“Nothing worth mentioning. I was just thinking that it reminded me a little up here of the first time you and I ever talked together.”
He glanced down at the panorama below, with its odd jumble of hideous buildings, softened here and there with wreaths of sunstained smoke, its great blots of ugliness irredeemable, insistent.
“It's different, of course,” she went on. “I remember, even now, the view from the house-top that night. In a sense, it was finer than this; everything was more lurid and yet more chaotic; one simply felt that underneath all those mysterious places was some great being, toiling and struggling—Life itself, groaning through space with human cogwheels. Up here one sees too much. Oh, my dear Leonard,” she continued, “to think that you, too, should be one of the devastators!”
He fitted his instrument into its case and replaced it in his pocket.
“Come,” he said, “you mustn't call me hard names. I shall remind you of the man whose works you are making me read. You know what he says—'The aesthete is, after all, only a dallier. The world lives and progresses by reason of its utilitarians.' This hill represents to me most of the things that are worth having in life.”
She laughed shortly.
“You will cut down those hedges and drive away the birds to find a fresh home; you will plough up the green grass, cut out a street and lay down granite stones. Then I see your ugly little houses coming up like mushrooms all over the place. You are a vandal, my dear Leonard.”
“I am simply obeying the law,” he answered. “After all, even from your own point of view, I do not think that it is so bad. Look closer, and you will find that the hedges are blackened here and there with smuts. The birds will find a better dwelling place further away. See how the smoke from those factory chimneys is sending its smuts across these fields. They are no longer country; they are better gathered in.”
She shivered.
“There is something about life,” she said, sadly, “which terrifies me. Every force that counts seems to be destructive.”