World's End

by Upton Sinclair

  Lanny was beginning to be uneasy. This slum appeared to be endless, and he didn’t know how to get out of it. He had been told that any time he lost his way, he should ask a “bobby,” but there appeared to be none in this lost world, and Lanny didn’t know if it was safe to speak to any of these lost people. The men seemed to be looking at him with hostile eyes, and the leering women frightened him no less. “Two bob to you, mytey!” a girl would say, holding out her hands with what she meant for a seductive gesture. Starved children followed him, beggars whined and showed their sores and crippled limbs; he hurried on, being afraid to take out his purse.

  Darkness was falling fast. The shopping district of the slum came to an end, and Lanny, trying to find a better neighborhood, followed a street that widened out. There were sheds, and gravel under foot; dimly he could see benches, and people sitting on them—the same terrible ape figures in stinking rags, men and women and children: a baby laid on its back, and no one even troubling to put a cover on it; whole families huddled near together; a bearded man with his head back, snoring, a woman curled up against him; a man and a woman lying in each other’s arms.

  A raw wind had sprung up, and Lanny felt chilly, even while he was walking; but these people sat or lay, never moving. Could it be that they had no place to go? The boy had observed human forms curled up alongside dustbins and sheds, and had supposed they must be drunk; but could it be that they slept out all night?

  He pressed on, still more hurriedly; he was beginning to be really afraid now. He had broken his promise to his mother, never to go anywhere except where plenty of people were to be seen. He was in a dark street, and the figures that passed were slinking and furtive, and many seemed to be watching him. He saw two women fighting, shrieking at each other, pulling hair; children stood watching them, apathetic and silent.

  It was a street of tenements, but now and then came a pub, with lights and sounds of roistering. A man came out, and as he swung the doors open, the light fell on Lanny. The stranger fell in beside him on the narrow sidewalk. “’Ullo, little tyke!” said he.

  Lanny thought he ought to be polite. “Hello,” he replied; and the fellow doubtless noted something different about his accent. “Whur yer bound fer, mytey?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know,” replied Lanny, hesitatingly. “I’m afraid maybe I’m lost.”

  “Ho! Little toff!” exclaimed the other. “Little toff come inter the slums lookin’ fer mayflowers, eh, wot?” He was a burly fellow, and in the light of the pub the boy had seen that his face was grimy, as if he were a coal heaver; or perhaps it was several days’ growth of beard. His breath reeked of alcohol. “Listen, mytey,” he said, leaning over cajolingly, “gimme a bob, will yer? Me throat is so dry it burns up, it fair do.”

  This was a problem for the boy. If he took out his purse the fellow would probably grab it. “I’m sorry, I haven’t any money with me,” said he.

  “Garn!” snarled the other, turning ugly at once. “A toff don’t go withaht no brass.”

  They had come to a dark place in the street, and Lanny had just decided to make a dash for it, when to his terror the man grabbed him by the arm. “Cough up!” he commanded.

  Lanny struggled; then, finding that the fellow’s grip was too strong, he screamed: “Help! Help!”

  “Shut yer bloomin’ fyce,” growled the man, “or I’ll bryke every bone in yer body!” He fetched the boy a cuff on the side of the head. It was the first time that Lanny had ever been struck in his whole life, and it had a terrifying effect on him; he became frantic, he twisted and struggled, harder than ever, and shouted at the top of his lungs.

  The ruffian began to drag him toward a dark opening leading into a court. Lanny’s cries brought people to doors and windows, but not one moved a hand to help him; they just stood and looked. They were interested, but not concerned—as if it were a Punch and Judy show.

  But suddenly a door in the court was flung open, and a light streamed upon the scene. A young woman emerged, wild-looking, with tousled black hair and a blouse open at the throat and hanging out at the waist, as if she had put it on in a hurry. When she saw the man and his victim, she darted toward them. “Wot yer doin’, Slicer?”

  The answer was, “Shut yer silly fyce!” But the girl began shouting louder: “’Ave yer gone barmy, ye bleedin’ fool? Carnt yer see the kid’s a toff? An’ right in front of yer own drum!” When the man continued to drag Lanny into the court, she rushed at him like a wildcat. “Cut it, I sye! Yer’ll ’ave the tecs ’ere, an’ we’ll all do a stretch!”

  He called her a “bitch,” and she told the world in return that he was a “muckworm.” When he still wouldn’t give up, she began clawing at his face in a fury. He had to take one hand to push her away, and that gave Lanny his chance; with a frantic effort he tore himself loose and dashed for the street.

  The crowd gave way; it wasn’t theirs to stop him. The man came pounding behind, cursing; but Lanny hadn’t been climbing mountains and swimming in the Golfe Juan and practicing Muscovite leaps for nothing. He was built like a deer, whereas the man was heavy and clumsy, and presently he gave up. But the boy didn’t stop until he had got to a thoroughfare thronged with long-bearded Jews and curly-headed babies, and having signs that said: “Whitechapel High Street.”

  Then a blue uniform, the one sight that could really bring an end to Lanny’s terror. The London bobby didn’t carry weapons, like the French gendarme, but he was a symbol of the Empire. Lanny waited until he got back his breath and could speak normally, then he approached and said: “Please, would you tell me how to get to the tube?”

  The bobby had a large blue helmet, with a strap across his chin. He answered like an automaton: “First t’right, second t’left.” He said it very fast, and when Lanny said: “I beg pardon?” he said it again, even faster than before.

  The boy thought it over, and then dropped a delicate hint: “Please, might I walk with you if you’re going that way?” It was obviously not the right accent for Whitechapel, and the “copper” looked him over more carefully, and then said: “Right you are, guv’nor.”

  They walked together in silent state. When they parted, Lanny wasn’t sure if the symbol of the Empire would accept a tip, but he took a chance, and held out a shilling which he had denied to “Slicer.” The symbol took it with one hand and with the other touched his helmet. “Kew!” said he. The visitor had already had it explained to him that this was the second half of “Thank you,” doing duty for the whole.

  VIII

  Lanny decided to say nothing to his mother about his misadventure. It would only worry her, and do no good; he had learned his lesson, and wouldn’t repeat the mistake. He brooded all by himself over the state of the people of East London. When he went to call for his mother at a tea party in Kensington Gardens, the sight of exquisite ladies on the greensward under the trees made him think of the families that were lying out on benches all night because they had no place to go. Instead of snow-white tulle and pink mousseline de soie, he saw filthy and loathsome rags; instead of the fragrant concentrations of the flower gardens of Provence, he smelled the stink of rotting bodies and the reek of gin.

  They drove to Ascot on the second day of the races, the day of the gold vase. It was known as a “black and white” Ascot, because of the costumes decreed by the fashion dictators. He saw black and white striped taffeta dresses with black and white parasols to match. He listened to the chatter of his mother and her friends, commenting upon the fashion parade—froufrou hats, broché effects, corsage prolonged into polonaise, shot silk draped as tunic, butterfly wing confection, black liseré straw, poufs of tea-rose taffeta, bandeau hats and plume towers, cothurns of lizard-green suede—and all the while he would be seeing babies lying on benches with only rags to cover them. He watched the royal procession, the King and Queen riding across the turf amid thunderous cheers from the crowd, and he thought: “I wonder if they know about it!”

  The person he took into his confidence w
as Rick; and Rick said that people knew if they chose to know, but mostly they didn’t. He said those conditions were as old as England. The politicians talked about remedying them, but when they got elected they thought about getting elected again. He said it was a problem of educating those slum people; of raising the tone of the intellectual and art life of the country. He took Lanny to a matinee of a play by Bernard Shaw which was the rage that season, and dealt with a flower girl who talked just the sort of Cockney that Lanny had heard during his descent into hell. A professor of phonetics succeeded in correcting her accent, making her into a regular lady of Mayfair. It was most amusing—and it seemed to be in line with Rick’s suggestion.

  Kurt Meissner arrived, and he, too, was taken into the discussion. Said Kurt: “We don’t leave our poor to the mercies of the wage market. The Germans are efficient, and provide decent housing for the workers, and insurance against sickness, old age, and unemployment.” Kurt was perhaps a little too well satisfied with conditions in his country, and too contemptuous of British slackness. Rick, who was willing to make any number of sarcastic remarks about his native land, wasn’t so pleased to hear them from a foreigner. Rick and Kurt didn’t get along so well in London as they had in Hellerau.

  Lanny talked about the question of poverty with his mother also, and Beauty assured him that the kind English people were not overlooking the problem. He would soon see proof of it; the twenty-fourth of June was known as “Alexandra Day,” and the fashionable ladies of England honored their Queen Mother by putting on their daintiest white frocks and hats with many flowers and going out on the streets of the cities to sell artificial pink roses for the benefit of the overcrowded hospitals. Lanny saw his mother, the loveliest sight in Piccadilly Circus, taking in silver coins hand over fist; he had to drive three times in one of Lord Eversham-Watson’s cars to keep her supplied with stock in trade. He hoped that he might be able to provide accommodations for all those babies who were sleeping outdoors on benches.

  9

  Green and Pleasant Land

  I

  The home of Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson was called “The Reaches,” and was close to the Thames River some way below Oxford. It was a very old place, and not much had been done to modernize it, because, as Rick explained, his father was too poor; they had all they could do to keep the place, and not much left for their beloved arts. There was a little bit of everything in the architecture of the house: an old tower, a peaked roof with gables, mullioned windows, a crenelated wall, a venerable archway through which you drove to the porte-cochere. The structures were jammed one against another, and topping them all were chimney pots, sometimes three or four in a row. This meant that all the year except summer the maidservants were busy carrying coal scuttles; and since there was very little running water, when they had finished with scuttles they carried pails.

  But, of course, in summertime everybody went to the river, crossing a beautiful sloping lawn under an archway of aged oaks. It was a new kind of swimming for Lanny, and he thought he could never get enough of it. The boys lived in bathing suits, and “punted” in a long flat-bottomed boat with a ten-foot pole. It was a nice friendly little river, neither wide nor deep. Boathouses lined it, and gaily decorated motorboats went by, and long thin shells, with oarsmen practicing for the coming races. It was a holiday thoroughfare, and there was laughter and singing; the three musketeers of the arts sang all the songs they knew.

  Rick had a sister, two years older than himself, and therefore too old for either of the visitors; but she had friends with younger sisters, so there was a troop of English girls bright-cheeked and jolly, interested in everything the boys were doing, and sharing their sports. Lanny was just at the age where he was preparing to discover that girls were wonderful, and here they were.

  Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson was a middle-aged gentleman, tall and slender, with handsome dark mustaches turning gray, sharp features, a hawk’s nose, and keen dark eyes. He had a Spanish mother, and maybe a trace of Jewish blood, as Rick had said. He was a lover of all the arts and friend of all the artists. He knew many rich people, and acted as a sort of go-between for the bohemian world; telling the “swells” what was what in art and helping the struggling geniuses to find patrons. An impecunious playwright would bring him a blank-verse tragedy, and Sir Alfred would decide that it was a masterpiece, and would design a group of magnificent sets for it; then he would set out to find a backer, and when he failed he would declare that England was going to the dogs. He had very high standards, and would relieve his disappointments by composing sharp epigrams.

  It was a free and easy world which he had made for himself within his castle. The most extreme opinions were freely voiced, and it was everybody’s pride not to be shocked. But at the same time it would be better not to commit any lapse of table etiquette, and when you took off your bathing suit you put on the right sort of clothes. This made an odd mixture of convention and scorn for convention, and a boy with American parents had now and then to ask his friend for guidance. Rick would give it with an apology. “The older people try to be mod’n, but they really aren’t quite up to it.”

  Kurt Meissner found even greater difficulties, because he was stiff and serious and couldn’t get used to the idea of saying things that you didn’t entirely mean. “In a Pickwickian sense,” was the English phrase, and what was a youth from a province of Prussia to make of it? Kurt was puzzled by their habit of running down their own country; what they said about the state of England was what Kurt himself believed, but he couldn’t get used to the idea of Englishmen saying it. They would even discuss the desirability of getting rid of their royal family. “The Prince of Wales is going to turn out to be another dancing boy,” Sir Alfred would remark blandly; “a ladies’ man like his grandfather.”

  And then the suffragettes! The son of the comptroller-general of Castle Stubendorf had read in the newspapers about maniacal creatures who were pouring acids into letter boxes and chaining themselves to the railings of the House of Commons in order to prove their fitness to have the vote; but never in his wildest moment had it occurred to him that he might be called upon to sit at dinner table with one of these creatures, and to take her punting upon the Thames! But here was Mildred Noggyns, nineteen years old, the daughter of a former undersecretary in the government; pretty, but pale and rather grim, only three weeks out of Holloway gaol after having chopped a hole in the painted face of the Velásquez Venus, most highly prized treasure of the National Gallery. And talking quite calmly about it, discussing the “cat-and-mouse act,” by which the authorities were combating hunger strikes; they let you out of jail when they thought you were near dying, and took you back again as soon as you had picked up a bit.

  Rick’s sister, Jocelyn, abetted her; and of course these saucy ladies soon found out what was in the haughty soul of the Junker from Silesia, and it became their delight to tease him beyond endurance. They wouldn’t let him help them into a punt. “No, thank you, all that nonsense is over, chivalry, and bowing and scraping before women; we’re quite able to get into punts by ourselves, and we’ll do our share of handling the pole, if you please. And what do you mean when you say that man is gregarious, and that man is a spiritual being, and so on? Do you refer to lordly males like yourself, or do you deign to include the females? And if you include us, why don’t you say so? Of course, we know it’s just a way of speaking, but it’s a benighted way devised by men, and we object to it.”

  “Yes, Miss Noggyns,” Kurt would reply, “but unfortunately I have not learned any word in your language which expresses the concept ‘man and woman.’” When the feminist lady proposed that they should create such a word, Kurt replied, gravely: “I have found it hard enough to learn the English language as it exists, without presuming to add anything to it.”

  II

  The three boys discussed the matter among themselves. Kurt thought that the revolt of women meant the breakdown of English society; it was like the “war of the members” in one of
the fables of Aesop. Lanny hoped that, if women got the vote, society might be kinder and there wouldn’t be so much talk about war. Rick said: “It won’t make much difference, one way or the other; the women’ll divide about as the men do, and there’ll be more votes to count.” Generally when these three argued they had different opinions—and when they finished, they still had them.

  Of course they talked about girls, and what was called the “sex problem.” No one of the three had as yet had a sex experience. Kurt said that he had had opportunities; the peasant girls were often willing enough, and looked upon it as an honor that a gentleman would do them; but Kurt had the idea of saving himself for a great and worthy love. Lanny remembered what the Social-Democratic editor had said about Kurt’s father, but of course he wouldn’t breathe a word of that.

  Rick said, rather casually: “If a sex experience comes my way I’ll probably take it; I think people make more fuss about it than is necessary—especially since methods of birth control are generally known. It seems to me the women are waking up and will attend to changing our ideas.”

  “I’d hate to put Miss Mildred Noggyns in charge of my ideas.” replied Kurt; and they all laughed.

  Lanny, desiring to contribute something to the conversation, told about his unpleasant experience with Baron Livens-Mazursky. Rick, young man of the world, said that homosexuality was spreading, it was one of the consequences of the false morality of Puritanism. “There’s a plague of it in our public schools,” he declared. “The boys hide their share from the masters, and the masters hide their share from the boys, or think they do.”