A Story Of The Days To Come
:
Space And Time
I--THE CURE FOR LOVE
The excellent Mr. Morris was an Englishman, and he lived in the days of
Queen Victoria the Good. He was a prosperous and very sensible man; he
read the Times and went to church, and as he grew towards middle age
an expression of quiet contented contempt for all who were not as
himself settled on his face. He was one of those people who do
everything that is right and proper and
sensible with inevitable
regularity. He always wore just the right and proper clothes, steering
the narrow way between the smart and the shabby, always subscribed to
the right charities, just the judicious compromise between ostentation
and meanness, and never failed to have his hair cut to exactly the
proper length.
Everything that it was right and proper for a man in his position to
possess, he possessed; and everything that it was not right and proper
for a man in his position to possess, he did not possess.
And among other right and proper possessions, this Mr. Morris had a wife
and children. They were the right sort of wife, and the right sort and
number of children, of course; nothing imaginative or highty-flighty
about any of them, so far as Mr. Morris could see; they wore perfectly
correct clothing, neither smart nor hygienic nor faddy in any way, but
just sensible; and they lived in a nice sensible house in the later
Victorian sham Queen Anne style of architecture, with sham
half-timbering of chocolate-painted plaster in the gables, Lincrusta
Walton sham carved oak panels, a terrace of terra cotta to imitate
stone, and cathedral glass in the front door. His boys went to good
solid schools, and were put to respectable professions; his girls, in
spite of a fantastic protest or so, were all married to suitable,
steady, oldish young men with good prospects. And when it was a fit and
proper thing for him to do so, Mr. Morris died. His tomb was of marble,
and, without any art nonsense or laudatory inscription, quietly
imposing--such being the fashion of his time.
He underwent various changes according to the accepted custom in these
cases, and long before this story begins his bones even had become dust,
and were scattered to the four quarters of heaven. And his sons and his
grandsons and his great-grandsons and his great-great-grandsons, they
too were dust and ashes, and were scattered likewise. It was a thing he
could not have imagined, that a day would come when even his
great-great-grandsons would be scattered to the four winds of heaven. If
any one had suggested it to him he would have resented it. He was one of
those worthy people who take no interest in the future of mankind at
all. He had grave doubts, indeed, if there was any future for mankind
after he was dead.
It seemed quite impossible and quite uninteresting to imagine anything
happening after he was dead. Yet the thing was so, and when even his
great-great-grandson was dead and decayed and forgotten, when the sham
half-timbered house had gone the way of all shams, and the Times was
extinct, and the silk hat a ridiculous antiquity, and the modestly
imposing stone that had been sacred to Mr. Morris had been burnt to make
lime for mortar, and all that Mr. Morris had found real and important
was sere and dead, the world was still going on, and people were still
going about it, just as heedless and impatient of the Future, or,
indeed, of anything but their own selves and property, as Mr. Morris had
been.
And, strange to tell, and much as Mr. Morris would have been angered if
any one had foreshadowed it to him, all over the world there were
scattered a multitude of people, filled with the breath of life, in
whose veins the blood of Mr. Morris flowed. Just as some day the life
which is gathered now in the reader of this very story may also be
scattered far and wide about this world, and mingled with a thousand
alien strains, beyond all thought and tracing.
And among the descendants of this Mr. Morris was one almost as sensible
and clear-headed as his ancestor. He had just the same stout, short
frame as that ancient man of the nineteenth century, from whom his name
of Morris--he spelt it Mwres--came; he had the same half-contemptuous
expression of face. He was a prosperous person, too, as times went, and
he disliked the "new-fangled," and bothers about the future and the
lower classes, just as much as the ancestral Morris had done. He did not
read the Times: indeed, he did not know there ever had been a
Times--that institution had foundered somewhere in the intervening
gulf of years; but the phonograph machine, that talked to him as he
made his toilet of a morning, might have been the voice of a
reincarnated Blowitz when it dealt with the world's affairs. This
phonographic machine was the size and shape of a Dutch clock, and down
the front of it were electric barometric indicators, and an electric
clock and calendar, and automatic engagement reminders, and where the
clock would have been was the mouth of a trumpet. When it had news the
trumpet gobbled like a turkey, "Galloop, galloop," and then brayed out
its message as, let us say, a trumpet might bray. It would tell Mwres in
full, rich, throaty tones about the overnight accidents to the omnibus
flying-machines that plied around the world, the latest arrivals at the
fashionable resorts in Tibet, and of all the great monopolist company
meetings of the day before, while he was dressing. If Mwres did not like
hearing what it said, he had only to touch a stud, and it would choke a
little and talk about something else.
Of course his toilet differed very much from that of his ancestor. It is
doubtful which would have been the more shocked and pained to find
himself in the clothing of the other. Mwres would certainly have sooner
gone forth to the world stark naked than in the silk hat, frock coat,
grey trousers and watch-chain that had filled Mr. Morris with sombre
self-respect in the past. For Mwres there was no shaving to do: a
skilful operator had long ago removed every hair-root from his face. His
legs he encased in pleasant pink and amber garments of an air-tight
material, which with the help of an ingenious little pump he distended
so as to suggest enormous muscles. Above this he also wore pneumatic
garments beneath an amber silk tunic, so that he was clothed in air and
admirably protected against sudden extremes of heat or cold. Over this
he flung a scarlet cloak with its edge fantastically curved. On his
head, which had been skilfully deprived of every scrap of hair, he
adjusted a pleasant little cap of bright scarlet, held on by suction and
inflated with hydrogen, and curiously like the comb of a cock. So his
toilet was complete; and, conscious of being soberly and becomingly
attired, he was ready to face his fellow-beings with a tranquil eye.
This Mwres--the civility of "Mr." had vanished ages ago--was one of the
officials under the Wind Vane and Waterfall Trust, the great company
that owned every wind wheel and waterfall in the world, and which pumped
all the water and supplied all the electric energy that people in these
latter days required. He lived in a vast hotel near that part of London
called Seventh Way, and had very large and comfortable apartments on the
seventeenth floor. Households and family life had long since disappeared
with the progressive refinement of manners; and indeed the steady rise
in rents and land values, the disappearance of domestic servants, the
elaboration of cookery, had rendered the separate domicile of Victorian
times impossible, even had any one desired such a savage seclusion. When
his toilet was completed he went towards one of the two doors of his
apartment--there were doors at opposite ends, each marked with a huge
arrow pointing one one way and one the other--touched a stud to open it,
and emerged on a wide passage, the centre of which bore chairs and was
moving at a steady pace to the left. On some of these chairs were seated
gaily-dressed men and women. He nodded to an acquaintance--it was not in
those days etiquette to talk before breakfast--and seated himself on one
of these chairs, and in a few seconds he had been carried to the doors
of a lift, by which he descended to the great and splendid hall in which
his breakfast would be automatically served.
It was a very different meal from a Victorian breakfast. The rude
masses of bread needing to be carved and smeared over with animal fat
before they could be made palatable, the still recognisable fragments of
recently killed animals, hideously charred and hacked, the eggs torn
ruthlessly from beneath some protesting hen,--such things as these,
though they constituted the ordinary fare of Victorian times, would have
awakened only horror and disgust in the refined minds of the people of
these latter days. Instead were pastes and cakes of agreeable and
variegated design, without any suggestion in colour or form of the
unfortunate animals from which their substance and juices were derived.
They appeared on little dishes sliding out upon a rail from a little box
at one side of the table. The surface of the table, to judge by touch
and eye, would have appeared to a nineteenth-century person to be
covered with fine white damask, but this was really an oxidised metallic
surface, and could be cleaned instantly after a meal. There were
hundreds of such little tables in the hall, and at most of them were
other latter-day citizens singly or in groups. And as Mwres seated
himself before his elegant repast, the invisible orchestra, which had
been resting during an interval, resumed and filled the air with music.
But Mwres did not display any great interest either in his breakfast or
the music; his eye wandered incessantly about the hall, as though he
expected a belated guest. At last he rose eagerly and waved his hand,
and simultaneously across the hall appeared a tall dark figure in a
costume of yellow and olive green. As this person, walking amidst the
tables with measured steps, drew near, the pallid earnestness of his
face and the unusual intensity of his eyes became apparent. Mwres
reseated himself and pointed to a chair beside him.
"I feared you would never come," he said. In spite of the intervening
space of time, the English language was still almost exactly the same as
it had been in England under Victoria the Good. The invention of the
phonograph and suchlike means of recording sound, and the gradual
replacement of books by such contrivances, had not only saved the human
eyesight from decay, but had also by the establishment of a sure
standard arrested the process of change in accent that had hitherto been
so inevitable.
"I was delayed by an interesting case," said the man in green and
yellow. "A prominent politician--ahem!--suffering from overwork." He
glanced at the breakfast and seated himself. "I have been awake for
forty hours."
"Eh dear!" said Mwres: "fancy that! You hypnotists have your work to
do."
The hypnotist helped himself to some attractive amber-coloured jelly. "I
happen to be a good deal in request," he said modestly.
"Heaven knows what we should do without you."
"Oh! we're not so indispensable as all that," said the hypnotist,
ruminating the flavour of the jelly. "The world did very well without us
for some thousands of years. Two hundred years ago even--not one! In
practice, that is. Physicians by the thousand, of course--frightfully
clumsy brutes for the most part, and following one another like
sheep--but doctors of the mind, except a few empirical flounderers there
were none."
He concentrated his mind on the jelly.
"But were people so sane--?" began Mwres.
The hypnotist shook his head. "It didn't matter then if they were a bit
silly or faddy. Life was so easy-going then. No competition worth
speaking of--no pressure. A human being had to be very lopsided before
anything happened. Then, you know, they clapped 'em away in what they
called a lunatic asylum."
"I know," said Mwres. "In these confounded historical romances that
every one is listening to, they always rescue a beautiful girl from an
asylum or something of the sort. I don't know if you attend to that
rubbish."
"I must confess I do," said the hypnotist. "It carries one out of
oneself to hear of those quaint, adventurous, half-civilised days of the
nineteenth century, when men were stout and women simple. I like a good
swaggering story before all things. Curious times they were, with their
smutty railways and puffing old iron trains, their rum little houses and
their horse vehicles. I suppose you don't read books?"
"Dear, no!" said Mwres, "I went to a modern school and we had none of
that old-fashioned nonsense. Phonographs are good enough for me."
"Of course," said the hypnotist, "of course"; and surveyed the table for
his next choice. "You know," he said, helping himself to a dark blue
confection that promised well, "in those days our business was scarcely
thought of. I daresay if any one had told them that in two hundred
years' time a class of men would be entirely occupied in impressing
things upon the memory, effacing unpleasant ideas, controlling and
overcoming instinctive but undesirable impulses, and so forth, by means
of hypnotism, they would have refused to believe the thing possible. Few
people knew that an order made during a mesmeric trance, even an order
to forget or an order to desire, could be given so as to be obeyed after
the trance was over. Yet there were men alive then who could have told
them the thing was as absolutely certain to come about as--well, the
transit of Venus."
"They knew of hypnotism, then?"
"Oh, dear, yes! They used it--for painless dentistry and things like
that! This blue stuff is confoundedly good: what is it?"
"Haven't the faintest idea," said Mwres, "but I admit it's very good.
Take some more."
The hypnotist repeated his praises, and there was an appreciative pause.
"Speaking of these historical romances," said Mwres, with an attempt at
an easy, off-hand manner, "brings me--ah--to the matter I--ah--had in
mind when I asked you--when I expressed a wish to see you." He paused
and took a deep breath.
The hypnotist turned an attentive eye upon him, and continued eating.
"The fact is," said Mwres, "I have a--in fact a--daughter. Well, you
know I have given her--ah--every educational advantage. Lectures--not a
solitary lecturer of ability in the world but she has had a telephone
direct, dancing, deportment, conversation, philosophy, art criticism ..."
He indicated catholic culture by a gesture of his hand. "I had intended
her to marry a very good friend of mine--Bindon of the Lighting
Commission--plain little man, you know, and a bit unpleasant in some of
his ways, but an excellent fellow really--an excellent fellow."
"Yes," said the hypnotist, "go on. How old is she?"
"Eighteen."
"A dangerous age. Well?"
"Well: it seems that she has been indulging in these historical
romances--excessively. Excessively. Even to the neglect of her
philosophy. Filled her mind with unutterable nonsense about soldiers who
fight--what is it?--Etruscans?"
"Egyptians."
"Egyptians--very probably. Hack about with swords and revolvers and
things--bloodshed galore--horrible!--and about young men on torpedo
catchers who blow up--Spaniards, I fancy--and all sorts of irregular
adventurers. And she has got it into her head that she must marry for
Love, and that poor little Bindon--"
"I've met similar cases," said the hypnotist. "Who is the other young
man?"
Mwres maintained an appearance of resigned calm. "You may well ask," he
said. "He is"--and his voice sank with shame--"a mere attendant upon the
stage on which the flying-machines from Paris alight. He has--as they
say in the romances--good looks. He is quite young and very eccentric.
Affects the antique--he can read and write! So can she. And instead of
communicating by telephone, like sensible people, they write and
deliver--what is it?"
"Notes?"
"No--not notes.... Ah--poems."
The hypnotist raised his eyebrows. "How did she meet him?"
"Tripped coming down from the flying-machine from Paris--and fell into
his arms. The mischief was done in a moment!"
"Yes?"
"Well--that's all. Things must be stopped. That is what I want to
consult you about. What must be done? What can be done? Of course I'm
not a hypnotist; my knowledge is limited. But you--?"
"Hypnotism is not magic," said the man in green, putting both arms on
the table.
"Oh, precisely! But still--!"
"People cannot be hypnotised without their consent. If she is able to
stand out against marrying Bindon, she will probably stand out against
being hypnotised. But if once she can be hypnotised--even by somebody
else--the thing is done."
"You can--?"
"Oh, certainly! Once we get her amenable, then we can suggest that she
must marry Bindon--that that is her fate; or that the young man is
repulsive, and that when she sees him she will be giddy and faint, or
any little thing of that sort. Or if we can get her into a sufficiently
profound trance we can suggest that she should forget him altogether--"
"Precisely."
"But the problem is to get her hypnotised. Of course no sort of proposal
or suggestion must come from you--because no doubt she already distrusts
you in the matter."
The hypnotist leant his head upon his arm and thought.
"It's hard a man cannot dispose of his own daughter," said Mwres
irrelevantly.
"You must give me the name and address of the young lady," said the
hypnotist, "and any information bearing upon the matter. And, by the
bye, is there any money in the affair?"
Mwres hesitated.
"There's a sum--in fact, a considerable sum--invested in the Patent Road
Company. From her mother. That's what makes the thing so exasperating."
"Exactly," said the hypnotist. And he proceeded to cross-examine Mwres
on the entire affair.
It was a lengthy interview.
And meanwhile "Elizebe{th} Mwres," as she spelt her name, or "Elizabeth
Morris" as a nineteenth-century person would have put it, was sitting in
a quiet waiting-place beneath the great stage upon which the
flying-machine from Paris descended. And beside her sat her slender,
handsome lover reading her the poem he had written that morning while on
duty upon the stage. When he had finished they sat for a time in
silence; and then, as if for their special entertainment, the great
machine that had come flying through the air from America that morning
rushed down out of the sky.
At first it was a little oblong, faint and blue amidst the distant
fleecy clouds; and then it grew swiftly large and white, and larger and
whiter, until they could see the separate tiers of sails, each hundreds
of feet wide, and the lank body they supported, and at last even the
swinging seats of the passengers in a dotted row. Although it was
falling it seemed to them to be rushing up the sky, and over the
roof-spaces of the city below its shadow leapt towards them. They heard
the whistling rush of the air about it and its yelling siren, shrill and
swelling, to warn those who were on its landing-stage of its arrival.
And abruptly the note fell down a couple of octaves, and it had passed,
and the sky was clear and void, and she could turn her sweet eyes again
to Denton at her side.
Their silence ended; and Denton, speaking in a little language of broken
English that was, they fancied, their private possession--though lovers
have used such little languages since the world began--told her how they
too would leap into the air one morning out of all the obstacles and
difficulties about them, and fly to a sunlit city of delight he knew of
in Japan, half-way about the world.
She loved the dream, but she feared the leap; and she put him off with
"Some day, dearest one, some day," to all his pleading that it might be
soon; and at last came a shrilling of whistles, and it was time for him
to go back to his duties on the stage. They parted--as lovers have been
wont to part for thousands of years. She walked down a passage to a
lift, and so came to one of the streets of that latter-day London, all
glazed in with glass from the weather, and with incessant moving
platforms that went to all parts of the city. And by one of these she
returned to her apartments in the Hotel for Women where she lived, the
apartments that were in telephonic communication with all the best
lecturers in the world. But the sunlight of the flying stage was in her
heart, and the wisdom of all the best lecturers in the world seemed
folly in that light.
She spent the middle part of the day in the gymnasium, and took her
midday meal with two other girls and their common chaperone--for it was
still the custom to have a chaperone in the case of motherless girls of
the more prosperous classes. The chaperone had a visitor that day, a man
in green and yellow, with a white face and vivid eyes, who talked
amazingly. Among other things, he fell to praising a new historical
romance that one of the great popular story-tellers of the day had just
put forth. It was, of course, about the spacious times of Queen
Victoria; and the author, among other pleasing novelties, made a little
argument before each section of the story, in imitation of the chapter
headings of the old-fashioned books: as for example, "How the Cabmen of
Pimlico stopped the Victoria Omnibuses, and of the Great Fight in Palace
Yard," and "How the Piccadilly Policeman was slain in the midst of his
Duty." The man in green and yellow praised this innovation. "These pithy
sentences," he said, "are admirable. They show at a glance those
headlong, tumultuous times, when men and animals jostled in the filthy
streets, and death might wait for one at every corner. Life was life
then! How great the world must have seemed then! How marvellous! They
were still parts of the world absolutely unexplored. Nowadays we have
almost abolished wonder, we lead lives so trim and orderly that courage,
endurance, faith, all the noble virtues seem fading from mankind."
And so on, taking the girls' thoughts with him, until the life they led,
life in the vast and intricate London of the twenty-second century, a
life interspersed with soaring excursions to every part of the globe,
seemed to them a monotonous misery compared with the daedal past.
At first Elizabeth did not join in the conversation, but after a time
the subject became so interesting that she made a few shy
interpolations. But he scarcely seemed to notice her as he talked. He
went on to describe a new method of entertaining people. They were
hypnotised, and then suggestions were made to them so skilfully that
they seemed to be living in ancient times again. They played out a
little romance in the past as vivid as reality, and when at last they
awakened they remembered all they had been through as though it were a
real thing.
"It is a thing we have sought to do for years and years," said the
hypnotist. "It is practically an artificial dream. And we know the way
at last. Think of all it opens out to us--the enrichment of our
experience, the recovery of adventure, the refuge it offers from this
sordid, competitive life in which we live! Think!"
"And you can do that!" said the chaperone eagerly.
"The thing is possible at last," the hypnotist said. "You may order a
dream as you wish."
The chaperone was the first to be hypnotised, and the dream, she said,
was wonderful, when she came to again.
The other two girls, encouraged by her enthusiasm, also placed
themselves in the hands of the hypnotist and had plunges into the
romantic past. No one suggested that Elizabeth should try this novel
entertainment; it was at her own request at last that she was taken into
that land of dreams where there is neither any freedom of choice nor
will....
And so the mischief was done.
One day, when Denton went down to that quiet seat beneath the flying
stage, Elizabeth was not in her wonted place. He was disappointed, and a
little angry. The next day she did not come, and the next also. He was
afraid. To hide his fear from himself, he set to work to write sonnets
for her when she should come again....
For three days he fought against his dread by such distraction, and then
the truth was before him clear and cold, and would not be denied. She
might be ill, she might be dead; but he would not believe that he had
been betrayed. There followed a week of misery. And then he knew she was
the only thing on earth worth having, and that he must seek her, however
hopeless the search, until she was found once more.
He had some small private means of his own, and so he threw over his
appointment on the flying stage, and set himself to find this girl who
had become at last all the world to him. He did not know where she
lived, and little of her circumstances; for it had been part of the
delight of her girlish romance that he should know nothing of her,
nothing of the difference of their station. The ways of the city opened
before him east and west, north and south. Even in Victorian days London
was a maze, that little London with its poor four millions of people;
but the London he explored, the London of the twenty-second century, was
a London of thirty million souls. At first he was energetic and
headlong, taking time neither to eat nor sleep. He sought for weeks and
months, he went through every imaginable phase of fatigue and despair,
over-excitement and anger. Long after hope was dead, by the sheer
inertia of his desire he still went to and fro, peering into faces and
looking this way and that, in the incessant ways and lifts and passages
of that interminable hive of men.
At last chance was kind to him, and he saw her.
It was in a time of festivity. He was hungry; he had paid the inclusive
fee and had gone into one of the gigantic dining-places of the city; he
was pushing his way among the tables and scrutinising by mere force of
habit every group he passed.
He stood still, robbed of all power of motion, his eyes wide, his lips
apart. Elizabeth sat scarcely twenty yards away from him, looking
straight at him. Her eyes were as hard to him, as hard and
expressionless and void of recognition, as the eyes of a statue.
She looked at him for a moment, and then her gaze passed beyond him.
Had he had only her eyes to judge by he might have doubted if it was
indeed Elizabeth, but he knew her by the gesture of her hand, by the
grace of a wanton little curl that floated over her ear as she moved her
head. Something was said to her, and she turned smiling tolerantly to
the man beside her, a little man in foolish raiment knobbed and spiked
like some odd reptile with pneumatic horns--the Bindon of her father's
choice.
For a moment Denton stood white and wild-eyed; then came a terrible
faintness, and he sat before one of the little tables. He sat down with
his back to her, and for a time he did not dare to look at her again.
When at last he did, she and Bindon and two other people were standing
up to go. The others were her father and her chaperone.
He sat as if incapable of action until the four figures were remote and
small, and then he rose up possessed with the one idea of pursuit. For
a space he feared he had lost them, and then he came upon Elizabeth and
her chaperone again in one of the streets of moving platforms that
intersected the city. Bindon and Mwres had disappeared.
He could not control himself to patience. He felt he must speak to her
forthwith, or die. He pushed forward to where they were seated, and sat
down beside them. His white face was convulsed with half-hysterical
excitement.
He laid his hand on her wrist. "Elizabeth?" he said.
She turned in unfeigned astonishment. Nothing but the fear of a strange
man showed in her face.
"Elizabeth," he cried, and his voice was strange to him: "dearest--you
know me?"
Elizabeth's face showed nothing but alarm and perplexity. She drew
herself away from him. The chaperone, a little grey-headed woman with
mobile features, leant forward to intervene. Her resolute bright eyes
examined Denton. "What do you say?" she asked.
"This young lady," said Denton,--"she knows me."
"Do you know him, dear?"
"No," said Elizabeth in a strange voice, and with a hand to her
forehead, speaking almost as one who repeats a lesson. "No, I do not
know him. I know--I do not know him."
"But--but ... Not know me! It is I--Denton. Denton! To whom you used to
talk. Don't you remember the flying stages? The little seat in the open
air? The verses--"
"No," cried Elizabeth,--"no. I do not know him. I do not know him. There
is something.... But I don't know. All I know is that I do not know
him." Her face was a face of infinite distress.
The sharp eyes of the chaperone flitted to and fro from the girl to the
man. "You see?" she said, with the faint shadow of a smile. "She does
not know you."
"I do not know you," said Elizabeth. "Of that I am sure."
"But, dear--the songs--the little verses--"
"She does not know you," said the chaperone. "You must not.... You have
made a mistake. You must not go on talking to us after that. You must
not annoy us on the public ways."
"But--" said Denton, and for a moment his miserably haggard face
appealed against fate.
"You must not persist, young man," protested the chaperone.
"Elizabeth!" he cried.
Her face was the face of one who is tormented. "I do not know you," she
cried, hand to brow. "Oh, I do not know you!"
For an instant Denton sat stunned. Then he stood up and groaned aloud.
He made a strange gesture of appeal towards the remote glass roof of the
public way, then turned and went plunging recklessly from one moving
platform to another, and vanished amidst the swarms of people going to
and fro thereon. The chaperone's eyes followed him, and then she looked
at the curious faces about her.
"Dear," asked Elizabeth, clasping her hand, and too deeply moved to heed
observation, "who was that man? Who was that man?"
The chaperone raised her eyebrows. She spoke in a clear, audible voice.
"Some half-witted creature. I have never set eyes on him before."
"Never?"
"Never, dear. Do not trouble your mind about a thing like this."
* * * * *
And soon after this the celebrated hypnotist who dressed in green and
yellow had another client. The young man paced his consulting-room, pale
and disordered. "I want to forget," he cried. "I must forget."
The hypnotist watched him with quiet eyes, studied his face and clothes
and bearing. "To forget anything--pleasure or pain--is to be, by so
much--less. However, you know your own concern. My fee is high."
"If only I can forget--"
"That's easy enough with you. You wish it. I've done much harder things.
Quite recently. I hardly expected to do it: the thing was done against
the will of the hypnotised person. A love affair too--like yours. A
girl. So rest assured."
The young man came and sat beside the hypnotist. His manner was a forced
calm. He looked into the hypnotist's eyes. "I will tell you. Of course
you will want to know what it is. There was a girl. Her name was
Elizabeth Mwres. Well ..."
He stopped. He had seen the instant surprise on the hypnotist's face. In
that instant he knew. He stood up. He seemed to dominate the seated
figure by his side. He gripped the shoulder of green and gold. For a
time he could not find words.
"Give her me back!" he said at last. "Give her me back!"
"What do you mean?" gasped the hypnotist.
"Give her me back."
"Give whom?"
"Elizabeth Mwres--the girl--"
The hypnotist tried to free himself; he rose to his feet. Denton's grip
tightened.
"Let go!" cried the hypnotist, thrusting an arm against Denton's chest.
In a moment the two men were locked in a clumsy wrestle. Neither had the
slightest training--for athleticism, except for exhibition and to afford
opportunity for betting, had faded out of the earth--but Denton was not
only the younger but the stronger of the two. They swayed across the
room, and then the hypnotist had gone down under his antagonist. They
fell together....
Denton leaped to his feet, dismayed at his own fury; but the hypnotist
lay still, and suddenly from a little white mark where his forehead had
struck a stool shot a hurrying band of red. For a space Denton stood
over him irresolute, trembling.
A fear of the consequences entered his gently nurtured mind. He turned
towards the door. "No," he said aloud, and came back to the middle of
the room. Overcoming the instinctive repugnance of one who had seen no
act of violence in all his life before, he knelt down beside his
antagonist and felt his heart. Then he peered at the wound. He rose
quietly and looked about him. He began to see more of the situation.
When presently the hypnotist recovered his senses, his head ached
severely, his back was against Denton's knees and Denton was sponging
his face.
The hypnotist did not speak. But presently he indicated by a gesture
that in his opinion he had been sponged enough. "Let me get up," he
said.
"Not yet," said Denton.
"You have assaulted me, you scoundrel!"
"We are alone," said Denton, "and the door is secure."
There was an interval of thought.
"Unless I sponge," said Denton, "your forehead will develop a tremendous
bruise."
"You can go on sponging," said the hypnotist sulkily.
There was another pause.
"We might be in the Stone Age," said the hypnotist. "Violence!
Struggle!"
"In the Stone Age no man dared to come between man and woman," said
Denton.
The hypnotist thought again.
"What are you going to do?" he asked.
"While you were insensible I found the girl's address on your tablets.
I did not know it before. I telephoned. She will be here soon. Then--"
"She will bring her chaperone."
"That is all right."
"But what--? I don't see. What do you mean to do?"
"I looked about for a weapon also. It is an astonishing thing how few
weapons there are nowadays. If you consider that in the Stone Age men
owned scarcely anything but weapons. I hit at last upon this lamp. I
have wrenched off the wires and things, and I hold it so." He extended
it over the hypnotist's shoulders. "With that I can quite easily smash
your skull. I will--unless you do as I tell you."
"Violence is no remedy," said the hypnotist, quoting from the "Modern
Man's Book of Moral Maxims."
"It's an undesirable disease," said Denton.
"Well?"
"You will tell that chaperone you are going to order the girl to marry
that knobby little brute with the red hair and ferrety eyes. I believe
that's how things stand?"
"Yes--that's how things stand."
"And, pretending to do that, you will restore her memory of me."
"It's unprofessional."
"Look here! If I cannot have that girl I would rather die than not. I
don't propose to respect your little fancies. If anything goes wrong you
shall not live five minutes. This is a rude makeshift of a weapon, and
it may quite conceivably be painful to kill you. But I will. It is
unusual, I know, nowadays to do things like this--mainly because there
is so little in life that is worth being violent about."
"The chaperone will see you directly she comes--"
"I shall stand in that recess. Behind you."
The hypnotist thought. "You are a determined young man," he said, "and
only half civilised. I have tried to do my duty to my client, but in
this affair you seem likely to get your own way...."
"You mean to deal straightly."
"I'm not going to risk having my brains scattered in a petty affair like
this."
"And afterwards?"
"There is nothing a hypnotist or doctor hates so much as a scandal. I at
least am no savage. I am annoyed.... But in a day or so I shall bear no
malice...."
"Thank you. And now that we understand each other, there is no
necessity to keep you sitting any longer on the floor."
II--THE VACANT COUNTRY
The world, they say, changed more between the year 1800 and the year
1900 than it had done in the previous five hundred years. That century,
the nineteenth century, was the dawn of a new epoch in the history of
mankind--the epoch of the great cities, the end of the old order of
country life.
In the beginning of the nineteenth century the majority of mankind still
lived upon the countryside, as their way of life had been for countless
generations. All over the world they dwelt in little towns and villages
then, and engaged either directly in agriculture, or in occupations that
were of service to the agriculturist. They travelled rarely, and dwelt
close to their work, because swift means of transit had not yet come.
The few who travelled went either on foot, or in slow sailing-ships, or
by means of jogging horses incapable of more than sixty miles a day.
Think of it!--sixty miles a day. Here and there, in those sluggish
times, a town grew a little larger than its neighbours, as a port or as
a centre of government; but all the towns in the world with more than a
hundred thousand inhabitants could be counted on a man's fingers. So it
was in the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the end, the
invention of railways, telegraphs, steamships, and complex agricultural
machinery, had changed all these things: changed them beyond all hope of
return. The vast shops, the varied pleasures, the countless conveniences
of the larger towns were suddenly possible, and no sooner existed than
they were brought into competition with the homely resources of the
rural centres. Mankind were drawn to the cities by an overwhelming
attraction. The demand for labour fell with the increase of machinery,
the local markets were entirely superseded, and there was a rapid growth
of the larger centres at the expense of the open country.
The flow of population townward was the constant preoccupation of
Victorian writers. In Great Britain and New England, in India and China,
the same thing was remarked: everywhere a few swollen towns were visibly
replacing the ancient order. That this was an inevitable result of
improved means of travel and transport--that, given swift means of
transit, these things must be--was realised by few; and the most puerile
schemes were devised to overcome the mysterious magnetism of the urban
centres, and keep the people on the land.
Yet the developments of the nineteenth century were only the dawning of
the new order. The first great cities of the new time were horribly
inconvenient, darkened by smoky fogs, insanitary and noisy; but the
discovery of new methods of building, new methods of heating, changed
all this. Between 1900 and 2000 the march of change was still more
rapid; and between 2000 and 2100 the continually accelerated progress of
human invention made the reign of Victoria the Good seem at last an
almost incredible vision of idyllic tranquil days.
The introduction of railways was only the first step in that development
of those means of locomotion which finally revolutionised human life. By
the year 2000 railways and roads had vanished together. The railways,
robbed of their rails, had become weedy ridges and ditches upon the face
of the world; the old roads, strange barbaric tracks of flint and soil,
hammered by hand or rolled by rough iron rollers, strewn with
miscellaneous filth, and cut by iron hoofs and wheels into ruts and
puddles often many inches deep, had been replaced by patent tracks made
of a substance called Eadhamite. This Eadhamite--it was named after its
patentee--ranks with the invention of printing and steam as one of the
epoch-making discoveries of the world's history.
When Eadham discovered the substance, he probably thought of it as a
mere cheap substitute for india rubber; it cost a few shillings a ton.
But you can never tell all an invention will do. It was the genius of a
man named Warming that pointed to the possibility of using it, not only
for the tires of wheels, but as a road substance, and who organised the
enormous network of public ways that speedily covered the world.
These public ways were made with longitudinal divisions. On the outer on
either side went foot cyclists and conveyances travelling at a less
speed than twenty-five miles an hour; in the middle, motors capable of
speed up to a hundred; and the inner, Warming (in the face of enormous
ridicule) reserved for vehicles travelling at speeds of a hundred miles
an hour and upward.
For ten years his inner ways were vacant. Before he died they were the
most crowded of all, and vast light frameworks with wheels of twenty and
thirty feet in diameter, hurled along them at paces that year after year
rose steadily towards two hundred miles an hour. And by the time this
revolution was accomplished, a parallel revolution had transformed the
ever-growing cities. Before the development of practical science the
fogs and filth of Victorian times vanished. Electric heating replaced
fires (in 2013 the lighting of a fire that did not absolutely consume
its own smoke was made an indictable nuisance), and all the city ways,
all public squares and places, were covered in with a recently invented
glass-like substance. The roofing of London became practically
continuous. Certain short-sighted and foolish legislation against tall
buildings was abolished, and London, from a squat expanse of petty
houses--feebly archaic in design--rose steadily towards the sky. To the
municipal responsibility for water, light, and drainage, was added
another, and that was ventilation.
But to tell of all the changes in human convenience that these two
hundred years brought about, to tell of the long foreseen invention of
flying, to describe how life in households was steadily supplanted by
life in interminable hotels, how at last even those who were still
concerned in agricultural work came to live in the towns and to go to
and fro to their work every day, to describe how at last in all England
only four towns remained, each with many millions of people, and how
there were left no inhabited houses in all the countryside: to tell all
this would take us far from our story of Denton and his Elizabeth. They
had been separated and reunited, and still they could not marry. For
Denton--it was his only fault--had no money. Neither had Elizabeth until
she was twenty-one, and as yet she was only eighteen. At twenty-one all
the property of her mother would come to her, for that was the custom of
the time. She did not know that it was possible to anticipate her
fortune, and Denton was far too delicate a lover to suggest such a
thing. So things stuck hopelessly between them. Elizabeth said that she
was very unhappy, and that nobody understood her but Denton, and that
when she was away from him she was wretched; and Denton said that his
heart longed for her day and night. And they met as often as they could
to enjoy the discussion of their sorrows.
They met one day at their little seat upon the flying stage. The precise
site of this meeting was where in Victorian times the road from
Wimbledon came out upon the common. They were, however, five hundred
feet above that point. Their seat looked far over London. To convey the
appearance of it all to a nineteenth-century reader would have been
difficult. One would have had to tell him to think of the Crystal
Palace, of the newly built "mammoth" hotels--as those little affairs
were called--of the larger railway stations of his time, and to imagine
such buildings enlarged to vast proportions and run together and
continuous over the whole metropolitan area. If then he was told that
this continuous roof-space bore a huge forest of rotating wind-wheels,
he would have begun very dimly to appreciate what to these young people
was the commonest sight in their lives.
To their eyes it had something of the quality of a prison, and they were
talking, as they had talked a hundred times before, of how they might
escape from it and be at last happy together: escape from it, that is,
before the appointed three years were at an end. It was, they both
agreed, not only impossible but almost wicked, to wait three years.
"Before that," said Denton--and the notes of his voice told of a
splendid chest--"we might both be dead!"
Their vigorous young hands had to grip at this, and then Elizabeth had a
still more poignant thought that brought the tears from her wholesome
eyes and down her healthy cheeks. "One of us," she said, "one of us
might be--"
She choked; she could not say the word that is so terrible to the young
and happy.
Yet to marry and be very poor in the cities of that time was--for any
one who had lived pleasantly--a very dreadful thing. In the old
agricultural days that had drawn to an end in the eighteenth century
there had been a pretty proverb of love in a cottage; and indeed in
those days the poor of the countryside had dwelt in flower-covered,
diamond-windowed cottages of thatch and plaster, with the sweet air and
earth about them, amidst tangled hedges and the song of birds, and with
the ever-changing sky overhead. But all this had changed (the change was
already beginning in the nineteenth century), and a new sort of life was
opening for the poor--in the lower quarters of the city.
In the nineteenth century the lower quarters were still beneath the sky;
they were areas of land on clay or other unsuitable soil, liable to
floods or exposed to the smoke of more fortunate districts,
insufficiently supplied with water, and as insanitary as the great fear
of infectious diseases felt by the wealthier classes permitted. In the
twenty-second century, however, the growth of the city storey above
storey, and the coalescence of buildings, had led to a different
arrangement. The prosperous people lived in a vast series of sumptuous
hotels in the upper storeys and halls of the city fabric; the industrial
population dwelt beneath in the tremendous ground-floor and basement, so
to speak, of the place.
In the refinement of life and manners these lower classes differed
little from their ancestors, the East-enders of Queen Victoria's time;
but they had developed a distinct dialect of their own. In these under
ways they lived and died, rarely ascending to the surface except when
work took them there. Since for most of them this was the sort of life
to which they had been born, they found no great misery in such
circumstances; but for people like Denton and Elizabeth, such a plunge
would have seemed more terrible than death.
"And yet what else is there?" asked Elizabeth.
Denton professed not to know. Apart from his own feeling of delicacy, he
was not sure how Elizabeth would like the idea of borrowing on the
strength of her expectations.
The passage from London to Paris even, said Elizabeth, was beyond their
means; and in Paris, as in any other city in the world, life would be
just as costly and impossible as in London.
Well might Denton cry aloud: "If only we had lived in those days,
dearest! If only we had lived in the past!" For to their eyes even
nineteenth-century Whitechapel was seen through a mist of romance.
"Is there nothing?" cried Elizabeth, suddenly weeping. "Must we really
wait for those three long years? Fancy three years--six-and-thirty
months!" The human capacity for patience had not grown with the ages.
Then suddenly Denton was moved to speak of something that had already
flickered across his mind. He had hit upon it at last. It seemed to him
so wild a suggestion that he made it only half seriously. But to put a
thing into words has ever a way of making it seem more real and possible
than it seemed before. And so it was with him.
"Suppose," he said, "we went into the country?"
She looked at him to see if he was serious in proposing such an
adventure.
"The country?"
"Yes--beyond there. Beyond the hills."
"How could we live?" she said. "Where could we live?"
"It is not impossible," he said. "People used to live in the country."
"But then there were houses."
"There are the ruins of villages and towns now. On the clay lands they
are gone, of course. But they are still left on the grazing land,
because it does not pay the Food Company to remove them. I know
that--for certain. Besides, one sees them from the flying machines, you
know. Well, we might shelter in some one of these, and repair it with
our hands. Do you know, the thing is not so wild as it seems. Some of
the men who go out every day to look after the crops and herds might be
paid to bring us food...."
She stood in front of him. "How strange it would be if one really
could...."
"Why not?"
"But no one dares."
"That is no reason."
"It would be--oh! it would be so romantic and strange. If only it were
possible."
"Why not possible?"
"There are so many things. Think of all the things we have, things that
we should miss."
"Should we miss them? After all, the life we lead is very unreal--very
artificial." He began to expand his idea, and as he warmed to his
exposition the fantastic quality of his first proposal faded away.
She thought. "But I have heard of prowlers--escaped criminals."
He nodded. He hesitated over his answer because he thought it sounded
boyish. He blushed. "I could get some one I know to make me a sword."
She looked at him with enthusiasm growing in her eyes. She had heard of
swords, had seen one in a museum; she thought of those ancient days when
men wore them as a common thing. His suggestion seemed an impossible
dream to her, and perhaps for that reason she was eager for more detail.
And inventing for the most part as he went along, he told her, how they
might live in the country as the old-world people had done. With every
detail her interest grew, for she was one of those girls for whom
romance and adventure have a fascination.
His suggestion seemed, I say, an impossible dream to her on that day,
but the next day they talked about it again, and it was strangely less
impossible.
"At first we should take food," said Denton. "We could carry food for
ten or twelve days." It was an age of compact artificial nourishment,
and such a provision had none of the unwieldy suggestion it would have
had in the nineteenth century.
"But--until our house," she asked--"until it was ready, where should we
sleep?"
"It is summer."
"But ... What do you mean?"
"There was a time when there were no houses in the world; when all
mankind slept always in the open air."
"But for us! The emptiness! No walls--no ceiling!"
"Dear," he said, "in London you have many beautiful ceilings. Artists
paint them and stud them with lights. But I have seen a ceiling more
beautiful than any in London...."
"But where?"
"It is the ceiling under which we two would be alone...."
"You mean...?"
"Dear," he said, "it is something the world has forgotten. It is Heaven
and all the host of stars."
Each time they talked the thing seemed more possible and more desirable
to them. In a week or so it was quite possible. Another week, and it was
the inevitable thing they had to do. A great enthusiasm for the country
seized hold of them and possessed them. The sordid tumult of the town,
they said, overwhelmed them. They marvelled that this simple way out of
their troubles had never come upon them before.
One morning near Midsummer-day, there was a new minor official upon the
flying stage, and Denton's place was to know him no more.
Our two young people had secretly married, and were going forth manfully
out of the city in which they and their ancestors before them had lived
all their days. She wore a new dress of white cut in an old-fashioned
pattern, and he had a bundle of provisions strapped athwart his back,
and in his hand he carried--rather shame-facedly it is true, and under
his purple cloak--an implement of archaic form, a cross-hilted thing of
tempered steel.
Imagine that going forth! In their days the sprawling suburbs of
Victorian times with their vile roads, petty houses, foolish little
gardens of shrub and geranium, and all their futile, pretentious
privacies, had disappeared: the towering buildings of the new age, the
mechanical ways, the electric and water mains, all came to an end
together, like a wall, like a cliff, near four hundred feet in height,
abrupt and sheer. All about the city spread the carrot, swede, and
turnip fields of the Food Company, vegetables that were the basis of a
thousand varied foods, and weeds and hedgerow tangles had been utterly
extirpated. The incessant expense of weeding that went on year after
year in the petty, wasteful and barbaric farming of the ancient days,
the Food Company had economised for ever more by a campaign of
extermination. Here and there, however, neat rows of bramble standards
and apple trees with whitewashed stems, intersected the fields, and at
places groups of gigantic teazles reared their favoured spikes. Here and
there huge agricultural machines hunched under waterproof covers. The
mingled waters of the Wey and Mole and Wandle ran in rectangular
channels; and wherever a gentle elevation of the ground permitted a
fountain of deodorised sewage distributed its benefits athwart the land
and made a rainbow of the sunlight.
By a great archway in that enormous city wall emerged the Eadhamite road
to Portsmouth, swarming in the morning sunshine with an enormous traffic
bearing the blue-clad servants of the Food Company to their toil. A
rushing traffic, beside which they seemed two scarce-moving dots. Along
the outer tracks hummed and rattled the tardy little old-fashioned
motors of such as had duties within twenty miles or so of the city; the
inner ways were filled with vaster mechanisms--swift monocycles bearing
a score of men, lank multicycles, quadricycles sagging with heavy loads,
empty gigantic produce carts that would come back again filled before
the sun was setting, all with throbbing engines and noiseless wheels and
a perpetual wild melody of horns and gongs.
Along the very verge of the outermost way our young people went in
silence, newly wed and oddly shy of one another's company. Many were the
things shouted to them as they tramped along, for in 2100 a
foot-passenger on an English road was almost as strange a sight as a
motor car would have been in 1800. But they went on with steadfast eyes
into the country, paying no heed to such cries.
Before them in the south rose the Downs, blue at first, and as they came
nearer changing to green, surmounted by the row of gigantic wind-wheels
that supplemented the wind-wheels upon the roof-spaces of the city, and
broken and restless with the long morning shadows of those whirling
vanes. By midday they had come so near that they could see here and
there little patches of pallid dots--the sheep the Meat Department of
the Food Company owned. In another hour they had passed the clay and the
root crops and the single fence that hedged them in, and the prohibition
against trespass no longer held: the levelled roadway plunged into a
cutting with all its traffic, and they could leave it and walk over the
greensward and up the open hillside.
Never had these children of the latter days been together in such a
lonely place.
They were both very hungry and footsore--for walking was a rare
exercise--and presently they sat down on the weedless, close-cropped
grass, and looked back for the first time at the city from which they
had come, shining wide and splendid in the blue haze of the valley of
the Thames. Elizabeth was a little afraid of the unenclosed sheep away
up the slope--she had never been near big unrestrained animals
before--but Denton reassured her. And overhead a white-winged bird
circled in the blue.
They talked but little until they had eaten, and then their tongues were
loosened. He spoke of the happiness that was now certainly theirs, of
the folly of not breaking sooner out of that magnificent prison of
latter-day life, of the old romantic days that had passed from the
world for ever. And then he became boastful. He took up the sword that
lay on the ground beside him, and she took it from his hand and ran a
tremulous finger along the blade.
"And you could," she said, "you--could raise this and strike a man?"
"Why not? If there were need."
"But," she said, "it seems so horrible. It would slash.... There would
be"--her voice sank,--"blood."
"In the old romances you have read often enough ..."
"Oh, I know: in those--yes. But that is different. One knows it is not
blood, but just a sort of red ink.... And you--killing!"
She looked at him doubtfully, and then handed him back the sword.
After they had rested and eaten, they rose up and went on their way
towards the hills. They passed quite close to a huge flock of sheep, who
stared and bleated at their unaccustomed figures. She had never seen
sheep before, and she shivered to think such gentle things must needs be
slain for food. A sheep-dog barked from a distance, and then a shepherd
appeared amidst the supports of the wind-wheels, and came down towards
them.
When he drew near he called out asking whither they were going.
Denton hesitated, and told him briefly that they sought some ruined
house among the Downs, in which they might live together. He tried to
speak in an off-hand manner, as though it was a usual thing to do. The
man stared incredulously.
"Have you done anything?" he asked.
"Nothing," said Denton. "Only we don't want to live in a city any
longer. Why should we live in cities?"
The shepherd stared more incredulously than ever. "You can't live here,"
he said.
"We mean to try."
The shepherd stared from one to the other. "You'll go back to-morrow,"
he said. "It looks pleasant enough in the sunlight.... Are you sure
you've done nothing? We shepherds are not such great friends of the
police."
Denton looked at him steadfastly. "No," he said. "But we are too poor to
live in the city, and we can't bear the thought of wearing clothes of
blue canvas and doing drudgery. We are going to live a simple life here,
like the people of old."
The shepherd was a bearded man with a thoughtful face. He glanced at
Elizabeth's fragile beauty.
"They had simple minds," he said.
"So have we," said Denton.
The shepherd smiled.
"If you go along here," he said, "along the crest beneath the
wind-wheels, you will see a heap of mounds and ruins on your right-hand
side. That was once a town called Epsom. There are no houses there, and
the bricks have been used for a sheep pen. Go on, and another heap on
the edge of the root-land is Leatherhead; and then the hill turns away
along the border of a valley, and there are woods of beech. Keep along
the crest. You will come to quite wild places. In some parts, in spite
of all the weeding that is done, ferns and bluebells and other such
useless plants are growing still. And through it all underneath the
wind-wheels runs a straight lane paved with stones, a roadway of the
Romans two thousand years old. Go to the right of that, down into the
valley and follow it along by the banks of the river. You come presently
to a street of houses, many with the roofs still sound upon them. There
you may find shelter."
They thanked him.
"But it's a quiet place. There is no light after dark there, and I have
heard tell of robbers. It is lonely. Nothing happens there. The
phonographs of the story-tellers, the kinematograph entertainments, the
news machines--none of them are to be found there. If you are hungry
there is no food, if you are ill no doctor ..." He stopped.
"We shall try it," said Denton, moving to go on. Then a thought struck
him, and he made an agreement with the shepherd, and learnt where they
might find him, to buy and bring them anything of which they stood in
need, out of the city.
And in the evening they came to the deserted village, with its houses
that seemed so small and odd to them: they found it golden in the glory
of the sunset, and desolate and still. They went from one deserted house
to another, marvelling at their quaint simplicity, and debating which
they should choose. And at last, in a sunlit corner of a room that had
lost its outer wall, they came upon a wild flower, a little flower of
blue that the weeders of the Food Company had overlooked.
That house they decided upon; but they did not remain in it long that
night, because they were resolved to feast upon nature. And moreover the
houses became very gaunt and shadowy after the sunlight had faded out
of the sky. So after they had rested a little time they went to the
crest of the hill again to see with their own eyes the silence of heaven
set with stars, about which the old poets had had so many things to
tell. It was a wonderful sight, and Denton talked like the stars, and
when they went down the hill at last the sky was pale with dawn. They
slept but little, and in the morning when they woke a thrush was singing
in a tree.
So these young people of the twenty-second century began their exile.
That morning they were very busy exploring the resources of this new
home in which they were going to live the simple life. They did not
explore very fast or very far, because they went everywhere
hand-in-hand; but they found the beginnings of some furniture. Beyond
the village was a store of winter fodder for the sheep of the Food
Company, and Denton dragged great armfuls to the house to make a bed;
and in several of the houses were old fungus-eaten chairs and
tables--rough, barbaric, clumsy furniture, it seemed to them, and made
of wood. They repeated many of the things they had said on the previous
day, and towards evening they found another flower, a harebell. In the
late afternoon some Company shepherds went down the river valley riding
on a big multicycle; but they hid from them, because their presence,
Elizabeth said, seemed to spoil the romance of this old-world place
altogether.
In this fashion they lived a week. For all that week the days were
cloudless, and the nights nights of starry glory, that were invaded each
a little more by a crescent moon.
Yet something of the first splendour of their coming faded--faded
imperceptibly day after day; Denton's eloquence became fitful, and
lacked fresh topics of inspiration; the fatigue of their long march from
London told in a certain stiffness of the limbs, and each suffered from
a slight unaccountable cold. Moreover, Denton became aware of unoccupied
time. In one place among the carelessly heaped lumber of the old times
he found a rust-eaten spade, and with this he made a fitful attack on
the razed and grass-grown garden--though he had nothing to plant or sow.
He returned to Elizabeth with a sweat-streaming face, after half an hour
of such work.
"There were giants in those days," he said, not understanding what wont
and training will do. And their walk that day led them along the hills
until they could see the city shimmering far away in the valley. "I
wonder how things are going on there," he said.
And then came a change in the weather. "Come out and see the clouds,"
she cried; and behold! they were a sombre purple in the north and east,
streaming up to ragged edges at the zenith. And as they went up the hill
these hurrying streamers blotted out the sunset. Suddenly the wind set
the beech-trees swaying and whispering, and Elizabeth shivered. And then
far away the lightning flashed, flashed like a sword that is drawn