Κυνηδόν
I
The Angel Æthereal, on his official visit to the Earth in 1947, paused
between the Bank and the Stock Exchange to smoke a cigarette and
scrutinise the passers-by.
“How they swarm,” he said, “and with what seeming energy--in such an
atmosphere! Of what can they be made?”
“Of money, sir,” replied his dragoman; “in the past, the present, or
the future. Stocks are booming. The barometer of joy stands very high.
Nothing like it has been known for thirty years; not, indeed, since the
days of the Great Skirmish.”
“There is, then, a connection between joy and money?” remarked the
Angel, letting smoke dribble through his chiselled nostrils.
“Such is the common belief; though to prove it might take time. I will,
however, endeavour to do this if you desire it, sir.”
“I certainly do,” said the Angel; “for a less joyous-looking crowd I
have seldom seen. Between every pair of brows there is a furrow, and no
one whistles.”
“You do not understand,” returned his dragoman; “nor indeed is it
surprising, for it is not so much the money as the thought that some
day you need no longer make it which causes joy.”
“If that day is coming to all,” asked the Angel, “why do they not look
joyful?”
“It is not so simple as that, sir. To the majority of these persons
that day will never come, and many of them know it--these are called
clerks; to some amongst the others, even, it will not come--these will
be called bankrupts; to the rest it will come, and they will live at
Wimblehurst and other islands of the blessed, when they have become so
accustomed to making money that to cease making it will be equivalent
to boredom, if not torture, or when they are so old that they can but
spend it in trying to modify the disabilities of age.”
“What price joy, then?” said the Angel, raising his eyebrows. “For
that, I fancy, is the expression you use?”
“I perceive, sir,” answered his dragoman, “that you have not yet
regained your understanding of the human being, and especially of the
breed which inhabits this country. Illusion is what we are after.
Without our illusions we might just as well be angels or Frenchmen, who
pursue at all events to some extent the sordid reality known as ‘_le
plaisir_,’ or enjoyment of life. In pursuit of illusion we go on making
money and furrows in our brows, for the process is wearing. I speak, of
course, of the bourgeoisie or Patriotic classes; for the practice of
the Laborious is different, though their illusions are the same.”
“How?” asked the Angel briefly.
“Why, sir, both hold the illusion that they will one day be joyful
through the possession of money; but whereas the Patriotic expect to
make it through the labour of the Laborious, the Laborious expect to
make it through the labour of the Patriotic.”
“Ha, ha!” said the Angel.
“Angels may laugh,” replied his dragoman, “but it is a matter to make
men weep.”
“You know your own business best,” said the Angel, “I suppose.”
“Ah! sir, if we did, how pleasant it would be. It is frequently my fate
to study the countenances and figures of the population, and I find
the joy which the pursuit of illusion brings them is insufficient to
counteract the confined, monotonous, and worried character of their
lives.”
“They are certainly very plain,” said the Angel.
“They are,” sighed his dragoman, “and getting plainer every day. Take
for instance that one,” and he pointed to a gentleman going up the
steps. “Mark how he is built. The top of his grizzled head is narrow,
the bottom of it broad. His body is short and thick and square;
his legs even thicker, and his feet turn out too much; the general
effect is almost pyramidal. Again, take this one,” and he indicated
a gentleman coming down the steps, “you could thread his legs and
body through a needle’s eye, but his head would defy you. Mark his
boiled eyes, his flashing spectacles, and the absence of all hair.
Disproportion, sir, has become endemic.”
“Can this not be corrected?” asked the Angel.
“To correct a thing,” answered his dragoman, “you must first be
aware of it, and these are not; no more than they are aware that
it is disproportionate to spend six days out of every seven in a
counting-house or factory. Man, sir, is the creature of habit, and when
his habits are bad, man is worse.”
“I have a headache,” said the Angel; “the noise is more deafening than
it was when I was here in 1910.”
“Yes, sir; since then we have had the Great Skirmish, an event which
furiously intensified money-making. We, like every other people, have
ever since been obliged to cultivate the art of getting five out
of two-and-two. The progress of civilisation has been considerably
speeded-up thereby, and everything but man has benefited; even horses,
for they are no longer overloaded and overdriven up Tower Hill or any
other.”
“How is that,” asked the Angel, “if the pressure of work is greater?”
“Because they are extinct,” said his dragoman; “entirely superseded by
electric and air traction, as you see.”
“You appear to be inimical to money,” the Angel interjected, with a
penetrating look. “Tell me, would you really rather own one shilling
than five and sixpence?”
“Sir,” replied his dragoman, “you are putting the candidate before
the caucus, as the saying is. For money is nothing but the power to
purchase what one wants. You should rather be inquiring what I want.”
“Well, what do you?” said the Angel.
“To my thinking,” answered his dragoman, “instead of endeavouring to
increase money when we found ourselves so very bankrupt, we should have
endeavoured to decrease our wants. The path of real progress, sir,
is the simplification of life and desire till we have dispensed even
with trousers and wear a single clean garment reaching to the knees;
till we are content with exercising our own limbs on the solid earth;
the eating of simple food we have grown ourselves; the hearing of our
own voices, and tunes on oaten straws; the feel on our faces of the
sun and rain and wind; the scent of the fields and woods; the homely
roof, and the comely wife unspoiled by heels, pearls, and powder; the
domestic animals at play, wild birds singing, and children brought up
to colder water than their fathers. It should have been our business to
pursue health till we no longer needed the interior of the chemist’s
shop, the optician’s store, the hairdresser’s, the corset-maker’s,
the thousand-and-one emporiums which patch and prink us, promoting
our fancies and disguising the ravages which modern life makes in our
figures. Our ambition should have been to need so little that, with our
present scientific knowledge, we should have been able to produce it
very easily and quickly, and have had abundant leisure and sound nerves
and bodies wherewith to enjoy nature, art, and the domestic affections.
The tragedy of man, sir, is his senseless and insatiate curiosity and
greed, together with his incurable habit of neglecting the present for
the sake of a future which will never come.”
“You speak like a book,” said the Angel.
“I wish I did,” retorted his dragoman, “for no book I am able to
procure enjoins us to stop this riot, and betake ourselves to the
pleasurable simplicity which alone can save us.”
“You would be bored stiff in a week,” said the Angel.
“We should, sir,” replied his dragoman, “because from our schooldays we
are brought up to be acquisitive, competitive, and restless. Consider
the baby in the perambulator, absorbed in contemplating the heavens and
sucking its own thumb. Existence, sir, should be like that.”
“A beautiful metaphor,” said the Angel.
“As it is, we do but skip upon the hearse of life.”
“You would appear to be of those whose motto is: ‘Try never to leave
things as you find them,’” observed the Angel.
“Ah, sir!” responded his dragoman, with a sad smile, “the part of a
dragoman is rather ever to try and find things where he leaves them.”
“Talking of that,” said the Angel dreamily, “when I was here in 1910, I
bought some Marconis for the rise. What are they at now?”
“I cannot tell you,” replied his dragoman in a deprecating voice, “but
this I will say: Inventors are not only the benefactors but the curses
of mankind, and will be so long as we do not find a way of adapting
their discoveries to our very limited digestive powers. The chronic
dyspepsia of our civilisation, due to the attempt to swallow every
pabulum which ingenuity puts before it, is so violent that I sometimes
wonder whether we shall survive until your visit in 1984.”
“Ah!” said the Angel, pricking his ears; “you really think there is a
chance?”
“I do indeed,” his dragoman answered gloomily. “Life is now one long
telephone call--and what’s it all about? A tour in darkness! A rattling
of wheels under a sky of smoke! A never-ending game of poker!”
“Confess,” said the Angel, “that you have eaten something which has not
agreed with you?”
“It is so,” answered his dragoman; “I have eaten of modernity, the
damnedest dish that was ever set to lips. Look at those fellows,” he
went on, “busy as ants from nine o’clock in the morning to seven in the
evening. And look at their wives!”
“Ah! yes,” said the Angel cheerily; “let us look at their wives,” and
with three strokes of his wings he passed to Oxford Street.
“Look at them!” repeated his dragoman, “busy as ants from ten o’clock
in the morning to five in the evening.”
“Plain is not the word for _them_,” said the Angel sadly. “What are
they after, running in and out of these shop-holes?”
“Illusion, sir. The romance of business there, the romance of commerce
here. They have got into these habits and, as you know, it is so much
easier to get in than to get out. Would you like to see one of their
homes?”
“No, no,” said the Angel, starting back and coming into contact with a
lady’s hat. “Why do they have them so large?” he asked, with a certain
irritation.
“In order that they may have them small next season,” replied his
dragoman. “The future, sir; the future! The cycle of beauty and eternal
hope, and, incidentally, _the good of trade_. Grasp that phrase and you
will have no need for further inquiry, and probably no inclination.”
“One could get American sweets in here, I guess,” said the Angel,
entering.