The Pilgrim's Regress Read Online Free PDF

In actual fact, he is by profession a pimp.’
    â€˜And the Island?’ said John.
    â€˜We’ll talk about it in the morning. Ain’t the kind of Island you’re thinking of. Tell you what. I don’t live with my father and my precious sister. I live in Eschropolis and I am going back to-morrow. I’ll take you down to the laboratory and show you some real poetry. Not fantasies. The real thing.’
    â€˜Thank you very much,’ said John.
    Then young Mr. Halfways found his room for him and the whole of that household went to bed.

VIII
    Great Promises
    G US HALFWAYS WAS the name of Mr. Halfway’s son. As soon as he rose in the morning he called John down to breakfast with him so that they might start on their journey. There was no one to hinder them, for old Halfways was still asleep and Media always had breakfast in bed. When they had eaten, Gus brought him into a shed beside his father’s house and showed him a machine on wheels.
    â€˜What is this?’ said John.
    â€˜My old bus,’ said young Halfways. Then he stood back with his head on one side and gazed at it for a bit: but presently he began to speak in a changed and reverent voice.
    â€˜She is a poem. She is the daughter of the spirit of the age. What was the speed of Atalanta to her speed? The beauty of Apollo to her beauty?
    Now beauty to John meant nothing save glimpses of his Island, and the machine did not remind him of his Island at all: so he held his tongue.
    â€˜Don’t you see?’ said Gus. ‘Our fathers made images of what they 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-deception and phallic sentiment. But here you have the real art. Nothing erotic about her, eh?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 long time nothing happened: but at last there came a 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 ZEITGEISTHEIM
    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 civilization and philosophy has painfully struggled up.
    SHAW

I
    Eschropolis
    T HEN I DREAMED THAT he led John into a big room rather like a bathroom: it was full of steel 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—except for a few of them who had long hair and beards.
    â€˜What are they so angry