CHAPTER XXIII

 

The writing table was under the window.  Dimmed by the smoky air of Sheffield, a shaft of yellow, viscous-looking sunlight lit up a corner of the table and a patch of red and flowered carpet.  Everard Webley was writing a letter.  His pen rushed over the paper.  Whatever he did was done with rapidity and decision.

      'Dearest Elinor,' he wrote. 'De profundis clamavi, from the depths of this repulsive hotel bedroom and the even lower depths of this political tour of the North, I call to you.'  (He wrote his I's as though they were pillars - a strong straight shaft and two little transverse strokes at top and bottom for capital and base.  The crosses on his t's were firm and uncompromising.)  'But I don't suppose you listen.  I've always felt such sympathy for the savages who give their gods a good beating when they don't answer prayers or respond to sacrifices. England expects that every god this day will do his duty.  And if he doesn't - well, so much the worse for him; he'll get a taste of the cat-o'-nine-tails.  The modern worship of a remote Ineffable, whose acts one doesn't criticize, seems to me very satisfactory.  What's the good of making a contract with somebody who can break it at will and against whom one has no redress?  Women have gone the same way as the gods.  They mayn't be questioned.  You're not allowed to compel them to do their duty by their worshippers or fulfil their part in the natural contract between the sexes.  I write, I implore.  But, like the newfangled god of modern philosophies and broad theologies, you don't listen.  And one's not allowed to take reprisals; it's bad form to beat the defaulting god.  It isn't done.  All the same, I warn you: one of these days I'll try the good old methods.  I'll do a slight Rape of the Sabines and then where will you ineffable remote superiority be?  How I hate you really for compelling me to love you so much!  It's such a damnable injustice - getting so much passion and longing out of me and giving nothing in return.  And you not here to receive the punishment you deserve!  I have to take a vicarious revenge on the ruffians who disturb my meetings.  I had a terrific battle last night.  Howls, booing, organized singing of the International.  But I fought them down.  Literally at one moment.  I had to give one of the ringleaders a black eye.  Poor devil!  He was only paying for your misdeeds.  He was your scapegoat.  For it was really you I was fighting.  If it hadn't been for you I wouldn't have been half so savage.  I probably wouldn't have won.  So indirectly I owe you my victory.  For which I'm duly grateful.  But another time there won't be any Communists to vent my rage on.  The next fight will be against the real enemy - against you.  So be careful, my dear.  I'll try to stop short of black eyes; but in the heat of the moment one never knows.  But seriously, Elinor, seriously.  Why are you so cold and aloof and dead?  Why do you shut yourself off from me?  I think of you so incessantly, so insistently.  The thought of you is always there.  It lies hidden, a latency, in the most unlikely things and places, ready at the command of some chance association to jump out at me from its ambush.  Haunting, like a guilty conscience.  If I ...'

      There was a knock at the door.  It was Hugo Brockle who came in. Everard looked at his watch, then at Hugo.  The expression on his face was menacing.  'Why are you so late?' he asked in a terrifyingly quiet voice.

      Hugo blushed.  'I hadn't realized the time.'  It was only too true.  He had been lunching with the Upwiches, twenty miles away across the moors.  Polly Logan was staying with them.  After lunch old Upwich and the others had gone to play a round of golf on the private links in the park.  Polly, providentially, didn't play.  He had taken her for a walk through the woods along the river.  How should he have realized the time?  'I'm sorry,' he added.

      'I should hope you were,' said Everard and the latent violence broke out from under his quietness.  'I tell you to be back at five and it's now a quarter past six.  When you're with me on British Freeman business you're under military discipline.  My orders are to be obeyed, do you understand?  Do you understand?' he insisted.

      'Sheepishly, Hugo nodded.  'Yes.'

      'And now go away and see that all the arrangements for this evening's meeting have been properly made.  And mind, this sort of thing mustn't happen again.  You won't get off so lightly next time.'

      Hugo shut the door after him.  All the anger instantly vanished from Everard's face.  He believed in frightening his subordinates from time to time.  Anger, he always found, was an excellent weapon, so long as you didn't let yourself by mastered by it.  He never did.  Poor Hugo! he smiled to himself and went on with his letter.  Ten minutes later Hugo came in to say that dinner was ready.  The meeting was at eight; they had to eat very early.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      'But it's so silly, all this political squabbling,' said Rampion, his voice shrill with exasperation, 'so utterly silly.  Bolsheviks and Fascists, Radicals and Conservatives, Communists and British Freemen - what the devil are they all fighting about?  I'll tell you.  They're fighting to decide whether we shall go to hell by communist express train or capitalist racing motorcar, by individualist 'bus or collectivist tram running on the rails of state control.  The destination's the same in every case.  They're all of them bound for hell, all headed for the same psychological impasse and the social collapse that results from psychological collapse.  The only point of difference between them is: How shall we get there?  It's simply impossible for a man of sense to be interested in such disputes.  For the man of sense the important thing is hell, not the means of transport to be employed in getting there.  The question for the man of sense is: Do we or do we not want to go to hell?  And his answer is: No, we don't.  And if that's his answer, then he won't have anything to do with any of the politicians.  Because they all want to land us in hell.  All, without exception.  Lenin and Mussolini, MacDonald and Baldwin.  All equally anxious to take us to hell and only squabbling about the means of taking us.'

      'Some of them may take us a little more slowly than others,' suggested Philip.

      Rampion shrugged his shoulders. 'But so very little more slowly that it wouldn't make any appreciable difference.  They all believe in industrialism in one form or another, they all believe in Americanization.  Think of the Bolshevist ideal.  America but much more so.  America with government departments taking the place of trusts and state officials instead of rich men.  And then the ideal of the rest of Europe.  The same thing, only with the rich men preserved.  Machinery and government officials there.  Machinery and Alfred Mond or Henry Ford here.  The machinery to take us to hell; the rich or the officials to drive it.  You think one set may drive more cautiously than the over?  Perhaps you're right.  But I can't see that there's anything to choose between them.  They're all equally in a hurry.  In the name of science, progress and human happiness!  Amen and step on the gas.'

      Philip nodded.  'They do step on it all right,' he said.  'They get a move on.  Progress.  But as you say, it's probably in the direction of the bottomless pit.'

      'And the only thing the reformers can find to talk about is the shape, colour and steering arrangements of the vehicle.  Can't the imbeciles see that it's the direction that matters, that we're entirely on the wrong road and ought to go back - preferably on foot, without the stinking machine?'

      'You may be right,' said Philip.  'But the trouble is that, given our existing world, you can't go back, you can't scrap the machine.  That is, you can't do it unless you're prepared to kill off about half the human race.  Industrialism made possible the doubling of the world's population in a hundred years.  If you want to get rid of industrialism, you've got to get back to where you started.  That's to say, you've got to slaughter half the existing number of men and women.  Which might, sub specie aeternitatis or merely historiae, be an excellent thing.  But hardly a matter of practical politics.'

      'Not at the moment,' Rampion agreed.  'But the next war and the next revolution will make it only too practical.'

      'Possibly.   But one shouldn't count on wars and revolutions.  Because, if you count on them happening, they certainly will happen.'

      'They'll happen,' said Rampion, 'whether you count on them or not.  Industrial progress means over-production, means the need for getting new markets, means international rivalry, means war.  And mechanical progress means more specialization and standardization of work, means more ready-made and unindividual amusements, means diminution of initiative and creativeness, means more intellectualism and the progressive atrophy of all the vital and fundamental things in human nature, means increased boredom and restlessness, means finally a kind of individual madness that can only result in social revolution.  Count on them or not, wars and revolutions are inevitable, if things are allowed to go on as they are at present.'

      'So the problem will solve itself,' said Philip.

      'Only by destroying itself.  When humanity's destroyed, obviously there'll be no more problem.  But it seems a poor sort of solution.  I believe there may be another, even within the framework of the present system.  A temporary one while the system's being modified in the direction of a permanent solution.  The root of the evil's in the individual psychology; so it's there, in the individual psychology, that you'd have to begin.  The first step would be to make people live dualistically, in two compartments.  In one compartment as industrialized workers, in the other as human beings.  As idiots and machines for eight hours out of every twenty-four and real human beings for the rest.'

      'Don't they do that already?'

      'Of course they don't.  They live as idiots and machines all the time, at work and in their leisure.  Like idiots and machines, but imagining they're living like civilized humans, even like gods.  The first thing to do is to make them admit that they are idiots and machines during working hours.  "Our civilization being what it is," this is what you'll have to say to them, "you've got to spend eight hours out of every twenty-four as a mixture between an imbecile and a sewing machine.  It's very disagreeable, I know.  It's humiliating and disgusting.  But there you are.  You've got to do it; otherwise the whole fabric of our world will fall to bits and we'll all starve.  Do the job, then, idiotically and mechanically; and spend your leisure hours in being a real complete man or woman, as the case may be.  Don't mix the two lives together; keep the bulkheads watertight between them.  The genuine human life in your leisure hours is the real thing.  The other's just a dirty job that's got to be done.  And never forget that it is dirty and, except insofar as it keeps you fed and society intact, utterly unimportant, utterly irrelevant to the real human life.  Don't be deceived by the canting rogues who talk of the sanctity of labour and the Christian Service that business men do their fellows.  It's all lies.  Your work's just a nasty, dirty job, made unfortunately necessary by the folly of your ancestors.  They piled up a mountain of garbage and you've got to go on digging it away, for fear it might stink you to death, dig for dear life, while cursing the memory of the maniacs who made all the dirty work for you to do.  But don't try to cheer yourself up by pretending the nasty mechanical job is a noble one.  It isn't; and the only result of saying and believing that it is, will be to lower your humanity to the level of the dirty work.  If you believe in business as Service and the sanctity of labour, you'll merely turn yourself into a mechanical idiot for twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four.  Admit it's dirty, hold your nose and do it for eight hours and then concentrate on being a real human being in your leisure.  A real complete human being.  Not a newspaper reader, not a jazzer, not a radio fan.  The industrialists who purvey standardized ready-made amusements to the masses are doing their best to make you as much of a mechanical imbecile in your leisure as in your hours of work.  But don't let them.  Made the effort of being human."  That's what you've got to say to people; that's the lesson you've got to teach the young.  You've got to persuade everybody that all this grand industrial civilization is just a bad smell and that the real, significant life can only be lived apart from it.  It'll be a very long time before decent living and industrial smell can be reconciled.  Perhaps, indeed, they're irreconcilable.  It remains to be seen.  In the meantime, at any rate, we must shovel the garbage and bear the smell stoically, and in the intervals try to lead the real human life.'

      'It's a good programme,' said Philip.  'But I don't see you winning many votes on it at the next election.'

      'That's the trouble,' Rampion frowned.  'One would have them all against one.  For the only thing they're all agreed on - Tories, Liberals, Socialists, Bolsheviks - is the intrinsic excellence of the industrial stink and the necessity of standardizing and specializing every trace of genuine manhood or womanhood out of the human race.  And we're expected to take an interest in politics.  Well, well.'  He shook his head.  'Let's think about something pleasanter.  Look, I want to show you this picture.'  He crossed the studio and pulled out one from a stack of canvases leaning against the wall. 'There,' he said when he had set it up on an easel.  Seated on the crest of a grassy bank, where she formed the apex of the pyramidal composition, a naked woman was sucking a child.  Below and in front of her to the left crouched a man, his bare back turned to the spectator, and in the corresponding position on the right stood a little boy.  The crouching man was playing with a couple of tiny leopard cubs that occupied the centre of the picture, a little below the seated mother's feet; the little boy looked on.  Close behind the woman and filling almost the whole of the upper part of the picture, stood a cow, its head slightly averted, ruminating.  The woman's head and shoulder stood out pale against its dun flank.

      'It's a picture I like particularly,' said Rampion after a little silence.  'The flesh is good.  Don't you think?  Has a bloom to it, a living quality.  By God, how marvellously your father-in-law could paint flesh in the open air?  Amazing!  Nobody's done it better.  Not even Renoir.  I wish I had his gifts.  Butt this is all right, you know,' he went on, turning back to the picture.  'Quite good, really.  And there are other qualities.  I feel I've managed to get the living relationship of the figures to each other and the rest of the world.  The cow, for example.  It's turned away, it's unaware of the human scene.  But somehow you feel it's happily in touch with the humans in some milky, cud-chewing, bovine way.  And the humans are in touch with it.  And also in touch with the leopards, but in quite a different way - a way corresponding to the quick leopardy way the cubs are in touch with them.  Yes, I like it.'

      'So do I,' said Philip.  'It's something to put over against the industrial stink.'  He laughed.  'You ought to paint a companion picture of life in the civilized world.  The woman in a mackintosh, leaning against a giant Bovril bottle and feeding her baby with Glaxo.  The bank covered with asphalt.  The man dressed in a five-guinea suit for fifty shillings, squatting down to play with a wireless set.  And the little boy, pimpled and with rickets, looking interestedly on.'

      'And the whole thing painted in the cubist manner,' said Rampion; 'so as to make sure that there should be no life in it whatever.  Nothing like modern art for sterilizing the life out of things.  Carbolic acid isn't in it.'