"That's the ge'man all over," said the swart man. "Who arst you to?"
"But your time?"
"If you don't get learnt scrapping you'll get killed,--don't you make no
bones of that."
Denton thought. "I don't know," he said.
He looked at the face beside him, and all its native coarseness shouted
at him. He felt a quick revulsion from his transient friendliness. It
seemed to him incredible that it should be necessary for him to be
indebted to such a creature.
"The chaps are always scrapping," said the swart man. "Always. And, of
course--if one gets waxy and 'its you vital ..."
"By God!" cried Denton; "I wish one would."
"Of course, if you feel like that--"
"You don't understand."
"P'raps I don't," said the swart man; and lapsed into a fuming silence.
When he spoke again his voice was less friendly, and he prodded Denton
by way of address. "Look see!" he said: "are you going to let me show
you 'ow to scrap?"
"It's tremendously kind of you," said Denton; "but--"
There was a pause. The swart man rose and bent over Denton.
"Too much ge'man," he said--"eh? I got a red face.... By gosh! you
are--you _are_ a brasted fool!"
He turned away, and instantly Denton realised the truth of this remark.
The swart man descended with dignity to a cross way, and Denton, after a
momentary impulse to pursuit, remained on the platform. For a time the
things that had happened filled his mind. In one day his graceful system
of resignation had been shattered beyond hope. Brute force, the final,
the fundamental, had thrust its face through all his explanations and
glosses and consolations and grinned enigmatically. Though he was
hungry and tired, he did not go on directly to the Labour Hotel, where
he would meet Elizabeth. He found he was beginning to think, he wanted
very greatly to think; and so, wrapped in a monstrous cloud of
meditation, he went the circuit of the city on his moving platform
twice. You figure him, tearing through the glaring, thunder-voiced city
at a pace of fifty miles an hour, the city upon the planet that spins
along its chartless path through space many thousands of miles an hour,
funking most terribly, and trying to understand why the heart and will
in him should suffer and keep alive.
When at last he came to Elizabeth, she was white and anxious. He might
have noted she was in trouble, had it not been for his own
preoccupation. He feared most that she would desire to know every detail
of his indignities, that she would be sympathetic or indignant. He saw
her eyebrows rise at the sight of him.
"I've had rough handling," he said, and gasped. "It's too fresh--too
hot. I don't want to talk about it." He sat down with an unavoidable air
of sullenness.
She stared at him in astonishment, and as she read something of the
significant hieroglyphic of his battered face, her lips whitened. Her
hand--it was thinner now than in the days of their prosperity, and her
first finger was a little altered by the metal punching she
did--clenched convulsively. "This horrible world!" she said, and said no
more.
In these latter days they had become a very silent couple; they said
scarcely a word to each other that night, but each followed a private
train of thought. In the small hours, as Elizabeth lay awake, Denton
started up beside her suddenly--he had been lying as still as a dead
man.
"I cannot stand it!" cried Denton. "I _will_ not stand it!"
She saw him dimly, sitting up; saw his arm lunge as if in a furious blow
at the enshrouding night. Then for a space he was still.
"It is too much--it is more than one can bear!"
She could say nothing. To her, also, it seemed that this was as far as
one could go. She waited through a long stillness. She could see that
Denton sat with his arms about his knees, his chin almost touching them.
Then he laughed.
"No," he said at last, "I'm going to stand it. That's the peculiar
thing. There isn't a grain of suicide in us--not a grain. I suppose all
the people with a turn that way have gone. We're going through with
it--to the end."
Elizabeth thought grayly, and realised that this also was true.
"We're going through with it. To think of all who have gone through with
it: all the generations--endless--endless. Little beasts that snapped
and snarled, snapping and snarling, snapping and snarling, generation
after generation."
His monotone, ended abruptly, resumed after a vast interval.
"There were ninety thousand years of stone age. A Denton somewhere in
all those years. Apostolic succession. The grace of going through. Let
me see! Ninety--nine hundred--three nines, twenty-seven--_three
thousand_ generations of men!--men more or less. And each fought, and
was bruised, and shamed, and somehow held his own--going through with
it--passing it on.... And thousands more to come perhaps--thousands!
"Passing it on. I wonder if they will thank us."
His voice assumed an argumentative note. "If one could find something
definite ... If one could say, 'This is why--this is why it goes
on....'"
He became still, and Elizabeth's eyes slowly separated him from the
darkness until at last she could see how he sat with his head resting on
his hand. A sense of the enormous remoteness of their minds came to her;
that dim suggestion of another being seemed to her a figure of their
mutual understanding. What could he be thinking now? What might he not
say next? Another age seemed to elapse before he sighed and whispered:
"No. I don't understand it. No!" Then a long interval, and he repeated
this. But the second time it had the tone almost of a solution.
She became aware that he was preparing to lie down. She marked his
movements, perceived with astonishment how he adjusted his pillow with a
careful regard to comfort. He lay down with a sigh of contentment
almost. His passion had passed. He lay still, and presently his
breathing became regular and deep.
But Elizabeth remained with eyes wide open in the darkness, until the
clamour of a bell and the sudden brilliance of the electric light warned
them that the Labour Company had need of them for yet another day.
That day came a scuffle with the albino Whitey and the little
ferret-faced man. Blunt, the swart artist in scrapping, having first
let Denton grasp the bearing of his lesson, intervened, not without a
certain quality of patronage. "Drop 'is 'air, Whitey, and let the man
be," said his gross voice through a shower of indignities. "Can't you
see 'e don't know _'ow_ to scrap?" And Denton, lying shamefully in the
dust, realised that he must accept that course of instruction after all.
He made his apology straight and clean. He scrambled up and walked to
Blunt. "I was a fool, and you are right," he said. "If it isn't too
late ..."
That night, after the second spell, Denton went with Blunt to certain
waste and slime-soaked vaults under the Port of London, to learn the
first beginnings of the high art of scrapping as it had been perfected
in the great world of the underways: how to hit or kick a man so as to
hurt him excruciatingly or make him violently sick, how to hit or kick
"vital," how to use glass in one's garments as a club and to spread red
ruin with various domestic implements, how to anticipate and demolish
your adversary's intentions in other directions; all the pleasant
devices, in fact, that had grown up among the disinherited of the great
cities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, were spread out by a
gifted exponent for Denton's learning. Blunt's bashfulness fell from
him as the instruction proceeded, and he developed a certain expert
dignity, a quality of fatherly consideration. He treated Denton with the
utmost consideration, only "flicking him up a bit" now and then, to keep
the interest hot, and roaring with laughter at a happy fluke of Denton's
that covered his mouth with blood.
"I'm always keerless of my mouth," said Blunt, admitting a weakness.
"Always. It don't seem to matter, like, just getting bashed in the
mouth--not if your chin's all right. Tastin' blood does me good. Always.
But I better not 'it you again."
Denton went home, to fall asleep exhausted and wake in the small hours
with aching limbs and all his bruises tingling. Was it worth while that
he should go on living? He listened to Elizabeth's breathing, and
remembering that he must have awaked her the previous night, he lay very
still. He was sick with infinite disgust at the new conditions of his
life. He hated it all, hated even the genial savage who had protected
him so generously. The monstrous fraud of civilisation glared stark
before his eyes; he saw it as a vast lunatic growth, producing a
deepening torrent of savagery below, and above ever more flimsy
gentility and silly wastefulness. He could see no redeeming reason, no
touch of honour, either in the life he had led or in this life to which
he had fallen. Civilisation presented itself as some catastrophic
product as little concerned with men--save as victims--as a cyclone or a
planetary collision. He, and therefore all mankind, seemed living
utterly in vain. His mind sought some strange expedients of escape, if
not for himself then at least for Elizabeth. But he meant them for
himself. What if he hunted up Mwres and told him of their disaster? It
came to him as an astonishing thing how utterly Mwres and Bindon had
passed out of his range. Where were they? What were they doing? From
that he passed to thoughts of utter dishonour. And finally, not arising
in any way out of this mental tumult, but ending it as dawn ends the
night, came the clear and obvious conclusion of the night before: the
conviction that he had to go through with things; that, apart from any
remoter view and quite sufficient for all his thought and energy, he had
to stand up and fight among his fellows and quit himself like a man.
The second night's instruction was perhaps less dreadful than the first;
and the third was even endurable, for Blunt dealt out some praise. The
fourth day Denton chanced upon the fact that the ferret-faced man was a
coward. There passed a fortnight of smouldering days and feverish
instruction at night; Blunt, with many blasphemies, testified that never
had he met so apt a pupil; and all night long Denton dreamt of kicks and
counters and gouges and cunning tricks. For all that time no further
outrages were attempted, for fear of Blunt; and then came the second
crisis. Blunt did not come one day--afterwards he admitted his
deliberate intention--and through the tedious morning Whitey awaited the
interval between the spells with an ostentatious impatience. He knew
nothing of the scrapping lessons, and he spent the time in telling
Denton and the vault generally of certain disagreeable proceedings he
had in mind.
Whitey was not popular, and the vault disgorged to see him haze the new
man with only a languid interest. But matters changed when Whitey's
attempt to open the proceedings by kicking Denton in the face was met by
an excellently executed duck, catch and throw, that completed the flight
of Whitey's foot in its orbit and brought Whitey's head into the
ash-heap that had once received Denton's. Whitey arose a shade whiter,
and now blasphemously bent upon vital injuries. There were indecisive
passages, foiled enterprises that deepened Whitey's evidently growing
perplexity; and then things developed into a grouping of Denton
uppermost with Whitey's throat in his hand, his knee on Whitey's chest,
and a tearful Whitey with a black face, protruding tongue and broken
finger endeavouring to explain the misunderstanding by means of hoarse
sounds. Moreover, it was evident that among the bystanders there had
never been a more popular person than Denton.
Denton, with proper precaution, released his antagonist and stood up.
His blood seemed changed to some sort of fluid fire, his limbs felt
light and supernaturally strong. The idea that he was a martyr in the
civilisation machine had vanished from his mind. He was a man in a world
of men.
The little ferret-faced man was the first in the competition to pat him
on the back. The lender of oil cans was a radiant sun of genial
congratulation.... It seemed incredible to Denton that he had ever
thought of despair.
Denton was convinced that not only had he to go through with things, but
that he could. He sat on the canvas pallet expounding this new aspect to
Elizabeth. One side of his face was bruised. She had not recently
fought, she had not been patted on the back, there were no hot bruises
upon her face, only a pallor and a new line or so about the mouth. She
was taking the woman's share. She looked steadfastly at Denton in his
new mood of prophecy. "I feel that there is something," he was saying,
"something that goes on, a Being of Life in which we live and move and
have our being, something that began fifty--a hundred million years ago,
perhaps, that goes on--on: growing, spreading, to things beyond
us--things that will justify us all.... That will explain and justify my
fighting--these bruises, and all the pain of it. It's the chisel--yes,
the chisel of the Maker. If only I could make you feel as I feel, if I
could make you! You _will_, dear, I know you will."
"No," she said in a low voice. "No, I shall not."
"So I might have thought--"
She shook her head. "No," she said, "I have thought as well. What you
say--doesn't convince me."
She looked at his face resolutely. "I hate it," she said, and caught at
her breath. "You do not understand, you do not think. There was a time
when you said things and I believed them. I am growing wiser. You are a
man, you can fight, force your way. You do not mind bruises. You can be
coarse and ugly, and still a man. Yes--it makes you. It makes you. You
are right. Only a woman is not like that. We are different. We have let
ourselves get civilised too soon. This underworld is not for us."
She paused and began again.
"I hate it! I hate this horrible canvas! I hate it more than--more than
the worst that can happen. It hurts my fingers to touch it. It is
horrible to the skin. And the women I work with day after day! I lie
awake at nights and think how I may be growing like them...."
She stopped. "I _am_ growing like them," she cried passionately.
Denton stared at her distress. "But--" he said and stopped.
"You don't understand. What have I? What have I to save me? _You_ can
fight. Fighting is man's work. But women--women are different.... I have
thought it all out, I have done nothing but think night and day. Look at
the colour of my face! I cannot go on. I cannot endure this life.... I
cannot endure it."
She stopped. She hesitated.
"You do not know all," she said abruptly, and for an instant her lips
had a bitter smile. "I have been asked to leave you."
"Leave me!"
She made no answer save an affirmative movement of the head.
Denton stood up sharply. They stared at one another through a long
silence.
Suddenly she turned herself about, and flung face downward upon their
canvas bed. She did not sob, she made no sound. She lay still upon her
face. After a vast, distressful void her shoulders heaved and she began
to weep silently.
"Elizabeth!" he whispered--"Elizabeth!"
Very softly he sat down beside her, bent down, put his arm across her in
a doubtful caress, seeking vainly for some clue to this intolerable
situation.
"Elizabeth," he whispered in her ear.
She thrust him from her with her hand. "I cannot bear a child to be a
slave!" and broke out into loud and bitter weeping.
Denton's face changed--became blank dismay. Presently he slipped from
the bed and stood on his feet. All the complacency had vanished from his
face, had given place to impotent rage. He began to rave and curse at
the intolerable forces which pressed upon him, at all the accidents and
hot desires and heedlessness that mock the life of man. His little voice
rose in that little room, and he shook his fist, this animalcule of the
earth, at all that environed him about, at the millions about him, at
his past and future and all the insensate vastness of the overwhelming
city.