Section 3
That made Parload put down the opera-glass and look at me.
"It's a bad time to change just now," he said after a little pause.
Rawdon had said as much, in a less agreeable tone.
But with Parload I felt always a disposition to the heroic note.
"I'm tired," I said, "of humdrum drudgery for other men. One may
as well starve one's body out of a place as to starve one's soul
in one."
"I don't know about that altogether," began Parload, slowly. . . .
And with that we began one of our interminable conversations, one
of those long, wandering, intensely generalizing, diffusely personal
talks that will be dear to the hearts of intelligent youths until
the world comes to an end. The Change has not abolished that,
anyhow.
It would be an incredible feat of memory for me now to recall all
that meandering haze of words, indeed I recall scarcely any of it,
though its circumstances and atmosphere stand out, a sharp, clear
picture in my mind. I posed after my manner and behaved very foolishly
no doubt, a wounded, smarting egotist, and Parload played his part
of the philosopher preoccupied with the deeps.
We were presently abroad, walking through the warm summer's night
and talking all the more freely for that. But one thing that I
said I can remember. "I wish at times," said I, with a gesture at
the heavens, "that comet of yours or some such thing would indeed
strike this world--and wipe us all away, strikes, wars, tumults,
loves, jealousies, and all the wretchedness of life!"
"Ah!" said Parload, and the thought seemed to hang about him.
"It could only add to the miseries of life," he said irrelevantly,
when presently I was discoursing of other things.
"What would?"
"Collision with a comet. It would only throw things back. It would
only make what was left of life more savage than it is at present."
"But why should ANYTHING be left of life?" said I. . . .
That was our style, you know, and meanwhile we walked together up
the narrow street outside his lodging, up the stepway and the lanes
toward Clayton Crest and the high road.
But my memories carry me back so effectually to those days before
the Change that I forget that now all these places have been altered
beyond recognition, that the narrow street and the stepway and the
view from Clayton Crest, and indeed all the world in which I was
born and bred and made, has vanished clean away, out of space and
out of time, and wellnigh out of the imagination of all those who
are younger by a generation than I. You cannot see, as I can see,
the dark empty way between the mean houses, the dark empty way
lit by a bleary gas-lamp at the corner, you cannot feel the hard
checkered pavement under your boots, you cannot mark the dimly lit
windows here and there, and the shadows upon the ugly and often
patched and crooked blinds of the people cooped within. Nor can you
presently pass the beerhouse with its brighter gas and its queer,
screening windows, nor get a whiff of foul air and foul language
from its door, nor see the crumpled furtive figure--some rascal
child--that slinks past us down the steps.
We crossed the longer street, up which a clumsy steam tram, vomiting
smoke and sparks, made its clangorous way, and adown which one
saw the greasy brilliance of shop fronts and the naphtha flares of
hawkers' barrows dripping fire into the night. A hazy movement of
people swayed along that road, and we heard the voice of an itinerant
preacher from a waste place between the houses. You cannot see these
things as I can see them, nor can you figure--unless you know the
pictures that great artist Hyde has left the world--the effect of
the great hoarding by which we passed, lit below by a gas-lamp and
towering up to a sudden sharp black edge against the pallid sky.
Those hoardings! They were the brightest colored things in all
that vanished world. Upon them, in successive layers of paste and
paper, all the rough enterprises of that time joined in chromatic
discord; pill vendors and preachers, theaters and charities,
marvelous soaps and astonishing pickles, typewriting machines and
sewing machines, mingled in a sort of visualized clamor. And passing
that there was a muddy lane of cinders, a lane without a light,
that used its many puddles to borrow a star or so from the sky. We
splashed along unheeding as we talked.
Then across the allotments, a wilderness of cabbages and evil-looking
sheds, past a gaunt abandoned factory, and so to the high road.
The high road ascended in a curve past a few houses and a beerhouse
or so, and round until all the valley in which four industrial
towns lay crowded and confluent was overlooked.
I will admit that with the twilight there came a spell of weird
magnificence over all that land and brooded on it until dawn. The
horrible meanness of its details was veiled, the hutches that were
homes, the bristling multitudes of chimneys, the ugly patches of
unwilling vegetation amidst the makeshift fences of barrel-stave
and wire. The rusty scars that framed the opposite ridges where
the iron ore was taken and the barren mountains of slag from the
blast furnaces were veiled; the reek and boiling smoke and dust
from foundry, pot-bank, and furnace, transfigured and assimilated
by the night. The dust-laden atmosphere that was gray oppression
through the day became at sundown a mystery of deep translucent
colors, of blues and purples, of somber and vivid reds, of strange
bright clearnesses of green and yellow athwart the darkling sky.
Each upstart furnace, when its monarch sun had gone, crowned itself
with flames, the dark cinder heaps began to glow with quivering
fires, and each pot-bank squatted rebellious in a volcanic coronet of
light. The empire of the day broke into a thousand feudal baronies
of burning coal. The minor streets across the valley picked themselves
out with gas-lamps of faint yellow, that brightened and mingled at
all the principal squares and crossings with the greenish pallor of
incandescent mantles and the high cold glare of the electric arc.
The interlacing railways lifted bright signal-boxes over their
intersections, and signal stars of red and green in rectangular
constellations. The trains became articulated black serpents
breathing fire.
Moreover, high overhead, like a thing put out of reach and near
forgotten, Parload had rediscovered a realm that was ruled by
neither sun nor furnace, the universe of stars.
This was the scene of many a talk we two had held together. And
if in the daytime we went right over the crest and looked westward
there was farmland, there were parks and great mansions, the spire
of a distant cathedral, and sometimes when the weather was near
raining, the crests of remote mountains hung clearly in the sky.
Beyond the range of sight indeed, out beyond, there was Checkshill;
I felt it there always, and in the darkness more than I did by day.
Checkshill, and Nettie!
And to us two youngsters as we walked along the cinder path beside
the rutted road and argued out our perplexities, it seemed that
this ridge gave us compendiously a view of our whole world.
There on the one hand in a crowded darkness, about the ugly factories
and work-places, the workers herded together, ill clothed, ill
nourished, ill taught, badly and expensively served at every occasion
in life, uncertain even of their insufficient livelihood from day
to day, the chapels and churches and public-houses swelling up amidst
their wretched homes like saprophytes amidst a general corruption,
and on the other, in space, freedom, and dignity, scarce heeding
the few cottages, as overcrowded as they were picturesque, in which
the laborers festered, lived the landlords and masters who owned
pot-banks and forge and farm and mine. Far away, distant, beautiful,
irrelevant, from out of a little cluster of secondhand bookshops,
ecclesiastical residences, and the inns and incidentals of a decaying
market town, the cathedral of Lowchester pointed a beautiful,
unemphatic spire to vague incredible skies. So it seemed to us that
the whole world was planned in those youthful first impressions.
We saw everything simple, as young men will. We had our angry, confident
solutions, and whosoever would criticize them was a friend of the
robbers. It was a clear case of robbery, we held, visibly so; there
in those great houses lurked the Landlord and the Capitalist, with
his scoundrel the Lawyer, with his cheat the Priest, and we others
were all the victims of their deliberate villainies. No doubt they
winked and chuckled over their rare wines, amidst their dazzling,
wickedly dressed women, and plotted further grinding for the faces
of the poor. And amidst all the squalor on the other hand, amidst
brutalities, ignorance, and drunkenness, suffered multitudinously
their blameless victim, the Working Man. And we, almost at the
first glance, had found all this out, it had merely to be asserted
now with sufficient rhetoric and vehemence to change the face
of the whole world. The Working Man would arise--in the form of a
Labor Party, and with young men like Parload and myself to represent
him--and come to his own, and then------?
Then the robbers would get it hot, and everything would be extremely
satisfactory.
Unless my memory plays me strange tricks that does no injustice
to the creed of thought and action that Parload and I held as the
final result of human wisdom. We believed it with heat, and rejected
with heat the most obvious qualification of its harshness. At
times in our great talks we were full of heady hopes for the near
triumph of our doctrine, more often our mood was hot resentment
at the wickedness and stupidity that delayed so plain and simple a
reconstruction of the order of the world. Then we grew malignant,
and thought of barricades and significant violence. I was very
bitter, I know, upon this night of which I am now particularly
telling, and the only face upon the hydra of Capitalism and Monopoly
that I could see at all clearly, smiled exactly as old Rawdon had
smiled when he refused to give me more than a paltry twenty shillings
a week.
I wanted intensely to salve my self-respect by some revenge upon
him, and I felt that if that could be done by slaying the hydra, I
might drag its carcass to the feet of Nettie, and settle my other
trouble as well. "What do you think of me NOW, Nettie?"
That at any rate comes near enough to the quality of my thinking,
then, for you to imagine how I gesticulated and spouted to Parload
that night. You figure us as little black figures, unprepossessing in
the outline, set in the midst of that desolating night of flaming
industrialism, and my little voice with a rhetorical twang
protesting, denouncing. . . .
You will consider those notions of my youth poor silly violent
stuff; particularly if you are of the younger generation born since
the Change you will be of that opinion. Nowadays the whole world
thinks clearly, thinks with deliberation, pellucid certainties, you
find it impossible to imagine how any other thinking could have
been possible. Let me tell you then how you can bring yourself
to something like the condition of our former state. In the first
place you must get yourself out of health by unwise drinking and
eating, and out of condition by neglecting your exercise, then you
must contrive to be worried very much and made very anxious and
uncomfortable, and then you must work very hard for four or five
days and for long hours every day at something too petty to be
interesting, too complex to be mechanical, and without any personal
significance to you whatever. This done, get straightway into
a room that is not ventilated at all, and that is already full of
foul air, and there set yourself to think out some very complicated
problem. In a very little while you will find yourself in a state
of intellectual muddle, annoyed, impatient, snatching at the obvious
presently in choosing and rejecting conclusions haphazard. Try
to play chess under such conditions and you will play stupidly and
lose your temper. Try to do anything that taxes the brain or temper
and you will fail.
Now, the whole world before the Change was as sick and feverish as
that, it was worried and overworked and perplexed by problems that
would not get stated simply, that changed and evaded solution, it
was in an atmosphere that had corrupted and thickened past breathing;
there was no thorough cool thinking in the world at all. There
was nothing in the mind of the world anywhere but half-truths,
hasty assumptions, hallucinations, and emotions. Nothing. . . .
I know it seems incredible, that already some of the younger men
are beginning to doubt the greatness of the Change our world has
undergone, but read--read the newspapers of that time. Every age
becomes mitigated and a little ennobled in our minds as it recedes
into the past. It is the part of those who like myself have stories
of that time to tell, to supply, by a scrupulous spiritual realism,
some antidote to that glamour.
