The World Set Free

Section 6

Barnet welcomed the appearance of the atomic engine with the zest of masculine youth in all fresh machinery, and it is evident that for some time he failed to connect the rush of wonderful new possibilities with the financial troubles of his family.  ‘I knew my father was worried,’ he admits.  That cast the smallest of shadows upon his delighted departure for Italy and Greece and Egypt with three congenial companions in one of the new atomic models.  They flew over the Channel Isles and Touraine, he mentions, and circled about Mont Blanc—­’These new helicopters, we found,’ he notes, ’had abolished all the danger and strain of sudden drops to which the old-time aeroplanes were liable’—­and then he went on by way of Pisa, Paestum, Ghirgenti, and Athens, to visit the pyramids by moonlight, flying thither from Cairo, and to follow the Nile up to Khartum.  Even by later standards, it must have been a very gleeful holiday for a young man, and it made the tragedy of his next experiences all the darker.  A week after his return his father, who was a widower, announced himself ruined, and committed suicide by means of an unscheduled opiate.

At one blow Barnet found himself flung out of the possessing, spending, enjoying class to which he belonged, penniless and with no calling by which he could earn a living.  He tried teaching and some journalism, but in a little while he found himself on the underside of a world in which he had always reckoned to live in the sunshine.  For innumerable men such an experience has meant mental and spiritual destruction, but Barnet, in spite of his bodily gravitation towards comfort, showed himself when put to the test, of the more valiant modern quality.  He was saturated with the creative stoicism of the heroic times that were already dawning, and he took his difficulties and discomforts stoutly as his appointed material, and turned them to expression.

Indeed, in his book, he thanks fortune for them.  ’I might have lived and died,’ he says, ’in that neat fool’s paradise of secure lavishness above there.  I might never have realised the gathering wrath and sorrow of the ousted and exasperated masses.  In the days of my own prosperity things had seemed to me to be very well arranged.’  Now from his new point of view he was to find they were not arranged at all; that government was a compromise of aggressions and powers and lassitudes, and law a convention between interests, and that the poor and the weak, though they had many negligent masters, had few friends.

‘I had thought things were looked after,’ he wrote.  ’It was with a kind of amazement that I tramped the roads and starved—­and found that no one in particular cared.’

He was turned out of his lodging in a backward part of London.

’It was with difficulty I persuaded my landlady—­she was a needy widow, poor soul, and I was already in her debt—­to keep an old box for me in which I had locked a few letters, keepsakes, and the like.  She lived in great fear of the Public Health and Morality Inspectors, because she was sometimes too poor to pay the customary tip to them, but at last she consented to put it in a dark tiled place under the stairs, and then I went forth into the world—­to seek first the luck of a meal and then shelter.’

He wandered down into the thronging gayer parts of London, in which a year or so ago he had been numbered among the spenders.

London, under the Visible Smoke Law, by which any production of visible smoke with or without excuse was punishable by a fine, had already ceased to be the sombre smoke-darkened city of the Victorian time; it had been, and indeed was, constantly being rebuilt, and its main streets were already beginning to take on those characteristics that distinguished them throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.  The insanitary horse and the plebeian bicycle had been banished from the roadway, which was now of a resilient, glass-like surface, spotlessly clean; and the foot passenger was restricted to a narrow vestige of the ancient footpath on either side of the track and forbidden at the risk of a fine, if he survived, to cross the roadway.  People descended from their automobiles upon this pavement and went through the lower shops to the lifts and stairs to the new ways for pedestrians, the Rows, that ran along the front of the houses at the level of the first story, and, being joined by frequent bridges, gave the newer parts of London a curiously Venetian appearance.  In some streets there were upper and even third-story Rows.  For most of the day and all night the shop windows were lit by electric light, and many establishments had made, as it were, canals of public footpaths through their premises in order to increase their window space.

Barnet made his way along this night-scene rather apprehensively since the police had power to challenge and demand the Labour Card of any indigent-looking person, and if the record failed to show he was in employment, dismiss him to the traffic pavement below.

But there was still enough of his former gentility about Barnet’s appearance and bearing to protect him from this; the police, too, had other things to think of that night, and he was permitted to reach the galleries about Leicester Square—­that great focus of London life and pleasure.

He gives a vivid description of the scene that evening.  In the centre was a garden raised on arches lit by festoons of lights and connected with the Rows by eight graceful bridges, beneath which hummed the interlacing streams of motor traffic, pulsating as the current alternated between east and west and north and south.  Above rose great frontages of intricate rather than beautiful reinforced porcelain, studded with lights, barred by bold illuminated advertisements, and glowing with reflections.  There were the two historical music halls of this place, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, in which the municipal players revolved perpetually through the cycle of Shakespeare’s plays, and four other great houses of refreshment and entertainment whose pinnacles streamed up into the blue obscurity of the night.  The south side of the square was in dark contrast to the others; it was still being rebuilt, and a lattice of steel bars surmounted by the frozen gestures of monstrous cranes rose over the excavated sites of vanished Victorian buildings.

This framework attracted Barnet’s attention for a time to the exclusion of other interests.  It was absolutely still, it had a dead rigidity, a stricken inaction, no one was at work upon it and all its machinery was quiet; but the constructor’s globes of vacuum light filled its every interstice with a quivering green moonshine and showed alert but motionless—­soldier sentinels!

He asked a passing stroller, and was told that the men had struck that day against the use of an atomic riveter that would have doubled the individual efficiency and halved the number of steel workers.

‘Shouldn’t wonder if they didn’t get chucking bombs,’ said Barnet’s informant, hovered for a moment, and then went on his way to the Alhambra music hall.

Barnet became aware of an excitement in the newspaper kiosks at the corners of the square.  Something very sensational had been flashed upon the transparencies.  Forgetting for a moment his penniless condition, he made his way over a bridge to buy a paper, for in those days the papers, which were printed upon thin sheets of metallic foil, were sold at determinate points by specially licensed purveyors.  Half over, he stopped short at a change in the traffic below; and was astonished to see that the police signals were restricting vehicles to the half roadway.  When presently he got within sight of the transparencies that had replaced the placards of Victorian times, he read of the Great March of the Unemployed that was already in progress through the West End, and so without expenditure he was able to understand what was coming.

He watched, and his book describes this procession which the police had considered it unwise to prevent and which had been spontaneously organised in imitation of the Unemployed Processions of earlier times.  He had expected a mob but there was a kind of sullen discipline about the procession when at last it arrived.  What seemed for a time an unending column of men marched wearily, marched with a kind of implacable futility, along the roadway underneath him.  He was, he says, moved to join them, but instead he remained watching.  They were a dingy, shabby, ineffective-looking multitude, for the most part incapable of any but obsolete and superseded types of labour.  They bore a few banners with the time-honoured inscription:  ‘Work, not Charity,’ but otherwise their ranks were unadorned.

They were not singing, they were not even talking, there was nothing truculent nor aggressive in their bearing, they had no definite objective they were just marching and showing themselves in the more prosperous parts of London.  They were a sample of that great mass of unskilled cheap labour which the now still cheaper mechanical powers had superseded for evermore.  They were being ’scrapped’—­as horses had been ‘scrapped.’

Barnet leant over the parapet watching them, his mind quickened by his own precarious condition.  For a time, he says, he felt nothing but despair at the sight; what should be done, what could be done for this gathering surplus of humanity?  They were so manifestly useless—­and incapable—­and pitiful.

What were they asking for?

They had been overtaken by unexpected things.  Nobody had foreseen——­

It flashed suddenly into his mind just what the multitudinous shambling enigma below meant.  It was an appeal against the unexpected, an appeal to those others who, more fortunate, seemed wiser and more powerful, for something—­for intelligence.  This mute mass, weary footed, rank following rank, protested its persuasion that some of these others must have foreseen these dislocations—­that anyhow they ought to have foreseen—­and arranged.

That was what this crowd of wreckage was feeling and seeking so dumbly to assert.

‘Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened room,’ he says.  ’These men were praying to their fellow creatures as once they prayed to God!  The last thing that men will realise about anything is that it is inanimate.  They had transferred their animation to mankind.  They still believed there was intelligence somewhere, even if it was careless or malignant….  It had only to be aroused to be conscience-stricken, to be moved to exertion….  And I saw, too, that as yet there was no such intelligence.  The world waits for intelligence.  That intelligence has still to be made, that will for good and order has still to be gathered together, out of scraps of impulse and wandering seeds of benevolence and whatever is fine and creative in our souls, into a common purpose.  It’s something still to come….’

It is characteristic of the widening thought of the time that this not very heroical young man who, in any previous age, might well have been altogether occupied with the problem of his own individual necessities, should be able to stand there and generalise about the needs of the race.

But upon all the stresses and conflicts of that chaotic time there was already dawning the light of a new era.  The spirit of humanity was escaping, even then it was escaping, from its extreme imprisonment in individuals.  Salvation from the bitter intensities of self, which had been a conscious religious end for thousands of years, which men had sought in mortifications, in the wilderness, in meditation, and by innumerable strange paths, was coming at last with the effect of naturalness into the talk of men, into the books they read, into their unconscious gestures, into their newspapers and daily purposes and everyday acts.  The broad horizons, the magic possibilities that the spirit of the seeker had revealed to them, were charming them out of those ancient and instinctive preoccupations from which the very threat of hell and torment had failed to drive them.  And this young man, homeless and without provision even for the immediate hours, in the presence of social disorganisation, distress, and perplexity, in a blazing wilderness of thoughtless pleasure that blotted out the stars, could think as he tells us he thought.

‘I saw life plain,’ he wrote.  ’I saw the gigantic task before us, and the very splendour of its intricate and immeasurable difficulty filled me with exaltation.  I saw that we have still to discover government, that we have still to discover education, which is the necessary reciprocal of government, and that all this—­in which my own little speck of a life was so manifestly overwhelmed—­this and its yesterday in Greece and Rome and Egypt were nothing, the mere first dust swirls of the beginning, the movements and dim murmurings of a sleeper who will presently be awake….’