That night young Gresley, filled with admiration, told the whole story to his father.
"Of course, Dad, you'll move him up to a good post at once?" he said.
Old Gresley, leaning his scraggy face upon his hand, replied curtly, "I shall do no such thing."
The son, who knew that his father never said a thing without reason, waited.
"Wilmot? He was the young fellow who helped you when you went fooling away your money at cards, wasn't he?" continued the old man, suddenly turning his Napoleonic eye upon his son.
"Yes. He pulled me out of a tight place."
"That young man wouldn't thank me for undeserved promotion. He has the right stuff in him, and he wants to do things from the beginning—the only way! I often wish that you had had to start in the same fashion, Harry: there's nothing like it for making men. But your foolish old dad had been over the ground before you, and that made things easy. What that boy wants is work. I'll see he gets it, and I'll watch how he does it, and I'll take care that he is paid according to his merits."
Consequently Pip, much to his relief, was left in undisturbed possession of his self-sought limbo, and made the recipient of an ever-increasing load of work,—varied, strenuous, responsible work,—and for three sturdy years he lived a life that hardened his muscles, broadened his views, taught him self-reliance, cheery contentment with his lot, and, in short, made a man of him.
He learned to live on a pound a week. He learned to drink four ale and smoke shag. He became an habitué of those establishments which are so ably administered by Lord Rowton and Mr. Lockhart. He obtained an insight into the workings of the proletariat mind. He learned the first lesson which all who desire to know their world must learn, namely, that mankind is not divided into three classes,—our own, another immediately above it, and another immediately below it,—but that a motor factory may contain as many grades and distinctions, as many social barriers and smart sets, as many cliques and cabals, as Mayfair—or Upper Tooting. He learned to distinguish the stupid, beer-swilling, illiterate, but mainly honest British workman of the old-fashioned type from the precocious, clerkly, unstable, rather weedy product of the board-school and music-hall. He discovered earnest young men in blue overalls who read Ruskin, and pulverised empires and withered up dynasties once a week in a debating society. He made the acquaintance of the paid agitator, with his stereotyped phrases and glib assertions of the right of man to a fair day's work and a fair day's wage, oblivious of the fact that he did not know the meaning of the first and would never have been content with the second. He rubbed shoulders with men who struggled, amid cylinders and accumulators, with religious doubts; men who had been "saved," and who insisted on leaving evidence to that effect, in pamphlet form, in their mates' coat-pockets; and men who, either through excess of intellect or from lack of adversity, had never had any need of God, and consequently did not believe in Him.
He saw other things, many of which made him sick. He saw child-wives of seventeen, tied to stunted youths of twenty, already inured and almost indifferent to a thrashing every Saturday night. He saw babies everywhere, chiefly in public-houses, where their sole diet appeared to consist of as much gin as they could lick off the fingers which accommodating parents from time to time dipped into their glasses and thrust into their wailing little mouths. He saw the beast that a woman can make of a man and the wreck that a man can make of a woman, and the horror that drink can make of both; and, being young and inexperienced, he grew depressed at these sights, and came to the conclusion that the world was very evil.