Section 4
In the night, fever, pain, fatigue--it may be the indigestion ofmy supper of bread and cheese--roused me at last out of a hag-ridsleep to face despair. I was a soul lost amidst desolations andshame, dishonored, evilly treated, hopeless. I raged against theGod I denied, and cursed him as I lay.
And it was in the nature of my fever, which was indeed only halffatigue and illness, and the rest the disorder of passionate youth,that Nettie, a strangely distorted Nettie, should come through thebrief dreams that marked the exhaustions of that vigil, to dominatemy misery. I was sensible, with an exaggerated distinctness, ofthe intensity of her physical charm for me, of her every grace andbeauty; she took to herself the whole gamut of desire in me andthe whole gamut of pride. She, bodily, was my lost honor. It wasnot only loss but disgrace to lose her. She stood for life and allthat was denied; she mocked me as a creature of failure and defeat.My spirit raised itself towards her, and then the bruise upon myjaw glowed with a dull heat, and I rolled in the mud again beforemy rivals.
There were times when something near madness took me, and I gnashedmy teeth and dug my nails into my hands and ceased to curse and cryout only by reason of the insufficiency of words. And once towardsdawn I got out of bed, and sat by my looking-glass with my revolverloaded in my hand. I stood up at last and put it carefully in mydrawer and locked it--out of reach of any gusty impulse. Afterthat I slept for a little while.
Such nights were nothing rare and strange in that old order of theworld. Never a city, never a night the whole year round, but amidstthose who slept were those who waked, plumbing the deeps of wrathand misery. Countless thousands there were so ill, so troubled,they agonize near to the very border-line of madness, eachone 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 anklewas too swollen for that to be possible. I sat indoors in theill-lit downstairs kitchen, with my foot bandaged, and mused darklyand read. My dear old mother waited on me, and her brown eyes watchedme and wondered at my black silences, my frowning preoccupations.I had not told her how it was my ankle came to be bruised and myclothes muddy. She had brushed my clothes in the morning before Igot up.
Ah well! Mothers are not treated in that way now. That I supposemust console me. I wonder how far you will be able to picture thatdark, grimy, untidy room, with its bare deal table, its tatteredwall paper, the saucepans and kettle on the narrow, cheap, butby no means economical range, the ashes under the fireplace, therust-spotted steel fender on which my bandaged feet rested; I wonderhow near you can come to seeing the scowling pale-faced hobbledehoyI was, unshaven and collarless, in the Windsor chair, and the littletimid, dirty, devoted old woman who hovered about me withlove peering out from her puckered eyelids. . .
When she went out to buy some vegetables in the middle of themorning she got me a half-penny journal. It was just such a one asthese upon my desk, only that the copy I read was damp from thepress, and these are so dry and brittle, they crack if I touchthem. I have a copy of the actual issue I read that morning; itwas a paper called emphatically the New Paper, but everybody boughtit and everybody called it the "yell." It was full that morning ofstupendous news and still more stupendous headlines, so stupendousthat for a little while I was roused from my egotistical broodingsto wider interests. For it seemed that Germany and England were onthe brink of war.
Of all the monstrous irrational phenomena of the former time, warwas certainly the most strikingly insane. In reality it was probablyfar less mischievous than such quieter evil as, for example, thegeneral acquiescence in the private ownership of land, but its evilconsequences showed so plainly that even in those days of stiflingconfusion one marveled at it. On no conceivable grounds was thereany sense in modern war. Save for the slaughter and mangling of amultitude 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 changehumanity, you assumed yourselves to be a superior tribe in physiqueand discipline, you demonstrated this upon your neighbors, andif successful you took their land and their women and perpetuatedand enlarged your superiority. The new war changed nothing but thecolor of maps, the design of postage stamps, and the relationshipof a few accidentally conspicuous individuals. In one of the lastof these international epileptic fits, for example, the English,with much dysentery and bad poetry, and a few hundred deaths inbattle, conquered the South African Boers at a gross cost of aboutthree thousand pounds per head--they could have bought the wholeof that preposterous imitation of a nation for a tenth of thatsum--and except for a few substitutions of personalities, thisgroup of partially corrupt officials in the place of that, and soforth, the permanent change was altogether insignificant. (Butan excitable young man in Austria committed suicide when at lengththe Transvaal ceased to be a "nation.") Men went through the seatof that war after it was all over, and found humanity unchanged,except for a general impoverishment, and the convenience of anunlimited supply of empty ration tins and barbed wire and cartridgecases--unchanged and resuming with a slight perplexity all its oldhabits and misunderstandings, the nigger still in his slum-likekraal, 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 myadolescence from fourteen to seventeen went to the music of thatmonstrous resonating futility, the cheering, the anxieties, thesongs and the waving of flags, the wrongs of generous Buller andthe glorious heroism of De Wet--who ALWAYS got away; that was thegreat point about the heroic De Wet--and it never occurred to usthat the total population we fought against was less than half thenumber of those who lived cramped ignoble lives within the compassof the Four Towns.
But before and after that stupid conflict of stupidities, a greaterantagonism was coming into being, was slowly and quietly definingitself as a thing inevitable, sinking now a little out of attentiononly to resume more emphatically, now flashing into some acutedefinitive expression and now percolating and pervading some newregion of thought, and that was the antagonism of Germany and GreatBritain.
When I think of that growing proportion of readers who belongentirely to the new order, who are growing up with only the vaguestearly memories of the old world, I find the greatest difficultyin writing down the unintelligible confusions that were matter offact to their fathers.
Here were we British, forty-one millions of people, in a state ofalmost indescribably aimless, economic, and moral muddle that we hadneither the courage, the energy, nor the intelligence to improve,that most of us had hardly the courage to think about, and with ouraffairs hopelessly entangled with the entirely different confusionsof three hundred and fifty million other persons scattered aboutthe globe, and here were the Germans over against us, fifty-sixmillions, in a state of confusion no whit better than our own,and the noisy little creatures who directed papers and wrote booksand gave lectures, and generally in that time of world-dementiapretended to be the national mind, were busy in both countries,with a sort of infernal unanimity, exhorting--and not only exhortingbut successfully persuading--the two peoples to divert such smallcommon store of material, moral and intellectual energy as eitherpossessed, into the purely destructive and wasteful business of war.And--I have to tell you these things even if you do not believethem, because they are vital to my story--there was not a man alivewho could have told you of any real permanent benefit, of anythingwhatever to counterbalance the obvious waste and evil, that wouldresult from a war between England and Germany, whether Englandshattered Germany or was smashed and overwhelmed, or whatever theend might be.
The thing was, in fact, an enormous irrational obsession, it was,in the microcosm of our nation, curiously parallel to the egotisticalwrath and jealousy that swayed my individual microcosm. It measuredthe excess of common emotion over the common intelligence, thelegacy of inordinate passion we have receiv
ed from the brute fromwhich we came. Just as I had become the slave of my own surprise andanger and went hither and thither with a loaded revolver, seekingand intending vague fluctuating crimes, so these two nations wentabout the earth, hot eared and muddle headed, with loaded naviesand armies terribly ready at hand. Only there was not even a Nettieto justify their stupidity. There was nothing but quiet imaginarythwarting on either side.
And the press was the chief instrument that kept these two hugemultitudes of people directed against one another.
The press--those newspapers that are now so strange to us--likethe "Empires," the "Nations," the Trusts, and all the other greatmonstrous shapes of that extraordinary time--was in the natureof an unanticipated accident. It had happened, as weeds happen inabandoned gardens, just as all our world has happened,--becausethere was no clear Will in the world to bring about anything better.Towards the end this "press" was almost entirely under the directionof youngish men of that eager, rather unintelligent type, thatis never able to detect itself aimless, that pursues nothing withincredible pride and zeal, and if you would really understand thismad era the comet brought to an end, you must keep in mind that everyphase in the production of these queer old things was pervaded bya 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 hastilydesigned building in a dirty, paper-littered back street of oldLondon, and a number of shabbily dressed men coming and going inthis with projectile swiftness, and within this factory companiesof printers, tensely active with nimble fingers--they were alwaysspeeding up the printers--ply their type-setting machines, and castand arrange masses of metal in a sort of kitchen inferno, abovewhich, in a beehive of little brightly lit rooms, disheveled mensit and scribble. There is a throbbing of telephones and a clickingof telegraph needles, a rushing of messengers, a running to and froof heated men, clutching proofs and copy. Then begins a clatterroar of machinery catching the infection, going faster and faster,and whizzing and banging,--engineers, who have never had time towash since their birth, flying about with oil-cans, while paperruns off its rolls with a shudder of haste. The proprietor youmust suppose arriving explosively on a swift motor-car, leapingout before the thing is at a standstill, with letters and documentsclutched in his hand, rushing in, resolute to "hustle," gettingwonderfully in everybody's way. At the sight of him even the messengerboys who are waiting, get up and scamper to and fro. Sprinkle yourvision with collisions, curses, incoherencies. You imagine all theparts of this complex lunatic machine working hysterically towarda crescendo of haste and excitement as the night wears on. At lastthe only things that seem to travel slowly in all those tearingvibrating premises are the hands of the clock.
Slowly things draw on toward publication, the consummation of allthose stresses. Then in the small hours, into the now dark anddeserted streets comes a wild whirl of carts and men, the placespurts 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. Theinterest passes outwardly; the men from the little rooms are goinghomeward, the printers disperse yawning, the roaring presses slacken.The paper exists. Distribution follows manufacture, and we followthe bundles.
Our vision becomes a vision of dispersal. You see those bundleshurling into stations, catching trains by a hair's breadth, speedingon their way, breaking up, smaller bundles of them hurled witha fierce accuracy out upon the platforms that rush by, and theneverywhere a division of these smaller bundles into still smallerbundles, into dispersing parcels, into separate papers, and thedawn happens unnoticed amidst a great running and shouting of boys,a shoving through letter slots, openings of windows, spreading outupon book-stalls. For the space of a few hours you must figure thewhole country dotted white with rustling papers--placards everywherevociferating the hurried lie for the day; men and women in trains,men and women eating and reading, men by study-fenders, peoplesitting up in bed, mothers and sons and daughters waiting for fatherto finish--a million scattered people reading--reading headlong--orfeverishly ready to read. It is just as if some vehement jethad sprayed that white foam of papers over the surface of the land. . .
And then you know, wonderfully gone--gone utterly, vanished as foammight vanish upon the sand.
Nonsense! The whole affair a noisy paroxysm of nonsense, unreasonableexcitement, witless mischief, and waste of strength--signifyingnothing. . . .
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 darkunderground kitchen of my mother's, clean roused from my personaltroubles by the yelp of the headlines. She sat, sleeves tucked upfrom her ropy arms, peeling potatoes as I read.
It was like one of a flood of disease germs that have invaded abody, that paper. There I was, one corpuscle in the big amorphousbody of the English community, one of forty-one million suchcorpuscles and, for all my preoccupations, these potent headlines,this paper ferment, caught me and swung me about. And all over thecountry that day, millions read as I read, and came round into linewith me, under the same magnetic spell, came round--how did we sayit?--Ah!--"to face the foe."
The comet had been driven into obscurity overleaf. The columnheaded "Distinguished Scientist says Comet will Strike our Earth.Does it Matter?" went unread. "Germany"--I usually figured thismythical malignant creature as a corseted stiff-mustached Emperorenhanced by heraldic black wings and a large sword--had insultedour flag. That was the message of the New Paper, and the monstertowered over me, threatening fresh outrages, visibly spittingupon my faultless country's colors. Somebody had hoisted a Britishflag on the right bank of some tropical river I had never heard ofbefore, and a drunken German officer under ambiguous instructionshad torn it down. Then one of the convenient abundant nativesof the country, a British subject indisputably, had been shot inthe leg. But the facts were by no means clear. Nothing was clearexcept 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 dreamingof battles and victories by land and sea, of shell fire, andentrenchments, 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.