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 mayas well starve one's body out of a place as to starve one's soulin one."
"I don't know about that altogether," began Parload, slowly. . . .
And with that we began one of our interminable conversations, oneof those long, wandering, intensely generalizing, diffusely personaltalks that will be dear to the hearts of intelligent youths untilthe 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 allthat meandering haze of words, indeed I recall scarcely any of it,though its circumstances and atmosphere stand out, a sharp, clearpicture in my mind. I posed after my manner and behaved very foolishlyno doubt, a wounded, smarting egotist, and Parload played his partof the philosopher preoccupied with the deeps.
We were presently abroad, walking through the warm summer's nightand talking all the more freely for that. But one thing that Isaid I can remember. "I wish at times," said I, with a gesture atthe heavens, "that comet of yours or some such thing would indeedstrike 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 wouldonly 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 upthe narrow street outside his lodging, up the stepway and the lanestoward Clayton Crest and the high road.
But my memories carry me back so effectually to those days beforethe Change that I forget that now all these places have been alteredbeyond recognition, that the narrow street and the stepway and theview from Clayton Crest, and indeed all the world in which I wasborn and bred and made, has vanished clean away, out of space andout of time, and wellnigh out of the imagination of all those whoare younger by a generation than I. You cannot see, as I can see,the dark empty way between the mean houses, the dark empty waylit by a bleary gas-lamp at the corner, you cannot feel the hardcheckered pavement under your boots, you cannot mark the dimly litwindows here and there, and the shadows upon the ugly and oftenpatched and crooked blinds of the people cooped within. Nor can youpresently pass the beerhouse with its brighter gas and its queer,screening windows, nor get a whiff of foul air and foul languagefrom its door, nor see the crumpled furtive figure--some rascalchild--that slinks past us down the steps.
We crossed the longer street, up which a clumsy steam tram, vomitingsmoke and sparks, made its clangorous way, and adown which onesaw the greasy brilliance of shop fronts and the naphtha flares ofhawkers' barrows dripping fire into the night. A hazy movement ofpeople swayed along that road, and we heard the voice of an itinerantpreacher from a waste place between the houses. You cannot see thesethings as I can see them, nor can you figure--unless you know thepictures that great artist Hyde has left the world--the effect ofthe great hoarding by which we passed, lit below by a gas-lamp andtowering up to a sudden sharp black edge against the pallid sky.
Those hoardings! They were the brightest colored things in allthat vanished world. Upon them, in successive layers of paste andpaper, all the rough enterprises of that time joined in chromaticdiscord; pill vendors and preachers, theaters and charities,marvelous soaps and astonishing pickles, typewriting machines andsewing machines, mingled in a sort of visualized clamor. And passingthat 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. Wesplashed along unheeding as we talked.
Then across the allotments, a wilderness of cabbages and evil-lookingsheds, past a gaunt abandoned factory, and so to the high road.The high road ascended in a curve past a few houses and a beerhouseor so, and round until all the valley in which four industrialtowns lay crowded and confluent was overlooked.
I will admit that with the twilight there came a spell of weirdmagnificence over all that land and brooded on it until dawn. Thehorrible meanness of its details was veiled, the hutches that werehomes, the bristling multitudes of chimneys, the ugly patches ofunwilling vegetation amidst the makeshift fences of barrel-staveand wire. The rusty scars that framed the opposite ridges wherethe iron ore was taken and the barren mountains of slag from theblast furnaces were veiled; the reek and boiling smoke and dustfrom foundry, pot-bank, and furnace, transfigured and assimilatedby the night. The dust-laden atmosphere that was gray oppressionthrough the day became at sundown a mystery of deep translucentcolors, of blues and purples, of somber and vivid reds, of strangebright clearnesses of green and yellow athwart the darkling sky.Each upstart furnace, when its monarch sun had gone, crowned itselfwith flames, the dark cinder heaps began to glow with quiveringfires, and each pot-bank squatted rebellious in a volcanic coronet oflight. The empire of the day broke into a thousand feudal baroniesof burning coal. The minor streets across the valley picked themselvesout with gas-lamps of faint yellow, that brightened and mingled atall the principal squares and crossings with the greenish pallor ofincandescent mantles and the high cold glare of the electric arc.The interlacing railways lifted bright signal-boxes over theirintersections, and signal stars of red and green in rectangularconstellations. The trains became articulated black serpentsbreathing fire.
Moreover, high overhead, like a thing put out of reach and nearforgotten, Parload had rediscovered a realm that was ruled byneither sun nor furnace, the universe of stars.
This was the scene of many a talk we two had held together. Andif in the daytime we went right over the crest and looked westwardthere was farmland, there were parks and great mansions, the spireof a distant cathedral, and sometimes when the weather was nearraining, 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 besidethe rutted road and argued out our perplexities, it seemed thatthis ridge gave us compendiously a view of our whole world.
There on the one hand in a crowded darkness, about the ugly factoriesand work-places, the workers herded together, ill clothed, illnourished, ill taught, badly and expensively served at every occasionin life, uncertain even of their insufficient livelihood from dayto day, the chapels and churches and public-houses swelling up amidsttheir wretched homes like saprophytes amidst a general corruption,and on the other, in space, freedom, and dignity, scarce heedingthe few cottages, as overcrowded as they were picturesque, in whichthe laborers festered, lived the landlords and masters who ownedpot-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 decayingmarket town, the cathedral of Lowchester pointed a beautiful,unemphatic spire to vague incredible skies. So it seemed to us thatthe whole world was planned in those youthful first impressions.
We saw everything simple, as young men will. We had our angry, confidentsolutions, and whosoever would criticize them was a friend of therobbers. It was a clear case of robbery, we held, visibly so; therein those great houses lurked the Landlord and the Capitalist, withhis scoundrel the Lawyer, with his cheat the Priest, and we otherswere all the victims of their deliberate villainies. No doubt theywinked and chuckled over their rare wines, amidst their dazzling,wickedly dressed women, and plotted further grinding for the facesof the poor. And amidst
all the squalor on the other hand, amidstbrutalities, ignorance, and drunkenness, suffered multitudinouslytheir blameless victim, the Working Man. And we, almost at thefirst glance, had found all this out, it had merely to be assertednow with sufficient rhetoric and vehemence to change the faceof the whole world. The Working Man would arise--in the form of aLabor Party, and with young men like Parload and myself to representhim--and come to his own, and then------?
Then the robbers would get it hot, and everything would be extremelysatisfactory.
Unless my memory plays me strange tricks that does no injusticeto the creed of thought and action that Parload and I held as thefinal result of human wisdom. We believed it with heat, and rejectedwith heat the most obvious qualification of its harshness. Attimes in our great talks we were full of heady hopes for the neartriumph of our doctrine, more often our mood was hot resentmentat the wickedness and stupidity that delayed so plain and simple areconstruction of the order of the world. Then we grew malignant,and thought of barricades and significant violence. I was verybitter, I know, upon this night of which I am now particularlytelling, and the only face upon the hydra of Capitalism and Monopolythat I could see at all clearly, smiled exactly as old Rawdon hadsmiled when he refused to give me more than a paltry twenty shillingsa week.
I wanted intensely to salve my self-respect by some revenge uponhim, and I felt that if that could be done by slaying the hydra, Imight drag its carcass to the feet of Nettie, and settle my othertrouble 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 Parloadthat night. You figure us as little black figures, unprepossessing inthe outline, set in the midst of that desolating night of flamingindustrialism, and my little voice with a rhetorical twangprotesting, denouncing. . . .
You will consider those notions of my youth poor silly violentstuff; particularly if you are of the younger generation born sincethe Change you will be of that opinion. Nowadays the whole worldthinks clearly, thinks with deliberation, pellucid certainties, youfind it impossible to imagine how any other thinking could havebeen possible. Let me tell you then how you can bring yourselfto something like the condition of our former state. In the firstplace you must get yourself out of health by unwise drinking andeating, and out of condition by neglecting your exercise, then youmust contrive to be worried very much and made very anxious anduncomfortable, and then you must work very hard for four or fivedays and for long hours every day at something too petty to beinteresting, too complex to be mechanical, and without any personalsignificance to you whatever. This done, get straightway intoa room that is not ventilated at all, and that is already full offoul air, and there set yourself to think out some very complicatedproblem. In a very little while you will find yourself in a stateof intellectual muddle, annoyed, impatient, snatching at the obviouspresently in choosing and rejecting conclusions haphazard. Tryto play chess under such conditions and you will play stupidly andlose your temper. Try to do anything that taxes the brain or temperand you will fail.
Now, the whole world before the Change was as sick and feverish asthat, it was worried and overworked and perplexed by problems thatwould not get stated simply, that changed and evaded solution, itwas in an atmosphere that had corrupted and thickened past breathing;there was no thorough cool thinking in the world at all. Therewas 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 menare beginning to doubt the greatness of the Change our world hasundergone, but read--read the newspapers of that time. Every agebecomes mitigated and a little ennobled in our minds as it recedesinto the past. It is the part of those who like myself have storiesof that time to tell, to supply, by a scrupulous spiritual realism,some antidote to that glamour.