时空传说-V—BINDON INTERVENESIn Bindon's younger days he had dabbled in
speculation and made three brilliant flukes. For
the rest of his life he had the wisdom to let
gambling alone, and the conceit to believe himself
a very clever man. A certain desire for influence
and reputation interested him in the
business intrigues of the giant city in which his
flukes were made. He became at last one of
the most influential shareholders in the company
that owned the London flying stages to
which the a?roplanes came from all parts of the
world. This much for his public activities. In
his private life he was a man of pleasure. And
this is the story of his heart.
But before proceeding to such depths, one
must devote a little time to the exterior of this
person. Its physical basis was slender, and
short, and dark; and the face, which was fine-featured
and assisted by pigments, varied from
an insecure self-complacency to an intelligent
uneasiness. His face and head had been depilated,
according to the cleanly and hygienic
fashion of the time, so that the colour and contour
of his hair varied with his costume. This
he was constantly changing.
At times he would distend himself with pneumatic
vestments in the rococo vein. From
among the billowy developments of this style,
and beneath a translucent and illuminated headdress,
his eye watched jealously for the respect
of the less fashionable world. At other times
he emphasised his elegant slenderness in close-fitting
garments of black satin. For effects of
dignity he would assume broad pneumatic
shoulders, from which hung a robe of carefully
arranged folds of China silk, and a classical
Bindon in pink tights was also a transient
phenomenon in the eternal pageant of Destiny.
In the days when he hoped to marry Elizabeth,
he sought to impress and charm her, and at the
same time to take off something of his burthen
of forty years, by wearing the last fancy of the
contemporary buck, a costume of elastic material
with distensible warts and horns, changing
in colour as he walked, by an ingenious arrangement
of versatile chromatophores. And
no doubt, if Elizabeth's affection had not been
already engaged by the worthless Denton, and
if her tastes had not had that odd bias for old-fashioned
ways, this extremely chic conception
would have ravished her. Bindon had consulted
Elizabeth's father before presenting himself in
this garb—he was one of those men who always
invite criticism of their costume—and
Mwres had pronounced him all that the heart of
woman could desire. But the affair of the
hypnotist proved that his knowledge of the
heart of woman was incomplete.
Bindon's idea of marrying had been formed
some little time before Mwres threw Elizabeth's
budding womanhood in his way. It was one of
Bindon's most cherished secrets that he had a
considerable capacity for a pure and simple life
of a grossly sentimental type. The thought imparted
a sort of pathetic seriousness to the offensive
and quite inconsequent and unmeaning
excesses, which he was pleased to regard as
dashing wickedness, and which a number of
good people also were so unwise as to treat in
that desirable manner. As a consequence of
these excesses, and perhaps by reason also of an
inherited tendency to early decay, his liver became
seriously affected, and he suffered increasing
inconvenience when travelling by a?roplane.
It was during his convalescence from a
protracted bilious attack that it occurred to him
that in spite of all the terrible fascinations of
Vice, if he found a beautiful, gentle, good
young woman of a not too violently intellectual
type to devote her life to him, he might yet be
saved to Goodness, and even rear a spirited
family in his likeness to solace his declining
years. But like so many experienced men of
the world, he doubted if there were any good
women. Of such as he had heard tell he was
outwardly sceptical and privately much afraid.
When the aspiring Mwres effected his introduction
to Elizabeth, it seemed to him that his
good fortune was complete. He fell in love
with her at once. Of course, he had always
been falling in love since he was sixteen, in accordance
with the extremely varied recipes to
be found in the accumulated literature of many
centuries. But this was different. This was
real love. It seemed to him to call forth all the
lurking goodness in his nature. He felt that
for her sake he could give up a way of life that
had already produced the gravest lesions on his
liver and nervous system. His imagination presented
him with idyllic pictures of the life of
the reformed rake. He would never be sentimental
with her, or silly; but always a little
cynical and bitter, as became the past. Yet he
was sure she would have an intuition of his real
greatness and goodness. And in due course he
would confess things to her, pour his version of
what he regarded as his wickedness—showing
what a complex of Goethe, and Benvenuto Cellini,
and Shelley, and all those other chaps he
really was—into her shocked, very beautiful,
and no doubt sympathetic ear. And preparatory
to these things he wooed her with infinite
subtlety and respect. And the reserve with
which Elizabeth treated him seemed nothing
more nor less than an exquisite modesty
touched and enhanced by an equally exquisite
lack of ideas.
Bindon knew nothing of her wandering affections,
nor of the attempt made by Mwres to
utilise hypnotism as a corrective to this digression
of her heart; he conceived he was on the
best of terms with Elizabeth, and had made her
quite successfully various significant presents
of jewellery and the more virtuous cosmetics,
when her elopement with Denton threw the
world out of gear for him. His first aspect of
the matter was rage begotten of wounded vanity,
and as Mwres was the most convenient person,
he vented the first brunt of it upon him.
He went immediately and insulted the desolate
father grossly, and then spent an active and
determined day going to and fro about the city
and interviewing people in a consistent and
partly-successful attempt to ruin that matrimonial
speculator. The effectual nature of these
activities gave him a temporary exhilaration,
and he went to the dining-place he had frequented
in his wicked days in a devil-may-care
frame of mind, and dined altogether too amply
and cheerfully with two other golden youths in
their early forties. He threw up the game; no
woman was worth being good for, and he astonished
even himself by the strain of witty
cynicism he developed. One of the other desperate
blades, warmed with wine, made a facetious
allusion to his disappointment, but at the
time this did not seem unpleasant.
The next morning found his liver and temper
inflamed. He kicked his phonographic-news
machine to pieces, dismissed his valet, and
resolved that he would perpetrate a terrible revenge
upon Elizabeth. Or Denton. Or somebody.
But anyhow, it was to be a terrible revenge;
and the friend who had made fun at
him should no longer see him in the light of a
foolish girl's victim. He knew something of
the little property that was due to her, and that
this would be the only support of the young
couple until Mwres should relent. If Mwres
did not relent, and if unpropitious things should
happen to the affair in which Elizabeth's expectations
lay, they would come upon evil times
and be sufficiently amenable to temptation of a
sinister sort. Bindon's imagination, abandoning
its beautiful idealism altogether, expanded
the idea of temptation of a sinister sort. He
figured himself as the implacable, the intricate
and powerful man of wealth pursuing this
maiden who had scorned him. And suddenly
her image came upon his mind vivid and dominant,
and for the first time in his life Bindon
realised something of the real power of passion.
His imagination stood aside like a respectful
footman who has done his work in ushering in
the emotion.
"My God!" cried Bindon: "I will have her!
If I have to kill myself to get her! And that
other fellow—!"
After an interview with his medical man and
a penance for his overnight excesses in the form
of bitter drugs, a mitigated but absolutely resolute
Bindon sought out Mwres. Mwres he
found properly smashed, and impoverished and
humble, in a mood of frantic self-preservation,
ready to sell himself body and soul, much more
any interest in a disobedient daughter, to recover
his lost position in the world. In the
reasonable discussion that followed, it was
agreed that these misguided young people
should be left to sink into distress, or possibly
even assisted towards that improving discipline
by Bindon's financial influence.
"And then?" said Mwres.
"They will come to the Labour Company,"
said Bindon. "They will wear the blue canvas."
"And then?"
"She will divorce him," he said, and sat for
a moment intent upon that prospect. For in
those days the austere limitations of divorce of
Victorian times were extraordinarily relaxed,
and a couple might separate on a hundred different
scores.
Then suddenly Bindon astonished himself
and Mwres by jumping to his feet. "She shall
divorce him!" he cried. "I will have it so—I
will work it so. By God! it shall be so. He
shall be disgraced, so that she must. He shall
be smashed and pulverised."
The idea of smashing and pulverising inflamed
him further. He began a Jovian pacing
up and down the little office. "I will have
her," he cried. "I will have her! Heaven and
Hell shall not save her from me!" His passion
evaporated in its expression, and left him at the
end simply histrionic. He struck an attitude
and ignored with heroic determination a sharp
twinge of pain about the diaphragm. And
Mwres sat with his pneumatic cap deflated and
himself very visibly impressed.
And so, with a fair persistency, Bindon sat
himself to the work of being Elizabeth's malignant
providence, using with ingenious dexterity
every particle of advantage wealth in those
days gave a man over his fellow-creatures. A
resort to the consolations of religion hindered
these operations not at all. He would go and
talk with an interesting, experienced and sympathetic
Father of the Huysmanite sect of the
Isis cult, about all the irrational little proceedings
he was pleased to regard as his heaven-dismaying
wickedness, and the interesting, experienced
and sympathetic Father representing
Heaven dismayed, would with a pleasing affectation
of horror, suggest simple and easy penances,
and recommend a monastic foundation
that was airy, cool, hygienic, and not vulgarised,
for viscerally disordered penitent sinners
of the refined and wealthy type. And after
these excursions, Bindon would come back to
London quite active and passionate again. He
would machinate with really considerable
energy, and repair to a certain gallery high
above the street of moving ways, from which
he could view the entrance to the barrack of
the Labour Company in the ward which sheltered
Denton and Elizabeth. And at last one
day he saw Elizabeth go in, and thereby his
passion was renewed.
So in the fullness of time the complicated
devices of Bindon ripened, and he could go to
Mwres and tell him that the young people were
near despair.
"It's time for you," he said, "to let your parental
affections have play. She's been in blue
canvas some months, and they've been cooped
together in one of those Labour dens, and the
little girl is dead. She knows now what his
manhood is worth to her, by way of protection,
poor girl. She'll see things now in a
clearer light. You go to her—I don't want to
appear in this affair yet—and point out to her
how necessary it is that she should get a divorce
from him...."
"She's obstinate," said Mwres doubtfully.
"Spirit!" said Bindon. "She's a wonderful
girl—a wonderful girl!"
"She'll refuse."
"Of course she will. But leave it open to
her. Leave it open to her. And some day—in
that stuffy den, in that irksome, toilsome life
they can't help it—they'll have a quarrel. And
then—"
Mwres meditated over the matter, and did as
he was told.
Then Bindon, as he had arranged with his
spiritual adviser, went into retreat. The retreat
of the Huysmanite sect was a beautiful
place, with the sweetest air in London, lit by
natural sunlight, and with restful quadrangles
of real grass open to the sky, where at the same
time the penitent man of pleasure might enjoy
all the pleasures of loafing and all the satisfaction
of distinguished austerity. And, save for
participation in the simple and wholesome
dietary of the place and in certain magnificent
chants, Bindon spent all his time in meditation
upon the theme of Elizabeth, and the extreme
purification his soul had undergone since he
first saw her, and whether he would be able to
get a dispensation to marry her from the experienced
and sympathetic Father in spite of
the approaching "sin" of her divorce; and then ... Bindon
would lean against a pillar
of the quadrangle and lapse into reveries on the
superiority of virtuous love to any other form
of indulgence. A curious feeling in his back
and chest that was trying to attract his attention,
a disposition to be hot or shiver, a general
sense of ill-health and cutaneous discomfort
he did his best to ignore. All that of course belonged
to the old life that he was shaking off.
When he came out of retreat he went at once
to Mwres to ask for news of Elizabeth. Mwres
was clearly under the impression that he was
an exemplary father, profoundly touched about
the heart by his child's unhappiness. "She was
pale," he said, greatly moved; "She was pale.
When I asked her to come away and leave him—and
be happy—she put her head down upon
the table"—Mwres sniffed—"and cried."
His agitation was so great that he could say
no more.
"Ah!" said Bindon, respecting this manly
grief. "Oh!" said Bindon quite suddenly, with
his hand to his side.
Mwres looked up sharply out of the pit of his
sorrows, startled. "What's the matter?" he
asked, visibly concerned.
"A most violent pain. Excuse me! You
were telling me about Elizabeth."
And Mwres, after a decent solicitude for Bindon's
pain, proceeded with his report. It was
even unexpectedly hopeful. Elizabeth, in her
first emotion at discovering that her father had
not absolutely deserted her, had been frank
with him about her sorrows and disgusts.
"Yes," said Bindon, magnificently, "I shall
have her yet." And then that novel pain
twitched him for the second time.
For these lower pains the priest was comparatively
ineffectual, inclining rather to regard
the body and them as mental illusions amenable
to contemplation; so Bindon took it to a man
of a class he loathed, a medical man of extraordinary
repute and incivility. "We must go
all over you," said the medical man, and did so
with the most disgusting frankness. "Did you
ever bring any children into the world?" asked
this gross materialist among other impertinent
questions.
"Not that I know of," said Bindon, too
amazed to stand upon his dignity.
"Ah!" said the medical man, and proceeded
with his punching and sounding. Medical
science in those days was just reaching the beginnings
of precision. "You'd better go right
away," said the medical man, "and make the
Euthanasia. The sooner the better."
Bindon gasped. He had been trying not to
understand the technical explanations and anticipations
in which the medical man had indulged.
"I say!" he said. "But do you mean to say ...
Your science ..."
"Nothing," said the medical man. "A few
opiates. The thing is your own doing, you
know, to a certain extent."
"I was sorely tempted in my youth."
"It's not that so much. But you come of a
bad stock. Even if you'd have taken precautions
you'd have had bad times to wind up with.
The mistake was getting born. The indiscretions
of the parents. And you've shirked exercise,
and so forth."
"I had no one to advise me."
"Medical men are always willing."
"I was a spirited young fellow."
"We won't argue; the mischief's done now.
You've lived. We can't start you again. You
ought never to have started at all. Frankly—the
Euthanasia!"
Bindon hated him in silence for a space.
Every word of this brutal expert jarred upon
his refinements. He was so gross, so impermeable
to all the subtler issues of being. But it is no
good picking a quarrel with a doctor. "My religious
beliefs," he said, "I don't approve of
suicide."
"You've been doing it all your life."
"Well, anyhow, I've come to take a serious
view of life now."
"You're bound to, if you go on living.
You'll hurt. But for practical purposes it's
late. However, if you mean to do that—perhaps
I'd better mix you a little something.
You'll hurt a great deal. These little twinges ..."
"Twinges!"
"Mere preliminary notices."
"How long can I go on? I mean, before I
hurt—really."
"You'll get it hot soon. Perhaps three days."
Bindon tried to argue for an extension of
time, and in the midst of his pleading gasped,
put his hand to his side. Suddenly the extraordinary
pathos of his life came to him clear
and vivid. "It's hard," he said. "It's infernally
hard! I've been no man's enemy but my own.
I've always treated everybody quite fairly."
The medical man stared at him without any
sympathy for some seconds. He was reflecting
how excellent it was that there were no more
Bindons to carry on that line of pathos. He
felt quite optimistic. Then he turned to his
telephone and ordered up a prescription from
the Central Pharmacy.
He was interrupted by a voice behind him.
"By God!" cried Bindon; "I'll have her yet."
The physician stared over his shoulder at
Bindon's expression, and then altered the prescription.
So soon as this painful interview was over,
Bindon gave way to rage. He settled that the
medical man was not only an unsympathetic
brute and wanting in the first beginnings of a
gentleman, but also highly incompetent; and he
went off to four other practitioners in succession,
with a view to the establishment of this
intuition. But to guard against surprises he
kept that little prescription in his pocket. With
each he began by expressing his grave doubts
of the first doctor's intelligence, honesty and
professional knowledge, and then stated his
symptoms, suppressing only a few more material
facts in each case. These were always
subsequently elicited by the doctor. In spite of
the welcome depreciation of another practitioner,
none of these eminent specialists would
give Bindon any hope of eluding the anguish
and helplessness that loomed now close upon
him. To the last of them he unburthened his
mind of an accumulated disgust with medical
science. "After centuries and centuries," he
exclaimed hotly; "and you can do nothing—except
admit your helplessness. I say, 'save me'—and
what do you do?"
"No doubt it's hard on you," said the doctor.
"But you should have taken precautions."
"How was I to know?"
"It wasn't our place to run after you," said
the medical man, picking a thread of cotton
from his purple sleeve. "Why should we save
you in particular? You see—from one point of
view—people with imaginations and passions
like yours have to go—they have to go."
"Go?"
"Die out. It's an eddy."
He was a young man with a serene face. He
smiled at Bindon. "We get on with research,
you know; we give advice when people have
the sense to ask for it. And we bide our time."
"Bide your time?"
"We hardly know enough yet to take over
the management, you know."
"The management?"
"You needn't be anxious. Science is young
yet. It's got to keep on growing for a few
generations. We know enough now to know
we don't know enough yet.... But the
time is coming, all the same. You won't see
the time. But, between ourselves, you rich men
and party bosses, with your natural play of the
passions and patriotism and religion and so
forth, have made rather a mess of things;
haven't you? These Underways! And all that
sort of thing. Some of us have a sort of fancy
that in time we may know enough to take over
a little more than the ventilation and drains.
Knowledge keeps on piling up, you know. It
keeps on growing. And there's not the slightest
hurry for a generation or so. Some day—some
day, men will live in a different way." He
looked at Bindon and meditated. "There'll be
a lot of dying out before that day can come."
Bindon attempted to point out to this young
man how silly and irrelevant such talk was to a
sick man like himself, how impertinent and uncivil
it was to him, an older man occupying a
position in the official world of extraordinary
power and influence. He insisted that a doctor
was paid to cure people—he laid great stress on
"paid"—and had no business to glance even for
a moment at "those other questions." "But
we do," said the young man, insisting upon
facts, and Bindon lost his temper.
His indignation carried him home. That
these incompetent impostors, who were unable
to save the life of a really influential man like
himself, should dream of some day robbing the
legitimate property owners of social control, of
inflicting one knew not what tyranny upon the
world. Curse science! He fumed over the
intolerable prospect for some time, and then the
pain returned, and he recalled the made-up prescription
of the first doctor, still happily in his
pocket. He took a dose forthwith.
It calmed and soothed him greatly, and he
could sit down in his most comfortable chair
beside his library (of phonographic records),
and think over the altered aspect of affairs. His
indignation passed, his anger and his passion
crumbled under the subtle attack of that prescription,
pathos became his sole ruler. He
stared about him, at his magnificent and voluptuously
appointed apartment, at his statuary
and discreetly veiled pictures, and all the evidences
of a cultivated and elegant wickedness;
he touched a stud and the sad pipings of Tristan's
shepherd filled the air. His eye wandered
from one object to another. They
were costly and gross and florid—but they were
his. They presented in concrete form his ideals,
his conceptions of beauty and desire, his idea of
all that is precious in life. And now—he must
leave it all like a common man. He was, he
felt, a slender and delicate flame, burning out.
So must all life flame up and pass, he thought.
His eyes filled with tears.
Then it came into his head that he was
alone. Nobody cared for him, nobody needed
him! at any moment he might begin to hurt vividly.
He might even howl. Nobody would
mind. According to all the doctors he would
have excellent reason for howling in a day or
so. It recalled what his spiritual adviser had
said of the decline of faith and fidelity, the degeneration
of the age. He beheld himself as a
pathetic proof of this; he, the subtle, able, important,
voluptuous, cynical, complex Bindon,
possibly howling, and not one faithful simple
creature in all the world to howl in sympathy.
Not one faithful simple soul was there—no
shepherd to pipe to him! Had all such faithful
simple creatures vanished from this harsh and
urgent earth? He wondered whether the horrid
vulgar crowd that perpetually went about the
city could possibly know what he thought of
them. If they did he felt sure some would try
to earn a better opinion. Surely the world went
from bad to worse. It was becoming impossible
for Bindons. Perhaps some day ... He
was quite sure that the one thing he had needed
in life was sympathy. For a time he regretted
that he left no sonnets—no enigmatical pictures
or something of that sort behind him to carry
on his being until at last the sympathetic mind
should come....
It seemed incredible to him that this that
came was extinction. Yet his sympathetic spiritual
guide was in this matter annoyingly figurative
and vague. Curse science! It had undermined
all faith—all hope. To go out, to
vanish from theatre and street, from office and
dining-place, from the dear eyes of womankind.
And not to be missed! On the whole to leave
the world happier!
He reflected that he had never worn his heart
upon his sleeve. Had he after all been too unsympathetic?
Few people could suspect how
subtly profound he really was beneath the mask
of that cynical gaiety of his. They would not
understand the loss they had suffered. Elizabeth,
for example, had not suspected....
He had reserved that. His thoughts having
come to Elizabeth gravitated about her for
some time. How little Elizabeth understood
him!
That thought became intolerable. Before all
other things he must set that right. He realised
that there was still something for him to do in
life, his struggle against Elizabeth was even yet
not over. He could never overcome her now,
as he had hoped and prayed. But he might still
impress her!
From that idea he expanded. He might impress
her profoundly—he might impress her so
that she should for evermore regret her treatment
of him. The thing that she must realise
before everything else was his magnanimity.
His magnanimity! Yes! he had loved her with
amazing greatness of heart. He had not seen
it so clearly before—but of course he was going
to leave her all his property. He saw it instantly,
as a thing determined and inevitable.
She would think how good he was, how spaciously
generous; surrounded by all that makes
life tolerable from his hand, she would recall
with infinite regret her scorn and coldness. And
when she sought expression for that regret, she
would find that occasion gone forever, she
should be met by a locked door, by a disdainful
stillness, by a white dead face. He closed his
eyes and remained for a space imagining himself
that white dead face.
From that he passed to other aspects of the
matter, but his determination was assured. He
meditated elaborately before he took action,
for the drug he had taken inclined him to
a lethargic and dignified melancholy. In certain
respects he modified details. If he left all
his property to Elizabeth it would include the
voluptuously appointed room he occupied, and
for many reasons he did not care to leave that
to her. On the other hand, it had to be left to
some one. In his clogged condition this worried
him extremely.
In the end he decided to leave it to the sympathetic
exponent of the fashionable religious cult,
whose conversation had been so pleasing in the
past. "He will understand," said Bindon with
a sentimental sigh. "He knows what Evil
means—he understands something of the Stupendous
Fascination of the Sphinx of Sin. Yes—he
will understand." By that phrase it was
that Bindon was pleased to dignify certain unhealthy
and undignified departures from sane
conduct to which a misguided vanity and an ill-controlled
curiosity had led him. He sat for a
space thinking how very Hellenic and Italian
and Neronic, and all those things, he had been.
Even now—might one not try a sonnet? A
penetrating voice to echo down the ages, sensuous,
sinister, and sad. For a space he forgot
Elizabeth. In the course of half an hour he
spoilt three phonographic coils, got a headache,
took a second dose to calm himself, and reverted
to magnanimity and his former design.
At last he faced the unpalatable problem of
Denton. It needed all his newborn magnanimity
before he could swallow the thought of
Denton; but at last this greatly misunderstood
man, assisted by his sedative and the near approach
of death, effected even that. If he was
at all exclusive about Denton, if he should display
the slightest distrust, if he attempted any
specific exclusion of that young man, she might—misunderstand.
Yes—she should have her
Denton still. His magnanimity must go even to
that. He tried to think only of Elizabeth in the
matter.
He rose with a sigh, and limped across to the
telephonic apparatus that communicated with
his solicitor. In ten minutes a will duly attested
and with its proper thumb-mark signature lay
in the solicitor's office three miles away. And
then for a space Bindon sat very still.
Suddenly he started out of a vague reverie
and pressed an investigatory hand to his side.
Then he jumped eagerly to his feet and
rushed to the telephone. The Euthanasia Company
had rarely been called by a client in a
greater hurry.
So it came at last that Denton and his Elizabeth,
against all hope, returned unseparated
from the labour servitude to which they had
fallen. Elizabeth came out from her cramped
subterranean den of metal-beaters and all the
sordid circumstances of blue canvas, as one
comes out of a nightmare. Back towards the
sunlight their fortune took them; once the bequest
was known to them, the bare thought of
another day's hammering became intolerable.
They went up long lifts and stairs to levels that
they had not seen since the days of their disaster.
At first she was full of this sensation of
escape; even to think of the underways was intolerable;
only after many months could she begin
to recall with sympathy the faded women
who were still below there, murmuring scandals
and reminiscences and folly, and tapping away
their lives.
Her choice of the apartments they presently
took expressed the vehemence of her release.
They were rooms upon the very verge of the
city; they had a roof space and a balcony upon
the city wall, wide open to the sun and wind,
the country and the sky.
And in that balcony comes the last scene in
this story. It was a summer sunsetting, and the
hills of Surrey were very blue and clear. Denton
leant upon the balcony regarding them, and
Elizabeth sat by his side. Very wide and spacious
was the view, for their balcony hung five
hundred feet above the ancient level of the
ground. The oblongs of the Food Company,
broken here and there by the ruins—grotesque
little holes and sheds—of the ancient suburbs,
and intersected by shining streams of sewage,
passed at last into a remote diapering at the
foot of the distant hills. There once had been
the squatting-place of the children of Uya. On
those further slopes gaunt machines of unknown
import worked slackly at the end of their
spell, and the hill crest was set with stagnant
wind vanes. Along the great south road the Labour
Company's field workers in huge wheeled
mechanical vehicles, were hurrying back to their
meals, their last spell finished. And through the
air a dozen little private a?roplanes sailed down
towards the city. Familiar scene as it was to
the eyes of Denton and Elizabeth, it would have
filled the minds of their ancestors with incredulous
amazement. Denton's thoughts fluttered
towards the future in a vain attempt at what
that scene might be in another two hundred
years, and, recoiling, turned towards the past.
He shared something of the growing knowledge
of the time; he could picture the quaint
smoke-grimed Victorian city with its narrow
little roads of beaten earth, its wide common-land,
ill-organised, ill-built suburbs, and irregular
enclosures; the old countryside of the Stuart
times, with its little villages and its petty London;
the England of the monasteries, the far
older England of the Roman dominion, and
then before that a wild country with here and
there the huts of some warring tribe. These
huts must have come and gone and come again
through a space of years that made the Roman
camp and villa seem but yesterday; and before
those years, before even the huts, there had been
men in the valley. Even then—so recent had it
all been when one judged it by the standards of
geological time—this valley had been here; and
those hills yonder, higher, perhaps, and snow-tipped,
had still been yonder hills, and the
Thames had flowed down from the Cotswolds
to the sea. But the men had been but the shapes
of men, creatures of darkness and ignorance,
victims of beasts and floods, storms and pestilence
and incessant hunger. They had held a
precarious foothold amidst bears and lions and
all the monstrous violence of the past. Already
some at least of these enemies were overcome....
For a time Denton pursued the thoughts of
this spacious vision, trying in obedience to his
instinct to find his place and proportion in the
scheme.
"It has been chance," he said, "it has been
luck. We have come through. It happens we
have come through. Not by any strength of our
own....
"And yet ... No. I don't know."
He was silent for a long time before he spoke
again.
"After all—there is a long time yet. There
have scarcely been men for twenty thousand
years—and there has been life for twenty millions.
And what are generations? What are
generations? It is enormous, and we are so little.
Yet we know—we feel. We are not dumb
atoms, we are part of it—part of it—to the limits
of our strength and will. Even to die is part
of it. Whether we die or live, we are in the
making....
"As time goes on—perhaps—men will be
wiser.... Wiser....
"Will they ever understand?"
He became silent again. Elizabeth said nothing
to these things, but she regarded his dreaming
face with infinite affection. Her mind was
not very active that evening. A great contentment
possessed her. After a time she laid a
gentle hand on his beside her. He fondled it
softly, still looking out upon the spacious gold-woven
view. So they sat as the sun went down.
Until presently Elizabeth shivered.
Denton recalled himself abruptly from these
spacious issues of his leisure, and went in to
fetch her a shawl.