Tales of Space and Time
"Last night!" she said. "I could not live through another such night."
He looked at her. Her face was pale for want of sleep, and drawn and
haggard. He came to a sudden resolution. "We must go back," he said.
She looked at the dead dogs, and shivered. "We cannot stay here," she
said.
"We must go back," he repeated, glancing over his shoulder to see if the
enemy kept their distance. "We have been happy for a time.... But the
world is too civilised. Ours is the age of cities. More of this will
kill us."
"But what are we to do? How can we live there?"
Denton hesitated. His heel kicked against the wall on which he sat.
"It's a thing I haven't mentioned before," he said, and coughed;
"but ..."
"Yes?"
"You could raise money on your expectations," he said.
"Could I?" she said eagerly.
"Of course you could. What a child you are!"
She stood up, and her face was bright. "Why did you not tell me before?"
she asked. "And all this time we have been here!"
He looked at her for a moment, and smiled. Then the smile vanished. "I
thought it ought to come from you," he said. "I didn't like to ask for
your money. And besides--at first I thought this would be rather fine."
There was a pause.
"It _has_ been fine," he said; and glanced once more over his shoulder.
"Until all this began."
"Yes," she said, "those first days. The first three days."
They looked for a space into one another's faces, and then Denton slid
down from the wall and took her hand.
"To each generation," he said, "the life of its time. I see it all
plainly now. In the city--that is the life to which we were born. To
live in any other fashion ... Coming here was a dream, and this--is the
awakening."
"It was a pleasant dream," she said,--"in the beginning."
For a long space neither spoke.
"If we would reach the city before the shepherds come here, we must
start," said Denton. "We must get our food out of the house and eat as
we go."
Denton glanced about him again, and, giving the dead dogs a wide berth,
they walked across the garden space and into the house together. They
found the wallet with their food, and descended the blood-stained stairs
again. In the hall Elizabeth stopped. "One minute," she said. "There is
something here."
She led the way into the room in which that one little blue flower was
blooming. She stooped to it, she touched it with her hand.
"I want it," she said; and then, "I cannot take it...."
Impulsively she stooped and kissed its petals.
Then silently, side by side, they went across the empty garden-space
into the old high road, and set their faces resolutely towards the
distant city--towards the complex mechanical city of those latter days,
the city that had swallowed up mankind.
III--THE WAYS OF THE CITY
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