providers. And it was a much grimmer business, providing for the populace of
work, than for the populace of pleasure. While he was doing his stories, and
`getting on' in the world, Tevershall was going to the wall.
He realized now that the bitch-goddess of Success had two main
appetites: one for flattery, adulation, stroking and tickling such as
writers and artists gave her; but the other a grimmer appetite for meat and
bones. And the meat and bones for the bitch-goddess were provided by the men
who made money in industry.
Yes, there were two great groups of dogs wrangling for the
bitch-goddess: the group of the flatterers, those who offered her amusement,
stories, films, plays: and the other, much less showy, much more savage
breed, those who gave her meat, the real substance of money. The
well-groomed showy dogs of amusement wrangled and snarled among themselves
for the favours of the bitch-goddess. But it was nothing to the silent
fight-to-the-death that went on among the indispensables, the bone-bringers.
But under Mrs Bolton's influence, Clifford was tempted to enter this
other fight, to capture the bitch-goddess by brute means of industrial
production. Somehow, he got his pecker up.
In one way, Mrs Bolton made a man of him, as Connie never did. Connie
kept him apart, and made him sensitive and conscious of himself and his own
states. Mrs Bolton made hint aware only of outside things. Inwardly he began
to go soft as pulp. But outwardly he began to be effective.
He even roused himself to go to the mines once more: and when he was
there, he went down in a tub, and in a tub he was hauled out into the
workings. Things he had learned before the war, and seemed utterly to have
forgotten, now came back to him. He sat there, crippled, in a tub, with the
underground manager showing him the seam with a powerful torch. And he said
little. But his mind began to work.
He began to read again his technical works on the coal-mining industry,
he studied the government reports, and he read with care the latest things
on mining and the chemistry of coal and of shale which were written in
German. Of course the most valuable discoveries were kept secret as far as
possible. But once you started a sort of research in the field of
coal-mining, a study of methods and means, a study of by-products and the
chemical possibilities of coal, it was astounding the ingenuity and the
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