Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II BITTER-BLACK James Fontaine, or "Jemmy," as he was known to his mother and wife and to nobody else in the world, for he had few friends and no intimates, was a common soldier in that grey army of conformity—the London middle-middle class, the class of the little huckstering commission man, the clerk, and the counter-jumper—the army of the Unskilled. Jemmy had learnt little about life and less from it. They had taught him in the schools of the nation to read a little, to write a little, to cipher a little—his duty towards his God, whom he knew intimately, and towards his neighbour, whom he did not know at all, and turned out the finished article at the age of fourteen or so to be a credit to itself and to its country in a world of Free Competition and Pure Religion. There were also educational frills in respect of one's duty to one's betters. The Finished Article did its best. That is to say, it was flung neck and crop into the tin tacks and 'orneriness of a hardware house in the Borough, whence it emerged, slightly dishevelled as to moral and pocket, some three years afterwards, to be precipitated through a series of experiences of a uniformity calculated to destroy any belief in human nature it might originally have possessed, and Jemmy Fontaine was a man of incredible belief and of as incredible suspicion. It was not that Jemmy was unsteady—the whole bent of his nature and upbringing was "the safe job," but he had an Irishwoman for a mother, and when a man has an Irishwoman for a mother he is apt to develop a jumpiness that defies even the calculation of a London Cockney father. Finally, he had brought up in "commissions." Finn, who to his father was as astonishing as though he had generated an archangel and who kept him in a state thatalternated between shock ...