Tales of Space and Time
"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