Presently he drifted towards the industrial North of England and became employed in a huge factory where thousands of people worked. It was here that Dick's life underwent a great change. For the first time he found himself the daily, hourly companion of grimy-handed toilers.
This gave him a new vision of life; it placed new meanings on great problems; he was made to look at life from new angles. For the first time he felt the squalor, the ugliness of life. He lived in a grimy street, amidst grimy surroundings. He saw things as the working classes saw them, saw them with all their grey unloveliness, their numbing monotony.
Still ambitious, still determined to carve out a career, he felt oppressed by the ghastly atmosphere in which he found himself. He was now fast approaching thirty, and he found himself unable to adapt himself to his new conditions. He thought of all he had hoped to do and be, and now by some sport of fate he had become engulfed in this maelstrom of life.
Little by little the inwardness of it all appealed to him. He had to do with men and women who were drunken, foul-mouthed, depraved. What wonder that he himself was becoming coarsened every day! Things at which he would once have shuddered he now passed by with a shrug of his shoulders. How could the working classes be refined, how could they have exalted ideas amidst such surroundings?
He noticed the tremendous disparity between the moneyed and the working classes. The former were deliberately exploiting the great world convulsion, and the peculiar conditions caused thereby, to make huge profits. It was all wrong—utterly wrong. What was the worker, on whose labour everything depended? Mere means for swelling the capitalists' profits. Who cared about them? Politicians talked glibly about what they meant to do; but they did nothing.
Newspapers shrieked, and capitalists talked about the disloyalty of the working classes. How could men go on strike while the very existence of empire, civilisation, humanity hung in the balance? they asked. But what of their own disloyalty? What of those who held a pistol at the head of the Government, and threatened to disorganise the trade of the country and paralyse output, if they could not stuff their money-bags still fuller?
And so on, and on. His new environment changed him—changed his sympathies, his thoughts, his outlook. He thought of Tony Riggleton spending the money these people were making for him in wild orgies among loose men and women, and he became angry and bitter.
Little by little his superior education asserted itself. He found, too, that he had a remarkable aptitude for public speech. He discovered that he could sway huge multitudes by the burning fervour of his words. He was able to put into language what the people felt, and before long became a popular hero.
The world was in a state of flux; old ideas, old conceptions were swept aside as worn-out fallacies. What ten years before were regarded as madmen's dreams no longer appeared either unreasonable or quixotic. The forces of life had become fluid, and it was the toiler of the nation who was to decide into what channels the new movements were to flow.
And Dick became a doctrinaire, as well as a dreamer of a new heaven and a new earth. He became an ardent reader, too. He was surprised at the ease with which his mind grasped theories hitherto unknown to him, how he absorbed the spirit of unrest, and how he flung himself into the world's great fray.