Cities and towns -- Growth -- Fiction; Wales -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
But a generation seemed to have arisen, very different in some ways, yet
exactly the same in others. They were different in that they refused to
be exploited any longer according to the old familiar formulas, yet the
same in that they were as subject as their fathers had been, and as
their sons and grandsons will be, to the man who could devise a new one.
All manner of circumstances contributed to their unuttered invitation
(it was that in effect, and the only thing they did not utter) that
somebody should bring to their exploitation the spice of variety. There
were smoulderings everywhere--smoulderings at Durham and West Ham, at
Ayr and Lanark and Swansea, at Sheffield and Manchester and Liverpool
and Leeds and Hull. Over his glasses and under his glasses Edward Garden
noted them, and inferred that the sum of it all was that folk intended
to have a better time than they had been having. They were quite
unmistakably resolved to have a much better time. Their grandfathers'
idea of a Wakes Week, for example, might have been staying at home and
timing the pigeons into the cote; but they meant to improve on that.
They intended to doff their clogs and to put on their thinnest shoes, to
draw extravagant sums from the Club, to take railway-tickets, and not to
rest from their arduous relaxation as long as a penny remained
unspent.... Manganese? The moment they showed signs of coming his way,
Edward Garden was after richer returns than manganese would yield. He
granted that without manganese there would have been no Railhead coming
up out of the east, but what he had his eye on was the new generation's
deadly resolve to be amused, the crammed coffers of its Holiday Clubs,
the beginnings of those tens and scores and hundreds of thousands of
pounds that to-day a single town will get rid of in a single fortnight
by the sea.
But _only_ if it came his way. He was no Terry. It was his business to
take things as they were, not to try to make them something they were
not. He had no theories, no criticisms, no impulses, no hesitations. He
asked for nothing but uncoloured data. Therefore, and to that extent,
Llanyglo's future was not entirely in his hands. It was still free, and
always, always, save for a little rising of new stone here and there,
just the same to look at--watched over by the Light on its noble Trwyn,
guarded by the majestic mountain behind, and presenting to its diurnal
tides the same shore that Copley Fielding drew.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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