The Great Discovery Part 6

The ticket-collector stood at his post and scanned the pa.s.sengers as they went through. He knew them all, and had only a stray ticket to collect. I was last, and duly gave up my "return" from the "Cities of the Plain." But he did not let me through the gate. "I want to show you something," said the ticket-collector, and he led me into his office and produced a pamphlet.

"I got it from the man who goes to Keswick," said the ticket-collector; "you know him." I knew him, the best of men.

"Nae doubt," went on the ticket-collector; "nae doubt. He was always giving me tracts. Tracts--faugh!--poor stuff, nae style, nae logic, and nae philosophee in them. But I aye took them and thanked him--for he is a nice man, though a perfect babe in matters of understanding.

And I found them useful for spills. The other day he handed me this..." and he waved a blue paper-covered booklet.

"Mahn," he exclaimed, pushing his peaked cap back from his grey head, and sweeping his bra.s.s b.u.t.tons down with his hand; "mahn, this has fair hit me between the eyes." Then he opened the pamphlet and began to read pa.s.sages that he had heavily scored with blue pencil. The Czar has abolished the sale of vodka for ever! What is the result?

"The old women in the villages," read the ticket-collector, "can hardly believe their own eyes, so changed are their menfolk.... Everywhere peace, kindness and industry. War is said to be h.e.l.l; but this is like a foretaste of heaven."

"Listen to this," cried the collector, his arm outstretched. "A newspaper correspondent writes, since the sale of vodka stopped the old night population (in the doss-houses) seems to have vanished." Every pa.s.sage he read bore the same testimony.

"And what are we doing?" he exclaimed. "We have stopped nothing; we surround our soldiers with the old temptations, and we leave their defenceless wives exposed to the same temptations; I know all about it.

Mahn, it was Ruskin that said, 'There is no wealth but life,' and we leave all our wealth of life at the mercy of every evil. It's a fair scandal. Do you ken the conclusion I've come to! It is that the best form of government is a benevolent despotism. Oor men are afraid of this and that--losing votes--but an autocrat with a stroke of a pen can sweep away the power of h.e.l.l. If they would only make King George an autocrat for a few years.... That would be grand!"

He insisted on lending me the blue-covered pamphlet, and it being his hour off he walked with me across the bridge. The valley was now dark.

The snuff-manufacturer's house down below was wrapped in gloom. Lights twinkled on the slopes. Below a lamp-post at the far end of the bridge two men stood. When he saw them the ticket-collector stood fast.

"Mahn," said he, "I've come to a great resolution. I'm too old to fight; and they canna get at me in ony way. No Income-tax for me; and threepence on the tea is naething, for I never take it; I want to feel that I am worth men dying for me; and I am going to be tee-total till the end of the war. I'll give the money to help the soldiers' weans.

It's the weans that pull at my heart-strings."

And he turned on his heel and walked rapidly back across the bridge.

Under the lamp-post stood the roadman and the beadle, looking after him. I spoke to them, for since the war began we all speak to each other in our parish.

"Has he forgotten ony thin'?" asked the roadman, waving a hand towards the retreating form of the ticket-collector.

"I don't think so," I answered, "he just said that he was going to be tee-total till the end of the war."

"Tee-total!" echoed the roadman mournfully; "there gangs anither lost soul!"

My two friends went sadly down the steep brae, and I turned up the long flight of stone steps that leads to the road above. On the top of the first flight I turned and looked after them. When they came opposite the door of the village inn, they slowed down ... and then went resolutely past, down into the hollow. The two of them have probably resolved to join the company of the "lost souls."

I have read the ticket-collector's pamphlet, and I feel a little dazed.

It is such an odd world, and the strange thing is that I never realised its queerness before. A Grand Duke is murdered in a place of which I never heard before, and whose name I cannot even now trust myself to write down correctly, and here, a thousand miles away, the result is that I am brought face to face for the first time with the problem that lay twice a day under my feet--the problem of the Cities of the Plain.

A flood of light seems to have fallen on things which were aforetime hazy. Events stand out luridly and arrestingly. Here is one. I was in a far Hebridean isle when war broke out. All of a sudden there sounded the drum,

"Saying Come, Freemen, come, Ere your heritage be wasted! said the quick alarming drum."

And the manhood of the island sprang to their feet. Mothers gave their sons, sending them away with sobs and tears, but in the name of G.o.d.

On a drizzling morning the little steamer lay at the pier, crowded with men and horses, going out to fight and die. The hawsers were loosed.

The steamer churned and backed and crept away. A girl stood near me crying softly. A youth with clean-cut features, and the yearning no tongue can utter shining in his eyes, leant over the taffrail and called to her, "Not crying, Jessie?" And she wiped her cheek with the moist handkerchief, and turned a smiling face to him and said, "No, I am not crying." And the paddles churned faster, and they pa.s.sed into the drizzle and the haze. Weeks later I read how one man of that regiment--the regiment of my own county--killed another ... and a few days later I read that he had done so in a drunken brawl. He was not from the island, that man, and I know not who he is. His mother doubtless sent him forth to fight as a hero for his King, and he became a murderer under the fostering of the State.

Out of the clean countryside they were taken, these men, and the State that summoned them, and whose call they answered, surrounded them with temptations. Away from the influence of mother and sister and sweetheart, wearied and worn with the hard toil of preparation, the State opened the canteen and said, "Take your ease thus," and they did so. The Secretary of War made appeals to them. "Be sober," said he, "avoid alcohol, that the State, through your self-denial, may live."

But the State said, "See, I have made ample provision for you, so that you may disregard the n.o.ble advice my servant gives you." They came in their thousands across the Atlantic from the far North-West at the call of their mother--clean and sober--and their mother opened the canteen for their benefit on the plain. Such a world as that dwelt in the imagination of Dean Swift--I never imagined that it could exist here and now. And in that world of the cities of the plain, what reward are we preparing for the men who are baring their b.r.e.a.s.t.s to the arrows, standing between us and death? When they come back, war-worn, to what will they return? To homes in which the fires are extinguished, the candles burnt down to the socket; the cupboards bare, the children famished and neglected? Is that to be the guerdon of their sacrifice; is it for that that they have gone down into h.e.l.l? Surely it cannot be for that! A wave has pa.s.sed over us, raising us to the realisation of the higher values of things. Words live for us now which were dead yesterday. A beam of light has fallen into the chamber of imagery, and the word _Temperance_ has risen from the couch on which it lay dying, and it claims us for its own. Through it we can make the world know that we are worth fighting for--worth that the young, the strong, and the brave should take everything they hold dear--their ideals, their love, their little children unborn--and throw them into the trench, and there give themselves and their dreams to death for us. We must see to it that we are worthy the sacrifice.

It seemed to me hitherto that I was a citizen of the country endowed with the greatest freedom on earth. But the ticket-collector has proved to me that that was a dream. Here in our parish I have no power to control this thing that matters so vitally in the Cities of the Plain. We have a Parish Council and a County Council, and I don't know how many other dignified and honourable authorities, whom we elect.

But we elect n.o.body to control this. A body of unelected Justices, of whom we know nothing, settle for us that down yonder in the Cities of the Plain there shall be half a dozen State-regulated places for the manufacturing of paupers and criminals. (The laws change with such kaleidoscopic swiftness in those days that I may be wrong.) And here am I, newly awakened by the ticket-collector to that enormity, and I am not free to do anything. It is surely a mad world. We needed to be awakened; and we have been awakened with the shriek of sh.e.l.ls and the crying of the perishing! And the result of the awakening will be regeneration for the Cities of the Plain.

The ticket-collector has deprived me for the time being of my peace of mind. My conversion is so recent that I am afraid of falling into the fanaticism of the newly converted. I followed the General the other day into the railway carriage, and as we were pa.s.sing over Sodom, lying there under our feet, I spoke to him about it. He looked at me with cold eyes.

"Do you want to sacrifice the freedom of the individual?" he asked in his curt military tones; "do you think that you can make saints of people by Act of Parliament? They would be mere plaster-saints."

I was reduced to silence. My new-born zeal seemed to ooze out at every pore. There was a touch of amused scorn in the General's eye as he glanced at me. The General is a man of experience, and he is quite right. Acts of Parliament will never make saints of the people. But the State can see to it that the people are not surrounded by temptations through the operations of Acts of Parliament; that, if the State is impotent to make saints, it shall not, on the other hand, set itself deliberately to make devils. That, it seems to me, is what the State is now doing in the Cities of the Plain.

In ten thousand schools the State sanctions that its children be taught to pray--"Lead us not into temptation," and that same State encircles the path of its children by legalised temptations at every corner. It is the maddest of worlds. I may be wrong and the General wholly right.

But as the ticket-collector said the last time I saw him--"I would like to see the man who could convince me that I am wrong." And I don't know whether to be grateful to the ticket-collector or not. He has deprived me of some of my sleep; he has made my head ache with thinking of problems which I am not fit to cope with; and, most unlooked for of all, he has made a tee-totaler of me till the end of the war. There is a plaintive note in the ticket-collector's voice, which strikes a chord in my heart, when he invariably adds: "I hope the war won't last long."

For, if it does, there will be the danger of the ticket-collector and myself becoming teetotalers for altogether. And it is such an ugly word--tee-totaler! If only the ticket-collector would coin a new and beautiful word to connote his new and beneficent state of mind! It is a pity that great causes should be burdened by the weight of ugly words.