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- 8087
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- 2026-01-30T03:55:03.883Z
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- 8011
- text
- one might experience at the fulfilment of some mysterious prophecy. But
how absurd, thought I again; the thing is a mere machine, the essence of
which is unvarying punctuality and precision.
Previously absorbed by the wheels and cylinders, my attention was now
directed to a sad-looking woman standing by.
‘That is rather an elderly person so silently tending the machine-end
here. She would not seem wholly used to it either.’
‘Oh,’ knowingly whispered Cupid, through the din, ‘she only came last
week. She was a nurse formerly. But the business is poor in these parts,
and she’s left it. But look at the paper she is piling there.’
‘Ay, foolscap,’ handling the piles of moist, warm sheets, which
continually were being delivered into the woman’s waiting hands. ‘Don’t
you turn out anything but foolscap at this machine?’
‘Oh, sometimes, but not often, we turn out finer work--cream-laid and
royal sheets, we call them. But foolscap being in chief demand, we turn
out foolscap most.’
It was very curious. Looking at that blank paper continually dropping,
dropping, dropping, my mind ran on in wonderings of those strange uses
to which those thousand sheets eventually would be put. All sorts of
writings would be writ on those now vacant things--sermons, lawyers’
briefs, physicians’ prescriptions, love-letters, marriage certificates,
bills of divorce, registers of births, death-warrants, and so on,
without end. Then, recurring back to them as they here lay all blank, I
could not but bethink me of that celebrated comparison of John Locke,
who, in demonstration of his theory that man had no innate ideas,
compared the human mind at birth to a sheet of blank paper; something
destined to be scribbled on, but what sort of characters no soul might
tell.
Pacing slowly to and fro along the involved machine, still humming with
its play, I was struck as well by the inevitability as the
evolvement-power in all its motions.
‘Does that thin cobweb there,’ said I, pointing to the sheet in its more
imperfect stage, ‘does that never tear or break? It is marvellous
fragile, and yet this machine it passes through is so mighty.’
‘It never is known to tear a hair’s point.’
‘Does it never stop--get clogged?’
‘No. It _must_ go. The machinery makes it go just _so_; just that very
way, and at that very pace you there plainly _see_ it go. The pulp can’t
help going.’
Something of awe now stole over me, as I gazed upon this inflexible iron
animal. Always, more or less, machinery of this ponderous, elaborate
sort strikes, in some moods, strange dread into the human heart, as some
living, panting Behemoth might. But what made the thing I saw so
specially terrible to me was the metallic necessity, the unbudging
fatality which governed it. Though, here and there, I could not follow
the thin, gauzy veil of pulp in the course of its more mysterious or
entirely invisible advance, yet it was indubitable that, at those points
where it eluded me, it still marched on in unvarying docility to the
autocratic cunning of the machine. A fascination fastened on me. I stood
spellbound and wandering in my soul. Before my eyes--there, passing in
slow procession along the wheeling cylinders, I seemed to see, glued to
the pallid incipience of the pulp, the yet more pallid faces of all the
pallid girls I had eyed that heavy day. Slowly, mournfully,
beseechingly, yet unresistingly, they gleamed along, their agony dimly
outlined on the imperfect paper, like the print of the tormented face on
the handkerchief of Saint Veronica.
‘Halloa! the heat of the room is too much for you,’ cried Cupid, staring
at me.
‘No--I am rather chill, if anything.’
‘Come out, sir--out--out,’ and, with the protecting air of a careful
father, the precocious lad hurried me outside.
- title
- Chunk 8