In a world where all were vagabond and brutal, where each met each with suspicion and all men were immersed in the intensity of their bodily needs, very few had thoughts to exchange. Mentally, as well as actually, they lived to themselves and where they did not distrust they were indifferent; the starvelings who slunk into shelter that they might huddle for the night round a common fire found little to say to one another. As human desire concentrated itself on the satisfaction of animal cravings, so human speech degenerated into mere expression of those cravings and the emotions aroused by them. Only once or twice while he starved and drifted did Theodore talk with men who sought to give expression to more than their present terrors and the immediate needs of their bodies, who used speech that was the vehicle of thought.
One such he remembered—met haphazard, as all men met each other—when he sheltered for an autumn night on the outskirts of a town left derelict. With falling dusk came a sudden sharp patter of rain and he took refuge hurriedly in the nearest house—a red-brick villa, standing silent with gaping windows. What was left of the door swung loosely on its hinges—half the lower panels had been hacked away to serve as firewood; the hall was befouled with the feet of many searchers and of the furniture remained but a litter of rags and fragments that could not be burned.
He thought the place empty till he scented smoke from the basement; whereupon he crept down the stairs, soft-footed and alert, to discover that precaution was needless. There was only one occupant of the house, a man plainly dying; a livid hollow-eyed skeleton who coughed and trembled as he knelt by the grate and tried to blow damp sticks into a flame. Theodore, in his own interests, took charge of the fire, ransacked the house for inflammable material and tore up strips of broken boarding that the other was too feeble to wrestle with. When the blaze flared up, the sick man cowered to it, stretched out his hands—filthy skin-covered bones—and thanked him; whereat Theodore turned suddenly and stared. It was long—how long?—since any man had troubled to thank him; and this man, for all his verminous misery, had a voice that was educated, cultured.... Something in the tone of it—the manner—took Theodore back to the world where men ate courteously together, were companions, considered each other; and instinctively, almost without effort, he offered a share of his foraging. The offer was refused, whereat Theodore wondered still more; but the man, near death, was past desire for food and shook his head almost with repulsion. Perhaps it was the fever that had turned him against food that loosened his tongue and set him talking—or perhaps he, also, by another’s voice and manner, was reminded of his past humanity.
“‘My mind to me a kingdom is,’” he quoted suddenly. “Who wrote that—do you remember?”
“No,” Theodore said, “I’ve forgotten.” He stared at the cowering, hunched figure with its shaking hands stretched to the blaze. The man, it might be, was mad as well as dying—he had met many such in his wanderings; babbling of verse as someone—who was it?—had babbled in dying of green fields.
“‘My mind to me a kingdom is,’” the sick man repeated. “Well, even if we’ve forgotten who wrote it, there’s one thing about him that’s certain; he didn’t know what we know—hadn’t lived in our kind of hell. The place where you haven’t a mind—only fear and a stomach.... The flesh and the devil—hunger and fear; they haven’t left us a world!... But if there’s ever a world again, I believe I shall have learned how to write. Now I know what we are—the fundamentals and the nakedness....”
“Were you a writer?” Theodore asked him—and at the question his old humanity stirred curiously within him.
“Yes,” said the other, “I was a writer.... When I think of what I wrote—the little, little things that seemed important!... I spent a year once—a whole good year—on a book about a woman who was finding out she didn’t love her husband. She was well fed and housed, lived comfortably—and I wrote of her as if she were a tragedy. The work I put into it—the work and the thought! I tried to get what I called atmosphere.... And all the time there was this in us—this raw, red thing—and I never even touched it, never guessed what we were without our habits.... Do you know where we made the mistake?”—he turned suddenly to Theodore, thrusting out a finger—“We were not civilized—it was only our habits that were civilized; but we thought they were flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. Underneath, the beast in us was always there—lying in wait till his time came. The beast that is ourselves, that is flesh of our flesh—clothed in habits, in rags that have been torn from us.”
He broke off to cough horribly and lay breathless and exhausted for a time; then, when breath came back to him, talked on while Theodore listened—not so much to his words as to a voice from the world that had passed.
“The religions were right,” he said. “They were right through and through; the only sane thing and the only safe thing is humility—to realize your sin, to confess it and repent.... We—we were bestial and we did not know it; and when you don’t even suspect you sin how can you repent and save your soul alive?... We dressed ourselves and taught ourselves the little politenesses and ceremonies which made it easy to forget that we were brutes in our hearts; we never faced our own possibilities of evil and beastliness, never confessed and repented them, took no precautions against them. Our limitless possibilities.... We thought our habits—we called them virtues—were as real and natural and ingrained as our instincts; and now what is left of our habits? When we should have been crying, ‘Lord have mercy on us,’ we believed in ourselves, our enlightenment and progress. Enlightenment that ended as science applied to destruction and progress that has led us—to this.... And to-day it has gone, every shred of it, and we’re back at what we started with—hunger and lust! Brute instincts ... and the primitive passion, hatred—against those who thwart hunger and lust. Nothing else—how can there be anything else? When we lost all we loved, we lost the habit and power of loving.... ‘My mind to me a kingdom is’—of hatred and hunger and lust.”
“Yes,” said Theodore—and he, too, stared at the fire.... What the other had said was truth and truth only. Even Phillida had left him; the power of loving her was gone. “I hadn’t thought of it like that—but it’s right.... We can only hate.”
“It’s that,” said the dying man, “that’s beyond all torment.... God pity us!”
He covered his eyes and sat silent until Theodore asked him, “Does that mean you still believe in God?”
“There’s Law,” said the other. “Is that God?... We have got to see into our own souls and to pay for everything we take. That’s all I know, so far—except that what we think we own—owns us. That’s what the wise men meant by renunciation.... It’s what we made and thought we owned that has turned on us—the creatures that were born for our pleasure and power, to increase our comfort and our riches. As we made them they fastened on us—set their claws in us—and they have taken our minds from us as well as our bodies. As we made them, they followed the law of their life. We created life without a soul; but it was life and it went its own way.”
Crouched to the fire, and between his bouts of coughing, he played with the idea and insisted on it. Everything that we made, that we thought dead and dumb, had a life that we could not control. In the case of books and art we admitted the fact, had a name for the life, called it influence: influence a form of independent existence.... In the same way we took metals and welded them, made machines; which were beasts, potent beasts, whose destiny was the same as our own. To live and develop and, developing, to turn on the power that enslaved them.... That was what had happened; they had made themselves necessary, fastened on us and, grown strong enough, had turned on their masters and killed—even though they died in the killing. The revolt against servitude had always been accounted a virtue in men and the law of all life was the same. The beasts we had made could not live without us, but they would have their revenge before they died.
“Think of us,” he said, “how we run and squeal and hide from them!... The patient servants, our goods and chattels, who were brought into life for our pleasure—they chase us while we run and squeal and hide!”
“Yes,” Theodore answered, “I’ve felt that, too—the humiliation.”
“The humiliation,” the sick man nodded. “Always in the end the slave rules his master—it’s the price paid for servitude, possession. I tell you, they were wise men who preached renunciation—before what we own takes hold of us and possession turns to servitude. For there’s a law of average in all things—have you ever felt it as I have? A law of balance which we never strike aright.... When the mighty tread hard enough on the humble and meek, the humble and meek are exalted and begin to tread hard in their turn. That’s obvious and we’ve generally known it; but it’s the same in what we call material things. We rise into the air—make machines that can fly—and grovel underground to protect ourselves from the flying-man. As we struck the balance to the one side, so it has to swing back on the other; a few men rise high into the air and many creep down into trenches and cellars, crouch flat.... If we could work out the numbers and heights mathematically, be sure that we should strike the perfect balance—represented by the surface of the earth. Balance—in all things balance.”
He rambled on, perhaps half-delirious, coughing out his thoughts and theories concerning a world he was leaving.... In all things balance, inevitably; the purpose of life which, so far, we sought blindly—by passion and recoil from it, by excess and consequent exhaustion.... It was in the cities where men herded, where life swarmed, that death had come most thickly, that desolation was swiftest and most complete. The ground underneath them needed rest from men; there was an average of life it could support and bear with. Now, the average exceeded, the cities lay ruined, were silent, knew the peace they had craved for—while those who once swarmed in them avoided them in fear or scattered themselves in the open country, finding no sustenance in brickwork, stone or paved street.... With the machine and its consequence, the industrial system, population had increased beyond the average allotted to the race; now the balance was righting itself by a very massacre of famine—induced by the self-same process of invention which had fostered reproduction unhindered. Because millions too many had crawled upon earth, long stretches of earth must lie waste and desolate till the average had worked itself out.... The art of life was adjustment of the balance in all things—was action and reaction rightly applied, was provision of counterweight, discovery of the destined mean. Was control of Truth, lest it turn into a lie; was check upon the power and velocity of Good ere it swung to immeasurable Evil....
The fire, for want of more wood to pile on it, had died low, to a flicker in the ashes, and the two men sat almost in darkness; the one, between the bouts that shook him, whispering out the tenets of his Law; the other, now listening, now staring back into the world that once was—and ever should be.... He was with Markham, listening to the Westminster chimes—(on the crest of the centuries, Markham had said)—when there were sudden yelping screams outside and a patter of feet on the road. The human rats who had crept into the town for shelter from the night were bolting in panic from their holes.
“They’re running,” said the dying man and felt towards the stairs. “It’s gas—it must be gas! Oh God, where’s the door—where’s the door?”
As they groped and stumbled through the door and up the stairway, he was clutching at Theodore’s arm and gasping in an ecstasy of terror; as fearful of losing his few poor hours of life as if they had been years of health and usefulness. In the open air was darkness with figures flying dimly by; a thin stream of panic that raced against death by suffocation.
The man with death on him held to Theodore’s arm and besought him, for Christ’s sake, not to leave him—he could run if he were only helped! Theodore let him cling for a dragging pace or two; then, looking behind him, saw a woman reel, clawing the air.
He wrenched himself free and ran on till he could run no further.