THE STRANGERS’ HOUSE
During my brief journeys through the streets earlier in the day I had
been too conscious of my surprise and perplexity to examine my
surroundings with any concentration of mind. Now, standing on the middle
platform of what seemed to be one of the principal streets and traveled
at a speed of about eight miles an hour, I looked about me with
increasing astonishment. I do not know which attracted my attention
more, the crowds or the buildings. I asked David for information as we
proceeded, stating that I was unable to read the signs, as I was
acquainted only with the old alphabet. Seeing his incredulity, I added:
“When you are willing, I shall be glad to tell you my history, though I
shall hardly hope to be believed. For the present, let me say that I
know nothing at all of your modern civilization.”
“But surely in Russia—” David began, and checked himself. Thereafter he
seemed to admit the possibility that I was not dissembling, and to
consider me as a bona fide traveler from some interior Russian province.
“Our writing is syllabic,” he said. “We have gone the round of the
circle and now make the syllable the unit instead of the letter, as the
Assyrians did, and the Chinese.”
“And what is the purpose of this blue paint on the buildings?” I asked,
shielding my eyes from the dazzling, blue-white luster.
“Blue?” repeated David in surprise.
“There—and there.”
“Why, that is glow, of course,” he answered. “Surely you are not
color-blind, Arnold? Or can it be that in—where you came from they have
only the old seven colors in the spectrum?”
“From red to violet.”
He shook his head and looked at me whimsically. “We have had nine for at
least twenty years,” he said. “Mull, below red, and glow, above violet;
what our ancestors called ultra-violet and believed to be invisible,
though it was staring them in the face everywhere all the time. There
used to be a theory that the color sense has developed with
civilization. Don’t make any reference to that color-blindness of yours,
Arnold,” he continued, after a brief pause.
It occurred to me that he had not explained the choice of this color,
though he had named it.
“Here is the Bureau of Statistics,” he went on, as we traveled past
another of the interminable buildings. “This is the Bureau of Prints and
Indexes; there are more than a thousand million records within. This is
the Bureau of Economics; this of Pedigrees and Relationships; this of
Defective Germ-Plasm; and this is our Sixth District School.”
The streets were scrupulously clean; they occupied only the central part
of the space between the fronts of the buildings, that which would have
been called the pavement formerly, being used as resting and lounging
places.
“Here is our district store,” he added. “Would you like to look inside?”
I assented, and we stepped off the moving portion of the street into an
open space surrounded by telephone funnels, at which small groups of men
and women were listening. As he halted, a loud voice began calling:
“Latest news! Rain is expected. Don’t forget Freedom Day! Muster for
your amusement in Picnic Park, or the Council will make it hot for you!
The escaped defectives all caught and sent to the leathers. A foreign
spy captured this morning after a desperate resistance and now under
guard. The miserable defective has confessed, involving numerous others.
He is a low-class brach and a filthy degenerate. Boss Lembken is on the
job. Praise him!”
“Hurrah!” shouted the mob.
“Come,” said David, plucking me by the sleeve.
It was only then I realized that the reference was to me. I must have
uttered an indignant exclamation, for he drew me away hurriedly.
“Hush! You must keep your tongue guarded in public,” he whispered. “One
can hear at both ends of the telephone.”
“But it is a lie!” I said indignantly. “Who can spread such news as
that, and why?”
I noticed that one or two people were watching me curiously. Then,
glancing up, I was amazed to see my face outlined upon a screen beneath
a hood that formed a dark circle around it. It was an execrable
caricature, designed to arouse hate and contempt; and yet the likeness
was plainly discernible.
Somehow David got me away. “It will be all right,” he kept repeating.
“It doesn’t mean anything. See, here is our store.”
Bewildered, I allowed him to lead me toward the entrance of a large
building, before which a woman sat within a cage of crystal.
“Change pieces!” she cried at intervals, in a high-pitched voice.
“Change pieces or show brasses!”
“We change our money here,” David explained. “Purchases of more than
half a hektone are made on the credit system. Our brasses are
identification checks. The district clearing-house keeps the complete
record of each citizen’s financial status.”
I had expected to see all the products of the world spread out within. I
found, instead, only a single sample of each kind of merchandise, the
goods themselves being stored in warehouses. Seeing an excellent blue
overcoat of fine cheviot, I paid thirty ones for it, and David ordered a
similar coat to be sent to me at the Strangers’ House.
“Watch the street!” he said, as we emerged.
I perceived the passengers scrambling off the moving portion of the
roadway. A moment later the track began to travel in the opposite
direction.
“We reverse our streets according to the stream of travel,” said David.
“The mechanism is controlled by solar power, transmitted from the
Vosges.”
We journeyed for some five and twenty minutes by the new reckoning—what
would have been a quarter of an hour. We changed streets frequently, and
it seemed to me, although I could not be sure of it, that David
purposely selected a roundabout route. At length, we stopped in front of
a large building of the uniform height and style. Upon the front was
sculptured a man in a laborer’s blouse with a protecting hand laid upon
the head of one who cowered before him—presumably the stranger.
“I shall take you in by the basement and internal elevator,” said David,
“so as to give you a glimpse of our traffic system.”
We had passed numbers of subway entrances, with gentle ramps descending
into clean, white-walled passages, along which I had seen an endless
series of trucks proceeding on single rails. Beneath the Strangers’
House I saw the termination of a branch line; and, as we stood watching,
a porter in blue seized a small truck which had detached itself from the
rail, and, with a slight push, sent it spinning into a goods elevator.
“Gyroscopic action,” explained David. “Above this is the House kitchen,
connecting with the district sub-kitchen by means of a two-foot tube.”
And every now and then he would stop in the midst of his explanations
and cast that searching look at me, as if to inquire whether I could be
ignorant of all this.
We stepped into an elevator, David pressed a button, and the cage shot
up to the top story. Opposite us was a door with a bell at the side, as
in the old-fashioned apartment. David rang, and the door opened,
revealing a girl about eighteen years of age, who looked at me with
parted lips and an expression that was unmistakably fear.
“Arnold, this is my daughter Elizabeth,” said David, kissing her.
“Arnold is under our special care,” he continued. “He comes from a very
distant city outside the Federation, and is waiting to be ascribed. He
knows no more about civilization than if he had just awakened after a
sleep of a century.”
The girl shot a quick, dubious, searching glance at me. I met it
steadily, and she turned her eyes away. Again she looked at me, and my
gaze apparently reassured her, for she gave me her hand in a very
unaffected manner, and we went through a living-room into a simply
furnished dining-room. It much resembled one of my own century, except
that the furniture was in good taste; the curves and spirals and volutes
of our machine-carved chairs and tables were gone; the wall was of a
plain gray, without paper or pictures; the carpet was plain, and the
absence of curls and twists even on the handles of the cutlery was
extraordinarily restful. Between the two rooms was a small enclosed
space containing a telephone funnel with knobs and levers disposed about
it, and a dumb-waiter. The table linen was of a peculiar lusterless
black. Looking out of the window, I saw that the uppermost street ran
past it, and occasionally the hatless head of a pedestrian appeared.
“Anything new to you, Arnold?” inquired my host, as we took our places
at the table.
“Principally the color of the table linen,” I answered. “Black seems
strange to me.”
“Black! Do you call that black?” asked David in surprise. “Why, that is
mull, and not at all like black to me. For my part I prefer the
old-fashioned white, but two years ago, when the plans to dress us in
mull instead of blue were rescinded, the Wool and Linen bosses had
accumulated a large quantity of mull goods in the warehouses on
speculation, the loss of which would have hurt them badly—so we were
asked to use mull-colored table linen.”
“Do you like chicken?” inquired Elizabeth. “It is of last year’s
freezing, and I got it as a special favor, for the supply for 34–5 is
not yet exhausted, and they are supposed not to draw on the new cellars.
If father had told me that he was going to bring home a guest—”
“But I didn’t know it myself,” said David. “Of course, I could have
telephoned, but—”
“Never do that!” exclaimed Elizabeth impetuously; and I saw the look of
fear upon her face again.
A bell sounded, the shaft door clicked open, and a tray lay in the
orifice. Elizabeth carried it to the table, and a well-cooked meal was
smoking before us.
“You may be surprised to know that this tea was made two miles away,”
said David, “in the district sub-kitchen. It came to us at seventy miles
an hour. Before we had the gyroscopic attachments, fluids were
occasionally spilled.”
“And how do you clean the apartment?” I asked Elizabeth.
“In the old-fashioned way,” she answered, smiling. “I am an expert with
the solar vacuum and duster.”
“I believe our friend is accustomed to the existence of a servant
class,” said David, laughing at me.
But there was a subdued melancholy about him, as well as about
Elizabeth. The sense of it, and the constraint it bred, grew on me
momentarily. After dinner the dishes were sent down the shaft, and David
handed me a typical twentieth-century cigar.
“In a sense, this is one of our compromises,” he said, as we sat down in
the adjoining room. “Doctor Sanson wants to forbid the use of nicotine
as impairing the productive efficiency of the race. But the Council
thinks the narcotic has a restraining influence—”
He broke off as Elizabeth looked at him rather significantly.
“I understand, then, that the old tendencies toward the illogical and
the unnecessary have not been entirely conquered?” I asked.
“No, no!” said David emphatically. “Private apartments, for instance,
instead of the phalanstery. And then the tabloid floods! The human
stomach still demands bulk as well as nutriment. Still, it is claimed
that with education—”
“Do you remember the legend of the man who educated his ass to live on a
single straw a day?” asked Elizabeth.
We laughed; but I was still conscious of the restraint.
“Then, of course, people are too lazy, when hungry, to weigh their food
and calculate it in calories,” David continued. “Doctor Sanson is
fighting the abuse of protein. He claims that its decrease will set free
more workers to apply themselves to more productive labor instead of
food-raising, and will also lengthen the productive life of the
individual. But we are still protein gluttons.”
“The chicken—” interposed Elizabeth.
It seemed to me that the girl had some serious purpose in her
interruptions. I was beginning to realize that she still feared me; I
wondered why.
“And you may have observed that the eternal feminine has baffled Doctor
Sanson’s desire to abolish the skirt,” continued David. “In fact, human
nature seems to flow on in much the same old way beneath the surface of
civilization. I am inclined to think that our economic changes have not
seriously amended it.”
“Father, if you are going to talk like a heretic, I shall leave you!”
exclaimed Elizabeth, rising.
She left the room, and David followed her. Presently he came back alone.
“Arnold,” he began, seating himself and knocking the ashes from his
cigar, “my daughter is troubled about my frankness with you. You know
there is a period of necessary restraint just now, owing to the final
adjustment being incomplete. Some of the oldest men remember the former
régime. The Council is strict, and—in short, Arnold, I am putting my own
safety in your hands because I trust you, and also because—” He broke
off in confusion. “You need to know so much before you face the
Council,” he resumed. “Arnold, some time I will receive your confidence,
and then—well, this misunderstanding will be cleared away.”
I shook his hand warmly. “I suppose I am not permitted to leave the
apartment?” I asked.
“By all means. Go where you will. Your gray uniform shows you to be an
unascribed stranger, and every policeman has your photograph in his
thumb-book by now. Only, remember that you must decline to enter into
conversation with anyone who may accost you. Please remember this point
scrupulously, for your own sake. But, Arnold, do you know, I think you
can spend the rest of your day very profitably in learning to read.”
“Learn in a day?”
“To some extent. There are only thirty-five principal characters, and
all the sub-characters are readily discernible as coming under these
heads. I believe Elizabeth has an old spelling-book, and she will be
delighted to instruct you.”
The idea aroused his enthusiasm, and a few minutes later Elizabeth had
begun to give me my lesson. By supper time I had already mastered the
elements, and we continued to study in the evening under the soft solar
light, which, issuing from small, shaded, glass-covered apertures in the
walls, made the room as bright as day.
Soon after dinner the dumb-waiter shaft clicked open and a package lay
there. Inside was my overcoat.
At least, it was meant for me. But instead of the fine cheviot, I
discovered a wretched mixture of cotton and shoddy. I was indignant.
David advised me to do nothing. “A stranger sometimes gets poor
service,” he explained.
“It is a deliberate fraud, then?” I demanded.
He placed his hand restrainingly on my arm. “Is it worth while
quarreling with the Wool Boss before you go to the Council?” he asked.
He went on to explain that each industry was autonomous, and had its own
boss, elected annually by the workers, in theory, but for life in
practice. The Wool Boss, like the other bosses, received one per cent
upon the value of every article made by his department.
“At present our social organization is a little upset,” he explained
again. “When the Russian troubles are ended we shall resume our normal
life. There will be more spaciousness, more freedom ... liberty will be
enlarged....”
We went to bed early. I was grateful to discover that the old-fashioned
bed had not been sent into limbo. But then the bed, of course, antedates
history.
David apologized for mentioning bedtime.
“Nine is the curfew hour,” he explained. “At nine-half the solar light
goes out. It is only a temporary restriction until—” Again he checked
himself.
I mused so long that the solar light, which flooded the bedroom within
and made London a vivid picture in a black frame without, was suddenly
turned off, leaving me to grope my way into bed in the darkness. I lay
thinking of Esther, who had died so long ago, and I knew that when the
first bewilderment of the new life had passed away my loss would seem as
unbearable as before. I was as helpless as a savage in this fantastic
city. It seemed incredible that I had been groping in the cellar that
same morning.
I thought of Elizabeth and the terrified look in her eyes; I heard a
city clock strike ten, and, an hour later, one, and it was long before I
remembered that ten was midnight; my last resolve was to try to forget
my former life and fling myself with all my power into the new. At last
I fell asleep, to be awakened by the sun shining into my eyes along a
canyon that stretched between the high buildings as far as I could see.