Section 4
In the night, fever, pain, fatigue--it may be the indigestion of
my supper of bread and cheese--roused me at last out of a hag-rid
sleep to face despair. I was a soul lost amidst desolations and
shame, dishonored, evilly treated, hopeless. I raged against the
God I denied, and cursed him as I lay.
And it was in the nature of my fever, which was indeed only half
fatigue and illness, and the rest the disorder of passionate youth,
that Nettie, a strangely distorted Nettie, should come through the
brief dreams that marked the exhaustions of that vigil, to dominate
my misery. I was sensible, with an exaggerated distinctness, of
the intensity of her physical charm for me, of her every grace and
beauty; she took to herself the whole gamut of desire in me and
the whole gamut of pride. She, bodily, was my lost honor. It was
not only loss but disgrace to lose her. She stood for life and all
that was denied; she mocked me as a creature of failure and defeat.
My spirit raised itself towards her, and then the bruise upon my
jaw glowed with a dull heat, and I rolled in the mud again before
my rivals.
There were times when something near madness took me, and I gnashed
my teeth and dug my nails into my hands and ceased to curse and cry
out only by reason of the insufficiency of words. And once towards
dawn I got out of bed, and sat by my looking-glass with my revolver
loaded in my hand. I stood up at last and put it carefully in my
drawer and locked it--out of reach of any gusty impulse. After
that I slept for a little while.
Such nights were nothing rare and strange in that old order of the
world. Never a city, never a night the whole year round, but amidst
those who slept were those who waked, plumbing the deeps of wrath
and misery. Countless thousands there were so ill, so troubled,
they agonize near to the very border-line of madness, each
one the center of a universe darkened and lost. . .
The next day I spent in gloomy lethargy.
I had intended to go to Checkshill that day, but my bruised ankle
was too swollen for that to be possible. I sat indoors in the
ill-lit downstairs kitchen, with my foot bandaged, and mused darkly
and read. My dear old mother waited on me, and her brown eyes watched
me and wondered at my black silences, my frowning preoccupations.
I had not told her how it was my ankle came to be bruised and my
clothes muddy. She had brushed my clothes in the morning before I
got up.
Ah well! Mothers are not treated in that way now. That I suppose
must console me. I wonder how far you will be able to picture that
dark, grimy, untidy room, with its bare deal table, its tattered
wall paper, the saucepans and kettle on the narrow, cheap, but
by no means economical range, the ashes under the fireplace, the
rust-spotted steel fender on which my bandaged feet rested; I wonder
how near you can come to seeing the scowling pale-faced hobbledehoy
I was, unshaven and collarless, in the Windsor chair, and the little
timid, dirty, devoted old woman who hovered about me with
love peering out from her puckered eyelids. . .
When she went out to buy some vegetables in the middle of the
morning she got me a half-penny journal. It was just such a one as
these upon my desk, only that the copy I read was damp from the
press, and these are so dry and brittle, they crack if I touch
them. I have a copy of the actual issue I read that morning; it
was a paper called emphatically the New Paper, but everybody bought
it and everybody called it the "yell." It was full that morning of
stupendous news and still more stupendous headlines, so stupendous
that for a little while I was roused from my egotistical broodings
to wider interests. For it seemed that Germany and England were on
the brink of war.
Of all the monstrous irrational phenomena of the former time, war
was certainly the most strikingly insane. In reality it was probably
far less mischievous than such quieter evil as, for example, the
general acquiescence in the private ownership of land, but its evil
consequences showed so plainly that even in those days of stifling
confusion one marveled at it. On no conceivable grounds was there
any sense in modern war. Save for the slaughter and mangling of a
multitude of people, the destruction of vast quantities of material,
and the waste of innumerable units of energy, it effected nothing.
The old war of savage and barbaric nations did at least change
humanity, you assumed yourselves to be a superior tribe in physique
and discipline, you demonstrated this upon your neighbors, and
if successful you took their land and their women and perpetuated
and enlarged your superiority. The new war changed nothing but the
color of maps, the design of postage stamps, and the relationship
of a few accidentally conspicuous individuals. In one of the last
of these international epileptic fits, for example, the English,
with much dysentery and bad poetry, and a few hundred deaths in
battle, conquered the South African Boers at a gross cost of about
three thousand pounds per head --they could have bought the whole
of that preposterous imitation of a nation for a tenth of that
sum--and except for a few substitutions of personalities, this
group of partially corrupt officials in the place of that, and so
forth, the permanent change was altogether insignificant. (But
an excitable young man in Austria committed suicide when at length
the Transvaal ceased to be a "nation.") Men went through the seat
of that war after it was all over, and found humanity unchanged,
except for a general impoverishment, and the convenience of an
unlimited supply of empty ration tins and barbed wire and cartridge
cases--unchanged and resuming with a slight perplexity all its old
habits and misunderstandings, the nigger still in his slum-like
kraal, the white in his ugly ill-managed shanty. . .
But we in England saw all these things, or did not see them,
through the mirage of the New Paper, in a light of mania. All my
adolescence from fourteen to seventeen went to the music of that
monstrous resonating futility, the cheering, the anxieties, the
songs and the waving of flags, the wrongs of generous Buller and
the glorious heroism of De Wet--who ALWAYS got away; that was the
great point about the heroic De Wet--and it never occurred to us
that the total population we fought against was less than half the
number of those who lived cramped ignoble lives within the compass
of the Four Towns.
But before and after that stupid conflict of stupidities, a greater
antagonism was coming into being, was slowly and quietly defining
itself as a thing inevitable, sinking now a little out of attention
only to resume more emphatically, now flashing into some acute
definitive expression and now percolating and pervading some new
region of thought, and that was the antagonism of Germany and Great
Britain.
When I think of that growing proportion of readers who belong
entirely to the new order, who are growing up with only the vaguest
early memories of the old world, I find the greatest difficulty
in writing down the unintelligible confusions that were matter of
fact to their fathers.
Here were we British, forty-one millions of people, in a state of
almost indescribably aimless, economic, and moral muddle that we had
neither the courage, the energy, nor the intelligence to improve,
that most of us had hardly the courage to think about, and with our
affairs hopelessly entangled with the entirely different confusions
of three hundred and fifty million other persons scattered about
the globe, and here were the Germans over against us, fifty-six
millions, in a state of confusion no whit better than our own,
and the noisy little creatures who directed papers and wrote books
and gave lectures, and generally in that time of world-dementia
pretended to be the national mind, were busy in both countries,
with a sort of infernal unanimity, exhorting--and not only exhorting
but successfully persuading--the two peoples to divert such small
common store of material, moral and intellectual energy as either
possessed, into the purely destructive and wasteful business of war.
And--I have to tell you these things even if you do not believe
them, because they are vital to my story--there was not a man alive
who could have told you of any real permanent benefit, of anything
whatever to counterbalance the obvious waste and evil, that would
result from a war between England and Germany, whether England
shattered Germany or was smashed and overwhelmed, or whatever the
end might be.
The thing was, in fact, an enormous irrational obsession, it was,
in the microcosm of our nation, curiously parallel to the egotistical
wrath and jealousy that swayed my individual microcosm. It measured
the excess of common emotion over the common intelligence, the
legacy of inordinate passion we have received from the brute from
which we came. Just as I had become the slave of my own surprise and
anger and went hither and thither with a loaded revolver, seeking
and intending vague fluctuating crimes, so these two nations went
about the earth, hot eared and muddle headed, with loaded navies
and armies terribly ready at hand. Only there was not even a Nettie
to justify their stupidity. There was nothing but quiet imaginary
thwarting on either side.
And the press was the chief instrument that kept these two huge
multitudes of people directed against one another.
The press--those newspapers that are now so strange to us--like
the "Empires," the "Nations," the Trusts, and all the other great
monstrous shapes of that extraordinary time--was in the nature
of an unanticipated accident. It had happened, as weeds happen in
abandoned gardens, just as all our world has happened,--because
there was no clear Will in the world to bring about anything better.
Towards the end this "press" was almost entirely under the direction
of youngish men of that eager, rather unintelligent type, that
is never able to detect itself aimless, that pursues nothing with
incredible pride and zeal, and if you would really understand this
mad era the comet brought to an end, you must keep in mind that every
phase in the production of these queer old things was pervaded by
a strong aimless energy and happened in a concentrated rush.
Let me describe to you, very briefly, a newspaper day.
Figure first, then, a hastily erected and still more hastily
designed building in a dirty, paper-littered back street of old
London, and a number of shabbily dressed men coming and going in
this with projectile swiftness, and within this factory companies
of printers, tensely active with nimble fingers--they were always
speeding up the printers--ply their type-setting machines, and cast
and arrange masses of metal in a sort of kitchen inferno, above
which, in a beehive of little brightly lit rooms, disheveled men
sit and scribble. There is a throbbing of telephones and a clicking
of telegraph needles, a rushing of messengers, a running to and fro
of heated men, clutching proofs and copy. Then begins a clatter
roar of machinery catching the infection, going faster and faster,
and whizzing and banging,--engineers, who have never had time to
wash since their birth, flying about with oil-cans, while paper
runs off its rolls with a shudder of haste. The proprietor you
must suppose arriving explosively on a swift motor-car, leaping
out before the thing is at a standstill, with letters and documents
clutched in his hand, rushing in, resolute to "hustle," getting
wonderfully in everybody's way. At the sight of him even the messenger
boys who are waiting, get up and scamper to and fro. Sprinkle your
vision with collisions, curses, incoherencies. You imagine all the
parts of this complex lunatic machine working hysterically toward
a crescendo of haste and excitement as the night wears on. At last
the only things that seem to travel slowly in all those tearing
vibrating premises are the hands of the clock.
Slowly things draw on toward publication, the consummation of all
those stresses. Then in the small hours, into the now dark and
deserted streets comes a wild whirl of carts and men, the place
spurts paper at every door, bales, heaps, torrents of papers,
that are snatched and flung about in what looks like a free fight,
and off with a rush and clatter east, west, north, and south. The
interest passes outwardly; the men from the little rooms are going
homeward, the printers disperse yawning, the roaring presses slacken.
The paper exists. Distribution follows manufacture, and we follow
the bundles.
Our vision becomes a vision of dispersal. You see those bundles
hurling into stations, catching trains by a hair's breadth, speeding
on their way, breaking up, smaller bundles of them hurled with
a fierce accuracy out upon the platforms that rush by, and then
everywhere a division of these smaller bundles into still smaller
bundles, into dispersing parcels, into separate papers, and the
dawn happens unnoticed amidst a great running and shouting of boys,
a shoving through letter slots, openings of windows, spreading out
upon book-stalls. For the space of a few hours you must figure the
whole country dotted white with rustling papers--placards everywhere
vociferating the hurried lie for the day; men and women in trains,
men and women eating and reading, men by study-fenders, people
sitting up in bed, mothers and sons and daughters waiting for father
to finish--a million scattered people reading--reading headlong
--or feverishly ready to read. It is just as if some vehement jet
had sprayed that white foam of papers over the surface of the land. . .
And then you know, wonderfully gone--gone utterly, vanished as foam
might vanish upon the sand.
Nonsense! The whole affair a noisy paroxysm of nonsense, unreasonable
excitement, witless mischief, and waste of strength--signifying
nothing. . . .
And one of those white parcels was the paper I held in my hands,
as I sat with a bandaged foot on the steel fender in that dark
underground kitchen of my mother's, clean roused from my personal
troubles by the yelp of the headlines. She sat, sleeves tucked up
from her ropy arms, peeling potatoes as I read.
It was like one of a flood of disease germs that have invaded a
body, that paper. There I was, one corpuscle in the big amorphous
body of the English community, one of forty-one million such
corpuscles and, for all my preoccupations, these potent headlines,
this paper ferment, caught me and swung me about. And all over the
country that day, millions read as I read, and came round into line
with me, under the same magnetic spell, came round--how did we say
it?--Ah!--"to face the foe."
The comet had been driven into obscurity overleaf. The column
headed "Distinguished Scientist says Comet will Strike our Earth.
Does it Matter?" went unread. "Germany"--I usually figured this
mythical malignant creature as a corseted stiff-mustached Emperor
enhanced by heraldic black wings and a large sword--had insulted
our flag. That was the message of the New Paper, and the monster
towered over me, threatening fresh outrages, visibly spitting
upon my faultless country's colors. Somebody had hoisted a British
flag on the right bank of some tropical river I had never heard of
before, and a drunken German officer under ambiguous instructions
had torn it down. Then one of the convenient abundant natives
of the country, a British subject indisputably, had been shot in
the leg. But the facts were by no means clear. Nothing was clear
except that we were not going to stand any nonsense from Germany.
Whatever had or had not happened we meant to have an apology for,
and apparently they did not mean apologizing.
"HAS WAR COME AT LAST?"
That was the headline. One's heart leapt to assent. . . .
There were hours that day when I clean forgot Nettie, in dreaming
of battles and victories by land and sea, of shell fire, and
entrenchments, and the heaped slaughter of many thousands of men.
But the next morning I started for Checkshill, started, I remember,
in a curiously hopeful state of mind, oblivious of comets, strikes,
and wars.
