wanted to revert to the strictest
Toryism. But the desire did not last long enough to carry him into action.
    During his childhood and his boyhood he had wanted a sort of savagedom. The
days of Homer were his ideal, when a man was chief of an army of heroes, or
spent his years in wonderful Odyssey. He hated remorselessly the circumstances
of his own life, so much that he never really saw Beldover and the colliery
valley. He turned his face entirely away from the blackened mining region that
stretched away on the right hand of Shortlands, he turned entirely to the
country and the woods beyond Willey Water. It was true that the panting and
rattling of the coal-mines could always be heard at Shortlands. But from his
earliest childhood, Gerald had paid no heed to this. He had ignored the whole of
the industrial sea which surged in coal-blackened tides against the grounds of
the house. The world was really a wilderness where one hunted and swam and rode.
He rebelled against all authority. Life was a condition of savage freedom.
    Then he had been sent away to school, which was so much death to him. He
refused to go to Oxford, choosing a German university. He had spent a certain
time at Bonn, at Berlin, and at Frankfurt. There, a curiosity had been aroused
in his mind. He wanted to see and to know, in a curious objective fashion, as if
it were an amusement to him. Then he must try war. Then he must travel into the
savage regions that had so attracted him.
    The result was, he found humanity very much alike everywhere, and to a mind
like his, curious and cold, the savage was duller, less exciting than the
European. So he took hold of all kinds of sociological ideas, and ideas of
reform. But they never went more than skin-deep, they were never more than a
mental amusement. Their interest lay chiefly in the reaction against the
positive order, the destructive reaction.
    He discovered at last a real adventure in the coal-mines. His father asked
him to help in the firm. Gerald had been educated in the science of mining, and
it had never interested him. Now, suddenly, with a sort of exulation, he laid
hold of the world.
    There was impressed photographically on his consciousness the great
industry. Suddenly, it was real, he was part of it. Down the valley ran the
colliery railway, linking mine with mine. Down the railway ran the trains, short
trains of heavily laden trucks, long trains of empty