It is a year since last I wrote anything in this book, and the year
has passed with such speed that I can scarcely believe that the ink
of December is dry. Nothing makes time slide away so fast as regular
monotonous employment, and not only this year, but the year before
that, and five months before that, seem pressed into a moment, dried
and flattened. But all the things that happened before that, when
in August, 1914, the whole of one's consciousness was changed, is
incredibly remote.
The war has made a cleavage across the continuity of life, and while
the mind and the conscious self get to be at home in the changed
existence, the line of cleavage does not become obliterated, but, on
the contrary, appears steeper and more sheer-sided. The edges of the
chasm have been covered over with the green growth of habit, of the
adjustment that alone renders fresh conditions possible; but further
and further away becomes the consciousness that there was once a time
in which all Europe was not at war. In those golden years people used
to discuss, just as they would discuss ghosts or the approach of a
comet, the possibility of a German war, that would lead all Europe into
the gate of Hell. But it was discussed theoretically as a subject of
polite conversation, when topics that were really of interest, like
Suffragettes or Home Rule in Ireland, ran dry. You talked about the
comet, Halley's comet, that was going to destroy the world, and then
you talked about a European war, that was going to destroy the world.
And then you played the guessing game.... It was all one: just a matter
of remote possibilities, based on an idea that you did not believe
in. And then it came, not Halley's comet, or a ghost, but the third
incredible happening. All that was before has receded into dim ages.
You feel that "once upon a time," as in stories you tell to children,
there was somebody else masquerading under your own name, and suppose
that as by some conjuring trick he was mysteriously identical with
you. If you were closely questioned you would allow that in 1913 you
did this or that; you wanted something (and perhaps got it); you lived
in a house in a certain street, and were popularly supposed to be the
same person who lives in that or another house now. You would have to
admit these facts, but deep down in yourself you would cling to the
secret belief that it was somebody else who, under your name, did the
things and lived the life that is supposed to have been yours. A label
was attached to you then, which gave your name and address, and you
find the same label round your neck still. For the sake of convenience
you continue to answer to your name, and, in a manner of speaking,
are responsible for the old lease. But all the time you feel that
another person wears the label now. A different identity (that is your
private opinion) inhabits your house. He wears the same (or similar)
boots and shoes; he comes when he is called; he has a face that is
still recognized by his friends. But though his friends recognize him,
you scarcely recognize him yourself. He, who was nurtured in peace,
has now but a remote memory of those tranquil years, and thinks they
must surely belong to someone else. All he knows now is that since
the foundation of the world he has lived in the midst of this grim
struggle, which, since the foundation of the world, was as inevitable
as the succession of night and day. Before the storm broke, somebody
(himself probably, since everyone else says so) knew only that life
was a pleasant business (or unpleasant, as the case may be), and that
it would go on for a certain number of years, and that then an end
would come to it. It was all very jolly, and a railway strike or the
rise of the income-tax to, say, one and sixpence in the pound was the
sum of the inconvenience ahead. In due time he would get pneumonia or
cancer, or be run over by a motor-bus; but all those disheartening
possibilities seemed quite remote. Then came the war, and it cleaved
his former life from his present life as by an impassable chasm. That
being so, he adjusted himself to his present life, and, if he was wise,
ceased to waste time over thinking of the "jolly days" which preceded
the changed conditions. And if he was wiser still, he did not throw
the memory of the "jolly days" away, but put them in a box and locked
it up. And if he was wisest of all, he said: "I am different, but the
eternal things are not different," and went on just as usual.
Indeed, why you do a thing matters far more than what you do. It is
easy to conceive of a thoroughly lethargic person who, for mere want of
vitality, lives a most respectable life. He has not energy enough--and
thereby is less of a man--to commit the usual errors. But the question
seriously arises as to whether he had not better be more of a man and
commit them. I hasten over this difficult phase, and conceive of him
again as more vital than ever, and abstaining from the usual crimes
because he is now above them rather than below them. He looks down on
them instead of gazing feebly up at them. In actual result, his conduct
as regards errors is the same, but who can doubt about the respective
values of the respective conducts? The two are poles apart (though in
net and tangible result the extremes meet), for no one can say that the
man who does not cheat at cards simply from fear of detection has the
smallest spiritual affinity with the average person who plays honestly
because he is honest.
There is a periodical piece of business in shops and places where they
sell things, called stock-taking, and, as its name implies, it consists
in the owner going through the goods and seeing what he has got. It
is a useful custom, not only in shops, but as applied by ordinary
individuals to themselves, and the first day of a New Year is a date
commonly in use as the day of internal stock-taking. Very sensible
people will tell you that the division of one's life into years is a
purely arbitrary arrangement, and that December 31st is not severed
from January 1st by any more real division than July 3rd is severed
from July 4th. But less superbly-constituted minds fall back on these
arbitrary arrangements, and with the sense that they are starting
again on January 1st, they often have a look round their cupboards
and shelves to see what they have in hand. It is a disagreeable sort
of business; you will find that your things have got very dusty and
dirty, and that probably there is much that should be thrown away and
but little that is worth keeping when you run over your record for the
past year. But far more important than your actual conduct (as in the
case of the two very different gentlemen, neither of whom cheats at
cards) is the motive that inspired your conduct. If you are lucky you
will perhaps find that you have done a certain number of good-natured
things; you may have done some generous ones, but if you are wise,
you will, before you let a faint smile of satisfaction steal over
your mobile features, consider why you did them. You may have been
good-natured out of kindness of heart; all congratulations if it is so;
but you may find you have been good-natured out of laziness, in which
case I venture to congratulate you again on having brought that fact
home to yourself.... Indeed, this search for motive rather resembles
what happens when you turn over a prettily marked piece of rock lying
on the grass. It _may_ be all right, but sometimes you discover
horrible creepy-crawlies below it, which, when disturbed, scud about
in a disconcerting manner. Or again (which is more encouraging), you
may come across an object--a piece of conduct, that is to say--which
really makes you blush to look at it. But possibly, when you turn it
over you may find that you really meant rather well, in spite of your
deplorable behaviour. Hoard that encouragement, for you will want as
much encouragement as you can possibly find if you intend to do your
stock-taking honestly; otherwise, you will assuredly not have the
spirit to go through with it. And when the stock-taking is done look
at the total, which will certainly be very disappointing, without
dismay, but with a sanguine hope that you will find a better show next
year. Think it over well, and then dismiss the whole thing from your
conscious mind. For to dwell too much on your stock-taking, or to take
stock too often, produces a paralysing sort of self-consciousness.
The man who sets his past failures continually before him is not
likely to be much better in the future; while he who contemplates his
past successes gets fat and inert with probably quite ill-founded
complacency. One of the shrewdest philosophers who ever lived gives
very sage advice on this point when he says: "And when he hath done all
that is to be done, as far as he knoweth, let him think that he hath
done nothing."... So we, who have not done one tithe of the things that
we knew we ought to have done, will certainly have little excuse for
thinking we have done something.
* * * * *
Another effect of this last year of tension, besides that of sundering
our present lives and consciousness from pre-war days, is that it has
made a vast quantity of people very much older. That has advantages
and disadvantages, for while there are certainly many very admirable
things connected with the sense of youth, there are some which are
not so admirable when manifested by those of mature and middle age.
It is admirable, for instance, that the middle-aged should have
enough vitality to devote themselves to learning the fox-trot, or the
bunny-bump, but it is less admirable that they should actually spend
their vitality in doing so. The war has taken the wish to bunny-bump
out of them, the desire for bunny-bumping has failed, and that has
caused them to realize that they are not quite so young as they
thought, or as they proposed to be for the next twenty years or so. The
sense of middle-age has come upon them as suddenly as the war itself
came, and many have found it extremely disconcerting. It is as if they
were introduced to a perfect stranger, whom they have to take into
their house and live with. They don't like the look of the stranger,
nor his manners, nor his habits, and this infernal intruder does not
propose, they feel, to make a short visit, but has come to stop with
them permanently. He eats and walks and reads with them, and when they
wake up at night they see his head on their pillow. He seems to them
ungracious and angular and forbidding; they dearly long to get away
from him, but that is impossible. What, then, are they to do? There is
only one thing to be done, to make friends with him without loss of
time, and never to regret the vanishing of the jolly days before he
came. If they had been wise (hardly anybody is in this respect), they
would have made friends with him long before he came as a permanent
guest; they would have asked him to lunch, so to speak, on one day, and
gone out a walk with him on another, and have thus got accustomed to
his ways by degrees. But as they have not done that, they must resign
themselves to a period of discomfort now.
Probably they will find that he is much easier to get on with than they
think at first. They fancy that they will never be happy again with
that old bore always at their elbows, and it is quite true that they
never will be happy again in the old way. They must find a new way, and
the first step towards that is not to call this guest, middle-age, an
old bore, but discover what he can do, and what his good points are. He
really has a good many, if you take the trouble to look for them. He
has not got the tearing high spirits which they are accustomed to, but
he has a certain serenity which is far from disagreeable if you will be
at the pains to draw it out. He is not very quick, he has but little
of that quality compounded of wit and activity and nonsense which they
were wont to consider the basis of all social enjoyment; but he has
a certain rather kindly humour which gives a twinkle to the eye that
sparkles no longer. He has boiled down his experiences, sad and joyful
alike, into a sort of broth which is nutritive and palatable, though
without bubble. But patience is one of its excellent ingredients, a
wholesome herb, which, for all its homeliness, has a very pleasant
taste. He can be a very good friend, not liable to take offence, and
though his affections are not passionate, they are very sincere.
But if you refuse to see his good points, and will not make friends
with him (he will always allow you to do that; it is "up to you"), he
will prove himself a very cantankerous old person indeed. He will give
you the most annoying reminders of his presence, digging you with his
skinny elbow, and making all sorts of sarcastic interruptions when you
are talking. You will get to hate him more and more, for he will always
be spoiling your pleasure until you are cordially inclined towards
him. He will trip you up in the bunny-bump; he will give you aches and
pains if you persist in behaving as if you were twenty-five still; he
will make you feel very unwell if you choose to eat lobster-salad at
sunrise. And you can't get rid of him; the more strenuously you deny
his existence, the more indefatigably he will remind you of it. He is
quite a good friend, in fact, but a perfectly pernicious enemy. But
naturally you will do what you choose about him, as you have always
done about everything else....
To revert to Francis (a far more exhilarating subject than New Year
reflections), he was at home for a few days last week. After the
Dardanelles expedition was abandoned, he went out to France (after
having condescended to accept a commission), where he proceeded at
once to earn the V.C. for a deed of ludicrous valour, under a storm of
machine-gun bullets, and while on leave received his decoration.
"Of course I like it awfully," was his comment about it; "but, as a
matter of fact, I didn't deserve it, because on that particular morning
I didn't happen to be frightened. I usually am frightened, and I've
deserved the V.C. millions of times, but just when I got it I didn't
deserve it. They ought to give the V.C. to fellows who are in the devil
of a fright all the time they are doing their job. But that day I
wasn't; I had had a delicious breakfast, and felt as calm as Matilda is
looking. I don't believe she can speak a word by the way; you made it
all up."
I was very much mortified by Matilda's conduct. Ever since Francis's
return she had sat in dead silence, though I had taught her to say
"Hurrah for the V.C.," and she had repeated it without stopping for
several hours the day before he arrived. But the moment she saw
him, she looked at him with a cold grey eye and remained absolutely
speechless. Of course I did not tell Francis what I had taught her to
say, because she might take it into her head to begin to talk at any
time, and her congratulations would not then be a surprise to him. So
I held my tongue, and Matilda hers.
Then a most unfortunate incident occurred, for Francis left his
decoration in a taxi next day, and though we telephoned to all the
taxi-ranks and police-stations in the world, we could hear nothing of
it. I don't think I ever saw anyone so furious as he was.
"No one will believe I got it," he shouted. "I meant to wear it day
and night, so that even a burglar coming into the house should see it.
But now no one will know. I can't go about chanting 'I am a V.C., but
I left it in a taxi.' Who would believe such a cock-and-bull story? If
you heard a fellow in the street saying 'I am a V.C.,' you wouldn't
believe him. Of course there's the riband, but it was the Cross I
wanted to wear day and night--nobody looks at an inch of riband. Don't
laugh."
Matilda suddenly cleared her throat, and blew her nose, which is often
the prologue to conversation. I sincerely hoped she wouldn't say
"Hurrah for the V.C." just this moment, for it really seemed possible
that the enraged Francis might wring her neck if she mocked at him. I
hastened to talk myself, for Matilda usually waits for silence before
she scatters her pearls of wisdom.
"Well, apply for another one," I said. "They'll surely give you another
one. Or earn another one, but apply first."
"And how many years do you think I should have to wait for it?" he
asked. "How many departments do you think I should have to visit? How
many papers and affidavits do you think I should have to sign? Apply
for another one, indeed, as if the V.C. was only a pound of sugar!"
"Only a pound of sugar!" I said. "Certainly, if it takes as long as it
takes to get a pound of sugar----"
Matilda gave a loud shriek.
"Gott strafe the V.C.!" she screamed. "Hurrah for Germany! Gott scratch
the Kaiser's head! Bow, wow, wow, wow, wow! Pussy!"
Francis stopped dead and turned his head slowly round to where Matilda
was screaming like a Pythian prophetess. She whistled like the milkman,
she cuckooed, she called on her Maker's name, and on Taffy's; in a
couple of minutes she had said everything she had ever known, and mixed
the V.C. up with them all. She laughed at the V.C.; she blew her nose
at him, accompanying these awful manifestations of Matilda-ism with
dancing a strange Brazilian measure on her perch. Then she stopped as
suddenly as if her power of speech had been blown out like a candle,
and hermetically sealed her horny beak for all conversational purposes
for precisely three weeks.
Francis had stuffed his handkerchief into his mouth, so that his
laughter should not interrupt Matilda, and got so red in the face I was
afraid he was going to have a fit. But when she definitely stopped, he
took the handkerchief out of his mouth, and laughed till exhaustion set
in.
"O Lord! I'm so glad Matilda is true!" he said. "I was half afraid you
might have invented her, though I was surprised at the impeccable art
of your invention."
"Why surprised?" I asked coldly.
"Oh, I don't know. The ordinary reason. But she's really more like
the British public than King Tino. They get things more mixed up than
anyone I ever came across. For instance, they think that they ought to
be very grave and serious, because the war is very grave and serious.
Why, there's Matilda-ism for you! The only possible way of meeting
a grave situation is to meet it gaily, and they would learn that if
they came out to the trenches. Unless you were flippant there you
would expire with depression. They are beavers at work, I allow that,
but when the day's work is over they ought to be compelled to amuse
themselves."
"But they don't feel inclined to," said I.
"No, and I don't feel inclined to get up in the morning, but that is no
justification for lying in bed. There ought to be an amusement-board,
which should make raids on private houses, if they suspected that
unseemly seriousness was practised there. People talk of unseemly
mirth, but they don't realize that gloom, as a general rule, is much
more unseemly. Besides, you don't arrive at anything like the proper
output of work if it is done by depressed people. Also, the quality of
it is different."
"Do you mean that a shell made by cheerful munition workers has a
greater explosive force than when it has been made by the melancholy?"
I asked.
"I daresay that is the case, and it would account for the fact that
the Boches' shells haven't been nearly so devastating lately, because
beyond doubt the Boches are a good deal depressed. There is a marked
sluggishness stealing into their explosives. If you want to do a good
day's work on Thursday, by far the best preparation you can make for
it is to have a howling, jolly time on Wednesday evening. Pleasure
gives you energy, and pleasure is every bit as _real_ as pain, and
cheerfulness as depression. I know you will say that it is the
fogs that make people depressed, but it is more likely, as someone
suggested, that the depressed people make the fogs. If so, I don't
wonder at the impenetrable state of affairs outside."
He pointed at the window, which, as far as purposes of illumination
went, was about as useful as the wall. Since dawn no light had broken
through that opaque cloud of brown vapour; a moonless night was not
darker than this beleaguered noonday. It had penetrated into the house
and veiled the corners of the room in obscurity, and filled eyes and
nose with smarting ill-smelling stuff.
"Yes, decidedly it's the depressed people who make the fog," said he.
"They are the same thing on two different planes, for they both refuse
to admit the sunshine."
"But, good heavens, aren't you ever depressed?" I asked.
"Not inside. I don't count surface depression, which can be easily
produced by an aching tooth, though, indeed, I haven't got much
experience of that. But I am never fundamentally depressed; I never
doubt that behind the clouds is the sun still shining, as that odious
school-marm Longfellow tells us. Often things are immensely tiresome,
but tiresome things, painful things, have no root. They don't penetrate
down to the central reality. But all happiness springs from it.
Even mere pleasure is as real as pain, as I said just now; but joy,
happiness, is infinitely more real than either. But somehow--I don't
quite understand this, though I know it's true--somehow happiness
casts a shadow, like a tree growing in the sunshine. Thomas à Kempis,
as usual, is quite right when he says, 'Without sorrow none liveth in
love.' But that sorrow is a thing that passes; it wheels with the sun;
it is not steadfast; it is not everlasting. But it's the devil to try
to describe that which from its very nature is indescribable. Only
there are so many excellent folk who think that the shadow is more real
than the object which causes it."
He came and sat on the hearth-rug, where presently he stretched himself
at length.
"And yet some of the best people who have ever lived," he said,
"have experienced what they call the darkness of the soul. The
whole of their belief in God and in love, all that has made them far
the happiest creatures on the earth, suddenly leaves them. Their
naked souls are left in outer darkness; they are convinced in their
own minds--minds, I say--that there is nothing in the world except
darkness. And their souls must remain perfectly steadfast, clinging in
this freezing blindness to the conviction that it can't be so, that
all their senses and their reasoning powers are wrong. Nothing can
help them except their own unaided faith, from which all support seems
withdrawn. Job had it pretty badly. It must be beastly, for you can't
guess at the time what is the matter with you. Your mind simply tells
you that it has become a reasoned and convinced atheist. It's a sort of
possession; the devil, for some inscrutable reason, is allowed to enter
into you, and he's an awful sort of tenant. He's so plausible too, so
convincing. He gets hold of your mind and says, 'Just chuck overboard
all that you once blindly believed, and now clear-sightedly know to be
false. You needn't bother yourself to curse God and die, because there
isn't such a thing as God. And instead of dying live and thoroughly
enjoy yourself.' That sounds ridiculous to you and me, whose minds the
devil doesn't entirely possess, but imagine what it would be if your
mind had his spell cast on it, if all you had ever believed drifted
away from you, and left you in the outer darkness. It would sound
excellent advice then. Your mind would tell you that there was nothing
beyond the mere material pleasures of the world. It would seem very
foolish not to make the most of them, regardless of everything else, if
there was nothing else."
"But all atheists are not unbridled hedonists," said I.
"More fools they. At least, from my point of view, the only possible
bridle on one's carnal and material desires is the fact that one is not
an atheist. What does the progress of mankind amount to considered by
itself? A few scientific inventions, a little less small-pox. Is it for
that that unnumbered generations have lived and suffered and enjoyed?"
"But can't atheists believe in and work for the progress of the world?"
I asked.
"I know they do, but for the life of me I can't see why. I wouldn't
stir a finger or make a single act of renunciation if all that inspired
me was the welfare of the next generation. To me the brotherhood of man
is a meaningless phrase unless it is coupled with the fatherhood of
God."
"But you left Alatri, you went to fight, you won the V.C. you left in a
taxi for the sake of men."
"No, for the sake of what they stood for," he said. "For the sake of
that of which they are the manifestation."
He got up and looked at his watch.
"Blow it! I've got to go and see the manifestation known as the War
Office," he said.
"After which?" I asked. "Will you be back for lunch?"
"No, I don't think so. Lord, I wish I wasn't going to the War Office,
specially since you have a morning off. Why shouldn't I say that
I'm tired of the war--I might telephone it--or that I have become a
conscientious objector, or that I've got an indisposition?"
"There's the telephone," said I.
He buckled his belt.
"Wonderful thing the telephone," he said. "And what if it's true that
there's another telephone possible: I mean the telephone between the
people whom we think of as living, and the people whom we don't really
think of as dead? I'm going to lunch with an Aunt, by the way, who is
steeped in spiritual things; so much so, indeed, that she forgets that
the chief spiritual duties, as far as we know them for certain, are to
be truthful and cheerful, and all those dull affairs which liars and
pessimists say that anybody can do. Aunt Aggie doesn't do any of them;
she's an awful liar and a hopeless pessimist, and her temper--well! But
as I said, or didn't I say it--I'm going to lunch with her and go to a
_séance_ afterwards. She's going to inquire after Uncle Willy, who was
no comfort to her in this life; but perhaps he'll make up for that now.
Really London is getting rather cracked, which is the most sensible
thing it ever did. I think it's the cold stodgy granite of the English
temperament which I dislike so. But really it's getting chipped, it's
getting cracked. Aunt Aggie bows to the new moon just like a proper
Italian, and wouldn't sit down thirteen to dinner however hungry she
was. Oh, there are flaws in Aunt Aggie's granite, and she does have
such horrible food! Good-bye."
I settled down with a book, and an electric light at my elbow, and
a large fire at my feet, to the entrancing occupation of not doing
anything at all. The blessed sixth morning of the week had arrived,
when I was not obliged to go out to a large chilly office after
breakfast, and I mentally contrasted the nuisance of having to go out
into a beastly morning with the bliss of not having to go out, and
found the latter was far bigger with blessing than the former with
beastliness. I needn't read my book. I needn't do anything that I did
not want to do, but very soon the book, that I had really taken up for
fear of being surprised by a servant doing nothing at all, began to
engross me. It was concerned with the inexplicable telephone to which
Francis had alluded, and contained an account of the communications
which had been made by a young soldier killed in France with his
relatives. As Francis had said, London had got cracked on the
subject....
After all, what wonder? Were there the slightest chance of establishing
communication between the living and the dead, what subject (even the
war) would be worthier of the profoundest study and experiment? Nothing
more interesting, nothing more vitally important, could engross us,
for which of the affairs in this world could be so important as the
establishment, scientifically and firmly, of any facts that concern the
next world? For there is one experience, namely, death, that is of
absolutely universal interest. Everything else, from my little finger
to Shakespeare's brain, only concerns a certain number of people;
whereas death concerns the remotest Patagonian. However strongly and
sincerely we may happen to believe that death is not an extinguishing
of the essential self, with what intense interest we must all grab at
anything which can throw light on the smallest, most insignificant
detail of the life that is hereafter lived? Or, if your mind is so
constructed that you do not believe in the survival of personality, how
infinitely more keenly you would clutch at the remotest evidence (so
long as it _is_ evidence) that there is something to follow after the
earth has been filled in above the body, from which, we are all agreed,
_something_ has departed. Without prejudice, without bias either of
child-like faith or convinced scepticism, and preserving only an open
mind, willing to be convinced by reasonable phenomena, there is nothing
sublunar or superlunar that so vitally concerns us. You may not care
about the treatment of leprosy, presumably in the belief that you will
not have leprosy; you may not care about Danish politics in the belief
that you will never be M.P. (if there is such a thing) for Copenhagen.
But what cannot fail to interest you is the slightest evidence of what
may occur to you when you pass the inevitable gates.
There are only two things that can possibly happen: the one is complete
extinction (in which case I allow that the subject is closed, since if
you are extinguished it is idle to inquire what occurs next, since
nothing can occur); the other is the survival, in some form, of life,
of yourself. This falls into three heads:
(_i_) Reincarnation, as an earwig, or a Hottentot, or an
emperor.
(_ii_) Mere absorption into the central furnace of life.
(_iii_) Survival of personality.
And here the personal equation comes in. I cannot really believe I
am going to be an earwig or an emperor. To my mind that sounds so
unlikely that I cannot fix serious thought upon it. What shall I, this
Me, do when I am an earwig or an emperor? How shall I feel? The mind
slips from the thought, as you slip on ice, and falls down. Nor can
I conceive being absorbed into the central furnace, because that, as
far as personality goes, is identical with extinction. My soul will be
burned in the source of life, just as my body may perhaps be burned
in a crematorium, and I don't really care, in such a case, what will
happen to either of them.
But my unshakeable conviction, with regard to which I long for
evidence, is that I--something that I call I--will continue a perhaps
less inglorious career than it has hitherto pursued. And if you
assemble together a dozen healthy folk, who have got no idea of dying
at present, you will find that, rooted in the consciousness of at least
eleven of them, if they will be honest about themselves, there is this
same immutable conviction that They Themselves will neither have been
extinguished or reincarnated or absorbed when their bodies are put away
in a furnace or a churchyard. There is the illusion or conviction of a
vast majority of mankind that with the withdrawal from the body of the
Something which has kept it alive, that Something does not cease to
have an independent and personal existence.
Well, there has been lately an enormous increase in the number of those
who seek evidence on this overwhelmingly interesting subject. The
book which I have been reading and wondering over treats of it, and
Francis has gone with his Aunt Aggie to seek it. There has been, too,
it is only fair to say, an enormous increase in the exasperation of
the folk who, knowing nothing whatever about the subject, and scorning
to make any study of what they consider such hopeless balderdash,
condemn all those who have an open mind on the question as blithering
idiots, hoodwinked by the trickery of so-called mediums. Out of their
own inner consciousness they know that there can be no such thing as
communication between the living and the dead, and there's the end of
the matter. All who think there possibly may be such communication are
fools, and all who profess to be able to produce evidence for it are
knaves.... They themselves, being persons of sanity and common-sense,
know that it is impossible.
But other shining examples of sanity and common-sense would undoubtedly
have affirmed thirty years ago, with the same pontifical infallibility,
that such a thing as wireless telegraphy was impossible, or a hundred
years ago that it was equally ridiculous to think that a sort of big
tea-kettle could draw a freight of human beings along iron rails
at sixty miles an hour. But wireless telegraphy and express trains
_happened,_ in spite of their sanity and common-sense, and it seems
to me that if we deny the possibility of this communication between
the living and the dead, we are acting in precisely the same manner as
those same sensible people would have acted thirty and a hundred years
ago.
Another favourite assertion of the sane and sensible is that if they
could get evidence themselves (though they foam with rage at the very
notion of attempting to do such a thing) they would believe it. That is
precisely the same thing as saying you will not believe in Australia
till you have been there. For the existence of Australia depends (for
those who have never seen it) on the evidence of others. The evidence
for the existence of Australia is overwhelming, and therefore we
are right to accept it, even though we have not seen it ourselves.
Kangaroos and gold, and Australian troops and postage-stamps, and
the voyages of steamers, makes its existence absolutely certain;
there is no doubt whatever about it. And the evidence in favour of
the possibility of communication between this world and another
non-material world is now in process of accumulation. It is being
studied by people who are eminent in the scientific world, and it seems
that there are fragments, scraps of evidence, which must be treated
with the respect of an open mind by all who have not the pleasant gift
of the infallibility that springs from complete ignorance. It is no
longer any use to quote from Mr. Sludge the Medium....
There are a great many gullible people in the world and a great many
fraudulent ones, and when the two get together round a table in a
darkened room, it is obvious that there is a premium on trickery.
But because a certain medium is a knave and a vagabond, who ought to
be put in prison, and others are such as should not be allowed to go
out, except with their minds under care of a nurse, it does not follow
that there are no such things as genuine manifestations. It would be
as reasonable to say that because a child does his multiplication
sum wrong, there is something unsound in the multiplication table. A
fraudulent medium does not invalidate a possible genuineness in those
who are not cheats; a quack or a million quacks do not cast a slur
on the science of medicine. In questions of spiritualism there is no
denying that the number of quacks exposed and unexposed is regrettably
large, and, without doubt, all spiritualistic phenomena should be
ruthlessly and pitilessly scrutinized. But when this is done, it is
only a hide-bound stupidity that refuses to treat the results with
respect.
Other reservations must be made. All results that can conceivably
be accounted for by such well-established phenomena as telepathy or
thought-reading must be unhesitatingly ruled out. They are deeply
interesting in themselves, they are like the traces of other metals
discovered in exploring a gold-reef, but they are not the gold, and
have no more to do with the thing inquirers are in quest of than have
acid-drops or penny buns. Many mediums (so-called) are not mediums at
all, but have that strange and marvellous gift of being able to explore
the minds of others....
What is the working and mechanism of that group of phenomena, among
which we may class hypnotism, thought-reading, telepathy, and so forth,
we do not rightly know. But inside the conscious self of every human
being there lurks the sub-conscious or subliminal self, which has
something to do with all these things. Every event that happens to a
man, every thought that passes through his mind, every impression that
his brain receives makes a mark on it, similar, perhaps, to the minute
dots on phonograph records. That phonograph record (probably) is in
the keeping of the sub-conscious mind, and though the conscious mind
may have forgotten the fact, and the circumstances in the making of
any of these marks, the sub-conscious mind has it recorded, and, under
certain conditions, can produce it again. And it is the sub-conscious
mind which without doubt exercises those thought-reading and telepathic
functions. In most people it lies practically inaccessible; others,
numerically few, appear, in trance or even without the suspension of
the conscious mind, to be able to exercise its powers, and--leaving out
the mere conjuring tricks of fraudulent persons--it is they who pass
for mediums.
What happens? This: A bereaved mother or a bereaved wife sits with one
of those mediums. The medium goes into a genuine trance, and probing
the mind of the eager expectant sitter, can tell her all sorts of
intimate details about the husband or son who has been killed which are
already known to her. The medium can produce his name, his appearance;
can recount events and happenings of his childhood; can even say things
which the mother has forgotten, but which prove to be true. Is it
any wonder that the sitter is immensely impressed? She is more than
impressed, she is consoled and comforted when the medium proceeds to
add (still not quite fraudulently) messages of love and assurance of
well-being. It is not quite conscious fraud; it is perhaps a fraud of
the sub-conscious mind.
Now all this, these reminiscences, these encouraging messages from the
other world, have to be ruled out if we want to get at the real thing.
They are phenomena vastly interesting in themselves, but they are
clearly accountable for by the established theory of thought-reading.
They need have nothing whatever to do with communications from
discarnate spirits, for they can be accounted for by a natural law
already known to us. They do not help in the slightest degree to
establish the new knowledge for which so many are searching....
Francis had come back from his lunch and his _séance_ with Aunt Aggie,
and a considerable part of these reflections are really a _précis_ of
our discussion. It had been quite a good thought-reading _séance:_
Uncle Willy, through the mouth of the medium in trance, had affirmed
his dislike of parsnips and mushrooms, had mentioned his name, and
nickname, Puffin, by which Aunt Aggie had known him, and had described
with extraordinary precision the room where he used to sit.
"I was rather impressed," said Francis. "It really was queer, for
silly though Aunt Aggie is, I don't think she had previously gone to
Amber--yes, the medium was Amber, just Amber--and primed her with
regard to this information. Amber read it all right out of Aunt Aggie's
mind. But then Uncle Willy became so extremely unlike himself that I
couldn't possibly believe it was Uncle Willy; it must have been a sort
of reflection of what Aunt Aggie hoped he had become. He was deeply
edifying; he said he was learning to be patient; he told us that he
had improved wonderfully. Poor Aunt Aggie sobbed, and I knew she loved
sobbing. It made her feel good inside. All the same----" He let himself
lie inertly on the sofa, in that supreme bodily laziness which, as I
have said, gives his mind the greater activity.
"It was all a thought-reading _séance_," he said, "quite good of its
kind, but it had no more to do with the other world than Matilda....
But why shouldn't there be a way through between the material and the
spiritual, just as there is a way for telegraphy, as you said, without
wires? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, no doubt, a so-called
message from the other side is only a subtle intercommunication between
minds on this side. It's so hard to guard against that. But it might be
done. We might think of some piece of knowledge known only to a fellow
who was dead."
Suddenly he jumped up.
"I've thought of a lovely plan," he said. "Go for a walk, if you
haven't been out all day, or go and have a bath or something; and while
you are gone I'll prepare a packet, and seal it up in a box. Nobody
will know but me. And then when the next bit of shrapnel comes along
and hits me instead of the potted-meat tin, you will pay half-a-guinea,
I think it is--I know I paid for Aunt Aggie and myself--and see if a
medium can tell you what is in that box. Nobody will know except me,
and I shall be dead, so it really will look very much as if I had a
hand in it if a medium in trance can tell you what is in it. A box
can't telepathize, can it? The Roman Catholics say it's devil-work
to communicate with the dead; they say all sorts of foul spirits get
hold of the other end of the telephone. Isn't it lucky we aren't Roman
Catholics?"
"And what about the War Office?" I said, chiefly because I didn't want
either to go out or have a bath.
"Oh, I forgot. I'm going to be sent out to the Italian front. We've
got some people there, and it seems they don't know Italian very well.
I don't know what I shall be quite: I think a sort of Balaam's ass
that talks, a sort of mule perhaps with a mixed Italian and English
parentage. Duties? Ordering dinner, I suppose."
"Lucky devil!"
"I'm not sure. I think I would sooner take my chance in the trenches.
But off I go day after to-morrow. Lord, if I get a week's leave now and
then, shan't I fly to Alatri! Can't you come out, too, to look after
your Italian property? Fancy having a week at Alatri again! There won't
be bathing, of course; but how I long to hear the swish and bang of the
shutters that Pasqualino has forgotten to hitch to, in the Tramontana!
And the sweeping of the wind in the stone-pine! And the glow and
crackle of the wood-fire on the hearth! And the draughty rooms! And the
springing up of the freesias! And Seraphina, fat Seraphina, and the
smell of frying! Fancy being _heedless_ again for a week! I feel sure
the war has never touched the enchanted island. The world as it was!
Good Lord, the world as it was!"
He had sat and then lain down on the floor.
"It's odd," he said, "that though I wouldn't change that which I am,
and that which I know, for anything that went before, I long for a
week, a day, an hour of the time when all the material jollinesses of
the world were so magically exciting. Oh, the pleasant evenings when
one didn't think, but just enjoyed what was there! There's a great
lump of Boy still in me, which I don't get rid of. The cache: think of
the cache we were going to revisit in September, 1914! After all, It,
the mystical thing that matters, was there all the time, though one
didn't really know it.... But I should love to get the world as it was
again. I don't want it for long, I think, but just for a little while.
Rest, you know, child's play, nonsense, Italy. I would buckle to again
afterwards, but it would be nice to be an animal again. I want not to
think about anything that matters, God, and my soul, and right and
wrong....
"I want to rebel. Just for a minute. I daresay it's the devil who makes
me want. It's a way he has. 'Be an innocent child,' says he, 'and don't
think. Just look at the jolly things, and the beautiful things, and
take your choice!' I don't want to be beastly, but I do want to get out
of the collar of the only life which I believe to be real. I want to
eat and drink and sit in the sun, and hear the shutters bang, and read
a witty wicked book, and see a friend--you, in fact--and do again what
we did; I want to quench the light invisible, and make it invisible,
really invisible, for a minute or two. I suppose that's blasphemy all
right."
He lay silent a moment, and then got up.
"Oh, do go for a walk," he said, "while I prepare my posthumous packet.
Or prepare a posthumous packet for me. You may die first, you see;
it's easily possible that you may die first now that they're not
sending me to the trenches again, and it would be so interesting after
your lamentable decease to be told by a medium what you had put in the
packet. Let's do that. Let each of us prepare a posthumous packet,
and seal it up, and on yours you must put directions that it is to be
delivered to me unopened. I needn't put anything on mine; you can keep
them both in a cupboard till one of us dies. And the survivor will
consult a medium as to what is in the late lamented's packet. Only the
late lamented will know. Really, it will be a great test. Come on. It
will be like playing caches again. Mind you put something ridiculous in
yours."
I procured two cardboard boxes, of which we each took one, and went to
my bedroom to select unlikely objects. Eventually I decided on a "J"
nib, a five-franc piece and a small quantity of carbolic tooth-powder.
These I put in my box, put directions on the top that it was to be
given on my death to Francis, and went downstairs again, where I found
him sealing his up. I put them both in a drawer of a table and locked
it.
"Lord, how I long to tell you what I've put in mine!" said Francis.
* * * * *
More than half the month has passed (I am writing, as a matter of
evidential data, on the 17th of January), and I desire to record with
the utmost accuracy gleanable in such affairs, the general feeling
of the inhabitants of London with regard to the war. Briefly, then,
a huge wave of optimism--for which God be thanked--has roared over
the town. Peace Notes, and the replies to them, and the replies to
those replies have been probably the wind that raised that wave, or,
in other words, the super-coxcomb who rules the German Empire has
expressed his "holy wrath" at the reply of our Allied nations to his
gracious granting of peace on his own terms. But England and France
and Russia and Italy have unanimously wondered when, in the history
of the world, a nation that proclaimed itself victor has offered
peace to the adversary it proclaimed it has conquered. Germany, not
only belligerent, but also apparently umpire, has announced that she
has won the war, and therefore offers peace to her victims. That was
a most astounding piece of news, and it surprised us all very much.
But what must have surprised Germany more was the supposedly-expiring
squeal of her victims which intimated that they were not conquered.
Hence the "holy wrath" of the World-War-Lord, who had intimated, as out
of Sinai, that they were conquered. They don't think so--they may be
wrong, but they just don't think so. Instead they are delighted with
his victorious proclamation, and take the proclamation as evidence that
he is not victorious. German newspapers have been, if possible, more
childishly profane than he, and tell us they are ready to grasp the
hand of God Almighty, who is giving such success to their submarine
warfare. They said just that; it was their duty to shake hands with
God Almighty, because with His aid they had sunk so many defenceless
merchant ships. Perhaps that "goes down" in Germany, for it appears
that they are short of food, and would gladly swallow anything.
But here we are, the conquered beleaguered nation--and by a tiresome
perversity we delight in the savage glee of our conquerors, for we
happen to believe that it expresses, not glee of the conqueror, but the
savage snarl of a fighting beast at bay. Rightly or wrongly, we think
just that, and the louder the pæans from Germany, the brighter are the
eyes here. Though still the bitterness of this winter of war binds us
with stricture of frost, a belief in the approaching advent of spring,
now in mid-January, possesses everybody. Reports, the authenticity
of which it is no longer possible to doubt, are rife concerning the
internal condition of Germany and Austria, which is beginning to be
intolerable. There is not starvation, nor anything like starvation,
but the stress of real want grows daily, and we all believe that from
one cause or other, from this, or from the great offensive on the
Western front, the preparations for which, none doubts, are swiftly
and steadily maturing, the breaking of winter is in sight. Perhaps all
we optimists, as has happened before, will again prove to be wrong,
and some great crumbling or collapse may be threatening one of the
Allies. But to-day the quality of optimism is somehow different from
what it has been before. Also, the black background of war (not yet
lifted), in front of which for the last two years and a half our lives
have enacted themselves, has become infinitely and intensely more
engrossing. But here in England and France and Italy and Russia, it is
pierced with sudden gleams of sunshine; there are rifts in it through
which for a moment or two shines the light of the peace that is coming.
Only over Germany it hangs black and unbroken.
A king gave a feast to his lords and by his command there were brought
in the spoils and the vessels which he had taken from the house of God
which he had sacked and destroyed. In the same hour came forth fingers
of a man's hand, and wrote on the wall of the king's palace. Then the
king's countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that
the joints of his loins were loosed and his knees smote one against
another. For he had lifted himself up against the Lord of Heaven, and
he knew that his doom was written. There was no need to call in the
astrologers and soothsayers, or to search for a Daniel who should be
able to interpret the writing, or to promise to him who should read the
writing and show the interpretation thereof a clothing of scarlet, a
chain of gold, and that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom,
for the king's captains and his lords, and the king himself, knew what
the meaning and the interpretation of the writing was. In silence they
sat as they read it, and they sat in silence looking in each other's
eyes which were bright with terror, and on each other's faces which
were blanched with dread. But most of all they looked at the king
himself, still clad in his shining armour, and the cold foam of his
doom was white on the lips that profaned the name of the Most Highest,
and the hand that still grasped the hilt of the sword which to his
eternal infamy he had unscabbarded and to his everlasting dishonour had
soaked in innocent blood, was shaken with an ague of mortal fear. And
this is the writing that was written: _MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN,_
for God had numbered his kingdom and finished it; he was weighed in the
balance and found wanting; his kingdom was divided.
Even so, as in the days of King Belshazzar, is the doom written of
him who, above all others, is responsible for the blood that has been
outpoured on the battle-field of Europe, for the shattered limbs, the
blinded eyes, for the murder of women and children from below on the
high seas, and from above in their undefended homes. God set him on the
throne of his fathers, and out of his monstrous vanity, his colossal
and inhuman ambitions, he has given over the harvest fields of the East
to the reaper Death, and has caused blood to flow from the wine presses
of the West. East and West he has blared out his infamous decree that
evil is good, might is right, that murder and rape and the unspeakable
tales of Teutonic atrocities are deeds well pleasing in the sight of
God. And even as in the days when, with his fool's-cap stuck on top
of his Imperial diadem, and the jester's bells a-tinkle against his
shining armour, he paraded through the courts of Europe and the castles
of his dupes, as Supreme Artist, Supreme Musician, Supreme Preacher,
as well as Supreme War Lord, and fancied himself set so high above the
common race of man that no human standard could measure him; so now his
infamy has sunk him so low beneath the zones of human sympathy that not
till we can feel pity for him who first left the love-supper of His
Lord and hanged himself, we shall commiserate the doom that thickens
round the head of the Judas who has betrayed his country and his God in
hope to gratify his insensate dream of world-wide domination.
There still he sits at the feast with his lords and captains, but the
wine is spilt from his cup, and his thoughts are troubled and voices
of despair whisper to him out of the invading night. Low already burn
the lights in the banqueting-hall that was once so nobly ablaze with
the glory of those who in the sciences and the arts and in learning and
high philosophy made Germany a prince among nations. He and his dupes
and his flatterers have made a brigand and a pirate of her, have well
and truly earned for her the scorn and the detestation of all civilized
minds and lovers of high endeavour, and in the _Dämmerung_ that gathers
ever thicker round them the fingers of a man's hand trace on the wall
the letters of pale flame that need no Daniel to interpret. The painted
timbers of the roof are cracking, the tapestries are rent, the spilt
wine congeals in pools of blood, and the legend of the decree of God
blazes complete in the ruin of the shambles where they sit.
* * * * *
It is then this belief that ruin is moving swiftly and steadily up over
the Central Empires that causes the war once more, as in its earlier
days, to engross the whole of our thoughts. It is coming, as it were,
in the traditional manner of a thunderstorm against the wind, for there
is no use in pretending that, as far as military and naval operations
go, the wind is not at the moment being favourable to our enemies. By
sea the submarine menace is more serious than it has been since the
war begun; there is still no advance on the West front, while on the
East the complete over-running of Roumania cannot be called a success
from our point of view. But in spite of this, there is the rooted
belief that the collapse which we have so long waited for is getting
measurably nearer. None knows, and few are rash enough to assert when
it will come, or what month, near or distant, will see it, and in the
meantime the broom of the new Government, to judge by the dust it
raises, may be thought to be sweeping clean, and the appalling bequests
of our late rulers, the accumulated remains of sloppy Cabinet puddings,
are being vigorously relegated to the dustbins. With the ineradicable
boyishness of the nation (which really has a good deal to be said for
it), we still tend to make a game out of serious necessities, and are
having great sport over the question of food. For a few weeks we
amused ourselves over one of the most characteristic inventions of
the last Government, and tried to see how much we could eat without
indulging in more than three courses for dinner or two for lunch, which
was what the late Food Controller allowed us. This was an amusing
game, but as a policy it had insuperable defects, as, for instance,
when we consider that the bulk of the working population takes its
solid meal in the middle of the day, and would no more think of eating
three courses in the evening than of eating four in the morning. There
was a regular tariff: meat counted as one course, pudding another,
toasted cheese another, but you were allowed any quantity of cold
cheese, bread and butter (those articles in which national economy was
really important) without counting anything at all. In the same way
you could have as many slices of beef as you wished (as the Government
wanted to effect a saving in the consumption of meat), but to touch
an apple or a pear, about which there was no desire to save, cost you
a course. Altogether it was one of the least helpful, but most comic
schemes that could well be devised. Matilda, I fancy, thought it out
and communicated it to Mr. Runciman by the telepathy that exists
between bird-like brains. It is in flat and flagrant violation of human
psychology, for you have only to tell the perverse race of mankind
that they may only eat two dishes, to ensure that they will eat much
more of those two dishes than was comprised in the whole of their
unrestricted meals, while to allow them to eat as much cheese as they
wish is simply to make cheese-eaters out of those who never dreamed of
touching it before. But there is a rumour now that we are to go back to
our ordinary diet again, which I take to be true, for when this morning
I gave Matilda a list of the regulations to show her how it looked in
print, she uttered a piercing yell and tore the card into a million
fragments.
But with the new broom has come a powerful deal of cleaning up: there
is a new Food Board, and a Man Power Board, and a fifty per cent.
increase in railway fares (which will be nice for the dividends of
railway companies), and hints of meatless days and sugar tickets, and
there are ideas of ploughing up the parks and planting wheat there
(which will be nice for the wood-pigeons). Indeed, as Francis said, we
are perhaps beginning to take the war seriously, though, on the other
hand, since he left the prevalent optimism has largely remedied the
absence of the gaiety which he so much deplored.