In Bindon's younger days he had dabbled in speculation and made three
brilliant flukes. For the rest of his life he had the wisdom to let
gambling alone, and the conceit to believe himself a very clever man. A
certain desire for influence and reputation interested him in the
business intrigues of the giant city in which his flukes were made. He
became at last one of the most influential shareholders in the company
that owned the London flying stages to which the aeroplanes came from
all parts of the world. This much for his public activities. In his
private life he was a man of pleasure. And this is the story of his
heart.
But before proceeding to such depths, one must devote a little time to
the exterior of this person. Its physical basis was slender, and short,
and dark; and the face, which was fine-featured and assisted by
pigments, varied from an insecure self-complacency to an intelligent
uneasiness. His face and head had been depilated, according to the
cleanly and hygienic fashion of the time, so that the colour and contour
of his hair varied with his costume. This he was constantly changing.
At times he would distend himself with pneumatic vestments in the rococo
vein. From among the billowy developments of this style, and beneath a
translucent and illuminated headdress, his eye watched jealously for the
respect of the less fashionable world. At other times he emphasised his
elegant slenderness in close-fitting garments of black satin. For
effects of dignity he would assume broad pneumatic shoulders, from which
hung a robe of carefully arranged folds of China silk, and a classical
Bindon in pink tights was also a transient phenomenon in the eternal
pageant of Destiny. In the days when he hoped to marry Elizabeth, he
sought to impress and charm her, and at the same time to take off
something of his burthen of forty years, by wearing the last fancy of
the contemporary buck, a costume of elastic material with distensible
warts and horns, changing in colour as he walked, by an ingenious
arrangement of versatile chromatophores. And no doubt, if Elizabeth's
affection had not been already engaged by the worthless Denton, and if
her tastes had not had that odd bias for old-fashioned ways, this
extremely _chic_ conception would have ravished her. Bindon had
consulted Elizabeth's father before presenting himself in this garb--he
was one of those men who always invite criticism of their costume--and
Mwres had pronounced him all that the heart of woman could desire. But
the affair of the hypnotist proved that his knowledge of the heart of
woman was incomplete.
Bindon's idea of marrying had been formed some little time before Mwres
threw Elizabeth's budding womanhood in his way. It was one of Bindon's
most cherished secrets that he had a considerable capacity for a pure
and simple life of a grossly sentimental type. The thought imparted a
sort of pathetic seriousness to the offensive and quite inconsequent and
unmeaning excesses, which he was pleased to regard as dashing
wickedness, and which a number of good people also were so unwise as to
treat in that desirable manner. As a consequence of these excesses, and
perhaps by reason also of an inherited tendency to early decay, his
liver became seriously affected, and he suffered increasing
inconvenience when travelling by aeroplane. It was during his
convalescence from a protracted bilious attack that it occurred to him
that in spite of all the terrible fascinations of Vice, if he found a
beautiful, gentle, good young woman of a not too violently intellectual
type to devote her life to him, he might yet be saved to Goodness, and
even rear a spirited family in his likeness to solace his declining
years. But like so many experienced men of the world, he doubted if
there were any good women. Of such as he had heard tell he was outwardly
sceptical and privately much afraid.
When the aspiring Mwres effected his introduction to Elizabeth, it
seemed to him that his good fortune was complete. He fell in love with
her at once. Of course, he had always been falling in love since he was
sixteen, in accordance with the extremely varied recipes to be found in
the accumulated literature of many centuries. But this was different.
This was real love. It seemed to him to call forth all the lurking
goodness in his nature. He felt that for her sake he could give up a way
of life that had already produced the gravest lesions on his liver and
nervous system. His imagination presented him with idyllic pictures of
the life of the reformed rake. He would never be sentimental with her,
or silly; but always a little cynical and bitter, as became the past.
Yet he was sure she would have an intuition of his real greatness and
goodness. And in due course he would confess things to her, pour his
version of what he regarded as his wickedness--showing what a complex of
Goethe, and Benvenuto Cellini, and Shelley, and all those other chaps he
really was--into her shocked, very beautiful, and no doubt sympathetic
ear. And preparatory to these things he wooed her with infinite subtlety
and respect. And the reserve with which Elizabeth treated him seemed
nothing more nor less than an exquisite modesty touched and enhanced by
an equally exquisite lack of ideas.
Bindon knew nothing of her wandering affections, nor of the attempt made
by Mwres to utilise hypnotism as a corrective to this digression of her
heart; he conceived he was on the best of terms with Elizabeth, and had
made her quite successfully various significant presents of jewellery
and the more virtuous cosmetics, when her elopement with Denton threw
the world out of gear for him. His first aspect of the matter was rage
begotten of wounded vanity, and as Mwres was the most convenient person,
he vented the first brunt of it upon him.
He went immediately and insulted the desolate father grossly, and then
spent an active and determined day going to and fro about the city and
interviewing people in a consistent and partly-successful attempt to
ruin that matrimonial speculator. The effectual nature of these
activities gave him a temporary exhilaration, and he went to the
dining-place he had frequented in his wicked days in a devil-may-care
frame of mind, and dined altogether too amply and cheerfully with two
other golden youths in their early forties. He threw up the game; no
woman was worth being good for, and he astonished even himself by the
strain of witty cynicism he developed. One of the other desperate
blades, warmed with wine, made a facetious allusion to his
disappointment, but at the time this did not seem unpleasant.
The next morning found his liver and temper inflamed. He kicked his
phonographic-news machine to pieces, dismissed his valet, and resolved
that he would perpetrate a terrible revenge upon Elizabeth. Or Denton.
Or somebody. But anyhow, it was to be a terrible revenge; and the friend
who had made fun at him should no longer see him in the light of a
foolish girl's victim. He knew something of the little property that was
due to her, and that this would be the only support of the young couple
until Mwres should relent. If Mwres did not relent, and if unpropitious
things should happen to the affair in which Elizabeth's expectations
lay, they would come upon evil times and be sufficiently amenable to
temptation of a sinister sort. Bindon's imagination, abandoning its
beautiful idealism altogether, expanded the idea of temptation of a
sinister sort. He figured himself as the implacable, the intricate and
powerful man of wealth pursuing this maiden who had scorned him. And
suddenly her image came upon his mind vivid and dominant, and for the
first time in his life Bindon realised something of the real power of
passion.
His imagination stood aside like a respectful footman who has done his
work in ushering in the emotion.
"My God!" cried Bindon: "I will have her! If I have to kill myself to
get her! And that other fellow--!"
After an interview with his medical man and a penance for his overnight
excesses in the form of bitter drugs, a mitigated but absolutely
resolute Bindon sought out Mwres. Mwres he found properly smashed, and
impoverished and humble, in a mood of frantic self-preservation, ready
to sell himself body and soul, much more any interest in a disobedient
daughter, to recover his lost position in the world. In the reasonable
discussion that followed, it was agreed that these misguided young
people should be left to sink into distress, or possibly even assisted
towards that improving discipline by Bindon's financial influence.
"And then?" said Mwres.
"They will come to the Labour Company," said Bindon. "They will wear the
blue canvas."
"And then?"
"She will divorce him," he said, and sat for a moment intent upon that
prospect. For in those days the austere limitations of divorce of
Victorian times were extraordinarily relaxed, and a couple might
separate on a hundred different scores.
Then suddenly Bindon astonished himself and Mwres by jumping to his
feet. "She _shall_ divorce him!" he cried. "I will have it so--I will
work it so. By God! it shall be so. He shall be disgraced, so that she
must. He shall be smashed and pulverised."
The idea of smashing and pulverising inflamed him further. He began a
Jovian pacing up and down the little office. "I will have her," he
cried. "I _will_ have her! Heaven and Hell shall not save her from me!"
His passion evaporated in its expression, and left him at the end
simply histrionic. He struck an attitude and ignored with heroic
determination a sharp twinge of pain about the diaphragm. And Mwres sat
with his pneumatic cap deflated and himself very visibly impressed.
And so, with a fair persistency, Bindon sat himself to the work of being
Elizabeth's malignant providence, using with ingenious dexterity every
particle of advantage wealth in those days gave a man over his
fellow-creatures. A resort to the consolations of religion hindered
these operations not at all. He would go and talk with an interesting,
experienced and sympathetic Father of the Huysmanite sect of the Isis
cult, about all the irrational little proceedings he was pleased to
regard as his heaven-dismaying wickedness, and the interesting,
experienced and sympathetic Father representing Heaven dismayed, would
with a pleasing affectation of horror, suggest simple and easy penances,
and recommend a monastic foundation that was airy, cool, hygienic, and
not vulgarised, for viscerally disordered penitent sinners of the
refined and wealthy type. And after these excursions, Bindon would come
back to London quite active and passionate again. He would machinate
with really considerable energy, and repair to a certain gallery high
above the street of moving ways, from which he could view the entrance
to the barrack of the Labour Company in the ward which sheltered Denton
and Elizabeth. And at last one day he saw Elizabeth go in, and thereby
his passion was renewed.
So in the fullness of time the complicated devices of Bindon ripened,
and he could go to Mwres and tell him that the young people were near
despair.
"It's time for you," he said, "to let your parental affections have
play. She's been in blue canvas some months, and they've been cooped
together in one of those Labour dens, and the little girl is dead. She
knows now what his manhood is worth to her, by way of protection, poor
girl. She'll see things now in a clearer light. You go to her--I don't
want to appear in this affair yet--and point out to her how necessary it
is that she should get a divorce from him...."
"She's obstinate," said Mwres doubtfully.
"Spirit!" said Bindon. "She's a wonderful girl--a wonderful girl!"
"She'll refuse."
"Of course she will. But leave it open to her. Leave it open to her. And
some day--in that stuffy den, in that irksome, toilsome life they can't
help it--_they'll have a quarrel_. And then--"
Mwres meditated over the matter, and did as he was told.
Then Bindon, as he had arranged with his spiritual adviser, went into
retreat. The retreat of the Huysmanite sect was a beautiful place, with
the sweetest air in London, lit by natural sunlight, and with restful
quadrangles of real grass open to the sky, where at the same time the
penitent man of pleasure might enjoy all the pleasures of loafing and
all the satisfaction of distinguished austerity. And, save for
participation in the simple and wholesome dietary of the place and in
certain magnificent chants, Bindon spent all his time in meditation upon
the theme of Elizabeth, and the extreme purification his soul had
undergone since he first saw her, and whether he would be able to get a
dispensation to marry her from the experienced and sympathetic Father in
spite of the approaching "sin" of her divorce; and then ... Bindon would
lean against a pillar of the quadrangle and lapse into reveries on the
superiority of virtuous love to any other form of indulgence. A curious
feeling in his back and chest that was trying to attract his attention,
a disposition to be hot or shiver, a general sense of ill-health and
cutaneous discomfort he did his best to ignore. All that of course
belonged to the old life that he was shaking off.
When he came out of retreat he went at once to Mwres to ask for news of
Elizabeth. Mwres was clearly under the impression that he was an
exemplary father, profoundly touched about the heart by his child's
unhappiness. "She was pale," he said, greatly moved; "She was pale. When
I asked her to come away and leave him--and be happy--she put her head
down upon the table"--Mwres sniffed--"and cried."
His agitation was so great that he could say no more.
"Ah!" said Bindon, respecting this manly grief. "Oh!" said Bindon quite
suddenly, with his hand to his side.
Mwres looked up sharply out of the pit of his sorrows, startled. "What's
the matter?" he asked, visibly concerned.
"A most violent pain. Excuse me! You were telling me about Elizabeth."
And Mwres, after a decent solicitude for Bindon's pain, proceeded with
his report. It was even unexpectedly hopeful. Elizabeth, in her first
emotion at discovering that her father had not absolutely deserted her,
had been frank with him about her sorrows and disgusts.
"Yes," said Bindon, magnificently, "I shall have her yet." And then that
novel pain twitched him for the second time.
For these lower pains the priest was comparatively ineffectual,
inclining rather to regard the body and them as mental illusions
amenable to contemplation; so Bindon took it to a man of a class he
loathed, a medical man of extraordinary repute and incivility. "We must
go all over you," said the medical man, and did so with the most
disgusting frankness. "Did you ever bring any children into the world?"
asked this gross materialist among other impertinent questions.
"Not that I know of," said Bindon, too amazed to stand upon his dignity.
"Ah!" said the medical man, and proceeded with his punching and
sounding. Medical science in those days was just reaching the beginnings
of precision. "You'd better go right away," said the medical man, "and
make the Euthanasia. The sooner the better."
Bindon gasped. He had been trying not to understand the technical
explanations and anticipations in which the medical man had indulged.
"I say!" he said. "But do you mean to say ... Your science ..."
"Nothing," said the medical man. "A few opiates. The thing is your own
doing, you know, to a certain extent."
"I was sorely tempted in my youth."
"It's not that so much. But you come of a bad stock. Even if you'd have
taken precautions you'd have had bad times to wind up with. The mistake
was getting born. The indiscretions of the parents. And you've shirked
exercise, and so forth."
"I had no one to advise me."
"Medical men are always willing."
"I was a spirited young fellow."
"We won't argue; the mischief's done now. You've lived. We can't start
you again. You ought never to have started at all. Frankly--the
Euthanasia!"
Bindon hated him in silence for a space. Every word of this brutal
expert jarred upon his refinements. He was so gross, so impermeable to
all the subtler issues of being. But it is no good picking a quarrel
with a doctor. "My religious beliefs," he said, "I don't approve of
suicide."
"You've been doing it all your life."
"Well, anyhow, I've come to take a serious view of life now."
"You're bound to, if you go on living. You'll hurt. But for practical
purposes it's late. However, if you mean to do that--perhaps I'd better
mix you a little something. You'll hurt a great deal. These little
twinges ..."
"Twinges!"
"Mere preliminary notices."
"How long can I go on? I mean, before I hurt--really."
"You'll get it hot soon. Perhaps three days."
Bindon tried to argue for an extension of time, and in the midst of his
pleading gasped, put his hand to his side. Suddenly the extraordinary
pathos of his life came to him clear and vivid. "It's hard," he said.
"It's infernally hard! I've been no man's enemy but my own. I've always
treated everybody quite fairly."
The medical man stared at him without any sympathy for some seconds. He
was reflecting how excellent it was that there were no more Bindons to
carry on that line of pathos. He felt quite optimistic. Then he turned
to his telephone and ordered up a prescription from the Central
Pharmacy.
He was interrupted by a voice behind him. "By God!" cried Bindon; "I'll
have her yet."
The physician stared over his shoulder at Bindon's expression, and then
altered the prescription.
So soon as this painful interview was over, Bindon gave way to rage. He
settled that the medical man was not only an unsympathetic brute and
wanting in the first beginnings of a gentleman, but also highly
incompetent; and he went off to four other practitioners in succession,
with a view to the establishment of this intuition. But to guard against
surprises he kept that little prescription in his pocket. With each he
began by expressing his grave doubts of the first doctor's intelligence,
honesty and professional knowledge, and then stated his symptoms,
suppressing only a few more material facts in each case. These were
always subsequently elicited by the doctor. In spite of the welcome
depreciation of another practitioner, none of these eminent specialists
would give Bindon any hope of eluding the anguish and helplessness that
loomed now close upon him. To the last of them he unburthened his mind
of an accumulated disgust with medical science. "After centuries and
centuries," he exclaimed hotly; "and you can do nothing--except admit
your helplessness. I say, 'save me'--and what do you do?"
"No doubt it's hard on you," said the doctor. "But you should have taken
precautions."
"How was I to know?"
"It wasn't our place to run after you," said the medical man, picking a
thread of cotton from his purple sleeve. "Why should we save _you_ in
particular? You see--from one point of view--people with imaginations
and passions like yours have to go--they have to go."
"Go?"
"Die out. It's an eddy."
He was a young man with a serene face. He smiled at Bindon. "We get on
with research, you know; we give advice when people have the sense to
ask for it. And we bide our time."
"Bide your time?"
"We hardly know enough yet to take over the management, you know."
"The management?"
"You needn't be anxious. Science is young yet. It's got to keep on
growing for a few generations. We know enough now to know we don't know
enough yet.... But the time is coming, all the same. _You_ won't see the
time. But, between ourselves, you rich men and party bosses, with your
natural play of the passions and patriotism and religion and so forth,
have made rather a mess of things; haven't you? These Underways! And all
that sort of thing. Some of us have a sort of fancy that in time we may
know enough to take over a little more than the ventilation and drains.
Knowledge keeps on piling up, you know. It keeps on growing. And there's
not the slightest hurry for a generation or so. Some day--some day, men
will live in a different way." He looked at Bindon and meditated.
"There'll be a lot of dying out before that day can come."
Bindon attempted to point out to this young man how silly and irrelevant
such talk was to a sick man like himself, how impertinent and uncivil it
was to him, an older man occupying a position in the official world of
extraordinary power and influence. He insisted that a doctor was paid to
cure people--he laid great stress on "_paid_"--and had no business to
glance even for a moment at "those other questions." "But we do," said
the young man, insisting upon facts, and Bindon lost his temper.
His indignation carried him home. That these incompetent impostors, who
were unable to save the life of a really influential man like himself,
should dream of some day robbing the legitimate property owners of
social control, of inflicting one knew not what tyranny upon the world.
Curse science! He fumed over the intolerable prospect for some time, and
then the pain returned, and he recalled the made-up prescription of the
first doctor, still happily in his pocket. He took a dose forthwith.
It calmed and soothed him greatly, and he could sit down in his most
comfortable chair beside his library (of phonographic records), and
think over the altered aspect of affairs. His indignation passed, his
anger and his passion crumbled under the subtle attack of that
prescription, pathos became his sole ruler. He stared about him, at his
magnificent and voluptuously appointed apartment, at his statuary and
discreetly veiled pictures, and all the evidences of a cultivated and
elegant wickedness; he touched a stud and the sad pipings of Tristan's
shepherd filled the air. His eye wandered from one object to another.
They were costly and gross and florid--but they were his. They presented
in concrete form his ideals, his conceptions of beauty and desire, his
idea of all that is precious in life. And now--he must leave it all like
a common man. He was, he felt, a slender and delicate flame, burning
out. So must all life flame up and pass, he thought. His eyes filled
with tears.
Then it came into his head that he was alone. Nobody cared for him,
nobody needed him! at any moment he might begin to hurt vividly. He
might even howl. Nobody would mind. According to all the doctors he
would have excellent reason for howling in a day or so. It recalled what
his spiritual adviser had said of the decline of faith and fidelity, the
degeneration of the age. He beheld himself as a pathetic proof of this;
he, the subtle, able, important, voluptuous, cynical, complex Bindon,
possibly howling, and not one faithful simple creature in all the world
to howl in sympathy. Not one faithful simple soul was there--no shepherd
to pipe to him! Had all such faithful simple creatures vanished from
this harsh and urgent earth? He wondered whether the horrid vulgar crowd
that perpetually went about the city could possibly know what he thought
of them. If they did he felt sure _some_ would try to earn a better
opinion. Surely the world went from bad to worse. It was becoming
impossible for Bindons. Perhaps some day ... He was quite sure that the
one thing he had needed in life was sympathy. For a time he regretted
that he left no sonnets--no enigmatical pictures or something of that
sort behind him to carry on his being until at last the sympathetic
mind should come....
It seemed incredible to him that this that came was extinction. Yet his
sympathetic spiritual guide was in this matter annoyingly figurative and
vague. Curse science! It had undermined all faith--all hope. To go out,
to vanish from theatre and street, from office and dining-place, from
the dear eyes of womankind. And not to be missed! On the whole to leave
the world happier!
He reflected that he had never worn his heart upon his sleeve. Had he
after all been _too_ unsympathetic? Few people could suspect how subtly
profound he really was beneath the mask of that cynical gaiety of his.
They would not understand the loss they had suffered. Elizabeth, for
example, had not suspected....
He had reserved that. His thoughts having come to Elizabeth gravitated
about her for some time. How _little_ Elizabeth understood him!
That thought became intolerable. Before all other things he must set
that right. He realised that there was still something for him to do in
life, his struggle against Elizabeth was even yet not over. He could
never overcome her now, as he had hoped and prayed. But he might still
impress her!
From that idea he expanded. He might impress her profoundly--he might
impress her so that she should for evermore regret her treatment of him.
The thing that she must realise before everything else was his
magnanimity. His magnanimity! Yes! he had loved her with amazing
greatness of heart. He had not seen it so clearly before--but of course
he was going to leave her all his property. He saw it instantly, as a
thing determined and inevitable. She would think how good he was, how
spaciously generous; surrounded by all that makes life tolerable from
his hand, she would recall with infinite regret her scorn and coldness.
And when she sought expression for that regret, she would find that
occasion gone forever, she should be met by a locked door, by a
disdainful stillness, by a white dead face. He closed his eyes and
remained for a space imagining himself that white dead face.
From that he passed to other aspects of the matter, but his
determination was assured. He meditated elaborately before he took
action, for the drug he had taken inclined him to a lethargic and
dignified melancholy. In certain respects he modified details. If he
left all his property to Elizabeth it would include the voluptuously
appointed room he occupied, and for many reasons he did not care to
leave that to her. On the other hand, it had to be left to some one. In
his clogged condition this worried him extremely.
In the end he decided to leave it to the sympathetic exponent of the
fashionable religious cult, whose conversation had been so pleasing in
the past. "_He_ will understand," said Bindon with a sentimental sigh.
"He knows what Evil means--he understands something of the Stupendous
Fascination of the Sphinx of Sin. Yes--he will understand." By that
phrase it was that Bindon was pleased to dignify certain unhealthy and
undignified departures from sane conduct to which a misguided vanity and
an ill-controlled curiosity had led him. He sat for a space thinking how
very Hellenic and Italian and Neronic, and all those things, he had
been. Even now--might one not try a sonnet? A penetrating voice to echo
down the ages, sensuous, sinister, and sad. For a space he forgot
Elizabeth. In the course of half an hour he spoilt three phonographic
coils, got a headache, took a second dose to calm himself, and reverted
to magnanimity and his former design.
At last he faced the unpalatable problem of Denton. It needed all his
newborn magnanimity before he could swallow the thought of Denton; but
at last this greatly misunderstood man, assisted by his sedative and the
near approach of death, effected even that. If he was at all exclusive
about Denton, if he should display the slightest distrust, if he
attempted any specific exclusion of that young man, she
might--_misunderstand_. Yes--she should have her Denton still. His
magnanimity must go even to that. He tried to think only of Elizabeth in
the matter.
He rose with a sigh, and limped across to the telephonic apparatus that
communicated with his solicitor. In ten minutes a will duly attested and
with its proper thumb-mark signature lay in the solicitor's office three
miles away. And then for a space Bindon sat very still.
Suddenly he started out of a vague reverie and pressed an investigatory
hand to his side.
Then he jumped eagerly to his feet and rushed to the telephone. The
Euthanasia Company had rarely been called by a client in a greater
hurry.
So it came at last that Denton and his Elizabeth, against all hope,
returned unseparated from the labour servitude to which they had fallen.
Elizabeth came out from her cramped subterranean den of metal-beaters
and all the sordid circumstances of blue canvas, as one comes out of a
nightmare. Back towards the sunlight their fortune took them; once the
bequest was known to them, the bare thought of another day's hammering
became intolerable. They went up long lifts and stairs to levels that
they had not seen since the days of their disaster. At first she was
full of this sensation of escape; even to think of the underways was
intolerable; only after many months could she begin to recall with
sympathy the faded women who were still below there, murmuring scandals
and reminiscences and folly, and tapping away their lives.
Her choice of the apartments they presently took expressed the vehemence
of her release. They were rooms upon the very verge of the city; they
had a roof space and a balcony upon the city wall, wide open to the sun
and wind, the country and the sky.
And in that balcony comes the last scene in this story. It was a summer
sunsetting, and the hills of Surrey were very blue and clear. Denton
leant upon the balcony regarding them, and Elizabeth sat by his side.
Very wide and spacious was the view, for their balcony hung five hundred
feet above the ancient level of the ground. The oblongs of the Food
Company, broken here and there by the ruins--grotesque little holes and
sheds--of the ancient suburbs, and intersected by shining streams of
sewage, passed at last into a remote diapering at the foot of the
distant hills. There once had been the squatting-place of the children
of Uya. On those further slopes gaunt machines of unknown import worked
slackly at the end of their spell, and the hill crest was set with
stagnant wind vanes. Along the great south road the Labour Company's
field workers in huge wheeled mechanical vehicles, were hurrying back to
their meals, their last spell finished. And through the air a dozen
little private aeroplanes sailed down towards the city. Familiar scene
as it was to the eyes of Denton and Elizabeth, it would have filled the
minds of their ancestors with incredulous amazement. Denton's thoughts
fluttered towards the future in a vain attempt at what that scene might
be in another two hundred years, and, recoiling, turned towards the
past.
He shared something of the growing knowledge of the time; he could
picture the quaint smoke-grimed Victorian city with its narrow little
roads of beaten earth, its wide common-land, ill-organised, ill-built
suburbs, and irregular enclosures; the old countryside of the Stuart
times, with its little villages and its petty London; the England of the
monasteries, the far older England of the Roman dominion, and then
before that a wild country with here and there the huts of some warring
tribe. These huts must have come and gone and come again through a space
of years that made the Roman camp and villa seem but yesterday; and
before those years, before even the huts, there had been men in the
valley. Even then--so recent had it all been when one judged it by the
standards of geological time--this valley had been here; and those hills
yonder, higher, perhaps, and snow-tipped, had still been yonder hills,
and the Thames had flowed down from the Cotswolds to the sea. But the
men had been but the shapes of men, creatures of darkness and ignorance,
victims of beasts and floods, storms and pestilence and incessant
hunger. They had held a precarious foothold amidst bears and lions and
all the monstrous violence of the past. Already some at least of these
enemies were overcome....
For a time Denton pursued the thoughts of this spacious vision, trying
in obedience to his instinct to find his place and proportion in the
scheme.
"It has been chance," he said, "it has been luck. We have come through.
It happens we have come through. Not by any strength of our own....
"And yet ... No. I don't know."
He was silent for a long time before he spoke again.
"After all--there is a long time yet. There have scarcely been men for
twenty thousand years--and there has been life for twenty millions. And
what are generations? What are generations? It is enormous, and we are
so little. Yet we know--we feel. We are not dumb atoms, we are part of
it--part of it--to the limits of our strength and will. Even to die is
part of it. Whether we die or live, we are in the making....
"As time goes on--_perhaps_--men will be wiser.... Wiser....
"Will they ever understand?"
He became silent again. Elizabeth said nothing to these things, but she
regarded his dreaming face with infinite affection. Her mind was not
very active that evening. A great contentment possessed her. After a
time she laid a gentle hand on his beside her. He fondled it softly,
still looking out upon the spacious gold-woven view. So they sat as the
sun went down. Until presently Elizabeth shivered.
Denton recalled himself abruptly from these spacious issues of his
leisure, and went in to fetch her a shawl.