In the Land of Time (47 page)

“Work at what?” one of us asked him.

“The hill,” said Jorkens. “While the others were debating about estimates he got down to it with a pick and a shovel alone, and in thirty years he shovelled it all away. I don't know if a man has ever earned a high order of knighthood for work with a pick and a shovel or if he has not, but, however that may be, he earned his knighthood. Sometimes when he was young he worked as much as ten hours a day, and at the end of thirty years he had beaten the hill and let into the principal street of their capital city this splendid view of the sea, and the tips of a range of mountains that lay beyond it. He earned that decoration if ever a man did, in the opinion of the man who told me his story.

“Well, they thought he would rest then; after all, he was approaching fifty. But he was one of those men who never rest on their oars. He did not spend six months thinking over what he had done, or looking at the fine view that he had brought to their city. He hardly looked at it for three months, and then very soon old memories began to come flocking round him of the city as he had known it as a boy, and the hill at the end of the street. He was about the time of life when those sort of memories come, and somehow the further he got away from them, the more vivid they all became. And they were not only vivid, they were strong too, and they seemed to pull at his heart-strings. Well, as I told you, he wasn't a man to sit idle, and no sooner did he see that he had made a mistake and that the old ways were the best, than he got out his shovel again. He didn't take the pick this time, just his shovel, and he shovelled the small hill back to its old place. He was older now, but he did not let that stop him. He had scattered the earth over two or three acres, where it lay fairly light and came up easily. But it took him thirty years. And by the time he finished, the other party got into power, and with a big majority, the party that cared for the old things. They didn't need their big majority to reward the old fellow then: no one grudged him the star that they gave him, and there was scarcely any semblance of opposition to the bestowal of it. ‘No one else in our country,' said my foreign friend, ‘had those two stars, and I don't think anybody grudges either of them to him. He has spent a hard, hard life, a model for all of us.”

We had a good deal of discussion about this story of Jorkens, and when it died away some of us tried to get him to tell us where the country was. But he would not tell us that; and the only clue he gave, so far as I can remember, were the few words he said as he got up from the table, which were: “It wasn't so very far away.”

VI.

SOME LATE TALES

“Going by a cross-roads at that pace,” said the policeman to my taxi-driver; “and when I held my hand up. You'll kill yourself and everybody else.”

The rebuke stuck in my mind, until I began to wonder what would happen if he did; and what it would be like when he had done it.

No doubt the motor buses and private cars would help him; and then the traffic would begin to slow down: one day it would stop. And at once the brambles and convolvulus on each side of every road would get to know of it, and their tendrils would slip out softly on some still evening and begin to scout over the tar. But in London, where the forces of Nature seem so weak and few; what would happen there?

Why, the very window-boxes would know of it. Small tendrils would stray over sills and peer about to welcome the weeds that would soon creep up from below. The seed of the plane trees would go abroad in their season and sweep along pavements like dust, till they found the homes that they sought in cracks and in crannies; and the winged seed of the limes, travelling farther than anyone guesses, would find hard lodging at first, but would rustle a little farther with every breeze till they also came to their rest in soil however scanty.

The news of the work of that taxi-driver would spread to flies as rapidly as the swiftest winds could carry it, and not only would they come from incredible distances to settle down upon London in one rejoicing cloud, but billions would be born for this very occasion, and in all our empty cathedrals, in all our trafficless streets, their hum would be the first anthem to announce the passing of man. It seems to me that an important duty would fall on the flies, to tidy up after the taxi-driver, and to make the Thames valley habitable for whatever forms of life were coming there next.

Birds would follow the flies and of course kill millions, but could never check their rejoicing. The air would be full of swallows all through summer, and the swifts sailing above them; the little dun-coloured fly-catcher would perch on abandoned walls, and leap up to catch his prey, and return again to his perch; and the predatory birds in far woods would immediately know of the sport, and would come swooping in to prey on the lesser hunters.

The abandoned food of London would become a patrimony for more rats than there are in the whole of the Thames valley, and they would increase until their numbers were worthy of that opportunity. The cats would never check them; and though there might be cats that would think the houses of men were now their own, curling up cosily in soft chairs in the best rooms, they would learn soon that there dwelt in each house a vast population that cared little enough for them and their dainty airs.

And what new alliance would the dog make when his old master was gone? Would he oust the jackal and serve the lion? In Africa perhaps. But what would he do in London? He would be lonely at first. And then he would form into packs running wild through parks and through squares, in at doors and out of windows, hunting down streets become populous with all manner of things except man. And some trace, though I can't think what, of us and our customs would still be felt in his packs; for it is always so when something great has gone; there remains a trace of it amongst lesser folk for century after century. What sport those packs would have, free to follow for ever that instinct that they had learned for a whole geological era, yet touched now and then by the memory of a friendship which, though it had only started a little before history, might be poignant enough.

And all the while the little weeds would be growing; every wind would do their work, every shower soften their beds for them; and great far-travelling gales would come in from the hills, bringing flowers new to London. It would probably not be long before the traces of man's supremacy began to grow indistinct, the outlines of all his work in steel or stone being blurred by weeds till they grew as vague as old footprints. And at that weedy touch a certain angular look, a certain feeling of hardness, would be all gone from the houses, so that all the wild things would know at a glance they could enter and be at rest.

What kind of habitation will they make for those that are other than us? Some know them already, the cat, the mouse, and the spider; the jackdaw, too, has known the chimneys of man. Will these be our heirs when the work of the taxi-driver is finished? Or will others oust them? And another question one cannot help asking: will the world be the worse for the change? We cannot answer that: we are too much absorbed by our point of view to be able to say if the greenery of grass and moss and ivy tenanted by all manner of creatures, molested no longer by us, be a better or worse habitation than our pavements trodden by men. That green will rise like a tide, bringing with it forgetfulness, and drowning a little deeper with every leaf of the buttercup, and every downy clock of the dandelion, the fear and remembrance of man.

What a noise we made! But it will all be forgotten. What a mess we made with our hoardings, what a glare in the sky. But a few clean winds will tidy the hoardings up, and the sky above London will return to its stars as a patient from fever to health.

And who will remember, when all these things are forgotten? Who will remember at all? Who will look at the soft green mounds and recall man's angular houses and remember that we were here? The dog. The dog will remember. On some night when he is not hunting some dog may stray from his pack; and in a clearing of young woods of lime, growing dense by the banks of the Thames, may suddenly see his old enemy the full moon rising huge over weed-covered houses. At once he will lift his head and cry out to warn man. Not a voice will answer him, not a harsh ungrateful cry, which he never resented of old, for he never asked for man's gratitude: it used to be enough to warn him and guard him, without looking for recompense.

And now not a voice would come, except perhaps for a dog far off in the marshes passing the warning on, and the quiet mutter of geese. And suddenly he will remember then, man has not been seen for years. He'll be sorry, at that, and think of all we've done, so far as he can understand it, and will think of our motives and praise them: not the motives we knew; even historians, likely as not, miss them; but those divine purposes, mysterious, almost inscrutable, that he guessed at and credited to us and humbly revered. Don't let us be too greatly elated at that reverence that may outlast us, for it will not come so much from our own deserts as from the depths of the fathomless loyalty that is in the heart of the dog.

The mouse will remember houses, the cat will remember soft rugs, the jackdaw for many a year will remember chimneys, but the dog will remember man. And what an odd memory it will be, that memory lingering on in the marshes and woods of the Thames, a memory of something that once was here, so wise, so powerful and so far-seeing that it could alter the face of the earth; and yet so blind that it could not see by starlight, so deaf that a footfall coming up from behind could not be heard till too late, and quite unable even to smell at all.

One who never even knew who his enemies were; never guessed the plotting of wild things, the disloyalty of cats, nor the emnity of the full moon. And in the end the face of the earth, for all that man had done to it, went back in spite of him to its old, old way. And here were the cats and the rats, the foxes and the full moon, all quietly triumphant over the end of that mysterious figure that was so much mightier, wiser, and kinder than they. And just when a thought arises too deep for tears, that watchful dog by the marshes under the moon will turn to another thought more swiftly than we can turn, for I know the ways of the dog, and will raise a hind leg to scratch at his neck with a sudden vigour. Ah, yes, that flea will interest him more than man.

We must be content with whatever memory we can get when we are gone. When nature is busy everywhere hiding our work away, belfry and factory alike dumb under cascades of clematis, it will be something to have even that much memory, even though it come briefly and rarely on nights of a full moon.

And, after all, that policeman may have exaggerated, though he spoke so deliberately and calmly and seemed so sure, and though I myself have long thought on similar lines, and have not at all supposed that machines were for ever. I had always thought that machines in the end would overthrow machines, the bombing plane and the pullman cancelling out, and that Nature at last would return; so that when I suddenly heard the policeman's prophecy, and saw his confident hearing, I did not doubt at first that what he predicted was true.

But after reflection, and in the policeman's absence, it seems there may well be a chance that the taxi-driver may kill himself before he has time to kill everybody, and that he may be buried by folk of our race, who only dimly and rarely guess with what he had threatened us all. What will they write on his tombstone? I can think of no more fitting inscription, if after all we survive him, than those words so often uttered over the dead in London: The Driver Was Exonerated From All Blame.

Smethers is my name. I'm what you might call a small man, and in a small way of business. I travel for Numnumo, a relish for meats and savouries; the world-famous relish I ought to say. It's really quite good, no deleterious acids in it, and does not affect the heart; so it is quite easy to push. I wouldn't have got the job if it weren't. But I hope some day to get something that's harder to push, as of course the harder they are to push, the better the pay. At present I can just make my way, with nothing at all over; but then I live in a very expensive flat. It happened like this, and that brings me to my story. And it isn't the story you'd expect from a small man like me, yet there's nobody else to tell it. Those that know anything of it besides me, are all for hushing it up. Well, I was looking for a room to live in in London when first I got my job; it had to be in London, to be central; and I went to a block of buildings, very gloomy they looked, and saw the man that ran them and asked him for what I wanted; flats they called them; just a bedroom and a sort of a cupboard. Well, he was showing a man round at the time who was a gent, in fact more than that, so he didn't take much notice of me, the man that ran all those flats didn't, I mean. So I just ran behind for a bit, seeing all sorts of rooms, and waiting till I could be shown my class of thing. We came to a very nice flat, a sitting-room, bedroom and bath-room, and a sort of little place that they called a hall. And that's how I came to know Linley. He was the bloke that was being shown round.

“Bit expensive,” he said.

And the man that ran the flats turned away to the window and picked his teeth. It's funny how much you can show by a simple thing like that. What he meant to say was that he'd hundreds of flats like that, and thousands of people looking for them, and he didn't care who had them or whether they all went on looking. There was no mistaking him, somehow. And yet he never said a word, only looked away out of the window and picked his teeth. And I ventured to speak to Mr. Linley then; and I said, “How about it, sir, if I paid half, and shared it? I wouldn't be in the way, and I'm out all day, and whatever you said would go, and really I wouldn't be no more in your way than a cat.”