MY study window looks down upon Hyde Park, and often, to quote the
familiar promise of each new magazine, it amuses and instructs me to
watch from my tower the epitome of human life that passes to and fro
beneath. At the opening of the gates, creeps in the woman of the
streets. Her pitiful work for the time being is over. Shivering in the
chill dawn, she passes to her brief rest. Poor Slave! Lured to the
galley’s lowest deck, then chained there. Civilization, tricked fool,
they say has need of such. You serve as the dogs of Eastern towns. But
at least, it seems to me, we need not spit on you. Home to your kennel!
Perchance, if the Gods be kind, they may send you dreams of a cleanly
hearth, where you lie with a silver collar round your neck.
Next comes the labourer—the hewer of wood, the drawer of water—slouching
wearily to his toil; sleep clinging still about his leaden eyes, his
pittance of food carried tied up in a dish-clout. The first stroke of
the hour clangs from Big Ben. Haste thee, fellow-slave, lest the
overseer’s whip, “Out, we will have no lie-a-beds here,” descend upon thy
patient back.
Later, the artisan, with his bag of tools across his shoulder. He, too,
listens fearfully to the chiming of the bells. For him also there hangs
ready the whip.
After him, the shop boy and the shop girl, making love as they walk, not
to waste time. And after these the slaves of the desk and of the
warehouse, employers and employed, clerks and tradesmen, office boys and
merchants. To your places, slaves of all ranks. Get you unto your
burdens.
Now, laughing and shouting as they run, the children, the sons and
daughters of the slaves. Be industrious, little children, and learn your
lessons, that when the time comes you may be ready to take from our hands
the creaking oar, to slip into our seat at the roaring loom. For we
shall not be slaves for ever, little children. It is the good law of the
land. So many years in the galleys, so many years in the fields; then we
can claim our freedom. Then we shall go, little children, back to the
land of our birth. And you we must leave behind us to take up the tale
of our work. So, off to your schools, little children, and learn to be
good little slaves.
Next, pompous and sleek, come the educated slaves—journalists, doctors,
judges, and poets; the attorney, the artist, the player, the priest.
They likewise scurry across the Park, looking anxiously from time to time
at their watches, lest they be late for their appointments; thinking of
the rates and taxes to be earned, of the bonnets to be paid for, the
bills to be met. The best scourged, perhaps, of all, these slaves. The
cat reserved for them has fifty tails in place of merely two or three.
Work, you higher middle-class slave, or you shall come down to the
smoking of twopenny cigars; harder yet, or you shall drink shilling
claret; harder, or you shall lose your carriage and ride in a penny bus;
your wife’s frocks shall be of last year’s fashion; your trousers shall
bag at the knees; from Kensington you shall be banished to Kilburn, if
the tale of your bricks run short. Oh, a many-thonged whip is yours, my
genteel brother.
The slaves of fashion are the next to pass beneath me in review. They
are dressed and curled with infinite pains. The liveried, pampered
footman these, kept more for show than use; but their senseless tasks
none the less labour to them. Here must they come every day, merry or
sad. By this gravel path and no other must they walk; these phrases
shall they use when they speak to one another. For an hour they must go
slowly up and down upon a bicycle from Hyde Park Corner to the Magazine
and back. And these clothes must they wear; their gloves of this colour,
their neck-ties of this pattern. In the afternoon they must return
again, this time in a carriage, dressed in another livery, and for an
hour they must pass slowly to and fro in foolish procession. For dinner
they must don yet another livery, and after dinner they must stand about
at dreary social functions till with weariness and boredom their heads
feel dropping from their shoulders.
With the evening come the slaves back from their work: barristers,
thinking out their eloquent appeals; school-boys, conning their dog-eared
grammars; City men, planning their schemes; the wearers of motley,
cudgelling their poor brains for fresh wit with which to please their
master; shop boys and shop girls, silent now as, together, they plod
homeward; the artisan; the labourer. Two or three hours you shall have
to yourselves, slaves, to think and love and play, if you be not too
tired to think, or love, or play. Then to your litter, that you may be
ready for the morrow’s task.
The twilight deepens into dark; there comes back the woman of the
streets. As the shadows, she rounds the City’s day. Work strikes its
tent. Evil creeps from its peering place.
So we labour, driven by the whip of necessity, an army of slaves. If we
do not our work, the whip descends upon us; only the pain we feel in our
stomach instead of on our back. And because of that, we call ourselves
free men.
Some few among us bravely struggle to be really free: they are our tramps
and outcasts. We well-behaved slaves shrink from them, for the wages of
freedom in this world are vermin and starvation. We can live lives worth
living only by placing the collar round our neck.
There are times when one asks oneself: Why this endless labour? Why this
building of houses, this cooking of food, this making of clothes? Is the
ant so much more to be envied than the grasshopper, because she spends
her life in grubbing and storing, and can spare no time for singing? Why
this complex instinct, driving us to a thousand labours to satisfy a
thousand desires? We have turned the world into a workshop to provide
ourselves with toys. To purchase luxury we have sold our ease.
Oh, Children of Israel! why were ye not content in your wilderness? It
seems to have been a pattern wilderness. For you, a simple wholesome
food, ready cooked, was provided. You took no thought for rent and
taxes; you had no poor among you—no poor-rate collectors. You suffered
not from indigestion, nor the hundred ills that follow over-feeding; an
omer for every man was your portion, neither more nor less. You knew not
you had a liver. Doctors wearied you not with their theories, their
physics, and their bills. You were neither landowners nor leaseholders,
neither shareholders nor debenture holders. The weather and the market
reports troubled you not. The lawyer was unknown to you; you wanted no
advice; you had nought to quarrel about with your neighbour. No riches
were yours for the moth and rust to damage. Your yearly income and
expenditure you knew would balance to a fraction. Your wife and children
were provided for. Your old age caused you no anxiety; you knew you
would always have enough to live upon in comfort. Your funeral, a simple
and tasteful affair, would be furnished by the tribe. And yet, poor,
foolish child, fresh from the Egyptian brickfield, you could not rest
satisfied. You hungered for the fleshpots, knowing well what flesh-pots
entail: the cleaning of the flesh-pots, the forging of the flesh-pots,
the hewing of wood to make the fires for the boiling of the flesh-pots,
the breeding of beasts to fill the pots, the growing of fodder to feed
the beasts to fill the pots.
All the labour of our life is centred round our flesh-pots. On the altar
of the flesh-pot we sacrifice our leisure, our peace of mind. For a mess
of pottage we sell our birthright.
Oh! Children of Israel, saw you not the long punishment you were
preparing for yourselves, when in your wilderness you set up the image of
the Calf, and fell before it, crying—“This shall be our God.”
You would have veal. Thought you never of the price man pays for Veal?
The servants of the Golden Calf! I see them, stretched before my eyes, a
weary, endless throng. I see them toiling in the mines, the black sweat
on their faces. I see them in sunless cities, silent, and grimy, and
bent. I see them, ague-twisted, in the rain-soaked fields. I see them,
panting by the furnace doors. I see them, in loin-cloth and necklace,
the load upon their head. I see them in blue coats and red coats,
marching to pour their blood as an offering on the altar of the Calf. I
see them in homespun and broadcloth, I see them in smock and gaiters, I
see them in cap and apron, the servants of the Calf. They swarm on the
land and they dot the sea. They are chained to the anvil and counter;
they are chained to the bench and the desk. They make ready the soil,
they till the fields where the Golden Calf is born. They build the ship,
and they sail the ship that carries the Golden Calf. They fashion the
pots, they mould the pans, they carve the tables, they turn the chairs,
they dream of the sauces, they dig for the salt, they weave the damask,
they mould the dish to serve the Golden Calf.
The work of the world is to this end, that we eat of the Calf. War and
Commerce, Science and Law! what are they but the four pillars supporting
the Golden Calf? He is our God. It is on his back that we have
journeyed from the primeval forest, where our ancestors ate nuts and
fruit. He is our God. His temple is in every street. His blue-robed
priest stands ever at the door, calling to the people to worship. Hark!
his voice rises on the gas-tainted air—“Now’s your time! Now’s your
time! Buy! Buy! ye people. Bring hither the sweat of your brow, the
sweat of your brain, the ache of your heart, buy Veal with it. Bring me
the best years of your life. Bring me your thoughts, your hopes, your
loves; ye shall have Veal for them. Now’s your time! Now’s your time!
Buy! Buy!”
Oh! Children of Israel, was Veal, even with all its trimmings, quite
worth the price?
And we! what wisdom have we learned, during the centuries? I talked with
a rich man only the other evening. He calls himself a Financier,
whatever that may mean. He leaves his beautiful house, some twenty miles
out of London, at a quarter to eight, summer and winter, after a hurried
breakfast by himself, while his guests still sleep, and he gets back just
in time to dress for an elaborate dinner he himself is too weary or too
preoccupied to more than touch. If ever he is persuaded to give himself
a holiday it is for a fortnight in Ostend, when it is most crowded and
uncomfortable. He takes his secretary with him, receives and despatches
a hundred telegrams a day, and has a private telephone, through which he
can speak direct to London, brought up into his bedroom.
I suppose the telephone is really a useful invention. Business men tell
me they wonder how they contrived to conduct their affairs without it.
My own wonder always is, how any human being with the ordinary passions
of his race can conduct his business, or even himself, creditably, within
a hundred yards of the invention. I can imagine Job, or Griselda, or
Socrates liking to have a telephone about them as exercise. Socrates, in
particular, would have made quite a reputation for himself out of a three
months’ subscription to a telephone. Myself, I am, perhaps, too
sensitive. I once lived for a month in an office with a telephone, if
one could call it life. I was told that if I had stuck to the thing for
two or three months longer, I should have got used to it. I know friends
of mine, men once fearless and high-spirited, who now stand in front of
their own telephone for a quarter of an hour at a time, and never so much
as answer it back. They tell me that at first they used to swear and
shout at it as I did; but now their spirit seems crushed. That is what
happens: you either break the telephone, or the telephone breaks you.
You want to see a man two streets off. You might put on your hat, and be
round at his office in five minutes. You are on the point of starting
when the telephone catches your eye. You think you will ring him up to
make sure he is in. You commence by ringing up some half-dozen times
before anybody takes any notice of you whatever. You are burning with
indignation at this neglect, and have left the instrument to sit down and
pen a stinging letter of complaint to the Company when the ring-back
re-calls you. You seize the ear trumpets, and shout—
“How is it that I can never get an answer when I ring? Here have I been
ringing for the last half-hour. I have rung twenty times.” (This is a
falsehood. You have rung only six times, and the “half-hour” is an
absurd exaggeration; but you feel the mere truth would not be adequate to
the occasion.) “I think it disgraceful,” you continue, “and I shall
complain to the Company. What is the use of my having a telephone if I
can’t get any answer when I ring? Here I pay a large sum for having this
thing, and I can’t get any notice taken. I’ve been ringing all the
morning. Why is it?”
Then you wait for the answer.
“What—what do you say? I can’t hear what you say.”
“I say I’ve been ringing here for over an hour, and I can’t get any
reply,” you call back. “I shall complain to the Company.”
“You want what? Don’t stand so near the tube. I can’t hear what you
say. What number?”
“Bother the number; I say why is it I don’t get an answer when I ring?”
“Eight hundred and what?”
You can’t argue any more, after that. The machine would give way under
the language you want to make use of. Half of what you feel would
probably cause an explosion at some point where the wire was weak.
Indeed, mere language of any kind would fall short of the requirements of
the case. A hatchet and a gun are the only intermediaries through which
you could convey your meaning by this time. So you give up all attempt
to answer back, and meekly mention that you want to be put in
communication with four-five-seven-six.
“Four-nine-seven-six?” says the girl.
“No; four-five-seven-six.”
“Did you say seven-six or six-seven?”
“Six-seven—no! I mean seven-six: no—wait a minute. I don’t know what I
do mean now.”
“Well, I wish you’d find out,” says the young lady severely. “You are
keeping me here all the morning.”
So you look up the number in the book again, and at last she tells you
that you are in connection; and then, ramming the trumpet tight against
your ear, you stand waiting.
And if there is one thing more than another likely to make a man feel
ridiculous it is standing on tip-toe in a corner, holding a machine to
his head, and listening intently to nothing. Your back aches and your
head aches, your very hair aches. You hear the door open behind you and
somebody enter the room. You can’t turn your head. You swear at them,
and hear the door close with a bang. It immediately occurs to you that
in all probability it was Henrietta. She promised to call for you at
half-past twelve: you were to take her to lunch. It was twelve o’clock
when you were fool enough to mix yourself up with this infernal machine,
and it probably is half-past twelve by now. Your past life rises before
you, accompanied by dim memories of your grandmother. You are wondering
how much longer you can bear the strain of this attitude, and whether
after all you do really want to see the man in the next street but two,
when the girl in the exchange-room calls up to know if you’re done.
“Done!” you retort bitterly; “why, I haven’t begun yet.”
“Well, be quick,” she says, “because you’re wasting time.”
Thus admonished, you attack the thing again. “_Are_ you there?” you cry
in tones that ought to move the heart of a Charity Commissioner; and
then, oh joy! oh rapture! you hear a faint human voice replying—
“Yes, what is it?”
“Oh! Are you four-five-seven-six?”
“What?”
“Are you four-five-seven-six, Williamson?”
“What! who are you?”
“Eight-one-nine, Jones.”
“Bones?”
“No, _J_ones. Are you four-five-seven-six?”
“Yes; what is it?”
“Is Mr. Williamson in?”
“Will I what—who are you?”
“Jones! Is Mr. Williamson in?”
“Who?”
“Williamson. Will-i-am-son!”
“You’re the son of what? I can’t hear what you say.”
Then you gather yourself for one final effort, and succeed, by superhuman
patience, in getting the fool to understand that you wish to know if Mr.
Williamson is in, and he says, so it sounds to you, “Be in all the
morning.”
So you snatch up your hat and run round.
“Oh, I’ve come to see Mr. Williamson,” you say.
“Very sorry, sir,” is the polite reply, “but he’s out.”
“Out? Why, you just now told me through the telephone that he’d be in
all the morning.”
“No, I said, he ‘_won’t_ be in all the morning.’”
You go back to the office, and sit down in front of that telephone and
look at it. There it hangs, calm and imperturbable. Were it an ordinary
instrument, that would be its last hour. You would go straight
down-stairs, get the coal-hammer and the kitchen-poker, and divide it
into sufficient pieces to give a bit to every man in London. But you
feel nervous of these electrical affairs, and there is a something about
that telephone, with its black hole and curly wires, that cows you. You
have a notion that if you don’t handle it properly something may come and
shock you, and then there will be an inquest, and bother of that sort, so
you only curse it.
That is what happens when you want to use the telephone from your end.
But that is not the worst that the telephone can do. A sensible man,
after a little experience, can learn to leave the thing alone. Your
worst troubles are not of your own making. You are working against time;
you have given instructions not to be disturbed. Perhaps it is after
lunch, and you are thinking with your eyes closed, so that your thoughts
shall not be distracted by the objects about the room. In either case
you are anxious not to leave your chair, when off goes that telephone
bell and you spring from your chair, uncertain, for the moment, whether
you have been shot, or blown up with dynamite. It occurs to you in your
weakness that if you persist in taking no notice, they will get tired,
and leave you alone. But that is not their method. The bell rings
violently at ten-second intervals. You have nothing to wrap your head up
in. You think it will be better to get this business over and done with.
You go to your fate and call back savagely—
“What is it? What do you want?”
No answer, only a confused murmur, prominent out of which come the voices
of two men swearing at one another. The language they are making use of
is disgraceful. The telephone seems peculiarly adapted for the
conveyance of blasphemy. Ordinary language sounds indistinct through it;
but every word those two men are saying can be heard by all the telephone
subscribers in London.
It is useless attempting to listen till they have done. When they are
exhausted, you apply to the tube again. No answer is obtainable. You
get mad, and become sarcastic; only being sarcastic when you are not sure
that anybody is at the other end to hear you is unsatisfying.
At last, after a quarter of an hour or so of saying, “Are you there?”
“Yes, I’m here,” “Well?” the young lady at the Exchange asks what you
want.
“I don’t want anything,” you reply.
“Then why do you keep talking?” she retorts; “you mustn’t play with the
thing.”
This renders you speechless with indignation for a while, upon recovering
from which you explain that somebody rang you up.
“_Who_ rang you up?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
“I wish you did,” she observes.
Generally disgusted, you slam the trumpet up and return to your chair.
The instant you are seated the bell clangs again; and you fly up and
demand to know what the thunder they want, and who the thunder they are.
“Don’t speak so loud, we can’t hear you. What do you want?” is the
answer.
“I don’t want anything. What do you want? Why do you ring me up, and
then not answer me? Do leave me alone, if you can!”
“We can’t get Hong Kongs at seventy-four.”
“Well, I don’t care if you can’t.”
“Would you like Zulus?”
“What are you talking about?” you reply; “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Would you like Zulus—Zulus at seventy-three and a half?”
“I wouldn’t have ’em at six a penny. What are you talking about?”
“Hong Kongs—we can’t get them at seventy-four. Oh, half-a-minute” (the
half-a-minute passes). “Are you there?”
“Yes, but you are talking to the wrong man.”
“We can get you Hong Kongs at seventy-four and seven-eights.”
“Bother Hong Kongs, and you too. I tell you, you are talking to the
wrong man. I’ve told you once.”
“Once what?”
“Why, that I am the wrong man—I mean that you are talking to the wrong
man.”
“Who are you?”
“Eight-one-nine, Jones.”
“Oh, aren’t you one-nine-eight?”
“No.”
“Oh, good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
How can a man after that sit down and write pleasantly of the European
crisis? And, if it were needed, herein lies another indictment against
the telephone. I was engaged in an argument, which, if not in itself
serious, was at least concerned with a serious enough subject, the
unsatisfactory nature of human riches; and from that highly moral
discussion have I been lured, by the accidental sight of the word
“telephone,” into the writing of matter which can have the effect only of
exciting to frenzy all critics of the New Humour into whose hands, for
their sins, this book may come. Let me forget my transgression and
return to my sermon, or rather to the sermon of my millionaire
acquaintance.
It was one day after dinner, we sat together in his magnificently
furnished dining-room. We had lighted our cigars at the silver lamp.
The butler had withdrawn.
“These cigars we are smoking,” my friend suddenly remarked, _à propos_
apparently of nothing, “they cost me five shillings apiece, taking them
by the thousand.”
“I can quite believe it,” I answered; “they are worth it.”
“Yes, to you,” he replied, almost savagely. “What do you usually pay for
your cigars?”
We had known each other years ago. When I first met him his offices
consisted of a back room up three flights of stairs in a dingy by-street
off the Strand, which has since disappeared. We occasionally dined
together, in those days, at a restaurant in Great Portland Street, for
one and nine. Our acquaintanceship was of sufficient standing to allow
of such a question.
“Threepence,” I answered. “They work out at about twopence
three-farthings by the box.”
“Just so,” he growled; “and your twopenny-three-farthing weed gives you
precisely the same amount of satisfaction that this five shilling cigar
affords me. That means four and ninepence farthing wasted every time I
smoke. I pay my cook two hundred a year. I don’t enjoy my dinner as
much as when it cost me four shillings, including a quarter flask of
Chianti. What is the difference, personally, to me whether I drive to my
office in a carriage and pair, or in an omnibus? I often do ride in a
bus: it saves trouble. It is absurd wasting time looking for one’s
coachman, when the conductor of an omnibus that passes one’s door is
hailing one a few yards off. Before I could afford even buses—when I
used to walk every morning to the office from Hammersmith—I was
healthier. It irritates me to think how hard I work for no earthly
benefit to myself. My money pleases a lot of people I don’t care two
straws about, and who are only my friends in the hope of making something
out of me. If I could eat a hundred-guinea dinner myself every night,
and enjoy it four hundred times as much as I used to enjoy a
five-shilling dinner, there would be some sense in it. Why do I do it?”
I had never heard him talk like this before. In his excitement he rose
from the table, and commenced pacing the room.
“Why don’t I invest my money in the two and a half per cents?” he
continued. “At the very worst I should be safe for five thousand a year.
What, in the name of common sense, does a man want with more? I am
always saying to myself, I’ll do it; why don’t I?
“Well, why not?” I echoed.
“That’s what I want you to tell me,” he returned. “You set up for
understanding human nature, it’s a mystery to me. In my place, you would
do as I do; you know that. If somebody left you a hundred thousand
pounds to-morrow, you would start a newspaper, or build a theatre—some
damn-fool trick for getting rid of the money and giving yourself
seventeen hours’ anxiety a day; you know you would.”
I hung my head in shame. I felt the justice of the accusation. It has
always been my dream to run a newspaper and own a theatre.
“If we worked only for what we could spend,” he went on, “the City might
put up its shutters to-morrow morning. What I want to get at the bottom
of is this instinct that drives us to work apparently for work’s own
sake. What is this strange thing that gets upon our back and spurs us?”
A servant entered at that moment with a cablegram from the manager of one
of his Austrian mines, and he had to leave me for his study. But,
walking home, I fell to pondering on his words. _Why_ this endless work?
Why each morning do we get up and wash and dress ourselves, to undress
ourselves at night and go to bed again? Why do we work merely to earn
money to buy food; and eat food so as to gain strength that we may work?
Why do we live, merely in the end to say good-bye to one another? Why do
we labour to bring children into the world that they may die and be
buried?
Of what use our mad striving, our passionate desire? Will it matter to
the ages whether, once upon a time, the Union Jack or the Tricolour
floated over the battlements of Badajoz? Yet we poured our blood into
its ditches to decide the question. Will it matter, in the days when the
glacial period shall have come again, to clothe the earth with silence,
whose foot first trod the Pole? Yet, generation after generation, we
mile its roadway with our whitening bones. So very soon the worms come
to us; does it matter whether we love, or hate? Yet the hot blood rushes
through our veins, we wear out heart and brain for shadowy hopes that
ever fade as we press forward.
The flower struggles up from seed-pod, draws the sweet sap from the
ground, folds its petals each night, and sleeps. Then love comes to it
in a strange form, and it longs to mingle its pollen with the pollen of
some other flower. So it puts forth its gay blossoms, and the wandering
insect bears the message from seed-pod to seed-pod. And the seasons
pass, bringing with them the sunshine and the rain, till the flower
withers, never having known the real purpose for which it lived, thinking
the garden was made for it, not it for the garden. The coral insect
dreams in its small soul, which is possibly its small stomach, of home
and food. So it works and strives deep down in the dark waters, never
knowing of the continents it is fashioning.
But the question still remains: for what purpose is it all? Science
explains it to us. By ages of strife and effort we improve the race;
from ether, through the monkey, man is born. So, through the labour of
the coming ages, he will free himself still further from the brute.
Through sorrow and through struggle, by the sweat of brain and brow, he
will lift himself towards the angels. He will come into his kingdom.
But why the building? Why the passing of the countless ages? Why should
he not have been born the god he is to be, imbued at birth with all the
capabilities his ancestors have died acquiring? Why the Pict and Hun
that _I_ may be? Why _I_, that a descendant of my own, to whom I shall
seem a savage, shall come after me? Why, if the universe be ordered by a
Creator to whom all things are possible, the protoplasmic cell? Why not
the man that is to be? Shall all the generations be so much human waste
that he may live? Am I but another layer of the soil preparing for him?
Or, if our future be in other spheres, then why the need of this planet?
Are we labouring at some Work too vast for us to perceive? Are our
passions and desires mere whips and traces by the help of which we are
driven? Any theory seems more hopeful than the thought that all our
eager, fretful lives are but the turning of a useless prison crank.
Looking back the little distance that our dim eyes can penetrate the
past, what do we find? Civilizations, built up with infinite care, swept
aside and lost. Beliefs for which men lived and died, proved to be
mockeries. Greek Art crushed to the dust by Gothic bludgeons. Dreams of
fraternity, drowned in blood by a Napoleon. What is left to us, but the
hope that the work itself, not the result, is the real monument? Maybe,
we are as children, asking, “Of what use are these lessons? What good
will they ever be to us?” But there comes a day when the lad understands
why he learnt grammar and geography, when even dates have a meaning for
him. But this is not until he has left school, and gone out into the
wider world. So, perhaps, when we are a little more grown up, we too may
begin to understand the reason for our living.