Latest / The H. G. Wells Library / The Passionate Friends Chapter 8 - This Swarming Business of Mankind Parts 3-6

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The Passionate Friends Chapter 8 - This Swarming Business of Mankind Parts 3-6 · The H. G. Wells Library

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Speaker 1: Chapter eight, parts three to six of The Passionate Friends
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Speaker 1: by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the
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Speaker 1: public domain recording by Peter Eastman, Chapter the eighth, This
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Speaker 1: Swarming Business of Mankind three. I came out of these
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Speaker 1: dark corners presently into the sun blaze of India. I
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Speaker 1: was now intensely interested in the whole question of employment,
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Speaker 1: and engaged in preparing matter for my first book, Enterprise
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Speaker 1: in India. And therein you may read how I went
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Speaker 1: first to a Psalm and then down to Ceylon, following
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Speaker 1: up this perplexing and complicated business of human enslavement to toil,
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Speaker 1: exercised by this great spectacle of human labor, and at
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Speaker 1: once attracted by, and stimulated by, and dissatisfied with those
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Speaker 1: socialist generalizations that would make all this vast, harsh spectacle
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Speaker 1: of productive enterprise a kind of wickedness and outrage upon humanity.
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Speaker 1: And behind and about the things I was looking for
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Speaker 1: were other things for which I was not looking that
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Speaker 1: slowly came into and qualified the problem. It dawned upon
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Speaker 1: me by degrees that India is not so much one
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Speaker 1: country as a vast spectacle of human development at every
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Speaker 1: stage in infinite variety, one ranges between naked savages and
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Speaker 1: the most sophisticated of human beings. I pursued my enquiries
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Speaker 1: about great modern enterprises, about railway, labor, canal labor, tea
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Speaker 1: planting across vast stretches of country. Were men still lived illiterate, agricultural,
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Speaker 1: unprogressive and simple as men lived before the first stirrings
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Speaker 1: of recorded history. One sees by the tanks of those
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Speaker 1: mud built villages groups of women with brass vessels who
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Speaker 1: are identical in pose and figure and quality with the
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Speaker 1: women modeled in Tanagra figures. And the droning wall wheel
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Speaker 1: is the same that irrigated the fields of ancient Greece,
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Speaker 1: and the crops and beasts and all the life is
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Speaker 1: as it was in Greece and Italy, Phoenicia and Judea
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Speaker 1: before the very dawn of history. By imperceptible degrees, I
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Speaker 1: came to realize that this matter of expropriation and enslavement
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Speaker 1: and control, which bulk so vastly upon the modern consciousness,
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Speaker 1: which the socialists treat as though it was the comprehensive
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Speaker 1: present process of mankind, is no more than one aspect
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Speaker 1: of an over life that struggles out of a massive,
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Speaker 1: ancient and traditional common way of living, struggles out again
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Speaker 1: and again, blindly, and always so far with a disorderly
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Speaker 1: in success. I began to see in their proper proportion,
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Speaker 1: the vast, enduring, normal human existence, the peasant's agricultural life, unlettered, laborious,
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Speaker 1: and essentially unchanging, on the one hand, and on the other,
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Speaker 1: those excrescences of multitudinous city aggregation, those stormy excesses of
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Speaker 1: productive energy that flare up out of that life, establish
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Speaker 1: for a time great unstable strangenesses of human living, palaces, cities, roads, empires, literatures,
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Speaker 1: and then totter and fall back again into ruin. In India,
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Speaker 1: even more than about the Mediterranean. All this is spectacular
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Speaker 1: there and goes about his work according to the usage
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Speaker 1: of fifty thousand years. He has a primitive version of religion,
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Speaker 1: a moral tradition, a social usage, closely adapted by countless
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Speaker 1: years of trial and survival to his needs. And the
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Speaker 1: whole land is littered with the vestiges and abandoned material
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Speaker 1: of those newer, bolder, more experimental beginnings, beginnings that merely began.
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Speaker 1: It was when I was going through the panther haunted
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Speaker 1: palaces of Akbar at Fotepur Sikrie, that I first felt
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Speaker 1: how tremendously the ruins of the past may face towards
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Speaker 1: the future. The thing there is like a frozen wave
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Speaker 1: that rose and never broke. And once I had caught
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Speaker 1: that light upon things, I found the same quality in
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Speaker 1: all the ruins I saw in Ombur and Vigianaga and Chitor,
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Speaker 1: and at all that I have seen or heard of
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Speaker 1: in ancient Rome and ancient Verona, in Pestime and Nassus
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Speaker 1: and ancient Athens. None of these places has ever really
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Speaker 1: finished and done with. The basilicas of Caesar and Constantine.
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Speaker 1: Just as much as the baths and galleries and halls
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Speaker 1: of audience at Fotiport Sikrie express not ends achieved, but
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Speaker 1: thwarted intentions of permanence. They embody repulse and rejection. They
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Speaker 1: are trials, abandoned, trials towards ends, vaguely apprehended, ends felt
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Speaker 1: rather than known. Even so as I moved by the
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Speaker 1: bruges like emptinesses of Peking in the vast pretensions of
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Speaker 1: its forbidden city, which are like a cry long sustained
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Speaker 1: that at last dies away in a whale. I saw
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Speaker 1: the place in niaineteen o five, in that slack interval
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Speaker 1: after the European Looting and before the great awakening that
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Speaker 1: followed the Russo Japanese war. Pey King in a century
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Speaker 1: or so may be added in its turn to the
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Speaker 1: list of abandoned endeavors. Insensibly the scepter passes nearer home
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Speaker 1: than any of these places. Have I imagined the same
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Speaker 1: thing In Paris, it seemed to me I felt the
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Speaker 1: first chill shadow of that same arrest, that impalpable ebb
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Speaker 1: and cessation at the very crest of things, that voice
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Speaker 1: which opposes to all the hasty ambitions and gathering eagerness
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Speaker 1: of men. It is not here, It is not yet.
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Speaker 1: Only the other day, as I came back from Paris
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Speaker 1: to this quiet place, and walked across the fields from
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Speaker 1: the railway station to this house, I saw an old woman,
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Speaker 1: a grandmother, a bent old crone, with two children playing
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Speaker 1: about her, as she cut grass by the wayside. And
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Speaker 1: she cut it, except that her sickle was steel, exactly
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Speaker 1: as old women were cutting grass before there was riding,
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Speaker 1: before the dawn of history, before men laid the first stones,
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Speaker 1: one upon the other of the first city that ever
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Speaker 1: became a ruin. You see, civilization has never yet existed.
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Speaker 1: It is only continually and obstinately attempted to be. Our
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Speaker 1: civilization is but the indistinct twilight before the dawn. It
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Speaker 1: is still only a confused attempt, a flourish out of
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Speaker 1: barbarism and the normal life of men, the twiling, earthy
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Speaker 1: life of the field, and the buyer goes on still
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Speaker 1: like a stream that at once supports and carries to destruction.
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Speaker 1: The experimental ships of some still imperfect inventor. India gives
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Speaker 1: it all from first to last. And now the modern movement,
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Speaker 1: the latest half conscious struggle of the new thing in mankind,
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Speaker 1: throws up Bombay and Calcutta, vast feverish pustules upon the
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Speaker 1: face of the peninsula, bridges the sacred rivers with hideous
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Speaker 1: iron latticework, and smears the sky of the dusty ruin
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Speaker 1: girdled city of Delhi. Each ruin is the vestige of
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Speaker 1: an empire, with the black smoke of factory chimneys. Altogether
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Speaker 1: scattered over that sunburnt plain, there are the remains of
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Speaker 1: five or six extinguished delhis that played their dramas of
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Speaker 1: frustration before the Delhi of the Great Mogul. This present
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Speaker 1: phase of human living, its symbol at Delhi, is now,
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Speaker 1: I suppose a scaffold, bristling pile of Neo Georgian building
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Speaker 1: is the latest of the constructive, synthetic efforts to make
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Speaker 1: a newer and fuller life for mankind. Who dares call
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Speaker 1: it the last? I question myself constantly whether this life
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Speaker 1: we live to day, whether that too is more than
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Speaker 1: a trial of these blind constructive forces, more universal, perhaps
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Speaker 1: more powerful, perhaps than any predecessor, but still a trial
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Speaker 1: to litter the world with rusting material when the phase
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Speaker 1: of recession recurs. But yet I can never quite think
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Speaker 1: that is so. This time, surely it is different. This
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Speaker 1: time may indeed be the beginning of a permanent change.
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Speaker 1: This time there are new elements, new methods, and a
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Speaker 1: new spirit at work upon construction that the world has
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Speaker 1: never known before. Mankind may be now in the dawn
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Speaker 1: of a fresh phase of living. Altogether, it is possible
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Speaker 1: the forces of construction are proportionally gigantic. There was never
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Speaker 1: so much clear and critical thought in the world as
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Speaker 1: there is now never so large a body of generally
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Speaker 1: accessible knowledge and suggestion never anything like the same breadth
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Speaker 1: of outlook, the same universality of imaginative freedom, That is
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Speaker 1: so in spite of infinite turmoil and confusion. Moreover, the
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Speaker 1: effort now is less concentrated, less dramatic. There is no
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Speaker 1: one vital center to the modern movement which disaster can
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Speaker 1: strike or decay under mine. If Paris or New York
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Speaker 1: slacken and grow dull and materialist, if Berlin and London
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Speaker 1: conspire for a mutual destruction, Tokyo or Baku or Volparaiso
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Speaker 1: or Christiania or Smyrna or Delhi will shelter and continue
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Speaker 1: the onward impetus. And this time too, it is not
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Speaker 1: any one person, anyone dynasty, anyone cult or race which
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Speaker 1: carries our destiny. Human thought has begun to free itself
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Speaker 1: from individual entanglements and dramatic necessities and accidental standards. It
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Speaker 1: becomes a collective mind, a collective will towards achievement greater
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Speaker 1: than individuals or cities or kingdoms or peoples, a mind
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Speaker 1: and will to which we all contribute, and which none
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Speaker 1: of us may command nor compromise by our private errors.
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Speaker 1: It ceases to be aristocratic. It detaches itself from persons
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Speaker 1: and takes possession of us. All we are involved as
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Speaker 1: it grows free and dominant. We find ourselves in spite
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Speaker 1: of ourselves, in spite of quarrels and jealousies and conflicts,
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Speaker 1: helping and serving in the making of a new world city,
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Speaker 1: a new greater state. Above are legal states in which
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Speaker 1: all human life becomes a splendid enterprise, free and beautiful,
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Speaker 1: whose aptest symbol in all our world is a huge
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Speaker 1: Gothic cathedral lit to flame by the sun, whose scheme
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Speaker 1: is the towering conquest of the universe, whose every little
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Speaker 1: detail is the wrought out effort of a human soul.
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Speaker 1: Such were the ideas that grew together in my mind
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Speaker 1: as I went about India and the East, across those
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Speaker 1: vast sunlit plains, where men and women still toil in
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Speaker 1: their dusty fields for a harsh living, and live in
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Speaker 1: doorless hovels on floors of trampled cowdung, persecuted by a
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Speaker 1: hundred hostile beasts and parasites, caught and eaten by tigers
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Speaker 1: and panthers as cats eat mice, and grievously afflicted by
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Speaker 1: periodic famine and pestilence, even as men and women lived
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Speaker 1: before the dawn of history, for untold centuries, for hundreds
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Speaker 1: of thousands of years. Four. How strange we English seem
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Speaker 1: in India a little scattered garrison. Are we anything more
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Speaker 1: than accidental, anything more than the messenger boy who has
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Speaker 1: brought the impetus of the new effort towards civilization through
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Speaker 1: the gates of the East. Are we makers or just
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Speaker 1: a means casually taken up and used by the great
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Speaker 1: forces of God? I do not know. I have never
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Speaker 1: been able to tell. I've ever been able to decide
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Speaker 1: whether we are the greatest or the dullest of peoples.
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Speaker 1: I think we are an imaginative people, with an imagination
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Speaker 1: at once gigantic, heroic, and shy. And also we are
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Speaker 1: strangely restrained and disciplined people who are yet neither subdued
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Speaker 1: nor subordinated. These are flat contradictions to state. And yet
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Speaker 1: how else can one render the paradox of the English
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Speaker 1: character and the spectacle of a handful of mute, snobbish,
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Speaker 1: not obviously clever, and quite obviously ill educated men holding
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Speaker 1: together kingdoms, tongues and races, three hundred millions of them,
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Speaker 1: in a restless fermenting peace. Again and again in India,
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Speaker 1: I would find myself in little circles of the official English, supercilious, pretentious, conventional,
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Speaker 1: carefully turned out people living gaukaly, thinking gaukaly, talking nothing
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Speaker 1: but sport and gossip, relaxing at rare intervals into sentimentality
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Speaker 1: and levity as mean as a banjo tune, and a
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Speaker 1: kind of despairful disgust would engulf me. And then, in
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Speaker 1: some man's work, in some huge irrigation scheme, some feet
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Speaker 1: of strategic foresight, some simple penetrating realization of deep lying things,
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Speaker 1: I would find an effect, as if out of a
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Speaker 1: thickly rusted sheath one had pulled a sword and found
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Speaker 1: it flame. I recall one evening I spent at a
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Speaker 1: little station in Bengal, between Lucknow and Delhi, an evening
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Speaker 1: given over to private theatricals. The theater was a huge tent,
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Speaker 1: and the little, roughly improvised stage was lit by a
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Speaker 1: row of oil footlights, and so small as to bear
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Speaker 1: give a foothold for the actors and actresses. In the
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Speaker 1: more crowded scenes. About me were the great people. The
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Speaker 1: colonel's wife, a touring young man of family officers and
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Speaker 1: the wife of the manager of the big sugar refinery.
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Speaker 1: Close at hand behind were English of a more dubious
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Speaker 1: social position, also connected with the sugar refinery, a Eurasian
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Speaker 1: family or so very dressy and aggressive and terribly snubbed.
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Speaker 1: And then I think various Portuguese and other nondescripts, and
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Speaker 1: groups of non commissioned officers and men, some with their wives.
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Speaker 1: The play, admirably chosen was that crystallization of liberal Victorian
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Speaker 1: snobbery cast And I remember there was a subcurrent of
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Speaker 1: amusement because the young officer who played what is the
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Speaker 1: name of the hero's friend I forget, had, in the
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Speaker 1: haste of his superficiality, adopted a mustache it would not
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Speaker 1: keep on, and an eyeglass that would not keep in.
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Speaker 1: Everybody was acting very badly, nobody was word perfect, and
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Speaker 1: a rasping prompter would not keep ahead as he ought
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Speaker 1: to have done. The scenery and the make ups were daubs,
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Speaker 1: And I was filled with amazement that having quite wantonly
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Speaker 1: undertaken to do this thing, these people could then do
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Speaker 1: it so slackly. Then a certain sudden warmth in the
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Speaker 1: applause about me quickened my attention, and I realized the
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Speaker 1: satirical purport of drunken old father Eccles and the moral
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Speaker 1: intention of his son in law, the plumber. Between them,
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Speaker 1: they expressed the whole duty of the working man as
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Speaker 1: the prosperous Victorians conceived it. He was to work hard, always,
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Speaker 1: at any job he could find, for any wages he
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Speaker 1: could get, and if he didn't, he was a drunken shirker,
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Speaker 1: and the dupe of agitators, a comforting but misleading doctrine.
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Speaker 1: And here were these people, a decade on in the
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Speaker 1: twentieth century, with time, death and judgment close upon them,
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Speaker 1: still eagerly applauding, eager to excuse their minds with this
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Speaker 1: one sided, ungracious, old fashioned nonsense that has done so
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Speaker 1: much to intensify the deepening class antagonisms that strain us
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Speaker 1: now at home, almost to the breaking point. How amazingly
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Speaker 1: it seemed these people didn't understand and wouldn't understand, any
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Speaker 1: class but their own, any race but their own, any
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Speaker 1: usage other than their use. Covertly I surveyed the colonel's profile.
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Speaker 1: It expressed nothing but entire satisfaction with these disastrous interpretations.
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Speaker 1: What a weather worn, thought free face that grizzled veteran
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Speaker 1: showed the world. I was seized with a sudden curiosity
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Speaker 1: to see how the private soldiers behind me were taking
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Speaker 1: old echoes. I turned round to discover cropped heads and
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Speaker 1: faces as expressionless as masks, and behind them dusky faces
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Speaker 1: watching very alertly, and then other dusky faces Eurasians, inferiors, servants, natives. Then,
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Speaker 1: at a sharp edge, the glare of our lighting ceased,
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Speaker 1: and the canvas walls of our narrow world of illusion
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Speaker 1: opened into a vast blue twilight. At the opening stood
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Speaker 1: two white clad seeks, very very still and attentive, watching
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Speaker 1: the performance. And beyond them was a great space of sky,
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Speaker 1: over a dim profile of trees and roofs, and a minaret,
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Speaker 1: a sky darkling down to the flushed red memory. Such
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Speaker 1: a short memory, it is in India, of a day
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Speaker 1: that had gone forever. I remained staring at that for
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Speaker 1: some time. Isn't old Eccles good? Whispered the colonel's wife
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Speaker 1: beside me, and recalled me to the play. Somehow, that
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Speaker 1: picture of a narrow canvas tent in the midst of
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Speaker 1: immensities has become my symbol for the whole life of
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Speaker 1: the governing English, the English of India and Switzerland, and
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Speaker 1: the Riviera and the West End, and the public services.
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Speaker 1: But they are not England. They are not the English reality,
20:45
Speaker 1: which is a thing at once bright and illuminating and fitful,
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Speaker 1: a thing humorous and wise and adventurous. Shakespeare, Dickens, Newton, Darwin, Nelson, Bacon, Shelley,
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Speaker 1: English name every one like the piercing light of lanterns
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Speaker 1: swinging and swaying among the branches of dark trees. At
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Speaker 1: night five, I went again to Ceylon to look into
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Speaker 1: the conditions of coolly importation. And then I was going
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Speaker 1: back into Asam, once more, still in the wake of
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Speaker 1: indentured labor, when I chanced upon a misadventure. I had
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Speaker 1: my first and only experience of big game shooting in
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Speaker 1: the Garrow Hills. I was clawed out of a tree
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Speaker 1: by a wounded panther. He missed his hold and I
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Speaker 1: got back to my branch, but my shoulder was put out,
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Speaker 1: my thigh was badly torn, and my blood was poisoned
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Speaker 1: by the wound. I had an evil, uncomfortable time. My
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Speaker 1: injury hampered me greatly, and for a while it seemed
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Speaker 1: likely I should be permanently lamed. I had to keep
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Speaker 1: to vehicles and reasonably good roads. I wound up my
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Speaker 1: convalescence with a voyage to Singapore, and from thence I
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Speaker 1: went on, rather disconnectedly, to a number of exploratory journeys,
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Speaker 1: excursions rather than journeys into China. I got to Peking
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Speaker 1: and then suddenly faced back to Europe, returning overland through Russia.
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Speaker 1: I wanted now to study the conditions of modern industrialism
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Speaker 1: at its sources, and my disablement did but a little
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Speaker 1: to accelerate a return already decided upon. I had got
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Speaker 1: my conception of the East as a whole, and of
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Speaker 1: the shape of the historical process. I no longer felt
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Speaker 1: adrift in a formless chaos of forces. I perceived now
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Speaker 1: very clearly that human life is essentially a creative struggle
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Speaker 1: out of the usage of immemorial years, that the synthesis
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Speaker 1: of our contemporary civilization is this creative impulse rising again
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Speaker 1: in its latest and greatest effort, the creative impulse rising
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Speaker 1: again as a wave rises from the trough of its predecessors,
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Speaker 1: out of the ruins of our parent system imperial Rome.
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Speaker 1: But this time, and for the first time, the effort
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Speaker 1: is world wide, and China and Iceland, Patagonia and Central
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Speaker 1: Africa all swing together with us to make or into
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Speaker 1: another catastrophic failure, to make the great state of mankind.
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Speaker 1: All this I had now distinctly in my mind. The
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Speaker 1: new process, I perceive had gone further in the West,
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Speaker 1: was most developed in the West. The lighter end lifts first.
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Speaker 1: So back I came away from the great body of mankind,
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Speaker 1: which is Asia to its head. And since I was
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Speaker 1: still held by my promise from returning to England, I
23:59
Speaker 1: betook myself first to the Pas de Calais, and then
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Speaker 1: to Belgium, and thence into industrial Germany, to study the
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Speaker 1: socialistic movement at its sources. And I was beginning to
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Speaker 1: see too very clearly by the time of my return,
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Speaker 1: that what is confusedly called the labor problem is really
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Speaker 1: not one problem at all, but two. There is the
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Speaker 1: old problem, the problem as old as Zimbabwe and the Pyramids,
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Speaker 1: the declining problem, the problem of organizing masses of unskilled
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Speaker 1: labor to the constructive ends of a great state. And
24:38
Speaker 1: there is the new modification, due to machinery, which has
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Speaker 1: rendered unskilled labor and labor of a low grade of
24:45
Speaker 1: skill almost unnecessary to mankind, added coal, oil, wind, and water,
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Speaker 1: the elementary school, and the printing press to our sources
24:54
Speaker 1: of power, and superseded the ancient shepherding and driving of
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Speaker 1: men by the possibility of their intelligent and willing co operation.
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Speaker 1: The two are still mixed in every discussion, even as
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Speaker 1: they are mixed in the practice of life. But inevitably
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Speaker 1: they will be disentangled. We break free from slavery, open
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Speaker 1: or disguised, just as we illuminate and develop this disentanglement.
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Speaker 1: I have long since ceased to trouble about the economics
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Speaker 1: of human society. Ours are not economic but psychological difficulties.
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Speaker 1: There is enough for every one, and only a fool
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Speaker 1: can be found to deny it. But our methods of
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Speaker 1: getting and making are still ruled by legal and social
25:46
Speaker 1: traditions from the time before we had tapped these new
25:50
Speaker 1: sources of power, before there was more than enough for
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Speaker 1: every one, and when a bare supply was only secured
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Speaker 1: by jealous possession and unremitting toil. We have no longer
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Speaker 1: to secure enough by a stern insistence. We have come
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Speaker 1: to a plenty. The problem now is to make that
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Speaker 1: plenty go round. And keep it enough while we do.
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Speaker 1: Our real perplexities are altogether psychological. There are no valid
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Speaker 1: arguments against a great spirited socialism, but this that people
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Speaker 1: will not indolence, greed, meanness of spirit, the aggressiveness of authority,
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Speaker 1: and above all jealousy, jealousy for our pride and vanity,
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Speaker 1: jealousy for what we esteem our possessions, jealousy for those
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Speaker 1: upon whom we have set the heavy fetters of our love.
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Speaker 1: A jealousy of criticism and association. These are the real
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Speaker 1: obstacles to those brave, large reconstructions, those profitable abnegatiations and
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Speaker 1: brotherly feats of generosity, that will yet turn human life,
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Speaker 1: of which our individual lives are but the momentary parts,
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Speaker 1: into a glad, beautiful and triumphant cooperation all round this
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Speaker 1: sunlit world. If but humanity could have its imagination touched,
27:25
Speaker 1: I was already beginning to see the great problem of
27:28
Speaker 1: mankind as indeed nothing other than a magnification of the
27:33
Speaker 1: little problem of myself, as a problem in escape from grooves,
27:39
Speaker 1: from preoccupations and suspicions, precautions and ancient angers, a problem
27:45
Speaker 1: of escape from these spiritual beasts that prowl and claw,
27:50
Speaker 1: to a new generosity and a new breadth of view
27:55
Speaker 1: for all of us, little son, as for each of
27:59
Speaker 1: us solve it is that we have to get away
28:03
Speaker 1: from ourselves to a greater thing, to a giant's desire
28:08
Speaker 1: and an unending life ours, and yet not our own.
28:16
Speaker 1: Six It is a queer experience to be, even for
28:21
Speaker 1: a moment in the grip of a great beast. I
28:24
Speaker 1: had been put into the fork of a tree, so
28:27
Speaker 1: that I could shoot with a big stem behind my back.
28:30
Speaker 1: The fork wasn't, i suppose, more than a score of
28:33
Speaker 1: feet from the ground. It was a safe enough place
28:36
Speaker 1: from a tiger, and that is what we expected. We
28:40
Speaker 1: had been misled by our tracker, who had mistaken the
28:44
Speaker 1: pugs of a big leopard for a tiger's. They were
28:47
Speaker 1: over rocky ground for the most part, and he had
28:50
Speaker 1: only the spoor of a chance patch of half dried
28:52
Speaker 1: mud to go upon. The beast had killed a goat
28:56
Speaker 1: and was beaten out of a thicket near by me
28:59
Speaker 1: in which he had been lying up. The probability had
29:03
Speaker 1: seemed that he would go away a long attempting ravine,
29:06
Speaker 1: to where Captain Crosbie, who as my host, awaited him.
29:10
Speaker 1: I as the amateur was intended to be little more
29:12
Speaker 1: than a spectator. But he broke back towards the wing
29:16
Speaker 1: of the line of beaters and came across the sunlit
29:19
Speaker 1: rocks within thirty yards of my post scene, going along
29:25
Speaker 1: in that way, flattened almost to the ground. He wasn't
29:29
Speaker 1: a particularly impressive beast, and I shot at his shoulder
29:33
Speaker 1: as one might blaze away at a rabbit, perhaps just
29:36
Speaker 1: a little more carefully, feeling as a lord of creation
29:40
Speaker 1: should who dispenses a merited death. I expected him either
29:44
Speaker 1: to roll over or bolt. Then instantly he was coming
29:50
Speaker 1: in huge bounds towards me. He came so rapidly that
29:55
Speaker 1: he was covered by the big limb of the tree
29:57
Speaker 1: on which I was standing, until he was quite beneath me.
30:00
Speaker 1: And my second shot, which I thought in the instant,
30:03
Speaker 1: must have missed him, was taken rapidly as he crouched
30:07
Speaker 1: to spring up the trunk. Then, you know, came a
30:11
Speaker 1: sort of astonishment, And I think because afterwards Crosbie picked
30:16
Speaker 1: up a dropped cartridge at the foot of the tree
30:18
Speaker 1: that I tried to reload. I believe I was completely
30:22
Speaker 1: incredulous that the beast was going to have me until
30:25
Speaker 1: he actually got me. The thing was too completely out
30:29
Speaker 1: of my imaginative picture. I don't believe I thought at all.
30:33
Speaker 1: While he was coming up the tree, I merely noted
30:36
Speaker 1: how astonishingly he resembled an angry cat. Then he'd got
30:41
Speaker 1: my leg. He was hanging on to it, first by
30:44
Speaker 1: two claws and then by one claw, and the whole
30:47
Speaker 1: weight of him was pulling me down. It didn't seem
30:51
Speaker 1: to be my leg. I wasn't frightened. I felt absolutely nothing.
30:56
Speaker 1: I was amazed. I slipped, tried to get a hold
31:00
Speaker 1: on the tree trunk, felt myself being hauled down, and
31:04
Speaker 1: then got my arm about the branch. I still clung
31:07
Speaker 1: to my unloaded gun, as an impoverished aristocrat might cling
31:11
Speaker 1: to his patent of nobility. That was I felt, my
31:15
Speaker 1: answer for him. Yet I supposed the situation lasted a
31:20
Speaker 1: fraction of a second, though it seemed to me to
31:24
Speaker 1: last an interminable time. Then I could feel my laking's
31:29
Speaker 1: rip and his claw go scoring deeply down my calf.
31:33
Speaker 1: That hurt in a kind of painless, impersonal interesting way.
31:38
Speaker 1: Was my leg coming off boot. The weight had gone,
31:42
Speaker 1: that enormous weight he'd missed his hold altogether. I heard
31:48
Speaker 1: his claws teared on the bark of the tree, and
31:51
Speaker 1: then his heavy soft fall upon the ground. I achieved
31:56
Speaker 1: a cat like celerity. In another second, I was back
31:59
Speaker 1: in my reloading, my legs tucked up as tightly as possible.
32:05
Speaker 1: I peered down through the branches, ready for him. He
32:09
Speaker 1: wasn't there, not up the tree again. Then I saw
32:13
Speaker 1: him making off with a halting gait across the scorching
32:17
Speaker 1: rocks some thirty yards away, but I could not get
32:20
Speaker 1: my gun into a comfortable position before he was out
32:23
Speaker 1: of sight behind a ridge. I wondered why the sunlight
32:27
Speaker 1: seemed to be flickering, like an electric light that fails.
32:32
Speaker 1: Was somehow aware of blood streaming from my leg down
32:34
Speaker 1: the tree stem. It seemed a torrent of blood, and
32:39
Speaker 1: there was a long, loose ribbon of flesh, very sickening
32:42
Speaker 1: to see. And then I fainted and fell out of
32:46
Speaker 1: the tree, bruising my arm and cheek badly and dislocating
32:50
Speaker 1: my shoulder in the fall. Some of the beaters saw
32:54
Speaker 1: me fall and brought Crosbie in sufficient time to improvise
32:58
Speaker 1: a tourniquet and saved my life. End of Chapter eight