The poetry of the Machine Age is so very pure

called gods and goddesses; but they were really only brown girls and brown boys whitewashed--as anyone found out by looking at them too long. All self-depreciation and phallic sentiment. But here you have the real art. Nothing erotic about her, eh?"

"Certainly not," said John, looking at the cog-wheels and coils of wire, "it is certainly not at all like a brown girl." It was, in fact, more like a nest of hedgehogs and serpents.

"I should say not," said Gus. "Sheer power, eh? Speed, ruthlessness, austerity, significant form, eh? Also," (and here he dropped his voice) "very expensive indeed."

Then he made John sit in the machine and he himself sat beside him. Then he began pulling the levers about and for a time nothing happened: but at last there came flash and a roar and the machine bounded into the air and then dashed forward. Before John had got his breath they had flashed across a broad thoroughfare which he recognized as the main road, and were racing through the country to the north of it--a flat country of square stony fields divided by barbed wire fences. A moment later they were standing still in a city where all the houses were built of steel.

BOOK THREE

THROUGH DARKEST ZEITGEISTHEIM²⁷

And every shrewd turn was exalted among men...and simple goodness, wherein nobility doth ever most participate, was mocked away and clean vanished.--Thucydides

Now live the lesser, as lords of the world,

The busy troublers. Banished is our glory,

The earth's excellence grows old and sere. --Anon

The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilisation and philosophy has painfully struggled up.--Shaw

The poetry of Silly Twenties

CHAPTER ONE

Eschropolis

Then I dreamed that he led John into a big room rather like a bathroom: it was full of stell and glass and the walls were nearly all window, and there was a crowd of people there, drinking what looked like medicine and talking at the tops of their voices. They were all either young, or dressed up to look as if they were young. The girls had short hair and flat breasts and flat buttocks so that they looked like boys: but the boys had pale, egg-shaped faces and slender waists and big hips so that they looked like girls--expect for a few of them who had long hair and beards.

"What are they so angry about?" whispered John.

"They are not angry," said Gus; "they are talking about Art."

Then he brought John into the middle of the room and said:

"Say! Here's a guy who has been taken in by my father and wants some real hundred per cent music to clean him out. We had better begin with something neo-romantic to make the transition."

Then all the Clevers consulted together and presently they all agreed that Victoriana had better sing first. When Victoriana rose John at first thought that she was a schoolgirl: but after he had looked at her again he perceived that she was in fact about fifty. Before she began to sing she put on a dress which was a sort of exaggerated copy of Mr. Halfways' robes, and a mask which was like the Steward's mask except that the nose had been painted bright red and one of the eyes had been closed in a permanent wink.

"Priceless!" exclaimed one half of the Clevers, "too Puritanian."

But the other half, which included all the bearded men, held their noses in the air and looked very stiff. Then Victoriana took a little toy harp and began. The noises of the toy harp were so strange that John could not think of them as music at all. Then, when she sang, he had a picture in his mind which was a little like the Island, but he saw at once