§ 1
I have set myself to write the story of the Great Change, so far as it
has affected my own life and the lives of one or two people closely
connected with me, primarily to please myself.
Long ago in my crude unhappy youth, I conceived the desire of writing a
book. To scribble secretly and dream of authorship was one of my chief
alleviations, and I read with a sympathetic envy every scrap I could
get about the world of literature and the lives of literary people. It
is something, even amidst this present happiness, to find leisure and
opportunity to take up and partially realize these old and hopeless
dreams. But that alone, in a world where so much of vivid and
increasing interest presents itself to be done, even by an old man,
would not, I think, suffice to set me at this desk. I find some such
recapitulation of my past as this will involve, is becoming necessary
to my own secure mental continuity. The passage of years brings a man
at last to retrospection; at seventy-two one’s youth is far more
important than it was at forty. And I am out of touch with my youth.
The old life seems so cut off from the new, so alien and so
unreasonable, that at times I find it bordering upon the incredible.
The data have gone, the buildings and places. I stopped dead the other
afternoon in my walk across the moor, where once the dismal outskirts
of Swathinglea straggled toward Leet, and asked, “Was it here indeed
that I crouched among the weeds and refuse and broken crockery and
loaded my revolver ready for murder? Did ever such a thing happen in my
life? Was such a mood and thought and intention ever possible to me?
Rather, has not some queer nightmare spirit out of dreamland slipped a
pseudo-memory into the records of my vanished life?” There must be many
alive still who have the same perplexities. And I think too that those
who are now growing up to take our places in the great enterprise of
mankind, will need many such narratives as mine for even the most
partial conception of the old world of shadows that came before our
day. It chances too that my case is fairly typical of the Change; I was
caught midway in a gust of passion; and a curious accident put me for a
time in the very nucleus of the new order.
My memory takes me back across the interval of fifty years to a little
ill-lit room with a sash window open to a starry sky, and instantly
there returns to me the characteristic smell of that room, the
penetrating odor of an ill-trimmed lamp, burning cheap paraffin.
Lighting by electricity had then been perfected for fifteen years, but
still the larger portion of the world used these lamps. All this first
scene will go, in my mind at least, to that olfactory accompaniment.
That was the evening smell of the room. By day it had a more subtle
aroma, a closeness, a peculiar sort of faint pungency that I
associate—I know not why—with dust.
Let me describe this room to you in detail. It was perhaps eight feet
by seven in area and rather higher than either of these dimensions; the
ceiling was of plaster, cracked and bulging in places, gray with the
soot of the lamp, and in one place discolored by a system of yellow and
olive-green stains caused by the percolation of damp from above. The
walls were covered with dun-colored paper, upon which had been printed
in oblique reiteration a crimson shape, something of the nature of a
curly ostrich feather, or an acanthus flower, that had in its less
faded moments a sort of dingy gaiety. There were several big
plaster-rimmed wounds in this, caused by Parload’s ineffectual attempts
to get nails into the wall, whereby there might hang pictures. One nail
had hit between two bricks and got home, and from this depended,
sustained a little insecurely by frayed and knotted blind-cord,
Parload’s hanging bookshelves, planks painted over with a treacly blue
enamel and further decorated by a fringe of pinked American cloth
insecurely fixed by tacks. Below this was a little table that behaved
with a mulish vindictiveness to any knee that was thrust beneath it
suddenly; it was covered with a cloth whose pattern of red and black
had been rendered less monotonous by the accidents of Parload’s
versatile ink bottle, and on it, _leit motif_ of the whole, stood and
stank the lamp. This lamp, you must understand, was of some whitish
translucent substance that was neither china nor glass, it had a shade
of the same substance, a shade that did not protect the eyes of a
reader in any measure, and it seemed admirably adapted to bring into
pitiless prominence the fact that, after the lamp’s trimming, dust and
paraffin had been smeared over its exterior with a reckless generosity.
The uneven floor boards of this apartment were covered with scratched
enamel of chocolate hue, on which a small island of frayed carpet dimly
blossomed in the dust and shadows.
There was a very small grate, made of cast-iron in one piece and
painted buff, and a still smaller misfit of a cast-iron fender that
confessed the gray stone of the hearth. No fire was laid, only a few
scraps of torn paper and the bowl of a broken corn-cob pipe were
visible behind the bars, and in the corner and rather thrust away was
an angular japanned coal-box with a damaged hinge. It was the custom in
those days to warm every room separately from a separate fireplace,
more prolific of dirt than heat, and the rickety sash window, the small
chimney, and the loose-fitting door were expected to organize the
ventilation of the room among themselves without any further direction.
Parload’s truckle bed hid its gray sheets beneath an old patchwork
counterpane on one side of the room, and veiled his boxes and suchlike
oddments, and invading the two corners of the window were an old
whatnot and the washhandstand, on which were distributed the simple
appliances of his toilet.
This washhandstand had been made of deal by some one with an excess of
turnery appliances in a hurry, who had tried to distract attention from
the rough economies of his workmanship by an arresting ornamentation of
blobs and bulbs upon the joints and legs. Apparently the piece had then
been placed in the hands of some person of infinite leisure equipped
with a pot of ocherous paint, varnish, and a set of flexible combs.
This person had first painted the article, then, I fancy, smeared it
with varnish, and then sat down to work with the combs to streak and
comb the varnish into a weird imitation of the grain of some nightmare
timber. The washhandstand so made had evidently had a prolonged career
of violent use, had been chipped, kicked, splintered, punched, stained,
scorched, hammered, desiccated, damped, and defiled, had met indeed
with almost every possible adventure except a conflagration or a
scrubbing, until at last it had come to this high refuge of Parload’s
attic to sustain the simple requirements of Parload’s personal
cleanliness. There were, in chief, a basin and a jug of water and a
slop-pail of tin, and, further, a piece of yellow soap in a tray, a
tooth-brush, a rat-tailed shaving brush, one huckaback towel, and one
or two other minor articles. In those days only very prosperous people
had more than such an equipage, and it is to be remarked that every
drop of water Parload used had to be carried by an unfortunate servant
girl,—the “slavey,” Parload called her—up from the basement to the top
of the house and subsequently down again. Already we begin to forget
how modern an invention is personal cleanliness. It is a fact that
Parload had never stripped for a swim in his life; never had a
simultaneous bath all over his body since his childhood. Not one in
fifty of us did in the days of which I am telling you.
A chest, also singularly grained and streaked, of two large and two
small drawers, held Parload’s reserve of garments, and pegs on the door
carried his two hats and completed this inventory of a
“bed-sitting-room” as I knew it before the Change. But I had
forgotten—there was also a chair with a “squab” that apologized
inadequately for the defects of its cane seat. I forgot that for the
moment because I was sitting on the chair on the occasion that best
begins this story.
I have described Parload’s room with such particularity because it will
help you to understand the key in which my earlier chapters are
written, but you must not imagine that this singular equipment or the
smell of the lamp engaged my attention at that time to the slightest
degree. I took all this grimy unpleasantness as if it were the most
natural and proper setting for existence imaginable. It was the world
as I knew it. My mind was entirely occupied then by graver and intenser
matters, and it is only now in the distant retrospect that I see these
details of environment as being remarkable, as significant, as indeed
obviously the outward visible manifestations of the old world disorder
in our hearts.
§ 2
Parload stood at the open window, opera-glass in hand, and sought and
found and was uncertain about and lost again, the new comet.
I thought the comet no more than a nuisance then because I wanted to
talk of other matters. But Parload was full of it. My head was hot, I
was feverish with interlacing annoyances and bitterness, I wanted to
open my heart to him—at least I wanted to relieve my heart by some
romantic rendering of my troubles—and I gave but little heed to the
things he told me. It was the first time I had heard of this new speck
among the countless specks of heaven, and I did not care if I never
heard of the thing again.
We were two youths much of an age together, Parload was two and twenty,
and eight months older than I. He was—I think his proper definition was
“engrossing clerk” to a little solicitor in Overcastle, while I was
third in the office staff of Rawdon’s pot-bank in Clayton. We had met
first in the “Parliament” of the Young Men’s Christian Association of
Swathinglea; we had found we attended simultaneous classes in
Overcastle, he in science and I in shorthand, and had started a
practice of walking home together, and so our friendship came into
being. (Swathinglea, Clayton, and Overcastle were contiguous towns, I
should mention, in the great industrial area of the Midlands.) We had
shared each other’s secret of religious doubt, we had confided to one
another a common interest in Socialism, he had come twice to supper at
my mother’s on a Sunday night, and I was free of his apartment. He was
then a tall, flaxen-haired, gawky youth, with a disproportionate
development of neck and wrist, and capable of vast enthusiasm; he gave
two evenings a week to the evening classes of the organized science
school in Overcastle, physiography was his favorite “subject,” and
through this insidious opening of his mind the wonder of outer space
had come to take possession of his soul. He had commandeered an old
opera-glass from his uncle who farmed at Leet over the moors, he had
bought a cheap paper planisphere and _Whitaker’s Almanac_, and for a
time day and moonlight were mere blank interruptions to the one
satisfactory reality in his life—star-gazing. It was the deeps that had
seized him, the immensities, and the mysterious possibilities that
might float unlit in that unplumbed abyss. With infinite labor and the
help of a very precise article in _The Heavens_, a little monthly
magazine that catered for those who were under this obsession, he had
at last got his opera-glass upon the new visitor to our system from
outer space. He gazed in a sort of rapture upon that quivering little
smudge of light among the shining pin-points—and gazed. My troubles had
to wait for him.
“Wonderful,” he sighed, and then as though his first emphasis did not
satisfy him, “wonderful!”
He turned to me. “Wouldn’t you like to see?”
I had to look, and then I had to listen, how that this scarce-visible
intruder was to be, was presently to be, one of the largest comets this
world has ever seen, how that its course must bring it within at
most—so many score of millions of miles from the earth, a mere step,
Parload seemed to think that; how that the spectroscope was already
sounding its chemical secrets, perplexed by the unprecedented band in
the green, how it was even now being photographed in the very act of
unwinding—in an unusual direction—a sunward tail (which presently it
wound up again), and all the while in a sort of undertow I was thinking
first of Nettie Stuart and the letter she had just written me, and then
of old Rawdon’s detestable face as I had seen it that afternoon. Now I
planned answers to Nettie and now belated repartees to my employer, and
then again “Nettie” was blazing all across the background of my
thoughts. . . .
Nettie Stuart was daughter of the head gardener of the rich Mr.
Verrall’s widow, and she and I had kissed and become sweethearts before
we were eighteen years old. My mother and hers were second cousins and
old schoolfellows, and though my mother had been widowed untimely by a
train accident, and had been reduced to letting lodgings (she was the
Clayton curate’s landlady), a position esteemed much lower than that of
Mrs. Stuart, a kindly custom of occasional visits to the gardener’s
cottage at Checkshill Towers still kept the friends in touch. Commonly
I went with her. And I remember it was in the dusk of one bright
evening in July, one of those long golden evenings that do not so much
give way to night as admit at last, upon courtesy, the moon and a
choice retinue of stars, that Nettie and I, at the pond of goldfish
where the yew-bordered walks converged, made our shy beginners’ vow. I
remember still—something will always stir in me at that memory—the
tremulous emotion of that adventure. Nettie was dressed in white, her
hair went off in waves of soft darkness from above her dark shining
eyes; there was a little necklace of pearls about her sweetly modeled
neck, and a little coin of gold that nestled in her throat. I kissed
her half-reluctant lips, and for three years of my life thereafter—nay!
I almost think for all the rest of her life and mine—I could have died
for her sake.
You must understand—and every year it becomes increasingly difficult to
understand—how entirely different the world was then from what it is
now. It was a dark world; it was full of preventable disorder,
preventable diseases, and preventable pain, of harshness and stupid
unpremeditated cruelties; but yet, it may be even by virtue of the
general darkness, there were moments of a rare and evanescent beauty
that seem no longer possible in my experience. The great Change has
come for ever more, happiness and beauty are our atmosphere, there is
peace on earth and good will to all men. None would dare to dream of
returning to the sorrows of the former time, and yet that misery was
pierced, ever and again its gray curtain was stabbed through and
through by joys of an intensity, by perceptions of a keenness that it
seems to me are now altogether gone out of life. Is it the Change, I
wonder, that has robbed life of its extremes, or is it perhaps only
this, that youth has left me—even the strength of middle years leaves
me now—and taken its despairs and raptures, leaving me judgment,
perhaps, sympathy, memories?
I cannot tell. One would need to be young now and to have been young
then as well, to decide that impossible problem.
Perhaps a cool observer even in the old days would have found little
beauty in our grouping. I have our two photographs at hand in this
bureau as I write, and they show me a gawky youth in ill-fitting
ready-made clothing, and Nettie—Indeed Nettie is badly dressed, and her
attitude is more than a little stiff; but I can see her through the
picture, and her living brightness and something of that mystery of
charm she had for me, comes back again to my mind. Her face has
triumphed over the photographer—or I would long ago have cast this
picture away.
The reality of beauty yields itself to no words. I wish that I had the
sister art and could draw in my margin something that escapes
description. There was a sort of gravity in her eyes. There was
something, a matter of the minutest difference, about her upper lip so
that her mouth closed sweetly and broke very sweetly to a smile. That
grave, sweet smile!
After we had kissed and decided not to tell our parents for awhile of
the irrevocable choice we had made, the time came for us to part, shyly
and before others, and I and my mother went off back across the moonlit
park—the bracken thickets rustling with startled deer—to the railway
station at Checkshill and so to our dingy basement in Clayton, and I
saw no more of Nettie—except that I saw her in my thoughts—for nearly a
year. But at our next meeting it was decided that we must correspond,
and this we did with much elaboration of secrecy, for Nettie would have
no one at home, not even her only sister, know of her attachment. So I
had to send my precious documents sealed and under cover by way of a
confidential schoolfellow of hers who lived near London. . . . I could
write that address down now, though house and street and suburb have
gone beyond any man’s tracing.
Our correspondence began our estrangement, because for the first time
we came into more than sensuous contact and our minds sought
expression.
Now you must understand that the world of thought in those days was in
the strangest condition, it was choked with obsolete inadequate
formulae, it was tortuous to a maze-like degree with secondary
contrivances and adaptations, suppressions, conventions, and
subterfuges. Base immediacies fouled the truth on every man’s lips. I
was brought up by my mother in a quaint old-fashioned narrow faith in
certain religious formulae, certain rules of conduct, certain
conceptions of social and political order, that had no more relevance
to the realities and needs of everyday contemporary life than if they
were clean linen that had been put away with lavender in a drawer.
Indeed, her religion did actually smell of lavender; on Sundays she put
away all the things of reality, the garments and even the furnishings
of everyday, hid her hands, that were gnarled and sometimes chapped
with scrubbing, in black, carefully mended gloves, assumed her old
black silk dress and bonnet and took me, unnaturally clean and sweet
also, to church. There we sang and bowed and heard sonorous prayers and
joined in sonorous responses, and rose with a congregational sigh
refreshed and relieved when the doxology, with its opening “Now to God
the Father, God the Son,” bowed out the tame, brief sermon. There was a
hell in that religion of my mother’s, a red-haired hell of curly flames
that had once been very terrible; there was a devil, who was also _ex
officio_ the British King’s enemy, and much denunciation of the wicked
lusts of the flesh; we were expected to believe that most of our poor
unhappy world was to atone for its muddle and trouble here by suffering
exquisite torments for ever after, world without end, Amen. But indeed
those curly flames looked rather jolly. The whole thing had been
mellowed and faded into a gentle unreality long before my time; if it
had much terror even in my childhood I have forgotten it, it was not so
terrible as the giant who was killed by the Beanstalk, and I see it all
now as a setting for my poor old mother’s worn and grimy face, and
almost lovingly as a part of her. And Mr. Gabbitas, our plump little
lodger, strangely transformed in his vestments and lifting his voice
manfully to the quality of those Elizabethan prayers, seemed, I think,
to give her a special and peculiar interest with God. She radiated her
own tremulous gentleness upon Him, and redeemed Him from all the
implications of vindictive theologians; she was in truth, had I but
perceived it, the effectual answer to all she would have taught me.
So I see it now, but there is something harsh in the earnest intensity
of youth, and having at first taken all these things quite seriously,
the fiery hell and God’s vindictiveness at any neglect, as though they
were as much a matter of fact as Bladden’s iron-works and Rawdon’s
pot-bank, I presently with an equal seriousness flung them out of my
mind again.
Mr. Gabbitas, you see, did sometimes, as the phrase went, “take notice”
of me, he had induced me to go on reading after I left school, and with
the best intentions in the world and to anticipate the poison of the
times, he had lent me Burble’s “Scepticism Answered,” and drawn my
attention to the library of the Institute in Clayton.
The excellent Burble was a great shock to me. It seemed clear from his
answers to the sceptic that the case for doctrinal orthodoxy and all
that faded and by no means awful hereafter, which I had hitherto
accepted as I accepted the sun, was an extremely poor one, and to
hammer home that idea the first book I got from the Institute happened
to be an American edition of the collected works of Shelley, his gassy
prose as well as his atmospheric verse. I was soon ripe for blatant
unbelief. And at the Young Men’s Christian Association I presently made
the acquaintance of Parload, who told me, under promises of the most
sinister secrecy, that he was “a Socialist out and out.” He lent me
several copies of a periodical with the clamant title of _The Clarion_,
which was just taking up a crusade against the accepted religion. The
adolescent years of any fairly intelligent youth lie open, and will
always lie healthily open, to the contagion of philosophical doubts, of
scorns and new ideas, and I will confess I had the fever of that phase
badly. Doubt, I say, but it was not so much doubt—which is a complex
thing—as startled emphatic denial. “Have I believed _this!_” And I was
also, you must remember, just beginning love-letters to Nettie.
We live now in these days, when the Great Change has been in most
things accomplished, in a time when every one is being educated to a
sort of intellectual gentleness, a gentleness that abates nothing from
our vigor, and it is hard to understand the stifled and struggling
manner in which my generation of common young men did its thinking. To
think at all about certain questions was an act of rebellion that set
one oscillating between the furtive and the defiant. People begin to
find Shelley—for all his melody—noisy and ill conditioned now because
his Anarchs have vanished, yet there was a time when novel thought HAD
to go to that tune of breaking glass. It becomes a little difficult to
imagine the yeasty state of mind, the disposition to shout and say,
“Yah!” at constituted authority, to sustain a persistent note of
provocation such as we raw youngsters displayed. I began to read with
avidity such writing as Carlyle, Browning, and Heine have left for the
perplexity of posterity, and not only to read and admire but to
imitate. My letters to Nettie, after one or two genuinely intended
displays of perfervid tenderness, broke out toward theology, sociology,
and the cosmos in turgid and startling expressions. No doubt they
puzzled her extremely.
I retain the keenest sympathy and something inexplicably near to envy
for my own departed youth, but I should find it difficult to maintain
my case against any one who would condemn me altogether as having been
a very silly, posturing, emotional hobbledehoy indeed and quite like my
faded photograph. And when I try to recall what exactly must have been
the quality and tenor of my more sustained efforts to write memorably
to my sweetheart, I confess I shiver. . . Yet I wish they were not all
destroyed.
Her letters to me were simple enough, written in a roundish, unformed
hand and badly phrased. Her first two or three showed a shy pleasure in
the use of the word “dear,” and I remember being first puzzled and
then, when I understood, delighted, because she had written “Willie
_asthore_” under my name. “Asthore,” I gathered, meant “darling.” But
when the evidences of my fermentation began, her answers were less
happy.
I will not weary you with the story of how we quarreled in our silly
youthful way, and how I went the next Sunday, all uninvited, to
Checkshill, and made it worse, and how afterward I wrote a letter that
she thought was “lovely,” and mended the matter. Nor will I tell of all
our subsequent fluctuations of misunderstanding. Always I was the
offender and the final penitent until this last trouble that was now
beginning; and in between we had some tender near moments, and I loved
her very greatly. There was this misfortune in the business, that in
the darkness, and alone, I thought with great intensity of her, of her
eyes, of her touch, of her sweet and delightful presence, but when I
sat down to write I thought of Shelley and Burns and myself, and other
such irrelevant matters. When one is in love, in this fermenting way,
it is harder to make love than it is when one does not love at all. And
as for Nettie, she loved, I know, not me but those gentle mysteries. It
was not my voice should rouse her dreams to passion. . . So our letters
continued to jar. Then suddenly she wrote me one doubting whether she
could ever care for any one who was a Socialist and did not believe in
Church, and then hard upon it came another note with unexpected
novelties of phrasing. She thought we were not suited to each other, we
differed so in tastes and ideas, she had long thought of releasing me
from our engagement. In fact, though I really did not apprehend it
fully at the first shock, I was dismissed. Her letter had reached me
when I came home after old Rawdon’s none too civil refusal to raise my
wages. On this particular evening of which I write, therefore, I was in
a state of feverish adjustment to two new and amazing, two nearly
overwhelming facts, that I was neither indispensable to Nettie nor at
Rawdon’s. And to talk of comets!
Where did I stand?
I had grown so accustomed to think of Nettie as inseparably mine—the
whole tradition of “true love” pointed me to that—that for her to face
about with these precise small phrases toward abandonment, after we had
kissed and whispered and come so close in the little adventurous
familiarities of the young, shocked me profoundly. I! I! And Rawdon
didn’t find me indispensable either. I felt I was suddenly repudiated
by the universe and threatened with effacement, that in some positive
and emphatic way I must at once assert myself. There was no balm in the
religion I had learnt, or in the irreligion I had adopted, for wounded
self-love.
Should I fling up Rawdon’s place at once and then in some
extraordinary, swift manner make the fortune of Frobisher’s adjacent
and closely competitive pot-bank?
The first part of that program, at any rate, would be easy of
accomplishment, to go to Rawdon and say, “You will hear from me again,”
but for the rest, Frobisher might fail me. That, however, was a
secondary issue. The predominant affair was with Nettie. I found my
mind thick-shot with flying fragments of rhetoric that might be of
service in the letter I would write her. Scorn, irony, tenderness—what
was it to be?
“Brother!” said Parload, suddenly.
“What?” said I.
“They’re firing up at Bladden’s iron-works, and the smoke comes right
across my bit of sky.”
The interruption came just as I was ripe to discharge my thoughts upon
him.
“Parload,” said I, “very likely I shall have to leave all this. Old
Rawdon won’t give me a rise in my wages, and after having asked I don’t
think I can stand going on upon the old terms anymore. See? So I may
have to clear out of Clayton for good and all.”
§ 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 may as well
starve one’s body out of a place as to starve one’s soul in one.”
“I don’t know about that altogether,” began Parload, slowly. . . .
And with that we began one of our interminable conversations, one of
those long, wandering, intensely generalizing, diffusely personal talks
that will be dear to the hearts of intelligent youths until the 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 all that
meandering haze of words, indeed I recall scarcely any of it, though
its circumstances and atmosphere stand out, a sharp, clear picture in
my mind. I posed after my manner and behaved very foolishly no doubt, a
wounded, smarting egotist, and Parload played his part of the
philosopher preoccupied with the deeps.
We were presently abroad, walking through the warm summer’s night and
talking all the more freely for that. But one thing that I said I can
remember. “I wish at times,” said I, with a gesture at the heavens,
“that comet of yours or some such thing would indeed strike 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 would only
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 up the
narrow street outside his lodging, up the stepway and the lanes toward
Clayton Crest and the high road.
But my memories carry me back so effectually to those days before the
Change that I forget that now all these places have been altered beyond
recognition, that the narrow street and the stepway and the view from
Clayton Crest, and indeed all the world in which I was born and bred
and made, has vanished clean away, out of space and out of time, and
wellnigh out of the imagination of all those who are younger by a
generation than I. You cannot see, as I can see, the dark empty way
between the mean houses, the dark empty way lit by a bleary gas-lamp at
the corner, you cannot feel the hard checkered pavement under your
boots, you cannot mark the dimly lit windows here and there, and the
shadows upon the ugly and often patched and crooked blinds of the
people cooped within. Nor can you presently pass the beerhouse with its
brighter gas and its queer, screening windows, nor get a whiff of foul
air and foul language from its door, nor see the crumpled furtive
figure—some rascal child—that slinks past us down the steps.
We crossed the longer street, up which a clumsy steam tram, vomiting
smoke and sparks, made its clangorous way, and adown which one saw the
greasy brilliance of shop fronts and the naphtha flares of hawkers’
barrows dripping fire into the night. A hazy movement of people swayed
along that road, and we heard the voice of an itinerant preacher from a
waste place between the houses. You cannot see these things as I can
see them, nor can you figure—unless you know the pictures that great
artist Hyde has left the world—the effect of the great hoarding by
which we passed, lit below by a gas-lamp and towering up to a sudden
sharp black edge against the pallid sky.
Those hoardings! They were the brightest colored things in all that
vanished world. Upon them, in successive layers of paste and paper, all
the rough enterprises of that time joined in chromatic discord; pill
vendors and preachers, theaters and charities, marvelous soaps and
astonishing pickles, typewriting machines and sewing machines, mingled
in a sort of visualized clamor. And passing that 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. We splashed along unheeding as we
talked.
Then across the allotments, a wilderness of cabbages and evil-looking
sheds, past a gaunt abandoned factory, and so to the high road. The
high road ascended in a curve past a few houses and a beerhouse or so,
and round until all the valley in which four industrial towns lay
crowded and confluent was overlooked.
I will admit that with the twilight there came a spell of weird
magnificence over all that land and brooded on it until dawn. The
horrible meanness of its details was veiled, the hutches that were
homes, the bristling multitudes of chimneys, the ugly patches of
unwilling vegetation amidst the makeshift fences of barrel-stave and
wire. The rusty scars that framed the opposite ridges where the iron
ore was taken and the barren mountains of slag from the blast furnaces
were veiled; the reek and boiling smoke and dust from foundry,
pot-bank, and furnace, transfigured and assimilated by the night. The
dust-laden atmosphere that was gray oppression through the day became
at sundown a mystery of deep translucent colors, of blues and purples,
of somber and vivid reds, of strange bright clearnesses of green and
yellow athwart the darkling sky. Each upstart furnace, when its monarch
sun had gone, crowned itself with flames, the dark cinder heaps began
to glow with quivering fires, and each pot-bank squatted rebellious in
a volcanic coronet of light. The empire of the day broke into a
thousand feudal baronies of burning coal. The minor streets across the
valley picked themselves out with gas-lamps of faint yellow, that
brightened and mingled at all the principal squares and crossings with
the greenish pallor of incandescent mantles and the high cold glare of
the electric arc. The interlacing railways lifted bright signal-boxes
over their intersections, and signal stars of red and green in
rectangular constellations. The trains became articulated black
serpents breathing fire.
Moreover, high overhead, like a thing put out of reach and near
forgotten, Parload had rediscovered a realm that was ruled by neither
sun nor furnace, the universe of stars.
This was the scene of many a talk we two had held together. And if in
the daytime we went right over the crest and looked westward there was
farmland, there were parks and great mansions, the spire of a distant
cathedral, and sometimes when the weather was near raining, 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 beside the
rutted road and argued out our perplexities, it seemed that this ridge
gave us compendiously a view of our whole world.
There on the one hand in a crowded darkness, about the ugly factories
and work-places, the workers herded together, ill clothed, ill
nourished, ill taught, badly and expensively served at every occasion
in life, uncertain even of their insufficient livelihood from day to
day, the chapels and churches and public-houses swelling up amidst
their wretched homes like saprophytes amidst a general corruption, and
on the other, in space, freedom, and dignity, scarce heeding the few
cottages, as overcrowded as they were picturesque, in which the
laborers festered, lived the landlords and masters who owned pot-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 decaying market town, the
cathedral of Lowchester pointed a beautiful, unemphatic spire to vague
incredible skies. So it seemed to us that the whole world was planned
in those youthful first impressions.
We saw everything simple, as young men will. We had our angry,
confident solutions, and whosoever would criticize them was a friend of
the robbers. It was a clear case of robbery, we held, visibly so; there
in those great houses lurked the Landlord and the Capitalist, with his
scoundrel the Lawyer, with his cheat the Priest, and we others were all
the victims of their deliberate villainies. No doubt they winked and
chuckled over their rare wines, amidst their dazzling, wickedly dressed
women, and plotted further grinding for the faces of the poor. And
amidst all the squalor on the other hand, amidst brutalities,
ignorance, and drunkenness, suffered multitudinously their blameless
victim, the Working Man. And we, almost at the first glance, had found
all this out, it had merely to be asserted now with sufficient rhetoric
and vehemence to change the face of the whole world. The Working Man
would arise—in the form of a Labor Party, and with young men like
Parload and myself to represent him—and come to his own, and then———?
Then the robbers would get it hot, and everything would be extremely
satisfactory.
Unless my memory plays me strange tricks that does no injustice to the
creed of thought and action that Parload and I held as the final result
of human wisdom. We believed it with heat, and rejected with heat the
most obvious qualification of its harshness. At times in our great
talks we were full of heady hopes for the near triumph of our doctrine,
more often our mood was hot resentment at the wickedness and stupidity
that delayed so plain and simple a reconstruction of the order of the
world. Then we grew malignant, and thought of barricades and
significant violence. I was very bitter, I know, upon this night of
which I am now particularly telling, and the only face upon the hydra
of Capitalism and Monopoly that I could see at all clearly, smiled
exactly as old Rawdon had smiled when he refused to give me more than a
paltry twenty shillings a week.
I wanted intensely to salve my self-respect by some revenge upon him,
and I felt that if that could be done by slaying the hydra, I might
drag its carcass to the feet of Nettie, and settle my other trouble 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 Parload that
night. You figure us as little black figures, unprepossessing in the
outline, set in the midst of that desolating night of flaming
industrialism, and my little voice with a rhetorical twang protesting,
denouncing. . . .
You will consider those notions of my youth poor silly violent stuff;
particularly if you are of the younger generation born since the Change
you will be of that opinion. Nowadays the whole world thinks clearly,
thinks with deliberation, pellucid certainties, you find it impossible
to imagine how any other thinking could have been possible. Let me tell
you then how you can bring yourself to something like the condition of
our former state. In the first place you must get yourself out of
health by unwise drinking and eating, and out of condition by
neglecting your exercise, then you must contrive to be worried very
much and made very anxious and uncomfortable, and then you must work
very hard for four or five days and for long hours every day at
something too petty to be interesting, too complex to be mechanical,
and without any personal significance to you whatever. This done, get
straightway into a room that is not ventilated at all, and that is
already full of foul air, and there set yourself to think out some very
complicated problem. In a very little while you will find yourself in a
state of intellectual muddle, annoyed, impatient, snatching at the
obvious presently in choosing and rejecting conclusions haphazard. Try
to play chess under such conditions and you will play stupidly and lose
your temper. Try to do anything that taxes the brain or temper and you
will fail.
Now, the whole world before the Change was as sick and feverish as
that, it was worried and overworked and perplexed by problems that
would not get stated simply, that changed and evaded solution, it was
in an atmosphere that had corrupted and thickened past breathing; there
was no thorough cool thinking in the world at all. There was 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 men are
beginning to doubt the greatness of the Change our world has undergone,
but read—read the newspapers of that time. Every age becomes mitigated
and a little ennobled in our minds as it recedes into the past. It is
the part of those who like myself have stories of that time to tell, to
supply, by a scrupulous spiritual realism, some antidote to that
glamour.
§ 4
Always with Parload I was chief talker.
I can look back upon myself with, I believe, an almost perfect
detachment, things have so changed that indeed now I am another being,
with scarce anything in common with that boastful foolish youngster
whose troubles I recall. I see him vulgarly theatrical, egotistical,
insincere, indeed I do not like him save with that instinctive material
sympathy that is the fruit of incessant intimacy. Because he was myself
I may be able to feel and write understandingly about motives that will
put him out of sympathy with nearly every reader, but why should I
palliate or defend his quality?
Always, I say, I did the talking, and it would have amazed me beyond
measure if any one had told me that mine was not the greater
intelligence in these wordy encounters. Parload was a quiet youth, and
stiff and restrained in all things, while I had that supreme gift for
young men and democracies, the gift of copious expression. Parload I
diagnosed in my secret heart as a trifle dull; he posed as pregnant
quiet, I thought, and was obsessed by the congenial notion of
“scientific caution.” I did not remark that while my hands were chiefly
useful for gesticulation or holding a pen Parload’s hands could do all
sorts of things, and I did not think therefore that fibers must run
from those fingers to something in his brain. Nor, though I bragged
perpetually of my shorthand, of my literature, of my indispensable
share in Rawdon’s business, did Parload lay stress on the conics and
calculus he “mugged” in the organized science school. Parload is a
famous man now, a great figure in a great time, his work upon
intersecting radiations has broadened the intellectual horizon of
mankind for ever, and I, who am at best a hewer of intellectual wood, a
drawer of living water, can smile, and he can smile, to think how I
patronized and posed and jabbered over him in the darkness of those
early days.
That night I was shrill and eloquent beyond measure. Rawdon was, of
course, the hub upon which I went round—Rawdon and the Rawdonesque
employer and the injustice of “wages slavery” and all the immediate
conditions of that industrial blind alley up which it seemed our lives
were thrust. But ever and again I glanced at other things. Nettie was
always there in the background of my mind, regarding me enigmatically.
It was part of my pose to Parload that I had a romantic love-affair
somewhere away beyond the sphere of our intercourse, and that note gave
a Byronic resonance to many of the nonsensical things I produced for
his astonishment.
I will not weary you with too detailed an account of the talk of a
foolish youth who was also distressed and unhappy, and whose voice was
balm for the humiliations that smarted in his eyes. Indeed, now in many
particulars I cannot disentangle this harangue of which I tell from
many of the things I may have said in other talks to Parload. For
example, I forget if it was then or before or afterwards that, as it
were by accident, I let out what might be taken as an admission that I
was addicted to drugs.
“You shouldn’t do that,” said Parload, suddenly. “It won’t do to poison
your brains with that.”
My brains, my eloquence, were to be very important assets to our party
in the coming revolution. . . .
But one thing does clearly belong to this particular conversation I am
recalling. When I started out it was quite settled in the back of my
mind that I must not leave Rawdon’s. I simply wanted to abuse my
employer to Parload. But I talked myself quite out of touch with all
the cogent reasons there were for sticking to my place, and I got home
that night irrevocably committed to a spirited—not to say a
defiant—policy with my employer.
“I can’t stand Rawdon’s much longer,” I said to Parload by way of a
flourish.
“There’s hard times coming,” said Parload.
“Next winter.”
“Sooner. The Americans have been overproducing, and they mean to dump.
The iron trade is going to have convulsions.”
“I don’t care. Pot-banks are steady.”
“With a corner in borax? No. I’ve heard—”
“What have you heard?”
“Office secrets. But it’s no secret there’s trouble coming to potters.
There’s been borrowing and speculation. The masters don’t stick to one
business as they used to do. I can tell that much. Half the valley may
be ‘playing’ before two months are out.” Parload delivered himself of
this unusually long speech in his most pithy and weighty manner.
“Playing” was our local euphemism for a time when there was no work and
no money for a man, a time of stagnation and dreary hungry loafing day
after day. Such interludes seemed in those days a necessary consequence
of industrial organization.
“You’d better stick to Rawdon’s,” said Parload.
“Ugh,” said I, affecting a noble disgust.
“There’ll be trouble,” said Parload.
“Who cares?” said I. “Let there be trouble—the more the better. This
system has got to end, sooner or later. These capitalists with their
speculation and corners and trusts make things go from bad to worse.
Why should I cower in Rawdon’s office, like a frightened dog, while
hunger walks the streets? Hunger is the master revolutionary. When he
comes we ought to turn out and salute him. Anyway, _I’m_ going to do so
now.”
“That’s all very well,” began Parload.
“I’m tired of it,” I said. “I want to come to grips with all these
Rawdons. I think perhaps if I was hungry and savage I could talk to
hungry men—”
“There’s your mother,” said Parload, in his slow judicial way.
That _was_ a difficulty.
I got over it by a rhetorical turn. “Why should one sacrifice the
future of the world—why should one even sacrifice one’s own
future—because one’s mother is totally destitute of imagination?”
§ 5
It was late when I parted from Parload and came back to my own home.
Our house stood in a highly respectable little square near the Clayton
parish church. Mr. Gabbitas, the curate of all work, lodged on our
ground floor, and upstairs there was an old lady, Miss Holroyd, who
painted flowers on china and maintained her blind sister in an adjacent
room; my mother and I lived in the basement and slept in the attics.
The front of the house was veiled by a Virginian creeper that defied
the Clayton air and clustered in untidy dependent masses over the
wooden porch.
As I came up the steps I had a glimpse of Mr. Gabbitas printing
photographs by candle light in his room. It was the chief delight of
his little life to spend his holiday abroad in the company of a queer
little snap-shot camera, and to return with a great multitude of foggy
and sinister negatives that he had made in beautiful and interesting
places. These the camera company would develop for him on advantageous
terms, and he would spend his evenings the year through in printing
from them in order to inflict copies upon his undeserving friends.
There was a long frameful of his work in the Clayton National School,
for example, inscribed in old English lettering, “Italian Travel
Pictures, by the Rev. E. B. Gabbitas.” For this it seemed he lived and
traveled and had his being. It was his only real joy. By his shaded
light I could see his sharp little nose, his little pale eyes behind
his glasses, his mouth pursed up with the endeavor of his employment.
“Hireling Liar,” I muttered, for was not he also part of the system,
part of the scheme of robbery that made wages serfs of Parload and
me?—though his share in the proceedings was certainly small.
“Hireling Liar,” said I, standing in the darkness, outside even his
faint glow of traveled culture. . .
My mother let me in.
She looked at me, mutely, because she knew there was something wrong
and that it was no use for her to ask what.
“Good night, mummy,” said I, and kissed her a little roughly, and lit
and took my candle and went off at once up the staircase to bed, not
looking back at her.
“I’ve kept some supper for you, dear.”
“Don’t want any supper.”
“But, dearie———”
“Good night, mother,” and I went up and slammed my door upon her, blew
out my candle, and lay down at once upon my bed, lay there a long time
before I got up to undress.
There were times when that dumb beseeching of my mother’s face
irritated me unspeakably. It did so that night. I felt I had to
struggle against it, that I could not exist if I gave way to its
pleadings, and it hurt me and divided me to resist it, almost beyond
endurance. It was clear to me that I had to think out for myself
religious problems, social problems, questions of conduct, questions of
expediency, that her poor dear simple beliefs could not help me at
all—and she did not understand! Hers was the accepted religion, her
only social ideas were blind submissions to the accepted order—to laws,
to doctors, to clergymen, lawyers, masters, and all respectable persons
in authority over us, and with her to believe was to fear. She knew
from a thousand little signs—though still at times I went to church
with her—that I was passing out of touch of all these things that ruled
her life, into some terrible unknown. From things I said she could
infer such clumsy concealments as I made. She felt my socialism, felt
my spirit in revolt against the accepted order, felt the impotent
resentments that filled me with bitterness against all she held sacred.
Yet, you know, it was not her dear gods she sought to defend so much as
me! She seemed always to be wanting to say to me, “Dear, I know it’s
hard—but revolt is harder. Don’t make war on it, dear—don’t! Don’t do
anything to offend it. I’m sure it will hurt you if you do—it will hurt
you if you do.”
She had been cowed into submission, as so many women of that time had
been, by the sheer brutality of the accepted thing. The existing order
dominated her into a worship of abject observances. It had bent her,
aged her, robbed her of eyesight so that at fifty-five she peered
through cheap spectacles at my face, and saw it only dimly, filled her
with a habit of anxiety, made her hands——— Her poor dear hands! Not in
the whole world now could you find a woman with hands so grimy, so
needle-worn, so misshapen by toil, so chapped and coarsened, so evilly
entreated. . . . At any rate, there is this I can say for myself, that
my bitterness against the world and fortune was for her sake as well as
for my own.
Yet that night I pushed by her harshly. I answered her curtly, left her
concerned and perplexed in the passage, and slammed my door upon her.
And for a long time I lay raging at the hardship and evil of life, at
the contempt of Rawdon, and the loveless coolness of Nettie’s letter,
at my weakness and insignificance, at the things I found intolerable,
and the things I could not mend. Over and over went my poor little
brain, tired out and unable to stop on my treadmill of troubles.
Nettie. Rawdon. My mother. Gabbitas. Nettie. . .
Suddenly I came upon emotional exhaustion. Some clock was striking
midnight. After all, I was young; I had these quick transitions. I
remember quite distinctly, I stood up abruptly, undressed very quickly
in the dark, and had hardly touched my pillow again before I was
asleep.
But how my mother slept that night I do not know.
Oddly enough, I do not blame myself for behaving like this to my
mother, though my conscience blames me acutely for my arrogance to
Parload. I regret my behavior to my mother before the days of the
Change, it is a scar among my memories that will always be a little
painful to the end of my days, but I do not see how something of the
sort was to be escaped under those former conditions. In that time of
muddle and obscurity people were overtaken by needs and toil and hot
passions before they had the chance of even a year or so of clear
thinking; they settled down to an intense and strenuous application to
some partial but immediate duty, and the growth of thought ceased in
them. They set and hardened into narrow ways. Few women remained
capable of a new idea after five and twenty, few men after thirty-one
or two. Discontent with the thing that existed was regarded as immoral,
it was certainly an annoyance, and the only protest against it, the
only effort against that universal tendency in all human institutions
to thicken and clog, to work loosely and badly, to rust and weaken
towards catastrophes, came from the young—the crude unmerciful young.
It seemed in those days to thoughtful men the harsh law of being—that
either we must submit to our elders and be stifled, or disregard them,
disobey them, thrust them aside, and make our little step of progress
before we too ossified and became obstructive in our turn.
My pushing past my mother, my irresponsive departure to my own silent
meditations, was, I now perceive, a figure of the whole hard
relationship between parents and son in those days. There appeared no
other way; that perpetually recurring tragedy was, it seemed, part of
the very nature of the progress of the world. We did not think then
that minds might grow ripe without growing rigid, or children honor
their parents and still think for themselves. We were angry and hasty
because we stifled in the darkness, in a poisoned and vitiated air.
That deliberate animation of the intelligence which is now the
universal quality, that vigor with consideration, that judgment with
confident enterprise which shine through all our world, were things
disintegrated and unknown in the corrupting atmosphere of our former
state.
(So the first fascicle ended. I put it aside and looked for the second.
“Well?” said the man who wrote.
“This is fiction?”
“It’s my story.”
“But you— Amidst this beauty— You are not this ill-conditioned,
squalidly bred lad of whom I have been reading?”
He smiled. “There intervenes a certain Change,” he said. “Have I not
hinted at that?”
I hesitated upon a question, then saw the second fascicle at hand, and
picked it up.)
CHAPTER THE SECOND
NETTIE
§ 1
I cannot now remember (_the story resumed_), what interval separated
that evening on which Parload first showed me the comet—I think I only
pretended to see it then—and the Sunday afternoon I spent at
Checkshill.
Between the two there was time enough for me to give notice and leave
Rawdon’s, to seek for some other situation very strenuously in vain, to
think and say many hard and violent things to my mother and to Parload,
and to pass through some phases of very profound wretchedness. There
must have been a passionate correspondence with Nettie, but all the
froth and fury of that has faded now out of my memory. All I have clear
now is that I wrote one magnificent farewell to her, casting her off
forever, and that I got in reply a prim little note to say, that even
if there was to be an end to everything, that was no excuse for writing
such things as I had done, and then I think I wrote again in a vein I
considered satirical. To that she did not reply. That interval was at
least three weeks, and probably four, because the comet which had been
on the first occasion only a dubious speck in the sky, certainly
visible only when it was magnified, was now a great white presence,
brighter than Jupiter, and casting a shadow on its own account. It was
now actively present in the world of human thought, every one was
talking about it, every one was looking for its waxing splendor as the
sun went down—the papers, the music-halls, the hoardings, echoed it.
Yes; the comet was already dominant before I went over to make
everything clear to Nettie. And Parload had spent two hoarded pounds in
buying himself a spectroscope, so that he could see for himself, night
after night, that mysterious, that stimulating line—the unknown line in
the green. How many times I wonder did I look at the smudgy, quivering
symbol of the unknown things that were rushing upon us out of the
inhuman void, before I rebelled? But at last I could stand it no
longer, and I reproached Parload very bitterly for wasting his time in
“astronomical dilettantism.”
“Here,” said I. “We’re on the verge of the biggest lock-out in the
history of this countryside; here’s distress and hunger coming, here’s
all the capitalistic competitive system like a wound inflamed, and you
spend your time gaping at that damned silly streak of nothing in the
sky!”
Parload stared at me. “Yes, I do,” he said slowly, as though it was a
new idea. “Don’t I? . . . I wonder why.”
“_I_ want to start meetings of an evening on Howden’s Waste.”
“You think they’d listen?”
“They’d listen fast enough now.”
“They didn’t before,” said Parload, looking at his pet instrument.
“There was a demonstration of unemployed at Swathinglea on Sunday. They
got to stone throwing.”
Parload said nothing for a little while and I said several things. He
seemed to be considering something.
“But, after all,” he said at last, with an awkward movement towards his
spectroscope, “that does signify something.”
“The comet?”
“Yes.”
“What can it signify? You don’t want me to believe in astrology. What
does it matter what flames in the heavens—when men are starving on
earth?”
“It’s—it’s science.”
“Science! What we want now is socialism—not science.”
He still seemed reluctant to give up his comet.
“Socialism’s all right,” he said, “but if that thing up there _was_ to
hit the earth it might matter.”
“Nothing matters but human beings.”
“Suppose it killed them all.”
“Oh,” said I, “that’s Rot,”
“I wonder,” said Parload, dreadfully divided in his allegiance.
He looked at the comet. He seemed on the verge of repeating his growing
information about the nearness of the paths of the earth and comet, and
all that might ensue from that. So I cut in with something I had got
out of a now forgotten writer called Ruskin, a volcano of beautiful
language and nonsensical suggestions, who prevailed very greatly with
eloquent excitable young men in those days. Something it was about the
insignificance of science and the supreme importance of Life. Parload
stood listening, half turned towards the sky with the tips of his
fingers on his spectroscope. He seemed to come to a sudden decision.
“No. I don’t agree with you, Leadford,” he said. “You don’t understand
about science.”
Parload rarely argued with that bluntness of opposition. I was so used
to entire possession of our talk that his brief contradiction struck me
like a blow. “Don’t agree with me!” I repeated.
“No,” said Parload
“But how?”
“I believe science is of more importance than socialism,” he said.
“Socialism’s a theory. Science—science is something more.”
And that was really all he seemed to be able to say.
We embarked upon one of those queer arguments illiterate young men used
always to find so heating. Science or Socialism? It was, of course,
like arguing which is right, left handedness or a taste for onions, it
was altogether impossible opposition. But the range of my rhetoric
enabled me at last to exasperate Parload, and his mere repudiation of
my conclusions sufficed to exasperate me, and we ended in the key of a
positive quarrel. “Oh, very well!” said I. “So long as I know where we
are!”
I slammed his door as though I dynamited his house, and went raging
down the street, but I felt that he was already back at the window
worshiping his blessed line in the green, before I got round the
corner.