Waste

Maoriland Worker, Volume I, Issue 7, 20 March 1911, Page 20

Waste

She was gazing abstractedly at the imposing title of an elaborately bound book in her hand. "I do not feel any nearer what I want to know, and I am just getting tired of looking for it in print," she mused half aloud. "Everything is wrong, it seems to mc, and after all, it is not what is wrong that we want to know, but how for certain to put things right. lather used to say there was a Broken Law in the human action, and it does seem like to be something that the endless confusion of strife and resistance of men has not got hold upon." She turned aside to pick up a hatchet from the ground, with which she commenced to split up a small packingcase left by the grocer's boy for firewood. Carefully gathering the bright nails from the broken box as she jproceeded with her task, and placing them in a little heap together, she paused not until she had reduced, the wood to a convenient stock of small chips. Sur-vej-iug her finished work, she resumed her meditations. "It does not take any particular genius to tell what is wrong everywhere. Look at this box . . . and those nails . . . each as good as new. Before it has lost the sweet green clinging of the forest where it grew I shall burn the wood to boil the kettle for a fanciful cup of tea. The nails most folk would throw on the lire along with the sticks —not to say that the saving of things will right matters. I have no especial need for them, .but I hate to waste. "There again," she continued, approaching the kitchen range and tearing in half a newspaper with which to set the fire, "what a pitiful conclusion to a world of hard thought! Yet the beginning and the end scarcely could be found of the wealth of reason embodied in a single copy of daily print. As for the labour involved, what contribtvfcor has reaped an equitable return? It's brains and muscle I'm burning—and flesh and blood." She went over the ground with Dick in the dinner hour ; gentle, hard-think-ing, big-hearted Dick. "Yes, Aldine," he said in his quiet way, "it is clearly waste, and waste that should be impossible. "We are all subscribers to it, and for all waste there is corresponding want." She noticed that he did not say in the too-common jargon of the day, "should be made impossible." "Which is not intended in any sort for 'revolutionary,' I know," she replied thoughtfully; ' 'and yet I cannot see else how it works out." ' 'Ah, dear, no revealed scheme of men, as yet, has virttie to render your discovered Waste impossible. The exercise of violent forces wielded against indestructible elements, which forms the basis and development of all reformation, is sowing of the seed of strife, not setting of the germ of content. Only regeneration, however i\ comes, can create that." "I wonder if the text of the world's need lay in father's Broken Law, Dick?"

He did not reply, .but resting a. hand gently upon her shoulder in farewell, passed out. lieverent as the Apostle Paul's for Gamaliel was Dick Egerton's memory for Geraldine Raleigh's father. Dear to these two were the short hours of sweet communion which the stern battle of life left them to each other, when they renewed the feasts of reason and thought once discoursed to their budding minds by the great-souled scholar and human student whose vacant chair, it seemed to their fond imagining, still mutely shared their converse as they "Spake with naked hearts together Pondering much and much contriving How the tribes- of men might prosper." "If we could only understand father's book .... there is truth there .... perhaps revelation!" murmured the girl, as, left alone, she wandered slowly towards the pleasant shady parlour, where, taking a small bunch of keys from her pocket, she opened an oldfashioned escretoire and lifted from its recess a bound packet of parchment. Earnestly and long she gazed at the mystic signs upon the cover which indicated tlie text of its contents. These formed a manner of drawing which sometimes looked like a flight of swallows skimming the sunset horizon; again like unto a group of happy children amidst flowers, at play; and yet again, a band of enchained slaves, the bonds of which a strong white hand was severing. The varying effects were wonderfully produced by the degree of light and shade as it fell upon the picture. Each alternate page of the volume was left blank, its symbolic imprint being accomplished on the second, face of its leaves, evidently arranged thus for the purpose of later translation. This, in effect, had been begun, but ended abruptly with a single paragraph rendered in plain script thus— The condition of mankind is like urito a Great Clock, upon the face of which the fingers have been set . falsely to time; by which corrupt indication all other achievement becomes degenerate. "The Broken Law," she mused in dreamy tone, seating herself and resting her soft cheek against the side of the old desk. Then a wonderful smile lighting up her earnest features as a treble sound caught her ear, she rose and stepped quickly to an adjoining apartment where upon a cosily draped bed disported two fair children newly awakened from a noonday sleep. On the carpet in her path lay a scrap of crumpled newspaper, which she stooped of habit to pick up. Mechanically smoothing out its creased folds, a headline arrested her attention— "Scarcity of Boy and Girl Labour." The happy prattle of the babes continued, revelling in the proprietorship of selected patterns of a prettily designed patchwork quilt, but the young mother fell upon her knees by the bedside in an agony of suddenly revealed truth. "Boy and girl labour," she moaned. And the helplessness of the victims of the ages fell upon her spirit, and she cried in her breast with an exceeding bitter cry, "Oh, God! I can spare them rather—take them now ! Accursed labour ! The whip of man . . . the heel of woman . . . the suborned self . . . the grey round . . . the meagre reward —at the spur of an evil balance. And only the meaner chances of fate against the pitiless throw!" Meanwhile the sphinx-faced calendar on the wall recorded the memorial day of a noble brother, broken unto death on life's fair threshold by the grind of that Merciless Treadmill where Waste and Want unite their forces to the outptit of Labour and Pain.