The Telegraph Poles
My friend and I were walking in one of those wastes of pine-wood
which make inland seas of solitude in every part of Western Europe;
which have the true terror of a desert, since they are uniform,
and so one may lose one's way in them. Stiff, straight, and similar,
stood up all around us the pines of the wood, like the pikes of a
silent mutiny. There is a truth in talking of the variety of Nature;
but I think that Nature often shows her chief strangeness in
her sameness. There is a weird rhythm in this very repetition;
it is as if the earth were resolved to repeat a single shape until
the shape shall turn terrible.
Have you ever tried the experiment of saying some plain word,
such as "dog," thirty times? By the thirtieth time it has
become a word like "snark" or "pobble." It does not become tame,
it becomes wild, by repetition. In the end a dog walks about
as startling and undecipherable as Leviathan or Croquemitaine.
It may be that this explains the repetitions in Nature, it may be
for this reason that there are so many million leaves and pebbles.
Perhaps they are not repeated so that they may grow familiar.
Perhaps they are repeated only in the hope that they may at last
grow unfamiliar. Perhaps a man is not startled at the first cat he sees,
but jumps into the air with surprise at the seventy-ninth cat.
Perhaps he has to pass through thousands of pine trees before he finds
the one that is really a pine tree. However this may be, there is
something singularly thrilling, even something urgent and intolerant,
about the endless forest repetitions; there is the hint of something
like madness in that musical monotony of the pines.
I said something like this to my friend; and he answered with
sardonic truth, "Ah, you wait till we come to a telegraph post."
My friend was right, as he occasionally is in our discussions,
especially upon points of fact. We had crossed the pine forest
by one of its paths which happened to follow the wires of the
provincial telegraphy; and though the poles occurred at long intervals
they made a difference when they came. The instant we came to the
straight pole we could see that the pines were not really straight.
It was like a hundred straight lines drawn with schoolboy pencils all
brought to judgment suddenly by one straight line drawn with a ruler.
All the amateur lines seemed to reel to right and left. A moment
before I could have sworn they stood as straight as lances; now I could
see them curve and waver everywhere, like scimitars and yataghans.
Compared with the telegraph post the pines were crooked--and alive.
That lonely vertical rod at once deformed and enfranchised the forest.
It tangled it all together and yet made it free, like any grotesque
undergrowth of oak or holly.
"Yes," said my gloomy friend, answering my thoughts. "You don't know
what a wicked shameful thing straightness is if you think these trees
are straight. You never will know till your precious intellectual
civilization builds a forty-mile forest of telegraph poles."
We had started walking from our temporary home later in the day
than we intended; and the long afternoon was already lengthening
itself out into a yellow evening when we came out of the forest
on to the hills above a strange town or village, of which the lights
had already begun to glitter in the darkening valley. The change
had already happened which is the test and definition of evening.
I mean that while the sky seemed still as bright, the earth was growing
blacker against it, especially at the edges, the hills and the pine-tops.
This brought out yet more clearly the owlish secrecy of pine-woods;
and my friend cast a regretful glance at them as he came out under
the sky. Then he turned to the view in front; and, as it happened,
one of the telegraph posts stood up in front of him in the last sunlight.
It was no longer crossed and softened by the more delicate lines
of pine wood; it stood up ugly, arbitrary, and angular as any crude
figure in geometry. My friend stopped, pointing his stick at it,
and all his anarchic philosophy rushed to his lips.
"Demon," he said to me briefly, "behold your work. That palace of
proud trees behind us is what the world was before you civilized men,
Christians or democrats or the rest, came to make it dull with your dreary
rules of morals and equality. In the silent fight of that forest,
tree fights speechless against tree, branch against branch.
And the upshot of that dumb battle is inequality--and beauty.
Now lift up your eyes and look at equality and ugliness.
See how regularly the white buttons are arranged on that black stick,
and defend your dogmas if you dare."
"Is that telegraph post so much a symbol of democracy?" I asked.
"I fancy that while three men have made the telegraph to get dividends,
about a thousand men have preserved the forest to cut wood.
But if the telegraph pole is hideous (as I admit) it is not due to
doctrine but rather to commercial anarchy. If any one had a doctrine
about a telegraph pole it might be carved in ivory and decked with gold.
Modern things are ugly, because modern men are careless,
not because they are careful."
"No," answered my friend with his eye on the end of a splendid
and sprawling sunset, "there is something intrinsically deadening
about the very idea of a doctrine. A straight line is always ugly.
Beauty is always crooked. These rigid posts at regular intervals
are ugly because they are carrying across the world the real
message of democracy."
"At this moment," I answered, "they are probably carrying across the world
the message, 'Buy Bulgarian Rails.' They are probably the prompt
communication between some two of the wealthiest and wickedest of His
children with whom God has ever had patience. No; these telegraph
poles are ugly and detestable, they are inhuman and indecent.
But their baseness lies in their privacy, not in their publicity.
That black stick with white buttons is not the creation of
the soul of a multitude. It is the mad creation of the souls
of two millionaires."
"At least you have to explain," answered my friend gravely,
"how it is that the hard democratic doctrine and the hard telegraphic
outline have appeared together; you have... But bless my soul,
we must be getting home. I had no idea it was so late.
Let me see, I think this is our way through the wood. Come, let us
both curse the telegraph post for entirely different reasons and get
home before it is dark."
We did not get home before it was dark. For one reason or another
we had underestimated the swiftness of twilight and the suddenness
of night, especially in the threading of thick woods. When my
friend, after the first five minutes' march, had fallen over
a log, and I, ten minutes after, had stuck nearly to the knees
in mire, we began to have some suspicion of our direction.
At last my friend said, in a low, husky voice:
"I'm afraid we're on the wrong path. It's pitch dark."
"I thought we went the right way," I said, tentatively.
"Well," he said; and then, after a long pause, "I can't see any
telegraph poles. I've been looking for them."
"So have I," I said. "They're so straight."
We groped away for about two hours of darkness in the thick of
the fringe of trees which seemed to dance round us in derision.
Here and there, however, it was possible to trace the outline
of something just too erect and rigid to be a pine tree.
By these we finally felt our way home, arriving in a cold green
twilight before dawn.
