Tales of Space and Time
conquering youth. All of these artistic workers were much older than
Elizabeth, and two openly expressed their surprise that any one so young
and pleasant should come to share their toil. But Elizabeth did not
trouble them with her old-world moral conceptions.
They were permitted, and even encouraged to converse with each other,
for the directors very properly judged that anything that conduced to
variations of mood made for pleasing fluctuations in their patterning;
and Elizabeth was almost forced to hear the stories of these lives with
which her own interwove: garbled and distorted they were by vanity
indeed and yet comprehensible enough. And soon she began to appreciate
the small spites and cliques, the little misunderstandings and alliances
that enmeshed about her. One woman was excessively garrulous and
descriptive about a wonderful son of hers; another had cultivated a
foolish coarseness of speech, that she seemed to regard as the wittiest
expression of originality conceivable; a third mused for ever on dress,
and whispered to Elizabeth how she saved her pence day after day, and
would presently have a glorious day of freedom, wearing ... and then
followed hours of description; two others sat always together, and
called one another pet names, until one day some little thing happened,
and they sat apart, blind and deaf as it seemed to one another's being.
And always from them all came an incessant tap, tap, tap, tap, and the
manageress listened always to the rhythm to mark if one fell away. Tap,
tap, tap, tap: so their days passed, so their lives must pass. Elizabeth
sat among them, kindly and quiet, grey-hearted, marvelling at Fate: tap,
tap, tap; tap, tap, tap; tap, tap, tap.
So there came to Denton and Elizabeth a long succession of laborious
days, that hardened their hands, wove strange threads of some new and
sterner substance into the soft prettiness of their lives, and drew
grave lines and shadows on their faces. The bright, convenient ways of
the former life had receded to an inaccessible distance; slowly they
learnt the lesson of the underworld--sombre and laborious, vast and
pregnant. There were many little things happened: things that would be
tedious and miserable to tell, things that were bitter and grievous to
bear--indignities, tyrannies, such as must ever season the bread of the
poor in cities; and one thing that was not little, but seemed like the
utter blackening of life to them, which was that the child they had
given life to sickened and died. But that story, that ancient,
perpetually recurring story, has been told so often, has been told so
beautifully, that there is no need to tell it over again here. There was
the same sharp fear, the same long anxiety, the deferred inevitable
blow, and the black silence. It has always been the same; it will always
be the same. It is one of the things that must be.
And it was Elizabeth who was the first to speak, after an aching, dull
interspace of days: not, indeed, of the foolish little name that was a
name no longer, but of the darkness that brooded over her soul. They had
come through the shrieking, tumultuous ways of the city together; the
clamour of trade, of yelling competitive religions, of political appeal,
had beat upon deaf ears; the glare of focussed lights, of dancing
letters, and fiery advertisements, had fallen upon the set, miserable
faces unheeded. They took their dinner in the dining-hall at a place
apart. "I want," said Elizabeth clumsily, "to go out to the flying
stages--to that seat. Here, one can say nothing...."
Denton looked at her. "It will be night," he said.
"I have asked,--it is a fine night." She stopped.
He perceived she could find no words to explain herself. Suddenly he
understood that she wished to see the stars once more, the stars they
had watched together from the open downland in that wild honeymoon of
theirs five years ago. Something caught at his throat. He looked away
from her.
"There will be plenty of time to go," he said, in a matter-of-fact tone.
And at last they came out to their little seat on the flying stage, and
sat there for a long time in silence. The little seat was in shadow, but
the zenith was pale blue with the effulgence of the stage overhead, and
all the city spread below them, squares and circles and patches of
brilliance caught in a mesh-work of light. The little stars seemed very
faint and small: near as they had been to the old-world watcher, they
had become now infinitely remote. Yet one could see them in the darkened
patches amidst the glare, and especially in the northward sky, the
ancient constellations gliding steadfast and patient about the pole.
Long our two people sat in silence, and at last Elizabeth sighed.
"If I understood," she said, "if I could understand. When one is down
there the city seems everything--the noise, the hurry, the voices--you
must live, you must scramble. Here--it is nothing; a thing that passes.
One can think in peace."
"Yes," said Denton. "How flimsy it all is! From here more than half of
it is swallowed by the night.... It will pass."
"We shall pass first," said Elizabeth.
"I know," said Denton. "If life were not a moment, the whole of history
would seem like the happening of a day.... Yes--we shall pass. And the
city will pass, and all the things that are to come. Man and the Overman
and wonders unspeakable. And yet ..."
He paused, and then began afresh. "I know what you feel. At least I
fancy.... Down there one thinks of one's work, one's little vexations
and pleasures, one's eating and drinking and ease and pain. One lives,
and one must die. Down there and everyday--our sorrow seemed the end of
life....
"Up here it is different. For instance, down there it would seem
impossible almost to go on living if one were horribly disfigured,
horribly crippled, disgraced. Up here--under these stars--none of those
things would matter. They don't matter.... They are a part of something.
One seems just to touch that something--under the stars...."
He stopped. The vague, impalpable things in his mind, cloudy emotions
half shaped towards ideas, vanished before the rough grasp of words. "It
is hard to express," he said lamely.
They sat through a long stillness.
"It is well to come here," he said at last. "We stop--our minds are very
finite. After all we are just poor animals rising out of the brute, each
with a mind, the poor beginning of a mind. We are so stupid. So much
hurts. And yet ...
"I know, I know--and some day we shall _see_.
"All this frightful stress, all this discord will resolve to harmony,
and we shall know it. Nothing is but it makes for that. Nothing. All the
failures--every little thing makes for that harmony. Everything is
necessary to it, we shall find. We shall find. Nothing, not even the
most dreadful thing, could be left out. Not even the most trivial.
Every tap of your hammer on the brass, every moment of work, my idleness
even ... Dear one! every movement of our poor little one ... All these
things go on for ever. And the faint impalpable things. We, sitting here
together.--Everything ...
"The passion that joined us, and what has come since. It is not passion
now. More than anything else it is sorrow. _Dear_ ..."
He could say no more, could follow his thoughts no further.
Elizabeth made no answer--she was very still; but presently her hand
sought his and found it.
IV--UNDERNEATH
Under the stars one may reach upward and touch resignation, whatever the
evil thing may be, but in the heat and stress of the day's work we lapse
again, come disgust and anger and intolerable moods. How little is all
our magnanimity--an accident! a phase! The very Saints of old had first
to flee the world. And Denton and his Elizabeth could not flee their
world, no longer were there open roads to unclaimed lands where men
might live freely--however hardly--and keep their souls in peace. The
city had swallowed up mankind.
For a time these two Labour Serfs were kept at their original
occupations, she at her brass stamping and Denton at his press; and then
came a move for him that brought with it fresh and still bitterer
experiences of life in the underways of the great city. He was
transferred to the care of a rather more elaborate press in the central
factory of the London Tile Trust.
In this new situation he had to work in a long vaulted room with a
number of other men, for the most part born Labour Serfs. He came to
this intercourse reluctantly. His upbringing had been refined, and,
until his ill fortune had brought him to that costume, he had never
spoken in his life, except by way of command or some immediate
necessity, to the white-faced wearers of the blue canvas. Now at last
came contact; he had to work beside them, share their tools, eat with
them. To both Elizabeth and himself this seemed a further degradation.
His taste would have seemed extreme to a man of the nineteenth century.
But slowly and inevitably in the intervening years a gulf had opened
between the wearers of the blue canvas and the classes above, a
difference not simply of circumstances and habits of life, but of habits
of thought--even of language. The underways had developed a dialect of
their own: above, too, had arisen a dialect, a code of thought, a
language of "culture," which aimed by a sedulous search after fresh
distinction to widen perpetually the space between itself and
"vulgarity." The bond of a common faith, moreover, no longer held the
race together. The last years of the nineteenth century were
distinguished by the rapid development among the prosperous idle of
esoteric perversions of the popular religion: glosses and
interpretations that reduced the broad teachings of the carpenter of
Nazareth to the exquisite narrowness of their lives. And, spite of their
inclination towards the ancient fashion of living, neither Elizabeth nor
Denton had been sufficiently original to escape the suggestion of their
surroundings. In matters of common behaviour they had followed the ways
of their class, and so when they fell at last to be Labour Serfs it
seemed to them almost as though they were falling among offensive
inferior animals; they felt as a nineteenth-century duke and duchess
might have felt who were forced to take rooms in the Jago.
Their natural impulse was to maintain a "distance." But Denton's first
idea of a dignified isolation from his new surroundings was soon rudely
dispelled. He had imagined that his fall to the position of a Labour
Serf was the end of his lesson, that when their little daughter had died
he had plumbed the deeps of life; but indeed these things were only the
beginning. Life demands something more from us than acquiescence. And
now in a roomful of machine minders he was to learn a wider lesson, to
make the acquaintance of another factor in life, a factor as elemental
as the loss of things dear to us, more elemental even than toil.
His quiet discouragement of conversation was an immediate cause of
offence--was interpreted, rightly enough I fear, as disdain. His
ignorance of the vulgar dialect, a thing upon which he had hitherto
prided himself, suddenly took upon itself a new aspect. He failed to
perceive at once that his reception of the coarse and stupid but
genially intended remarks that greeted his appearance must have stung
the makers of these advances like blows in their faces. "Don't
understand," he said rather coldly, and at hazard, "No, thank you."
The man who had addressed him stared, scowled, and turned away.
A second, who also failed at Denton's unaccustomed ear, took the trouble
to repeat his remark, and Denton discovered he was being offered the use
of an oil can. He expressed polite thanks, and this second man embarked