[Chapter XXVII]
The capital of Clayland is St. Austell; but, as usual, nobody is very sure about the saint. If you say "Saintauzel" through the nose, you may be taken for a native. The church is in the centre of the town, and the narrow, crooked thoroughfares radiate from there. The town seems to have grown as wanted, every house pushing its neighbour towards the centre. The wealth of Ophir in black, glittering tin is said to underlie the town, and there is no doubt about the tin being there, for the nuggies may be heard working on their silver anvils, and bright lights dance upon the surface during autumnal mists. Any tinner will tell you the meaning of these mysterious illuminations; but the mines are not worked now, because the hills above and around are composed of the white clay which all the world wants.
"Saintauzel" is a Friday town. Most things are reckoned as from Friday to Friday, which is market day, and the inhabitants put on their Friday faces and Friday clothes. When it isn't Friday the inhabitants delight in watching the clay-waggons pass their shops, or in dodging them in the narrow, crooked labyrinths called streets. Everything gives way to the clay teams—butcher-boys and motor-drivers screw themselves into nothingness, or back down side-streets when the clay-man is in view, driving his horses in single file, all straining at their chains. An endless procession of heavy waggons rumbles through the narrow streets—waggons laden with powdered clay in barrels, or with square, white, glistening lumps uncovered; and the drivers, stiffened up with clay, like loaded yarn, crack their long whips and keep their teams at it. These drivers, born upon the hills, look a race to themselves—straight-backed, upright, and hard as nails. The clay which they absorb year by year doesn't hurt them. The amount which they swallow with their pasties must be fatal to microbes, as they seldom think of dying until tired of throwing about barrels of clay which would break an ordinary labourer's heart to handle. The old county is sent away in ships as fast as they can carry it, but there is some left.
Guy fancied that there was not so much "expression" in the faces and dramatic action with the people we met here as in other places, and hazarded a guess that this was a result of looking at so much inexpressionless clay. There is not much in clay to lay hold of the imagination, except its whiteness, and the purer the blanker it is; but, then, smirches in clay would cause a sensation, like the entrance of a lady with a past into a party of sweet young things playing at goodness in a social comedy. There is little in the article suggestive of anything but money. The people here are said to be very rich in comparison with those in other towns, and they need three banks to take care of their cash. The chief amusement at night is to walk around the banks, just to see that the doors are closed. The Bookworm made a few inquiries about libraries and art galleries, and that sort of thing, but there were none. He felt sad; he couldn't help it, he said, when he found people with money without books and pictures, and things of that sort. Samuel Drew was born here, so also was John William Colenso, the man who "made an epoch in criticism by his straightforwardness," and there is plenty of room for a statue to each. The old bull-ring is in evidence.
The hill on which the town stands stretches away a mile or so, and the further you go the better the view of the white, glistening patches, and the rills of white water trickling down the valleys seawards. "Milk!" is the one idea, milk flowing through the land—milk enough and to spare for all the condensed milk factories in the world. It's only an illusion—it's clay in solution, which by-and-by will show itself in the sea, like a white apron upon the shore, until it loses itself in the eternal blue. We stand here on what is a sort of terminus of the hilly backbone of the country—eastward, it is black and rugged, moor and mountain with white scars, and ruined engine-houses of abandoned mines; then westward, and there is paradise in green stretching towards the cathedral city. Down again to Clayopolis and the throb of arterial life—clay and money, money and clay.