On the Delights and Benefits of Slavery (2)

    “I don’t want anything. What do you want? Why do you ring me up, and then not answer me? Do leave me alone, if you can!”
    “We can’t get Hong Kongs at seventy-four.”
    “Well, I don’t care if you can’t.”
    “Would you like Zulus?”
    “What are you talking about?” you reply; “I don’t know what you mean.”
    “Would you like Zulus—Zulus at seventy-three and a half?”
    “I wouldn’t have ’em at six a penny. What are you talking about?”
    “Hong Kongs—we can’t get them at seventy-four. Oh, half-a-minute” (the half-a-minute passes). “Are you there?”
    “Yes, but you are talking to the wrong man.”
    “We can get you Hong Kongs at seventy-four and seven-eights.”
    “Bother Hong Kongs, and you too. I tell you, you are talking to the wrong man. I’ve told you once.”
    “Once what?”
    “Why, that I am the wrong man—I mean that you are talking to the wrong man.”
    “Who are you?”
    “Eight-one-nine, Jones.”
    “Oh, aren’t you one-nine-eight?”
    “No.”
    “Oh, good-bye.”
    “Good-bye.”
    How can a man after that sit down and write pleasantly of the European crisis? And, if it were needed, herein lies another indictment against the telephone. I was engaged in an argument, which, if not in itself serious, was at least concerned with a serious enough subject, the unsatisfactory nature of human riches; and from that highly moral discussion have I been lured, by the accidental sight of the word “telephone,” into the writing of matter which can have the effect only of exciting to frenzy all critics of the New Humour into whose hands, for their sins, this book may come. Let me forget my transgression and return to my sermon, or rather to the sermon of my millionaire acquaintance.
    It was one day after dinner, we sat together in his magnificently furnished dining-room. We had lighted our cigars at the silver lamp. The butler had withdrawn.
    “These cigars we are smoking,” my friend suddenly remarked, à propos apparently of nothing, “they cost me five shillings apiece, taking them by the thousand.”
    “I can quite believe it,” I answered; “they are worth it.”
    “Yes, to you,” he replied, almost savagely. “What do you usually pay for your cigars?”
    We had known each other years ago. When I first met him his offices consisted of a back room up three flights of stairs in a dingy by-street off the Strand, which has since disappeared. We occasionally dined together, in those days, at a restaurant in Great Portland Street, for one and nine. Our acquaintanceship was of sufficient standing to allow of such a question.
    “Threepence,” I answered. “They work out at about twopence three-farthings by the box.”
    “Just so,” he growled; “and your twopenny-three-farthing weed gives you precisely the same amount of satisfaction that this five shilling cigar affords me. That means four and ninepence farthing wasted every time I smoke. I pay my cook two hundred a year. I don’t enjoy my dinner as much as when it cost me four shillings, including a quarter flask of Chianti. What is the difference, personally, to me whether I drive to my office in a carriage and pair, or in an omnibus? I often do ride in a bus: it saves trouble. It is absurd wasting time looking for one’s coachman, when the conductor of an omnibus that passes one’s door is hailing one a few yards off. Before I could afford even buses—when I used to walk every morning to the office from Hammersmith—I was healthier. It irritates me to think how hard I work for no earthly benefit to myself. My money pleases a lot of people I don’t care two straws about, and who are only my friends in the hope of making something out of me. If I could eat a hundred-guinea dinner myself every night, and enjoy it four hundred times as much as I used to enjoy a five-shilling dinner, there would be some sense in it. Why do I do it?”
    I had never heard him talk like this before. In his excitement he rose from the table, and commenced pacing the room.
    “Why don’t I invest my money in the two and a half per cents?” he continued. “At the very worst I should be safe for five thousand a year. What, in the name of common sense, does a man want with more? I am always saying to myself, I’ll do it; why don’t I?
    “Well, why not?” I echoed.
    “That’s what I want you to tell me,” he returned. “You set up for understanding human nature, it’s a mystery to me. In my place, you would do as I do; you know that. If somebody left you a hundred thousand pounds to-morrow, you would start a newspaper, or build a theatre—some damn-fool trick for getting rid of the money and giving yourself seventeen hours’ anxiety a day; you know you would.”
    I hung my head in shame. I felt the justice of the accusation. It has always been my dream to run a newspaper and own a theatre.
    “If we worked only for what we could spend,” he went on, “the City might put up its shutters to-morrow morning. What I want to get at the bottom of is this instinct that drives us to work apparently for work’s own sake. What is this strange thing that gets upon our back and spurs us?”
    A servant entered at that moment with a cablegram from the manager of one of his Austrian mines, and he had to leave me for his study. But, walking home, I fell to pondering on his words. Why this endless work? Why each morning do we get up and wash and dress ourselves, to undress ourselves at night and go to bed again? Why do we work merely to earn money to buy food; and eat food so as to gain strength that we may work? Why do we live, merely in the end to say good-bye to one another? Why do we labour to bring children into the world that they may die and be buried?
    Of what use our mad striving, our passionate desire? Will it matter to the ages whether, once upon a time, the Union Jack or the Tricolour floated over the battlements of Badajoz? Yet we poured our blood into its ditches to decide the question. Will it matter, in the days when the glacial period shall have come again, to clothe the earth with silence, whose foot first trod the Pole? Yet, generation after generation, we mile its roadway with our whitening bones. So very soon the worms come to us; does it matter whether we love, or hate? Yet the hot blood rushes through our veins, we wear out heart and brain for shadowy hopes that ever fade as we press forward.
    The flower struggles up from seed-pod, draws the sweet sap from the ground, folds its petals each night, and sleeps. Then love comes to it in a strange form, and it longs to mingle its pollen with the pollen of some other flower. So it puts forth its gay blossoms, and the wandering insect bears the message from seed-pod to seed-pod. And the seasons pass, bringing with them the sunshine and the rain, till the flower withers, never having known the real purpose for which it lived, thinking the garden was made for it, not it for the garden. The coral insect dreams in its small soul, which is possibly its small stomach, of home and food. So it works and strives deep down in the dark waters, never knowing of the continents it is fashioning.
    But the question still remains: for what purpose is it all? Science explains it to us. By ages of strife and effort we improve the race; from ether, through the monkey, man is born. So, through the labour of the coming ages, he will free himself still further from the brute. Through sorrow and through struggle, by the sweat of brain and brow, he will lift himself towards the angels. He will come into his kingdom.
    But why the building? Why the passing of the countless ages? Why should he not have been born the god he is to be, imbued at birth with all the capabilities his ancestors have died acquiring? Why the Pict and Hun that I may be? Why I, that a descendant of my own, to whom I shall seem a savage, shall come after me? Why, if the universe be ordered by a Creator to whom all things are possible, the protoplasmic cell? Why not the man that is to be? Shall all the generations be so much human waste that he may live? Am I but another layer of the soil preparing for him?
    Or, if our future be in other spheres, then why the need of this planet? Are we labouring at some Work too vast for us to perceive? Are our passions and desires mere whips and traces by the help of which we are driven? Any theory seems more hopeful than the thought that all our eager, fretful lives are but the turning of a useless prison crank. Looking back the little distance that our dim eyes can penetrate the past, what do we find? Civilizations, built up with infinite care, swept aside and lost. Beliefs for which men lived and died, proved to be mockeries. Greek Art crushed to the dust by Gothic bludgeons. Dreams of fraternity, drowned in blood by a Napoleon. What is left to us, but the hope that the work itself, not the result, is the real monument? Maybe, we are as children, asking, “Of what use are these lessons? What good will they ever be to us?” But there comes a day when the lad understands why he learnt grammar and geography, when even dates have a meaning for him. But this is not until he has left school, and gone out into the wider world. So, perhaps, when we are a little more grown up, we too may begin to understand the reason for our living.