Tales of Space and Time
He heard the ferret-faced man in expostulation. "'E reely ought, eat
it," said the ferret-faced man. "'E did reely."
"No--you leave 'im alone," said the swart man.
Apparently nothing further was to happen to him that day. He passed out
to the passage and staircase that led up to the moving platforms of the
city.
He emerged on the livid brilliance and streaming movement of the public
street. He became acutely aware of his disfigured face, and felt his
swelling bruises with a limp, investigatory hand. He went up to the
swiftest platform, and seated himself on a Labour Company bench.
He lapsed into a pensive torpor. The immediate dangers and stresses of
his position he saw with a sort of static clearness. What would they do
to-morrow? He could not tell. What would Elizabeth think of his
brutalisation? He could not tell. He was exhausted. He was aroused
presently by a hand upon his arm.
He looked up, and saw the swart man seated beside him. He started.
Surely he was safe from violence in the public way!
The swart man's face retained no traces of his share in the fight; his
expression was free from hostility--seemed almost deferential. "'Scuse
me," he said, with a total absence of truculence. Denton realised that
no assault was intended. He stared, awaiting the next development.
It was evident the next sentence was premeditated.
"Whad--I--was--going--to say--was this," said the swart man, and sought
through a silence for further words.
"Whad--I--was--going--to say--was this," he repeated.
Finally he abandoned that gambit. "_You're_ aw right," he cried, laying
a grimy hand on Denton's grimy sleeve. "_You're_ aw right. You're a
ge'man. Sorry--very sorry. Wanted to tell you that."
Denton realised that there must exist motives beyond a mere impulse to
abominable proceedings in the man. He meditated, and swallowed an
unworthy pride.
"I did not mean to be offensive to you," he said, "in refusing that bit
of bread."
"Meant it friendly," said the swart man, recalling the scene; "but--in
front of that blarsted Whitey and his snigger--Well--I _'ad_ to scrap."
"Yes," said Denton with sudden fervour: "I was a fool."
"Ah!" said the swart man, with great satisfaction. "_That's_ aw right.
Shake!"
And Denton shook.
The moving platform was rushing by the establishment of a face moulder,
and its lower front was a huge display of mirror, designed to stimulate
the thirst for more symmetrical features. Denton caught the reflection
of himself and his new friend, enormously twisted and broadened. His own
face was puffed, one-sided, and blood-stained; a grin of idiotic and
insincere amiability distorted its latitude. A wisp of hair occluded one
eye. The trick of the mirror presented the swart man as a gross
expansion of lip and nostril. They were linked by shaking hands. Then
abruptly this vision passed--to return to memory in the anaemic
meditations of a waking dawn.
As he shook, the swart man made some muddled remark, to the effect that
he had always known he could get on with a gentleman if one came his
way. He prolonged the shaking until Denton, under the influence of the
mirror, withdrew his hand. The swart man became pensive, spat
impressively on the platform, and resumed his theme.
"Whad I was going to say was this," he said; was gravelled, and shook
his head at his foot.
Denton became curious. "Go on," he said, attentive.
The swart man took the plunge. He grasped Denton's arm, became intimate
in his attitude. "'Scuse me," he said. "Fact is, you done know _'ow_ to
scrap. Done know _'ow_ to. Why--you done know 'ow to _begin_. You'll get
killed if you don't mind. 'Ouldin' your 'ands--_There!_"
He reinforced his statement by objurgation, watching the effect of each
oath with a wary eye.
"F'r instance. You're tall. Long arms. You get a longer reach than any
one in the brasted vault. Gobblimey, but I thought I'd got a Tough on.
'Stead of which ... 'Scuse me. I wouldn't have _'it_ you if I'd known.
It's like fighting sacks. 'Tisn' right. Y'r arms seemed 'ung on 'ooks.
Reg'lar--'ung on 'ooks. There!"
Denton stared, and then surprised and hurt his battered chin by a sudden
laugh. Bitter tears came into his eyes.
"Go on," he said.
The swart man reverted to his formula. He was good enough to say he
liked the look of Denton, thought he had stood up "amazing plucky. On'y
pluck ain't no good--ain't no brasted good--if you don't 'old your
'ands.
"Whad I was going to say was this," he said. "Lemme show you 'ow to
scrap. Jest lemme. You're ig'nant, you ain't no class; but you might be
a very decent scrapper--very decent. Shown. That's what I meant to say."
Denton hesitated. "But--" he said, "I can't give you anything--"
"That's the ge'man all over," said the swart man. "Who arst you to?"
"But your time?"
"If you don't get learnt scrapping you'll get killed,--don't you make no
bones of that."
Denton thought. "I don't know," he said.
He looked at the face beside him, and all its native coarseness shouted
at him. He felt a quick revulsion from his transient friendliness. It
seemed to him incredible that it should be necessary for him to be
indebted to such a creature.
"The chaps are always scrapping," said the swart man. "Always. And, of
course--if one gets waxy and 'its you vital ..."
"By God!" cried Denton; "I wish one would."
"Of course, if you feel like that--"
"You don't understand."
"P'raps I don't," said the swart man; and lapsed into a fuming silence.
When he spoke again his voice was less friendly, and he prodded Denton
by way of address. "Look see!" he said: "are you going to let me show
you 'ow to scrap?"
"It's tremendously kind of you," said Denton; "but--"
There was a pause. The swart man rose and bent over Denton.
"Too much ge'man," he said--"eh? I got a red face.... By gosh! you
are--you _are_ a brasted fool!"
He turned away, and instantly Denton realised the truth of this remark.
The swart man descended with dignity to a cross way, and Denton, after a
momentary impulse to pursuit, remained on the platform. For a time the
things that had happened filled his mind. In one day his graceful system
of resignation had been shattered beyond hope. Brute force, the final,
the fundamental, had thrust its face through all his explanations and
glosses and consolations and grinned enigmatically. Though he was
hungry and tired, he did not go on directly to the Labour Hotel, where
he would meet Elizabeth. He found he was beginning to think, he wanted
very greatly to think; and so, wrapped in a monstrous cloud of
meditation, he went the circuit of the city on his moving platform
twice. You figure him, tearing through the glaring, thunder-voiced city
at a pace of fifty miles an hour, the city upon the planet that spins
along its chartless path through space many thousands of miles an hour,
funking most terribly, and trying to understand why the heart and will
in him should suffer and keep alive.
When at last he came to Elizabeth, she was white and anxious. He might
have noted she was in trouble, had it not been for his own
preoccupation. He feared most that she would desire to know every detail
of his indignities, that she would be sympathetic or indignant. He saw
her eyebrows rise at the sight of him.
"I've had rough handling," he said, and gasped. "It's too fresh--too
hot. I don't want to talk about it." He sat down with an unavoidable air
of sullenness.
She stared at him in astonishment, and as she read something of the
significant hieroglyphic of his battered face, her lips whitened. Her
hand--it was thinner now than in the days of their prosperity, and her
first finger was a little altered by the metal punching she
did--clenched convulsively. "This horrible world!" she said, and said no
more.
In these latter days they had become a very silent couple; they said
scarcely a word to each other that night, but each followed a private
train of thought. In the small hours, as Elizabeth lay awake, Denton
started up beside her suddenly--he had been lying as still as a dead
man.
"I cannot stand it!" cried Denton. "I _will_ not stand it!"
She saw him dimly, sitting up; saw his arm lunge as if in a furious blow
at the enshrouding night. Then for a space he was still.
"It is too much--it is more than one can bear!"
She could say nothing. To her, also, it seemed that this was as far as
one could go. She waited through a long stillness. She could see that
Denton sat with his arms about his knees, his chin almost touching them.
Then he laughed.
"No," he said at last, "I'm going to stand it. That's the peculiar
thing. There isn't a grain of suicide in us--not a grain. I suppose all
the people with a turn that way have gone. We're going through with
it--to the end."
Elizabeth thought grayly, and realised that this also was true.
"We're going through with it. To think of all who have gone through with
it: all the generations--endless--endless. Little beasts that snapped
and snarled, snapping and snarling, snapping and snarling, generation
after generation."
His monotone, ended abruptly, resumed after a vast interval.
"There were ninety thousand years of stone age. A Denton somewhere in
all those years. Apostolic succession. The grace of going through. Let
me see! Ninety--nine hundred--three nines, twenty-seven--_three
thousand_ generations of men!--men more or less. And each fought, and
was bruised, and shamed, and somehow held his own--going through with
it--passing it on.... And thousands more to come perhaps--thousands!
"Passing it on. I wonder if they will thank us."
His voice assumed an argumentative note. "If one could find something
definite ... If one could say, 'This is why--this is why it goes
on....'"
He became still, and Elizabeth's eyes slowly separated him from the
darkness until at last she could see how he sat with his head resting on
his hand. A sense of the enormous remoteness of their minds came to her;
that dim suggestion of another being seemed to her a figure of their
mutual understanding. What could he be thinking now? What might he not
say next? Another age seemed to elapse before he sighed and whispered:
"No. I don't understand it. No!" Then a long interval, and he repeated
this. But the second time it had the tone almost of a solution.
She became aware that he was preparing to lie down. She marked his
movements, perceived with astonishment how he adjusted his pillow with a
careful regard to comfort. He lay down with a sigh of contentment
almost. His passion had passed. He lay still, and presently his
breathing became regular and deep.
But Elizabeth remained with eyes wide open in the darkness, until the
clamour of a bell and the sudden brilliance of the electric light warned
them that the Labour Company had need of them for yet another day.
That day came a scuffle with the albino Whitey and the little
ferret-faced man. Blunt, the swart artist in scrapping, having first
let Denton grasp the bearing of his lesson, intervened, not without a
certain quality of patronage. "Drop 'is 'air, Whitey, and let the man
be," said his gross voice through a shower of indignities. "Can't you
see 'e don't know _'ow_ to scrap?" And Denton, lying shamefully in the
dust, realised that he must accept that course of instruction after all.
He made his apology straight and clean. He scrambled up and walked to
Blunt. "I was a fool, and you are right," he said. "If it isn't too
late ..."
That night, after the second spell, Denton went with Blunt to certain
waste and slime-soaked vaults under the Port of London, to learn the
first beginnings of the high art of scrapping as it had been perfected
in the great world of the underways: how to hit or kick a man so as to