Chapter 8

“I wish,” he said, “that you hadn’t that peculiar, excitable way of talking; you speak as if everything _mattered_ so tremendously. Yes,” he continued, “we live for ever, unless, of course, we get broken. That happens sometimes. I mean that we may fall over a high place or bump on something, and snap ourselves. You see, we’re just a little brittle still—some remnant, I suppose, of the Old Age germ—and we have to be careful. In fact,” he continued, “I don’t mind saying that accidents of this sort were the most distressing feature of our civilisation till we took steps to cut out all accidents. We forbid all street cars, street traffic, aeroplanes, and so on. The risks of your time,” he said, with a shiver of his asbestos clothes, “must have been awful.”

“They were,” I answered, with a new kind of pride in my generation that I had never felt before, “but we thought it part of the duty of brave people to—”

“Yes, yes,” said the Man in Asbestos impatiently, “please don’t get excited. I know what you mean. It was quite irrational.”

We sat silent for a long time. I looked about me at the crumbling buildings, the monotone, unchanging sky, and the dreary, empty street. Here, then, was the fruit of the Conquest, here was the elimination of work, the end of hunger and of cold, the cessation of the hard struggle, the downfall of change and death—nay, the very millennium of happiness. And yet, somehow, there seemed something wrong with it all. I pondered, then I put two or three rapid questions, hardly waiting to reflect upon the answers.

“Is there any war now?”

“Done with centuries ago. They took to settling international disputes with a slot machine. After that all foreign dealings were given up. Why have them? Everybody thinks foreigners awful.”

“Are there any newspapers now?”

“Newspapers! What on earth would we want them for? If we should need them at any time there are thousands of old ones piled up. But what is in them, anyway; only things that _happen_, wars and accidents and work and death. When these went newspapers went too. Listen,” continued the Man in Asbestos, “you seem to have been something of a social reformer, and yet you don’t understand the new life at all. You don’t understand how completely all our burdens have disappeared. Look at it this way. How used your people to spend all the early part of their lives?”

“Why,” I said, “our first fifteen years or so were spent in getting education.”

“Exactly,” he answered; “now notice how we improved on all that. Education in our day is done by surgery. Strange that in your time nobody realised that education was simply a surgical operation. You hadn’t the sense to see that what you really did was to slowly remodel, curve and convolute the inside of the brain by a long and painful mental operation. Everything learned was reproduced in a physical difference to the brain. You knew that, but you didn’t see the full consequences. Then came the invention of surgical education—the simple system of opening the side of the skull and engrafting into it a piece of prepared brain. At first, of course, they had to use, I suppose, the brains of dead people, and that was ghastly”—here the Man in Asbestos shuddered like a leaf—“but very soon they found how to make moulds that did just as well. After that it was a mere nothing; an operation of a few minutes would suffice to let in poetry or foreign languages or history or anything else that one cared to have. Here, for instance,” he added, pushing back the hair at the side of his head and showing a scar beneath it, “is the mark where I had my spherical trigonometry let in. That was, I admit, rather painful, but other things, such as English poetry or history, can be inserted absolutely without the least suffering. When I think of your painful, barbarous methods of education through the ear, I shudder at it. Oddly enough, we have found lately that for a great many things there is no need to use the head. We lodge them—things like philosophy and metaphysics, and so on—in what used to be the digestive apparatus. They fill it admirably.”

He paused a moment. Then went on:

“Well, then, to continue, what used to occupy your time and effort after your education?”

“Why,” I said, “one had, of course, to work, and then, to tell the truth, a great part of one’s time and feeling was devoted toward the other sex, towards falling in love and finding some woman to share one’s life.”

“Ah,” said the Man in Asbestos, with real interest. “I’ve heard about your arrangements with the women, but never quite understood them. Tell me; you say you selected some woman?”

“Yes.”

“And she became what you called your wife?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And you worked for her?” asked the Man in Asbestos in astonishment.

“Yes.”

“And she did not work?”

“No,” I answered, “of course not.”

“And half of what you had was hers?”

“Yes.”

“And she had the right to live in your house and use your things?”

“Of course,” I answered.

“How dreadful!” said the Man in Asbestos. “I hadn’t realised the horrors of your age till now.”

He sat shivering slightly, with the same timid look in his face as before.

Then it suddenly struck me that of the figures on the street, all had looked alike.

“Tell me,” I said, “are there no women now? Are they gone too?”

“Oh, no,” answered the Man in Asbestos, “they’re here just the same. Some of those are women. Only, you see, everything has been changed now. It all came as part of their great revolt, their desire to be like the men. Had that begun in your time?”

“Only a little.” I answered; “they were beginning to ask for votes and equality.”

“That’s it,” said my acquaintance, “I couldn’t think of the word. Your women, I believe, were something awful, were they not? Covered with feathers and skins and dazzling colours made of dead things all over them? And they laughed, did they not, and had foolish teeth, and at any moment they could inveigle you into one of those contracts! Ugh!”

He shuddered.

“Asbestos,” I said (I knew no other name to call him), as I turned on him in wrath, “Asbestos, do you think that those jelly-bag Equalities out on the street there, with their ash-barrel suits, can be compared for one moment with our unredeemed, unreformed, heaven-created, hobble-skirted women of the twentieth century?”

Then, suddenly, another thought flashed into my mind—

“The children,” I said, “where are the children? Are there any?”

“Children,” he said, “no! I have never heard of there being any such things for at least a century. Horrible little hobgoblins they must have been! Great big faces, and cried constantly! And _grew_, did they not? Like funguses! I believe they were longer each year than they had been the last, and—”

I rose.

“Asbestos!” I said, “this, then, is your coming Civilisation, your millennium. This dull, dead thing, with the work and the burden gone out of life, and with them all the joy and sweetness of it. For the old struggle—mere stagnation, and in place of danger and death, the dull monotony of security and the horror of an unending decay! Give me back,” I cried, and I flung wide my arms to the dull air, “the old life of danger and stress, with its hard toil and its bitter chances, and its heartbreaks. I see its value! I know its worth! Give me no rest,” I cried aloud—

“Yes, but give a rest to the rest of the corridor!” cried an angered voice that broke in upon my exultation.

Suddenly my sleep had gone.

I was back again in the room of my hotel, with the hum of the wicked, busy old world all about me, and loud in my ears the voice of the indignant man across the corridor.

“Quit your blatting, you infernal blatherskite,” he was calling. “Come down to earth.”

I came.