"Not that. But I want you to come to the flying stages--where we met.
You know? The little seat."
He hesitated. "_Can_ you?" he said, doubtfully.
"Must," she answered.
He hesitated still for a moment, then moved to obey her will.
And so it was they spent their last half-day of freedom out under the
open air in the little seat under the flying stages where they had been
wont to meet five short years ago. There she told him, what she could
not tell him in the tumultuous public ways, that she did not repent even
now of their marriage--that whatever discomfort and misery life still
had for them, she was content with the things that had been. The weather
was kind to them, the seat was sunlit and warm, and overhead the shining
aeroplanes went and came.
At last towards sunsetting their time was at an end, and they made their
vows to one another and clasped hands, and then rose up and went back
into the ways of the city, a shabby-looking, heavy-hearted pair, tired
and hungry. Soon they came to one of the pale blue signs that marked a
Labour Company Bureau. For a space they stood in the middle way
regarding this and at last descended, and entered the waiting-room.
The Labour Company had originally been a charitable organisation; its
aim was to supply food, shelter, and work to all comers. This it was
bound to do by the conditions of its incorporation, and it was also
bound to supply food and shelter and medical attendance to all incapable
of work who chose to demand its aid. In exchange these incapables paid
labour notes, which they had to redeem upon recovery. They signed these
labour notes with thumb-marks, which were photographed and indexed in
such a way that this world-wide Labour Company could identify any one of
its two or three hundred million clients at the cost of an hour's
inquiry. The day's labour was defined as two spells in a treadmill used
in generating electrical force, or its equivalent, and its due
performance could be enforced by law. In practice the Labour Company
found it advisable to add to its statutory obligations of food and
shelter a few pence a day as an inducement to effort; and its enterprise
had not only abolished pauperisation altogether, but supplied
practically all but the very highest and most responsible labour
throughout the world. Nearly a third of the population of the world were
its serfs and debtors from the cradle to the grave.
In this practical, unsentimental way the problem of the unemployed had
been most satisfactorily met and overcome. No one starved in the public
ways, and no rags, no costume less sanitary and sufficient than the
Labour Company's hygienic but inelegant blue canvas, pained the eye
throughout the whole world. It was the constant theme of the
phonographic newspapers how much the world had progressed since
nineteenth-century days, when the bodies of those killed by the
vehicular traffic or dead of starvation, were, they alleged, a common
feature in all the busier streets.
Denton and Elizabeth sat apart in the waiting-room until their turn
came. Most of the others collected there seemed limp and taciturn, but
three or four young people gaudily dressed made up for the quietude of
their companions. They were life clients of the Company, born in the
Company's _creche_ and destined to die in its hospital, and they had
been out for a spree with some shillings or so of extra pay. They talked
vociferously in a later development of the Cockney dialect, manifestly
very proud of themselves.
Elizabeth's eyes went from these to the less assertive figures. One
seemed exceptionally pitiful to her. It was a woman of perhaps
forty-five, with gold-stained hair and a painted face, down which
abundant tears had trickled; she had a pinched nose, hungry eyes, lean
hands and shoulders, and her dusty worn-out finery told the story of her
life. Another was a grey-bearded old man in the costume of a bishop of
one of the high episcopal sects--for religion was now also a business,
and had its ups and downs. And beside him a sickly, dissipated-looking
boy of perhaps two-and-twenty glared at Fate.
Presently Elizabeth and then Denton interviewed the manageress--for the
Company preferred women in this capacity--and found she possessed an
energetic face, a contemptuous manner, and a particularly unpleasant
voice. They were given various checks, including one to certify that
they need not have their heads cropped; and when they had given their
thumb-marks, learnt the number corresponding thereunto, and exchanged
their shabby middle-class clothes for duly numbered blue canvas suits,
they repaired to the huge plain dining-room for their first meal under
these new conditions. Afterwards they were to return to her for
instructions about their work.
When they had made the exchange of their clothing Elizabeth did not seem
able to look at Denton at first; but he looked at her, and saw with
astonishment that even in blue canvas she was still beautiful. And then
their soup and bread came sliding on its little rail down the long table
towards them and stopped with a jerk, and he forgot the matter. For they
had had no proper meal for three days.
After they had dined they rested for a time. Neither talked--there was
nothing to say; and presently they got up and went back to the
manageress to learn what they had to do.
The manageress referred to a tablet. "Y'r rooms won't be here; it'll be
in the Highbury Ward, Ninety-seventh Way, number two thousand and
seventeen. Better make a note of it on y'r card. _You_, nought nought
nought, type seven, sixty-four, b.c.d., _gamma_ forty-one, female; you
'ave to go to the Metal-beating Company and try that for a
day--fourpence bonus if ye're satisfactory; and _you_, nought seven one,
type four, seven hundred and nine, g.f.b., _pi_ five and ninety, male;
you 'ave to go to the Photographic Company on Eighty-first Way, and
learn something or other--_I_ don't know--thrippence. 'Ere's y'r cards.
That's all. Next! _What?_ Didn't catch it all? Lor! So suppose I must go
over it all again. Why don't you listen? Keerless, unprovident people!
One'd think these things didn't matter."
Their ways to their work lay together for a time. And now they found
they could talk. Curiously enough, the worst of their depression seemed
over now that they had actually donned the blue. Denton could talk with
interest even of the work that lay before them. "Whatever it is," he
said, "it can't be so hateful as that hat shop. And after we have paid
for Dings, we shall still have a whole penny a day between us even now.
Afterwards--we may improve,--get more money."
Elizabeth was less inclined to speech. "I wonder why work should seem
so hateful," she said.
"It's odd," said Denton. "I suppose it wouldn't be if it were not the
thought of being ordered about.... I hope we shall have decent
managers."
Elizabeth did not answer. She was not thinking of that. She was tracing
out some thoughts of her own.
"Of course," she said presently, "we have been using up work all our
lives. It's only fair--"
She stopped. It was too intricate.
"We paid for it," said Denton, for at that time he had not troubled
himself about these complicated things.
"We did nothing--and yet we paid for it. That's what I cannot
understand."
"Perhaps we are paying," said Elizabeth presently--for her theology was
old-fashioned and simple.
Presently it was time for them to part, and each went to the appointed
work. Denton's was to mind a complicated hydraulic press that seemed
almost an intelligent thing. This press worked by the sea-water that was
destined finally to flush the city drains--for the world had long since
abandoned the folly of pouring drinkable water into its sewers. This
water was brought close to the eastward edge of the city by a huge
canal, and then raised by an enormous battery of pumps into reservoirs
at a level of four hundred feet above the sea, from which it spread by a
billion arterial branches over the city. Thence it poured down,
cleansing, sluicing, working machinery of all sorts, through an infinite
variety of capillary channels into the great drains, the _cloacae
maximae_, and so carried the sewage out to the agricultural areas that
surrounded London on every side.
The press was employed in one of the processes of the photographic
manufacture, but the nature of the process it did not concern Denton to
understand. The most salient fact to his mind was that it had to be
conducted in ruby light, and as a consequence the room in which he
worked was lit by one coloured globe that poured a lurid and painful
illumination about the room. In the darkest corner stood the press whose
servant Denton had now become: it was a huge, dim, glittering thing with
a projecting hood that had a remote resemblance to a bowed head, and,
squatting like some metal Buddha in this weird light that ministered to
its needs, it seemed to Denton in certain moods almost as if this must
needs be the obscure idol to which humanity in some strange aberration
had offered up his life. His duties had a varied monotony. Such items as
the following will convey an idea of the service of the press. The thing
worked with a busy clicking so long as things went well; but if the
paste that came pouring through a feeder from another room and which it
was perpetually compressing into thin plates, changed in quality the
rhythm of its click altered and Denton hastened to make certain
adjustments. The slightest delay involved a waste of paste and the
docking of one or more of his daily pence. If the supply of paste
waned--there were hand processes of a peculiar sort involved in its
preparation, and sometimes the workers had convulsions which deranged
their output--Denton had to throw the press out of gear. In the painful
vigilance a multitude of such trivial attentions entailed, painful
because of the incessant effort its absence of natural interest
required, Denton had now to pass one-third of his days. Save for an
occasional visit from the manager, a kindly but singularly foul-mouthed
man, Denton passed his working hours in solitude.
Elizabeth's work was of a more social sort. There was a fashion for
covering the private apartments of the very wealthy with metal plates
beautifully embossed with repeated patterns. The taste of the time
demanded, however, that the repetition of the patterns should not be
exact--not mechanical, but "natural"--and it was found that the most
pleasing arrangement of pattern irregularity was obtained by employing
women of refinement and natural taste to punch out the patterns with
small dies. So many square feet of plates was exacted from Elizabeth as
a minimum, and for whatever square feet she did in excess she received a
small payment. The room, like most rooms of women workers, was under a
manageress: men had been found by the Labour Company not only less
exacting but extremely liable to excuse favoured ladies from a proper
share of their duties. The manageress was a not unkindly, taciturn
person, with the hardened remains of beauty of the brunette type; and
the other women workers, who of course hated her, associated her name
scandalously with one of the metal-work directors in order to explain
her position.
Only two or three of Elizabeth's fellow-workers were born labour serfs;
plain, morose girls, but most of them corresponded to what the
nineteenth century would have called a "reduced" gentlewoman. But the
ideal of what constituted a gentlewoman had altered: the faint, faded,
negative virtue, the modulated voice and restrained gesture of the
old-fashioned gentlewoman had vanished from the earth. Most of her
companions showed in discoloured hair, ruined complexions, and the
texture of their reminiscent conversations, the vanished glories of a
conquering youth. All of these artistic workers were much older than
Elizabeth, and two openly expressed their surprise that any one so young
and pleasant should come to share their toil. But Elizabeth did not
trouble them with her old-world moral conceptions.
They were permitted, and even encouraged to converse with each other,
for the directors very properly judged that anything that conduced to
variations of mood made for pleasing fluctuations in their patterning;
and Elizabeth was almost forced to hear the stories of these lives with
which her own interwove: garbled and distorted they were by vanity
indeed and yet comprehensible enough. And soon she began to appreciate
the small spites and cliques, the little misunderstandings and alliances
that enmeshed about her. One woman was excessively garrulous and
descriptive about a wonderful son of hers; another had cultivated a
foolish coarseness of speech, that she seemed to regard as the wittiest
expression of originality conceivable; a third mused for ever on dress,
and whispered to Elizabeth how she saved her pence day after day, and
would presently have a glorious day of freedom, wearing ... and then
followed hours of description; two others sat always together, and
called one another pet names, until one day some little thing happened,
and they sat apart, blind and deaf as it seemed to one another's being.
And always from them all came an incessant tap, tap, tap, tap, and the
manageress listened always to the rhythm to mark if one fell away. Tap,
tap, tap, tap: so their days passed, so their lives must pass. Elizabeth
sat among them, kindly and quiet, grey-hearted, marvelling at Fate: tap,
tap, tap; tap, tap, tap; tap, tap, tap.
So there came to Denton and Elizabeth a long succession of laborious
days, that hardened their hands, wove strange threads of some new and
sterner substance into the soft prettiness of their lives, and drew
grave lines and shadows on their faces. The bright, convenient ways of
the former life had receded to an inaccessible distance; slowly they
learnt the lesson of the underworld--sombre and laborious, vast and
pregnant. There were many little things happened: things that would be
tedious and miserable to tell, things that were bitter and grievous to
bear--indignities, tyrannies, such as must ever season the bread of the
poor in cities; and one thing that was not little, but seemed like the
utter blackening of life to them, which was that the child they had
given life to sickened and died. But that story, that ancient,
perpetually recurring story, has been told so often, has been told so
beautifully, that there is no need to tell it over again here. There was
the same sharp fear, the same long anxiety, the deferred inevitable
blow, and the black silence. It has always been the same; it will always
be the same. It is one of the things that must be.
And it was Elizabeth who was the first to speak, after an aching, dull
interspace of days: not, indeed, of the foolish little name that was a
name no longer, but of the darkness that brooded over her soul. They had
come through the shrieking, tumultuous ways of the city together; the
clamour of trade, of yelling competitive religions, of political appeal,
had beat upon deaf ears; the glare of focussed lights, of dancing
letters, and fiery advertisements, had fallen upon the set, miserable
faces unheeded. They took their dinner in the dining-hall at a place
apart. "I want," said Elizabeth clumsily, "to go out to the flying
stages--to that seat. Here, one can say nothing...."
Denton looked at her. "It will be night," he said.
"I have asked,--it is a fine night." She stopped.
He perceived she could find no words to explain herself. Suddenly he
understood that she wished to see the stars once more, the stars they
had watched together from the open downland in that wild honeymoon of
theirs five years ago. Something caught at his throat. He looked away
from her.
"There will be plenty of time to go," he said, in a matter-of-fact tone.
And at last they came out to their little seat on the flying stage, and
sat there for a long time in silence. The little seat was in shadow, but
the zenith was pale blue with the effulgence of the stage overhead, and
all the city spread below them, squares and circles and patches of
brilliance caught in a mesh-work of light. The little stars seemed very
faint and small: near as they had been to the old-world watcher, they
had become now infinitely remote. Yet one could see them in the darkened
patches amidst the glare, and especially in the northward sky, the
ancient constellations gliding steadfast and patient about the pole.
Long our two people sat in silence, and at last Elizabeth sighed.
"If I understood," she said, "if I could understand. When one is down
there the city seems everything--the noise, the hurry, the voices--you
must live, you must scramble. Here--it is nothing; a thing that passes.
One can think in peace."
"Yes," said Denton. "How flimsy it all is! From here more than half of
it is swallowed by the night.... It will pass."
"We shall pass first," said Elizabeth.
"I know," said Denton. "If life were not a moment, the whole of history
would seem like the happening of a day.... Yes--we shall pass. And the
city will pass, and all the things that are to come. Man and the Overman
and wonders unspeakable. And yet ..."
He paused, and then began afresh. "I know what you feel. At least I
fancy.... Down there one thinks of one's work, one's little vexations
and pleasures, one's eating and drinking and ease and pain. One lives,
and one must die. Down there and everyday--our sorrow seemed the end of
life....
"Up here it is different. For instance, down there it would seem
impossible almost to go on living if one were horribly disfigured,
horribly crippled, disgraced. Up here--under these stars--none of those
things would matter. They don't matter.... They are a part of something.
One seems just to touch that something--under the stars...."
He stopped. The vague, impalpable things in his mind, cloudy emotions
half shaped towards ideas, vanished before the rough grasp of words. "It
is hard to express," he said lamely.
They sat through a long stillness.
"It is well to come here," he said at last. "We stop--our minds are very
finite. After all we are just poor animals rising out of the brute, each
with a mind, the poor beginning of a mind. We are so stupid. So much
hurts. And yet ...
"I know, I know--and some day we shall _see_.
"All this frightful stress, all this discord will resolve to harmony,
and we shall know it. Nothing is but it makes for that. Nothing. All the
failures--every little thing makes for that harmony. Everything is
necessary to it, we shall find. We shall find. Nothing, not even the
most dreadful thing, could be left out. Not even the most trivial.
Every tap of your hammer on the brass, every moment of work, my idleness
even ... Dear one! every movement of our poor little one ... All these
things go on for ever. And the faint impalpable things. We, sitting here
together.--Everything ...
"The passion that joined us, and what has come since. It is not passion
now. More than anything else it is sorrow. _Dear_ ..."
He could say no more, could follow his thoughts no further.
Elizabeth made no answer--she was very still; but presently her hand
sought his and found it.