Joe Burt lodged in the East-end off Pevensey Road in the heart of the new and ever-growing industrial quarter of Seagate, which was gradually transforming a rather suburban little town of villas with a fishing-station attached into a manufacturing city, oppressed with all the thronging problems of our century. There the Colonel visited his new friend. Burt was the first man of his type the old soldier, who had done most of his service in India, had met. The engineer himself, and even more the room in which he lived, with its obvious air of culture, was an eye-opener to the Colonel.
There was an old sideboard, beautifully kept, and on it a copper kettle and spirit lamp; a good carpet, decent curtains. On the walls were Millais's Knight Errant, Greiffenhagen's Man with a Scythe, and Clausen's Girl at the Gate. But it was the books on a long deal plank that most amazed the old soldier; not so much the number of them but the quality. He stood in front of them and read their titles with grunts.
Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics lolled up against the Webbs' Industrial Democracy; Bradley's lectures on the tragedies of Shakespeare hobnobbed with Gilbert Murray's translations from Euripides. Few of the standard books on Economics and Industrial History, English or American, were missing. And the work of the modern creators in imaginative literature, Wells, Shaw, Arnold Bennett were mixed with Alton Locke, Daniel Deronda, Sybil, and the essays of Samuel Butler and Edward Carpenter.
"You're not married then?" said the Colonel, throwing a glance round the well-appointed room.
"Yes, A am though," the engineer answered, his black-brown eyes twinkling. "A'm married to Democracy. She's ma first loov and like to be ma last."
"What you doing down South?" asked the Colonel, tossing one leg over the other as he sat down to smoke.
"Coom to make trouble," replied the other.
"Good for you!" said the Colonel. "Hotting things up for our friend Stan. Well, he wants it. All the politicians do."
His first visit to Seagate Lane was by no means his last: for the engineer's courage, his integrity, his aggressive tactics, delighted and amused the scholarly old soldier; but when he came to tackle his man seriously on the business of the National Service League he found he could not move him an inch from the position he invariably took up: The Army would be used by the Government in the only war that matters—the Industrial war; and therefore the Army must not be strengthened.
"If the Army was used for the only purpose it ought to be used for—defence—A'd be with you. So'd the boolk of the workers. But it's not. They use it to croosh strikes!" And he brought his fist down on the table with a characteristic thump. "That's to croosh us!—For the strike's our only weapon, Colonel."