THE MESSIAH OF THE CYLINDER
[Illustration:
I put my feet inside and squeezed down to the bottom
[_Page 28_]
]
[Illustration:
The Messiah
of the
Cylinder
by
Victor Rousseau
Illustrated by
Joseph Clement Coll
]
CHICAGO
A.C. McCLURG & CO.
1917
Copyright
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1917
Published October, 1917
_Copyrighted in Great Britain_
_All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign
languages, including the Scandinavian._
W. F. HALL PRINTING COMPANY, CHICAGO
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I Over the Coffee Cups 1
II The Great Experiment 16
III In the Cellar 30
IV The Road to London 41
V London’s Welcome 53
VI The Strangers’ House 66
VII Hidden Things 79
VIII How the World Was Made Over 89
IX The Book 102
X The Domed Building 108
XI The Goddess of the Temple 122
XII The Lords of Misrule 137
XIII The Palace of Palms 151
XIV The House on the Wall 164
XV The Airscouts’ Fortress 174
XVI The Messiah’s Annunciation 186
XVII The Chapel Underground 198
XVIII Sanson 214
XIX The Story of the Cylinders 225
XX The Sweep of the Net 237
XXI Amaranth 247
XXII Esther 261
XXIII The Heart of the People 271
XXIV Lembken 280
XXV The Coming of the Cross 292
XXVI The Admiral of the Air 302
XXVII The New Order 312
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
I put my feet inside and squeezed down to the bottom _Frontispiece_
I made my difficult way toward the stairs 34
I glanced from one to another, and met hard, mirthless
eyes, and mouths twisted in sneering mockery 50
“Woe to you, accursed city!” he screamed, “Woe to you in
the day of judgment! Woe to your whites and harlots
when the judgment comes!” 150
It pulled me through the window-gap and I swung far out
above the Airscouts’ Fortress 172
A man near me leaped up and craned his neck, looking
into the gloom 242
A tall man with a black beard and a curved sword sheath
that clanked on the stones. I recognized in him
Mehemet, the Turkish commander 244
Sanson’s indomitable will flamed out. “I will not
drink!” he cried, and flung the cup to the floor 258
The giant leaped out before his followers. “Where is
Lembken?” he roared. “Where are the men?” 286
Upon the walls the Guard were swarming toward the
defenders. Out of their midst the Ray artillery
belched 300
The giant jaws upon our aircraft gaped. I saw steel
teeth within them 308
The Messiah of the Cylinder
CHAPTER I
OVER THE COFFEE CUPS
If I recall the conversation of that evening so minutely as to appear
tedious, I must plead that this was the last occasion on which I saw Sir
Spofforth alive. In such a case, one naturally remembers incidents and
recalls words that otherwise might have been forgotten; besides, here
were the two opposed opinions of life, as old as Christianity,
confronting each other starkly. And, as will be seen, the test was to
come in such manner as only one of us could have imagined.
I picture old Sir Spofforth as on that evening: courteous, restrained,
yet with the heat of conviction burning in his measured phrases; and
Esther listening with quaint seriousness, turning from her father to
Lazaroff and back, and sometimes to me, as each of us spoke. Outside, in
the moonlight, the shadow of the Institute lay black across the garden
of Sir Spofforth’s house. The dining-room was fragrant with the scent of
the tea-roses that grew beneath the windows.
The Biological Institute was less than five years old, but the London
smoke, which drifted beyond Croydon, already had darkened the bright-red
bricks to a tolerable terra cotta. The ivy had grown a good way up the
walls. The Institute was accommodating itself to the landscape, as
English buildings had the knack of doing. Lazaroff and I had been there
under Sir Spofforth since the foundation, and there never had been any
others upon the staff, the Institute being organized for specialized
work of narrow scope, though of immense perspective.
It was devoted to private research into the nature of life, in the
application of the Mendelian law to vertebrates. The millionaire who had
endowed it for this purpose and then died opportunely, had not had time
to hamper us with restrictions. Next to endowing us, his death was,
perhaps, the most imaginative thing that he had ever accomplished. The
Government concerned itself only about our vivisection certificates. But
our animal experimentation was too innocuous for these to be much more
than a safeguard. Carrel’s investigations in New York, a year or two
before, had shown the world that cell and tissue can not only survive
the extinction of the general vital quantity, but, under proper
conditions, proliferate indefinitely. We were investigating tissue life,
and our proceedings were quite innocuous. It will be seen that we
already had gotten away from Mendel, though we did breed Belgian hares,
whose disappearance always caused Esther distress, and we made fanciful
annotations inside ruled margins about “agoutis” and “allelomorphs.”
I am conscious now that we worked constantly under a sense of
constraint; there was an unnecessary secrecy in all our plans and
actions. Why? I think, when I look back, that it was not because of what
we were doing, but rather of what it might become necessary some day to
do. The work was so near to sacrilege—I mean, we viewed the animal
structure as a mechanism rather than as a temple. That, of course, was
then the way of all biologists; but that, I think, was the cause of our
rather furtive methods. We were hot on the trail of the mystery of life,
and never knew upon what intimacies we might stumble. We sought to
discover how and where consciousness is born out of unconscious tissue
vitality. Lazaroff had the intuition of genius, and his inductions were
amazing. Still, that problem baffled him.
“Pennell,” I hear him say, “at a certain period of growth, when millions
of cells, working cooperatively, have grouped themselves in certain
patterns, completing the design, consciousness comes into play. Why? Is
it a by-product, the creak that accompanies the wheel? But Nature
produces nothing in vain. Then why should we know that we exist? Why?”
Lazaroff was a Prussian Pole, I believe, though he spoke half a dozen
languages fluently. Keen and fanatical, daring, inflexible, he seemed to
me the sort of man who would welcome the chance to proclaim a Holy War
for Science and die in the front rank. He had the strange old German
faith that was called monism, and his hope for the human race was as
strong as his contempt for the man of our day.
“The race is all, Pennell,” I hear him say again. “We of this age, who
pride ourselves on our accomplishments, are only emerging from the dawn
of civilization. We are still encumbered with all the ghostly fears that
obsessed our ancestors of the Stone Age. But others will build the
Temple of Truth upon the foundations that we are rearing. Oh, if I could
have been born a hundred years ahead! For the change is coming fast,
Pennell!”
And, when I professed to doubt the nearness of that change: “If your
frontal area varied by only five centimeters, Pennell, you would
believe. That is your tragedy, to fall short of the human norm by five
centimeters of missing forehead.”
I can see his well-proportioned figure, and the mane of black hair
thrown back; the flashing eyes. Animated by religious impulse, Lazaroff
would have gone to the stake as unconcernedly as he would certainly have
burned others. He had invented a system of craniometry by which he
professed to discover the mentality of his subject, and I was his first.
Certainly the conditions were ideal for our work. We were both young
men, enthusiasts; and Sir Spofforth Moore, our chief, was nearing
eighty. The Trustees had picked him for the post because of his great
name in the medical world. He was an ideal chief. He interfered with us
no more than the Trustees did. He asked for no results. The Institute
existed only for patient research. Yes, the millionaire had certainly
displayed imagination for a millionaire, and it was fortunate that he
died before his hobby, whose inception came to him, I believe, from
reading sensational newspaper articles, grew into an obsession.
The Trustees refused to accept Sir Spofforth’s resignation when he
became infirm. He lent the Institute dignity and prestige. I doubt
whether he knew much of Mendelism, or had followed the work of the past
five years. He knew little of what we were doing, and initialed our
vouchers without ever demurring. Of course he tried to keep in touch
with us, and I will confess that our routine work was mainly a cover for
the daring plan that Lazaroff had, bit by bit, outlined to me.
“You see, Pennell,” he explained in self-justification, “the work must
be done. And where are there such opportunities as here? Science cannot
be bound by the provisions of a dead man’s deed. It is not likely that
Sir Spofforth would object, either, but the Trustees might have
intelligence enough to pick up the idea from the quarterly reports if we
were entirely frank, and a biologist with imagination is called a
charlatan. And we must work quickly, while we have this chance. When Sir
Spofforth dies the Trustees will probably pick some fussy little
busybody who will want to poke his nose into everything and take
personal charge. Then—what of our experiment?”
The idea aroused me to as much enthusiasm as Lazaroff. And yet there was
disappointment in the knowledge that we should never know the results of
it.
In brief, Lazaroff’s scheme was this: If animal tissues, removed from
the entire organism, can exist in a condition of suspended vitality for
an indefinite time, at a temperature suited to them in conditions which
forbid germ life to flourish, why not the living animal? Lazaroff had
selected three monkeys from among our stock for the experiment. They
were to be sealed each in a vacuum cylinder of special design, and left
for a century.
“The more I think about the plan, the more enthusiastic I become,
Pennell,” Lazaroff cried. “If the unconscious cell life survives
indefinitely, why not the entire organism plus consciousness?”
“Much may happen in a hundred years, Lazaroff,” I answered.
“True, Pennell. But they will never find the vault. Even now, before it
is sealed, it would not be looked for, built as it is into the cellar
wall beneath the freezing-plant. It was to this end, you know, that I
brought down workmen from London, instead of employing local talent.
Well—we shall leave papers. Earthquakes and revolutions may happen
overhead, but a hundred years hence, when the papers are opened, a
search will be made. Our traveling simians will be found by a very
different world, I assure you, Pennell!”
He had the light of an enthusiast in his eyes, and his mood aroused my
own imagination.
“What use is that, Lazaroff?” I cried. “We shall not know the results of
our experiment. And what message can monkeys carry to that world
concerning ours? If monkeys, why not men?”
He looked at me fixedly, smiling ever so little, and I perceived that he
had drawn the expression of that thought out of the depths of my own
mind by his strong will. Now he nodded in approbation.
“Pennell—” he began, with hesitation, “do you want to know why I myself
do not—?” He stopped. “I am almost ashamed to tell you what it is that
makes me wish to live out my life among my contemporaries,” he
continued. “How strong the primal instincts are in all of us, Arnold!
Nature, with her blind, but perfectly directed will, warring on mind,
and mind rising slowly to dominate her, armed, as she is, with her
dreadful arsenal of a thousand superstitions, instincts, terrors. It is
a fearful battle, Arnold, and many of us fall by the way.”
He turned aside abruptly, as if he regretted the half-confidence. I
thought I knew what he meant, and I was stirred too.
We dined that night with Sir Spofforth and Esther in their new house
within a stone’s throw of the Institute. Esther was the only child; her
mother had died during her infancy. We four had been intimates during
the whole five years of the Institute’s existence; strangely alone, we
four, in the busy Surrey town. The memory of that last night is the most
poignant that remains to me. How far away it seems, and how long ago! If
I could have known then that our companionship was ended!
The argument to which I have referred began after dinner, over our
coffee. It was our usual hour for disputations, but they had never been
so keen, nor Lazaroff so outspoken. Sir Spofforth was a man of the old
school of thought, religious, tolerant, and withal more disquieted than
he himself was aware, by the dominant materialism of the younger men;
and Lazaroff had all the tactlessness of his Jena training. There were
rumors of war with Germany, but Sir Spofforth was too old to adjust his
mind immediately to this conception. He grew heated, as always, on the
cynical scheme of the democratic government, dictated by its greed for
power, to force Ulster beneath an alien yoke, upon the loud and stunning
silence of our English pacifists and lovers of oppressed nations where
their sincerity would be best proved. He deplored the new and dangerous
doctrines that were permeating society, the decay of morals, the loss of
reverence and pride in service. Civilization, he said, seemed dying, and
democracy its murderer.
“Dying! It is still struggling in its birth throes!” cried Lazaroff
impetuously. “I grant that the democracy of today has proved its
futility. But there is a new democracy to come. We are enslaved by the
traditions of the past, by a worn-out religious system based upon the
primitive animistic notion of a soul. There is the fatal weakness of our
democracy. Science has never found the smallest trace of a soul; on the
contrary, we know beyond doubt that we live in a mechanistic universe of
absolute determinism.”
I see Sir Spofforth’s tolerant, yet eager look as he answered him.
“I grant you that the soul is not to be found in the dissecting-room,
Herman,” he answered. “I, as you know, have devoted my life to the
empirical investigation of truth, and I do not decry the method. But you
cannot ignore the interior way of analysis, through the one thing we
know most intimately—consciousness.”
“A by-product of matter,” answered Lazaroff contemptuously. “Or, if we
want to be precisely true, the sum and substance of cell consciousness.”
“Well, throw the blame on the cell, then, in the modern fashion,” said
Sir Spofforth, smiling. “I doubt, though, whether you have solved the
one big problem by creating some million smaller ones. On the contrary,
you are postulating a hierarchy of intelligences, quite in the Catholic
fashion. If brain consciousness is not a specialized form of omniscient
consciousness, how does the brainless amoeba find its food and engulf
it, or the vine its supports? If you have robbed us of the abortive hope
of saving the little empire of the brain beyond the change of death—and
I deny even that entirely—some of us have identified consciousness with
a non-material personality functioning through all life and fashioning
it.”
“Vitalism!” scoffed Lazaroff.
I watched Esther’s eager face as she looked from one speaker to the
other. Sir Spofforth seemed more agitated than the situation warranted,
and I saw him glance at his daughter a little nervously before he
answered.
“Herman, I repeat that I have given my life to scientific
investigation,” he replied. “But I have always recognized the validity
of the metaphysical inquiry. I believe Faith and Science have found
their paths convergent. Lodge thinks so, too. Kelvin took that stand.
James, your great psychologist, shifted before he died. Science must
confine her activities within their natural bounds and not seek to play
a pontifical part, or the excesses of the Scholastics will be repeated
in a new and darker age.”
“I cannot agree with you,” cried Lazaroff vehemently. “An age is dawning
when, relieved from their chains, men will look open-eyed into Nature to
learn her secrets. Today civilization is being choked to death by the
effete, the defective, whom a too benign humanitarianism suffers to live
beneath the shelter of a worn-out faith. The fearful menace of a race of
defectives has laid hold of the popular imagination. Soon we shall
follow the lead of progressive America, and forbid them to propagate
their kind. Here any statesman who dared suggest sterilization would be
hounded from office. But England is awakening.
“It will go, that relic of degrading, savage superstition called the
soul, the barbarous legacy of the ages enshrined in a hundred fairy
stories. Science will rule. Man will be free. The logical State, finely
conceived by Wells, without its rudimentary appendixes and fish-gills,
will be the nation of the future. For we are outgrowing childish things.
Man is coming of age. If only I could live to see it! But I was born a
century too soon!”
The expression on Lazaroff’s face at that moment was so singular that I
could not take my eyes away from it.
“It will be a world of physical and mental perfection, too,” he cried.
“Of free men and women, freely mating, separating when the mating
impulse is dead—”
“Yes, he is right, Father,” Esther interposed eagerly. “Whatever else
may come, the hour of woman’s liberation is striking.”
“That hour struck many times in the ancient world, my dear,” her father
answered. “And it brought, not liberation, but slavery.” He turned to
Lazaroff. “You want a world of men and women reared like prize cattle
and governed by laws as mechanistic as your universe,” he said. “Well,
Herman, you have had that world. That was the pre-Christian world. Your
free love, your eugenics has been tried in Rome, in Sparta, in many an
ancient kingdom. And we know what those civilizations were.
“If you eugenists only knew the dreadful crop of dragon’s teeth that you
are scattering today upon the fertile soil of the unthinking mind!
Because we, fortunately, live in the millennial lull of a transitional
age, you think that human nature has changed; that the fury of the
Crusades will never be renewed in fantastic social wars, and the madness
of religious fratricide in the madness of Science become Faith. All the
old evils are lying low, lurking in the minds of men, ready to spring
forth in all their ancient fury when the wise and illogical compromises,
evolved through centuries of experience, have been discarded. I
sometimes think that Holy Russia has man’s future in her charge. For
without Christianity the moral nature of man will be where it has been
in ages past. Social and economic readjustments leave it unchanged.”
“A religion of slaves, of the weak and incompetent,” said Lazaroff
loudly.
“You think, then, that human passions have become emulsified by
education? What a delusion!”
“Unquestionably. Permit me to refer to myself as an example of the crass
materialist. For I do not believe in anything but matter. Matter is
soul, as Hæckel proves. Yet, I am not on that account a man of base
impulses. I do not want to wound, to kill, to steal, to torture—”
“Are you quite sure you know yourself, Herman?”
“But I utterly reject the efficacy of your Christianity, except in this
low order of civilization. It is a dead faith, with its foolish
miracles, its preposterous and unscientific dualism.”
“And I say,” cried Sir Spofforth, rising out of his chair, “that it is
precisely the Christian norm, the unattainable ideal of Christ, working
in the human heart, that has freed civilization from cruelty and shame.
Why, look backward before Christ lived, and forward: don’t you see that
we are actually indwelling in Him, according to His promise? Think of
the Christians burned as living torches in Nero’s time, and read the
writings of contemporary Romans, men of disciplined lives and a
mentality as great as ours. Read Pliny, Tacitus, Seneca; read of the
hopelessness of life when Rome was at her highest, and see if this
stirred them. Picture Marcus Aurelius, the noble Stoic, presiding over
the amphitheater. Study the manners and morals of Athens when her light
burned most brightly. Contrast a thousand years of man’s abasement, and
try to set the Inquisition against that.
“Future ages will say this: that nobody, not one of our statesmen saw
the course that had been set when the civil State was first established.
Never before in history had tribe or nation existed but grew up round
the focus of some god. The churchless State is a body without a soul.
Warnings multiply—in France and in America—but who can read them? When
religion goes, the spirit of the race is dying. It is just the ideal of
Christ, enshrined in the minds of a few leaders of character and trained
conviction, that has kept the world on its slow course of progress. And
nothing else saves us from the unstable tyrannies of ancient days.”
I was so stirred by Sir Spofforth’s eloquence that I clapped my hands
vigorously, although I did not wholly agree with him. Esther was staring
at Lazaroff; she was partly convinced and wanted him to answer her
father. But Lazaroff, ignoring her gaze, scowled at me across the table.
“So you are of the same mind, are you, Pennell?” he asked, not trying to
disguise his sneer. “And you don’t imagine that it is your missing five
centimeters? Well, I hope that you may have your chance to find out for
yourself. I hope you may, indeed.” He nodded and smiled in a rather evil
fashion.
“Well, I must really offer you all an apology,” said Sir Spofforth,
penitently. “Enough of these debatable subjects for a week at least. We
two shall never agree on politics or religion, Herman. Let us go
upstairs.”