive quality of our time.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: Yet all good as good wine for the wise. Is
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: it incredible that a day should come when our great
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: gray monuments to the Norman spirit should cease to be
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: occupied by narrow witted parsons and besieged by narrow Soult
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: descenders the soul of our race in exile from the
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: home and place our fathers built for it. If he
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: was not perceptibly changed, I thought my cousin Jane had
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: become more than a little sharper and stiffer. She did
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: not like my own's own personal secularization, and still less
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: the glimpses she got of the ampler intentions of his book.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: She missed the proximity to the church and her parochial authority,
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: but she was always a silent woman and made her
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: comments with her profile and not with her tongue. I'm
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: glad you've come back, Stephen, said my father as we
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: sat together after dinner and her departure, with port and
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: tall silver candlesticks and shining mahogany between us. I've missed you.
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: I've done my best to follow things out there. I've
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: got I suppose every press mentioned there's been of you
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: during the war and since I've subscribed to two press
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: cutting agencies, so that if one missed you, the other
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: fellow got you. Perhaps you'll like to read them over
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: one of these days. You see, there's not been a
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: soldier in the family since the Peninsular War, and so
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: I've been particularly interested. You must tell me all the
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: things you're thinking of and what you mean to do.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: This last stuff, this Chinese business, it puzzles me. I
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: want to know what you think of it and everything.
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: I did my best to give him my ideas, such
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: as they were, and as they were still very vague ideas.
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: I have no doubt he found me rhetorical. I can
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: imagine myself talking of the white man's Burthen and how
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: in Africa it had seemed at first to sit rather
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: staggeringly upon her undertrained shoulders. I spoke of slackness and planlessness.
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: I've come back in search of efficiency. I have no
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: doubt I said that at any rate we're trying to
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: run this big empire, I may have explained with undertrained,
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: under educated, poor spirited stuff, and we we shall come
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: a cropper unless we raise our quality. I'm still imperialist,
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: more than ever I was, but I'm an imperialist on
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: a different footing. I've no great illusions left about the
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: superiority of the Anglo Saxons. All that has gone. But
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: I do think it will be a monstrous waste, a
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: disaster to human possibilities, if this great liberal spirited empire
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: sprawls itself asunder for the want of a little gravity
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: and purpose. And it's here the work has to be done,
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: the work of training and bracing up and stimulating the
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: public imagination. Yes, that would be the sort of thing
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: I should have said in those days. There's an old
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: National Review on my desk as I write, containing an
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: article by me with some of those fairy phrases in it.
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: I have been looking at it in order to remind
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: myself of my own forgotten eloquence. Yes, I remember my
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: father saying yes, and then after reflection. But those coolies,
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: those Chinese coolies. You can't build up an imperial population
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: by importing coolies. I don't like that side of the
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: business myself. I said, it's detail, perhaps, but the liberals
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: will turn you out on it next year and then
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: start badgering public houses and looting the church. And then
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: this tariff talk. Everybody on our side seems to be
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: mixing up the unity of the empire with tariffs. It's
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: a pity. Salisbury wouldn't have stood it. Unity unity depends
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: on a common literature and a common language, and common
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: ideas and sympathies. It doesn't unite people for them to
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: be forced to trade with each other. Trading isn't friendship.
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: I don't trade with my friends, and I don't make
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: friends with my tradesmen. Natural enemies, polite, of course, but antagonists.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: Are you keen over this tariff stuff, Steve, not a bit?
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: I said that too, seems a detail. It doesn't seem
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: to be keeping its place as a detail, said my father.
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: Very few men can touch tariffs and not get a
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: little soiled. I hate all this international sharping, all these
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: attempts to get artificial advantages, all this making poor people
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: by inferior goods. Dear in the name of the flag.
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: If it comes to that, damn the flag. Custom houses
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: are ugly things, Stephen, the dirty side of nationality, dirty things, ignoble,
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: cross cunning things. They wake you up in the small
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: hours and rout over your bags. An imperial people ought
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: to be an urbane people, a civilizing people, above such petty,
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: irritating things. I'd as soon put barbed wire along the
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: footpath across that field where the village children go to school,
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: or claim that her mushrooms are cultivated, or prosecute a
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: Sunday Society Cockney for picking my primroses custom houses. Indeed,
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: it's Chinese. There are things a great country mustn't do, Stephen.
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: A country like ours ought to get along without the
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: manners of a hard breathing, competitive cad. If it can't,
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: I'd rather it didn't get along. What's the good of
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: a huckster country. It's like having a wife on the
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: streets it's no excuse that she brings you money. But
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: since the peace and that man Chamberlain's visit to Africa,
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: you imperialists seem to have got this nasty spirit all
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: over you. The Germans do it, you say. My father
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: shut one eye and regarded the color of his port
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: against the waning life. Let them, he said, fancy quoting
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: the Germans. When I was a boy, there weren't any Germans.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: They came up after seventy state craft from Germany and
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: statesmen from Birmingham, Germans silver and electroplated empires. No, it's
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: just a part of our narrow outlook, I answered from
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: the hearth rug, after a pause. It's because we're so
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: limited that everyone is translating the greatness of empire into
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: preferential trading and jealousy of Germany. It's for something bigger
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: than that that I've returned. Those big things come slowly,
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: said my father, and then with a sigh age after age,
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: they seem at times to be standing still. Good things
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: go with the bad, bad things come with the good.
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: I remember him saying that, as though I could still
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: hear him. It must have been after dinner, for he
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: was sitting duskily indistinct against the light, with a voice
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: coming out to him. The candles had not been brought in,
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: and the view, when saw through the big plate glass
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: window behind him, was very clear and splendid. Those little
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: Wheelden hills in Surrey and Sussex assume at times for
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: all that by Swiss standers, they are the merest ridges
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: of Earth, the dignity and mystery of great mountains. Now,
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: the crests of Hindhead and Blackdown, purple black against the
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: level gold of the evening sky, might have been some
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: high flung boundary chain nearer their gathered banks and pools
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: of lut uminous lavender tinted mist, out of which hills
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: of Pinewood rose like islands out of the sea. The
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: intervening spaces were magnified to continental dimensions, and the closer,
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: lowlier things over which we looked. The cottages below us
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: were gray and black and dim pierced by a few
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: luminous orange windows, and with a solitary street lamp shining
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: like a star. The village might have been nestling a
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: mountain's height below instead of a couple of hundred feet.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: I left my hearth rug and walked to the window
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: to survey this. Who's got all that land stretching away there,
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: that little blooded sierra of pines and escarpments. I mean,
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: My father halted for an instant in his answer, and
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: glanced over his Shoulderingham and Baxter share all his coppices,
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: He remarked. They'd come up to my corner on each side,
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: but the dark heather and pine land beyond, with just
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: the gables of a house among the trees. Oh that,
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: he said, with a careful note of indifference. That's justin,
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: you know, justin. He used to come to Birdmore Park.
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: End of chapter five