‘Don’t bother about her,’ said the young man. ‘She has threatened that a hundred times. She is only a brown girl, though she doesn’t know it.’
‘A brown girl!’ cried John, ‘And your father …’
‘My father has been in the pay of the Brownies all his life. He doesn’t know it, the old chuckle-head. Calls them the Muses, or the Spirit, or some rot. In actual fact, he is by profession a pimp.’
‘And the Island?’ said John.
‘We’ll talk about it in the morning. Ain’t the kind of Island you’re thinking of. Tell you what. I don’t live with my father and my precious sister. I live in Eschropolis and I am going back tomorrow. I’ll take you down to the laboratory and show you some real poetry. Not fantasies. The real thing.’
‘Thank you very much,’ said John.
Then young Mr Halfways found his room for him and the whole of that household went to bed.
The poetry of the Machine Age is so very pure
Gus Halfways was the name of Mr Halfways’ son. As soon as he rose in the morning he called John down to breakfast with him so that they might start on their journey. There was no one to hinder them, for old Halfways was still asleep and Media always had breakfast in bed. When they had eaten, Gus brought him into a shed beside his father’s house and showed him a machine on wheels.
‘What is this?’ said John.
‘My old bus,’ said young Halfways. Then he stood back with his head on one side and gazed at it for a bit: but presently he began to speak in a changed and reverent voice.
‘She is a poem. She is the daughter of the spirit of the age. What was the speed of Atlanta to her speed? The beauty of Apollo to her beauty?’
Now beauty to John meant nothing save glimpses of his Island, and the machine did not remind him of his Island at all: so he held his tongue.
‘Don’t you see?’ said Gus. ‘Our fathers made images of what they called gods and goddesses; but they were really only brown girls and brown boys whitewashed – as anyone found out by looking at them too long. All self-deception and phallic sentiment. But here you have the real art. Nothing erotic about her, eh?’
‘Certainly not,’ said John, looking at the cog-wheels and coils of wire, ‘it is certainly not at all like a brown girl.’ It was, in fact, more like a nest of hedgehogs and serpents.
‘I should say not,’ said Gus. ‘Sheer power, eh? Speed, ruthlessness, austerity, significant form, eh? Also’ (and here he dropped his voice) ‘very expensive indeed.’
Then he made John sit in the machine and he himself sat beside him. Then he began pulling the levers about and for a long time nothing happened: but at last there came a flash and a roar and the machine bounded into the air and then dashed forward. Before John had got his breath they had flashed across a broad thoroughfare which he recognised as the main road, and were racing through the country to the north of it – a flat country of square stony fields divided by barbed wire fences. A moment later they were standing still in a city where all the houses were built of steel.
And every shrewd turn was exalted among Men … and simple goodness, wherein nobility doth ever most participate, was mocked away and clean vanished.
THUCYDIDES
Now live the lesser, as lords of the world, The busy troublers. Banished is our glory, The earth’s excellence grows old and sere.
ANON
The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilisation and philosophy has painfully struggled up.
SHAW
The poetry of the Silly Twenties – The ‘Courage’ and mutual loyalty of Artists
Then I dreamed that he led John into a big room rather like a bathroom: it was full of steel and glass and the walls were nearly all window, and there was a crowd of people there, drinking what looked like medicine and talking at the tops of their voices. They were all either young, or dressed up to look as if they were young. The girls had short hair and flat breasts and flat buttocks so that they looked like boys: but the boys had pale, egg-shaped faces and slender waists and big hips so that they looked like girls – except for a few of them who had long hair and beards.
‘What are they so angry about?’ whispered John.
‘They are not angry,’ said Gus; ‘they are talking about Art.’
Then he brought John into the middle of the room and said:
‘Say! Here’s a guy who has been taken in by my father and wants some real hundred per cent music to clean him out. We had better begin with something neo-romantic to make the transition.’
Then all the Clevers consulted together and presently they all agreed that Victoriana had better sing first. When Victoriana rose John at first thought that she was a school-girl: but after he had looked at her again he perceived that she was in fact about fifty. Before she began to sing she put on a dress which was a sort of exaggerated copy of Mr Halfways’ robes, and a mask which was like the Steward’s mask except that the nose had been painted bright red and one of the eyes had been closed in a permanent wink.
‘Priceless!’ exclaimed one half of the Clevers, ‘too Puritanian.’
But the other half, which included all the bearded men, held their noses in the air and looked very stiff. Then Victoriana took a little toy harp and began. The noises of the toy harp were so strange that John could not think of them as music at all. Then, when she sang, he had a picture in his mind which was a little like the Island, but he saw at once that it was not the Island. And presently he saw people who looked rather like his father, and the Steward and old Mr Halfways, dressed up as clowns and doing a stiff sort of dance. Then there was a columbine, and some sort of love-story. But suddenly the whole Island turned into an aspidistra in a pot and the song was over.
‘Priceless,’ said the Clevers.
‘I hope you like it,’ said Gus to John.
