94 



The Revlvw of Reviews. 



July 1, 1906. 



See? So I may have to clear out of Clayton for 

 good and all." 



III. 



That made Parload put down the opera-glass and 

 look at me. 



■• It's a bad time to change just now," he said, 

 after a little pause. 



Rawdon had said as much, in a less agreeable 

 tone. 



But with Parload I felt always a disposition to 

 the heroic note. '• I"m tired,' I said, " of humdrum 

 drudgery for other men. One may as well starve 

 one's body out of a place as starve one's soul in 

 one." 



•" I don't know about that altogether, " began Par- 

 load, slowly. 



And with that we began one of our interminable 

 conversations, one of those long, wandering, in- 

 tensely generalised, diffusely personal talks that will 

 be dear to the hearts of intelligent youths until the 

 world comes to an end. 



It would be an incredible feat of memory for me 

 now to recall all that meandering haze of talk; 

 indeed, I recall scarcely any of it, though its cir- 

 cumstances and atmosphere stand out, a sharp, 

 clear picture in my mind. I posed after my man- 

 ner, and behaved very foolishly, no doubt, a 

 wounded, smarting egotist, and Parload played his 

 part of the philosopher preoccupied with the deeps. 

 We were presently abroad, walking through the 

 warm summers night and talking all the more 

 freely for that. But one thing that I said I can 

 reaiDember. " I wish at times," said I, with a 

 gesture at the heavens, •■ that comet of yours or 

 some such thing would indeed strike this world and 

 wipe us all away — strikes, wars, tumults, loves, 

 jealousies, and all the wretchedness of life !" 



"Ah I" said Parload, and the thought seemed to 

 hang about him. 



•■ It could only add to the miseries of life," he 

 said irrelevantly, when presently I was discoursing 

 of other things. 

 "What would?" 



■■ Collision with a comet. It would onlv throw 

 things back. It w-ould only make what was left of 

 life more sa\age than it is at present." 



•' But why should anytliiiig be left of life ?"' said 



That was our style, you know, and meanwhile we 

 walked together up the narrow street outside his 

 lodging, up the stepway and the lanes toward Clay- 

 ton Crest and the highroad. 



We crossed a longer street, up which a clum.<;y 

 steam-tram, vomiting smoke and sparks, made its 

 clangorous way, and adown which one saw the 

 greasy brilliance of shop-fronts and the naphtha 

 flare of hawkers dripping fire into the night. A hazy 

 movement of people swayed along that road, and 

 we heard the voice of an itinerant preacher from 



a waste place between the houses. You cannot see 

 these things as I can see them, nor can you figure 

 — unless you know the pictures that great artist 

 Hyde has left the world — the effect of the great 

 hoarding by which we passed, lit below by a gas- 

 lamp and towering up to a sudden sharp black edge 

 against the pallid sky. 



Those hoardings '. They were the brightest- 

 coloured tilings in all that vanished world. Upon 

 them, in successive layers of paste and paper, all 

 the rough enterprises of that time joined in 

 chromatic discord — pill-venders and preachers, 

 theatres and charities, mari-ellous soaps and as- 

 tonishing pickles, typewriting machines and sewing 

 machines, mingled in a sort of visualised clamour. 

 And passing that there was a muddy lane of cinders, 

 a lane without a light, that used its many puddles 

 to borrow a star or so from the sky. We splashed 

 along unheeding as we talked. Then across the 

 allotments, a wilderness of cabbages and evil-look- 

 ing sheds, past a gaunt abandoned factory, and so to- 

 the highroad. The highroad ascended in a curve 

 past a few dwellings and a beerhouse or so, and 

 round until all the valley in which four industrial 

 tOAvns lay crowded and confluent was overlooked. 



I will admit that with the twilight there came a 

 spell of weird magnificence over all that land, and 

 brooded on it until da^^Tl. The horrible meanness 

 of its details was veiled — the hutches that were 

 homes, the bristling multitudes of chimneys, the ugly 

 patches of unwilling vegetation amidst the make- 

 shift fences of barrel-stave and wire. The rusty 

 scars that framed the opposite ridges where the iron 

 ore was taken, and the barren mountains of slag 

 from the blast-furnaces, were veiled; the reek and 

 boiling smoke and dust from foundry, pot-bank and 

 furnace were transfigured and assimiliated bv the 

 night. The dust-laden atmosphere that was a grey 

 oppression through the day became at sundown a 

 myster}' of deep translucejit colours, of blues and 

 purples, of sombre and vivid reds, of strange, bright 

 clearnesses of green and yellow athwart the dark- 

 ling sky. Eacfi upstart furnace, when its monarch 

 sun had gone, crowned itself with flames ; the dark 

 cinder-heaps began to glow with quivering fires and 

 each pot-bank also squatted rebellious in a volcanic 

 coronet of light. The empire of the day broke into 

 a thousand feudal baronies of burning coal. The 

 minor streets across the vallev picked themselves 

 out with gas-lamps of faint yellow, that brightened 

 and mingled at all the principal squares and cross- 

 ings with the greenish pallor of incandescent 

 mantles and the high, cold glare of the electric arc. 

 The interlacing railwa\-s lifted bright signal-boxes 

 over their intersections, and signal stars of red and 

 green in rectangular constellations. The trains be- 

 came fien' serpents breathing a lurid fire. 



Moreover, high overhead, like things put out of 

 reach and near forgotten, Parload had rediscovered 



