“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.
“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.”
“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.
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?”
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.