She had been very sleepless that night, she said, and took the reports
of the falling stars for shooting; there had been rioting in Clayton
and all through Swathinglea all day, and so she got out of bed to look.
She had a dim sense that I was in all such troubles.
But she was not looking when the Change came.
“When I saw the stars a-raining down, dear,” she said, “and thought of
you out in it, I thought there’d be no harm in saying a prayer for you,
dear? I thought you wouldn’t mind that.”
And so I got another of my pictures—the green vapors come and go, and
there by her patched coverlet that dear old woman kneels and droops,
still clasping her poor gnarled hands in the attitude of prayer—prayer
to IT—for me!
Through the meagre curtains and blinds of the flawed refracting window
I see the stars above the chimneys fade, the pale light of dawn creeps
into the sky, and her candle flares and dies. . . .
That also went with me through the stillness—that silent kneeling
figure, that frozen prayer to God to shield me, silent in a silent
world, rushing through the emptiness of space. . . .
§ 6
With the dawn that awakening went about the earth. I have told how it
came to me, and how I walked in wonder through the transfigured
cornfields of Shaphambury. It came to every one. Near me, and for the
time, clear forgotten by me, Verrall and Nettie woke—woke near one
another, each heard before all other sounds the other’s voice amidst
the stillness, and the light. And the scattered people who had run to
and fro, and fallen on the beach of Bungalow village, awoke; the
sleeping villagers of Menton started, and sat up in that unwonted
freshness and newness; the contorted figures in the garden, with the
hymn still upon their lips, stirred amidst the flowers, and touched
each other timidly, and thought of Paradise. My mother found herself
crouched against the bed, and rose—rose with a glad invincible
conviction of accepted prayer. . . .
Already, when it came to us, the soldiers, crowded between the lines of
dusty poplars along the road to Allarmont, were chatting and sharing
coffee with the French riflemen, who had hailed them from their
carefully hidden pits among the vineyards up the slopes of Beauville. A
certain perplexity had come to these marksmen, who had dropped asleep
tensely ready for the rocket that should wake the whirr and rattle of
their magazines. At the sight and sound of the stir and human confusion
in the roadway below, it had come to each man individually that he
could not shoot. One conscript, at least, has told his story of his
awakening, and how curious he thought the rifle there beside him in his
pit, how he took it on his knees to examine. Then, as his memory of its
purpose grew clearer, he dropped the thing, and stood up with a kind of
joyful horror at the crime escaped, to look more closely at the men he
was to have assassinated. “_Brave types_,” he thought, they looked for
such a fate. The summoning rocket never flew. Below, the men did not
fall into ranks again, but sat by the roadside, or stood in groups
talking, discussing with a novel incredulity the ostensible causes of
the war. “The Emperor!” said they; and “Oh, nonsense! We’re civilized
men. Get some one else for this job! . . . Where’s the coffee?”
The officers held their own horses, and talked to the men frankly,
regardless of discipline. Some Frenchmen out of the rifle-pits came
sauntering down the hill. Others stood doubtfully, rifles still in
hand. Curious faces scanned these latter. Little arguments sprang as:
“Shoot at us! Nonsense! They’re respectable French citizens.” There is
a picture of it all, very bright and detailed in the morning light, in
the battle gallery amidst the ruins at old Nancy, and one sees the
old-world uniform of the “soldier,” the odd caps and belts and boots,
the ammunition-belt, the water-bottle, the sort of tourist’s pack the
men carried, a queer elaborate equipment. The soldiers had awakened one
by one, first one and then another. I wonder sometimes whether,
perhaps, if the two armies had come awake in an instant, the battle, by
mere habit and inertia, might not have begun. But the men who waked
first, sat up, looked about them in astonishment, had time to think a
little. . . .
§ 7
Everywhere there was laughter, everywhere tears.
Men and women in the common life, finding themselves suddenly lit and
exalted, capable of doing what had hitherto been impossible, incapable
of doing what had hitherto been irresistible, happy, hopeful,
unselfishly energetic, rejected altogether the supposition that this
was merely a change in the blood and material texture of life. They
denied the bodies God had given them, as once the Upper Nile savages
struck out their canine teeth, because these made them like the beasts.
They declared that this was the coming of a spirit, and nothing else
would satisfy their need for explanations. And in a sense the Spirit
came. The Great Revival sprang directly from the Change—the last, the
deepest, widest, and most enduring of all the vast inundations of
religious emotion that go by that name.
But indeed it differed essentially from its innumerable predecessors.
The former revivals were a phase of fever, this was the first movement
of health, it was altogether quieter, more intellectual, more private,
more religious than any of those others. In the old time, and more
especially in the Protestant countries where the things of religion
were outspoken, and the absence of confession and well-trained priests
made religious states of emotion explosive and contagious, revivalism
upon various scales was a normal phase in the religious life, revivals
were always going on—now a little disturbance of consciences in a
village, now an evening of emotion in a Mission Room, now a great storm
that swept a continent, and now an organized effort that came to town
with bands and banners and handbills and motor-cars for the saving of
souls. Never at any time did I take part in nor was I attracted by any
of these movements. My nature, although passionate, was too critical
(or sceptical if you like, for it amounts to the same thing) and shy to
be drawn into these whirls; but on several occasions Parload and I sat,
scoffing, but nevertheless disturbed, in the back seats of revivalist
meetings.
I saw enough of them to understand their nature, and I am not surprised
to learn now that before the comet came, all about the world, even
among savages, even among cannibals, these same, or at any rate closely
similar, periodic upheavals went on. The world was stifling; it was in
a fever, and these phenomena were neither more nor less than the
instinctive struggle of the organism against the ebb of its powers, the
clogging of its veins, the limitation of its life. Invariably these
revivals followed periods of sordid and restricted living. Men obeyed
their base immediate motives until the world grew unendurably bitter.
Some disappointment, some thwarting, lit up for them—darkly indeed, but
yet enough for indistinct vision—the crowded squalor, the dark
inclosure of life. A sudden disgust with the insensate smallness of the
old-world way of living, a realization of sin, a sense of the
unworthiness of all individual things, a desire for something
comprehensive, sustaining, something greater, for wider communions and
less habitual things, filled them. Their souls, which were shaped for
wider issues, cried out suddenly amidst the petty interests, the narrow
prohibitions, of life, “Not this! not this!” A great passion to escape
from the jealous prison of themselves, an inarticulate, stammering,
weeping passion shook them. . . .
I have seen——— I remember how once in Clayton Calvinistic Methodist
chapel I saw—his spotty fat face strangely distorted under the
flickering gas-flares—old Pallet the ironmonger repent. He went to the
form of repentance, a bench reserved for such exhibitions, and
slobbered out his sorrow and disgust for some sexual indelicacy—he was
a widower—and I can see now how his loose fat body quivered and swayed
with his grief. He poured it out to five hundred people, from whom in
common times he hid his every thought and purpose. And it is a fact, it
shows where reality lay, that we two youngsters laughed not at all at
that blubbering grotesque, we did not even think the distant shadow of
a smile. We two sat grave and intent—perhaps wondering.
Only afterward and with an effort did we scoff. . . .
Those old-time revivals were, I say, the convulsive movements of a body
that suffocates. They are the clearest manifestations from before the
Change of a sense in all men that things were not right. But they were
too often but momentary illuminations. Their force spent itself in
inco-ordinated shouting, gesticulations, tears. They were but flashes
of outlook. Disgust of the narrow life, of all baseness, took shape in
narrowness and baseness. The quickened soul ended the night a
hypocrite; prophets disputed for precedence; seductions, it is
altogether indisputable, were frequent among penitents! and Ananias
went home converted and returned with a falsified gift. And it was
almost universal that the converted should be impatient and immoderate,
scornful of reason and a choice of expedients, opposed to balance,
skill, and knowledge. Incontinently full of grace, like thin old
wine-skins overfilled, they felt they must burst if once they came into
contact with hard fact and sane direction.
So the former revivals spent themselves, but the Great Revival did not
spend itself, but grew to be, for the majority of Christendom at least,
the permanent expression of the Change. For many it has taken the shape
of an outright declaration that this was the Second Advent—it is not
for me to discuss the validity of that suggestion, for nearly all it
has amounted to an enduring broadening of all the issues of life. . . .
§ 8
One irrelevant memory comes back to me, irrelevant, and yet by some
subtle trick of quality it summarizes the Change for me. It is the
memory of a woman’s very beautiful face, a woman with a flushed face
and tear-bright eyes who went by me without speaking, rapt in some
secret purpose. I passed her when in the afternoon of the first day,
struck by a sudden remorse, I went down to Menton to send a telegram to
my mother telling her all was well with me. Whither this woman went I
do not know, nor whence she came; I never saw her again, and only her
face, glowing with that new and luminous resolve, stands out for me. .
. .
But that expression was the world’s.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE CABINET COUNCIL
§ 1
And what a strange unprecedented thing was that cabinet council at
which I was present, the council that was held two days later in
Melmount’s bungalow, and which convened the conference to frame the
constitution of the World State. I was there because it was convenient
for me to stay with Melmount. I had nowhere to go particularly, and
there was no one at his bungalow, to which his broken ankle confined
him, but a secretary and a valet to help him to begin his share of the
enormous labors that evidently lay before the rulers of the world. I
wrote shorthand, and as there was not even a phonograph available, I
went in so soon as his ankle had been dressed, and sat at his desk to
write at his dictation. It is characteristic of the odd slackness that
went with the spasmodic violence of the old epoch, that the secretary
could not use shorthand and that there was no telephone whatever in the
place. Every message had to be taken to the village post-office in that
grocer’s shop at Menton, half a mile away. . . . So I sat in the back
of Melmount’s room, his desk had been thrust aside, and made such
memoranda as were needed. At that time his room seemed to me the most
beautifully furnished in the world, and I could identify now the vivid
cheerfulness of the chintz of the sofa on which the great statesman lay
just in front of me, the fine rich paper, the red sealing-wax, the
silver equipage of the desk I used. I know now that my presence in that
room was a strange and remarkable thing, the open door, even the coming
and going of Parker the secretary, innovations. In the old days a
cabinet council was a secret conclave, secrecy and furtiveness were in
the texture of all public life. In the old days everybody was always
keeping something back from somebody, being wary and cunning,
prevaricating, misleading—for the most part for no reason at all.
Almost unnoticed, that secrecy had dropped out of life.
I close my eyes and see those men again, hear their deliberating
voices. First I see them a little diffusely in the cold explicitness of
daylight, and then concentrated and drawn together amidst the shadow
and mystery about shaded lamps. Integral to this and very clear is the
memory of biscuit crumbs and a drop of spilt water, that at first stood
shining upon and then sank into the green table-cloth. . . .
I remember particularly the figure of Lord Adisham. He came to the
bungalow a day before the others, because he was Melmount’s personal
friend. Let me describe this statesman to you, this one of the fifteen
men who made the last war. He was the youngest member of the
Government, and an altogether pleasant and sunny man of forty. He had a
clear profile to his clean gray face, a smiling eye, a friendly,
careful voice upon his thin, clean-shaven lips, an easy disabusing
manner. He had the perfect quality of a man who had fallen easily into
a place prepared for him. He had the temperament of what we used to
call a philosopher—an indifferent, that is to say. The Change had
caught him at his week-end recreation, fly-fishing; and, indeed, he
said, I remember, that he recovered to find himself with his head
within a yard of the water’s brim. In times of crisis Lord Adisham
invariably went fly-fishing at the week-end to keep his mind in tone,
and when there was no crisis then there was nothing he liked so much to
do as fly-fishing, and so, of course, as there was nothing to prevent
it, he fished. He came resolved, among other things, to give up
fly-fishing altogether. I was present when he came to Melmount, and
heard him say as much; and by a more naive route it was evident that he
had arrived at the same scheme of intention as my master. I left them
to talk, but afterward I came back to take down their long telegrams to
their coming colleagues. He was, no doubt, as profoundly affected as
Melmount by the Change, but his tricks of civility and irony and
acceptable humor had survived the Change, and he expressed his altered
attitude, his expanded emotions, in a quaint modification of the
old-time man-of-the-world style, with excessive moderation, with a
trained horror of the enthusiasm that swayed him.
These fifteen men who ruled the British Empire were curiously unlike
anything I had expected, and I watched them intently whenever my
services were not in request. They made a peculiar class at that time,
these English politicians and statesmen, a class that has now
completely passed away. In some respects they were unlike the statesmen
of any other region of the world, and I do not find that any really
adequate account remains of them. . . . Perhaps you are a reader of the
old books. If so, you will find them rendered with a note of hostile
exaggeration by Dickens in “Bleak House,” with a mingling of gross
flattery and keen ridicule by Disraeli, who ruled among them
accidentally by misunderstanding them and pleasing the court, and all
their assumptions are set forth, portentously, perhaps, but truthfully,
so far as people of the “permanent official” class saw them, in the
novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward. All these books are still in this world
and at the disposal of the curious, and in addition the philosopher
Bagehot and the picturesque historian Macaulay give something of their
method of thinking, the novelist Thackeray skirts the seamy side of
their social life, and there are some good passages of irony, personal
descriptions, and reminiscence to be found in the “Twentieth Century
Garner” from the pens of such writers, for example, as Sidney Low. But
a picture of them as a whole is wanting. Then they were too near and
too great; now, very rapidly, they have become incomprehensible.
We common people of the old time based our conception of our statesmen
almost entirely on the caricatures that formed the most powerful weapon
in political controversy. Like almost every main feature of the old
condition of things these caricatures were an unanticipated
development, they were a sort of parasitic outgrowth from, which had
finally altogether replaced, the thin and vague aspirations of the
original democratic ideals. They presented not only the personalities
who led our public life, but the most sacred structural conceptions of
that life, in ludicrous, vulgar, and dishonorable aspects that in the
end came near to destroying entirely all grave and honorable emotion or
motive toward the State. The state of Britain was represented nearly
always by a red-faced, purse-proud farmer with an enormous belly, that
fine dream of freedom, the United States, by a cunning, lean-faced
rascal in striped trousers and a blue coat. The chief ministers of
state were pickpockets, washerwomen, clowns, whales, asses, elephants,
and what not, and issues that affected the welfare of millions of men
were dressed and judged like a rally in some idiotic pantomime. A
tragic war in South Africa, that wrecked many thousand homes,
impoverished two whole lands, and brought death and disablement to
fifty thousand men, was presented as a quite comical quarrel between a
violent queer being named Chamberlain, with an eyeglass, an orchid, and
a short temper, and “old Kroojer,” an obstinate and very cunning old
man in a shocking bad hat. The conflict was carried through in a mood
sometimes of brutish irritability and sometimes of lax slovenliness,
the merry peculator plied his trade congenially in that asinine
squabble, and behind these fooleries and masked by them, marched
Fate—until at last the clowning of the booth opened and revealed—hunger
and suffering, brands burning and swords and shame. . . . These men had
come to fame and power in that atmosphere, and to me that day there was
the oddest suggestion in them of actors who have suddenly laid aside
grotesque and foolish parts; the paint was washed from their faces, the
posing put aside.
Even when the presentation was not frankly grotesque and degrading it
was entirely misleading. When I read of Laycock, for example, there
arises a picture of a large, active, if a little wrong-headed,
intelligence in a compact heroic body, emitting that “Goliath” speech
of his that did so much to precipitate hostilities, it tallies not at
all with the stammering, high-pitched, slightly bald, and very
conscience-stricken personage I saw, nor with Melmount’s contemptuous
first description of him. I doubt if the world at large will ever get a
proper vision of those men as they were before the Change. Each year
they pass more and more incredibly beyond our intellectual sympathy.
Our estrangement cannot, indeed, rob them of their portion in the past,
but it will rob them of any effect of reality. The whole of their
history becomes more and more foreign, more and more like some queer
barbaric drama played in a forgotten tongue. There they strut through
their weird metamorphoses of caricature, those premiers and presidents,
their height preposterously exaggerated by political buskins, their
faces covered by great resonant inhuman masks, their voices couched in
the foolish idiom of public utterance, disguised beyond any semblance
to sane humanity, roaring and squeaking through the public press. There
it stands, this incomprehensible faded show, a thing left on one side,
and now still and deserted by any interest, its many emptinesses as
inexplicable now as the cruelties of medieval Venice, the theology of
old Byzantium. And they ruled and influenced the lives of nearly a
quarter of mankind, these politicians, their clownish conflicts swayed
the world, made mirth perhaps, made excitement, and permitted—infinite
misery.
I saw these men quickened indeed by the Change, but still wearing the
queer clothing of the old time, the manners and conventions of the old
time; if they had disengaged themselves from the outlook of the old
time they still had to refer back to it constantly as a common
starting-point. My refreshed intelligence was equal to that, so that I
think I did indeed see them. There was Gorrell-Browning, the Chancellor
of the Duchy; I remember him as a big round-faced man, the essential
vanity and foolishness of whose expression, whose habit of voluminous
platitudinous speech, triumphed absurdly once or twice over the roused
spirit within. He struggled with it, he burlesqued himself, and
laughed. Suddenly he said simply, intensely—it was a moment for every
one of clean, clear pain, “I have been a vain and self-indulgent and
presumptuous old man. I am of little use here. I have given myself to
politics and intrigues, and life is gone from me.” Then for a long time
he sat still. There was Carton, the Lord Chancellor, a white-faced man
with understanding, he had a heavy, shaven face that might have stood
among the busts of the Caesars, a slow, elaborating voice, with
self-indulgent, slightly oblique, and triumphant lips, and a momentary,
voluntary, humorous twinkle. “We have to forgive,” he said. “We have to
forgive—even ourselves.”
These two were at the top corner of the table, so that I saw their
faces well. Madgett, the Home Secretary, a smaller man with wrinkled
eyebrows and a frozen smile on his thin wry mouth, came next to Carton;
he contributed little to the discussion save intelligent comments, and
when the electric lights above glowed out, the shadows deepened queerly
in his eye-sockets and gave him the quizzical expression of an ironical
goblin. Next him was that great peer, the Earl of Richover, whose
self-indulgent indolence had accepted the _rôle_ of a twentieth-century
British Roman patrician of culture, who had divided his time almost
equally between his jockeys, politics, and the composition of literary
studies in the key of his _rôle_. “We have done nothing worth doing,”
he said. “As for me, I have cut a figure!” He reflected—no doubt on his
ample patrician years, on the fine great houses that had been his
setting, the teeming race-courses that had roared his name, the
enthusiastic meetings he had fed with fine hopes, the futile Olympian
beginnings. . . . “I have been a fool,” he said compactly. They heard
him in a sympathetic and respectful silence.
Gurker, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was partially occulted, so far
as I was concerned, by the back of Lord Adisham. Ever and again Gurker
protruded into the discussion, swaying forward, a deep throaty voice, a
big nose, a coarse mouth with a drooping everted lower lip, eyes
peering amidst folds and wrinkles. He made his confession for his race.
“We Jews,” he said, “have gone through the system of this world,
creating nothing, consolidating many things, destroying much. Our
racial self-conceit has been monstrous. We seem to have used our ample
coarse intellectuality for no other purpose than to develop and master
and maintain the convention of property, to turn life into a sort of
mercantile chess and spend our winnings grossly. . . . We have had no
sense of service to mankind. Beauty which is godhead—we made it a
possession.”
These men and these sayings particularly remain in my memory. Perhaps,
indeed, I wrote them down at the time, but that I do not now remember.
How Sir Digby Privet, Revel, Markheimer, and the others sat I do not
now recall; they came in as voices, interruptions, imperfectly assigned
comments. . . .
One got a queer impression that except perhaps for Gurker or Revel
these men had not particularly wanted the power they held; had desired
to do nothing very much in the positions they had secured. They had
found themselves in the cabinet, and until this moment of illumination
they had not been ashamed; but they had made no ungentlemanly fuss
about the matter. Eight of that fifteen came from the same school, had
gone through an entirely parallel education; some Greek linguistics,
some elementary mathematics, some emasculated “science,” a little
history, a little reading in the silent or timidly orthodox English
literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries,
all eight had imbibed the same dull gentlemanly tradition of behavior;
essentially boyish, unimaginative—with neither keen swords nor art in
it, a tradition apt to slobber into sentiment at a crisis and make a
great virtue of a simple duty rather clumsily done. None of these eight
had made any real experiments with life, they had lived in blinkers,
they had been passed from nurse to governess, from governess to
preparatory school, from Eton to Oxford, from Oxford to the
politico-social routine. Even their vices and lapses had been according
to certain conceptions of good form. They had all gone to the races
surreptitiously from Eton, had all cut up to town from Oxford to see
life—music-hall life—had all come to heel again. Now suddenly they
discovered their limitations. . . .
“What are we to do?” asked Melmount. “We have awakened; this empire in
our hands. . . .” I know this will seem the most fabulous of all the
things I have to tell of the old order, but, indeed, I saw it with my
eyes, I heard it with my ears. It is a fact that this group of men who
constituted the Government of one-fifth of the habitable land of the
earth, who ruled over a million of armed men, who had such navies as
mankind had never seen before, whose empire of nations, tongues,
peoples still dazzles in these greater days, had no common idea
whatever of what they meant to do with the world. They had been a
Government for three long years, and before the Change came to them it
had never even occurred to them that it was necessary to have a common
idea. There was no common idea at all. That great empire was no more
than a thing adrift, an aimless thing that ate and drank and slept and
bore arms, and was inordinately proud of itself because it had chanced
to happen. It had no plan, no intention; it meant nothing at all. And
the other great empires adrift, perilously adrift like marine mines,
were in the self-same case. Absurd as a British cabinet council must
seem to you now, it was no whit more absurd than the controlling
ganglion, autocratic council, president’s committee, or what not, of
each of its blind rivals. . . .
§ 2
I remember as one thing that struck me very forcibly at the time, the
absence of any discussion, any difference of opinion, about the broad
principles of our present state. These men had lived hitherto in a
system of conventions and acquired motives, loyalty to a party, loyalty
to various secret agreements and understandings, loyalty to the Crown;
they had all been capable of the keenest attention to precedence, all
capable of the most complete suppression of subversive doubts and
inquiries, all had their religious emotions under perfect control. They
had seemed protected by invisible but impenetrable barriers from all
the heady and destructive speculations, the socialistic, republican,
and communistic theories that one may still trace through the
literature of the last days of the comet. But now it was as if the very
moment of the awakening those barriers and defences had vanished, as if
the green vapors had washed through their minds and dissolved and swept
away a hundred once rigid boundaries and obstacles. They had admitted
and assimilated at once all that was good in the ill-dressed
propagandas that had clamored so vehemently and vainly at the doors of
their minds in the former days. It was exactly like the awakening from
an absurd and limiting dream. They had come out together naturally and
inevitably upon the broad daylight platform of obvious and reasonable
agreement upon which we and all the order of our world now stand.
Let me try to give the chief things that had vanished from their minds.
There was, first, the ancient system of “ownership” that made such an
extraordinary tangle of our administration of the land upon which we
lived. In the old time no one believed in that as either just or
ideally convenient, but every one accepted it. The community which
lived upon the land was supposed to have waived its necessary
connection with the land, except in certain limited instances of
highway and common. All the rest of the land was cut up in the maddest
way into patches and oblongs and triangles of various sizes between a
hundred square miles and a few acres, and placed under the nearly
absolute government of a series of administrators called landowners.
They owned the land almost as a man now owns his hat; they bought it
and sold it, and cut it up like cheese or ham; they were free to ruin
it, or leave it waste, or erect upon it horrible and devastating
eyesores. If the community needed a road or a tramway, if it wanted a
town or a village in any position, nay, even if it wanted to go to and
fro, it had to do so by exorbitant treaties with each of the monarchs
whose territory was involved. No man could find foothold on the face of
the earth until he had paid toll and homage to one of them. They had
practically no relations and no duties to the nominal, municipal, or
national Government amidst whose larger areas their own dominions lay.
. . . This sounds, I know, like a lunatic’s dream, but mankind was that
lunatic; and not only in the old countries of Europe and Asia, where
this system had arisen out of the rational delegation of local control
to territorial magnates, who had in the universal baseness of those
times at last altogether evaded and escaped their duties, did it
obtain, but the “new countries,” as we called them then—the United
States of America, the Cape Colony, Australia, and New Zealand—spent
much of the nineteenth century in the frantic giving away of land for
ever to any casual person who would take it. Was there coal, was there
petroleum or gold, was there rich soil or harborage, or the site for a
fine city, these obsessed and witless Governments cried out for
scramblers, and a stream of shabby, tricky, and violent adventurers set
out to found a new section of the landed aristocracy of the world.
After a brief century of hope and pride, the great republic of the
United States of America, the hope as it was deemed of mankind, became
for the most part a drifting crowd of landless men; landlords and
railway lords, food lords (for the land is food) and mineral lords
ruled its life, gave it Universities as one gave coins to a mendicant,
and spent its resources upon such vain, tawdry, and foolish luxuries as
the world had never seen before. Here was a thing none of these
statesmen before the Change would have regarded as anything but the
natural order of the world, which not one of them now regarded as
anything but the mad and vanished illusion of a period of dementia.
And as it was with the question of the land, so was it also with a
hundred other systems and institutions and complicated and disingenuous
factors in the life of man. They spoke of trade, and I realized for the
first time there could be buying and selling that was no loss to any
man; they spoke of industrial organization, and one saw it under
captains who sought no base advantages. The haze of old associations,
of personal entanglements and habitual recognitions had been dispelled
from every stage and process of the social training of men. Things long
hidden appeared discovered with an amazing clearness and nakedness.
These men who had awakened, laughed dissolvent laughs, and the old
muddle of schools and colleges, books and traditions, the old fumbling,
half-figurative, half-formal teaching of the Churches, the complex of
weakening and confusing suggestions and hints, amidst which the pride
and honor of adolescence doubted and stumbled and fell, became nothing
but a curious and pleasantly faded memory. “There must be a common
training of the young,” said Richover; “a frank initiation. We have not
so much educated them as hidden things from them, and set traps. And it
might have been so easy—it can all be done so easily.”
That hangs in my memory as the refrain of that council, “It can all be
done so easily,” but when they said it then, it came to my ears with a
quality of enormous refreshment and power. It can all be done so
easily, given frankness, given courage. Time was when these platitudes
had the freshness and wonder of a gospel.
In this enlarged outlook the war with the Germans—that mythical,
heroic, armed female, Germany, had vanished from men’s imaginations—was
a mere exhausted episode. A truce had already been arranged by
Melmount, and these ministers, after some marveling reminiscences, set
aside the matter of peace as a mere question of particular
arrangements. . . . The whole scheme of the world’s government had
become fluid and provisional in their minds, in small details as in
great, the unanalyzable tangle of wards and vestries, districts and
municipalities, counties, states, boards, and nations, the interlacing,
overlapping, and conflicting authorities, the felt of little interests
and claims, in which an innumerable and insatiable multitude of
lawyers, agents, managers, bosses, organizers lived like fleas in a
dirty old coat, the web of the conflicts, jealousies, heated patchings
up and jobbings apart, of the old order—they flung it all on one side.
“What are the new needs?” said Melmount. “This muddle is too rotten to
handle. We’re beginning again. Well, let us begin afresh.”
§ 3
“Let us begin afresh!” This piece of obvious common sense seemed then
to me instinct with courage, the noblest of words. My heart went out to
him as he spoke. It was, indeed, that day as vague as it was valiant;
we did not at all see the forms of what we were thus beginning. All
that we saw was the clear inevitableness that the old order should end.
. . .
And then in a little space of time mankind in halting but effectual
brotherhood was moving out to make its world anew. Those early years,
those first and second decades of the new epoch, were in their daily
detail a time of rejoicing toil; one saw chiefly one’s own share in
that, and little of the whole. It is only now that I look back at it
all from these ripe years, from this high tower, that I see the
dramatic sequence of its changes, see the cruel old confusions of the
ancient time become clarified, simplified, and dissolve and vanish
away. Where is that old world now? Where is London, that somber city of
smoke and drifting darkness, full of the deep roar and haunting music
of disorder, with its oily, shining, mud-rimmed, barge-crowded river,
its black pinnacles and blackened dome, its sad wildernesses of
smut-grayed houses, its myriads of draggled prostitutes, its millions
of hurrying clerks? The very leaves upon its trees were foul with
greasy black defilements. Where is lime-white Paris, with its green and
disciplined foliage, its hard unflinching tastefulness, its smartly
organized viciousness, and the myriads of workers, noisily shod,
streaming over the bridges in the gray cold light of dawn. Where is New
York, the high city of clangor and infuriated energy, wind swept and
competition swept, its huge buildings jostling one another and
straining ever upward for a place in the sky, the fallen pitilessly
overshadowed. Where are its lurking corners of heavy and costly luxury,
the shameful bludgeoning bribing vice of its ill ruled underways, and
all the gaunt extravagant ugliness of its strenuous life? And where now
is Philadelphia, with its innumerable small and isolated homes, and
Chicago with its interminable blood-stained stockyards, its polyglot
underworld of furious discontent.
All these vast cities have given way and gone, even as my native
Potteries and the Black Country have gone, and the lives that were
caught, crippled, starved, and maimed amidst their labyrinths, their
forgotten and neglected maladjustments, and their vast, inhuman,
ill-conceived industrial machinery have escaped—to life. Those cities
of growth and accident are altogether gone, never a chimney smokes
about our world to-day, and the sound of the weeping of children who
toiled and hungered, the dull despair of overburdened women, the noise
of brute quarrels in alleys, all shameful pleasures and all the ugly
grossness of wealthy pride have gone with them, with the utter change
in our lives. As I look back into the past I see a vast exultant dust
of house-breaking and removal rise up into the clear air that followed
the hour of the green vapors, I live again the Year of Tents, the Year
of Scaffolding, and like the triumph of a new theme in a piece of
music—the great cities of our new days arise. Come Caerlyon and
Armedon, the twin cities of lower England, with the winding summer city
of the Thames between, and I see the gaunt dirt of old Edinburgh die to
rise again white and tall beneath the shadow of her ancient hill; and
Dublin too, reshaped, returning enriched, fair, spacious, the city of
rich laughter and warm hearts, gleaming gaily in a shaft of sunlight
through the soft warm rain. I see the great cities America has planned
and made; the Golden City, with ever-ripening fruit along its broad
warm ways, and the bell-glad City of a Thousand Spires. I see again as
I have seen, the city of theaters and meeting-places, the City of the
Sunlight Bight, and the new city that is still called Utah; and
dominated by its observatory dome and the plain and dignified lines of
the university façade upon the cliff, Martenābar the great white winter
city of the upland snows. And the lesser places, too, the townships,
the quiet resting-places, villages half forest with a brawl of streams
down their streets, villages laced with avenues of cedar, villages of
garden, of roses and wonderful flowers and the perpetual humming of
bees. And through all the world go our children, our sons the old world
would have made into servile clerks and shopmen, plough drudges and
servants; our daughters who were erst anaemic drudges, prostitutes,
sluts, anxiety-racked mothers or sere, repining failures; they go about
this world glad and brave, learning, living, doing, happy and
rejoicing, brave and free. I think of them wandering in the clear quiet
of the ruins of Rome, among the tombs of Egypt or the temples of
Athens, of their coming to Mainington and its strange happiness, to
Orba and the wonder of its white and slender tower. . . . But who can
tell of the fullness and pleasure of life, who can number all our new
cities in the world?—cities made by the loving hands of men for living
men, cities men weep to enter, so fair they are, so gracious and so
kind. . . .
Some vision surely of these things must have been vouchsafed me as I
sat there behind Melmount’s couch, but now my knowledge of accomplished
things has mingled with and effaced my expectations. Something indeed I
must have foreseen—or else why was my heart so glad?
BOOK THE THIRD
THE NEW WORLD
CHAPTER THE FIRST
LOVE AFTER THE CHANGE
§ 1
So far I have said nothing of Nettie. I have departed widely from my
individual story. I have tried to give you the effect of the change in
relation to the general framework of human life, its effect of swift,
magnificent dawn, of an overpowering letting in and inundation of
light, and the spirit of living. In my memory all my life before the
Change has the quality of a dark passage, with the dimmest side gleams
of beauty that come and go. The rest is dull pain and darkness. Then
suddenly the walls, the bitter confines, are smitten and vanish, and I
walk, blinded, perplexed, and yet rejoicing, in this sweet, beautiful
world, in its fair incessant variety, its satisfaction, its
opportunities, exultant in this glorious gift of life. Had I the power
of music I would make a world-wide _motif_ swell and amplify, gather to
itself this theme and that, and rise at last to sheer ecstasy of
triumph and rejoicing. It should be all sound, all pride, all the hope
of outsetting in the morning brightness, all the glee of unexpected
happenings, all the gladness of painful effort suddenly come to its
reward; it should be like blossoms new opened and the happy play of
children, like tearful, happy mothers holding their first-born, like
cities building to the sound of music, and great ships, all hung with
flags and wine bespattered, gliding down through cheering multitudes to
their first meeting with the sea. Through it all should march Hope,
confident Hope, radiant and invincible, until at last it would be the
triumph march of Hope the conqueror, coming with trumpetings and
banners through the wide-flung gates of the world.
And then out of that luminous haze of gladness comes Nettie,
transfigured.
So she came again to me—amazing, a thing incredibly forgotten.
She comes back, and Verrall is in her company. She comes back into my
memories now, just as she came back then, rather quaintly at first—at
first not seen very clearly, a little distorted by intervening things,
seen with a doubt, as I saw her through the slightly discolored panes
of crinkled glass in the window of the Menton post-office and grocer’s
shop. It was on the second day after the Change, and I had been sending
telegrams for Melmount, who was making arrangements for his departure
for Downing Street. I saw the two of them at first as small, flawed
figures. The glass made them seem curved, and it enhanced and altered
their gestures and paces. I felt it became me to say “Peace” to them,
and I went out, to the jangling of the door-bell. At the sight of me
they stopped short, and Verrall cried with the note of one who has
sought, “Here he is!” And Nettie cried, “Willie!”
I went toward them, and all the perspectives of my reconstructed
universe altered as I did so.
I seemed to see these two for the first time; how fine they were, how
graceful and human. It was as though I had never really looked at them
before, and, indeed, always before I had beheld them through a mist of
selfish passion. They had shared the universal darkness and dwarfing of
the former time; they shared the universal exaltation of the new. Now
suddenly Nettie, and the love of Nettie, a great passion for Nettie,
lived again in me. This change which had enlarged men’s hearts had made
no end to love. Indeed, it had enormously enlarged and glorified love.
She stepped into the center of that dream of world reconstruction that
filled my mind and took possession of it all. A little wisp of hair had
blown across her cheek, her lips fell apart in that sweet smile of
hers; her eyes were full of wonder, of a welcoming scrutiny, of an
infinitely courageous friendliness.
I took her outstretched hand, and wonder overwhelmed me. “I wanted to
kill you,” I said simply, trying to grasp that idea. It seemed now like
stabbing the stars, or murdering the sunlight.
“Afterward we looked for you,” said Verrall; “and we could not find
you. . . . We heard another shot.”
I turned my eyes to him, and Nettie’s hand fell from me. It was then I
thought of how they had fallen together, and what it must have been to
have awakened in that dawn with Nettie by one’s side. I had a vision of
them as I had glimpsed them last amidst the thickening vapors, close
together, hand in hand. The green hawks of the Change spread their
darkling wings above their last stumbling paces. So they fell. And
awoke—lovers together in a morning of Paradise. Who can tell how bright
the sunshine was to them, how fair the flowers, how sweet the singing
of the birds? . . .
This was the thought of my heart. But my lips were saying, “When I
awoke I threw my pistol away.” Sheer blankness kept my thoughts silent
for a little while; I said empty things. “I am very glad I did not kill
you—that you are here, so fair and well. . . .”
“I am going away back to Clayton on the day after to-morrow,” I said,
breaking away to explanations. “I have been writing shorthand here for
Melmount, but that is almost over now. . . .”
Neither of them said a word, and though all facts had suddenly ceased
to matter anything, I went on informatively, “He is to be taken to
Downing Street where there is a proper staff, so that there will be no
need of me. . . . Of course, you’re a little perplexed at my being with
Melmount. You see I met him—by accident—directly I recovered. I found
him with a broken ankle—in that lane. . . . I am to go now to the Four
Towns to help prepare a report. So that I am glad to see you both
again”—I found a catch in my voice—“to say good-bye to you, and wish
you well.”
This was after the quality of what had come into my mind when first I
saw them through the grocer’s window, but it was not what I felt and
thought as I said it. I went on saying it because otherwise there would
have been a gap. It had come to me that it was going to be hard to part
from Nettie. My words sounded with an effect of unreality. I stopped,
and we stood for a moment in silence looking at one another.
It was I, I think, who was discovering most. I was realizing for the
first time how little the Change had altered in my essential nature. I
had forgotten this business of love for a time in a world of wonder.
That was all. Nothing was lost from my nature, nothing had gone, only
the power of thought and restraint had been wonderfully increased and
new interests had been forced upon me. The Green Vapors had passed, our
minds were swept and garnished, but we were ourselves still, though
living in a new and finer air. My affinities were unchanged; Nettie’s
personal charm for me was only quickened by the enhancement of my
perceptions. In her presence, meeting her eyes, instantly my desire, no
longer frantic but sane, was awake again.
It was just like going to Checkshill in the old time, after writing
about socialism. . . .