by H. G. Wells
CHAPTER THE FIRST.
THE ALTERED WORLD.
I.
Change played in its new fashion with the world for twenty years. Tomost men the new things came little by little and day by day, remarkablyenough, but not so abruptly as to overwhelm. But to one man at least thefull accumulation of those two decades of the Food's work was to berevealed suddenly and amazingly in one day. For our purpose it isconvenient to take him for that one day and to tell something of thethings he saw. This man was a convict, a prisoner for life--his crime isno concern of ours--whom the law saw fit to pardon after twenty years.One summer morning this poor wretch, who had left the world a young manof three-and-twenty, found himself thrust out again from the greysimplicity of toil and discipline, that had become his life, into adazzling freedom. They had put unaccustomed clothes upon him; his hairhad been growing for some weeks, and he had parted it now for some days,and there he stood, in a sort of shabby and clumsy newness of body andmind, blinking with his eyes and blinking indeed with his soul,_outside_ again, trying to realise one incredible thing, that after allhe was again for a little while in the world of life, and for all otherincredible things, totally unprepared. He was so fortunate as to have abrother who cared enough for their distant common memories to come andmeet him and clasp his hand--a brother he had left a little lad, and whowas now a bearded prosperous man--whose very eyes were unfamiliar. Andtogether he and this stranger from his kindred came down into the townof Dover, saying little to one another and feeling many things.
They sat for a space in a public-house, the one answering the questionsof the other about this person and that, reviving queer old points ofview, brushing aside endless new aspects and new perspectives, and thenit was time to go to the station and take the London train. Their namesand the personal things they had to talk of do not matter to our story,but only the changes and all the strangeness that this poor returningsoul found in the once familiar world.
In Dover itself he remarked little except the goodness of beer frompewter--never before had there been such a draught of beer, and itbrought tears of gratitude to his eyes. "Beer's as good as ever," saidhe, believing it infinitely better....
It was only as the train rattled them past Folkestone that he could lookout beyond his more immediate emotions, to see what had happened to theworld. He peered out of the window. "It's sunny," he said for thetwelfth time. "I couldn't ha' had better weather." And then for thefirst time it dawned upon him that there were novel disproportions inthe world. "Lord sakes," he cried, sitting up and looking animated forthe first time, "but them's mortal great thissels growing out there onthe bank by that broom. If so be they _be_ thissels? Or 'ave I beenforgetting?" But they were thistles, and what he took for tall bushesof broom was the new grass, and amidst these things a company of Britishsoldiers--red-coated as ever--was skirmishing in accordance with thedirections of the drill book that had been partially revised after theBoer War. Then whack! into a tunnel, and then into Sandling Junction,which was now embedded and dark--its lamps were all alight--in a greatthicket of rhododendron that had crept out of some adjacent gardens andgrown enormously up the valley. There was a train of trucks on theSandgate siding piled high with rhododendron logs, and here it was thereturning citizen heard first of Boomfood.
As they sped out into a country again that seemed absolutely unchanged,the two brothers were hard at their explanations. The one was full ofeager, dull questions; the other had never thought, had never troubledto see the thing as a single fact, and he was allusive and difficult tofollow. "It's this here Boomfood stuff," he said, touching his bottomrock of knowledge. "Don't you know? 'Aven't they told you--any of 'em?Boomfood! You know--Boomfood. What all the election's about. Scientificsort of stuff. 'Asn't no one ever told you?"
He thought prison had made his brother a fearful duffer not to knowthat.
They made wide shots at each other by way of question and answer.Between these scraps of talk were intervals of window-gazing. At firstthe man's interest in things was vague and general. His imagination hadbeen busy with what old so-and-so would say, how so-and-so would look,how he would say to all and sundry certain things that would present his"putting away" in a mitigated light. This Boomfood came in at first asit were a thing in an odd paragraph of the newspapers, then as a sourceof intellectual difficulty with his brother. But it came to himpresently that Boomfood was persistently coming in upon any topic hebegan.
In those days the world was a patchwork of transition, so that thisgreat new fact came to him in a series of shocks of contrast. Theprocess of change had not been uniform; it had spread from one centre ofdistribution here and another centre there. The country was in patches:great areas where the Food was still to come, and areas where it wasalready in the soil and in the air, sporadic and contagious. It was abold new motif creeping in among ancient and venerable airs.
The contrast was very vivid indeed along the line from Dover to Londonat that time. For a space they traversed just such a country-side as hehad known since his childhood, the small oblongs of field, hedge-lined,of a size for pigmy horses to plough, the little roads three cart-widthswide, the elms and oaks and poplars dotting these fields about, littlethickets of willow beside the streams; ricks of hay no higher than agiant's knees, dolls' cottages with diamond panes, brickfields, andstraggling village streets, the larger houses of the petty great,flower-grown railway banks, garden-set stations, and all the littlethings of the vanished nineteenth century still holding out againstImmensity. Here and there would be a patch of wind-sown, wind-tatteredgiant thistle defying the axe; here and there a ten-foot puff-ball orthe ashen stems of some burnt-out patch of monster grass; but that wasall there was to hint at the coming of the Food.
For a couple of score of miles there was nothing else to foreshadow inany way the strange bigness of the wheat and of the weeds that werehidden from him not a dozen miles from his route just over the hills inthe Cheasing Eyebright valley. And then presently the traces of the Foodwould begin. The first striking thing was the great new viaduct atTonbridge, where the swamp of the choked Medway (due to a giant varietyof _Chara_) began in those days. Then again the little country, andthen, as the petty multitudinous immensity of London spread out underits haze, the traces of man's fight to keep out greatness becameabundant and incessant.
In that south-eastern region of London at that time, and all about whereCossar and his children lived, the Food had become mysteriouslyinsurgent at a hundred points; the little life went on amidst dailyportents that only the deliberation of their increase, the slow parallelgrowth of usage to their presence, had robbed of their warning. But thisreturning citizen peered out to see for the first time the facts of theFood strange and predominant, scarred and blackened areas, big unsightlydefences and preparations, barracks and arsenals that this subtle,persistent influence had forced into the life of men.
Here, on an ampler scale, the experience of the first Experimental Farmhad been repeated time and again. It had been in the inferior andaccidental things of life--under foot and in waste places, irregularlyand irrelevantly--that the coming of a new force and new issues hadfirst declared itself. There were great evil-smelling yards andenclosures where some invincible jungle of weed furnished fuel forgigantic machinery (little cockneys came to stare at its clangorousoiliness and tip the men a sixpence); there were roads and tracks forbig motors and vehicles--roads made of the interwoven fibres ofhypertrophied hemp; there were towers containing steam sirens that couldyell at once and warn the world against any new insurgence of vermin,or, what was queerer, venerable church towers conspicuously fitted witha mechanical scream. There were little red-painted refuge huts andgarrison shelters, each with its 300-yard rifle range, where theriflemen practised daily with soft-nosed ammunition at targets in theshape of monstrous rats.
Six times since the day of the Skinners there had been outbreaks ofgiant rats--each time from the south-west London sewers, and now theywere as much an accepted fact there as tigers in the delta byCa
lcutta....
The man's brother had bought a paper in a heedless sort of way atSandling, and at last this chanced to catch the eye of the released man.He opened the unfamiliar sheets--they seemed to him to be smaller, morenumerous, and different in type from the papers of the times before--andhe found himself confronted with innumerable pictures about things sostrange as to be uninteresting, and with tall columns of printed matterwhose headings, for the most part, were as unmeaning as though they hadbeen written in a foreign tongue--"Great Speech by Mr. Caterham"; "TheBoomfood Laws."
"Who's this here Caterham?" he asked, in an attempt to makeconversation.
"_He's_ all right," said his brother.
"Ah! Sort of politician, eh?"
"Goin' to turn out the Government. Jolly well time he did."
"Ah!" He reflected. "I suppose all the lot _I_ used toknow--Chamberlain, Rosebery--all that lot--_What_?"
His brother had grasped his wrist and pointed out of the window.
"That's the Cossars!" The eyes of the released prisoner followed thefinger's direction and saw--
"My Gawd!" he cried, for the first time really overcome with amazement.The paper dropped into final forgottenness between his feet. Through thetrees he could see very distinctly, standing in an easy attitude, thelegs wide apart and the hand grasping a ball as if about to throw it, agigantic human figure a good forty feet high. The figure glittered inthe sunlight, clad in a suit of woven white metal and belted with abroad belt of steel. For a moment it focussed all attention, and thenthe eye was wrested to another more distant Giant who stood prepared tocatch, and it became apparent that the whole area of that great bay inthe hills just north of Sevenoaks had been scarred to gigantic ends.
A hugely banked entrenchment overhung the chalk pit, in which stood thehouse, a monstrous squat Egyptian shape that Cossar had built for hissons when the Giant Nursery had served its turn, and behind was a greatdark shed that might have covered a cathedral, in which a splutteringincandescence came and went, and from out of which came a Titanichammering to beat upon the ear. Then the attention leapt back to thegiant as the great ball of iron-bound timber soared up out of his hand.
The two men stood up and stared. The ball seemed as big as a cask.
"Caught!" cried the man from prison, as a tree blotted out the thrower.
The train looked on these things only for the fraction of a minute andthen passed behind trees into the Chislehurst tunnel. "My Gawd!" saidthe man from prison again, as the darkness closed about them. "Why! thatchap was as 'igh as a 'ouse."
"That's them young Cossars," said his brother, jerking his headallusively--"what all this trouble's about...."
They emerged again to discover more siren-surmounted towers, more redhuts, and then the clustering villas of the outer suburbs. The art ofbill-sticking had lost nothing in the interval, and from countless tallhoardings, from house ends, from palings, and a hundred such points ofvantage came the polychromatic appeals of the great Boomfood election."Caterham," "Boomfood," and "Jack the Giant-killer" again and again andagain, and monstrous caricatures and distortions--a hundred varieties ofmisrepresentations of those great and shining figures they had passed sonearly only a few minutes before....
II.
It had been the purpose of the younger brother to do a very magnificentthing, to celebrate this return to life by a dinner at some restaurantof indisputable quality, a dinner that should be followed by all thatglittering succession of impressions the Music Halls of those days wereso capable of giving. It was a worthy plan to wipe off the moresuperficial stains of the prison house by this display of freeindulgence; but so far as the second item went the plan was changed. Thedinner stood, but there was a desire already more powerful than theappetite for shows, already more efficient in turning the man's mindaway from his grim prepossession with his past than any theatre couldbe, and that was an enormous curiosity and perplexity about thisBoomfood and these Boom children--this new portentous giantry thatseemed to dominate the world. "I 'aven't the 'ang of 'em," he said."They disturve me."
His brother had that fineness of mind that can even set aside acontemplated hospitality. "It's _your_ evening, dear old boy," he said."We'll try to get into the mass meeting at the People's Palace."
And at last the man from prison had the luck to find himself wedged intoa packed multitude and staring from afar at a little brightly litplatform under an organ and a gallery. The organist had been playingsomething that had set boots tramping as the people swarmed in; but thatwas over now.
Hardly had the man from prison settled into place and done his quarrelwith an importunate stranger who elbowed, before Caterham came. Hewalked out of a shadow towards the middle of the platform, the mostinsignificant little pigmy, away there in the distance, a little blackfigure with a pink dab for a face,--in profile one saw his quitedistinctive aquiline nose--a little figure that trailed after it mostinexplicably--a cheer. A cheer it was that began away there and grew andspread. A little spluttering of voices about the platform at first thatsuddenly leapt up into a flame of sound and swept athwart the whole massof humanity within the building and without. How they cheered! Hooray!Hooray!
No one in all those myriads cheered like the man from prison. The tearspoured down his face, and he only stopped cheering at last because thething had choked him. You must have been in prison as long as he beforeyou can understand, or even begin to understand, what it means to a manto let his lungs go in a crowd. (But for all that he did not evenpretend to himself that he knew what all this emotion was about.)Hooray! O God!--Hoo-ray!
And then a sort of silence. Caterham had subsided to a conspicuouspatience, and subordinate and inaudible persons were saying and doingformal and insignificant things. It was like hearing voices through thenoise of leaves in spring. "Wawawawa---" What did it matter? People inthe audience talked to one another. "Wawawawawa---" the thing went on.Would that grey-headed duffer never have done? Interrupting? Of coursethey were interrupting. "Wa, wa, wa, wa---" But shall we hear Caterhamany better?
Meanwhile at any rate there was Caterham to stare at, and one couldstand and study the distant prospect of the great man's features. He waseasy to draw was this man, and already the world had him to study atleisure on lamp chimneys and children's plates, on Anti-Boomfood medalsand Anti-Boomfood flags, on the selvedges of Caterham silks and cottonsand in the linings of Good Old English Caterham hats. He pervades allthe caricature of that time. One sees him as a sailor standing to anold-fashioned gun, a port-fire labelled "New Boomfood Laws" in his hand;while in the sea wallows that huge, ugly, threatening monster,"Boomfood;" or he is _cap-a-pie_ in armour, St. George's cross on shieldand helm, and a cowardly titanic Caliban sitting amidst desecrations atthe mouth of a horrid cave declines his gauntlet of the "New BoomfoodRegulations;" or he comes flying down as Perseus and rescues a chainedand beautiful Andromeda (labelled distinctly about her belt as"Civilisation") from a wallowing waste of sea monster bearing upon itsvarious necks and claws "Irreligion," "Trampling Egotism," "Mechanism,""Monstrosity," and the like. But it was as "Jack the Giant-killer" thatthe popular imagination considered Caterham most correctly cast, and itwas in the vein of a Jack the Giant-killer poster that the man fromprison, enlarged that distant miniature.
The "Wawawawa" came abruptly to an end.
He's done. He's sitting down. Yes! No! Yes! It's Caterham! "Caterham!""Caterham!" And then came the cheers.
It takes a multitude to make such a stillness as followed that disorderof cheering. A man alone in a wilderness;--it's stillness of a sort nodoubt, but he hears himself breathe, he hears himself move, he hears allsorts of things. Here the voice of Caterham was the one single thingheard, a thing very bright and clear, like a little light burning in ablack velvet recess. Hear indeed! One heard him as though he spoke atone's elbow.
It was stupendously effective to the man from prison, that gesticulatinglittle figure in a halo of light, in a halo of rich and swaying sounds;behind it, partially effaced as it were, sat its
supporters on theplatform, and in the foreground was a wide perspective of innumerablebacks and profiles, a vast multitudinous attention. That little figureseemed to have absorbed the substance from them all.
Caterham spoke of our ancient institutions. "Earearear," roared thecrowd. "Ear! ear!" said the man from prison. He spoke of our ancientspirit of order and justice. "Earearear!" roared the crowd. "Ear! Ear!"cried the man from prison, deeply moved. He spoke of the wisdom of ourforefathers, of the slow growth of venerable institutions, of moral andsocial traditions, that fitted our English national characteristics asthe skin fits the hand. "Ear! Ear!" groaned the man from prison, withtears of excitement on his cheeks. And now all these things were to gointo the melting pot. Yes, into the melting pot! Because three men inLondon twenty years ago had seen fit to mix something indescribable in abottle, all the order and sanctity of things--Cries of "No! No!"--Well,if it was not to be so, they must exert themselves, they must saygood-bye to hesitation--Here there came a gust of cheering. They mustsay good-bye to hesitation and half measures.
"We have heard, gentlemen," cried Caterham, "of nettles that becomegiant nettles. At first they are no more than other nettles--littleplants that a firm hand may grasp and wrench away; but if you leavethem--if you leave them, they grow with such a power of poisonousexpansion that at last you must needs have axe and rope, you must needshave danger to life and limb, you must needs have toil and distress--menmay be killed in their felling, men may be killed in their felling---"
There came a stir and interruption, and then the man from prison heardCaterham's voice again, ringing clear and strong: "Learn about Boomfoodfrom Boomfood itself and--" He paused--"_Grasp your nettle before it istoo late!_"
He stopped and stood wiping his lips. "A crystal," cried some one, "acrystal," and then came that same strange swift growth to thunderoustumult, until the whole world seemed cheering....
The man from prison came out of the hall at last, marvellously stirred,and with that in his face that marks those who have seen a vision. Heknew, every one knew; his ideas were no longer vague. He had come backto a world in crisis, to the immediate decision of a stupendous issue.He must play his part in the great conflict like a man--like a free,responsible man. The antagonism presented itself as a picture. On theone hand those easy gigantic mail-clad figures of the morning--one sawthem now in a different light--on the other this little black-cladgesticulating creature under the limelight, that pigmy thing with itsordered flow of melodious persuasion, its little, marvellouslypenetrating voice, John Caterham--"Jack the Giant-killer." They must allunite to "grasp the nettle" before it was "too late."
III.
The tallest and strongest and most regarded of all the children of theFood were the three sons of Cossar. The mile or so of land nearSevenoaks in which their boyhood passed became so trenched, so dug outand twisted about, so covered with sheds and huge working models and allthe play of their developing powers, it was like no other place onearth. And long since it had become too little for the things theysought to do. The eldest son was a mighty schemer of wheeled engines; hehad made himself a sort of giant bicycle that no road in the world hadroom for, no bridge could bear. There it stood, a great thing of wheelsand engines, capable of two hundred and fifty miles an hour, uselesssave that now and then he would mount it and fling himself backwardsand forwards across that cumbered work-yard. He had meant to go aroundthe little world with it; he had made it with that intention, while hewas still no more than a dreaming boy. Now its spokes were rusted deepred like wounds, wherever the enamel had been chipped away.
"You must make a road for it first, Sonnie," Cossar had said, "beforeyou can do that."
So one morning about dawn the young giant and his brothers had set towork to make a road about the world. They seem to have had an inkling ofopposition impending, and they had worked with remarkable vigour. Theworld had discovered them soon enough, driving that road as straight asa flight of a bullet towards the English Channel, already some miles ofit levelled and made and stamped hard. They had been stopped beforemidday by a vast crowd of excited people, owners of land, land agents,local authorities, lawyers, policemen, soldiers even.
"We're making a road," the biggest boy had explained.
"Make a road by all means," said the leading lawyer on the ground, "butplease respect the rights of other people. You have already infringedthe private rights of twenty-seven private proprietors; let alone thespecial privileges and property of an urban district board, nine parishcouncils, a county council, two gasworks, and a railway company...."
"Goodney!" said the elder boy Cossar.
"You will have to stop it."
"But don't you want a nice straight road in the place of all theserotten rutty little lanes?"
"I won't say it wouldn't be advantageous, but--"
"It isn't to be done," said the eldest Cossar boy, picking up his tools.
"Not in this way," said the lawyer, "certainly."
"How is it to be done?"
The leading lawyer's answer had been complicated and vague.
Cossar had come down to see the mischief his children had done, andreproved them severely and laughed enormously and seemed to be extremelyhappy over the affair. "You boys must wait a bit," he shouted up tothem, "before you can do things like that."
"The lawyer told us we must begin by preparing a scheme, and gettingspecial powers and all sorts of rot. Said it would take us years."
"_We'll_ have a scheme before long, little boy," cried Cossar, hands tohis mouth as he shouted, "never fear. For a bit you'd better play aboutand make models of the things you want to do."
They did as he told them like obedient sons.
But for all that the Cossar lads brooded a little.
"It's all very well," said the second to the first, "but I don't alwayswant just to play about and plan, I want to do something _real_, youknow. We didn't come into this world so strong as we are, just to playabout in this messy little bit of ground, you know, and take littlewalks and keep out of the towns"--for by that time they were forbiddenall boroughs and urban districts, "Doing nothing's just wicked. Can't wefind out something the little people _want_ done and do it forthem--just for the fun of doing it?
"Lots of them haven't houses fit to live in," said the second boy,"Let's go and build 'em a house close up to London, that will holdheaps and heaps of them and be ever so comfortable and nice, and let'smake 'em a nice little road to where they all go and do business--nicestraight little road, and make it all as nice as nice. We'll make it allso clean and pretty that they won't any of them be able to live grubbyand beastly like most of them do now. Water enough for them to washwith, we'll have--you know they're so dirty now that nine out of ten oftheir houses haven't even baths in them, the filthy little skunks! Youknow, the ones that have baths spit insults at the ones that haven't,instead of helping them to get them--and call 'em the GreatUnwashed--_-You_ know. We'll alter all that. And we'll make electricitylight and cook and clean up for them, and all. Fancy! They make theirwomen--women who are going to be mothers--crawl about and scrub floors!
"We could make it all beautifully. We could bank up a valley in thatrange of hills over there and make a nice reservoir, and we could make abig place here to generate our electricity and have it all simplylovely. Couldn't we, brother? And then perhaps they'd let us do someother things."
"Yes," said the elder brother, "we could do it _very_ nice for them."
"Then _let's,"_ said the second brother.
"_I_ don't mind," said the elder brother, and looked about for a handytool.
And that led to another dreadful bother.
Agitated multitudes were at them in no time, telling them for a thousandreasons to stop, telling them to stop for no reason at all--babbling,confused, and varied multitudes. The place they were building was toohigh--it couldn't possibly be safe. It was ugly; it interfered with theletting of proper-sized houses in the neighbourhood; it ruined the toneof the neighbourhood; it was unneighbo
urly; it was contrary to the LocalBuilding Regulations; it infringed the right of the local authority tomuddle about with a minute expensive electric supply of its own; itinterfered with the concerns of the local water company.
Local Government Board clerks roused themselves to judicial obstruction.The little lawyer turned up again to represent about a dozen threatenedinterests; local landowners appeared in opposition; people withmysterious claims claimed to be bought off at exorbitant rates; theTrades Unions of all the building trades lifted up collective voices;and a ring of dealers in all sorts of building material became a bar.Extraordinary associations of people with prophetic visions of aesthetichorrors rallied to protect the scenery of the place where they wouldbuild the great house, of the valley where they would bank up the water.These last people were absolutely the worst asses of the lot, the Cossarboys considered. That beautiful house of the Cossar boys was just like awalking-stick thrust into a wasps' nest, in no time.
"I never did!" said the elder boy.
"We can't go on," said the second brother.
"Rotten little beasts they are," said the third of the brothers; "wecan't do _anything!_"
"Even when it's for their own comfort. Such a _nice_ place we'd havemade for them too."
"They seem to spend their silly little lives getting in each other'sway," said the eldest boy, "Rights and laws and regulations andrascalities; it's like a game of spellicans.... Well, anyhow, they'llhave to live in their grubby, dirty, silly little houses for a bitlonger. It's very evident _we_ can't go on with this."
And the Cossar children left that great house unfinished, a mere hole offoundations and the beginning of a wall, and sulked back to their bigenclosure. After a time the hole was filled with water and withstagnation and weeds, and vermin, and the Food, either dropped there bythe sons of Cossar or blowing thither as dust, set growth going in itsusual fashion. Water voles came out over the country and did infinitehavoc, and one day a farmer caught his pigs drinking there, andinstantly and with great presence of mind--for he knew: of the great hogof Oakham--slew them all. And from that deep pool it was the mosquitoescame, quite terrible mosquitoes, whose only virtue was that the sons ofCossar, after being bitten for a little, could stand the thing nolonger, but chose a moonlight night when law and order were abed anddrained the water clean away into the river by Brook.
But they left the big weeds and the big water voles and all sorts of bigundesirable things still living and breeding on the site they hadchosen--the site on which the fair great house of the little peoplemight have towered to heaven ...
IV.
That had been in the boyhood of the Sons, but now they were nearly men,And the chains had been tightening upon them and tightening with everyyear of growth. Each year they grew, and the Food spread and greatthings multiplied, each year the stress and tension rose. The Food hadbeen at first for the great mass of mankind a distant marvel, and nowIt was coming home to every threshold, and threatening, pressing againstand distorting the whole order of life. It blocked this, it overturnedthat; it changed natural products, and by changing natural products itstopped employments and threw men out of work by the hundred thousands;it swept over boundaries and turned the world of trade into a world ofcataclysms: no wonder mankind hated it.
And since it is easier to hate animate than inanimate things, animalsmore than plants, and one's fellow-men more completely than any animals,the fear and trouble engendered by giant nettles and six-foot grassblades, awful insects and tiger-like vermin, grew all into one greatpower of detestation that aimed itself with a simple directness at thatscattered band of great human beings, the Children of the Food. Thathatred had become the central force in political affairs. The old partylines had been traversed and effaced altogether under the insistence ofthese newer issues, and the conflict lay now with the party of thetemporisers, who were for putting little political men to control andregulate the Food, and the party of reaction for whom Caterharn spoke,speaking always with a more sinister ambiguity, crystallising hisintention first in one threatening phrase and then another, now that menmust "prune the bramble growths," now that they must find a "cure forelephantiasis," and at last upon the eve of the election that they must"Grasp the nettle."
One day the three sons of Cossar, who were now no longer boys but men,sat among the masses of their futile work and talked together aftertheir fashion of all these things. They had been working all day at oneof a series of great and complicated trenches their father had bid themmake, and now it was sunset, and they sat in the little garden spacebefore the great house and looked at the world and rested, until thelittle servants within should say their food was ready.
You must figure these mighty forms, forty feet high the least of themwas, reclining on a patch of turf that would have seemed a stubble ofreeds to a common man. One sat up and chipped earth from his huge bootswith an iron girder he grasped in his hand; the second rested on hiselbow; the third whittled a pine tree into shape and made a smell ofresin in the air. They were clothed not in cloth but in under-garmentsof woven rope and outer clothes of felted aluminium wire; they wereshod with timber and iron, and the links and buttons and belts of theirclothing were all of plated steel. The great single-storeyed house theylived in, Egyptian in its massiveness, half built of monstrous blocks ofchalk and half excavated from the living rock of the hill, had a front afull hundred feet in height, and beyond, the chimneys and wheels, thecranes and covers of their work sheds rose marvellously against the sky.Through a circular window in the house there was visible a spout fromwhich some white-hot metal dripped and dripped in measured drops into areceptacle out of sight. The place was enclosed and rudely fortified bymonstrous banks of earth, backed with steel both over the crests of theDowns above and across the dip of the valley. It needed something ofcommon size to mark the nature of the scale. The train that camerattling from Sevenoaks athwart their vision, and presently plunged intothe tunnel out of their sight, looked by contrast with them like somesmall-sized automatic toy.
"They have made all the woods this side of Ightham out of bounds," saidone, "and moved the board that was out by Knockholt two miles and morethis way."
"It is the least they could do," said the youngest, after a pause. "Theyare trying to take the wind out of Caterham's sails."
"It's not enough for that, and--it is almost too much for us," said thethird.
"They are cutting us off from Brother Redwood. Last time I went to himthe red notices had crept a mile in, either way. The road to him alongthe Downs is no more than a narrow lane."
The speaker thought. "What has come to our brother Redwood?"
"Why?" said the eldest brother.
The speaker hacked a bough from his pine. "He was like--as though hewasn't awake. He didn't seem to listen to what I had to say. And he saidsomething of--love."
The youngest tapped his girder on the edge of his iron sole and laughed."Brother Redwood," he said, "has dreams."
Neither spoke for a space. Then the eldest brother said, "This coopingup and cooping up grows more than I can bear. At last, I believe, theywill draw a line round our boots and tell us to live on that."
The middle brother swept aside a heap of pine boughs with one hand andshifted his attitude. "What they do now is nothing to what they will dowhen Caterham has power."
"If he gets power," said the youngest brother, smiting the ground withhis girder.
"As he will," said the eldest, staring at his feet.
The middle brother ceased his lopping, and his eye went to the greatbanks that sheltered them about. "Then, brothers," he said, "our youthwill be over, and, as Father Redwood said to us long ago, we must quitourselves like men."
"Yes," said the eldest brother; "but what exactly does that mean? Justwhat does it mean--when that day of trouble comes?"
He too glanced at those rude vast suggestions of entrenchment aboutthem, looking not so much at them as through them and over the hills tothe innumerable multitudes beyond. Something of the same sort cam
e intoall their minds--a vision of little people coming out to war, in aflood, the little people, inexhaustible, incessant, malignant....
"They are little," said the youngest brother; "but they have numbersbeyond counting, like the sands of the sea."
"They have arms--they have weapons even, that our brothers in Sunderlandhave made."
"Besides, Brothers, except for vermin, except for little accidents withevil things, what have we seen of killing?"
"I know," said the eldest brother. "For all that--we are what we are.When the day of trouble comes we must do the thing we have to do."
He closed his knife with a snap--the blade was the length of a man--andused his new pine staff to help himself rise. He stood up and turnedtowards the squat grey immensity of the house. The crimson of thesunset caught him as he rose, caught the mail and clasps about his neckand the woven metal of his arms, and to the eyes of his brother itseemed as though he was suddenly suffused with blood ...
As the young giant rose a little black figure became visible to himagainst that western incandescence on the top of the embankment thattowered above the summit of the down. The black limbs waved in ungainlygestures. Something in the fling of the limbs suggested haste to theyoung giant's mind. He waved his pine mast in reply, filled the wholevalley with his vast Hullo! threw a "Something's up" to his brothers,and set off in twenty-foot strides to meet and help his father.
V.
It chanced too that a young man who was not a giant was delivering hissoul about these sons of Cossar just at that same time. He had come overthe hills beyond Sevenoaks, he and his friend, and he it was did thetalking. In the hedge as they came along they had heard a pitifulsquealing, and had intervened to rescue three nestling tits from theattack of a couple of giant ants. That adventure it was had set himtalking.
"Reactionary!" he was saying, as they came within sight of the Cossarencampment. "Who wouldn't be reactionary? Look at that square of ground,that space of God's earth that was once sweet and fair, torn,desecrated, disembowelled! Those sheds! That great wind-wheel! Thatmonstrous wheeled machine! Those dykes! Look at those three monsterssquatting there, plotting some ugly devilment or other! Look--look atall the land!"
His friend glanced at his face. "You have been listening to Caterham,"he said.
"Using my eyes. Looking a little into the peace and order of the past weleave behind. This foul Food is the last shape of the Devil, still setas ever upon the ruin of our world. Think what the world must have beenbefore our days, what it was still when our mothers bore us, and see itnow! Think how these slopes once smiled under the golden harvest, howthe hedges, full of sweet little flowers, parted the modest portion ofthis man from that, how the ruddy farmhouses dotted the land, and thevoice of the church bells from yonder tower stilled the whole world eachSabbath into Sabbath prayer. And now, every year, still more and more ofmonstrous weeds, of monstrous vermin, and these giants growing all aboutus, straddling over us, blundering against all that is subtle and sacredin our world. Why here--Look!"
He pointed, and his friend's eyes followed the line of his white finger.
"One of their footmarks. See! It has smashed itself three feet deep andmore, a pitfall for horse and rider, a trap to the unwary. There is abriar rose smashed to death; there is grass uprooted and a teazlecrushed aside, a farmer's drain pipe snapped and the edge of the pathwaybroken down. Destruction! So they are doing all over the world, all overthe order and decency the world of men has made. Trampling on allthings. Reaction! What else?"
"But--reaction. What do you hope to do?"
"Stop it!" cried the young man from Oxford. "Before it is too late."
"But---"
"It's _not_ impossible," cried the young man from Oxford, with a jumpin his voice. "We want the firm hand; we want the subtle plan, theresolute mind. We have been mealy-mouthed and weak-handed; we havetrifled and temporised and the Food has grown and grown. Yet even now--"
He stopped for a moment. "This is the echo of Caterham," said hisfriend.
"Even now. Even now there is hope--abundant hope, if only we make sureof what we want and what we mean to destroy. The mass of people are withus, much more with us than they were a few years ago; the law is withus, the constitution and order of society, the spirit of the establishedreligions, the customs and habits of mankind are with us--and againstthe Food. Why should we temporise? Why should we lie? We hate it, wedon't want it; why then should we have it? Do you mean to just grizzleand obstruct passively and do nothing--till the sands are out?"
He stopped short and turned about. "Look at that grove of nettles there.In the midst of them are homes--deserted--where once clean families ofsimple men played out their honest lives!
"And there!" he swung round to where the young Cossars muttered to oneanother of their wrongs.
"Look at them! And I know their father, a brute, a sort of brute beastwith an intolerant loud voice, a creature who has ran amuck in our alltoo merciful world for the last thirty years and more. An engineer! Tohim all that we hold dear and sacred is nothing. Nothing! The splendidtraditions of our race and land, the noble institutions, the venerableorder, the broad slow march from precedent to precedent that has madeour English people great and this sunny island free--it is all an idletale, told and done with. Some claptrap about the Future is worth allthese sacred things.... The sort of man who would run a tramway over hismother's grave if he thought that was the cheapest line the tramwaycould take.... And you think to temporise, to make some scheme ofcompromise, that will enable you to live in your way while that--thatmachinery--lives in its. I tell you it is hopeless--hopeless. As wellmake treaties with a tiger! They want things monstrous--we want themsane and sweet. It is one thing or the other."
"But what can you do?"
"Much! All! Stop the Food! They are still scattered, these giants; stillimmature and disunited. Chain them, gag them, muzzle them. At any coststop them. It is their world or ours! Stop the Food. Shut up these menwho make it. Do anything to stop Cossar! You don't seem to remember--onegeneration--only one generation needs holding down, and then--Then wecould level those mounds there, fill up their footsteps, take the uglysirens from our church towers, smash all our elephant guns, and turn ourfaces again to the old order, the ripe old civilisation for which thesoul of man is fitted."
"It's a mighty effort."
"For a mighty end. And if we don't? Don't you see the prospect before usclear as day? Everywhere the giants will increase and multiply;everywhere they will make and scatter the Food. The grass will growgigantic in our fields, the weeds in our hedges, the vermin in thethickets, the rats in the drains. More and more and more. This is only abeginning. The insect world will rise on us, the plant world, the veryfishes in the sea, will swamp and drown our ships. Tremendous growthswill obscure and hide our houses, smother our churches, smash anddestroy all the order of our cities, and we shall become no more than afeeble vermin under the heels of the new race. Mankind will be swampedand drowned in things of its own begetting! And all for nothing! Size!Mere size! Enlargement and _da capo_. Already we go picking our wayamong the first beginnings of the coming time. And all we do is to say'How inconvenient!' To grumble and do nothing. _No_!"
He raised his hand.
"Let them do the thing they have to do! So also will I. I am forReaction--unstinted and fearless Reaction. Unless you mean to take thisFood also, what else is there to do in all the world? We have trifled inthe middle ways too long. You! Trifling in the middle ways is yourhabit, your circle of existence, your space and time. So, not I! I amagainst the Food, with all my strength and purpose against the Food."
He turned on his companion's grunt of dissent. "Where are you?"
"It's a complicated business---"
"Oh!--Driftwood!" said the young man from Oxford, very bitterly, with afling of all his limbs. "The middle way is nothingness. It is one thingor the other. Eat or destroy. Eat or destroy! What else is there todo?"