Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/124

 work that one of them should be off duty twice a day.

"I leave it to you, Stephen. I know you'll not let me down."

Sorrell's free hours were from twelve till half-past one, and from eight till half-past nine. The evenings were sacred to Kit, but that midday hour he spent reading in his room, or in wandering about the garden. He knew very little about gardens, and on one occasion he had drawn a rare and hoarse chuckle from the churlish Bowden.

"What are those things,—sunflowers?"

"Sunflowers! Don't 'ee know an artichoke?"

But Sorrell enjoyed the garden. He used to wander up and down a broad grass walk in the vegetable garden, where vegetables and fruit and flowers were intermixed. Sweet peas grew here, and Fanny Garland, coming out to cut flowers for her table vases, would see Sorrell walking up and down, and usually he had a little black note-book in his hand.

She wondered whether he wrote poetry.

But Sorrell found his poetry in figures. He was enjoying the romance of hard cash. These little glittering sixpences, shillings, florins, and half-crowns, they were the stars above his immediate world, and of far more significance and import than the stars. His means to an end, his material plunder for immaterial needs. For with his savings he was going to arm his son against a world that babbled of socialism and still clutched a knife or a club.

Skill and knowledge were to be Kit's "arms," some craft in which he should use hand and brain, and could say to the miner "Bring coal, or my skill is not for you," or to the baker "Bread, or you die." For Sorrell's sufferings and struggles had not led him towards the illusion of socialism. He had seen too much of human nature. Labour, becoming sectionalized, would split into groups, and group would grab from group, massing for the struggle instead of fighting a lone fight. Only the indispensable and individual few would be able to rise above this scramble of the industrial masses. It is the few who matter and who will always matter. So Sorrell thought.

Social service? O, yes, ten thousand years hence—perhaps. But for the moment—arms—and not too much trust in your neighbour.