Prominent if not paramount among world-changing inventions in the
history of man is that series of contrivances in locomotion that began
with the railway and ended for a century or more with the motor and the
patent road. That these contrivances, together with the device of
limited liability joint stock companies and the supersession of
agricultural labourers by skilled men with ingenious machinery, would
necessarily concentrate mankind in cities of unparallelled magnitude and
work an entire revolution in human life, became, after the event, a
thing so obvious that it is a matter of astonishment it was not more
clearly anticipated. Yet that any steps should be taken to anticipate
the miseries such a revolution might entail does not appear even to have
been suggested; and the idea that the moral prohibitions and sanctions,
the privileges and concessions, the conception of property and
responsibility, of comfort and beauty, that had rendered the mainly
agricultural states of the past prosperous and happy, would fail in the
rising torrent of novel opportunities and novel stimulations, never
seems to have entered the nineteenth-century mind. That a citizen,
kindly and fair in his ordinary life, could as a shareholder become
almost murderously greedy; that commercial methods that were reasonable
and honourable on the old-fashioned countryside, should on an enlarged
scale be deadly and overwhelming; that ancient charity was modern
pauperisation, and ancient employment modern sweating; that, in fact, a
revision and enlargement of the duties and rights of man had become
urgently necessary, were things it could not entertain, nourished as it
was on an archaic system of education and profoundly retrospective and
legal in all its habits of thought. It was known that the accumulation
of men in cities involved unprecedented dangers of pestilence; there was
an energetic development of sanitation; but that the diseases of
gambling and usury, of luxury and tyranny should become endemic, and
produce horrible consequences was beyond the scope of nineteenth-century
thought. And so, as if it were some inorganic process, practically
unhindered by the creative will of man, the growth of the swarming
unhappy cities that mark the twenty-first century accomplished itself.
The new society was divided into three main classes. At the summit
slumbered the property owner, enormously rich by accident rather than
design, potent save for the will and aim, the last _avatar_ of Hamlet in
the world. Below was the enormous multitude of workers employed by the
gigantic companies that monopolised control; and between these two the
dwindling middle class, officials of innumerable sorts, foremen,
managers, the medical, legal, artistic, and scholastic classes, and the
minor rich, a middle class whose members led a life of insecure luxury
and precarious speculation amidst the movements of the great managers.
Already the love story and the marrying of two persons of this middle
class have been told: how they overcame the obstacles between them, and
how they tried the simple old-fashioned way of living on the countryside
and came back speedily enough into the city of London. Denton had no
means, so Elizabeth borrowed money on the securities that her father
Mwres held in trust for her until she was one-and-twenty.
The rate of interest she paid was of course high, because of the
uncertainty of her security, and the arithmetic of lovers is often
sketchy and optimistic. Yet they had very glorious times after that
return. They determined they would not go to a Pleasure city nor waste
their days rushing through the air from one part of the world to the
other, for in spite of one disillusionment, their tastes were still
old-fashioned. They furnished their little room with quaint old
Victorian furniture, and found a shop on the forty-second floor in
Seventh Way where printed books of the old sort were still to be bought.
It was their pet affectation to read print instead of hearing
phonographs. And when presently there came a sweet little girl, to unite
them further if it were possible, Elizabeth would not send it to a
_creche_, as the custom was, but insisted on nursing it at home. The
rent of their apartments was raised on account of this singular
proceeding, but that they did not mind. It only meant borrowing a little
more.
Presently Elizabeth was of age, and Denton had a business interview with
her father that was not agreeable. An exceedingly disagreeable interview
with their money-lender followed, from which he brought home a white
face. On his return Elizabeth had to tell him of a new and marvellous
intonation of "Goo" that their daughter had devised, but Denton was
inattentive. In the midst, just as she was at the cream of her
description, he interrupted. "How much money do you think we have left,
now that everything is settled?"
She stared and stopped her appreciative swaying of the Goo genius that
had accompanied her description.
"You don't mean...?"
"Yes," he answered. "Ever so much. We have been wild. It's the interest.
Or something. And the shares you had, slumped. Your father did not mind.
Said it was not his business, after what had happened. He's going to
marry again.... Well--we have scarcely a thousand left!"
"Only a thousand?"
"Only a thousand."
And Elizabeth sat down. For a moment she regarded him with a white face,
then her eyes went about the quaint, old-fashioned room, with its middle
Victorian furniture and genuine oleographs, and rested at last on the
little lump of humanity within her arms.
Denton glanced at her and stood downcast. Then he swung round on his
heel and walked up and down very rapidly.
"I must get something to do," he broke out presently. "I am an idle
scoundrel. I ought to have thought of this before. I have been a selfish
fool. I wanted to be with you all day...."
He stopped, looking at her white face. Suddenly he came and kissed her
and the little face that nestled against her breast.
"It's all right, dear," he said, standing over her; "you won't be lonely
now--now Dings is beginning to talk to you. And I can soon get something
to do, you know. Soon.... Easily.... It's only a shock at first. But it
will come all right. It's sure to come right. I will go out again as
soon as I have rested, and find what can be done. For the present it's
hard to think of anything...."
"It would be hard to leave these rooms," said Elizabeth; "but----"
"There won't be any need of that--trust me."
"They are expensive."
Denton waved that aside. He began talking of the work he could do. He
was not very explicit what it would be; but he was quite sure that there
was something to keep them comfortably in the happy middle class, whose
way of life was the only one they knew.
"There are three-and-thirty million people in London," he said: "some of
them _must_ have need of me."
"Some _must_."
"The trouble is ... Well--Bindon, that brown little old man your father
wanted you to marry. He's an important person.... I can't go back to my
flying-stage work, because he is now a Commissioner of the Flying Stage
Clerks."
"I didn't know that," said Elizabeth.
"He was made that in the last few weeks ... or things would be easy
enough, for they liked me on the flying stage. But there's dozens of
other things to be done--dozens. Don't you worry, dear. I'll rest a
little while, and then we'll dine, and then I'll start on my rounds. I
know lots of people--lots."
So they rested, and then they went to the public dining-room and dined,
and then he started on his search for employment. But they soon realised
that in the matter of one convenience the world was just as badly off as
it had ever been, and that was a nice, secure, honourable, remunerative
employment, leaving ample leisure for the private life, and demanding no
special ability, no violent exertion nor risk, and no sacrifice of any
sort for its attainment. He evolved a number of brilliant projects, and
spent many days hurrying from one part of the enormous city to another
in search of influential friends; and all his influential friends were
glad to see him, and very sanguine until it came to definite proposals,
and then they became guarded and vague. He would part with them coldly,
and think over their behaviour, and get irritated on his way back, and
stop at some telephone office and spend money on an animated but
unprofitable quarrel. And as the days passed, he got so worried and
irritated that even to seem kind and careless before Elizabeth cost him
an effort--as she, being a loving woman, perceived very clearly.
After an extremely complex preface one day, she helped him out with a
painful suggestion. He had expected her to weep and give way to despair
when it came to selling all their joyfully bought early Victorian
treasures, their quaint objects of art, their antimacassars, bead mats,
repp curtains, veneered furniture, gold-framed steel engravings and
pencil drawings, wax flowers under shades, stuffed birds, and all sorts
of choice old things; but it was she who made the proposal. The
sacrifice seemed to fill her with pleasure, and so did the idea of
shifting to apartments ten or twelve floors lower in another hotel. "So
long as Dings is with us, nothing matters," she said. "It's all
experience." So he kissed her, said she was braver than when she fought
the sheep-dogs, called her Boadicea, and abstained very carefully from
reminding her that they would have to pay a considerably higher rent on
account of the little voice with which Dings greeted the perpetual
uproar of the city.
His idea had been to get Elizabeth out of the way when it came to
selling the absurd furniture about which their affections were twined
and tangled; but when it came to the sale it was Elizabeth who haggled
with the dealer while Denton went about the running ways of the city,
white and sick with sorrow and the fear of what was still to come. When
they moved into their sparsely furnished pink-and-white apartments in a
cheap hotel, there came an outbreak of furious energy on his part, and
then nearly a week of lethargy during which he sulked at home. Through
those days Elizabeth shone like a star, and at the end Denton's misery
found a vent in tears. And then he went out into the city ways again,
and--to his utter amazement--found some work to do.
His standard of employment had fallen steadily until at last it had
reached the lowest level of independent workers. At first he had aspired
to some high official position in the great Flying or Wind Vane or Water
Companies, or to an appointment on one of the General Intelligence
Organisations that had replaced newspapers, or to some professional
partnership, but those were the dreams of the beginning. From that he
had passed to speculation, and three hundred gold "lions" out of
Elizabeth's thousand had vanished one evening in the share market. Now
he was glad his good looks secured him a trial in the position of
salesman to the Suzannah Hat Syndicate, a Syndicate, dealing in ladies'
caps, hair decorations, and hats--for though the city was completely
covered in, ladies still wore extremely elaborate and beautiful hats at
the theatres and places of public worship.
It would have been amusing if one could have confronted a Regent Street
shopkeeper of the nineteenth century with the development of his
establishment in which Denton's duties lay. Nineteenth Way was still
sometimes called Regent Street, but it was now a street of moving
platforms and nearly eight hundred feet wide. The middle space was
immovable and gave access by staircases descending into subterranean
ways to the houses on either side. Right and left were an ascending
series of continuous platforms each of which travelled about five miles
an hour faster than the one internal to it, so that one could step from
platform to platform until one reached the swiftest outer way and so go
about the city. The establishment of the Suzannah Hat Syndicate
projected a vast _facade_ upon the outer way, sending out overhead at
either end an overlapping series of huge white glass screens, on which
gigantic animated pictures of the faces of well-known beautiful living
women wearing novelties in hats were thrown. A dense crowd was always
collected in the stationary central way watching a vast kinematograph
which displayed the changing fashion. The whole front of the building
was in perpetual chromatic change, and all down the _facade_--four
hundred feet it measured--and all across the street of moving ways,
laced and winked and glittered in a thousand varieties of colour and
lettering the inscription--