THE COUNCIL IN THE HOUSE.
"Brothers of the Holy College!" I cried, "you have beheld the
crime--you are witnesses of the Fact--you have actually seen the Arch
Physician himself revealing the Great Secret, which none of yourselves,
even of the College, hath been permitted to learn--the Secret confined
by the Wisdom of the College to himself and to his Suffragan."
"We are witnesses," they cried, with one consent. To my great
satisfaction, even those who were of Dr. Linister's party, and who
voted with him against the Administration and Policy of the College,
spoke, on this occasion, for the plain and undeniable truth.
"What," I asked, "is the Penalty when one of the least among us, even
an Assistant only, betrays to the People any of the secrets--even the
least secret--of the work carried on in this House?"
"It is DEATH," they replied, with one voice.
"It is DEATH," I repeated, pointing to the Arch Physician.
At such a moment, when nothing short of annihilation appeared in view,
one would have expected from the guilty pair an appearance of the
greatest consternation and dismay. On the contrary, the Arch Physician,
with an insensibility--or a bravado--which one would not have expected
of him, stood before us all, his arms folded, his eyes steady, his lips
even smiling. Beside him stood the girl, dressed in the ridiculous
mummery of the nineteenth century, bowed down, her face in her hands.
"It is I," she murmured--"it is I, Harry, who have brought you to
this. Oh, forgive me! Let us die together. Since I have awakened out
of the stupid torpor of the Present--since we remembered the Past--and
Love--let us die together; for I could not live without you." She knelt
at his feet, and laid her head upon his arm. "My love," she said, "my
Lord and Love! let me die with you."
At this extraordinary spectacle I laughed aloud. Love? I thought the
old wives' tales of Love and Lordship were long, long since dead and
forgotten. Yet here was a man for the sake of a woman--actually
because she wanted to go away and begin again the old pernicious
life--breaking his most sacred vows; and here was a woman--for the sake
of this man--actually and truly for his sake--asking for death--death
with him! Since, when they were both dead, there could be no more any
feeling one for the other, why ask for death? What good could that do
for either?
"Your wish," I said to this foolish woman, "shall be gratified, in
case the Judges of your case decide that your crime can be expiated
by no less a penalty. Fellows of the College, let this guilty pair be
confined for the night, and to-morrow we will try them solemnly in the
College Court according to ancient custom."
I know not how many years had elapsed since that Court was held. The
offences of the old time were for the most part against property--since
there had been no property, there had been no crimes of this kind.
Another class of old offences consisted of violence rising out of
quarrels; since almost all these quarrels originated in disputes about
property--every man in the old time who had property was either a thief
or the son of a thief, so that disputes were naturally incessant--there
could be no longer any such quarrels or any such violence. A third
class of crimes were caused by love, jealousy, and the like; these two
had happily, as we believed, disappeared forever.
The last class of crimes to vanish were those of mutiny. When the
People grew gradually to understand that the welfare of all was the
only rule of the governing body, and that selfishness, individualism,
property, privilege, would no longer be permitted, they left off
murmuring, and mutiny ceased. You have seen how orderly, how docile,
how tranquil, is the life of the People as it has been ordered by
the Sacred College. Alas! I thought that this order, this sheep-like
freedom from Thought, was going to be henceforth universal and
undisturbed.
Our prisoners made no opposition. John Lax, the Porter, bearing his
halberd of office, marched beside them. We closed in behind them, and
in this order we led them to the strong room over the South Porch,
which is provided with bars and a lock. It is the sleeping-chamber of
John Lax, but for this night he was to remain on the watch below.
Then, as Suffragan, I called a Council of Emergency in the Inner House,
taking the Presidency in the absence of the Arch Physician.
I told my brethren briefly what had happened; how my attention had
been called to the fact that a company of the People, headed by the
young girl called Christine, had begun to assemble every night in the
Museum, there to put on clothes which belonged to the old time, and to
masquerade in the manners, language, and amusements (so called) of that
time; that this assemblage, which might have been innocent and even
laudable if it led, as it should have done, to a detestation of the
old times, had proved mischievous, because, strangely enough, it had
exactly the opposite effect; that, in fact, everybody in the company
had fallen into an ardent yearning after the Past, and that all the
bad features of that bad time--the Social inequality, the Poverty, the
Injustice--were carefully ignored.
Upon this, one of Dr. Linister's Party arose, and begged permission
to interrupt the Suffragan. He wished to point out that memory was
indestructible; that even if we succeeded in reducing Mankind, as the
Suffragan wished, to be a mere breathing and feeding machine--the
Ultimate Triumph of Science--any one of these machines might be at any
time electrified into a full and exact memory of the Past; that, to
the average man, the Emotion of the Past would always be incomparably
preferable to the Tranquillity of the Present. What had just been done
would be done again.
I went on, after this interruption, to narrate how I set myself to
watch, and presently saw the Arch Physician himself enter the Museum;
how he exchanged his gown for the costume in which the men disfigured
themselves, play-acted, pretended, and masqueraded with them; danced
with them, no external respect whatever being paid to his rank; and
afterwards had certain love passages--actually love passages between
the Arch Physician and a Woman of the People!--which I overheard, and
repeated as far as I could remember them. The rest my brethren of the
College knew already; how I hastily summoned them, and led them into
the Inner House just before the arrival of the Criminals.
Thereupon, without any attempt of Dr. Linister's friends to the
contrary, it was Resolved that the Trial of the Arch Physician and his
accomplices should be held in the morning.
I next invited their attention to the behavior of the girl Christine.
She it was, I told them, who had instigated the whole of the business.
A culpable curiosity it was, no doubt, that first led her to consider
and study the ways of the ancient world; what should be the ways of the
Past to an honest and loyal person, satisfied with the Wisdom which
ruled the Present? She read the old books, looked at the old pictures,
and lived all day long in the old Museum. There were many things which
she could not understand; she wanted to understand these things; and
she conceived a violent, unreasoning admiration for the old time, which
appeared to this foolish girl to be a continual round of pleasure
and excitement. Therefore she gathered together a company of those
who had belonged to the richer class in the days when property was
permitted. She artfully awakened them out of their contentment, sowed
the seeds of dissatisfaction among them, caused them to remember the
Past with a vehement longing to reproduce the worst part of it--namely,
the manners and customs of the richer class--the people for whom the
bulk of mankind toiled, so that the privileged few might have nothing
to do but to feast, dance, sing, and make love. I asked the College,
therefore, what should be done with such a girl, warning them that one
Penalty, and one only, would meet the case and render for the future
such outbreaks impossible.
Again the Physician who had spoken before rose up and remarked that
such outbreaks were inevitable, because the memory is indestructible.
"You have here," he said, "a return to the Past, because a young girl,
by reading the old books, has been able to stimulate the memory of
those who were born in the Past. Other things may bring about the
same result; a dream, the talking together of two former friends.
Let the girl alone. She has acted as we might have expected a young
girl--the only young girl among us--to have acted. She has found that
the Past, which some of us have represented as full of woe and horror,
had its pleasant side; she asks why that pleasant side could not be
reproduced. I, myself, or any of us, might ask the same question. Nay,
it is well known that I protest--and always shall protest, my friends
and I--against the Theory of the Suffragan. His Triumph of Science
we consider horrible to the last degree. I, for one, shall never be
satisfied until the Present is wholly abolished, and until we have gone
back to the good old system of Individualism, and begun to encourage
the People once more to cultivate the old happiness by the old methods
of their own exertion."
I replied that my own recollection of the old time was perfectly clear,
and that there was nothing but unhappiness in it. As a child I lived in
the street; I never had enough to eat; I was cuffed and kicked; I could
never go to bed at night until my father, who always came home drunk,
was asleep; the streets were full of miserable children like myself.
Where was the happiness described by my learned brother? Where was the
pleasant side? More I said, but it suffices to record that by a clear
majority it was Resolved to arrest the girl Christine in the morning,
and to try all three prisoners, as soon as the Court could be prepared
for them, according to ancient usage.
Early in the morning I sought an interview with the Arch Physician.
I found him, with the woman Mildred, sitting in the Chamber over the
Porch. There was no look of terror, or even of dejection, on the face
of either. Rather there was an expression as of exaltation. Yet they
were actually going to die--to cease breathing--to lose consciousness!
I told the prisoner that I desired to represent my own conduct in its
true light. I reminded him that, with him, I was guardian of the Holy
Secret. The power and authority of the College, I pointed out, were
wholly dependent upon the preservation of that Secret in its own hands.
By divulging it to the People he would make them as independent of
the Physician as the Great Discovery itself had made them independent
of the Priest. The latter had, as he pretended, the Keys of the After
Life. The former did actually hold those of the Actual Life. The
authority of the Physician gone, the people would proceed to divide
among themselves, to split up into factions, to fight and quarrel, to
hold private property, and in fact would speedily return to the old
times, and all the work that we had accomplished would be destroyed.
Every man would have the knowledge of the Secret for himself and his
family. They would all begin to fight again--first for the family, next
for the Commune, and then for the tribe or nation. All this would have
been brought about by his treachery had not I prevented it.
"Yes," he said, "doubtless you are quite right, Grout." He spoke
quite in the old manner, as if I had been still his servant in the
old laboratory. It was not till afterwards that I remembered this,
and became enraged to think of his arrogance. "We will not argue
the matter. It is not worth while. You acted after your kind, and
as I might have expected." Again it was not until afterwards that I
considered what he meant and was enraged. "When we allowed gentlehood
to be destroyed, gentle manners, honor, dignity, and such old virtues
went too. You acted--for yourself--very well, Grout. Have you anything
more to say? As for us, we have gone back to the old times, this young
lady and I--quite to the old, old times." He took her hand and kissed
it, while his eyes met hers, and they were filled with a tenderness
which amazed me. "This lady, Grout," he said, "has done me the honor of
accepting my hand. You will understand that no greater happiness could
have befallen me. The rest that follows is of no importance--none--not
the least. My dear, this is Grout, formerly employed in my laboratory.
Unfortunately he has no experience of Love, or of any of the Arts or
Culture of the good old Time; but a man of great intelligence. You can
go, Grout."