Part 8 (1/2)

It was something to lie still upon the ground, though without power to move, and sick beyond all thought, loathing myself and all that I had been and seen. For I had not even the sense that I had been wronged to keep me up, but only a nausea and horror of movement, a giddiness and whirl of every sense. I lay like a log upon the ground.

When I recovered my faculties a little, it was to find myself once more in the great vacant plain which surrounded that accursed home of pleasure,--a great and desolate waste upon which I could see no track, which my heart fainted to look at, which no longer roused any hope in me, as if it might lead to another beginning, or any place in which yet at the last it might be possible to live. As I lay in that horrible giddiness and faintness, I loathed life and this continuance which brought me through one misery after another, and forbade me to die. Oh that death would come,--death, which is silent and still, which makes no movement and hears no sound! that I might end and be no more! Oh that I could go back even to the stillness of that chamber which I had not been able to endure! Oh that I could return,--return! to what? To other miseries and other pain, which looked less because they were past. But I knew now that return was impossible until I had circled all the dreadful round; and already I felt again the burning of that desire that p.r.i.c.ked and drove me on,--not back, for that was impossible. Little by little I had learned to understand, each step printed upon my brain as with red-hot irons: not back, but on, and on--to greater anguish, yes; but on, to fuller despair, to experiences more terrible,--but on, and on, and on.

I arose again, for this was my fate. I could not pause even for all the teachings of despair.

The waste stretched far as eyes could see. It was wild and terrible, with neither vegetation nor sign of life. Here and there were heaps of ruin, which had been villages and cities; but nothing was in them save reptiles and crawling poisonous life and traps for the unwary wanderer. How often I stumbled and fell among these ashes and dust-heaps of the past! Through what dread moments I lay, with cold and slimy things leaving their trace upon my fles.h.!.+ The horrors which seized me, so that I beat my head against a stone,--why should I tell? These were nought; they touched not the soul. They were but accidents of the way.

At length, when body and soul were low and worn out with misery and weariness, I came to another place, where all was so different from the last that the sight gave me a momentary solace. It was full of furnaces and clanking machinery and endless work. The whole air round was aglow with the fury of the fires; and men went and came like demons in the flames, with red-hot melting metal, pouring it into moulds and beating it on anvils. In the huge workshops in the background there was a perpetual whir of machinery, of wheels turning and turning, and pistons beating, and all the din of labor, which for a time renewed the anguish of my brain, yet also soothed it,--for there was meaning in the beatings and the whirlings. And a hope rose within me that with all the forces that were here, some revolution might be possible,--something that would change the features of this place and overturn the worlds. I went from workshop to workshop, and examined all that was being done, and understood,--for I had known a little upon the earth, and my old knowledge came back, and to learn so much more filled me with new life.

The master of all was one who never rested, nor seemed to feel weariness nor pain nor pleasure. He had everything in his hand. All who were there were his workmen or his a.s.sistants or his servants. No one shared with him in his councils. He was more than a prince among them; he was as a G.o.d. And the things he planned and made, and at which in armies and legions his workmen toiled and labored, were like living things. They were made of steel and iron, but they moved like the brains and nerves of men. They went where he directed them, and did what he commanded, and moved at a touch. And though he talked little, when he saw how I followed all that he did, he was a little moved towards me, and spoke and explained to me the conceptions that were in his mind, one rising out of another, like the leaf out of the stem and the flower out of the bud. For nothing pleased him that he did, and necessity was upon him to go on and on.

'They are like living things,' I said; 'they do your bidding, whatever you command them. They are like another and a stronger race of men.'

'Men!' he said, 'what are men? The most contemptible of all things that are made,--creatures who will undo in a moment what it has taken millions of years, and all the skill and all the strength of generations to do. These are better than men. They cannot think or feel. They cannot stop but at my bidding, or begin unless I will. Had men been made so, we should be masters of the world.'

'Had men been made so, you would never have been,--for what could genius have done or thought?--you would have been a machine like all the rest.'

'And better so!' he said, and turned away; for at that moment, watching keenly as he spoke the action of a delicate combination of movements, all made and balanced to a hair's breadth, there had come to him suddenly the idea of something which made it a hundredfold more strong and terrible.

For they were terrible, these things that lived yet did not live, which were his slaves and moved at his will. When he had done this, he looked at me, and a smile came upon his mouth; but his eyes smiled not, nor ever changed from the set look they wore. And the words he spoke were familiar words, not his, but out of the old life. 'What a piece of work is a man!'

he said; 'how n.o.ble in reason, how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?' His mind had followed another strain of thought, which to me was bewildering, so that I did not know how to reply. I answered like a child, upon his last word.

'We are dust no more,' I cried, for pride was in my heart,--pride of him and his wonderful strength, and his thoughts which created strength, and all the marvels he did; 'those things which hindered are removed. Go on; go on! you want but another step. What is to prevent that you should not shake the universe, and overturn this doom, and break all our bonds?

There is enough here to explode this gray fiction of a firmament, and to rend those precipices, and to dissolve that waste,--as at the time when the primeval seas dried up, and those infernal mountains rose.'

He laughed, and the echoes caught the sound and gave it back as if they mocked it. 'There is enough to rend us all into shreds,' he said, 'and shake, as you say, both heaven and earth, and these plains and those hills.'

'Then why,' I cried in my haste, with a dreadful hope piercing through my soul--'why do you create and perfect, but never employ? When we had armies on the earth, we used them. You have more than armies; you have force beyond the thoughts of man, but all without use as yet.'

'All,' he cried, 'for no use! All in vain!--in vain!'

'O master!' I said, 'great and more great in time to come, why?--why?'

He took me by the arm and drew me close.