The complete works, p.102
The Complete Works, page 102
"There are weary moments," said the little officer, reflectively.
"They all look young. Down there I should be
visibly the oldest man. And in my own time I should
have passed as middle-aged."
"They are young. There are few old people in this class in the work cities."
"How is that? "
"Old people's lives are not so pleasant as they used to be, unless they are rich to hire lovers and helpers.
And we have an institution called Euthanasy."
"Ah! that Euthanasy!" said Graham. "The easy death? "
"The easy death. It is the last pleasure. The
Euthanasy Company does it well. People will pay the
sum--it is a costly thing--long beforehand, go off to some pleasure city and return impoverished and
weary, very weary."
"There is a lot left for me to understand," said Graham after a pause. "Yet I see the logic of it all.
Our array of angry virtues and sour restraints was the consequence of danger and insecurity. The Stoic, the Puritan, even in my time, were vanishing types. In
the old days man was armed against Pain, now he is
eager for Pleasure. There lies the difference.
Civilisation has driven pain and danger so far off--for well-to-do people. And only well-to-do people matter now. I have been asleep two hundred years."
For a minute they leant on the balustrading, following the intricate evolution of the dance. Indeed the
scene was very beautiful.
"Before God," said Graham, suddenly, "I would rather be a wounded sentinel freezing in the snow than one of these painted fools! "
"In the snow," said Asano, "one might think diferently."
" I am uncivilised," said Graham, not heeding him.
"That is the trouble. I am primitive--Palaeolithic.
Their fountain of rage and fear and anger is sealed
and closed, the habits of a lifetime make them cheerful and easy and delightful. You must bear with my
nineteenth century shocks and disgusts. These
people, you say, are skilled workers and so forth. And while these dance, men are fighting--men are dying
in Paris to keep the world--that they may dance."
Asano smiled faintly. "For that matter, men are dying in London," he said.
There was a moment's silence.
"Where do these sleep?" asked Graham.
"Above and below--an intricate warren."
"And where do they work? This is--the domestic
life."
"You will see little work to-night. Half the workers are out or under arms. Half these people are keeping holiday. But we will go to the work places if you
wish it."
For a time Graham watched the dancers, then
suddenly turned away. "I want to see the workers.
I have seen enough of these," he said.
Asano led the way along the gallery across the
dancing hall. Presently they came to a transverse
passage that brought a breath of fresher, colder air.
Asano glanced at this passage as they went past,
stopped, went back to it, and turned to Graham with
a smile. "Here, Sire," he said, "is something--will be familiar to you at least--and yet--. But I will
not tell you. Come! "
He led the way along a closed passage that presently became cold. The reverberation of their feet told
that this passage was a bridge. They came into a
circular gallery that was glazed in from the outer
weather, and so reached a circular chamber which
seemed familiar, though Graham could not recall
distinctly when he had entered it before. In this was a ladder--the first ladder he had seen since his
awakening--up which they went, and came into a
high, dark, cold place in which was another almost
vertical ladder. This they ascended, Graham still
perplexed.
But at the top he understood, and recognized the
metallic bars to which he clung. He was in the cage
under the ball of St. Paul's. The dome rose but a
little way above the general contour of the city,
into the still twilight, and sloped away, shining
greasily under a few distant lights, into a circumambient ditch of darkness.
Out between the bars he looked upon the wind-clear
northern sky and saw the starry constellations
all unchanged. Capella hung in the west, Vega was
rising, and the seven glittering points of the Great Bear swept overhead in their stately circle about the Pole.
He saw these stars in a clear gap of sky. To the
east and south the great circular shapes of
complaining wind-wheels blotted out the heavens, so that the glare about the Council House was hidden. To the
south-west hung Orion, showing like a pallid ghost
through a tracery of iron-work and interlacing shapes above a dazzling coruscation of lights. A bellowing
and siren screaming that came from the flying
stages warned the world that one of the aeroplanes
was ready to start. He remained for a space gazing
towards the glaring stage. Then his eyes went back
to the northward constellations.
For a long time he was silent. "This," he said at last, smiling in the shadow, "seems the strangest thing of all. To stand in the dome of Saint Paul's and look once more upon these familiar, silent stars!"
Thence Graham was taken by Asano along devious
ways to the great gambling and business quarters
where the bulk of the fortunes in the city were lost and made. It impressed him as a well-nigh interminable series of very high halls, surrounded by tiers upon
tiers of galleries into which opened thousands of
offices, and traversed by a complicated multitude of bridges, footways, aerial motor rails, and trapeze and cable leaps. And here more than anywhere the note
of vehement vitality, of uncontrollable, hasty activity.
rose high. Everywhere was violent advertisement,
until his brain swam at the tumult of light and colour.
And Babble Machines of a peculiarly rancid tone were abundant and filled the air with strenuous squealing and an idiotic slang. "Skin your eyes and slide,"
"Gewhoop, Bonanza," "Gollipers come and hark!"
The place seemed to him to be dense with people
either profoundly agitated or swelling with obscure
cunning, yet he learnt that the place was comparatively empty, that the great political convulsion of the
last few days had reduced transactions to an
unprecedented minimum. In one huge place were long
avenues of roulette tables, each with an excited,
undignified crowd about it; in another a
yelping Babel of white-faced women and red-
necked leathery-lunged men bought and sold the
shares of an absolutely fictitious business
undertaking which, every five minutes, paid a dividend of ten per cent and cancelled a certain proportion of its shares by means of a lottery wheel.
These business activities were prosecuted with an
energy that readily passed into violence, and Graham approaching a dense crowd found at its centre a couple of prominent merchants in violent controversy with
teeth and nails on some delicate point of business
etiquette. Something still remained in life to be fought for. Further he had a shock at a vehement
announcement in phonetic letters of scarlet flame, each twice the height of a man, that " WE ASSURE THE
PROPRAIET'R. WE ASSURE THE PROPRAIET'R."
"Who's the proprietor?" he asked.
"You."
" But what do they assure me?" he asked. "What do they assure me?"
"Didn't you have assurance?"
Graham thought. "Insurance? "
"Yes--Insurance. I remember that was the older
word. They are insuring your life. Dozands of
people are taking out policies, myriads of lions are being put on you. And further on other people are
buying annuities. They do that on everybody who is
at all prominent. Look there!"
A crowd of people surged and roared, and Graham
saw a vast black screen suddenly illuminated in still larger letters of burning purple. "Anuetes on the Propraiet'r---x 5 pr. G." The people began to boo and shout at this, a number of hard breathing,
wildeyed men came running past, clawing with hooked
fingers at the air. There was a furious crush about a little doorway.
Asano did a brief calculation. "Seventeen per cent per annum is their annuity on you. They would not
pay so much per cent if they could see you now, Sire.
But they do not know. Your own annuities used to
be a very safe investment, but now you are sheer
gambling, of course. This is probably a desperate
bid. I doubt if people will get their money."
The crowd of would-be annuitants grew so thick
about them that for some time they could move neither forward no backward. Graham noticed what appeared
to him to be a high proportion of women among the
speculators, and was reminded again of the economical independence of their sex. They seemed remarkably
well able to take care of themselves in the crowd,
using their elbows with particular skill, as he learnt to his cost. One curly-headed person caught in the
pressure for a space, looked steadfastly at him several times, almost as if she recognized him, and then,
edging deliberately towards him, touched his hand
with her arm in a scarcely accidental manner, and
made it plain by a look as ancient as Chaldea that he had found favour in her eyes. And then a lank, grey-bearded man, perspiring copiously in a noble passion of self-help, blind to all earthly things save that glaring, bait, thrust between them in a cataclysmal rush towards that alluring " x 5 pr. G."
"I want to get out of this," said Graham to Asano.
"This is not what I came to see. Show me the
workers. I want to see the people in blue. These
parasitic lunatics--"
He found himself wedged in a struggling mass c
people, and this hopeful sentence went unfinished.
CHAPTER XXI
THE UNDER SIDE
From the Business Quarter they presently passed
by the running ways into a remote quarter of the city, where the bulk of the manufactures was done. On
their way the platforms crossed the Thames twice, and passed in a broad viaduct across one of the great roads that entered the city from the North. In both cases
his impression was swift and in both very vivid. The river was a broad wrinkled glitter of black sea water, overarched by buildings, and vanishing either way into a blackness starred with receding lights. A string of black barges passed seaward, manned by blue-clad
men. The road was a long and very broad and high
tunnel, along which big-wheeled machines drove
noiselessly and swiftly. Here, too, the distinctive blue of the Labour Company was in abundance. The
smoothness of the double tracks, the largeness and the lightness of the big pneumatic wheels in proportion to the vehicular body, struck Graham most vividly. One
lank and very high carriage with longitudinal metallic rods hung with the dripping carcasses of many
hundred sheep arrested his attention unduly. Abruptly the edge of the archway cut and blotted out the
picture.
Presently they left the way and descended by a lift
and traversed a passage that sloped downward, and
so came to a descending lift again. The appearance
of things changed. Even the pretence of architectural ornament disappeared, the lights diminished in
number and size, the architecture became more and
more massive in proportion to the spaces as the
factory quarters were reached. And in the dusty biscuit-making place of the potters, among the felspar mills in the furnace rooms of the metal workers, among the incandescent lakes of crude Eadhamite, the blue
canvas clothing was on man, woman and child.
Many of these great and dusty galleries were silent
avenues of machinery, endless raked out ashen furnaces testified to the revolutionary dislocation, but
wherever there was work it was being done by slow-
moving workers in blue canvas. The only people not
in blue canvas were the overlookers of the work-places and the orange-clad Labour Police. And fresh from
the flushed faces of the dancing halls, the voluntary vigours of the business quarter, Graham could note
the pinched faces, the feeble muscles, and weary eyes of many of the latter-day workers. Such as he saw at work were noticeably inferior in physique to the few gaily dressed managers and forewomen who were
directing their labours. The burly labourers of the
Victorian times had followed the dray horse and all
such living force producers, to extinction; the place of his costly muscles was taken by some dexterous
machine. The latter-day labourer, male as well as
female, was essentially a machine-minder and feeder, a servant and attendant, or an artist under direction.
The women, in comparison with those Graham
remembered, were as a class distinctly plain and flat-chested. Two hundred years of emancipation from
the moral restraints of Puritanical religion, two
hundred years of city life, had done their work in
eliminating the strain of feminine beauty and vigour from the blue canvas myriads. To be brilliant physically
or mentally, to be in any way attractive or exceptional, had been and was still a certain way of emancipation to the drudge, a line of escape to the Pleasure City and its splendours and delights, and at last to the
Euthanasy and peace. To be steadfast against such
inducements was scarcely to be expected of meanly
nourished souls. In the young cities of Graham's
former life, the newly aggregated labouring mass had been a diverse multitude, still stirred by the tradition of personal honour and a high morality; now it was
differentiating into a distinct class, with a moral and physical difference of its own--even with a dialect of its own.
They penetrated downward, ever downward, towards
the working places. Presently they passed underneath one of the streets of the moving ways, and saw its
platforms running on their rails far overhead, and chinks of white lights between the transverse slits. The
factories that were not working were sparsely lighted; to Graham they and their shrouded aisles of giant
machines seemed plunged in gloom, and even where
work was going on the illumination was far less
brilliant than upon the public ways.
Beyond the blazing lakes of Eadhamite he came to
the warren of the jewellers, and, with some difficulty and by using his signature, obtained admission to
these galleries. They were high and dark, and rather cold. In the first a few men were making ornaments
of gold filigree, each man at a little bench by himself, and with a little shaded light. The long vista of light patches, with the nimble fingers brightly lit and
moving among the gleaming yellow coils, and the
intent face like the face of a ghost, in each shadow had the oddest effect.
The work was beautifully executed, but without any
strength of modelling or drawing, for the most part
intricate grotesques or the ringing of the changes on a geometrical motif. These workers wore a peculiar
white uniform without pockets or sleeves. They
assumed this on coming to work, but at night they
were stripped and examined before they left the
premises of the Company. In spite of every precaution, the Labour policeman told them in a depressed
tone, the Company was not infrequently robbed.
Beyond was a gallery of women busied in cutting
and setting slabs of artificial ruby, and next these were men and women busied together upon the slabs of
copper net that formed the basis of cloisonne tiles.
Many of these workers had lips and nostrils a livid
white, due to a disease caused by a peculiar purple
enamel that chanced to be much in fashion. Asano
apologised to Graham for the offence of their faces, but excused himself on the score of the convenience of this route. "This is what I wanted to see," said Graham;
"this is what I wanted to see," trying to avoid a start at a particularly striking disfigurement that suddenly stared him in the face.
"She might have done better with herself than
that," said Asano.
Graham made some indignant comments.
"But, Sire, we simply could not stand that stuff without the purple," said Asano. "In your days people could stand such crudities, they were nearer the barbaric by two hundred years."
They continued along one of the lower galleries of
