As things round themselves off and accomplish themselves, one begins
for the first time to see them clearly. From the perspectives of a new
age one can look back upon the great and widening stream of literature
with a complete understanding. Things link up that seemed disconnected,
and things that were once condemned as harsh and aimless are seen to be
but factors in the statement of a gigantic problem. An enormous bulk of
the sincerer writing of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth
centuries falls together now into an unanticipated unanimity; one sees
it as a huge tissue of variations upon one theme, the conflict of human
egotism and personal passion and narrow imaginations on the one hand,
against the growing sense of wider necessities and a possible, more
spacious life.
That conflict is in evidence in so early a work as Voltaire’s
_Candide_, for example, in which the desire for justice as well as
happiness beats against human contrariety and takes refuge at last in a
forced and inconclusive contentment with little things. _Candide_ was
but one of the pioneers of a literature of uneasy complaint that was
presently an innumerable multitude of books. The novels more
particularly of the nineteenth century, if one excludes the mere
story-tellers from our consideration, witness to this uneasy
realisation of changes that call for effort and of the lack of that
effort. In a thousand aspects, now tragically, now comically, now with
a funny affectation of divine detachment, a countless host of witnesses
tell their story of lives fretting between dreams and limitations. Now
one laughs, now one weeps, now one reads with a blank astonishment at
this huge and almost unpremeditated record of how the growing human
spirit, now warily, now eagerly, now furiously, and always, as it
seems, unsuccessfully, tried to adapt itself to the maddening misfit of
its patched and ancient garments. And always in these books as one
draws nearer to the heart of the matter there comes a disconcerting
evasion. It was the fantastic convention of the time that a writer
should not touch upon religion. To do so was to rouse the jealous fury
of the great multitude of professional religious teachers. It was
permitted to state the discord, but it was forbidden to glance at any
possible reconciliation. Religion was the privilege of the pulpit....
It was not only from the novels that religion was omitted. It was
ignored by the newspapers; it was pedantically disregarded in the
discussion of business questions, it played a trivial and apologetic
part in public affairs. And this was done not out of contempt but
respect. The hold of the old religious organisations upon men’s respect
was still enormous, so enormous that there seemed to be a quality of
irreverence in applying religion to the developments of every day. This
strange suspension of religion lasted over into the beginnings of the
new age. It was the clear vision of Marcus Karenin much more than any
other contemporary influence which brought it back into the texture of
human life. He saw religion without hallucinations, without
superstitious reverence, as a common thing as necessary as food and
air, as land and energy to the life of man and the well-being of the
Republic. He saw that indeed it had already percolated away from the
temples and hierarchies and symbols in which men had sought to imprison
it, that it was already at work anonymously and obscurely in the
universal acceptance of the greater state. He gave it clearer
expression, rephrased it to the lights and perspectives of the new
dawn....
But if we return to our novels for our evidence of the spirit of the
times it becomes evident as one reads them in their chronological
order, so far as that is now ascertainable, that as one comes to the
latter nineteenth and the earlier twentieth century the writers are
much more acutely aware of secular change than their predecessors were.
The earlier novelists tried to show ‘life as it is,’ the latter showed
life as it changes. More and more of their characters are engaged in
adaptation to change or suffering from the effects of world changes.
And as we come up to the time of the Last Wars, this newer conception
of the everyday life as a reaction to an accelerated development is
continually more manifest. Barnet’s book, which has served us so well,
is frankly a picture of the world coming about like a ship that sails
into the wind. Our later novelists give a vast gallery of individual
conflicts in which old habits and customs, limited ideas, ungenerous
temperaments, and innate obsessions are pitted against this great
opening out of life that has happened to us. They tell us of the
feelings of old people who have been wrenched away from familiar
surroundings, and how they have had to make peace with uncomfortable
comforts and conveniences that are still strange to them. They give us
the discord between the opening egotisms of youths and the ill-defined
limitations of a changing social life. They tell of the universal
struggle of jealousy to capture and cripple our souls, of romantic
failures and tragical misconceptions of the trend of the world, of the
spirit of adventure, and the urgency of curiosity, and how these serve
the universal drift. And all their stories lead in the end either to
happiness missed or happiness won, to disaster or salvation. The
clearer their vision and the subtler their art, the more certainly do
these novels tell of the possibility of salvation for all the world.
For any road in life leads to religion for those upon it who will
follow it far enough....
It would have seemed a strange thing to the men of the former time that
it should be an open question as it is to-day whether the world is
wholly Christian or not Christian at all. But assuredly we have the
spirit, and as surely have we left many temporary forms behind.
Christianity was the first expression of world religion, the first
complete repudiation of tribalism and war and disputation. That it fell
presently into the ways of more ancient rituals cannot alter that. The
common sense of mankind has toiled through two thousand years of
chastening experience to find at last how sound a meaning attaches to
the familiar phrases of the Christian faith. The scientific thinker as
he widens out to the moral problems of the collective life, comes
inevitably upon the words of Christ, and as inevitably does the
Christian, as his thought grows clearer, arrive at the world republic.
As for the claims of the sects, as for the use of a name and
successions, we live in a time that has shaken itself free from such
claims and consistencies.
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN
Section 1
The second operation upon Marcus Karenin was performed at the new
station for surgical work at Paran, high in the Himalayas above the
Sutlej Gorge, where it comes down out of Thibet.
It is a place of such wildness and beauty as no other scenery in the
world affords. The granite terrace which runs round the four sides of
the low block of laboratories looks out in every direction upon
mountains. Far below in the hidden depths of a shadowy blue cleft, the
river pours down in its tumultuous passage to the swarming plains of
India. No sound of its roaring haste comes up to those serenities.
Beyond that blue gulf, in which whole forests of giant deodars seem no
more than small patches of moss, rise vast precipices of many-coloured
rock, fretted above, lined by snowfalls, and jagged into pinnacles.
These are the northward wall of a towering wilderness of ice and snow
which clambers southward higher and wilder and vaster to the
culminating summits of our globe, to Dhaulagiri and Everest. Here are
cliffs of which no other land can show the like, and deep chasms in
which Mt. Blanc might be plunged and hidden. Here are icefields as big
as inland seas on which the tumbled boulders lie so thickly that
strange little flowers can bloom among them under the untempered
sunshine. To the northward, and blocking out any vision of the uplands
of Thibet, rises that citadel of porcelain, that gothic pile, the Lio
Porgyul, walls, towers, and peaks, a clear twelve thousand feet of
veined and splintered rock above the river. And beyond it and eastward
and westward rise peaks behind peaks, against the dark blue Himalayan
sky. Far away below to the south the clouds of the Indian rains pile up
abruptly and are stayed by an invisible hand.
Hither it was that with a dreamlike swiftness Karenin flew high over
the irrigations of Rajputana and the towers and cupolas of the ultimate
Delhi; and the little group of buildings, albeit the southward wall
dropped nearly five hundred feet, seemed to him as he soared down to it
like a toy lost among these mountain wildernesses. No road came up to
this place; it was reached only by flight.
His pilot descended to the great courtyard, and Karenin assisted by his
secretary clambered down through the wing fabric and made his way to
the officials who came out to receive him.
In this place, beyond infections and noise and any distractions,
surgery had made for itself a house of research and a healing fastness.
The building itself would have seemed very wonderful to eyes accustomed
to the flimsy architecture of an age when power was precious. It was
made of granite, already a little roughened on the outside by frost,
but polished within and of a tremendous solidity. And in a honeycomb of
subtly lit apartments, were the spotless research benches, the
operating tables, the instruments of brass, and fine glass and platinum
and gold. Men and women came from all parts of the world for study or
experimental research. They wore a common uniform of white and ate at
long tables together, but the patients lived in an upper part of the
buildings, and were cared for by nurses and skilled attendants....
The first man to greet Karenin was Ciana, the scientific director of
the institution. Beside him was Rachel Borken, the chief organiser.
‘You are tired?’ she asked, and old Karenin shook his head.
‘Cramped,’ he said. ‘I have wanted to visit such a place as this.’
He spoke as if he had no other business with them.
There was a little pause.
‘How many scientific people have you got here now?’ he asked.
‘Just three hundred and ninety-two,’ said Rachel Borken.
‘And the patients and attendants and so on?’
‘Two thousand and thirty.’
‘I shall be a patient,’ said Karenin. ‘I shall have to be a patient.
But I should like to see things first. Presently I will be a patient.’
‘You will come to my rooms?’ suggested Ciana.
‘And then I must talk to this doctor of yours,’ said Karenin. ‘But I
would like to see a bit of this place and talk to some of your people
before it comes to that.’
He winced and moved forward.
‘I have left most of my work in order,’ he said.
‘You have been working hard up to now?’ asked Rachel Borken.
‘Yes. And now I have nothing more to do—and it seems strange.... And
it’s a bother, this illness and having to come down to oneself. This
doorway and the row of windows is well done; the gray granite and just
the line of gold, and then those mountains beyond through that arch.
It’s very well done....’
Section 2
Karenin lay on the bed with a soft white rug about him, and Fowler, who
was to be his surgeon sat on the edge of the bed and talked to him. An
assistant was seated quietly in the shadow behind the bed. The
examination had been made, and Karenin knew what was before him. He was
tired but serene.
‘So I shall die,’ he said, ‘unless you operate?’
Fowler assented. ‘And then,’ said Karenin, smiling, ‘probably I shall
die.’
‘Not certainly.’
‘Even if I do not die; shall I be able to work?’
‘There is just a chance....’
‘So firstly I shall probably die, and if I do not, then perhaps I shall
be a useless invalid?’
‘I think if you live, you may be able to go on—as you do now.’
‘Well, then, I suppose I must take the risk of it. Yet couldn’t you,
Fowler, couldn’t you drug me and patch me instead of all
this—vivisection? A few days of drugged and active life—and then the
end?’
Fowler thought. ‘We are not sure enough yet to do things like that,’ he
said.
‘But a day is coming when you will be certain.’
Fowler nodded.
‘You make me feel as though I was the last of deformity—Deformity is
uncertainty—inaccuracy. My body works doubtfully, it is not even sure
that it will die or live. I suppose the time is not far off when such
bodies as mine will no longer be born into the world.’
‘You see,’ said Fowler, after a little pause, ‘it is necessary that
spirits such as yours should be born into the world.’
‘I suppose,’ said Karenin, ‘that my spirit has had its use. But if you
think that is because my body is as it is I think you are mistaken.
There is no peculiar virtue in defect. I have always chafed against—all
this. If I could have moved more freely and lived a larger life in
health I could have done more. But some day perhaps you will be able to
put a body that is wrong altogether right again. Your science is only
beginning. It’s a subtler thing than physics and chemistry, and it
takes longer to produce its miracles. And meanwhile a few more of us
must die in patience.’
‘Fine work is being done and much of it,’ said Fowler. ‘I can say as
much because I have nothing to do with it. I can understand a lesson,
appreciate the discoveries of abler men and use my hands, but those
others, Pigou, Masterton, Lie, and the others, they are clearing the
ground fast for the knowledge to come. Have you had time to follow
their work?’
Karenin shook his head. ‘But I can imagine the scope of it,’ he said.
‘We have so many men working now,’ said Fowler. ‘I suppose at present
there must be at least a thousand thinking hard, observing,
experimenting, for one who did so in nineteen hundred.’
‘Not counting those who keep the records?’
‘Not counting those. Of course, the present indexing of research is in
itself a very big work, and it is only now that we are getting it
properly done. But already we are feeling the benefit of that. Since it
ceased to be a paid employment and became a devotion we have had only
those people who obeyed the call of an aptitude at work upon these
things. Here—I must show you it to-day, because it will interest you—we
have our copy of the encyclopaedic index—every week sheets are taken
out and replaced by fresh sheets with new results that are brought to
us by the aeroplanes of the Research Department. It is an index of
knowledge that grows continually, an index that becomes continually
truer. There was never anything like it before.’
‘When I came into the education committee,’ said Karenin, ‘that index
of human knowledge seemed an impossible thing. Research had produced a
chaotic mountain of results, in a hundred languages and a thousand
different types of publication....’ He smiled at his memories. ‘How we
groaned at the job!’
‘Already the ordering of that chaos is nearly done. You shall see.’
‘I have been so busy with my own work——Yes, I shall be glad to see.’
The patient regarded the surgeon for a time with interested eyes.
‘You work here always?’ he asked abruptly.
‘No,’ said Fowler.
‘But mostly you work here?’
‘I have worked about seven years out of the past ten. At times I go
away—down there. One has to. At least I have to. There is a sort of
grayness comes over all this, one feels hungry for life, real, personal
passionate life, love-making, eating and drinking for the fun of the
thing, jostling crowds, having adventures, laughter—above all
laughter——’
‘Yes,’ said Karenin understandingly.
‘And then one day, suddenly one thinks of these high mountains
again....’
‘That is how I would have lived, if it had not been for my—defects,’
said Karenin. ‘Nobody knows but those who have borne it the
exasperation of abnormality. It will be good when you have nobody alive
whose body cannot live the wholesome everyday life, whose spirit cannot
come up into these high places as it wills.’
‘We shall manage that soon,’ said Fowler.
‘For endless generations man has struggled upward against the
indignities of his body—and the indignities of his soul. Pains,
incapacities, vile fears, black moods, despairs. How well I’ve known
them. They’ve taken more time than all your holidays. It is true, is it
not, that every man is something of a cripple and something of a beast?
I’ve dipped a little deeper than most; that’s all. It’s only now when
he has fully learnt the truth of that, that he can take hold of himself
to be neither beast nor cripple. Now that he overcomes his servitude to
his body, he can for the first time think of living the full life of
his body.... Before another generation dies you’ll have the thing in
hand. You’ll do as you please with the old Adam and all the vestiges
from the brutes and reptiles that lurk in his body and spirit. Isn’t
that so?’
‘You put it boldly,’ said Fowler.
Karenin laughed cheerfully at his caution.... ‘When,’ asked Karenin
suddenly, ‘when will you operate?’
‘The day after to-morrow,’ said Fowler. ‘For a day I want you to drink
and eat as I shall prescribe. And you may think and talk as you
please.’
‘I should like to see this place.’
‘You shall go through it this afternoon. I will have two men carry you
in a litter. And to-morrow you shall lie out upon the terrace. Our
mountains here are the most beautiful in the world....’
Section 3
The next morning Karenin got up early and watched the sun rise over the
mountains, and breakfasted lightly, and then young Gardener, his
secretary, came to consult him upon the spending of his day. Would he
care to see people? Or was this gnawing pain within him too much to
permit him to do that?
‘I’d like to talk,’ said Karenin. ‘There must be all sorts of
lively-minded people here. Let them come and gossip with me. It will
distract me—and I can’t tell you how interesting it makes everything
that is going on to have seen the dawn of one’s own last day.’
‘Your last day!’
‘Fowler will kill me.’
‘But he thinks not.’
‘Fowler will kill me. If he does not he will not leave very much of me.
So that this is my last day anyhow, the days afterwards if they come at
all to me, will be refuse. I know....’
Gardener was about to speak when Karenin went on again.
‘I hope he kills me, Gardener. Don’t be—old-fashioned. The thing I am
most afraid of is that last rag of life. I may just go on—a scarred
salvage of suffering stuff. And then—all the things I have hidden and
kept down or discounted or set right afterwards will get the better of
me. I shall be peevish. I may lose my grip upon my own egotism. It’s
never been a very firm grip. No, no, Gardener, don’t say that! You know
better, you’ve had glimpses of it. Suppose I came through on the other
side of this affair, belittled, vain, and spiteful, using the prestige
I have got among men by my good work in the past just to serve some
small invalid purpose....’
He was silent for a time, watching the mists among the distant
precipices change to clouds of light, and drift and dissolve before the
searching rays of the sunrise.
‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘I am afraid of these anæsthetics and these fag
ends of life. It’s life we are all afraid of. Death!—nobody minds just
death. Fowler is clever—but some day surgery will know its duty better
and not be so anxious just to save something . . . provided only that
it quivers. I’ve tried to hold my end up properly and do my work. After
Fowler has done with me I am certain I shall be unfit for work—and what
else is there for me? . . . I know I shall not be fit for work....
‘I do not see why life should be judged by its last trailing thread of
vitality.... I know it for the splendid thing it is—I who have been a
diseased creature from the beginning. I know it well enough not to
confuse it with its husks. Remember that, Gardener, if presently my
heart fails me and I despair, and if I go through a little phase of
pain and ingratitude and dark forgetfulness before the end.... Don’t
believe what I may say at the last.... If the fabric is good enough the
selvage doesn’t matter. It can’t matter. So long as you are alive you
are just the moment, perhaps, but when you are dead then you are all
your life from the first moment to the last....’
Section 4
Presently, in accordance with his wish, people came to talk to him, and
he could forget himself again. Rachel Borken sat for a long time with
him and talked chiefly of women in the world, and with her was a girl
named Edith Haydon who was already very well known as a cytologist. And
several of the younger men who were working in the place and a patient
named Kahn, a poet, and Edwards, a designer of plays and shows, spent
some time with him. The talk wandered from point to point and came back
upon itself, and became now earnest and now trivial as the chance
suggestions determined. But soon afterwards Gardener wrote down notes
of things he remembered, and it is possible to put together again the
outlook of Karenin upon the world and how he thought and felt about
many of the principal things in life.
‘Our age,’ he said, ‘has been so far an age of scene-shifting. We have
been preparing a stage, clearing away the setting of a drama that was
played out and growing tiresome.... If I could but sit out the first
few scenes of the new spectacle....
‘How encumbered the world had become! It was ailing as I am ailing with
a growth of unmeaning things. It was entangled, feverish, confused. It
was in sore need of release, and I suppose that nothing less than the
violence of those bombs could have released it and made it a healthy
world again. I suppose they were necessary. Just as everything turns to
evil in a fevered body so everything seemed turning to evil in those
last years of the old time. Everywhere there were obsolete
organisations seizing upon all the new fine things that science was
giving to the world, nationalities, all sorts of political bodies, the
churches and sects, proprietorship, seizing upon those treat powers and
limitless possibilities and turning them to evil uses. And they would
not suffer open speech, they would not permit of education, they would
let no one be educated to the needs of the new time.... You who are
younger cannot imagine the mixture of desperate hope and protesting
despair in which we who could believe in the possibilities of science
lived in those years before atomic energy came....
‘It was not only that the mass of people would not attend, would not
understand, but that those who did understand lacked the power of real
belief. They said the things, they saw the things, and the things meant
nothing to them....
‘I have been reading some old papers lately. It is wonderful how our
fathers bore themselves towards science. They hated it. They feared it.
They permitted a few scientific men to exist and work—a pitiful
handful.... “Don’t find out anything about us,” they said to them;
“don’t inflict vision upon us, spare our little ways of life from the
fearful shaft of understanding. But do tricks for us, little limited
tricks. Give us cheap lighting. And cure us of certain disagreeable
things, cure us of cancer, cure us of consumption, cure our colds and
relieve us after repletion....” We have changed all that, Gardener.
Science is no longer our servant. We know it for something greater than
our little individual selves. It is the awakening mind of the race, and
in a little while——In a little while——I wish indeed I could watch for
that little while, now that the curtain has risen....
‘While I lie here they are clearing up what is left of the bombs in
London,’ he said. ‘Then they are going to repair the ruins and make it
all as like as possible to its former condition before the bombs fell.
Perhaps they will dig out the old house in St John’s Wood to which my
father went after his expulsion from Russia.... That London of my
memories seems to me like a place in another world. For you younger
people it must seem like a place that could never have existed.’
‘Is there much left standing?’ asked Edith Haydon.
‘Square miles that are scarcely shaken in the south and north-west,
they say; and most of the bridges and large areas of dock. Westminster,
which held most of the government offices, suffered badly from the
small bomb that destroyed the Parliament, there are very few traces of
the old thoroughfare of Whitehall or the Government region thereabout,
but there are plentiful drawings to scale of its buildings, and the
great hole in the east of London scarcely matters. That was a poor
district and very like the north and the south.... It will be possible
to reconstruct most of it.... It is wanted. Already it becomes
difficult to recall the old time—even for us who saw it.’
‘It seems very distant to me,’ said the girl.
‘It was an unwholesome world,’ reflected Karenin. ‘I seem to remember
everybody about my childhood as if they were ill. They were ill. They
were sick with confusion. Everybody was anxious about money and
everybody was doing uncongenial things. They ate a queer mixture of
foods, either too much or too little, and at odd hours. One sees how
ill they were by their advertisements. All this new region of London
they are opening up now is plastered with advertisements of pills.
Everybody must have been taking pills. In one of the hotel rooms in the
Strand they have found the luggage of a lady covered up by falling
rubble and unburnt, and she was equipped with nine different sorts of
pill and tabloid. The pill-carrying age followed the weapon-carrying
age. They are equally strange to us. People’s skins must have been in a
vile state. Very few people were properly washed; they carried the
filth of months on their clothes. All the clothes they wore were old
clothes; our way of pulping our clothes again after a week or so of
wear would have seemed fantastic to them. Their clothing hardly bears
thinking about. And the congestion of them! Everybody was jostling
against everybody in those awful towns. In an uproar. People were run
over and crushed by the hundred; every year in London the cars and
omnibuses alone killed or disabled twenty thousand people, in Paris it
was worse; people used to fall dead for want of air in the crowded
ways. The irritation of London, internal and external, must have been
maddening. It was a maddened world. It is like thinking of a sick
child. One has the same effect of feverish urgencies and acute
irrational disappointments.
‘All history,’ he said, ‘is a record of a childhood....
‘And yet not exactly a childhood. There is something clean and keen
about even a sick child—and something touching. But so much of the old
times makes one angry. So much they did seems grossly stupid,
obstinately, outrageously stupid, which is the very opposite to being
fresh and young.
‘I was reading only the other day about Bismarck, that hero of
nineteenth-century politics, that sequel to Napoleon, that god of blood
and iron. And he was just a beery, obstinate, dull man. Indeed, that is
what he was, the commonest, coarsest man, who ever became great. I
looked at his portraits, a heavy, almost froggish face, with projecting
eyes and a thick moustache to hide a poor mouth. He aimed at nothing
but Germany, Germany emphasised, indurated, enlarged; Germany and his
class in Germany; beyond that he had no ideas, he was inaccessible to
ideas; his mind never rose for a recorded instant above a bumpkin’s
elaborate cunning. And he was the most influential man in the world, in
the whole world, no man ever left so deep a mark on it, because
everywhere there were gross men to resonate to the heavy notes he
emitted. He trampled on ten thousand lovely things, and a kind of
malice in these louts made it pleasant to them to see him trample.
No—he was no child; the dull, national aggressiveness he stood for, no
childishness. Childhood is promise. He was survival.
‘All Europe offered its children to him, it sacrificed education, art,
happiness and all its hopes of future welfare to follow the clatter of
his sabre. The monstrous worship of that old fool’s “blood and iron”
passed all round the earth. Until the atomic bombs burnt our way to
freedom again....’
‘One thinks of him now as one thinks of the megatherium,’ said one of
the young men.
‘From first to last mankind made three million big guns and a hundred
thousand complicated great ships for no other purpose but war.’
‘Were there no sane men in those days,’ asked the young man, ‘to stand
against that idolatry?’
‘In a state of despair,’ said Edith Haydon.
‘He is so far off—and there are men alive still who were alive when
Bismarck died!’ . . . said the young man....
Section 5
‘And yet it may be I am unjust to Bismarck,’ said Karenin, following
his own thoughts. ‘You see, men belong to their own age; we stand upon
a common stock of thought and we fancy we stand upon the ground. I met
a pleasant man the other day, a Maori, whose great-grandfather was a
cannibal. It chanced he had a daguerreotype of the old sinner, and the
two were marvellously alike. One felt that a little juggling with time
and either might have been the other. People are cruel and stupid in a
stupid age who might be gentle and splendid in a gracious one. The
world also has its moods. Think of the mental food of Bismarck’s
childhood; the humiliations of Napoleon’s victories, the crowded,
crowning victory of the Battle of the Nations.... Everybody in those
days, wise or foolish, believed that the division of the world under a
multitude of governments was inevitable, and that it was going on for
thousands of years more. It _was_ inevitable until it was impossible.
Any one who had denied that inevitability publicly would have been
counted—oh! a _silly_ fellow. Old Bismarck was only just a
little—forcible, on the lines of the accepted ideas. That is all. He
thought that since there had to be national governments he would make
one that was strong at home and invincible abroad. Because he had fed
with a kind of rough appetite upon what we can see now were very stupid
ideas, that does not make him a stupid man. We’ve had advantages; we’ve
had unity and collectivism blasted into our brains. Where should we be
now but for the grace of science? I should have been an embittered,
spiteful, downtrodden member of the Russian Intelligenza, a
conspirator, a prisoner, or an assassin. You, my dear, would have been
breaking dingy windows as a suffragette.’
‘_Never_,’ said Edith stoutly....
For a time the talk broke into humorous personalities, and the young
people gibed at each other across the smiling old administrator, and
then presently one of the young scientific men gave things a new turn.
He spoke like one who was full to the brim.
‘You know, sir, I’ve a fancy—it is hard to prove such things—that
civilisation was very near disaster when the atomic bombs came banging
into it, that if there had been no Holsten and no induced
radio-activity, the world would have—smashed—much as it did. Only
instead of its being a smash that opened a way to better things, it
might have been a smash without a recovery. It is part of my business
to understand economics, and from that point of view the century before
Holsten was just a hundred years’ crescendo of waste. Only the extreme
individualism of that period, only its utter want of any collective
understanding or purpose can explain that waste. Mankind used up
material—insanely. They had got through three-quarters of all the coal
in the planet, they had used up most of the oil, they had swept away
their forests, and they were running short of tin and copper. Their
wheat areas were getting weary and populous, and many of the big towns
had so lowered the water level of their available hills that they
suffered a drought every summer. The whole system was rushing towards
bankruptcy. And they were spending every year vaster and vaster amounts
of power and energy upon military preparations, and continually
expanding the debt of industry to capital. The system was already
staggering when Holsten began his researches. So far as the world in
general went there was no sense of danger and no desire for inquiry.
They had no belief that science could save them, nor any idea that
there was a need to be saved. They could not, they would not, see the
gulf beneath their feet. It was pure good luck for mankind at large
that any research at all was in progress. And as I say, sir, if that
line of escape hadn’t opened, before now there might have been a crash,
revolution, panic, social disintegration, famine, and—it is
conceivable—complete disorder.... The rails might have rusted on the
disused railways by now, the telephone poles have rotted and fallen,
the big liners dropped into sheet-iron in the ports; the burnt,
deserted cities become the ruinous hiding-places of gangs of robbers.
We might have been brigands in a shattered and attenuated world. Ah,
you may smile, but that had happened before in human history. The world
is still studded with the ruins of broken-down civilisations. Barbaric
bands made their fastness upon the Acropolis, and the tomb of Hadrian
became a fortress that warred across the ruins of Rome against the
Colosseum.... Had all that possibility of reaction ended so certainly
in 1940? Is it all so very far away even now?’
‘It seems far enough away now,’ said Edith Haydon.
‘But forty years ago?’
‘No,’ said Karenin with his eyes upon the mountains, ‘I think you
underrate the available intelligence in those early decades of the
twentieth century. Officially, I know, politically, that intelligence
didn’t tell—but it was there. And I question your hypothesis. I doubt
if that discovery could have been delayed. There is a kind of
inevitable logic now in the progress of research. For a hundred years
and more thought and science have been going their own way regardless
of the common events of life. You see—_they have got loose_. If there
had been no Holsten there would have been some similar man. If atomic
energy had not come in one year it would have come in another. In
decadent Rome the march of science had scarcely begun.... Nineveh,
Babylon, Athens, Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first rough
experiments in association that made a security, a breathing-space, in
which inquiry was born. Man had to experiment before he found out the
way to begin. But already two hundred years ago he had fairly begun....
The politics and dignities and wars of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries were only the last phoenix blaze of the former civilisation
flaring up about the beginnings of the new. Which we serve.... ‘Man
lives in the dawn for ever,’ said Karenin. ‘Life is beginning and
nothing else but beginning. It begins everlastingly. Each step seems
vaster than the last, and does but gather us together for the nest.
This Modern State of ours, which would have been a Utopian marvel a
hundred years ago, is already the commonplace of life. But as I sit
here and dream of the possibilities in the mind of man that now gather
to a head beneath the shelter of its peace, these great mountains here
seem but little things....’
Section 6
About eleven Karenin had his midday meal, and afterwards he slept among
his artificial furs and pillows for two hours. Then he awoke and some
tea was brought to him, and he attended to a small difficulty in
connection with the Moravian schools in the Labrador country and in
Greenland that Gardener knew would interest him. He remained alone for
a little while after that, and then the two women came to him again.
Afterwards Edwards and Kahn joined the group, and the talk fell upon
love and the place of women in the renascent world. The cloudbanks of
India lay under a quivering haze, and the blaze of the sun fell full
upon the eastward precipices. Ever and again as they talked, some vast
splinter of rock would crack and come away from these, or a wild rush
of snow and ice and stone, pour down in thunder, hang like a wet thread
into the gulfs below, and cease....
Section 7
For a time Karenin said very little, and Kahn, the popular poet, talked
of passionate love. He said that passionate, personal love had been the
abiding desire of humanity since ever humanity had begun, and now only
was it becoming a possible experience. It had been a dream that
generation after generation had pursued, that always men had lost on
the verge of attainment. To most of those who had sought it obstinately
it had brought tragedy. Now, lifted above sordid distresses, men and
women might hope for realised and triumphant love. This age was the
Dawn of Love....
Karenin remained downcast and thoughtful while Kahn said these things.
Against that continued silence Kahn’s voice presently seemed to beat
and fail. He had begun by addressing Karenin, but presently he was
including Edith Haydon and Rachel Borken in his appeal. Rachel listened
silently; Edith watched Karenin and very deliberately avoided Kahn’s
eyes.
‘I know,’ said Karenin at last, ‘that many people are saying this sort
of thing. I know that there is a vast release of love-making in the
world. This great wave of decoration and elaboration that has gone
about the world, this Efflorescence, has of course laid hold of that. I
know that when you say that the world is set free, you interpret that
to mean that the world is set free for love-making. Down there,—under
the clouds, the lovers foregather. I know your songs, Kahn, your
half-mystical songs, in which you represent this old hard world
dissolving into a luminous haze of love—sexual love.... I don’t think
you are right or true in that. You are a young, imaginative man, and
you see life—ardently—with the eyes of youth. But the power that has
brought man into these high places under this blue-veiled blackness of
the sky and which beckons us on towards the immense and awful future of
our race, is riper and deeper and greater than any such emotions....
‘All through my life—it has been a necessary part of my work—I have had
to think of this release of sexual love and the riddles that perfect
freedom and almost limitless power will put to the soul of our race. I
can see now, all over the world, a beautiful ecstasy of waste; “Let us
sing and rejoice and be lovely and wonderful.” . . . The orgy is only
beginning, Kahn.... It was inevitable—but it is not the end of
mankind....
‘Think what we are. It is but a yesterday in the endlessness of time
that life was a dreaming thing, dreaming so deeply that it forgot
itself as it dreamt, its lives, its individual instincts, its moments,
were born and wondered and played and desired and hungered and grew
weary and died. Incalculable successions of vision, visions of sunlit
jungle, river wilderness, wild forest, eager desire, beating hearts,
soaring wings and creeping terror flamed hotly and then were as though
they had never been. Life was an uneasiness across which lights played
and vanished. And then we came, man came, and opened eyes that were a
question and hands that were a demand and began a mind and memory that
dies not when men die, but lives and increases for ever, an over-mind,
a dominating will, a question and an aspiration that reaches to the
stars.... Hunger and fear and this that you make so much of, this sex,
are but the elementals of life out of which we have arisen. All these
elementals, I grant you, have to be provided for, dealt with,
satisfied, but all these things have to be left behind.’
‘But Love,’ said Kahn.
‘I speak of sexual love and the love of intimate persons. And that is
what you mean, Kahn.’
Karenin shook his head. ‘You cannot stay at the roots and climb the
tree,’ he said....
‘No,’ he said after a pause, ‘this sexual excitement, this love story,
is just a part of growing up and we grow out of it. So far literature
and art and sentiment and all our emotional forms have been almost
altogether adolescent, plays and stories, delights and hopes, they have
all turned on that marvellous discovery of the love interest, but life
lengthens out now and the mind of adult humanity detaches itself. Poets
who used to die at thirty live now to eighty-five. You, too, Kahn!
There are endless years yet for you—and all full of learning.... We
carry an excessive burden of sex and sexual tradition still, and we
have to free ourselves from it. We do free ourselves from it. We have
learnt in a thousand different ways to hold back death, and this sex,
which in the old barbaric days was just sufficient to balance our
dying, is now like a hammer that has lost its anvil, it plunges through
human life. You poets, you young people want to turn it to delight.
Turn it to delight. That may be one way out. In a little while, if you
have any brains worth thinking about, you will be satisfied, and then
you will come up here to the greater things. The old religions and
their new offsets want still, I see, to suppress all these things. Let
them suppress. If they can suppress. In their own people. Either road
will bring you here at last to the eternal search for knowledge and the
great adventure of power.’
‘But incidentally,’ said Rachel Borken; ‘incidentally you have half of
humanity, you have womankind, very much specialised for—for this love
and reproduction that is so much less needed than it was.’
‘Both sexes are specialised for love and reproduction,’ said Karenin.
‘But the women carry the heavier burden.’
‘Not in their imaginations,’ said Edwards.
‘And surely,’ said Kahn, ‘when you speak of love as a phase—isn’t it a
necessary phase? Quite apart from reproduction the love of the sexes is
necessary. Isn’t it love, sexual love, which has released the
imagination? Without that stir, without that impulse to go out from
ourselves, to be reckless of ourselves and wonderful, would our lives
be anything more than the contentment of the stalled ox?’
‘The key that opens the door,’ said Karenin, ‘is not the goal of the
journey.’
‘But women!’ cried Rachel. ‘Here we are! What is our future—as women?
Is it only that we have unlocked the doors of the imagination for you
men? Let us speak of this question now. It is a thing constantly in my
thoughts, Karenin. What do you think of us? You who must have thought
so much of these perplexities.’
Karenin seemed to weigh his words. He spoke very deliberately. ‘I do
not care a rap about your future—as women. I do not care a rap about
the future of men—as males. I want to destroy these peculiar futures. I
care for your future as intelligences, as parts of and contribution to
the universal mind of the race. Humanity is not only naturally
over-specialised in these matters, but all its institutions, its
customs, everything, exaggerate, intensify this difference. I want to
unspecialise women. No new idea. Plato wanted exactly that. I do not
want to go on as we go now, emphasising this natural difference; I do
not deny it, but I want to reduce it and overcome it.’
‘And—we remain women,’ said Rachel Borken. ‘Need you remain thinking of
yourselves as women?’
‘It is forced upon us,’ said Edith Haydon.
‘I do not think a woman becomes less of a woman because she dresses and
works like a man,’ said Edwards. ‘You women here, I mean you scientific
women, wear white clothing like the men, twist up your hair in the
simplest fashion, go about your work as though there was only one sex
in the world. You are just as much women, even if you are not so
feminine, as the fine ladies down below there in the plains who dress
for excitement and display, whose only thoughts are of lovers, who
exaggerate every difference.... Indeed we love you more.’
‘But we go about our work,’ said Edith Haydon.
‘So does it matter?’ asked Rachel.
‘If you go about your work and if the men go about their work then for
Heaven’s sake be as much woman as you wish,’ said Karenin. ‘When I ask
you to unspecialise, I am thinking not of the abolition of sex, but the
abolition of the irksome, restricting, obstructive obsession with sex.
It may be true that sex made society, that the first society was the
sex-cemented family, the first state a confederacy of blood relations,
the first laws sexual taboos. Until a few years ago morality meant
proper sexual behaviour. Up to within a few years of us the chief
interest and motive of an ordinary man was to keep and rule a woman and
her children and the chief concern of a woman was to get a man to do
that. That was the drama, that was life. And the jealousy of these
demands was the master motive in the world. You said, Kahn, a little
while ago that sexual love was the key that let one out from the
solitude of self, but I tell you that so far it has only done so in
order to lock us all up again in a solitude of two.... All that may
have been necessary but it is necessary no longer. All that has changed
and changes still very swiftly. Your future, Rachel, _as women_, is a
diminishing future.’
‘Karenin?’ asked Rachel, ‘do you mean that women are to become men?’
‘Men and women have to become human beings.’
‘You would abolish women? But, Karenin, listen! There is more than sex
in this. Apart from sex we are different from you. We take up life
differently. Forget we are—females, Karenin, and still we are a
different sort of human being with a different use. In some things we
are amazingly secondary. Here am I in this place because of my trick of
management, and Edith is here because of her patient, subtle hands.
That does not alter the fact that nearly the whole body of science is
man made; that does not alter the fact that men do so predominatingly
make history, that you could nearly write a complete history of the
world without mentioning a woman’s name. And on the other hand we have
a gift of devotion, of inspiration, a distinctive power for truly
loving beautiful things, a care for life and a peculiar keen close eye
for behaviour. You know men are blind beside us in these last matters.
You know they are restless—and fitful. We have a steadfastness. We may
never draw the broad outlines nor discover the new paths, but in the
future isn’t there a confirming and sustaining and supplying _rôle_ for
us? As important, perhaps, as yours? Equally important. We hold the
world up, Karenin, though you may have raised it.’
‘You know very well, Rachel, that I believe as you believe. I am not
thinking of the abolition of woman. But I do want to abolish—the
heroine, the sexual heroine. I want to abolish the woman whose support
is jealousy and whose gift possession. I want to abolish the woman who
can be won as a prize or locked up as a delicious treasure. And away
down there the heroine flares like a divinity.’
‘In America,’ said Edwards, ‘men are fighting duels over the praises of
women and holding tournaments before Queens of Beauty.’
‘I saw a beautiful girl in Lahore,’ said Kahn, ‘she sat under a golden
canopy like a goddess, and three fine men, armed and dressed like the
ancient paintings, sat on steps below her to show their devotion. And
they wanted only her permission to fight for her.’
‘That is the men’s doing,’ said Edith Haydon.
‘I _said_,’ cried Edwards, ‘that man’s imagination was more specialised
for sex than the whole being of woman. What woman would do a thing like
that? Women do but submit to it or take advantage of it.’
‘There is no evil between men and women that is not a common evil,’
said Karenin. ‘It is you poets, Kahn, with your love songs which turn
the sweet fellowship of comrades into this woman-centred excitement.
But there is something in women, in many women, which responds to these
provocations; they succumb to a peculiarly self-cultivating egotism.
They become the subjects of their own artistry. They develop and
elaborate themselves as scarcely any man would ever do. They _look_ for
golden canopies. And even when they seem to react against that, they
may do it still. I have been reading in the old papers of the movements
to emancipate women that were going on before the discovery of atomic
force. These things which began with a desire to escape from the
limitations and servitude of sex, ended in an inflamed assertion of
sex, and women more heroines than ever. Helen of Holloway was at last
as big a nuisance in her way as Helen of Troy, and so long as you think
of yourselves as women’—he held out a finger at Rachel and smiled
gently—‘instead of thinking of yourselves as intelligent beings, you
will be in danger of—Helenism. To think of yourselves as women is to
think of yourselves in relation to men. You can’t escape that
consequence. You have to learn to think of yourselves—for our sakes and
your own sakes—in relation to the sun and stars. You have to cease to
be our adventure, Rachel, and come with us upon our adventures. ...’ He
waved his hand towards the dark sky above the mountain crests.
Section 8
‘These questions are the next questions to which research will bring us
answers,’ said Karenin. ‘While we sit here and talk idly and inexactly
of what is needed and what may be, there are hundreds of keen-witted
men and women who are working these things out, dispassionately and
certainly, for the love of knowledge. The next sciences to yield great
harvests now will be psychology and neural physiology. These
perplexities of the situation between man and woman and the trouble
with the obstinacy of egotism, these are temporary troubles, the issue
of our own times. Suddenly all these differences that seem so fixed
will dissolve, all these incompatibles will run together, and we shall
go on to mould our bodies and our bodily feelings and personal
reactions as boldly as we begin now to carve mountains and set the seas
in their places and change the currents of the wind.’
‘It is the next wave,’ said Fowler, who had come out upon the terrace
and seated himself silently behind Karenin’s chair.
‘Of course, in the old days,’ said Edwards, ‘men were tied to their
city or their country, tied to the homes they owned or the work they
did....’
‘I do not see,’ said Karenin, ‘that there is any final limit to man’s
power of self-modification.
‘There is none,’ said Fowler, walking forward and sitting down upon the
parapet in front of Karenin so that he could see his face. ‘There is no
absolute limit to either knowledge or power.... I hope you do not tire
yourself talking.’
‘I am interested,’ said Karenin. ‘I suppose in a little while men will
cease to be tired. I suppose in a little time you will give us
something that will hurry away the fatigue products and restore our
jaded tissues almost at once. This old machine may be made to run
without slacking or cessation.’
‘That is possible, Karenin. But there is much to learn.’
‘And all the hours we give to digestion and half living; don’t you
think there will be some way of saving these?’
Fowler nodded assent.
‘And then sleep again. When man with his blazing lights made an end to
night in his towns and houses—it is only a hundred years or so ago that
that was done—then it followed he would presently resent his eight
hours of uselessness. Shan’t we presently take a tabloid or lie in some
field of force that will enable us to do with an hour or so of slumber
and rise refreshed again?’
‘Frobisher and Ameer Ali have done work in that direction.’
‘And then the inconveniences of age and those diseases of the system
that come with years; steadily you drive them back and you lengthen and
lengthen the years that stretch between the passionate tumults of youth
and the contractions of senility. Man who used to weaken and die as his
teeth decayed now looks forward to a continually lengthening,
continually fuller term of years. And all those parts of him that once
gathered evil against him, the vestigial structures and odd,
treacherous corners of his body, you know better and better how to deal
with. You carve his body about and leave it re-modelled and unscarred.
The psychologists are learning how to mould minds, to reduce and remove
bad complexes of thought and motive, to relieve pressures and broaden
ideas. So that we are becoming more and more capable of transmitting
what we have learnt and preserving it for the race. The race, the
racial wisdom, science, gather power continually to subdue the
individual man to its own end. Is that not so?’
Fowler said that it was, and for a time he was telling Karenin of new
work that was in progress in India and Russia. ‘And how is it with
heredity?’ asked Karenin.
Fowler told them of the mass of inquiry accumulated and arranged by the
genius of Tchen, who was beginning to define clearly the laws of
inheritance and how the sex of children and the complexions and many of
the parental qualities could be determined.
‘He can actually _do_——?’
‘It is still, so to speak, a mere laboratory triumph,’ said Fowler,
‘but to-morrow it will be practicable.’
‘You see,’ cried Karenin, turning a laughing face to Rachel and Edith,
‘while we have been theorising about men and women, here is science
getting the power for us to end that old dispute for ever. If woman is
too much for us, we’ll reduce her to a minority, and if we do not like
any type of men and women, we’ll have no more of it. These old bodies,
these old animal limitations, all this earthly inheritance of gross
inevitabilities falls from the spirit of man like the shrivelled cocoon
from an imago. And for my own part, when I hear of these things I feel
like that—like a wet, crawling new moth that still fears to spread its
wings. Because where do these things take us?’
‘Beyond humanity,’ said Kahn.
‘No,’ said Karenin. ‘We can still keep our feet upon the earth that
made us. But the air no longer imprisons us, this round planet is no
longer chained to us like the ball of a galley slave....
‘In a little while men who will know how to bear the strange
gravitations, the altered pressures, the attenuated, unfamiliar gases
and all the fearful strangenesses of space will be venturing out from
this earth. This ball will be no longer enough for us; our spirit will
reach out.... Cannot you see how that little argosy will go glittering
up into the sky, twinkling and glittering smaller and smaller until the
blue swallows it up. They may succeed out there; they may perish, but
other men will follow them....
‘It is as if a great window opened,’ said Karenin.
Section 9
As the evening drew on Karenin and those who were about him went up
upon the roof of the buildings, so that they might the better watch the
sunset and the flushing of the mountains and the coming of the
afterglow. They were joined by two of the surgeons from the
laboratories below, and presently by a nurse who brought Karenin
refreshment in a thin glass cup. It was a cloudless, windless evening
under the deep blue sky, and far away to the north glittered two
biplanes on the way to the observatories on Everest, two hundred miles
distant over the precipices to the east. The little group of people
watched them pass over the mountains and vanish into the blue, and then
for a time they talked of the work that the observatory was doing. From
that they passed to the whole process of research about the world, and
so Karenin’s thoughts returned again to the mind of the world and the
great future that was opening upon man’s imagination. He asked the
surgeons many questions upon the detailed possibilities of their
science, and he was keenly interested and excited by the things they
told him. And as they talked the sun touched the mountains, and became
very swiftly a blazing and indented hemisphere of liquid flame and
sank.
Karenin looked blinking at the last quivering rim of incandescence, and
shaded his eyes and became silent.
Presently he gave a little start.
‘What?’ asked Rachel Borken.
‘I had forgotten,’ he said.
‘What had you forgotten?’
‘I had forgotten about the operation to-morrow. I have been so
interested as Man to-day that I have nearly forgotten Marcus Karenin.
Marcus Karenin must go under your knife to-morrow, Fowler, and very
probably Marcus Karenin will die.’ He raised his slightly shrivelled
hand. ‘It does not matter, Fowler. It scarcely matters even to me. For
indeed is it Karenin who has been sitting here and talking; is it not
rather a common mind, Fowler, that has played about between us? You and
I and all of us have added thought to thought, but the thread is
neither you nor me. What is true we all have; when the individual has
altogether brought himself to the test and winnowing of expression,
then the individual is done. I feel as though I had already been
emptied out of that little vessel, that Marcus Karenin, which in my
youth held me so tightly and completely. Your beauty, dear Edith, and
your broad brow, dear Rachel, and you, Fowler, with your firm and
skilful hands, are now almost as much to me as this hand that beats the
arm of my chair. And as little me. And the spirit that desires to know,
the spirit that resolves to do, that spirit that lives and has talked
in us to-day, lived in Athens, lived in Florence, lives on, I know, for
ever....
‘And you, old Sun, with your sword of flame searing these poor eyes of
Marcus for the last time of all, beware of me! You think I die—and
indeed I am only taking off one more coat to get at you. I have
threatened you for ten thousand years, and soon I warn you I shall be
coming. When I am altogether stripped and my disguises thrown away.
Very soon now, old Sun, I shall launch myself at you, and I shall reach
you and I shall put my foot on your spotted face and tug you about by
your fiery locks. One step I shall take to the moon, and then I shall
leap at you. I’ve talked to you before, old Sun, I’ve talked to you a
million times, and now I am beginning to remember. Yes—long ago, long
ago, before I had stripped off a few thousand generations, dust now and
forgotten, I was a hairy savage and I pointed my hand at you
and—clearly I remember it!—I saw you in a net. Have you forgotten that,
old Sun? . . .
‘Old Sun, I gather myself together out of the pools of the individual
that have held me dispersed so long. I gather my billion thoughts into
science and my million wills into a common purpose. Well may you slink
down behind the mountains from me, well may you cower....’
Section 10
Karenin desired that he might dream alone for a little while before he
returned to the cell in which he was to sleep. He was given relief for
a pain that began to trouble him and wrapped warmly about with furs,
for a great coldness was creeping over all things, and so they left
him, and he sat for a long time watching the afterglow give place to
the darkness of night.
It seemed to those who had to watch over him unobtrusively lest he
should be in want of any attention, that he mused very deeply.
The white and purple peaks against the golden sky sank down into cold,
blue remoteness, glowed out again and faded again, and the burning
cressets of the Indian stars, that even the moonrise cannot altogether
quench, began their vigil. The moon rose behind the towering screen of
dark precipices to the east, and long before it emerged above these,
its slanting beams had filled the deep gorges below with luminous mist
and turned the towers and pinnacles of Lio Porgyul to a magic
dreamcastle of radiance and wonder....
Came a great uprush of ghostly light above the black rim of rocks, and
then like a bubble that is blown and detaches itself the moon floated
off clear into the unfathomable dark sky....
And then Karenin stood up. He walked a few paces along the terrace and
remained for a time gazing up at that great silver disc, that silvery
shield that must needs be man’s first conquest in outer space....
Presently he turned about and stood with his hands folded behind him,
looking at the northward stars....
At length he went to his own cell. He lay down there and slept
peacefully till the morning. And early in the morning they came to him
and the anæsthetic was given him and the operation performed.
It was altogether successful, but Karenin was weak and he had to lie
very still; and about seven days later a blood clot detached itself
from the healing scar and travelled to his heart, and he died in an
instant in the night.