“No entry till 1799!” Dr. Obispo repeated indignantly. “The old bastard! Just when his case is getting really interesting, he goes and leaves us in the dark.”
Jeremy looked up from the note-book smiling. “Not entirely in the dark,” he said. “I’ll read you his first entry after the two years of silence and you can draw your own conclusions about the state of his intestinal flora.” He uttered a little cough and began to read in his Mrs. Gaskell manner. “ ‘May, 1799. The most promiscuously abandoned Females, especially among Women of Quality, are often those to whom an unkind Nature has denied the ordinary Reason and Excuse for Gallantry.
Cut off by a constitutional Frigidity from the enjoyments of Pleasure, they are in everlasting rebellion against their Fate. The power which drives them on to multiply the number of their Gallantries is not Sensuality, but Hope; not the wish to reiterate the experience of a familiar Bliss, but rather the aspiration towards a common and much vaunted Felicity which they themselves have had the misfortune never to know. To the Voluptuary, the woman of easy Virtue is often no less obnoxious, though for other reasons, than she seems to the severe Moralist. God preserve me in Future from any such Conquests as that which I made this Spring at Bath!’ ” Jeremy put down the book. “Do you still feel that you’ve been left in the dark?” he asked.
Chapter VII
WITH a deafening shriek the electric smoothing tool whirled its band of sandpaper against the rough surface of the wood. Bent over the carpenter’s bench, Mr. Propter did not hear the sound of Pete’s entrance and approach. For a long half minute the young man stood in silence, watching him while he moved the smoothing tool back and forth over the board before him. There was sawdust, Pete noticed, in the shaggy eyebrows, and on the sunburnt forehead a black smear where he had touched his face with oily fingers.
Pete felt a sudden twinge of compunction. It wasn’t right to spy on a man if he didn’t know you were there. It was underhand; you might be seeing something he didn’t want you to see. He called Mr. Propter’s name.
The old man looked up, smiled and stopped the motor of his little machine.
“Well, Pete,” he said. “You’re just the man I want. That is, if you’ll do some work for me. Will you? But I’d forgotten,” he added, interrupting Pete’s affirmative answer, “I’d forgotten about that heart of yours. These miserable rheumatic fevers! Do you think you ought to?”
Pete blushed a little; for he had not yet had time to live down a certain sense of shame in regard to his disability. “You’re not going to make me run the quarter mile, are you?”
Mr. Propter ignored the jocular question. “You’re sure it’s all right?” he insisted, looking with an affectionate earnestness into the young man’s face.
“Quite sure, if it’s only this sort of thing.” Pete waved his hand in the direction of the carpenter’s bench.
“Honest?”
Pete was touched and warmed by the other’s solicitude. “Honest!” he affirmed.
“Very well then,” said Mr. Propter, reassured. “You’re hired. Or rather you’re not hired, because you’ll be lucky if you get as much as a Coca-Cola for your work. You’re conscribed.”
All the other people round the place, he went on to explain, were busy. He had been left to run the entire furniture factory single-handed. And the trouble was that it had to be run under pressure; three of the migrant families down at the cabins were still without any chairs or tables.
“Here are the measurements,” he said, pointing to a typewritten sheet of paper pinned to the wall. “And there’s the lumber. Now, I’ll tell you what I’d like you to do first,” he added, as he picked up a board and laid it on the bench.
The two men worked for some time without trying to speak against the noise of their electric tools. Then there was an interim of less noisy activity. Too shy to embark directly upon the subject of his own perplexities, Pete started to talk about Professor Pearl’s new book on population. Forty inhabitants to the square mile for the entire land area of the planet. Sixteen acres per head. Take away at least half for unproductive land, and you were left with eight acres. And with average agricultural methods a human being could be supported on the produce of two and a half acres. With five and a half acres to spare for every person, why should a third of the world be hungry?
“I should have thought you’d have discovered the answer in Spain,” said Mr. Propter. “They’re hungry because man cannot live by bread alone.”
“What has that got to do with it?”
“Everything,” Mr. Propter answered. “Men can’t live by bread alone, because they need to feel that their life has a point. That’s why they take to idealism. But it’s a matter of experience and observation that most idealism leads to war, persecution and mass insanity. Man cannot live by bread alone; but if he chooses to nourish his mind on the wrong kind of spiritual food, he won’t even get bread. He won’t even get bread, because he’ll be so busy killing or preparing to kill his neighbours in the name of God, or Country, or Social Justice that he won’t be able to cultivate his fields. Nothing could be simpler or more obvious. But at the same time,” Mr. Propter concluded, “nothing is unfortunately more certain than that most people will go on choosing the wrong spiritual food and thereby indirectly choosing their own destruction.”
He turned on the current and once more the smoothing tool set up its rasping shriek. There was another cessation of talk.
“In a climate like this,” said Mr. Propter, in the next interval of silence, “and with all the water that’ll be available when the Colorado River aqueduct starts running next year, you could do practically anything you liked.” He unplugged the smoothing tool and went to fetch a drill. “Take a township of a thousand inhabitants; give it three or four thousand acres of land and a good system of producers’ and consumers’ co-operatives—it could feed itself completely; it could supply about two-thirds of its other needs on the spot; and it could produce a surplus to exchange for such things as it couldn’t produce itself. You could cover the state with such townships. That is,” he added, smiling rather mournfully, “that is, if you could get the permission from the banks and a supply of people intelligent and virtuous enough to run a genuine democracy.”
“You certainly wouldn’t get the banks to agree,” said Pete.
“And you probably couldn’t find more than quite a few of the right people,” Mr. Propter added. “And of course nothing’s more disastrous than starting a social experiment with the wrong people. Look at all the efforts to start communities in this country. Robert Owen, for example, and the Fourierists and the rest of them. Dozens of social experiments and they all failed. Why? Because the men in charge didn’t choose their people. There was no entrance examination and no novitiate. They accepted any one who came along. That’s what comes of being unduly optimistic about human beings.”
He started the drill and Pete took his turn with the smoothing tool.
“Do you think one oughtn’t to be optimistic?” the young man asked.
Mr. Propter smiled. “What a curious question!” he answered. “What would you say about a man who installed a vacuum pump in a fifty-foot well? Would you call him an optimist?”
“I’d call him a fool.”
“So would I,” said Mr. Propter. “And that’s the answer to your question; a man’s a fool if he’s optimistic about any situation in which experience has shown that there’s no justification for optimism. When Robert Owen took in a crowd of defectives and incompetents and habitual crooks, and expected them to organize themselves into a new and better sort of human society, he was just a damned fool.”
There was silence for a time while Pete did some sawing.
“I suppose I’ve been too optimistic,” the young man said reflectively, when it was over.
Mr. Propter nodded. “Too optimistic in certain directions,” he agreed. “And at the same time too pessimistic in others.”
“For instance?” Pete questioned.
“Well, to begin with,” said Mr. Propter, “too optimistic about social reforms. Imagining that good can be fabricated by mass production methods. But, unfortunately, good doesn’t happen to be that sort of commodity. Good is a matter of moral craftsmanship. It can’t be produced except by individuals. And, of course, if individuals don’t know what good consists in, or don’t wish to work for it, then it won’t be manifested, however perfect the social machinery. There!” he added, in another tone and blew the sawdust out of the hole he had been drilling. “Now for these chair legs and battens.” He crossed the room and began to adjust the lathe.
“And what do you think I’ve been too pessimistic about?” Pete asked.
Mr. Propter answered, without looking up from his work, “About human nature.”
Pete was surprised. “I’d have expected you to say I was too optimistic about human nature,” he said.
“Well, of course, in certain respects that’s true,” Mr. Propter agreed. “Like most people nowadays you’re insanely optimistic about people as they are, people living exclusively on the human level. You seem to imagine that people can remain as they are and yet be the inhabitants of a world conspicuously better than the world
