Mr. Shaw and the Traveller
wHILE I was reading Mr. Bernard Shaw's monu- mental work on the future of the world, called The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism'and Capitalism, in which our lives, or, rather, the lives of our descendants, are to be laid out in neat and undeviating lines, so that there shall be little or no opportunity for lapse or ascen- sion, dismay suddenly came into my heart when I began to speculate on the question of travel in the Shavian paradise. What, I demanded of myself, will be done to the man who wishes to wander about the world for a while, or even to change his place of residence, when all of us have had our activities appointed by the commu- nity, and all men and women are equally rewarded for their work, whatever it may be, and the standard means of production, distribution and exchange have all been nationalized ? Millions of us now comfort our imagina- tion with the thought that, some day, when we have saved enough money to pay for our fares, we will " go round the world " or make short, sharp dashes into the more dangerous parts of the earth. Many people, indeed, do most of their travelling in their imagination—a very good way, too, in which to do it—and can transport themselves from one pole to the other as rapidly as Ariel put a belt, about the globe, with no other help than that of an atlas and a collection of Thomas Cook's circulars ; but others prefer facts, and are not happy unless they are climbing into trains or steamers or motor-cars or aeroplanes, or suffering discomfort in the swamps of Burmah, or upsetting their insides with unaccustomed food in Argentina, or enduring danger and the likelihood of unpleasant death in the Arctic or the Antarctic Oceans. These are wayward and restless men, disinclined to stay in one place and loving to move about. Other people, not necessarily wayward or restless, and with no desire to be in danger or discomfort, dislike intensely the idea that they must spend the whole of their lives in the same street or city. They require the stimulus of a new environment. I am one of these people. I find in myself, after I have been living for, say, three years in one house, an immense boredom with it, and I cannot go on with my work until I have moved to another house. (This boredom, curiously enough, is felt only in towns. I can live quite contentedly in the same house in the country for very long spells.) The streets through which I am obliged to pass become terribly monotonous to me, and I squander pounds and pounds upon taxi-cabs merely to get myself all the quicker away from them. The boredom disappears at the moment that I am newly housed, and.I am enthralled by the busi- ness of discovering my way about the new district and making myself acquainted with its shops. This may be very silly of me, but I did not invent my own nature nor, in this respect or, perhaps, in any, can I alter it. Many, persons seem to be similarly afflicted. Others, of course are content with the station or place in which they were born, and have no wish to alter it or to move from it.
I have heard men boasting that they were born and reared in one house, and expressing an ardent desire to die in it. I neither blame them nor envy them : they are as God made them, and so am I. A woman, in whose house I lodged, told me that she was born in Hampstead, but had never seen the Thames Embankment or, indeed, the Thames, until, when she was more than middle-aged, her employer, who left her the liability to pay the rent of the house in lieu of wages that he owed her, resolved to remove himself and his damaged credit from Hampstead to Denmark Hill, where, having failed to make any impression upon the tradesmen, he incon- tinently died. Yet she was a happy woman and had her own romances. I came upon her once, in her kitchen, confabbing with a charwoman, and was astonished to hear them addressing each other, excessively even if they had been married, as " Mrs." When, later, I inquired if my ears had deceived me she assured me that they had not. " Women of our age," she explained, " do not like to be called Miss, so we always call each other Mrs. ! " A harmless, but illuminating, method of amus- ing oneself, I thought at the time, and still think. It was during her passage from Hampstead to Denmark Hill that she saw the Thames and the Embankment she never saw either of them again, although when she died, she was an old woman.
For such as her there will be no trouble or difficulty in Mr. Shaw's Utopia : they will stay put wherever they may be put ; but what is to become of the rest of us, the wayward ones who must always be moving about or be stimulated by new surroundings ? There appears to be no provision for us in Mr. Shaw's Paradise. We are to be maddened, perhaps, by monotony from which there may be no escape, for in that world a man's pleasures will be regulated as inexorably as his labours and his rewards, and the community will be neatly arranged, and the permanent officials will not allow individual desires to disarrange it. If all must work or die, and none may earn more than another and thus indulge his desires out of his savings, it is plain that a man who wishes to wander about the world for a year or two will not be permitted to do so, since, in his wanderings, he will have to be supported by the rest of the community. He may, perhaps, be allowed to work his way from place to place, but only if there is need for his work, or he may be able to wangle a travelling scholarship out of the authorities, on the plea that he hopes to improve his mind and the affairs of his district by studying the ways and habits of other races. But he will not be permitted suddenly, whimsically, for the gratification of his own desire and pleasure, to cease whatever work has been appointed for him, and go trapesing off to Timbuctoo or the Paps of Jura. If he announces his intention of sailing across three oceans in a twenty-ton yacht, as Mr. Conor O'Brien did, for no other purpose than to prove that it is possible to cross three oceans in a twenty-ton yacht, he will promptly be locked up and, if he persists in his useless proposal to the extent of making a dash for the nearest port, may be executed as an incorrigible loafer. Imagine a bricklayer in Truro asking the local authori- ties to transfer him to Lisburn or the Kyle of Lochalsh. " No," says the official whom he interviews, " you cannot be transferred at present. We require nineteen bricklayers, and if you go away, there will only be eighteen. You must wait until somebody in Lisburn or the Kyle of LochaLsh wishes to be transferred to Truro. There is a bricklayer in Sheffield who would like to be transferred to South Wales. If an arrangement can be made for someone to exchange with him, and that someone would care to come to Truro, we could then let you go to Sheffield . . " To which the impatient petitioner may retort, " But I don't want to go to Sheffield. Who does ? I want to go to Lisburn or the Kyle of Lochalsh ! " The official will then order him back to his bricklaying and threaten to be very severe with him if he comes again to that office in an emotional and highly temperamental condition. It may be, and perhaps this is Mr. Shaw's hope, that by the time the Shavian Utopia has been achieved, all desire to roam will have been eliminated from the human heart, and the population will consist entirely of people who will wish to stay put, and will regard a proposal to send them on a tour of the world as a punishment. " Poor old Jones," they will say of some unfortunate fellow who has committed a misdemeanour, " he has been sent to Biggleswade for a month ! " Or " He was saucy to the Inspector this morning, so he has been ordered to live in Kettering ! " Habitual individualists and persons who persist in having wills of their own will be sentenced to spend the rest of their natural lives in Wolverhampton, and may even, in extreme cases, be sent to Anerley ! . . . I cannot believe that this prospect of immobility is really pleasing to Mr. Shaw. He is himself a great mover- about, although none of his removals are what may be called adventurous. He goes only to places where the hotels are starred, and there are private baths and private sitting-rooms. No communal activities for him if he can avoid them ! I remember, too, that in Back to Methuselah, he presented us with He-Ancients and She-Ancients who spent the whole of their time in knocking around. They wandered incessantly and without any visible means of subsistence, nor did they appear to do any work. They had no work to do. Their purpose in life was to think, although what they thought or why they thought it, or what was the good of them thinking it, we were not informed. The important point for us, however, is that Mr. Shaw, when he gets as far as his thought can reach, foresees a world in which people will never stop from travelling. What puzzles me is how the gap between the age of the Officialized and the age of the Ancients is to be bridged ? How are the incessant travellers to be evolved out of the stay-putters ? By general consent or by bloody revolution ? The latter, I hope, for I have the faith to believe that man will become exceedingly cantankerous in the Shavian paradise and will insist on his right to do what he damn well pleases. I am certain that, if, through the improvidence of Heaven, Mr. Shaw's paradise were to come upon us now, the first person in it to be shot for insubordination would be Mr.
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