The Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow Part 8

They likewise scurry across the Park, looking anxiously from time to time at their watches, lest they be late for their appointments; thinking of the rates and taxes to be earned, of the bonnets to be paid for, the bills to be met. The best scourged, perhaps, of all, these slaves. The cat reserved for them has fifty tails in place of merely two or three. Work, you higher middle-cla.s.s slave, or you shall come down to the smoking of twopenny cigars; harder yet, or you shall drink s.h.i.+lling claret; harder, or you shall lose your carriage and ride in a penny bus; your wife's frocks shall be of last year's fas.h.i.+on; your trousers shall bag at the knees; from Kensington you shall be banished to Kilburn, if the tale of your bricks run short. Oh, a many-thonged whip is yours, my genteel brother.

The slaves of fas.h.i.+on are the next to pa.s.s beneath me in review. They are dressed and curled with infinite pains. The liveried, pampered footman these, kept more for show than use; but their senseless tasks none the less labour to them. Here must they come every day, merry or sad. By this gravel path and no other must they walk; these phrases shall they use when they speak to one another. For an hour they must go slowly up and down upon a bicycle from Hyde Park Corner to the Magazine and back. And these clothes must they wear; their gloves of this colour, their neck-ties of this pattern. In the afternoon they must return again, this time in a carriage, dressed in another livery, and for an hour they must pa.s.s slowly to and fro in foolish procession. For dinner they must don yet another livery, and after dinner they must stand about at dreary social functions till with weariness and boredom their heads feel dropping from their shoulders.

With the evening come the slaves back from their work: barristers, thinking out their eloquent appeals; school-boys, conning their dog-eared grammars; City men, planning their schemes; the wearers of motley, cudgelling their poor brains for fresh wit with which to please their master; shop boys and shop girls, silent now as, together, they plod homeward; the artisan; the labourer. Two or three hours you shall have to yourselves, slaves, to think and love and play, if you be not too tired to think, or love, or play. Then to your litter, that you may be ready for the morrow's task.

The twilight deepens into dark; there comes back the woman of the streets. As the shadows, she rounds the City's day. Work strikes its tent. Evil creeps from its peering place.

So we labour, driven by the whip of necessity, an army of slaves. If we do not our work, the whip descends upon us; only the pain we feel in our stomach instead of on our back. And because of that, we call ourselves free men.

Some few among us bravely struggle to be really free: they are our tramps and outcasts. We well-behaved slaves shrink from them, for the wages of freedom in this world are vermin and starvation. We can live lives worth living only by placing the collar round our neck.

There are times when one asks oneself: Why this endless labour? Why this building of houses, this cooking of food, this making of clothes? Is the ant so much more to be envied than the gra.s.shopper, because she spends her life in grubbing and storing, and can spare no time for singing?

Why this complex instinct, driving us to a thousand labours to satisfy a thousand desires? We have turned the world into a workshop to provide ourselves with toys. To purchase luxury we have sold our ease.

Oh, Children of Israel! why were ye not content in your wilderness? It seems to have been a pattern wilderness. For you, a simple wholesome food, ready cooked, was provided. You took no thought for rent and taxes; you had no poor among you--no poor-rate collectors. You suffered not from indigestion, nor the hundred ills that follow over-feeding; an omer for every man was your portion, neither more nor less. You knew not you had a liver. Doctors wearied you not with their theories, their physics, and their bills. You were neither landowners nor leaseholders, neither shareholders nor debenture holders. The weather and the market reports troubled you not. The lawyer was unknown to you; you wanted no advice; you had nought to quarrel about with your neighbour. No riches were yours for the moth and rust to damage. Your yearly income and expenditure you knew would balance to a fraction. Your wife and children were provided for. Your old age caused you no anxiety; you knew you would always have enough to live upon in comfort. Your funeral, a simple and tasteful affair, would be furnished by the tribe. And yet, poor, foolish child, fresh from the Egyptian brickfield, you could not rest satisfied. You hungered for the fleshpots, knowing well what flesh-pots entail: the cleaning of the flesh-pots, the forging of the flesh-pots, the hewing of wood to make the fires for the boiling of the flesh-pots, the breeding of beasts to fill the pots, the growing of fodder to feed the beasts to fill the pots.

All the labour of our life is centred round our flesh-pots. On the altar of the flesh-pot we sacrifice our leisure, our peace of mind. For a mess of pottage we sell our birthright.

Oh! Children of Israel, saw you not the long punishment you were preparing for yourselves, when in your wilderness you set up the image of the Calf, and fell before it, crying--"This shall be our G.o.d."

You would have veal. Thought you never of the price man pays for Veal?

The servants of the Golden Calf! I see them, stretched before my eyes, a weary, endless throng. I see them toiling in the mines, the black sweat on their faces. I see them in sunless cities, silent, and grimy, and bent. I see them, ague-twisted, in the rain-soaked fields. I see them, panting by the furnace doors. I see them, in loin-cloth and necklace, the load upon their head. I see them in blue coats and red coats, marching to pour their blood as an offering on the altar of the Calf. I see them in homespun and broadcloth, I see them in smock and gaiters, I see them in cap and ap.r.o.n, the servants of the Calf. They swarm on the land and they dot the sea. They are chained to the anvil and counter; they are chained to the bench and the desk. They make ready the soil, they till the fields where the Golden Calf is born. They build the s.h.i.+p, and they sail the s.h.i.+p that carries the Golden Calf. They fas.h.i.+on the pots, they mould the pans, they carve the tables, they turn the chairs, they dream of the sauces, they dig for the salt, they weave the damask, they mould the dish to serve the Golden Calf.

The work of the world is to this end, that we eat of the Calf. War and Commerce, Science and Law! what are they but the four pillars supporting the Golden Calf? He is our G.o.d. It is on his back that we have journeyed from the primeval forest, where our ancestors ate nuts and fruit. He is our G.o.d. His temple is in every street. His blue-robed priest stands ever at the door, calling to the people to wors.h.i.+p. Hark! his voice rises on the gas-tainted air--"Now's your time! Now's your time! Buy!

Buy! ye people. Bring hither the sweat of your brow, the sweat of your brain, the ache of your heart, buy Veal with it. Bring me the best years of your life. Bring me your thoughts, your hopes, your loves; ye shall have Veal for them. Now's your time! Now's your time! Buy! Buy!"

Oh! Children of Israel, was Veal, even with all its tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, quite worth the price?

And we! what wisdom have we learned, during the centuries? I talked with a rich man only the other evening. He calls himself a Financier, whatever that may mean. He leaves his beautiful house, some twenty miles out of London, at a quarter to eight, summer and winter, after a hurried breakfast by himself, while his guests still sleep, and he gets back just in time to dress for an elaborate dinner he himself is too weary or too preoccupied to more than touch. If ever he is persuaded to give himself a holiday it is for a fortnight in Ostend, when it is most crowded and uncomfortable. He takes his secretary with him, receives and despatches a hundred telegrams a day, and has a private telephone, through which he can speak direct to London, brought up into his bedroom.

I suppose the telephone is really a useful invention. Business men tell me they wonder how they contrived to conduct their affairs without it.

My own wonder always is, how any human being with the ordinary pa.s.sions of his race can conduct his business, or even himself, creditably, within a hundred yards of the invention. I can imagine Job, or Griselda, or Socrates liking to have a telephone about them as exercise. Socrates, in particular, would have made quite a reputation for himself out of a three months' subscription to a telephone. Myself, I am, perhaps, too sensitive. I once lived for a month in an office with a telephone, if one could call it life. I was told that if I had stuck to the thing for two or three months longer, I should have got used to it. I know friends of mine, men once fearless and high-spirited, who now stand in front of their own telephone for a quarter of an hour at a time, and never so much as answer it back. They tell me that at first they used to swear and shout at it as I did; but now their spirit seems crushed. That is what happens: you either break the telephone, or the telephone breaks you. You want to see a man two streets off. You might put on your hat, and be round at his office in five minutes. You are on the point of starting when the telephone catches your eye. You think you will ring him up to make sure he is in. You commence by ringing up some half-dozen times before anybody takes any notice of you whatever. You are burning with indignation at this neglect, and have left the instrument to sit down and pen a stinging letter of complaint to the Company when the ring-back re-calls you. You seize the ear trumpets, and shout--

"How is it that I can never get an answer when I ring? Here have I been ringing for the last half-hour. I have rung twenty times." (This is a falsehood. You have rung only six times, and the "half-hour" is an absurd exaggeration; but you feel the mere truth would not be adequate to the occasion.) "I think it disgraceful," you continue, "and I shall complain to the Company. What is the use of my having a telephone if I can't get any answer when I ring? Here I pay a large sum for having this thing, and I can't get any notice taken. I've been ringing all the morning. Why is it?"

Then you wait for the answer.

"What--what do you say? I can't hear what you say."

"I say I've been ringing here for over an hour, and I can't get any reply," you call back. "I shall complain to the Company."

"You want what? Don't stand so near the tube. I can't hear what you say.

What number?"

"Bother the number; I say why is it I don't get an answer when I ring?"

"Eight hundred and what?"

You can't argue any more, after that. The machine would give way under the language you want to make use of. Half of what you feel would probably cause an explosion at some point where the wire was weak.

Indeed, mere language of any kind would fall short of the requirements of the case. A hatchet and a gun are the only intermediaries through which you could convey your meaning by this time. So you give up all attempt to answer back, and meekly mention that you want to be put in communication with four-five-seven-six.

"Four-nine-seven-six?" says the girl.

"No; four-five-seven-six."

"Did you say seven-six or six-seven?"

"Six-seven--no! I mean seven-six: no--wait a minute. I don't know what I do mean now."

"Well, I wish you'd find out," says the young lady severely. "You are keeping me here all the morning."

So you look up the number in the book again, and at last she tells you that you are in connection; and then, ramming the trumpet tight against your ear, you stand waiting.

And if there is one thing more than another likely to make a man feel ridiculous it is standing on tip-toe in a corner, holding a machine to his head, and listening intently to nothing. Your back aches and your head aches, your very hair aches. You hear the door open behind you and somebody enter the room. You can't turn your head. You swear at them, and hear the door close with a bang. It immediately occurs to you that in all probability it was Henrietta. She promised to call for you at half-past twelve: you were to take her to lunch. It was twelve o'clock when you were fool enough to mix yourself up with this infernal machine, and it probably is half-past twelve by now. Your past life rises before you, accompanied by dim memories of your grandmother. You are wondering how much longer you can bear the strain of this att.i.tude, and whether after all you do really want to see the man in the next street but two, when the girl in the exchange-room calls up to know if you're done.

"Done!" you retort bitterly; "why, I haven't begun yet."

"Well, be quick," she says, "because you're wasting time."

Thus admonished, you attack the thing again. "ARE you there?" you cry in tones that ought to move the heart of a Charity Commissioner; and then, oh joy! oh rapture! you hear a faint human voice replying--"Yes, what is it?"

"Oh! Are you four-five-seven-six?"

"What?"

"Are you four-five-seven-six, Williamson?"

"What! who are you?"

"Eight-one-nine, Jones."

"Bones?"

"No, JONES. Are you four-five-seven-six?"

"Yes; what is it?"

"Is Mr. Williamson in?"

"Will I what--who are you?"

"Jones! Is Mr. Williamson in?"

"Who?"

"Williamson. Will-i-am-son!"

"You're the son of what? I can't hear what you say."