CHESTERTON-THE TRENDEDOUS TRIFLES - XXXII The Travellers in State
A railway station is an admirable place, although Ruskin did not
think so; he did not think so because he himself was even more
modern than the railway station. He did not think so because
he was himself feverish, irritable, and snorting like an engine.
He could not value the ancient silence of the railway station.
"In a railway station," he said, "you are in a hurry,
and therefore, miserable"; but you need not be either unless
you are as modern as Ruskin. The true philosopher does not
think of coming just in time for his train except as a bet
or a joke.
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to be
late for the one before. Do this, and you will find in a railway
station much of the quietude and consolation of a cathedral.
It has many of the characteristics of a great ecclesiastical building;
it has vast arches, void spaces, coloured lights, and, above all,
it has recurrence or ritual. It is dedicated to the celebration
of water and fire the two prime elements of all human ceremonial.
Lastly, a station resembles the old religions rather than the new
religions in this point, that people go there. In connection
with this it should also be remembered that all popular places,
all sites, actually used by the people, tend to retain the best
routine of antiquity very much more than any localities or machines
used by any privileged class. Things are not altered so quickly
or completely by common people as they are by fashionable people.
Ruskin could have found more memories of the Middle Ages in the
Underground Railway than in the grand hotels outside the stations.
The great palaces of pleasure which the rich build in London all have
brazen and vulgar names. Their names are either snobbish, like the
Hotel Cecil, or (worse still) cosmopolitan like the Hotel Metropole.
But when I go in a third-class carriage from the nearest circle station
to Battersea to the nearest circle station to the DAILY NEWS, the names
of the stations are one long litany of solemn and saintly memories.
Leaving Victoria I come to a park belonging especially to St. James
the Apostle; thence I go to Westminster Bridge, whose very name alludes
to the awful Abbey; Charing Cross holds up the symbol of Christendom;
the next station is called a Temple; and Blackfriars remembers
the mediaeval dream of a Brotherhood.
If you wish to find the past preserved, follow the million
feet of the crowd. At the worst the uneducated only wear
down old things by sheer walking. But the educated kick them
down out of sheer culture.
I feel all this profoundly as I wander about the empty
railway station, where I have no business of any kind.
I have extracted a vast number of chocolates from automatic machines;
I have obtained cigarettes, toffee, scent, and other things
that I dislike by the same machinery; I have weighed myself,
with sublime results; and this sense, not only of the
healthiness of popular things, but of their essential
antiquity and permanence, is still in possession of my mind.
I wander up to the bookstall, and my faith survives even
the wild spectacle of modern literature and journalism.
Even in the crudest and most clamorous aspects of the newspaper
world I still prefer the popular to the proud and fastidious.
If I had to choose between taking in the DAILY MAIL and taking
in the TIMES (the dilemma reminds one of a nightmare), I should
certainly cry out with the whole of my being for the DAILY MAIL.
Even mere bigness preached in a frivolous way is not so
irritating as mere meanness preached in a big and solemn way.
People buy the DAILY MAIL, but they do not believe in it.
They do believe in the TIMES, and (apparently) they do not buy it.
But the more the output of paper upon the modern world is
actually studied, the more it will be found to be in all its
essentials ancient and human, like the name of Charing Cross.
Linger for two or three hours at a station bookstall (as I am doing),
and you will find that it gradually takes on the grandeur
and historic allusiveness of the Vatican or Bodleian Library.
The novelty is all superficial; the tradition is all interior
and profound. The DAILY MAIL has new editions, but never a new idea.
Everything in a newspaper that is not the old human love
of altar or fatherland is the old human love of gossip.
Modern writers have often made game of the old chronicles
because they chiefly record accidents and prodigies; a church
struck by lightning, or a calf with six legs. They do not seem
to realise that this old barbaric history is the same as new
democratic journalism. It is not that the savage chronicle has
disappeared. It is merely that the savage chronicle now appears
every morning.
As I moved thus mildly and vaguely in front of the bookstall, my eye
caught a sudden and scarlet title that for the moment staggered me.
On the outside of a book I saw written in large letters, "Get On
or Get Out." The title of the book recalled to me with a sudden
revolt and reaction all that does seem unquestionably new and nasty;
it reminded me that there was in the world of to-day that utterly
idiotic thing, a worship of success; a thing that only means surpassing
anybody in anything; a thing that may mean being the most successful
person in running away from a battle; a thing that may mean being
the most successfully sleepy of the whole row of sleeping men.
When I saw those words the silence and sanctity of the railway station
were for the moment shadowed. Here, I thought, there is at any rate
something anarchic and violent and vile. This title, at any rate,
means the most disgusting individualism of this individualistic world.
In the fury of my bitterness and passion I actually bought the book,
thereby ensuring that my enemy would get some of my money. I opened it
prepared to find some brutality, some blasphemy, which would really be
an exception to the general silence and sanctity of the railway station.
I was prepared to find something in the book that was as infamous
as its title.
I was disappointed. There was nothing at all corresponding
to the furious decisiveness of the remarks on the cover.
After reading it carefully I could not discover whether
I was really to get on or to get out; but I had a vague
feeling that I should prefer to get out. A considerable part
of the book, particularly towards the end, was concerned
with a detailed description of the life of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Undoubtedly Napoleon got on. He also got out. But I could not
discover in any way how the details of his life given here were
supposed to help a person aiming at success. One anecdote described
how Napoleon always wiped his pen on his knee-breeches. I suppose
the moral is: always wipe your pen on your knee-breeches, and you
will win the battle of Wagram. Another story told that he let loose
a gazelle among the ladies of his Court. Clearly the brutal practical
inference is--loose a gazelle among the ladies of your acquaintance,
and you will be Emperor of the French. Get on with a gazelle or get
out. The book entirely reconciled me to the soft twilight of the
station. Then I suddenly saw that there was a symbolic division
which might be paralleled from biology. Brave men are vertebrates;
they have their softness on the surface and their toughness
in the middle. But these modern cowards are all crustaceans;
their hardness is all on the cover and their softness is inside.
But the softness is there; everything in this twilight
temple is soft.
Every now and then I have introduced into my essays an element
of truth. Things that really happened have been mentioned,
such as meeting President Kruger or being thrown out of a cab.
What I have now to relate really happened; yet there was no
element in it of practical politics or of personal danger.
It was simply a quiet conversation which I had with another man.
But that quiet conversation was by far the most terrible thing
that has ever happened to me in my life. It happened so long
ago that I cannot be certain of the exact words of the dialogue,
only of its main questions and answers; but there is one sentence
in it for which I can answer absolutely and word for word.
It was a sentence so awful that I could not forget it if I would.
It was the last sentence spoken; and it was not spoken to me.
The thing befell me in the days when I was at an art school.
An art school is different from almost all other schools or
colleges in this respect: that, being of new and crude creation
and of lax discipline, it presents a specially strong contrast
between the industrious and the idle. People at an art school
either do an atrocious amount of work or do no work at all.
I belonged, along with other charming people, to the latter class;
and this threw me often into the society of men who were very
different from myself, and who were idle for reasons very different
from mine. I was idle because I was very much occupied;
I was engaged about that time in discovering, to my own
extreme and lasting astonishment, that I was not an atheist.
But there were others also at loose ends who were engaged in
discovering what Carlyle called (I think with needless delicacy)
the fact that ginger is hot in the mouth.
I value that time, in short, because it made me acquainted with a good
representative number of blackguards. In this connection there are
two very curious things which the critic of human life may observe.
The first is the fact that there is one real difference between men
and women; that women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk
in threes. The second is that when you find (as you often do)
three young cads and idiots going about together and getting drunk
together every day you generally find that one of the three cads and
idiots is (for some extraordinary reason) not a cad and not an idiot.
In these small groups devoted to a drivelling dissipation there is
almost always one man who seems to have condescended to his company;
one man who, while he can talk a foul triviality with his fellows,
can also talk politics with a Socialist, or philosophy with a Catholic.
It was just such a man whom I came to know well. It was strange,
perhaps, that he liked his dirty, drunken society; it was stranger
still, perhaps, that he liked my society. For hours of the day he
would talk with me about Milton or Gothic architecture; for hours
of the night he would go where I have no wish to follow him, even
in speculation. He was a man with a long, ironical face, and close
and red hair; he was by class a gentleman, and could walk like one,
but preferred, for some reason, to walk like a groom carrying two
pails. He looked like a sort of Super-jockey; as if some archangel
had gone on the Turf. And I shall never forget the half-hour in
which he and I argued about real things for the first and the last
time.
. . . . .
Along the front of the big building of which our school
was a part ran a huge slope of stone steps, higher, I think,
than those that lead up to St. Paul's Cathedral. On a black
wintry evening he and I were wandering on these cold heights,
which seemed as dreary as a pyramid under the stars.
The one thing visible below us in the blackness was a burning
and blowing fire; for some gardener (I suppose) was burning
something in the grounds, and from time to time the red sparks went
whirling past us like a swarm of scarlet insects in the dark.
Above us also it was gloom; but if one stared long enough
at that upper darkness, one saw vertical stripes of grey
in the black and then became conscious of the colossal facade
of the Doric building, phantasmal, yet filling the sky, as if
Heaven were still filled with the gigantic ghost of Paganism.
. . . . .
The man asked me abruptly why I was becoming orthodox. Until he said
it, I really had not known that I was; but the moment he had said it
I knew it to be literally true. And the process had been so long and
full that I answered him at once out of existing stores of explanation.
"I am becoming orthodox," I said, "because I have come, rightly or
wrongly, after stretching my brain till it bursts, to the old belief
that heresy is worse even than sin. An error is more menacing than a
crime, for an error begets crimes. An Imperialist is worse than a
pirate. For an Imperialist keeps a school for pirates; he teaches
piracy disinterestedly and without an adequate salary.
A Free Lover is worse than a profligate. For a profligate is
serious and reckless even in his shortest love; while a Free Lover
is cautious and irresponsible even in his longest devotion.
I hate modern doubt because it is dangerous."
"You mean dangerous to morality," he said in a voice of wonderful
gentleness. "I expect you are right. But why do you care about morality?"
I glanced at his face quickly. He had thrust out his neck as he had
a trick of doing; and so brought his face abruptly into the light
of the bonfire from below, like a face in the footlights.
His long chin and high cheek-bones were lit up infernally from underneath;
so that he looked like a fiend staring down into the flaming pit.
I had an unmeaning sense of being tempted in a wilderness;
and even as I paused a burst of red sparks broke past.
"Aren't those sparks splendid?" I said.
"Yes," he replied.
"That is all that I ask you to admit," said I. "Give me
those few red specks and I will deduce Christian morality.
Once I thought like you, that one's pleasure in a flying
spark was a thing that could come and go with that spark.
Once I thought that the delight was as free as the fire.
Once I thought that red star we see was alone in space.
But now I know that the red star is only on the apex
of an invisible pyramid of virtues. That red fire is only
the flower on a stalk of living habits, which you cannot see.
Only because your mother made you say 'Thank you' for a bun
are you now able to thank Nature or chaos for those red stars
of an instant or for the white stars of all time. Only because you
were humble before fireworks on the fifth of November do you now
enjoy any fireworks that you chance to see. You only like them
being red because you were told about the blood of the martyrs;
you only like them being bright because brightness is a glory.
That flame flowered out of virtues, and it will fade with virtues.
Seduce a woman, and that spark will be less bright.
Shed blood, and that spark will be less red. Be really bad,
and they will be to you like the spots on a wall-paper."
He had a horrible fairness of the intellect that made me despair of
his soul. A common, harmless atheist would have denied that religion
produced humility or humility a simple joy: but he admitted both.
He only said, "But shall I not find in evil a life of its own?
Granted that for every woman I ruin one of those red sparks will go out:
will not the expanding pleasure of ruin . . ."
"Do you see that fire ?" I asked. "If we had a real fighting democracy,
some one would burn you in it; like the devil-worshipper that you are."
"Perhaps," he said, in his tired, fair way. "Only what you call
evil I call good."
He went down the great steps alone, and I felt as if I wanted
the steps swept and cleaned. I followed later, and as I went to find
my hat in the low, dark passage where it hung, I suddenly heard his
voice again, but the words were inaudible. I stopped, startled:
then I heard the voice of one of the vilest of his associates saying,
"Nobody can possibly know." And then I heard those two or three
words which I remember in every syllable and cannot forget.
I heard the Diabolist say, "I tell you I have done everything else.
If I do that I shan't know the difference between right and wrong."
I rushed out without daring to pause; and as I passed the fire I
did not know whether it was hell or the furious love of God.
I have since heard that he died: it may be said, I think,
that he committed suicide; though he did it with tools of pleasure,
not with tools of pain. God help him, I know the road he went;
but I have never known, or even dared to think, what was that place
at which he stopped and refrained.
Whatever is it that we are all looking for? I fancy that it is
really quite close. When I was a boy I had a fancy that Heaven
or Fairyland or whatever I called it, was immediately behind my
own back, and that this was why I could never manage to see it,
however often I twisted and turned to take it by surprise.
I had a notion of a man perpetually spinning round on one foot
like a teetotum in the effort to find that world behind his back
which continually fled from him. Perhaps this is why the world
goes round. Perhaps the world is always trying to look over
its shoulder and catch up the world which always escapes it,
yet without which it cannot be itself.
In any case, as I have said, I think that we must always conceive
of that which is the goal of all our endeavours as something which is
in some strange way near. Science boasts of the distance of its stars;
of the terrific remoteness of the things of which it has to speak.
But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almost
menacing closeness of the things with which they are concerned.
Always the Kingdom of Heaven is "At Hand"; and Looking-glass Land is
only through the looking-glass. So I for one should never be astonished
if the next twist of a street led me to the heart of that maze in
which all the mystics are lost. I should not be at all surprised if I
turned one corner in Fleet Street and saw a yet queerer-looking lamp;
I should not be surprised if I turned a third corner and found
myself in Elfland.
I should not be surprised at this; but I was surprised the other day
at something more surprising. I took a turn out of Fleet Street
and found myself in England.
. . . . .
The singular shock experienced perhaps requires explanation.
In the darkest or the most inadequate moments of England there
is one thing that should always be remembered about the very
nature of our country. It may be shortly stated by saying that
England is not such a fool as it looks. The types of England,
the externals of England, always misrepresent the country.
England is an oligarchical country, and it prefers that its
oligarchy should be inferior to itself.
The speaking in the House of Commons, for instance, is not only worse
than the speaking was, it is worse than the speaking is, in all or
almost all other places in small debating clubs or casual dinners.
Our countrymen probably prefer this solemn futility in the higher
places of the national life. It may be a strange sight to see
the blind leading the blind; but England provides a stranger.
England shows us the blind leading the people who can see.
And this again is an under-statement of the case. For the English
political aristocrats not only speak worse than many other people;
they speak worse than themselves. The ignorance of statesmen is
like the ignorance of judges, an artificial and affected thing.
If you have the good fortune really to talk with a statesman, you will
be constantly startled with his saying quite intelligent things.
It makes one nervous at first. And I have never been sufficiently
intimate with such a man to ask him why it was a rule of his life
in Parliament to appear sillier than he was.
It is the same with the voters. The average man votes below himself;
he votes with half a mind or with a hundredth part of one.
A man ought to vote with the whole of himself as he worships
or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart,
his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music;
also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet.
If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson colour of it
should creep into his vote. If he has ever heard splendid songs,
they should be in his ears when he makes the mystical cross.
But as it is, the difficulty with English democracy at all
elections is that it is something less than itself. The question
is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes.
The point is that only a minority of the voter votes.
. . . . .
This is the tragedy of England; you cannot judge it by its foremost men.
Its types do not typify. And on the occasion of which I speak
I found this to be so especially of that old intelligent middle
class which I had imagined had almost vanished from the world.
It seemed to me that all the main representatives of the middle
class had gone off in one direction or in the other; they had either
set out in pursuit of the Smart Set or they had set out in pursuit
of the Simple Life. I cannot say which I dislike more myself;
the people in question are welcome to have either of them, or, as is
more likely, to have both, in hideous alternations of disease and cure.
But all the prominent men who plainly represent the middle class have
adopted either the single eye-glass of Mr Chamberlain or the single
eye of Mr. Bernard Shaw.
The old class that I mean has no representative. Its food was plentiful;
but it had no show. Its food was plain; but it had no fads.
It was serious about politics; and when it spoke in public it
committed the solecism of trying to speak well. I thought that
this old earnest political England had practically disappeared.
And as I say, I took one turn out of Fleet Street and I found
a room full of it.
. . . . .
At the top of the room was a chair in which Johnson had sat. The club
was a club in which Wilkes had spoken, in a time when even the
ne'er-do-weel was virile. But all these things by themselves might be
merely archaism. The extraordinary thing was that this hall had all
the hubbub, the sincerity, the anger, the oratory of the eighteenth
century. The members of this club were of all shades of opinion, yet
there was not one speech which gave me that jar of unreality which I
often have in listening to the ablest men uttering my own opinion.
The Toryism of this club was like the Toryism of Johnson,
a Toryism that could use humour and appealed to humanity.
The democracy of this club was like the democracy of Wilkes,
a democracy that can speak epigrams and fight duels;
a democracy that can face things out and endure slander;
the democracy of Wilkes, or, rather, the democracy of Fox.
One thing especially filled my soul with the soul of my fathers.
Each man speaking, whether he spoke well or ill, spoke as
well as he could from sheer fury against the other man.
This is the greatest of our modern descents, that nowadays a man
does not become more rhetorical as he becomes more sincere.
An eighteenth-century speaker, when he got really and honestly furious,
looked for big words with which to crush his adversary.
The new speaker looks for small words to crush him with.
He looks for little facts and little sneers. In a modern speech
the rhetoric is put into the merely formal part, the opening
to which nobody listens. But when Mr. Chamberlain, or a Moderate,
or one of the harder kind of Socialists, becomes really sincere,
he becomes Cockney. "The destiny of the Empire," or "The destiny
of humanity," do well enough for mere ornamental preliminaries,
but when the man becomes angry and honest, then it is a snarl,
"Where do we come in?" or "It's your money they want."
The men in this eighteenth-century club were entirely different;
they were quite eighteenth century. Each one rose to his feet
quivering with passion, and tried to destroy his opponent,
not with sniggering, but actually with eloquence. I was arguing
with them about Home Rule; at the end I told them why the English
aristocracy really disliked an Irish Parliament; because it would
be like their club.
. . . . .
I came out again into Fleet Street at night, and by a dim lamp I
saw pasted up some tawdry nonsense about Wastrels and how London
was rising against something that London had hardly heard of.
Then I suddenly saw, as in one obvious picture, that the modern world
is an immense and tumultuous ocean, full of monstrous and living things.
And I saw that across the top of it is spread a thin, a very thin,
sheet of ice, of wicked wealth and of lying journalism.
And as I stood there in the darkness I could almost fancy that I
heard it crack.
I cannot remember whether this tale is true or not. If I read
it through very carefully I have a suspicion that I should come
to the conclusion that it is not. But, unfortunately, I cannot read
it through very carefully, because, you see, it is not written yet.
The image and the idea of it clung to me through a great part
of my boyhood; I may have dreamt it before I could talk; or told it
to myself before I could read; or read it before I could remember.
On the whole, however, I am certain that I did not read it,
for children have very clear memories about things like that;
and of the books which I was really fond I can still remember,
not only the shape and bulk and binding, but even the position
of the printed words on many of the pages. On the whole, I incline
to the opinion that it happened to me before I was born.
. . . . .
At any rate, let us tell the story now with all the advantages
of the atmosphere that has clung to it. You may suppose me,
for the sake of argument, sitting at lunch in one of those quick-lunch
restaurants in the City where men take their food so fast that it
has none of the quality of food, and take their half-hour's
vacation so fast that it has none of the qualities of leisure;
to hurry through one's leisure is the most unbusiness-like of actions.
They all wore tall shiny hats as if they could not lose an instant
even to hang them on a peg, and they all had one eye a little off,
hypnotised by the huge eye of the clock. In short, they were the slaves
of the modern bondage, you could hear their fetters clanking.
Each was, in fact, bound by a chain; the heaviest chain ever tied
to a man--it is called a watch-chain.
Now, among these there entered and sat down opposite to me a man
who almost immediately opened an uninterrupted monologue.
He was like all the other men in dress, yet he was startlingly
opposite to them in all manner. He wore a high shiny hat
and a long frock coat, but he wore them as such solemn things
were meant to be worn; he wore the silk hat as if it were a mitre,
and the frock coat as if it were the ephod of a high priest.
He not only hung his hat up on the peg, but he seemed
(such was his stateliness) almost to ask permission of the hat
for doing so, and to apologise to the peg for making use of it.
When he had sat down on a wooden chair with the air of one
considering its feelings and given a sort of slight stoop
or bow to the wooden table itself, as if it were an altar,
I could not help some comment springing to my lips.
For the man was a big, sanguine-faced, prosperous-looking man,
and yet he treated everything with a care that almost
amounted to nervousness.
For the sake of saying something to express my interest I said,
"This furniture is fairly solid; but, of course, people do treat
it much too carelessly."
As I looked up doubtfully my eye caught his, and was fixed
as his was fixed in an apocalyptic stare. I had thought him
ordinary as he entered, save for his strange, cautious manner;
but if the other people had seen him then they would have screamed
and emptied the room. They did not see him, and they went on making
a clatter with their forks, and a murmur with their conversation.
But the man's face was the face of a maniac.
"Did you mean anything particular by that remark?" he asked at last,
and the blood crawled back slowly into his face.
"Nothing whatever," I answered. "One does not mean anything here;
it spoils people's digestions."
He limped back and wiped his broad forehead with a big handkerchief;
and yet there seemed to be a sort of regret in his relief.
"I thought perhaps," he said in a low voice, "that another of them
had gone wrong."
"If you mean another digestion gone wrong," I said, "I never heard
of one here that went right. This is the heart of the Empire,
and the other organs are in an equally bad way."
"No, I mean another street gone wrong," and he said heavily
and quietly, "but as I suppose that doesn't explain much to you,
I think I shall have to tell you the story. I do so with all
the less responsibility, because I know you won't believe it.
For forty years of my life I invariably left my office, which is
in Leadenhall Street, at half-past five in the afternoon, taking with
me an umbrella in the right hand and a bag in the left hand.
For forty years two months and four days I passed out of the side
office door, walked down the street on the left-hand side,
took the first turning to the left and the third to the right,
from where I bought an evening paper, followed the road on
the right-hand side round two obtuse angles, and came out just
outside a Metropolitan station, where I took a train home.
For forty years two months and four days I fulfilled this course
by accumulated habit: it was not a long street that I traversed,
and it took me about four and a half minutes to do it.
After forty years two months and four days, on the fifth day I
went out in the same manner, with my umbrella in the right hand
and my bag in the left, and I began to notice that walking along
the familiar street tired me somewhat more than usual; and when I
turned it I was convinced that I had turned down the wrong one.
For now the street shot up quite a steep slant, such as one
only sees in the hilly parts of London, and in this part
there were no hills at all. Yet it was not the wrong street;
the name written on it was the same; the shuttered shops were
the same; the lamp-posts and the whole look of the perspective
was the same; only it was tilted upwards like a lid.
Forgetting any trouble about breathlessness or fatigue I ran
furiously forward, and reached the second of my accustomed turnings,
which ought to bring me almost within sight of the station.
And as I turned that corner I nearly fell on the pavement.
For now the street went up straight in front of my face like a steep
staircase or the side of a pyramid. There was not for miles
round that place so much as a slope like that of Ludgate Hill.
And this was a slope like that of the Matterhorn. The whole
street had lifted itself like a single wave, and yet every speck
and detail of it was the same, and I saw in the high distance,
as at the top of an Alpine pass, picked out in pink letters
the name over my paper shop.
"I ran on and on blindly now, passing all the shops and coming to a
part of the road where there was a long grey row of private houses.
I had, I know not why, an irrational feeling that I was a long
iron bridge in empty space. An impulse seized me, and I pulled up
the iron trap of a coal-hole. Looking down through it I saw empty
space and the stairs.
"When I looked up again a man was standing in his front garden, having
apparently come out of his house; he was leaning over the railings and
gazing at me. We were all alone on that nightmare road; his face was
in shadow; his dress was dark and ordinary; but when I saw him standing
so perfectly still I knew somehow that he was not of this world.
And the stars behind his head were larger and fiercer than ought
to be endured by the eyes of men.
"'If you are a kind angel,' I said, 'or a wise devil, or have anything
in common with mankind, tell me what is this street possessed of devils.'
"After a long silence he said, 'What do you say that it is?'
"'It is Bumpton Street, of course,' I snapped. 'It goes to Oldgate
Station.'
"'Yes,' he admitted gravely; 'it goes there sometimes. Just now, however,
it is going to heaven.'
"'To heaven?' I said. 'Why?'
"'It is going to heaven for justice,' he replied. 'You must have treated
it badly. Remember always that there is one thing that cannot be endured
by anybody or anything. That one unendurable thing is to be overworked
and also neglected. For instance, you can overwork women--everybody does.
But you can't neglect women--I defy you to. At the same time,
you can neglect tramps and gypsies and all the apparent refuse of the
State so long as you do not overwork it. But no beast of the field, no
horse, no dog can endure long to be asked to do more than his work and
yet have less than his honour. It is the same with streets. You have
worked this street to death, and yet you have never remembered its
existence. If you had a healthy democracy, even of pagans, they would
have hung this street with garlands and given it the name of a god.
Then it would have gone quietly. But at last the street has grown tired
of your tireless insolence; and it is bucking and rearing its head to
heaven. Have you never sat on a bucking horse?'
"I looked at the long grey street, and for a moment it seemed to me
to be exactly like the long grey neck of a horse flung up to heaven.
But in a moment my sanity returned, and I said, 'But this
is all nonsense. Streets go to the place they have to go.
A street must always go to its end.'
"'Why do you think so of a street?' he asked, standing very still.
"'Because I have always seen it do the same thing,' I replied,
in reasonable anger. 'Day after day, year after year, it has always
gone to Oldgate Station; day after . . .'
"I stopped, for he had flung up his head with the fury
of the road in revolt.
"'And you?' he cried terribly. 'What do you think the road thinks
of you? Does the road think you are alive? Are you alive?
Day after day, year after year, you have gone to Oldgate Station. . . .'
Since then I have respected the things called inanimate."
And bowing slightly to the mustard-pot, the man in
the restaurant withdrew.
CHESTERTON-THE TRENDEDOUS TRIFLES - XXXII The Travellers in State