Thecurtain whose colour changes from dawn to noon, from night to dawn—the curtain which never lifts, is fastened to the dark horizon.
On the black beach, beneath a black sky with its few stars, the sea wind blows a troubling savour from the west, as it did when man was not yet on the earth. It sings the same troubling song as when the first man heard it. And by this black beach man is collected in his hundreds, trying with all his might to take his holiday. Here he has built a theatre within the theatre of the night, and hung a canvas curtain to draw up and down, and round about lit lights to show him as many as may be of himself, and nothing of the encircling dark. Here he has brought singers, and put a band,armed with pipes of noise, to drown the troubling murmur of the wind. And behind his theatre he has made a fire whose smoke has qualified the troubling savour of the sea.
Male and female, from all the houses where he sleeps, he has herded to this music as close as he can herd. The lights fall on his faces, attentive, white, and still—as wonderfully blank as bits of wood cut out in round, with pencil marks for eyes. And every time the noises cease, he claps his hands as though to say: “Begin again, you noises; do not leave me lonely to the silence and the sighing of the night.”
Round the ring he circles, and each small group of him seems saying: “Talk—laugh—this is my holiday!”
This is his holiday, his rest from the incessant round of toil that fills his hours; to this he has looked forward all the year; to this he will look back until it comes again. He walks and talks and laughs, around this pavilion by the beach; he casts no glances at the pavilion of thenight, where Nature is playing her wind-music for the stars to dance. Long ago he found he could not bear his mother Nature’s inscrutable, ironic face, bending above him in the dark, and with a moan he drew the clothes over his head. In Her who gave him being he has perceived the only thing he cannot brave. And since there is courage and pride in the feeblest of his hearts, he has made a compact with himself: “Nature! There is no Nature! For what I cannot understand I cannot face, and what I cannot face I will not think of, and what I will not think of does not exist for me; thus, there is nothing that I cannot face. And—deny it as I may—this is why I herd in my pavilion under my lights, and make these noises against the sighing and the silence and the blackness of the night.”
Back from the dark sea, across a grassy space, is his row of houses with lighted windows; and behind it, stretching inland, a thousand more, huddled, closer and closer, round the lighted railway shed, where, like spider’s threads, the railsrun in from the expanse of sleeping fields and marshes and dim hills; of dark trees and moon-pale water fringed with reeds. All over the land these rails have run, chaining his houses into one great web so that he need never be alone.
For nothing is so dreadful to this man as solitude. In solitude he hears the voice of Her he cannot understand: “Ah! the baby that you are, my baby man!” And he sees Her smile, the ironic smile of evening over land and sea. In solitude he feels so small, so very small; for solitude is silence and silence irony, and irony he cannot bear, not even that of Her who gave him birth.
And so he is neither careful of his beauty nor of his strength; not careful to be clean or to be fine; his only care is not to be alone. To all his young, from the first day, he teaches the same lesson: Dread Her! Avoid Her! Look not on Her! Towns! more towns! There you can talk and listen to your fellows’ talk! Crowd into the towns; the eyes in your whitened faces need never see Her there!Fill every cranny of your houses so that no moment of silence or of solitude can come to any one of you. And if, by unhappy chance, in their parks you find yourself alone, lie neither on your back, for then you will see the quiet sunlight on the leaves, the quiet clouds, and birds with solitude within their wings; nor on your face, or you will catch the savour of the earth, and a faint hum, and for a minute live the life of tiny things that straddle in the trodden grasses. Fly from such sights and scents and sounds, for fear lest terror for your fate should visit you; fly to the streets; fly to your neighbours’ houses; talk, and be brave! Or if, and such times will come, your feet and brain and tongue are tired, then sleep! For, next to the drug of fellowship is the anodyne of slumber! And when it is your holiday, and time is all your own, be warned! The lot of those few left among you who are forced to live alone—on the sea, with the sheep of the green hills, guarding the trim wildness of your woods, turning the lonely soil—may for a moment seem desirable. Be sure it is not; the thought has come to you from books! Go to a spot where, though the nights are clear and the sun burns hot, the sea wind smells of salt, and the land wind smells of hay, you can avoid Her, huddled in your throngs! Dread Her! Fly from Her! Hide from Her smile, that seems to say: “Once, when you lived with me, you were a little gentleman. You looked in my eyes and learned a measure of repose, learned not to whimper at the dark, giggle, and jeer, and chatter through your nose, learned to hold yourself up, to think your own thoughts, and be content. And now you have gone from me to be a little cockney man. But for all your airs of courage and your fear of me—I shall get you back!” Dread Her! Avoid Her! Towns, more towns!
Such is the lesson man teaches, from the very birth, to every child of his unstinted breeding. And well he teaches it. Of all his thousands here to-night, drawn from his crowded, evil-smellingtowns, not one has gone apart on this black beach to spend a single minute with his shadow and the wind and stars. His laughter fills the air, his ceaseless chatter, songs, and fiddling, the clapping of his hands; so will it be throughout his holiday.
And who so foolish as to say it is not good that man should talk and laugh and clap his hands; who so blind as not to see that these are antidotes to evils that his one great fear has brought to him? This ring of him with vacant faces and staring eyes round that anæmic singer with the worn-out voice, or the stout singer with the voice of brass, is but an instance of Her irony: “This, then, is the medicine you have mixed, my little man, to cure the pain of your fevered souls. Well done! But if you had not left me you would have had no fever! There is none in the wind and the stars and the rhythm of the sea; there is none in green growth or fallen leaves; in my million courses it is not found. Fever is fear—to you alone, my restless mannikin, has fever come, and this is why, even in yourholiday, you stand in your sick crowds gulping down your little homœopathic draughts!”
The show is over. The pipes of noise are still, the lights fall dark, and man is left by the black beach with nothing to look on but the sky, or hear but the beat of wave-wings flighting on the sea. And suddenly in threes and fours he scurries home, lest for one second he should see Her face whose smile he cannot bear.
Eachmorning a noise of poured-out water revived him from that state in which his thoughts were occasionally irregular. Raising his face, with its regular nose above a regular moustache just going grey, he asked the time. Each morning he received the same answer, and would greet it with a yawn. Without this opening to his day he would not have known for certain that it had begun. Assured of the fact, he would leap from his bed into his bath, and sponge himself with cold, clear water. “Straight out of bed—never lose heat!” Such was his saying; and he would maintain it against every other theory of the morning tub. It was his own discovery—a fact on which, as on all facts, he set much store; and every morning he kept his mind fixed onits value. Then, in that underclothing, of which he said, “Never wear any other—lets the skin act!” he would take his stand in a chosen light before a glass, dipping in boiling water a razor on which was written the day’s name, and without vanity inspect his face to see that it preserved its shade of faintly mottled red against the encroachments of the town. Then, with a slanting edge—“Always shave slanting”—he would remove such hairs as seemed to him unnecessary. If he caught himself thinking, he would go to a bottle on the washstand and pour out a little bitter water, which he would drink; then, seizing a pair of Indian clubs, he would wave them. “I believe in Indian clubs!” he often said. Tying his tie at the angle he had tied it for nearly thirty years, and placing lavender water—the only scent he ever used—about his handkerchief, he would open his wife’s door, and say, “How are you, my dear?” Without waiting for an answer he would shut it, and go down.
His correspondence was set out on hiswriting-table, and as he was not a stupid man he soon disposed of it; then, with his daily paper—which he had long selected out of every other—he would stand before the hearth, reading, and believing that the news he read was of a definite importance. He took care that this reading should not stimulate his thoughts. He wanted facts, and the fact that the day’s facts were swallowed by the morrow’s did not disturb him, for the more facts he read the better he was pleased.
After his breakfast—eaten opposite his wife, and ended with some marmalade—he would go forth at ten o’clock, and walk the two miles to the Temple. He believed in walking, wet or fine, for, as he said: “It keeps your liver acting!”
On his way he would think of many things, such as: Whether to lay down Gruaud La Rose, 1900, or Château Margaux, 1899? And, though alive to its importance, he would soon decide this question, since indecision was repugnant to his nature. He walked by way of theGreen Park and Thames Embankment, expanding his chest quietly, and feeling inward satisfaction. To the crossing-sweeper nearest to Big Ben he gave on every day, save Saturdays, a nod, and on Saturdays sixpence; and, because he thus assisted him, he believed the man to be worthy of assistance. He passed all other crossing-sweepers without being conscious of their presence; and if they had asked for pennies would have put them down as lazy persons making an illicit living. They did not ask, however, accepting his attitude towards them as correct, from the vigour of its regularity. He walked always at the same pace, neither fast nor slow, his head erect, looking before him with an air of: I am getting there; this is salubrious!
And on getting there he looked at his watch—not because he did not know what it would tell him, but to satisfy his craving for the ascertainment of a fact. It took, he knew, thirty-two minutes between door and door.
Up the stone staircase he would pausehalf-way and glance through the window at a certain tree. A magpie had once built there. It had been gone now fifteen years, but the peculiar fact remained. Meeting his clerk in the dark narrow passage beyond the oaken door, he would address the young man thus: “Mornin’, Dyson. Anything fresh?” and pass on into his light and airy room, with its faint scent of Law Reports. Here, in an old Norfolk jacket, a meerschaum pipe, rarely alight, between his teeth, he would remain seated before papers of all sorts, working hard, and placing facts in order, ready for the conclusions of his chief, a man of genius, but devoid of regularity.
At one o’clock he would go out and walk some little way to lunch. When tempted to go elsewhere he would say, “No, no! Come with me; better grub at Sim’s!” He knew this for a fact—no novelty of any kind could alter it. Cigar in mouth, he would then walk for twenty minutes in the Temple Gardens, his hands behind his back, alone or withsome friend, and his good-humoured laugh would frequently be heard—the laugh of a fat man; for though by careful weighing he kept his body thin, he could not weigh his soul, and having thus no facts to go by, could never check its bulk.
From two to four he would continue the arrangement of his facts, and on the rising of the Courts place them before his chief. Strong in his power of seeing them as facts with no disturbing relevance to other things, he would show a shade of patronage to that disorderly distinguished man. Then, washing with Pears’ soap, and saying to his clerk, “Evenin’, Dyson; nothing that won’t keep,” he would take his umbrella and walk west. And again he would reflect on many things, such as: Whether to use the iron or cleek for the approach to that last hole? and would soon decide on one or on the other.
Passing the portals of his Club, of which he used to say, “I’ve belonged here twenty years; that shows you!” hewould hang his hat upon a certain peg and go into the card-room, where, for small stakes that never varied, he played the game of Bridge till seven o’clock. Then in a hansom cab he would go home resting body and brain, and looking straight before him at the backs of cabs in front. Entering his drawing-room he would go over to his wife, kiss her, and remark: “Well, old girl, what have you been doing?” and at once relate what he himself had done, finishing thus: “Time to dress for dinner! I’ve got a twist!” In a white tie and swallow-tail if they were dining out, a black tie and tail-less coat if they were dining in—for these were the proved facts of suitability—he would go to his wife’s room, take up one of her toilet bottles, examine the stamp on it, and tell her his programme for the morrow.
His habits in dining out were marked by regularity. A sweet or ice he never touched for fear of gout, of which he had felt twinges. He drank brandy with his coffee, not for fear of sleeplessness, whichhe had never had, but because he found it adjusted preceding facts more nicely than liqueurs; after champagne he would consume a glass or two of port. Some men drank claret, believing that it did less harm, but he would say: “Port after champagne—proved it a dozen times.” For, though it was really not important to his body which he drank, it concerned his soul to make the choice, and place importance on it. When the ladies had withdrawn, he would talk on the facts of politics and guns, of stocks and women; and, chiefly in the form of stories—facts about facts. To any one who linked these facts to an idea he would remark at once: “Exactly!” and, staring slightly, restore order with another fact. At last he would go home, and in the cab would touch his wife to see that she was there.
On Sundays he played golf—a game in which, armed with a fact, he hit a little fact long distances until he lodged it in a hole, when he would pick it out again and place it on a little fact and hit it off oncemore. And this was good for him. Returning in the train with other players of the game, he would sit silently reviewing the details of the business, and a particularly good and pleasant look would come upon his face, with its blue eyes, red cheeks, and fair moustache just going grey. And suddenly he would begin speaking to his neighbour, and tell him how at certain moments he had hit the little fact with an unwonted force, or an unusual gentleness.
Two days before the 12th of August he would take his guns and wife to Scotland, where he rented annually a piece of ground inhabited by grouse.
On arriving he would have a bath, then go out with his keeper and a ferret to “get his eye in”; and his first remark was always this: “Well, McNab, and how are you? Afraid I’m a bit above myself!” And his old keeper would answer thus: “Aye, I’m no saying but ye’ll be as well for a day on the hill.”
Each evening on returning from the moors he would cause the dead facts to beturned out of the pony’s paniers and laid in rows before him, and, touching them with the end of a stick so as to make sure, he would count them up; and the more there were of them the better he was pleased. Then, when they were removed and hung, he would enter their numbers in a book. And as these numbers grew, he compared them day by day and week by week with the numbers of each former year; thus, according to whether they were more or less, he could tell at any moment how much he was enjoying life.
On his return to London he would say: “First-class year—five hundred brace.” Or, shake his head and murmur: “Two hundred and thirty brace—a wretched year!”
Any particularly fine creature that he shot he would have stuffed, so that the fact might be remarked for ever.
Once, or perhaps twice, each year,malaisewould come on him, a feeling that his life was not quite all he wished, a desire for something that he could notshape in words, a conviction that there were facts which he was missing. At these times he was almost irritable, and would say: “Mistake for a man to marry, depend on it—narrows his life.” And suddenly one day he would know what he wanted, and, under pretext perhaps of two days’ sport, would go to Paris. The fact accomplished, of irregularity, that he would not have committed in England for the world—was of advantage to his soul, and he would return, more regular than ever.
For he was a man who must be doing, who respected only the thing done. He had no use for schemes of life, theories, dreams, or fancies. Ideas were “six a penny,” he would say. And the fact that facts without ideas were “six a ha’penny” was perhaps the only fact that he did not appreciate. He was made, in fact, for laying trains of little facts, in almost perfect order, in almost all directions. Forced by his nature to start laying without considering where they led to, he neither knew nor cared whenor what they would blow up; and when in fact they blew up something unexpected, or led into acul de sac, he would start at once laying them again in the first direction that seemed open. Thus actively employed, he kept from brooding, thinking, and nonsense of all kinds, so busy that he had no time to look ahead and see where he was going; and since, if he had got there he would not have known it, this was just as well.
Beyond everything, he believed in freedom; he never saw the things that his way of acting prevented him from doing, and so believed his life to be the freest in the world.
Nothing occasioned him a more unfeigned surprise than to tell him his ways were typical of the country where he lived. He answered with a stare, knowing well enough that no such likeness could be shown him as a fact. It was not his habit to be conscious; he was neither conscious of himself nor of his country, and this enabled him to be the man he was.
When he met himself about the town (which hourly happened) he had no knowledge that it was himself; on the contrary he looked on himself as specially designed, finding most other people “rather funny.”
An attempt to designate him as belonging to a type or class he mistrusted as some kind of Socialism. And yet he ate with himself in restaurants and private houses, travelled with himself in trains, read the speeches of himself in Parliament, and the accounts of how he had been surrounded by persons of Dutch origin, or on some frontier punished a tribe whose manners were not quite his own. He played golf with himself, and shot with his very images. Nor was he confined to his own class; but frequently drove himself home in cabs, watched himself drilling in the barrack squares, or, walking up and down in blue, protected his own house at night from burglars. If he required to send a message from his Club, he sent himself; he sold himself his waistcoats, and even laid the pavements of the streets that he trod daily in his pilgrimage.From his neighbourhood Imagination stretched its wings and flitted further on. Patron of precedent, pattern of order, upholder of the law, where he dwelt an orderly disorder reigned. He was for ever doing things, and out of everything he did there sprang up two more things that wanted to be done, and these things he would do—in time! Believing no real harm of others or himself, he kept young and green! Oh! very green and young!
And in old age, past doing things, seated in the Club smoking-room, he will recount behind his comely grey moustache that day’s shooting and that day’s run; the marriage of that fine girl; the death of that dear old chap; the details of that first-rate joke, or that bad dinner; and dwelling with love on these isolated facts, his old blue eyes will twinkle. Presently, when it is late and he is left alone, he will put his old tired feet up on the sofa, remove the cigar from his old lips, and, holding it a foot from off his eyes, look closely at the ash; finding this fact a little yellow, he will frown.
Whenhe rose every morning, the first thing he would do was to fall on his knees beside his bed. His figure in its white garment—for he wore a nightshirt—was rather long and lean, and looked its longest thus bent from the loins. His thick fair hair, little disturbed by sleep, together with a glimpse of sanguine neck and cheek, was all that could be seen above that figure, for his face was buried in the counterpane. Here he would commune with the deity he had constructed for himself out of his secret aspirations and desires, out of his most private consciousness. In the long and subtle processes of contemplation this deity had come to be a big white-clothed figure, whose face and head were shrouded from his gaze in frosty dimness, but whosehands—great hands, a little red—were always clearly visible, reposing motionless on knees parted beneath the white and flowing garment. The figure appeared in his imagination seated as it were on air ten or fifteen feet above the floor of a white, wide, marble corridor, and its great hands seemed to be pressing down and stilling all that came before them. So oddly concrete was this image that sometimes he addressed no prayers to it, but knelt, simply feeling that it was sitting there above him; and when at last he raised his head, a strange aspiring look had come into his strained eyes, and face suffused with blood. When he did pray, he himself hardly knew for what he prayed, unless it were to be made like his deity, that sat so quiet, above the marble corridor.
For, after all, this deity of his, like the deity of every other man, was but his temperament exaggerated beyond life-size and put in perfect order—it was but the concretion of his constant feeling that nothing could be trusted to behave,freed from the still, cold hands of Power. He had never trusted himself to act save under the authority of this peculiar deity, much less, then, could he feel that others could be trusted. This lack of trust—which was only, perhaps, a natural desire for putting everything and everybody in their proper places—had made him from a child eligible for almost any post of trust. And Nature, recognising this, had used him a hundred thousand times, weeding him out from among his more irregular and trustful fellows, and piling him in layers, one on another, till she had built out of him in every division of the State, temples of Power. Two qualifications alone had she exacted; that he should not be trustful, and that he should be content to lie beneath the layer above him, until he should come in time to be that upper layer himself. She had marked him down as quite a tiny boy, walking with his governess, chopping the heads off thistles with his stick, and ordering his brothers’ games precisely, so that they should all know what theywere playing at. She had seen him take his dog, and, squatting on the floor, hold it close to the biscuit that it did not want to eat; and she had marked the expression in his grey eyes, fixed on that little white fox-terrier, trying so hard to back out through her collar. She saw at once that he did not trust the little creature to know whether it required to eat the biscuit; it was her proper time for eating it, and even though by holding her nose close he could not make her eat it, he could put her in the corner for not eating it. And having in due course seen him do so, Nature had felt ever since that he would keep himself apart, year by year and step by step, till he was safely serving in the cold, still corridors of Power. She watched him, then, with interest, throughout his school and university career, considering what division of the State she had best build with him, though whether he should work at feeding soldiers, at supervising education, or organizing the incarceration of his fellows, did not seem to herto matter much. In all these things order was essential, and the love of placing the hand kindly but firmly on the public head, desirable; further, these were all things that must be done, and with her unerring instinct for economy, Nature saw that he should do them.
He had accordingly entered the State’s service at a proper age, and had remained there, rising.
Well aware that his was an occupation tending to the constriction of the mind, he had early made a practice of keeping it elastic by reading, argument, and a habit of presenting every case in every light, before pronouncing judgment; indeed, he would often take another person’s point of view, and, having improved on it, show that it was not really what the person thought it. Only when he was contradicted did a somewhat ugly look come into his eyes, and a peculiar smile contract his straight lips between his little fair moustache and his little, carefully kept, fair beard. At such moments he would raise his hands—red, andshapely, though rather large—as though about to press them on the head or shoulders of the presumptuous person. For, certain as he was that he always took all points of view before deciding any matter, he knew he must be right. But he was careful not to domineer in any way, recognising that to domineer was peculiarly unbecoming in a bureaucrat.
Keeping his mind elastic, he was always ready to welcome any sort of progress; the word indeed was often on his lips, and he regarded the thing itself as essential to the well-being of any modern State; it was only when some particular kind of progress happened to be mentioned that he felt any doubt. Then, caressing his beard slowly, and, if possible, taking up a pen, he would point out the difficulties. These were, it seemed, more numerous than the lay mind had imagined.
In the first place one must clearly understand what was meant by this word progress; he would personally not admitthat it meant advancing backwards. If this were established as a premise, it became imperative to ask whether the public were in a fit condition to assimilate this measure of so-called reform. Personally he had grave doubts; he was open to conviction, but his doubts were grave. And a very little smile would part his lips, seeming to say: “Yes, yes, my dear sir; progress—you use the word most glibly, and we all of us admit that it is necessary; but if you suppose that we are going to progress by trusting human nature—well, pardon me, but is there any precedent? One could trust oneself, no doubt, because of one’s sense of duty to one’s deity, but—men at large! If you think a minute you will see that they have practically no sense of duty or responsibility at all. You say you wish to foster it, but, my dear sir, if we foster it, what becomes of—Government? Depend on it, a sense of duty is only the possession of a few who have been trained to have it; and I cannot think it wise to take the slightestrisk in a matter of this gravity. The bonds that keep us all together, and me on the top—in my place, the machinery of morals and the State, are being daily loosened by disintegrating forces, and considering that I am here—by natural selection, not by accident—to keep the ship together, I am not exactly likely to help another wave to knock the ship to pieces. ‘It is,’ you say, ‘a question of degree.’ I consider that a very dangerous saying. I have little doubt that all so-called reforms at all times have been ushered in by the use of that expression. You make the fundamental error of overtrusting human nature. Believe me, if you lived here, and saw the machinery of things as closely as I see it, and worked, as I do, in this powerful atmosphere, and knew the worry and the difficulty of changing anything, and the thanklessness of the public that one works for, you would soon get a very different notion of the necessity of what you call reform. You must bear in mind the fact that the State has carefullyconsidered what is best for all, and that I am only an official of the State. And now I have three hours at least before I can get away, of important details (which you, no doubt, despise), connected with the business of the State, and which it is my duty and my pride to transact efficiently; so that you will forgive me if I drop a subject, on which of course I am still open to conviction. Progress, we must all admit, is necessary, but, I assure you, in this case you are making a mistake.”
The little smile died off his lips, and preceding the intruder to the door, he politely opened it. Then, in the marble corridor, he raised his eyes above his visitor’s retiring back. There, with its great red hands on the knees parted beneath a white and flowing robe, sat Power—his deity; and a silent prayer, far too instinctive and inevitable to be expressed in words, rose through the stagnant, dusty atmosphere:
“O great image that put me here, knowing as thou must the failings of myfellow-beings, give me power to see that they do right; let me provide for them the moral and the social diet they require. For, since I have been here, I have daily, hourly, humbly felt more certain of what it is they really want; more assured that, through thy help, I am the person who can give it them. O great image, before thou didst put me here I was not quite certain about anything, but now, thanks be to thee, everything is daily clearer and more definite; and I am less and less harassed by my spirit. Let this go on, great image, till my spirit is utterly at rest, and I am cold and still and changeless as this marble corridor.”
Withinthe circle of the high grey wall is silence.
Under a square of sky cut by high grey buildings nothing is to be seen of Nature but the prisoners themselves, the men who guard the prisoners, and a cat who eats the prison mice.
This house of perfect silence is in perfect order, as though God Himself had been at work—no dirt, no hurry, no lingering, no laughter. It is all like a well-oiled engine that goes—without a notion why. And each human thing that moves within this circle goes, day after day, year after year—as he has been set to go. The sun rises and the sun goes down—so says tradition in the House of Silence.
In yellow clothing marked with arrows the inhabitants are working. Each whenhe came in here was measured, weighed, and sounded; and, according to the entries made against his number, he received his silent task, and the proper quantity of food to keep his body able to fulfil it. He resumes this silent task each day, and if his work be sedentary, paces for an hour the speckless gravel yard from a number painted on the wall to a number painted on a wall. Every morning, and on Sundays twice, he marches in silence to the chapel, and, in the voice that he has nearly lost, praises the silent God of prisoners; this is his debauch of speech. Then, on his avid ears the words of the preacher fall; and motionless, row on row he sits, in the sensual pleasure of this sound. But the words are void of sense, for the music of speech has drugged his hearing.
Before he was admitted to this House of Silence he had endured his six months’ utter solitude, and now, in the small white-washed space, with a black floor whence he has cleaned all dirt, he spends only fourteen hours out of the twenty-four alone, except on Sundays, when hespends twenty-one, because it is God’s day. He spends them walking up and down, muttering to himself, listening for sound, with his eyes on the little peephole in the door, through which he can be seen but cannot see. Above his mug and plate of shining tin, his stiff, black-bristled brush and a piece of soap, is raised a little pyramid of godly books; no sound or scent, no living thing, no spider even, only his sense of humour comes between him and his God. But nothing whatever comes between him and his walking up and down, his listening for sound, his lying with his face pressed to the floor; till darkness falls, that he may stare at it, and beg for sleep, the only friend of prisoners, to touch him with her wings. And so, from day to day, from week to week, and year to year, according to the number of the years set opposite the name that once was his.
The workshops of the House of Silence hear no sound but that of work; the men in yellow, with arrows marked on them, are busy with a fearful zest. Their handsand feet and eyes move all the time; their lips are still. And on these lips, from mouth to mouth is seen no smile—so perfect is the order.
And their faces have one look, as though they said: We care for nothing—nothing; we hope for nothing—nothing; we work like this for fear of horror! Their quick dull stare fastens on him who comes to watch their silence; and all their eyes, curious, resentful, furtive, have in the depths of them the same defiant meaning, as though they saw in their visitor the world out of which they have been thrown, the millions of the free, the millions not alone all day and every day, the millions who cantalk; as though they saw Society, which bred them, nurtured them, and forced their steps to that exactly fitting point of physical or mental stress, out of which they found no way but the crime rewarded with these years of silence; as though they heard in the footsteps and the muttered questions of this casual intruder the whole pronouncement of man’s justice:
“You were dangerous! Your souls, born undersized, were dwarfed by Life to the commission point of crime. For our protection, therefore, we have placed you under lock and key. There you shall work—seeing, hearing, feeling nothing, without responsibility, without initiative, bereft of human contact with your kind. We shall see that you are clean, and have a bare sufficiency to eat, we shall inspect and weigh your bodies, and clothe them with a bare sufficiency of clothes by day and night; divine service you shall have; your work shall be apportioned to your strength. Corporal punishment we shall very seldom use. Lest you should give us trouble, and contaminate each other, you shall be silent, and, as far as possible, alone. You sinned against Society; your minds were bad; it were better if in our process you should lose those minds! For some reason which we cannot tell, you had but little social instinct at the start; that little social instinct soon decayed. Therefore, through bitter brooding and eternal silence, through horror ofyour lonely cells, and certainty that you are lost—no good, no mortal good to man or thing—you shall emerge cleansed of all social instinct. We are humane and scientific, we have outgrown the barbarous theories of old-fashioned law. We act for our protection and for your good. We believe in reformation. We are no torturers. Through loneliness and silence we will destroy your minds that we may form fresh minds within the bodies of which we take such care. In silence and in solitude is no real suffering—so we believe, for we ourselves have never passed one single silent day, one single day alone!”
This, by the expression of their eyes, is what the men in yellow seem to hear, and this, by the expression of their eyes, is what they seem to answer:
“Guv’nor! You tell me I did wrong to get in here, brought up like what I was—born in the purple—Brick Street, ’Ammersmith. My father was never up against the police; epileptic fits is what he went in for—I oughtn’t to have had himfor a father; I oughtn’t to have had a mother that liked her drop o’ trouble, leavin’ me what you might call violent from a child. That’s where the little difficulty was, you see. The bloke that came about my girl knows that, seein’ he laid two years upon his back after I’d done with ’im. That set ’em on reformin’ me. To do the business proper, guv’nor, they gave me six months solitary to start on. All them six months I asks meself: ‘If I were out again, an’ he came hangin’ round my girl—what would I do?’ And I answers: ‘Hit ’im like I done!’ You tell me I oughtn’t to been thinkin’ that; guv’nor, I ’adn’t nothin’ else to think on. Only that, an’ what was goin’ on outside, with me there buried-up alive. You tell me that ther’ solitude ought to ha’ done a lot for me, an’ so it did. I ain’t never been the same man since. Well, when I came out I made a big mistake, I find, to have that sentence up against me, in the earnin’ of me livin’ honest, like as though I’d never been in prison. I oughtn’t to ’ave been a carpenter, Iguess, or anythin’ where people ’as to trust yer, not likin’ them about their houses ’as has been in quod; I ought to ha’ had a trade that didn’t need no dealings with my fellow-creatures. You tell me what I wanted was to love me neighbour? But guv’nor, after I come out, I go regular wasted onthatjob. When you get wasted, guv’nor, you take to drink; your stomach feels a funny shiverin’; what it wants is warmth, a bit of fire—so, when you gets a sixpence, you lays it out in warmth. That’s wrong, you say. But, lucky guv’nor, drink puts heart into a man as has to get his livin’ out of lovin’ of his neighbour.... Soon after that I got another little lot, with six months’ solitude again, to put me straight. When you eat your heart out for want o’ somethin’ else to do, when your mind rots for the need of ever such a little bit to chew on, when you feel all day and every day like a poor dumb varmint of a caged-up rat—like as not you hit a warder, guv’nor. When you hit a warder, it’s the cat. This time I ought to ha’ come out p’rapsa different man—an’ so I did. I ought to ha’ had a different mind, bein’ chastened and taught the love o’ God; but, seein’, guv’nor, that when I come to think it over, which was all day and every day, I couldn’t really find out what I had done which in my case any other man would ha’ stopped short o’ doin’—bein’,not any other man, but me—I come out that time meanin’ to go upon my own. And on my own I went, and ever since I’ve been—an out-an’-outer, as you can see with lookin’ at me now. An’ if you ask me what I think of all o’ you outside, I can’t reply, seein’ I’m not allowed to speak.”
This is the answer that they seem to make, their lips move, but no sound comes.
The warder watches these moving lips, his eyes, the eyes of a keeper of wild beasts, are saying: “Pass on, sir, please, and don’t excite the convicts—you have seen all there is to see!”
And so the visitor goes out into the prison yard.
On to the grey old buildings a new grey block is being built; it runs up high already towards the square of sky; and on the pale scaffolding are prisoners cementing in the stones. A hundred feet up, they move with silent zest, helping to make the little whitewashed spaces safe, to hold—themselves; helping to make thick the walls, that they may hear nothing, and their own moaning may be smothered; helping to join stone to stone, and fill the cracks between, that no creature, however small, may come to share their solitude; helping to make the window-spaces high above their reach, that from them they shall look at—nothing; helping to hide themselves away out of the minds of all who have not sinned against man’s justice; for, to forget them in their silence and their solitude is good for man, and to remember them, unpleasant. The sky is grey above them, they are grey against the sky; no sound comes down but the smothered tapping of their tools.
The visitor goes out towards the prisongate; and, meeting him, come three convicts marching in—the tallest in the centre, an old man with active step and grey bristles on his weather-darkened face. Light darts into his eyes fixed on the visitor; he bares his yellow teeth and smiles. His lips move, and out of them come words. So, when skies have been dark all day, the sun gleams through, to prove the beauty of the Earthly Scheme. These words—the precious evidence of purifying solitude, the only words that have been spoken in the House of Silence, come faintly on the prison air:“Ye —— ——!”
Comingfrom where they cooked their food, we passed down a passage. The old warder in the dark blue uniform and a cap whose peak hung over his level iron-grey eyebrows, stopped.
“This,” he said, “is the jewel room;” and, taking a key that hung below his belt, he opened an iron door. A convict with a yellow face, in yellow clothing marked with arrows, and in his yellow hand a piece of yellow leather, darted a look at us, dropped his glance, and with a dreadful, silent, swift obsequiousness passed us and went out. We stood alone amongst the jewels, that he had evidently been polishing.
“We call it the jewel room for fun,” the old warder said, and a smile, the first of the morning, visited his face, butquickly left his eyes again to that strange mournful look, which some eyes have in the depths of them—a look, as if in strict attention to the outer things of life, their owner had parted with his soul. He took one of the jewels from the wall, and held it out. It was a light steel bangle joined by a light steel chain to another light steel bangle.
“That’s what they wear now when it’s necessary to put them on.”
One may see in harness rooms, bits, and chains, and stirrups glisten, but never was harness room so garnished as this little chamber. The four walls were bright as diamonds to the very ceiling with jewels of every kind; light and heavy bangles, long chains, short chains, thin chains, and very thick iron chains.
“Those are old-fashioned,” said the warder; “we don’t use them now.”
“And this?”
It stood quite close, made of three very bright steel bars, joined at the top, wide asunder at the bottom, and clamped together by cross bars in the middle.
“That’s the triangles,” he said a little hurriedly.
“Do you flog much?”
He stared. You are lacking—he seemed to say—in delicacy.
“Very little,” he answered, “only when it’s necessary.” And unconscious that he had proclaimed the spirit of the system that he served, the spirit of all systems, he drew his heels together, as though saluting discipline.
To his old figure standing there, tall, upright, and so orderly, and to his grave and not unkindly face, it was impossible to feel aversion. But in this little room there seemed to come and stand in line with him, and at his back, in an ever-growing pyramid, shaped to an apex like the very triangles themselves, the countless figures of officialdom. They stood there, upright, and orderly, with the words: “Only when it’s necessary,” coming from their mouths. And as one looked, one saw how chiselled in its form, how smooth and slippery in surface, how impermeable in structure, was that pyramid. Wedged in perfect symmetry, bound together man to man by something common to their souls, this phalanx stood by the force of its own shape, like dead masonry; stone on stone, each resting on the other, solid and immovable, in terrifying stillness. And in the eyes of all that phalanx—blue eyes, brown eyes, grey eyes, and mournful hazel eyes, converging on one point—there was the same look: “Stand away, please—don’t touch the pyramid!”
Turning his back on the triangles, the old warder said again:
“Only when it’s necessary.”
“And when is it necessary?”
“The rules decide that.”
“Of course. But who makes them?”
His smile faded. “The system,” he replied.
“And do you know how the system has come about?”
He frowned—a strange question, this, to ask him!
“That,” he said with slight impatience in his voice, “is not for me tosay.” And he jerked his neck, as though continuing:
“Ask that of him behind me!”
Involuntarily I looked, but there was no one there, behind him; only the triangles, beautifully bright. Then, with the same uncanny suddenness there sprang up again a vision of that solid pyramid of men, and the head of each seemed turned over his shoulder, saying:
“Ask that of him behind me.”
With a sort of eagerness I tried to see the apex of that pyramid. It was too far away.
“We’ve got to maintain order,” he said suddenly, as though repelling a subtle onslaught on his point of view.
“Of course; everything in this room, I suppose, is for that purpose?”
“Everything—that’s in use.”
“Ah, yes! I think you said there are some things that are not used now?”
“Those big iron chains, and these weights here—they weighted the prisoner down with those; that’s all out of date.”
“They look rather queer and barbarous, certainly.”
He smiled.
“You may say that,” he said.
“And can you tell me how they came to be disused?”
He seemed again to check the action of turning his head round.
“No,” he said, “I couldn’t tell you that. They found they weren’t necessary, I suppose.”
“When they were used, I take it the authorities believed in them?”
“No doubt,” he answered, “or they wouldn’t have used them.”
“They never thought that we should be looking at these things, and calling them barbarous, like this!”
He stared at the great manacles.
“They used them,” he said, “and never thought about it, I dare say.”
“They must have considered them necessary for discipline.”
“Just that.”
“And was discipline any better then than it is now?”
“Oh, no! Worse! They had a lot more trouble with the prisoners than we have, from what I hear.”
“If any one had told the authorities then that those heavy things did no good they’d have laughed at him.”
He answered with a smile: “Little doubt of that.”
“I wonder whether, a few years hence, people will be standing here and saying the same thing about those triangles, and all these other jewels, and calling us barbarians for using them. It would be interesting to know.”
His brows contracted: “Not likely,” he said; “you can’t do withoutthem.”
“You think it would not be possible?”
Again he seemed to check his eyes from looking round.
“No,” he repeated stolidly, “you can’t do without them.”
“It would be dangerous to try?”
He shook his close-cropped head under the peaked cap.
“I shouldn’t like to see it tried. We must keep order.”
“At the time they left off using those heavy chains, they must have thought they ran a risk?”
He answered coldly: “I don’t know anything about that.”
“The present state of things is final, then?”
He put the bangles back upon their nail, and turning rather suddenly, as though fearing to be attacked behind, said:
“We don’t trouble about such things; we’re here to administer the system as we find it. We don’t use these, except when it’s necessary.”
“Have you not begged the question?”
He said with dignity: “That is not my business,” laying his hand upon the triangles. And as he did so there seemed to spring up once more that solid phalanx, man linked to man, all with the same schoolmaster’s eyes—a living pyramid, turned to stone by the force of its own shape. And a sound came forth from them as though they were assenting, but it was only the scraping of the triangles,as the old warder pushed them a little farther back.
He went to the door and opened it; and going out in answer to this invitation, I looked back at the jewels. They hung in perfect brightness, round about the triangles; and suddenly, with that same dreadful, silent, swift obsequiousness, the man in yellow clothing marked with arrows, with the yellow face, and the yellow leather in his hand, passed us and went in. The iron door closed on him with a clang; but before it closed, I saw him at work already, polishing those shining jewels.
In dreams I have seen him since, alone with those emblems of a perfect order, working without sound! And in dreams too, guiding me away, I see the old warder with his regular, grave face, and his eyes mourning for something he has lost.
Shewalked as though pressed for time, slipping like a shadow along the railings of the houses. With her skimpy figure, in its shabby, wispy black, she hardly looked as if she had borne six sons. She had beneath her arm a little bundle which she always carried to and fro from the houses where she worked. Her face, with tired brown eyes, and hair as black and fine as silk under a black sailor hat, was skimpy too; creased and angled like her figure, it seemed to deny that life had ever left her strength for bearing children.
Though not yet nine o’clock, she had already done the work of her two rooms, lighted the fire, washed the youngest boys, given the four at home their breakfast, swept, made one bed—in the other her husband was still lying—and to thathusband she had served his tea. She had cut the mid-day ration of the two eldest boys, and, wrapping it in paper, had placed it on the window-sill in readiness for them to take to school; had portioned out the firing for the day, given the eldest boy the pence to buy the daily screws of tea and sugar, washed some ragged cloths, mended a little pair of trousers, put on her hat without consulting the cracked looking-glass, and hurried forth. And, since a penny was important to her, she had walked.
Having taken off the black straw hat, and changed the black and scanty dress for a blue linen frock which nearly hid her broken boots, worn to the thickness of brown paper, she was deemed ready to begin her labours. And while on her knees she scrubbed and polished, a certain sense of pleasurable rest would come to her; gazing into the depths of brass that she had made to shine, she thought of nothing. On some mornings she worked a little stiffly. This was when her husband, returning from late discussion at his public-house, had struck her with his belt, to show he was her master. On such mornings she was longer polishing the brass, often forced to clean it twice, having put her eyes too close to it. And she would think, over and over again: “He didn’t ought to hit me, he didn’t ought to treat me like he does, and me the mother of his children.” Thus far her thoughts would carry her, but—she was a simple soul—they carried her no further; nor did it ever penetrate her mind that her sons, born to and brought up by a drunken father, would some day carry on the glorious traditions of his life. But soon, because these things had happened to her many times, she would stop brooding, and over the mirroring brass, that gave a queer breadth and roundness to her face, would once more think of nothing.
Down in the kitchen, where she had her dinner, she never mentioned such unpleasant incidents, fearing they might harm her reputation. She talked, in fact, but little, not having much to talkof that would do her good in a social way of speaking. But every now and then something would break within her, and she would pour out a monotonous epic on her sons; as though, in spite of everything, she felt that to have borne them was a credit. In consequence of these outpourings, which came not less than once a week, it was usual to regard her as an incorrigible talker.
In the afternoon, though she no longer polished brass, she polished other things. She left at six o’clock. Then, in the dusk, once more dressed in black, she slipped along the railings of the houses, still hurrying, of course, and more like a shadow even than before. In one of her reddened hands—hands of which, holding them out before some fellow-woman whose soft, ringed fingers she admired, she would say, apologetically: “I’ve such dreadful ’ands, m’m”—in one of those red, roughened hands she grasped some little extra wrapped in newspaper, in the other the money she had earned.
She would cross the High Street, and,diving down a dim and narrow alley, make a purchase at a shop, and hurry on. Entering her door, she would pause, trying to tell by listening whether her husband had returned; this she always did, although in fact it made no difference to her going up, since in any case her sons were there, waiting to be fed. Silently passing up the narrow stairs, whose noticeable odour she never noticed, she would enter the front room. Here her four sons, their eyes fixed on the door, would be sitting or sprawling on the bed, teasing each other angrily, like young birds waiting for a meal. Taking off her hat, she would sit down to rest. But seeing her thus sitting, doing nothing, her sons would try to rouse her to activity, pulling her by the sleeve, jogging her chair, and the youngest, perhaps, kissing her with his little dirty mouth. Rising, she would begin to peel potatoes. She peeled them fast, working the upturned knife-blade close to her thin bosom, and round her the boys, affecting not to care now that they saw her working, resumedtheir restless teasing of each other, casting impatient glances at the busy knife-blade, the falling yellow slips of peel. At short intervals, when she was not too deadly tired, she would snap at them a little, but her power of speech was limited; the things she said had all been said before—her sons did not attend to them too much. Yet, they were good to her according to their lights, preferring her company to their father’s.
Presently her knife would stay suspended, the voices of her sons would cease; the footsteps of their father had been heard.
He would come in, in an old green overcoat, a muffler, and heavy boots; on his heavy face the look that says: My ways are what my life has made them—the proper ways for me to go! And according to his mood, sometimes jocular and sometimes sullen, there would be talk or silence, and through those silences the clipping of the knife at the potatoes would be heard, the sounds of cooking, and of washing, and of the making up ofbeds, and latest of all, the tiny sound of stitching.
But on Saturdays it would be different, for on Saturdays her man would not return until he was compelled by the closing of his public-house. On these evenings her heart would begin to beat at eight o’clock, and it would go on beating louder and louder as the hours went by, till, as she would have expressed it, she felt “fit to drop.” And yet, all those hours, while her sons were sleeping, there was at work a strange poison in her soul, a dull fever of revolt, in preparation for the blows that would be given her if he came in drunk—a sort of perverse spirit, vouchsafed by Providence, bringing those blows nearer, almost inviting them, yet keeping her alive beneath them. At the midnight striking of the nearest clock her heart would give a sickening leap under the malodorous and blackened quilt, and she would lie, trying to pretend to sleep. So old was that device, so useless—yet she never gave it up, for her brain was not a fertile one. Soon after would begin hisfootsteps, slow, wavering, coming up and up, with pauses, with mutterings, with now and then a heavy stumble. Her breath would come in gasps, and her eyes, just opening, would glue themselves to where the door showed dimly by the sputtering candlelight. Slowly that door would open, and he would enter. Through her slits of eyes she would look at him as he stood swaying there. And suddenly the angry thought that there he was—the sot that had drunken up her earnings and his own—would give her a dull buzzing in her head; and all fear left her. Not though he might tear away the blackened quilt, pull her out of bed, and shower blows, was there anything within her but a dull, shrill, waspish anger, shooting from her tongue and eyes. Only when he had finished, and rolled on to the bed to sleep like a dead man, did she feel the pains that he had given her. Then, dragging her feet slowly, she would creep back beneath the quilt, and cover up her face.
But some Saturdays he would comeback before the clock had struck twelve; and, standing by the door, with the light falling on his face, would look at her, swaying but slightly with his lower lip hanging very loose. Over his face, as he stood there, would spread a leering smile, and he would call her by her name.
Then in her dingy bed she would know that she still had work to do. And with no smile on her tired face, no joy in her thin body, no thought of anything in her starved brain, not even of the countless children she had borne in her dim alleys to this half-drunken man, nor of the countless children she had still to bear—she would lie waiting.