The Machine Stops | Page 8

E.M. Forster
those dead
workmen who had returned each evening to the starlight and to their
wives, and all the generations who had lived in the open air called back
to me, 'You will do it yet, you are coming,'"
He paused, and, absurd as he was, his last words moved her.
For Kuno had lately asked to be a father, and his request had been
refused by the Committee. His was not a type that the Machine desired
to hand on.

"Then a train passed. It brushed by me, but I thrust my head and arms
into the hole. I had done enough for one day, so I crawled back to the
platform, went down in the lift, and summoned my bed. Ah what
dreams! And again I called you, and again you refused."
She shook her head and said:
"Don't. Don't talk of these terrible things. You make me miserable. You
are throwing civilization away."
"But I had got back the sense of space and a man cannot rest then. I
determined to get in at the hole and climb the shaft. And so I exercised
my arms. Day after day I went through ridiculous movements, until my
flesh ached, and I could hang by my hands and hold the pillow of my
bed outstretched for many minutes. Then I summoned a respirator, and
started.
"It was easy at first. The mortar had somehow rotted, and I soon pushed
some more tiles in, and clambered after them into the darkness, and the
spirits of the dead comforted me. I don't know what I mean by that. I
just say what I felt. I felt, for the first time, that a protest had been
lodged against corruption, and that even as the dead were comforting
me, so I was comforting the unborn. I felt that humanity existed, and
that it existed without clothes. How can I possibly explain this? It was
naked, humanity seemed naked, and all these tubes and buttons and
machineries neither came into the world with us, nor will they follow
us out, nor do they matter supremely while we are here. Had I been
strong, I would have torn off every garment I had, and gone out into the
outer air unswaddled. But this is not for me, nor perhaps for my
generation. I climbed with my respirator and my hygienic clothes and
my dietetic tabloids! Better thus than not at all.
"There was a ladder, made of some prim¾val metal. The light from the
railway fell upon its lowest rungs, and I saw that it led straight upwards
out of the rubble at the bottom of the shaft. Perhaps our ancestors ran
up and down it a dozen times daily, in their building. As I climbed, the
rough edges cut through my gloves so that my hands bled. The light
helped me for a little, and then came darkness and, worse still, silence

which pierced my ears like a sword. The Machine hums! Did you know
that? Its hum penetrates our blood, and may even guide our thoughts.
Who knows! I was getting beyond its power. Then I thought: 'This
silence means that I am doing wrong.' But I heard voices in the silence,
and again they strengthened me." He laughed. "I had need of them. The
next moment I cracked my head against something."
She sighed.
"I had reached one of those pneumatic stoppers that defend us from the
outer air. You may have noticed them no the air-ship. Pitch dark, my
feet on the rungs of an invisible ladder, my hands cut; I cannot explain
how I lived through this part, but the voices till comforted me, and I felt
for fastenings. The stopper, I suppose, was about eight feet across. I
passed my hand over it as far as I could reach. It was perfectly smooth.
I felt it almost to the centre. Not quite to the centre, for my arm was too
short. Then the voice said: 'Jump. It is worth it. There may be a handle
in the centre, and you may catch hold of it and so come to us your own
way. And if there is no handle, so that you may fall and are dashed to
pieces--it is till worth it: you will still come to us your own way.' So I
jumped. There was a handle, and --"
He paused. Tears gathered in his mother's eyes. She knew that he was
fated. If he did not die today he would die tomorrow. There was not
room for such a person in the world. And with her pity disgust mingled.
She was ashamed at having borne such a son, she who had always been
so respectable and so full of ideas. Was he really the little boy to whom
she
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