Tales of Space and Time
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--
SUZANNA! 'ETS! SUZANNA! 'ETS!
A broadside of gigantic phonographs drowned all conversation in the
moving way and roared "_hats_" at the passer-by, while far down the
street and up, other batteries counselled the public to "walk down for
Suzannah," and queried, "Why _don't_ you buy the girl a hat?"
For the benefit of those who chanced to be deaf--and deafness was not
uncommon in the London of that age, inscriptions of all sizes were
thrown from the roof above upon the moving platforms themselves, and on
one's hand or on the bald head of the man before one, or on a lady's
shoulders, or in a sudden jet of flame before one's feet, the moving
finger wrote in unanticipated letters of fire "_'ets r chip t'de_," or
simply "_'ets_." And spite of all these efforts so high was the pitch at
which the city lived, so trained became one's eyes and ears to ignore
all sorts of advertisement, that many a citizen had passed that place
thousands of times and was still unaware of the existence of the
Suzannah Hat Syndicate.
To enter the building one descended the staircase in the middle way and
walked through a public passage in which pretty girls promenaded, girls
who were willing to wear a ticketed hat for a small fee. The entrance
chamber was a large hall in which wax heads fashionably adorned rotated
gracefully upon pedestals, and from this one passed through a cash
office to an interminable series of little rooms, each room with its
salesman, its three or four hats and pins, its mirrors, its
kinematographs, telephones and hat slides in communication with the
central depot, its comfortable lounge and tempting refreshments. A
salesman in such an apartment did Denton now become. It was his business
to attend to any of the incessant stream of ladies who chose to stop
with him, to behave as winningly as possible, to offer refreshment, to
converse on any topic the possible customer chose, and to guide the
conversation dexterously but not insistently towards hats. He was to
suggest trying on various types of hat and to show by his manner and
bearing, but without any coarse flattery, the enhanced impression made
by the hats he wished to sell. He had several mirrors, adapted by
various subtleties of curvature and tint to different types of face and
complexion, and much depended on the proper use of these.
Denton flung himself at these curious and not very congenial duties with
a good will and energy that would have amazed him a year before; but all
to no purpose. The Senior Manageress, who had selected him for
appointment and conferred various small marks of favour upon him,
suddenly changed in her manner, declared for no assignable cause that he
was stupid, and dismissed him at the end of six weeks of salesmanship.
So Denton had to resume his ineffectual search for employment.
This second search did not last very long. Their money was at the ebb.
To eke it out a little longer they resolved to part with their darling
Dings, and took that small person to one of the public _creches_ that
abounded in the city. That was the common use of the time. The
industrial emancipation of women, the correlated disorganisation of the
secluded "home," had rendered _creches_ a necessity for all but very
rich and exceptionally-minded people. Therein children encountered
hygienic and educational advantages impossible without such
organisation. _Creches_ were of all classes and types of luxury, down to
those of the Labour Company, where children were taken on credit, to be
redeemed in labour as they grew up.
But both Denton and Elizabeth being, as I have explained, strange
old-fashioned young people, full of nineteenth-century ideas, hated
these convenient _creches_ exceedingly and at last took their little
daughter to one with extreme reluctance. They were received by a
motherly person in a uniform who was very brisk and prompt in her manner
until Elizabeth wept at the mention of parting from her child. The
motherly person, after a brief astonishment at this unusual emotion,
changed suddenly into a creature of hope and comfort, and so won
Elizabeth's gratitude for life. They were conducted into a vast room
presided over by several nurses and with hundreds of two-year-old girls
grouped about the toy-covered floor. This was the Two-year-old Room.
Two nurses came forward, and Elizabeth watched their bearing towards
Dings with jealous eyes. They were kind--it was clear they felt kind,
and yet ...
Presently it was time to go. By that time Dings was happily established
in a corner, sitting on the floor with her arms filled, and herself,
indeed, for the most part hidden by an unaccustomed wealth of toys. She
seemed careless of all human relationships as her parents receded.
They were forbidden to upset her by saying good-bye.
At the door Elizabeth glanced back for the last time, and behold! Dings
had dropped her new wealth and was standing with a dubious face.
Suddenly Elizabeth gasped, and the motherly nurse pushed her forward and
closed the door.
"You can come again soon, dear," she said, with unexpected tenderness in
her eyes. For a moment Elizabeth stared at her with a blank face. "You
can come again soon," repeated the nurse. Then with a swift transition
Elizabeth was weeping in the nurse's arms. So it was that Denton's heart
was won also.
And three weeks after our young people were absolutely penniless, and
only one way lay open. They must go to the Labour Company. So soon as
the rent was a week overdue their few remaining possessions were seized,
and with scant courtesy they were shown the way out of the hotel.
Elizabeth walked along the passage towards the staircase that ascended
to the motionless middle way, too dulled by misery to think. Denton
stopped behind to finish a stinging and unsatisfactory argument with the
hotel porter, and then came hurrying after her, flushed and hot. He
slackened his pace as he overtook her, and together they ascended to the
middle way in silence. There they found two seats vacant and sat down.
"We need not go there--_yet_?" said Elizabeth.
"No--not till we are hungry," said Denton.
They said no more.
Elizabeth's eyes sought a resting-place and found none. To the right
roared the eastward ways, to the left the ways in the opposite
direction, swarming with people. Backwards and forwards along a cable
overhead rushed a string of gesticulating men, dressed like clowns, each
marked on back and chest with one gigantic letter, so that altogether
they spelt out:
"PURKINJE'S DIGESTIVE PILLS."
An anaemic little woman in horrible coarse blue canvas pointed a little
girl to one of this string of hurrying advertisements.
"Look!" said the anaemic woman: "there's yer father."
"Which?" said the little girl.
"'Im wiv his nose coloured red," said the anaemic woman.
The little girl began to cry, and Elizabeth could have cried too.
"Ain't 'e kickin' 'is legs!--_just!_" said the anaemic woman in blue,
trying to make things bright again. "Looky--_now!_"
On the _facade_ to the right a huge intensely bright disc of weird
colour span incessantly, and letters of fire that came and went spelt
out--
"DOES THIS MAKE YOU GIDDY?"
Then a pause, followed by
"TAKE A PURKINJE'S DIGESTIVE PILL."
A vast and desolating braying began. "If you love Swagger Literature,
put your telephone on to Bruggles, the Greatest Author of all Time. The
Greatest Thinker of all Time. Teaches you Morals up to your Scalp! The
very image of Socrates, except the back of his head, which is like
Shakspeare. He has six toes, dresses in red, and never cleans his teeth.
Hear HIM!"
Denton's voice became audible in a gap in the uproar. "I never ought to
have married you," he was saying. "I have wasted your money, ruined you,
brought you to misery. I am a scoundrel.... Oh, this accursed world!"
She tried to speak, and for some moments could not. She grasped his
hand. "No," she said at last.
A half-formed desire suddenly became determination. She stood up. "Will
you come?"
He rose also. "We need not go there yet."