Reconstruction
When I saw Nordenholt again after my return, I found that I had no
need to describe my experiences. He seemed to know exactly where I had
been and what had happened to me. I suspect that Glendyne must have
furnished him with a full report of the night’s doings.
“Well, Jack,” he greeted me; “what do you think of things now?”
“I’m down in the depths,” I confessed frankly. “If that’s what lies
at the roots of humanity, I see no chance of building much upon such
foundations. The trail of the brute’s over everything.”
“Of course it is! The whole of our machine is constructed on a brute
basis. Did you need to go to London to see that? Why, man, every time
you walk you swing your left hand and your right foot in time with each
other; and that’s only a legacy of some four-footed ancestor which ran
with the near fore-leg and off hind-leg acting in unison. Of course
the brute is the basis. A wolf-pack will give you a microcosm of a
nation: family life, struggles between wolf and wolf for a living,
co-operation against an external enemy or prey. But don’t forget that
humanity has refined things a little. Give it credit for that at least.
People laugh at the calf-love of a boy; but in many cases that has no
sexual feeling in it; it has touched a less brutal spring somewhere in
the machine. There’s altruism, too; it isn’t so uncommon as you think.
And patriotism isn’t necessarily confined to a mere tooth-and-claw
grapple with a hated opponent; it might still exist even if wars
were abolished. I know you’re still under the cloud, Jack; but don’t
think that the sun has gone down for good simply because it’s hidden.
All I wanted you to see was that you must be on your guard in your
reconstruction. You and Elsa were planning for an ideal humanity. I
want you to make things bearable for the flesh-and-blood units with
which you have to work. Don’t strain them too high.”
“I wish I could find my way through it all,” I said. “But anyway I see
your point. What you wanted was to let me know which was sand and which
was rock to build on, wasn’t it? You were afraid I was mistaking it all
for solid ground?”
“That’s about it. Remember, with decent luck you ought to have a clean
slate to start with. Most of our old troubles have solved themselves,
or will solve themselves in the course of the next few months. There’s
no idle class in the Nitrogen Area; money’s only a convenient fiction
and now they know it by experience; there’s no Parliament, no gabble
about Democracy, no laws that a man can’t understand. I’ve made a clean
sweep of most of the old system; and the rest will go down before we’re
done.”
“I know that, but to tell the truth I don’t know where to begin
building. It seems an impossible business; the more I look at it the
less confidence I have in myself.”
“Don’t worry so much about that. You’ll see that it will solve itself
step by step. It’s not so much cut-and-dried plans you need as a
flexible mind combined with general principles. It’s the principles
that will worry you.”
“I suppose you are right,” I said.
“It’s obvious if you look at it. Your first stages will be the
getting of these five million people into two sets: one on the land
to cultivate it; the other still working on nitrogen. That’s evident.
The whole of that part of the thing is a matter of statistics and
calculation; there’s nothing in it, so far as thinking goes. After
that, you have to arrange to get the best out of the people mentally
and morally; and I think Elsa will be a help to you there. By the way,
she refuses to leave me.”
“Then how am I going to get her help?”
“Oh, I’ve arranged that she is to have lighter work and she’ll have the
evenings free; so you and she can consult then, if you will.”
This seemed to be enough to go on with.
“There’s another thing, Jack,” he continued, “I’ve got good news for
you. It appears from the work that the bacteriologists are doing that
_B. diazotans_ is a short-lived creature. According to their results,
the whole lot will die out in less than three months from now, as
far as this part of the country is concerned. Apparently it combined
tremendous reproductive power with a very short existence; and it’s
now reaching the end of its tether. So in three months we ought to be
able to get the nitrogenous stuff on to the fields without any fear
of having it decomposed. That was what always frightened me; for if
_B. diazotans_ had been a permanent thing, the whole scheme would have
collapsed. I foresaw that, but we just had to take the chance; and I
always hoped that if the worst came to the worst we might hit on some
anti-agent which would destroy the brutes. You know that in some places
it hasn’t produced any effect at all; the local conditions seem against
it, somehow.”
* * * * *
Reconstruction! I remember those early days when I sat in my office
for hours together, making notes of schemes which I tore up next day
with an ever-increasing irritation at my own sterility. Given a clean
slate to start with, it seems at first sight the easiest thing in the
world to draw the plans of a Utopia, or at any rate to rough in the
outlines when one is not hampered by details. Try it yourself! You may
have better luck or a greater imagination than I had; and possibly
you may succeed in satisfying yourself: but remember that I had real
responsibility upon me; mine was not the easy dreaming of a literary
man dealing with puppets drawn from his ink-pot, malleable to his
will; it was a flesh-and-blood humanity with all its weaknesses, its
failings, its meannesses that I had to deal with in my schemes.
I cannot tell how many sketches I made and discarded in turn. Most of
them I had not even courage to put upon the files; so that I cannot now
trace the evolution of my ideas. I can recall that, as time went on, my
projects became more and more modest in their scope; and I think that
they seem to fall into four main divisions.
At the start, I began by imagining an ideal humanity, something like
the dwellers in our Fata Morgana; and from this picture I deducted bit
by bit all that seemed unrealisable with humanity as it was. I cut
away a custom here, a tradition there, until I had reduced the whole
sketch to a framework. And when I put this framework together upon
paper and saw what it contained, I found it to be an invertebrate mass
of disconnected shreds and tatters with no life in it and no hope of
existence. I remember even now the disappointment which that discovery
gave me. I began to understand the gulf between comfortable theories
and hard facts.
In the next stage of my development, I leaned mainly upon the future. I
was still under the sting of my disillusion; and I discarded the idea
that existing humanity could ever enter the courts of Fata Morgana. I
tried to plan foundations upon which the newer generations could rise
to the heights. Education! Had we ever in the old days understood the
meaning of the word? Had we ever consciously tried to draw out all
that was best in the human mind? Or had we merely stuffed the human
intellect with disconnected scraps of knowledge, the mere bones from
which all the flesh had wasted away? We had a clean slate--how often
my mind recurred to that simile in those days--could we not write
something better upon it than had been written in the past? A chasm
separated us from the older days; we need be hampered by no traditions.
Could we not start a fresh line?
I pondered this for days on end. It seemed to be feasible in some ways;
but in other directions I saw the difficulties to the full. The clean
slate was not a real thing at all. Environment counts for so much; and
all the adult minds in the community had been bred in the atmosphere of
the past. Their influence would always be there to hamper us, bearing
down upon the younger generations and cramping them in the old ideas.
There could be no clean severance between present and future, only a
gradual change of outlook through the years.
My third stage of evolution led on from this conclusion. I accepted the
present as it was and then tried to discover ways in which improvements
might be made in the future. Again I spent days in picking out faults
and making additions to the fabric of society; and at the end of it
all I found, as I had done before, that the result was a patchwork,
something which had no organic life of its own.
At this point, I think, I began to despair entirely; and I fell
back upon pure materialism. I considered the matter solely from the
standpoint of the practical needs of the time; for there I felt myself
upon sure ground. Whatever happened, I must have ready a concrete
scheme which would tide us over our early stages in the future.
I secured statistics showing the proportions of the population which
would be required in all the different branches of labour during
the coming year; and in doing this I had to divide them into groups
according as they were to work on the land or were required for keeping
up the supply of fixed nitrogen from the factories. My charts showed
me the areas which we expected to have under cultivation at given
dates in the future. I was back again in the unreal world of graphs
and curves; and I think that in some ways it was an advantage to me to
eliminate the human factor. It kept me from brooding too much over my
recollections of humanity in its decline.
On this materialistic basis, the whole thing resolved itself into
a problem of labour economy: the devising of a method whereby the
greatest yield of food could be obtained with the smallest expenditure
of power. Here I was on familiar ground; for it was my factory problem
over again, though the actual conditions were different. There were
only two main sides to the question: on the one hand I had to ensure
the greatest amount of food possible and on the other I had to look to
the ease of distribution of that food when it was produced. The idea of
huge tractor-ploughed areas followed as a matter of course; and from
this developed the conception of humanity gathered into a number of
moderately-sized aggregations rather than spread in cottages here and
there throughout the country-side. Each of these centres of population
would contain within itself all the essentials of existence and would
thus be a single unit capable of almost independent existence.
Having in this way roughed out my scheme, other factors forced
themselves on my attention. I had no wish to utilise the old villages
which still remained dotted here and there about the country-side.
Their sizes and positions had been dictated by conditions which had
now passed away; and it seemed better to make a clean sweep of them
and start afresh. From the purely practical standpoint, the erection
of huge phalansteries at fixed points would no doubt have been the
simplest solution of the problem; but I rejected this conception. I
wanted something better than barracks for my people to live in. I
wanted variety, not a depressing uniformity. And I wanted beauty also.
Step by step I began to see my way clearer before me. And now that
I look back upon it, I was simply following in the track of Nature
herself. To make sure of the material things, to preserve the race
first of all; then to increase comfort, to make some spot of the
Earth’s surface different from the rest for each of us, to create a
“home”; lastly, when the material side had been buttressed securely,
to turn to the mind and open it to beauty: that seems to me to be the
normal progress of humanity in the past, from the Stone Age onwards.
* * * * *
It was at this period that Elsa Huntingtower came more into my life.
While I was laying down the broad outlines of the material side of the
coming reconstruction, I had preferred to work alone; for in dealing
with problems of this nature, it seems to me best to have a single mind
upon the work. It was largely a matter of dry statistics, calculations,
graphs, estimates, cartography and so forth; and since it seemed to me
to be governed almost entirely by practical factors, I did not think
that much could be gained by calling for her help. I waited till I had
the outlines of the project completed before applying to Nordenholt in
the matter. When I spoke to him, he agreed with what I had done.
“I don’t want to see your plans, Jack. It’s your show; and if I were to
see them I would probably want to make suggestions and shake your trust
in your own judgment. Much better not.”
“What about Miss Huntingtower’s help? Am I not to get that?”
“That’s a different matter entirely. She ought to give you the feminine
point of view, which I couldn’t do. Let’s see. She can consult with you
in the evenings. Will that do?”
I agreed; and it was arranged that thereafter I was to spend the
evenings at Nordenholt’s house, where she and I could discuss things
in peace. Nordenholt left us almost entirely to ourselves, though
occasionally he would come into the room where we worked: but he
refused to take any interest in our affairs.
“One thing at a time for me, nowadays,” he used to say, when she
appealed to him. “My affair is to bring things up to the point where
you two can take over. Your business is to be ready to pull the
starting-lever when I give you the word. I won’t look beyond my limits.”
And, indeed, he had enough to do at that time. Things were not always
smooth in the Nitrogen Area; and I could see signs that they might
even become more difficult. Since I had left my own department, I had
gained more information about the general state of affairs; and I could
comprehend the possibilities of wreckage which menaced us as the months
went by.
I have said before that it is almost impossible for me to retrace in
detail the evolution of my reconstruction plans; and in the part where
Elsa Huntingtower and I collaborated, my recollections are even more
confused than they are with regard to the work I did alone. So much of
it was developed by discussions between us that in the end it was hard
to say who was really responsible for the final form of the schemes
which we laid down in common. She brought a totally new atmosphere into
the problem, details mostly, but details which meant the remodelling of
much that I had planned.
One example will be sufficient to show what I mean. I had, as I have
mentioned, planned a series of semi-isolated communities scattered over
the cultivable area; and I had gone the length of getting my architects
to design houses which I thought would be the best possible compromise:
something that would please the average taste without offending people
who happened to be particular in details. I showed some of these
drawings to her, expecting approval. She examined them carefully for a
long time, without saying anything.
“Well, Mr. Flint,” she said at last, “I know you will think I am very
hard to please; but personally I wouldn’t live in one of these things
if you paid me to do it.”
“What’s wrong with them? That one was drawn by Atkinson, and I believe
he’s supposed to be a rather good architect.”
“Of course he is. That’s just what condemns him in my mind. Don’t you
know that for generations the ‘best architects’ have been imposing on
people, giving them something that no one wants; and carrying it off
just because they are the ‘best architects’ and are supposed to know
what is the right thing. And not one of them ever seems to have taken
the trouble to find out what a woman wants, in a house. Not one.
“Don’t you see the awful sameness in these designs, for one thing? You
men seem to think that if you get four walls and a roof, everything
is all right. Can’t you understand that one woman wants something
different from another one?”
There certainly was a monotony about the designs, now I came to look at
them.
“Now here’s a suggestion,” she went on. “It may not be practical, but
it’s your business to make it practicable, and not simply to accept
what another man tells you is possible or impossible. You say that your
trouble is that you want to standardise, so as to make production on a
large scale easy. So you’ve simply set out to standardise your finished
product; and you want to build so many houses of one type and so many
of another type and let your people choose between the two types. Now
my idea is quite different. Suppose that you were to standardise your
_material_ so that it is capable of adaptation? You see what I mean?”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” I said.
“Like Meccano. You get a dozen strips of metal and some screws and
wheels; and out of that you can build fifty different models, using the
same pieces in each model. Well, why not try to design your girders and
beams and doors and so forth, in such a way that out of the same set
you could erect a whole series of different houses. It doesn’t seem to
me an impossibility if you get someone with brains to do it.”
“It sounds all right in theory; but I’m not so sure about the practical
side.”
“Of course if you put some old fogey on to it he won’t be able to
do it; but try a young man who believes in the idea and you’ll
get it done, I’m sure. It may mean making each part a little more
complicated than it would normally be; but that doesn’t matter much in
mass-production, does it?”
“It’s not an insuperable difficulty.”
“Well, another thing. Get your architect to draw up sketches of all the
possible combinations he can get out of his standardised material; and
then when people want a house, they can look at the different designs
and among them all they are almost sure to find something that suits
their taste. It is much better than your idea of three or four standard
house-patterns, anyway.”
“I’ll see what can be done.”
“Oh, the thing will be easy enough if you mean to have it. A child can
build endless castles with a single box of bricks; and surely a man’s
brain ought to be able to do with beams and joists what a child does
with bricks.”
I give this as an example of her suggestions. Some of her improvements
seemed trivial to me; but I took it that it was just these trivial
things that made all the difference to a feminine mind; so I followed
her more or less blindly.
Our collaboration was an ideal one, notwithstanding some hard-fought
debatable points. More and more, as time went on, I began to understand
the wisdom Nordenholt had shown in demanding that I should take her
into partnership. Our minds worked on totally different lines; but for
that very reason we completed each other, one seeing what the other
missed. I found that she was open to conviction if one could actually
put a finger on any weak point in her schemes.
And, behind the details of our plans, I began to see more and more
clearly the outlines of her character. I suppose that most men, thrown
into daily contact with any girl above the average in looks and brains,
will drift into some sort of admiration which is hardly platonic; but
in these affairs propinquity usually completes what it has begun by
showing up weak points in character or little mannerisms which end by
repelling instead of attracting. In a drawing-room, people are always
on their guard to some extent; but in the midst of absorbing work,
real character comes out. One sees gaps in intelligence; failures
to follow out a line of thought become apparent; any inharmony in
character soon makes itself felt. One seldom sees teachers marrying
their girl-students. But in Elsa Huntingtower I found a brain as good
as my own, though working along different lines. I expect that her
association with Nordenholt had given her chances which few girls ever
have; but she had natural abilities which had been sharpened by that
contact. She puzzled me, I must admit. My mind works very much in
the concrete; I like to see every step along the road, to test each
foothold before trusting my weight upon it. To me, her mental processes
seemed to depend more upon some intuition than did mine; but I believe
now that her reasoning was as rigid as my own and that it seemed
disjointed merely because her steps were different from mine. My brain
worked in arithmetical progression, if I may put it so, whilst hers
followed a geometrical progression. Often it was a dead heat between
the hare and the tortoise; for my steady advance attained the goal just
when her mysterious leaps of intelligence had brought her to the same
point by a different path.
It was not until we had cleared the ground of the main practical
difficulties that we allowed ourselves to think of the future. At
first, everything was subordinated to the necessity of getting
something coherent planned which would be ready for the ensuing stage
after the Nitrogen Area had done its work. But once we had convinced
ourselves that we had roughed out things on the material side, we
turned our minds in other directions as a kind of relaxation. Of course
we held divergent opinions upon many questions.
“What you want, Mr. Flint, is to build a kind of human rabbit hutch,
designed on the best hygienic lines. I can see that at the back of your
mind all the time. You think material things ought to come first, don’t
you?”
“I certainly want to see the people well housed and well cared for
before going any further.”
“And then?”
“Oh, after that, I want other things as well, naturally.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what I want. I want to see them _happy_.”
I can still remember that evening. The table between us was covered
with papers; and a shaded lamp threw a soothing light upon them. All
the rest of the room was in shadow; and I saw her face against the
setting of the darkness behind her. In the next room I could feel
the slow steps of Nordenholt in his study, pacing up and down as he
revolved some problem in his mind.
“When I think about it,” she went on, after a pause, “you men amaze
me. In the mass, I mean, of course; I’m not talking about individuals.
There seem to be three classes of you. The biggest class is simply
looking for what it calls ‘a good time.’ It wants to enjoy itself;
it looks on the world just as a playground; and it never seems to get
beyond the stage of a child crying for amusement in a nursery. At the
end of things, that type leaves the world just where the world was
before. It achieves nothing; and often it merely bores itself. It
doesn’t even know how to look for happiness. I don’t see much chance
for that type in the future, now that things have changed.
“Then there’s a second class which is a shade better. They want to
make money; and they’re generally successful in that, for they are
single-minded. But in concentrating on money, it seems to me, they
lose everything else. In the end, they can do nothing with their money
except turn it into more. They can’t spend it profitably; they haven’t
had the education for that. They just gather money in, and gather it
in, and become more and more slaves to their acquisitive instincts.
To a certain extent they are better than the first type of men, for
they do incidentally achieve something in the world. You can’t begin
to make money without doing _something_. You need to manufacture or
to transport goods or develop resources or organise in some way; so
mankind as a whole profits incidentally.
“Then you come to the last of the types: the men who want to _do_
something. Activity is their form of happiness. All the inventors and
discoverers and explorers belong to that class, all the artists and
engineers and builders of things, great or small. Their happiness is
in creation, bringing something new into the world, whether it’s new
knowledge or new methods or new beauty. But they are the smallest class
of all.”
“What amazes you in that?”
“The difference in the proportions of men in the different classes, of
course. You know what the third type get out of life: you’re one of
them yourself. Wouldn’t things be better if everyone got these things?
Don’t you think the pleasure of creation is the greatest of all?”
“Of course I do; but that’s because I’m built that way. I can’t help
it.”
“Well, I think that a good many of the rest of us have the instinct
too; but it gets stifled very early. It seems to me that our education
in the past has been all wrong. It has never been education at all, in
the proper sense of the term. It’s been a case of putting things into
minds instead of drawing out what the mind contains already.”
I was struck by the similarity between her thoughts and my own upon
this matter; but after all, there was nothing surprising in that; it
was what everyone thought who had speculated at all on the problem. She
was silent for a time; then she continued:
“It’s just like the thing we were speaking of to-night. A child’s
mind is like a box of bricks; and each child has a different box with
bricks unlike those of any other child. Our educational system has been
arranged to force each child to build a standard pattern of house from
its bricks, whether the bricks were suitable or not. The whole training
has been drawn up to suit what they call ‘the average child’--a thing
that never existed. So you get each child’s mind cramped in all sorts
of directions, capacities stifled, a rooted distaste for knowledge
engendered--a pretty result to aim at!”
“I don’t think you realise the difficulties of the thing,” I said. “The
younger generation isn’t a handful; it’s a largish mass to tackle:
and one must cut one’s coat according to one’s cloth. The number of
possible instructors is limited by the labour market.”
“Hearken to the voice of the ‘practical man.’” She laughed, but not
unkindly. “You don’t seem to realise, Mr. Flint, that things _can_ be
done if one is determined to do them--physical impossibilities apart,
of course. When a conjurer devises a trick, do you think that he sets
out by considering his available machinery? Not at all. He first thinks
of the illusion he wants to produce; and he fits his machinery to that.
What we need to do is to fix on our aim and then invent machinery for
it. You seem to me always to put the cart before the horse and to work
on the lines: ‘What can we do with the machinery we have?’ That’s all
wrong, you know. We’re on the edge of a new time now; and we can do
as we please. The old system is gone; and we can set up anything we
choose. What we have to be sure is that the end we work toward is the
right one.”
We discussed education from various points of view, I remember; but
what struck me most in her ideas was the emphasis which she laid on
the faculty of wonder. One of her fears was that, in the stress of the
new time, life would become machine-made and that the human race might
degenerate into a mere set of engine-tenders to whom the whole world of
imagination was closed.
“I would begin with the tiny children,” she said, “and feed their minds
on fairy tales. Only they would be new kinds of fairy tales--something
to bring the wonder of Fairyland into their daily life. The old fairy
tales were always about things ‘once upon a time’ and in some dim
far-off country which no child ever reached. I want to bring Fairyland
to their very doors and keep some of the mystery in life. I wouldn’t
mind if they grew superstitious and believed in gnomes and elves and
sprites and such things, so long as they felt the world was wonderful.
We mustn’t let them become mere slaves to machinery. Life needs a tinge
of unreality if one is to get the most out of it, so long as it is the
right kind of unreality. Did you ever read Hudson’s _Crystal Age_?”
“No, I never came across it.”
“Do you mind if I show you something in it?”
She rose and took down a book from its shelf; then, coming back into
the lamplight, searched for a passage and began to read:
“‘Thus ... we come to the wilderness of Coradine.... There a stony
soil brings forth only thorns, and thistles, and sere tufts of grass;
and blustering winds rush over the unsheltered reaches, where the
rough-haired goats huddle for warmth; and there is no melody save
the many-toned voices of the wind and the plover’s wild cry. There
dwell the children of Coradine, on the threshold of the wind-vexed
wilderness, where the stupendous columns of green glass uphold the roof
of the House of Coradine; the ocean’s voice is in their rooms, and the
inland-blowing wind brings to them the salt spray and yellow sand swept
at low tide from the desolate floors of the sea, and the white-winged
bird flying from the black tempest screams aloud in their shadowy
halls. There, from the high terraces, when the moon is at its full, we
see the children of Coradine gathered together, arrayed like no others,
in shining garments of gossamer threads, when, like thistledown chased
by eddying winds, now whirling in a cloud, now scattering far apart,
they dance their moonlight dances on the wide alabaster floors; and
coming and going they pass away, and seem to melt into the moonlight,
yet ever to return again with changeful melody and new measures. And,
seeing this, all those things in which we ourselves excel seem poor in
comparison, becoming pale in our memories. For the winds and waves, and
the whiteness and grace, have been ever with them; and the winged seed
of the thistle, and the flight of the gull, and the storm-vexed sea,
flowering in foam, and the light of the moon on sea and barren land,
have taught them this art, and a swiftness and grace which they alone
possess.’”
The moonbeam-haunted vision which the words called up seemed to touch
something in my mind; a long-closed gate of Faery swung softly
ajar; and once more I seemed to hear the faint and far-off horns of
Elfland as I had heard them when I was a child. Wearied with toil in
my ruthless world of the present, I paused, unconscious for a moment,
before this gateway of the Unreal. I felt the call of the seas that
wash the dim coasts of Ultima Thule and of the strange birds crying to
each other in the trees of Hy-Brasil.
Miss Huntingtower sat silent; and when I came out of these few seconds
of reverie, I found that she had been watching my expression keenly:
“You ‘wake from day-dreams to this real Night,’ apparently, Mr. Flint.
I could see you had gone a-wandering, even if it was only for an
instant or two. I’m glad; for it shows you understand.”
* * * * *
I have given an account of some of these apparently aimless and
inconclusive discussions between us in order to show clearly the manner
in which we went to work. At first, we oscillated between the practical
side of things, the planning of houses, the laying out of towns, the
applications of electricity and so forth, on the one hand, and the
most abstract considerations of the mental side of the problem on the
other. I remember that one evening we began with the desirability of
uniforms for the population while at work. I was in favour of it on
the grounds that it would facilitate mass-production and would also
mark the worker’s trade and possibly thus develop a greater _esprit de
corps_. She conceded these points, but insisted that women should be
allowed to dress as they chose, once their work was done. This brought
us to the question of luxury trades, and so led by degrees to the
consideration of the cultivation of artistic taste and finally to the
problems of Art in general under the new conditions. Looking back, I
see that our earlier advances were mainly gropings towards something
which we had not clearly conceived ourselves. We did not know exactly
what we wanted; and we threshed out many matters more for the sake
of clarifying our ideas than with any real intention of applying our
conclusions in practice.
Gradually, however, things grew more definite as we proceeded. We had
certain ideas in common, general principles which we both accepted:
and as time went on, this skeleton began to clothe itself in flesh and
become a living organism. She converted me to her idea that happiness
meant more than anything, provided it was gained in the right way.
Altruism was her ideal, I found, because to her it appeared to be the
most general mode of reaching contentment. At the back of all her
ideas, this ideal seemed to lie. She wanted the new world to be a happy
world; and each of her suggestions and all of her criticism took this
as a basis.
It seems hardly necessary to enter into an account of the final form
which we gave to our plans. It was not Fata Morgana that we built;
but I think that at least we laid the foundation-stone upon which our
dream-city may yet arise. These far-flung communities which you know
to-day, these groves and pleasure-grounds, these lakes and pleasances,
bright streets and velvet lawns, all sprang from our brain: and the
children who throng them, happier and more intelligent than their
fathers in their day, are also in part our work, taught and trained in
the ideals which inspired us. If anything, we were too timid in our
planning, for we had no clue to what the future held in store for us.
Had we known in time, we might have ventured to launch into the air
the high towers of Fata Morgana itself to catch the rising sun. On the
material side, we could have done it; but I believe we were wise in
our timidity. Dream-cities are not to be trodden by the human foot.
The refining of mankind will be a longer process than the building of
cities; and only a pure race could live in happiness in that Theleme
which we planned.
Looking backward, I think that during all these hours of designing
and peering into the future I caught something of her spirit and she
something of mine. By imperceptible stages we came together, mind
reaching out to mind. Unnoticed by ourselves, our collaboration grew
more efficient; our divergences less and less.
I can still recall these long lamp-lit evenings, the rustle of her
skirts as she moved about the room, the cadences of her voice, the
eagerness and earnestness of her face under its crown of fair hair.
Often, as we moulded the future in that quiet room with its shaded
lights, we must have seemed like children with an ever-new plaything
which changed continually beneath our hands. Meanwhile, over us and
between us stood the shadow of Nordenholt, ever grimmer as the days
went by, carrying his projects to their ruthless termination like some
great machine which pursues its appointed course uninfluenced by human
failings or human desires. To me, at that time, he seemed to loom above
us like some labouring Titan, aloof, mysterious, inscrutable.