John Galsworthy

“ A hundred feet up, they move with silent zest, helping to make the little whitewashed spaces safe, to hold—themselves; helping to make thick the walls, that they may hear nothing, and their own moaning may be smothered; helping to join stone to stone, and fill the cracks between, that no creature, however small, may come to share their solitude; helping to make the window-spaces high above their reach, that from them they shall look at—nothing; helping to hide themselves away out of the minds of all who have not sinned against man’s justice ”

“ And if, by unhappy chance, in their parks you find yourself alone, lie neither on your back, for then you will see the quiet sunlight on the leaves, the quiet clouds, and birds with solitude within their wings; nor on your face, or you will catch the savour of the earth, and a faint hum, and for a minute live the life of tiny things that straddle in the trodden grasses. Fly from such sights and scents and sounds, for fear lest terror for your fate should visit you; fly to the streets; fly to your neighbours’ houses ”

“ To yourself your sight seems good, such is your pleasant thought. Since you cannot even see this hedge around you, how can there be anything the other side? The ache beneath your corsets in the spring is all you are ever to know of what there is beyond. And no one is to blame for this—you least of all.
It was settled, long before the well-fed dullard’s kiss from which you sprang. Forces have worked, in dim, inexorable progress, from the remotest time till they have bred you, little blind creature, to be the masterpiece of their creation. ”

“ Yes, yes, my dear sir; progress—you use the word most glibly, and we all of us admit that it is necessary; but if you suppose that we are going to progress by trusting human nature—well, pardon me, but is there any precedent? One could trust oneself, no doubt, because of one’s sense of duty to one’s deity, but—men at large! If you think a minute you will see that they have practically no sense of duty or responsibility at all. ”

“ But suddenly in a pair of greenish eyes{101} and full lips sharpened at their corners, behind the fading paint and powder on a face, one could see the huntress—the soul as of a stealing cat, waiting to flesh its claws in what it could, driven by some deep, insatiable instinct. This one too had known sport; she had loved to spring and bring down the prey just as we who brought her here had loved to hunt her. Nature had put sport into her heart and into ours ”

“ For nothing is so dreadful to this man as solitude. In solitude he hears the voice of Her he cannot understand: “Ah! the baby that you are, my baby man!” And he sees Her smile, the ironic smile of evening over land and sea. In solitude he feels so small, so very small; for solitude is silence and silence irony, and irony he cannot bear, not even that of Her who gave him birth. ”

“ In the unmoving fish-white face his dead eyes, straining in their sockets, began to glow again with that queer yellow glare, as though alive with the spirit that dwells where light has never come; the spirit that possesses those dim multitudes who know no influence but that of force, no reason, and no gentleness, since these have never come their way; who know only that they must keep that little which they have, since that which they have not is so great and so desirable ”

“ Resented while you gathered being; brought into the world with the most distinguished skill; remembered by your mother when the whim came to her; taught to believe that life consists in caring for your clean, well-nourished body, and your manner that nothing usual can disturb; taught to regard Society as the little ring of men and women that you see, and to feel your only business is to know the next thing that you want and get it given you—You have never had a chance! ”

“ If you were a man of means, that is of means sufficient to enjoy the privileges of the Law, would you seriously offer to exert yourself to upset your conception of your country’s moral worth, and lose secretly a little of your self-esteem, that you might extend those privileges to such of your fellow-citizens as could not pay for them? Would you not rather feel: My own position is secure; this idea is only sentiment, mere abstract justice! If they want it they must pay for it! ”

“ And so, from day to day, from week to week, and year to year, according to the number of the years set opposite the name that once was his.
The workshops of the House of Silence hear no sound but that of work; the men in yellow, with arrows marked on them, are busy with a fearful zest. Their hands{180} and feet and eyes move all the time; their lips are still. And on these lips, from mouth to mouth is seen no smile—so perfect is the order.
And their faces have one look, as though they said: We care for nothing—nothing; we hope for nothing—nothing; we work like this for fear of horror! ”

“ Through loneliness and silence we will destroy your minds that we may form fresh minds within the bodies of which we take such care. In silence and in solitude is no real suffering—so we believe, for we ourselves have never passed one single silent day, one single day alone! ”

“ You take commands from no other creature; your heart gives you your commands, forms your desires, your wishes, your opinions, and passes them between your lips. From your heart well-up the springs that feed the river of your conduct; but your heart is a stagnant pool that has never seen the sun. Each year when April comes, and the earth smells new, you have an odd aching underneath your corsets. What is it for? You have a husband, or a lover, or both, or neither, whichever suits you best ”

“ On the black beach, beneath a black sky with its few stars, the sea wind blows a troubling savour from the west, as it did when man was not yet on the earth. It sings the same troubling song as when the first man heard it. And by this black beach man is collected in his hundreds, trying with all his might to take his holiday. ”

“ You are the heroine of the farce, but no one smiles at you, for you are tragic, the most tragic figure in the world. No fault of yours that ears and eyes and heart and voice are atrophied so that you have no longer spirit of your own! ”

“ You make the fundamental error of overtrusting human nature. Believe me, if you lived here, and saw the machinery of things as closely as I see it, and worked, as I do, in this powerful atmosphere, and knew the worry and the difficulty of changing anything, and the thanklessness of the public that one works for, you would soon get a very different notion of the necessity of what you call reform. You must bear in mind the fact that the State has carefully{173} considered what is best for all, and that I am only an official of the State. ”

“ If I once begin to see what is happening before my eyes all day and every day, I shall either feel uncomfortable and be compelled to give time and sympathy and money, and do harm into the bargain, destroying people’s independence ”

“ Above that road, below it, and on either hand, are the million things and beings that you cannot see; all that is organic in the world, all that is living and creating, all that is striving to be free. ”

“ For, sitting there in your seven hundred carriages, you are blind—in heart, and soul, and voice, and walk; the blindest creature in the world. Never for one minute of your life have you thought, or done, or spoken for yourself. ”

“ From the top of the plume, torn from a dying bird, or the flowers, made at an insufficient wage, that decorate your head, to the sole of the shoe that cramps your foot, you are decked out with solemn care; a year of labour has been sewn into your garments and forged into your rings—you are a breathing triumph! ”

“ The cut of your gown is perfect, the dressing of your hair the latest, the trimming of your hat is later still; your trick of speech the very thing; you droop your eyelids to the life; you have not too much powder; it is a lesson in grace to see you hold your parasol. ”

“ Well aware that his was an occupation tending to the constriction of the mind, he had early made a practice of keeping it elastic by reading, argument, and a habit of presenting every case in every light, before pronouncing judgment; indeed, he would often take another person’s point of view, and, having improved on it, show that it was not really what the person thought it. Only when he was contradicted did a somewhat ugly look come into his eyes, and a peculiar smile contract his straight lips between his little fair moustache and his little, carefully kept, fair beard. ”

“ There you shall work—seeing, hearing, feeling nothing, without responsibility, without initiative, bereft of human contact with your kind. We shall see that you are clean, and have a bare sufficiency to eat, we shall inspect and weigh your bodies, and clothe them with a bare sufficiency of clothes by day and night; divine service you shall have; your work shall be apportioned to your strength. Corporal punishment we shall very seldom use. Lest you should give us trouble, and contaminate each other, you shall be silent, and, as far as possible, alone. You sinned against Society ”

“ Public Opinion is itself secure in the enjoyment of the rights and privileges granted by the law, and it has decided by a simple sacrifice to conserve the moral fame of all. There must—it reasons—be a sacrifice; then let us sacrifice those without the means to pay! It is an accident that they, in their thousands, are not included in ourselves ”

“ Their quick dull stare fastens on him who comes to watch their silence; and all their eyes, curious, resentful, furtive, have in the depths of them the same defiant meaning, as though they saw in their visitor the world out of which they have been thrown, the millions of the free, the millions not alone all day and every day, the millions who can talk ”

“ These dun familiars of the wood were very shy, clinging to the deepest thickets, treading with gentle steps, invisible as spirits, and ever trying to break back. Now and then, leaping forward with hindquarters higher than its shoulders, one of them would face the line of beaters, and then would arise the strangest noises above the customary sounds and tappings—cries of fierce resentment that such fine “game” should thus escape the guns. ”

“ And for that moment he seemed comforted by this thought that there were thousands of other working creatures, on whose shoulders sat the grinning cat of mortal illness, all staring with him at utter emptiness—thousands of other working creatures who were dying because fear had made them work too long. ”

“ They sat at right angles at the breakfast table, and when they glanced up at each other’s cheeks their looks were kindly and affectionate. “You are a comfort to me, my dear, and I am a comfort to you,” those glances said.
Her cheek, in fact, was firm, and round, and fresh, and its strong cheekbone mounted almost to the little dark niche of her grey eye. Her hair, which had a sheen as though the sun were always falling on it, seemed to caress the top curve of her clean pink ear. There was just the suspicion of a chin beneath her rounded jaw. His cheek was not so strong and moulded ”

“ It would feel that, in granting what you, the People, in your dumbness and short sight might be tempted to think was common justice, it would be sacrificing the substance of morals to the shadow. The immorality to which you and your like{249} under the present law are, and ever will be, forced, need never lie open to the light of day, never become a matter of statistics, and offend the Public Eye. What is not a matter of statistics can do no damage to the country’s morals or the country’s name. ”

“ And Nature, recognising this, had used him a hundred thousand times, weeding him out from among his more irregular and trustful fellows, and piling him in layers, one on another, till she had built out of him in every division of the State, temples of Power. Two qualifications alone had she exacted; that he should not be trustful, and that he should be content to lie beneath the layer above him, until he should come in time to be that upper layer himself. ”

“ If she refuses to come to you unmarried—and you can hardly blame her—you will probably be driven, like most men in your position, to get what comfort you can from women who are like your wife. Society, of course, condemns these women, men of heart regard them with compassion, men of science with dismay. They breed canker in the nation ”

“ To see him lie there dead in the brown-grey twilight of the trees would give one a strange pleasure—a feeling such as some casual love affair will give a man, the pleasure of a primitive virility expressed—but to watch him disappear into the earth would irritate, for he had got his death, and, dead within the earth, he would not do one any sort of credit.{97} Nor was it nice to think that he was dying slowly, so one forbore to think. ”

“ And when it is your holiday, and time is all your own, be warned! The lot of those few left among you who are forced to live alone—on the sea, with the sheep of the green hills, guarding the trim wildness of your woods, turning the lonely soil{144}—may for a moment seem desirable. ”

“ At these times he was almost irritable, and would say: “Mistake for a man to marry, depend on it—narrows his life.” And suddenly one day he would know what he wanted, and, under pretext perhaps of two days’ sport, would go to Paris. The fact accomplished, of irregularity, that he would not have committed in England for the world—was of advantage to his soul, and he would return, more regular than ever. ”

“ If all those goodly coverings that contain you could be taken off, what should we find within the last and inmost shell—a little soul that has lost its power of speculation. A soul that was born in you a bird and has become a creeping thing ”

“ For some reason which we cannot tell, you had but little social instinct at the start; that little social instinct soon decayed. Therefore, through bitter brooding and eternal silence, through horror of{182} your lonely cells, and certainty that you are lost—no good, no mortal good to man or thing—you shall emerge cleansed of all social instinct. We are humane and scientific, we have outgrown the barbarous theories of old-fashioned law. We act for our protection and for your good. We believe in reformation. We are no torturers. ”

“ By no means think that this great principle of payment is confined merely to divorce; it underlies all justice in a greater or a less degree. It is ‘money makes the mare to go!’ It is money that dictates the measure of justice and its methods. But this is so mingled with the essence of our lives that we do not even notice it. Why, you could hardly find a man who, if you went to him in private and put your case, would not say at once that you were hardly used! To{251} the Law you cannot go privately; and the Law is the guardian of all justice. ”