“Consider the posture of men’s affairs now, consider where they stand

to-day, because they have not yet begun to look deeply and frankly into

realities; because, as they put it, they take life as they find it,

because _they are themselves_, heedless of history, and do not realize

that in truth they are but parts in one great adventure in space and

time. For four years now the world has been marching deeper and deeper

into tragedy.... Our life that seemed so safe grows insecure and more

and more insecure.... Six million soldiers, six million young men, have

been killed on the battlefields alone; three times as many have been

crippled and mutilated; as many again who were not soldiers have been

destroyed. That has been only the beginning of the disaster that has

come upon our race. All human relationships have been strained; roads,

ships, harvests destroyed; and behind the red swift tragedy of this

warfare comes the gaunt and desolating face of universal famine now, and

behind famine that inevitable follower of famine, pestilence. You

gentlemen who have played so useful a part in supplying munitions of

war, who have every reason in days well spent and energies well used to

see a transitory brightness upon these sombre things, you may tell me

that I lack faith when I say that I can see nothing to redeem the waste

and destruction of the last four years and the still greater waste and

spiritless disorder and poverty and disease ahead of us. You will tell

me that the world has learnt a lesson it could learn in no other way,

that we shall set up a World League of Nations now and put an end to

war. But on what will you set up your World League of Nations? What

foundations have you made in the last four years but ruins? Is there any

common idea, any common understanding yet in the minds of men? They are

still taking the world as they find it, they are being their unmitigated

selves more than ever, and below the few who scramble for profits now is

a more and more wolfish multitude scrambling for bread. There are no

common ideas in men’s minds upon which we can build. How can men be

united except by common ideas? The schools have failed the world. What

common thought is there in the world? A loud bawling of base newspapers,

a posturing of politicians. You can see chaos coming again over all the

east of Europe now, and bit by bit western Europe crumbles and drops

into the confusion. Art, science, reasoned thought, creative effort,

such things have ceased altogether in Russia; they may have ceased there

perhaps for centuries; they die now in Germany; the universities of the

west are bloodless and drained of their youth. That war that seemed at

first so like the dawn of a greater age has ceased to matter in the face

of this greater disaster. The French and British and Americans are

beating back the Germans from Paris. Can they beat them back to any

distance? Will not this present counterthrust diminish and fail as the

others have done? Which side may first drop exhausted now, will hardly

change the supreme fact. The supreme fact is exhaustion—exhaustion,

mental as well as material, failure to grasp and comprehend, cessation

even of attempts to grasp and comprehend, slackening of every sort of

effort....”

“What’s the _good_ of such despair?” said Mr. Dad.

“I do not despair. No. But what is the good of lying about hope and

success in the midst of failure and gathering disaster? What is the good

of saying that mankind wins—automatically—against the spirit of evil,

when mankind is visibly losing point after point, is visibly losing

heart? What is the good of pretending that there is order and

benevolence or some sort of splendid and incomprehensible process in

this festering waste, this windy desolation of tremendous things? There

is no reason anywhere, there is no creation anywhere, except the undying

fire, the spirit of God in the hearts of men ... which may fail ...

which may fail ... which seems to me to fail.”

§ 3

He paused. Dr. Barrack cleared his throat.

“I don’t want to seem obdurate,” said Dr. Barrack. “I want to respect

deep feeling. One must respect deep feeling.... But for the life of me I

can’t put much meaning into this phrase, _the spirit of God in the

hearts of men_. It’s rather against my habits to worry a patient, but

this is so interesting—this is an exceptional occasion. I would like to

ask you, Mr. Huss—frankly—is there anything very much more to it, than a

phrase?”

There was no answer.

“Words,” said Mr. Dad; “joost words. If Mr. Huss had ever spent three

months of war time running a big engineering factory—”

“My mind is a sceptical mind,” Dr. Barrack went on, after staring a

moment to see if Mr. Dad meant to finish his sentence. “I want things I

can feel and handle. I am an Agnostic by nature and habit and

profession. A Doubting Thomas, born and bred. Well, I take it that about

the universe Mr. Huss is very much of an Agnostic too. More so. He

doubts more than I do. He doubts whether there is any trace of plan or

purpose in it. What I call a Process, he calls a windy desolation. He

sees Chaos still waiting for a creator. But then he sets up against that

this undying fire of his, this spirit of God, which is lit in him and

only waiting to be lighted in us, a sort of insurgent apprentice

creator. Well—”

The doctor frowned and meditated on his words.

“I want more of the practical outcome of this fire. I admit a certain

poetry in the idea, but I am a plain and practical man. Give me

something to know this fire by and to recognize it again when I see it.

I won’t ask _why_ ‘undying.’ I won’t quibble about that. But what does

this undying fire mean in actual things and our daily life? In some way

it is mixed up with teaching history in schools.” A faint note of

derision made him glance at the face to his right. “That doesn’t strike

me as being so queer as it seems to strike Mr. Farr. It interests me.

There is a cause for it. But I think there are several links Mr. Huss

hasn’t shown and several vital points he still has to explain. This

undying fire is something that is burning in Mr. Huss, and I gather from

his pretty broad hints it ought, he thinks, to be burning in me—and you,

gentlemen. It is something that makes us forget our little personal

differences, makes us forget ourselves, and brings us all into line

against—what. That’s my first point;—against what? I don’t see the force

and value of this line-up. _I_ think we struggle against one another by

nature and necessity; that we polish one another in the struggle and

sharpen our edges. I think that out of this struggle for existence comes

better things and better. They may not be better things by our standards

now, but by the standards of the Process, they are. Sometimes the mills

of the Process may seem overpoweringly grim and high and pitiless; that

is a question of scale. But Mr. Huss does not believe in the struggle.

He wants to take men’s minds and teach them so that they will not

struggle against each other but live and work all together. _For_ what?

That is my second point;—_for what_? There is a rationality in my idea

of an everlasting struggle making incessantly for betterment, such an

idea does at any rate give a direction and take us somewhere; but there

is no rationality in declaring we are still fighting and fighting more

than ever, while in effect we are arranging to stop that struggle which

carries life on—if we can—if we can. That is the paradox of Mr. Huss.

When there is neither competition at home nor war abroad, when the cat

and the bird have come to a satisfactory understanding, when the spirit

of his human God rules even in the jungle and the sea, then where shall

we be heading? Time will be still unfolding. But man will have halted.

If he has ceased to compete individually he will have halted. Mr. Huss

looks at me as if he thought I wronged him in saying that. Well, then he

must answer my questions; what will the Human God be leading us

_against_, and what shall we be living _for_?”

§ 4

“Let me tell you first what the spirit of God struggles against,” said

Mr. Huss.

“I will not dispute that this Process of yours has made good things; all

the good things in man it has made as well as all the evil. It has made

them indifferently. In us—in some of us—it has made the will to seize

upon that chance-born good and separate it from the chance-born evil.

The spirit of God rises out of your process as if he were a part of your

process.... Except for him, the good and evil are inextricably mixed;

good things flower into evil things and evil things wholly or partially

redeem themselves by good consequences. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ have meaning

only for us. The Process is indifferent; it makes, it destroys, it

favours, it torments. On its own account it preserves nothing and

continues nothing. It is just careless. But for us it has made

opportunity. Life is opportunity. Unless we do now ourselves seize hold

upon life and the Process while we are in it, the Process, becoming

uncontrollable again, will presently sweep us altogether away. In the

back of your mind, doctor, is the belief in a happy ending just as much

as in the mind of Sir Eliphaz. I see deeper because I am not blinded by

health. You think that beyond man comes some sort of splendid super-man.

A healthy delusion! There is nothing beyond man unless men will that

something shall be. We shall be wiped out as carelessly as we have been

made, and something else will come, as disconnected and aimless,

something neither necessarily better nor necessarily worse but something

different, to be wiped out in its turn. Unless the spirit of God that

moves in us can rouse us to seize this universe for Him and ourselves,

that is the nature of your Process. Your Process is just Chaos; man is

the opportunity, the passing opportunity for order in the waste.

“People write and talk as if this great war which is now wrecking the

world, was a dramatic and consecutive thing. They talk of it as a purge,

as a great lesson, as a phase in history that marks the end of wars and

divisions. So it might be; but is it so and will it be so? I asked you a

little time ago to look straightly at the realities of animal life, of

life in general as we know it. I think I did a little persuade you to my

own sense of shallowness of our assumption that there is any natural

happiness. The poor beasts and creatures have to suffer. I ask you now

to look as straightly at the things that men have done and endured in

this war. It is plain that they have shown extraordinary fertility and

ingenuity in the inventions they have used and an amazing capacity for

sacrifice and courage; but it is, I argue, equally plain that the pains

and agonies they have undergone have taught the race little or nothing,

and that their devices have been mainly for their own destruction. The

only lesson and the only betterment that can come out of this war will

come if men, inspired by the Divine courage, say ‘This and all such

things must end.’... But I do not perceive them saying that. On the

other hand I do perceive a great amount of human energy and ability that

has been devoted and is still being devoted to things that lead straight

to futility and extinction.

“The most desolating thing about this war is neither the stupidity nor

the cruelty of it, but the streak of perversion that has run through it.

Against the meagreness of the intelligence that made the war, against

the absolute inability of the good forces in life to arrest it and end

it, I ask you to balance the intelligence and devotion that has gone to

such an enterprise as the offensive use of poison gas. Consider the

ingenuity and the elaboration of that; the different sorts of shell

used, the beautifully finished devices to delay the release of the

poison so as to catch men unawares after their gas masks are removed.

One method much in favour with the Germans now involves the use of two

sorts of gas. They have a gas now not very deadly but so subtle that it

penetrates the gas masks and produces nausea and retching. The man is

overcome by the dread of being sick so that he will clog his mask and

suffocate, and he snatches off his protection in an ungovernable

physical panic. Then the second gas, of the coarser, more deadly type,

comes into play. That he breathes in fully. His breath catches; he

realizes what he has done but it is too late; death has him by the

throat; he passes through horrible discomfort and torment to the end.

You cough, you stagger, you writhe upon the ground and are deadly

sick.... You die heaving and panting, with staring eyes.... So it is men

are being killed now; it is but one of a multitude of methods,

disgusting, undignified, and monstrous, but intelligent, technically

admirable.... You cannot deny, Doctor Barrack, that this ingenious

mixture is one of the last fruits of your Process. To that your Process

has at last brought men from the hoeing and herding of Neolithic days.

“Now tell me how is the onward progress of mankind to anything,

anywhere, secured by this fine flower of the Process? Intellectual

energy, industrial energy, are used up without stint to make this horror

possible; multitudes of brave young men are spoilt or killed. Is there

any selection in it? Along such lines can you imagine men or life or the

universe getting anywhere at all?

“Why do they do such things?

“They do not do it out of a complete and organized impulse to evil. If

you took the series of researches and inventions that led at last to

this use of poison gas, you would find they were the work of a multitude

of mainly amiable, fairly virtuous, and kindly-meaning men. Each one was

_doing his bit_, as Mr. Dad would say; each one, to use your phrase,

doctor, was _being himself_ and utilizing the gift that was in him in

accordance with the drift of the world about him; each one, Sir Eliphaz,

was modestly _taking the world as he found it_. They were living in an

uninformed world with no common understanding and no collective plan, a

world ignorant of its true history and with no conception of its future.

Into these horrors they drifted for the want of a world education. Out

of these horrors no lesson will be learnt, no will can arise, for the

same reason. Every man lives ignorantly in his own circumstances, from

hand to mouth, from day to day, swayed first of all by this catchword

and then by that.

“Let me take another instance of the way in which human ability and

energy if they are left to themselves, without co-ordination, without a

common basis of purpose, without a God, will run into cul-de-sacs of

mere horribleness; let me remind you a little of what the submarine is

and what it signifies. In this country we think of the submarine as an

instrument of murder; but we think of it as something ingeniously

contrived and at any rate not tormenting and destroying the hands that

guide it. I will not recall to you the stories that fill our newspapers

of men drowning in the night, of crowded boatloads of sailors and

passengers shelled and sunken, of men forced to clamber out of the sea

upon the destroying U-boat and robbed of their lifebelts in order that

when it submerged they should be more surely drowned. I want you to

think of the submarine in itself. There is a kind of crazy belief that

killing, however cruel, has a kind of justification in the survival of

the killer; we make that our excuse for instance for the destruction of

the native Tasmanians who were shot whenever they were seen, and killed

by poisoned meat left in their paths. But the marvel of these submarines

is that they also torture and kill their own crews. They are miracles of

short-sighted ingenuity for the common unprofitable reasonless

destruction of Germans and their enemies. They are almost quintessential

examples of the elaborate futility and horror into which partial ideas

about life, combative and competitive ideas of life, thrust mankind.

“Take some poor German boy with an ordinary sort of intelligence, an

ordinary human disposition to kindliness, and some gallantry, who

becomes finally a sailor in one of these craft. Consider his case and

what we do to him. You will find in him a sample of what we are doing

for mankind. As a child he is ingenuous, teachable, plastic. He is also

egotistical, greedy, and suspicious. He is easily led and easily

frightened. He likes making things if he knows how to make them; he is

capable of affection and capable of resentment. He is a sheet of white

paper upon which anything may be written. His parents teach him, his

companions, his school. Do they teach him anything of the great history

of mankind? Do they teach him of his blood brotherhood with all men? Do

they tell him anything of discovery, of exploration, of human effort and

achievement? No. They teach him that he belongs to a blonde and

wonderful race, the only race that matters on this planet. (No such

distinct race ever existed; it is a lie for the damning of men.) And

these teachers incite him to suspicion and hatred and contempt of all

other races. They fill his mind with fears and hostilities. Everything

German they tell him is good and splendid. Everything not German is

dangerous and wicked. They take that poor actor of an emperor at Potsdam

and glorify him until he shines upon this lad’s mind like a star....

“The boy grows up a mental cripple; his capacity for devotion and

self-sacrifice is run into a mould of fanatical loyalty for the Kaiser

and hatred for foreign things. Comes this war, and the youngster is only

too eager to give himself where he is most needed. He is told that the

submarine war is the sure way of striking the enemies of his country a

conclusive blow. To be in a submarine is to be at the spear point. He

dare scarcely hope that he will be accepted for this vital service; to

which princes might aspire. But he is fortunate; he is. He trains for a

submarine....

“I do not know how far you gentlemen remember your youth. A schoolmaster

perhaps remembers more of his early adolescence than other men because

he is being continually reminded of it. But it is a time of very fine

emotions, boundless ambitions, a newly awakened and eager sense of

beauty. This youngster sees himself as a hero, fighting for his

half-divine Kaiser, for dear Germany, against the cold and evil

barbarians who resist and would destroy her. He passes through his drill

and training. He goes down into a submarine for the first time, clambers

down the narrow hatchway. It is a little cold, but wonderful; a

marvellous machine. How can such a nest of inventions, ingenuities,

beautiful metal-work, wonderful craftsmanship, be anything but right?

His mind is full of dreams of proud enemy battleships smitten and

heeling over into the waters, while he watches his handiwork with a

stern pride, a restrained exultation, a sense of Germany vindicated....

“That is how his mind has been made for him. That is the sort of mind

that has been made and is being made in boys all over the world....

Because there is no common plan in the world, because each person in the

making of this boy, just as each person in the making of the submarine,

had ‘been himself’ and ‘done his bit,’ followed his own impulses and

interests without regard to the whole, regardless of any plan or purpose

in human affairs, ignorant of the spirit of God who would unify us and

lead us to a common use for all our gifts and energies.

“Let me go on with the story of this youngster....

“Comes a day when he realizes the reality of the work he is doing for

his kind. He stands by one of the guns of the submarine in an attack

upon some wretched ocean tramp. He realizes that the war he wages is no

heroic attack on pride or predominance, but a mere murdering of traffic.

He sees the little ship shelled, the wretched men killed and wounded, no

tyrants of the seas but sailor-men like himself; he sees their boats

smashed to pieces. Mostly such sinkings are done at dawn or sundown,

under a level light which displays a world of black lines and black

silhouettes asway with the slow heaving and falling of coldly shining

water. These little black things, he realizes incredulously, that

struggle and disappear amidst the wreckage are the heads of men,

brothers to himself....

“For hundreds of thousands of men who have come into this war expecting

bright and romantic and tremendous experiences their first killing must

have been a hideous disillusionment. For none so much as for the men of

the submarines. All that sense of being right and fine that carries men

into battle, that carries most of us through the world, must have

vanished completely at this first vision of reality. Our man must have

asked himself, ‘_What am I doing?_’...

“In the night he must have lain awake and stared at that question in

horrible doubt....

“We scold too much at the German submarine crews in this country. Most

of us in their places would be impelled to go on as they go on. The work

they do has been reached step by step, logically, inevitably, because

our world has been content to drift along on false premises and

haphazard assumptions about nationality and race and the order of

things. These things have happened because the technical education of

men has been better than their historical and social education. Once men

have lost touch with, or failed to apprehend that idea of a single human

community, that idea which is the substance of all true history and the

essential teaching of God, it is towards such organized abominations as

these that they drift—necessarily. People in this country who are just

as incoherent in their minds, just as likely to drift into some kindred

cul-de-sac of conduct, would have these U-boat men tortured—to show the

superiority of their own moral standards.

“But indeed these men _are_ tortured....

“Bear yet a little longer with this boy of mine in the U-boat. I’ve

tried to suggest him to you with his conscience scared—at a moment when

his submarine had made a kill. But those moments are rare. For most of

its time the U-boat is under water and a hunted thing. The surface

swarms with hostile craft; sea-planes and observation balloons are

seeking it. Every time a U-boat comes even near to the surface it may be

spotted by a sea-plane and destruction may fall upon it. Even when it is

submerged below the limits of visibility in the turbid North Sea waters,

the noise of its engines will betray it to a listening apparatus and a

happy guess with a depth charge may end its career. I want you to think

of the daily life of this youngster under these conditions. I want you

to see exactly where wrong ideas, not his, but wrong ideas ruling in the

world about him, are driving him.

“The method of detection by listening apparatus improves steadily, and

nowadays our destroyers will follow up a U-boat sometimes for sixty or

seventy hours, following her sounds as a hound follows the scent of its

quarry. At last, if the U-boat cannot shake off her pursuers she must

come to the surface and fight or surrender. That is the strangest game

of Blind-Man that ever human beings played. The U-boat doubles and

turns, listening also for the sounds of the pursuers at the surface. Are

they coming nearer? Are they getting fainter? Unless a helpful mud-bank

is available for it to lie up in silence for a time, the U-boat must

keep moving and using up electrical force, so that ultimately it must

come to the surface to recharge its batteries. As far as possible the

crew of the U-boat are kept in ignorance of the chase in progress. They

get hints from the anxiety or irritation of the commander, or from the

haste and variety of his orders. Something is going on—they do not know

quite what—something that may end disagreeably. If the pursuer tries a

depth charge, then they know for certain from the concussion that the

hand of death is feeling for them in the darkness....

“Always the dread of a depth charge must haunt the imagination of the

U-boat sailor. Without notice, at any hour, may come thud and concussion

to warn him that the destroying powers are on his track. The fragile

ship jumps and quivers from end to end; the men are thrown about. That

happens to our youngster. He curses the damned English. And if you think

it over, what else can you expect him to curse? A little nearer and the

rivets will start and actual leakage begin, letting in a pressure of

several atmospheres. Yet a little nearer and the water will come

pressing in through cracks and breaches at a score of points, the air

will be compressed in his lungs, the long death struggle of the U-boat

will begin, and after some hours of hopeless suffering he will suffocate

and drown like a rat in a flooded tunnel....

“Think of the life of endless apprehension in that confined space below

the waters. The air is almost always stuffy and sometimes it is

poisonous. All sorts of evil chances may occur in this crowded tinful of

machinery to release oppressive gases and evil odours. A whiff of

chlorine for instance may warn the crew of flooded accumulators. At the

first sting of chlorine the U-boat must come up at any risk.... And

nothing can be kept dry. The surfaces of the apparatus and the furniture

sweat continually; except where the machinery radiates a certain heat a

clammy chill pervades the whole contrivance. Have you ever seen the

thick blubber of a whale? Only by means of that enormous layer of

non-conductor can a whale keep its body warm in spite of the waters

about it. A U-boat cannot afford any layer of blubber. It is at the

temperature of the dark under-waters. And this life of cold, fear,

suffocation, headache and nausea is not sustained by hot and nourishing

food. There is no blazing galley fire for the cook of the U-boat.

“The U-boat rolls very easily; she is, of course, no heavier nor lighter

than the water in which she floats, and if by chance she touches bottom

in shallow water, she bounds about like a rubber ball on a pavement.

Inside the sailors are thrown about and dashed against the machinery.

“That is the quality of everyday life in a U-boat retained below the

surface. Now think what an emergence involves. Up she comes until the

periscope can scrutinize the sky and the nearer sea. Nothing in sight?

Thank God! She rises out of the water and some of the sailors get a

breath of fresh air. Not all, for there is no room nor time for all of

them to come out. But the fortunate ones who get to the hatches may even

have the luck of sunshine. To come to the surface on a calm open sea

away from any traffic at all is the secret hope of every U-boat sailor.

But suppose now there is something in sight. Then the U-boat must come

up with infinite discretion and examine the quarry. It looks an innocent

craft, a liner, a trawler, a cargo-boat. But is that innocence certain?

How does the U-boat man know that she hasn’t a gun? What new contrivance

of the hunter may not hide behind that harmless-looking mask? Until they

have put a ship down, the U-boat sailors never know what ugly surprise

she may not have in store for them. When they approach a vessel they

must needs be ignorant of what counter-attack creeps upon them from her

unseen other side. As a consequence these men are in terror of every

ship they hail.

“Is it any wonder then if their behaviour is hasty and hysterical, if

they curse and insult the wretched people they are proposing to drown,

if they fire upon them unexpectedly and do strange and abominable

things? The U-boat man is no fine captain on his quarter deck. He is a

man who lives a life of intense physical hardship and extreme fear, who

faces overwhelming risks, in order to commit as inglorious a crime as

any man can commit. He is a man already in hell.

“The Germans do what they can to keep up the spirit of these crews. An

English captain who spent a fortnight upon one as a prisoner and who was

recently released by way of Switzerland, says that when they had sunk a

merchant ship ‘they played victory music on the gramophone.’ Imagine

that bleak festival!

“The inevitable end of the U-boat sailor, unless he is lucky enough to

get captured, is death, and a very horrible and slow death indeed.

Sooner or later it is bound to come. Some never return from their first

voyage. There is a brief spree ashore if they do; then out they go

again. Perhaps they return a second time, perhaps not. Some may even

have made a score of voyages, but sooner or later they are caught. The

average life of a U-boat is less than five voyages—out and home. Of the

crews of the original U-boats which began the U-boat campaign very few

men survive to-day. When our young hopeful left his home in Germany to

join the U-boat service, he left it for a certain death. He learns that

slowly from the conversation of his mates. Men are so scarce now for

this vile work that once Germany has got a man she will use him to the

end.

“And that end—?

“I was given some particulars of the fate of one U-boat that were told

by two prisoners who died at Harwich the other day. This particular boat

was got by a mine which tore a hole in her aft. She was too disabled to

come to the surface, and she began to sink tail down. Now the immediate

effect of a hole in a U-boat is of course to bring the air pressure

within her to the same level as the pressure of the water outside. For

every ten yards of depth this means an addition of fourteen pounds to

the square inch. The ears and blood vessels are suddenly subjected to

this enormous pressure. There is at once a violent pain in the ears and

a weight on the chest. Cotton wool has to be stuffed into ears and

nostrils to save the ear drum. Then the boat is no longer on an even

keel. The men stand and slip about on the sides of things. They clamber

up the floor out of the way of the slowly rising water. For the water

does not come rushing in to drown them speedily. It cannot do that

because there is no escape for the air; the water creeps in steadily and

stealthily as the U-boat goes deeper and deeper. It is a process of slow

and crushing submergence that has the cruel deliberation of some story

by Edgar Allan Poe; it may last for hours. A time comes when the lights

go out and the rising waters stop the apparatus for keeping up the

supply of oxygen and absorbing the carbonic acid. Suffocation begins.

Think of what must happen in the minds of the doomed men crowded

together amidst the machinery. In the particular case these prisoners

described, several of the men drowned themselves deliberately in the

rising waters inside the boat. And in another case where the boat was

recovered full of dead men, they had all put their heads under the water

inside the boat. People say the U-boat men carry poison against such

mischances as this. They don’t. It would be too tempting....

“When it becomes evident that the U-boat can never recover the surface,

there is usually an attempt to escape by the hatches. The hatches can be

opened when at last the pressure inside is equal to that of the water

without. The water of course rushes in and sinks the U-boat to the

bottom like a stone, but the men _who are nearest to the hatch_ have a

chance of escaping with the rush of air to the surface. There is of

course a violent struggle to get nearest to the hatch. This is what

happened in the case of the particular U-boat from which these prisoners

came. The forward hatch was opened. Our patrol boat cruising above saw

the waters thrown up by the air-burst and then the heads of the men

struggling on the surface. Most of these men were screaming with pain.

All of them went under before they could be picked up except two. And

these two died in a day or so. They died because coming suddenly up to

the ordinary atmosphere out of the compressed air of the sinking

submarine had burst the tissues of their lungs. They were choked with

blood.

“Think of those poor creatures dying in the hospital. They were worn out

by fits of coughing and hæmorrhage, but there must have been moments of

exhausted quiet before the end, when our youngster lay and stared at the

bleak walls of the ward and thought; when he asked himself, ‘What have I

been doing? What have I done? What has this world done for me? It has

made me a murderer. It has tortured me and wasted me.... And I meant

well by it....’

“Whether he thought at all about the making of the submarine, the

numberless ingenuities and devices, the patience and devotion, that had

gone to make that grim trap in which he had been caught at last, I

cannot guess.... Probably he took it as a matter of course....

“So it was that our German youngster who dreamt dreams, who had

ambitions, who wished to serve and do brave and honourable things,

died.... So five thousand men at least have died, English some of them

as well as German, in lost submarines beneath the waters of the narrow

seas....

“There is a story and a true story. It is more striking than the fate of

most men and women in the world, but is it, in its essence, different?

Is not the whole life of our time in the vein of this story? Is not this

story of youth and hope and possibility misled, marched step by step

into a world misconceived, thrust into evil, and driven down to ugliness

and death, only a more vivid rendering of what is now the common fate of

great multitudes? Is there any one of us who is not in some fashion

aboard a submarine, doing evil and driving towards an evil end?...

“What are the businesses in which men engage? How many of them have any

likeness to freighted ships that serve the good of mankind? Think of the

lying and cornering, the crowding and outbidding, the professional

etiquette that robs the common man, the unfair advantage smugly

accepted! What man among us can say, ‘All that I do is service’? Our

holding and our effort: is it much better than the long interludes below

the surface, and when we come up to struggle for our own hands,

torpedoing competitors, wrecking antagonists, how is it with us? The

submarine sailors stare in the twilight at drowning men. Every day I

stare at a world drowning in poverty and ignorance, a world awash in the

seas of hunger, disease, and misery. We have been given leisure,

freedom, and intelligence; what have we done to prevent these things?

“I tell you all the world is a submarine, and every one of us is

something of a U-boat man. These fools who squeal in the papers for

cruelties to the U-boat men do not realize their own part in the

world.... We might live in sunshine and freedom and security, and we

live cramped and cold, in bitter danger, because we are at war with our

fellow men....

“But there, doctor, you have the answer to the first part of your

question. You asked what the Spirit of God in Man was against. It is

against these mental confusions, these ignorances, that thrust life into

a frightful cul-de-sac, that the God in our Hearts urges us to fight....

He is crying out in our hearts to save us from these blind alleys of

selfishness, darkness, cruelty, and pain in which our race must die; he

is crying for the high road which is salvation, he is commanding the

organized unity of mankind.”

§ 5

The lassitude that had been earlier apparent in the manner of Mr. Huss

had vanished. He was talking now with more energy; his eyes were bright

and there was a flush in his cheeks. His voice was low, but his speech

was clear and no longer broken by painful pauses.

“But your question had a double edge,” he continued; “you asked me not

only what it is that the Spirit of God in us fights against, but what it

is he fights for. Whither does the high road lead? I have told you what

I think the life of man is, a felted and corrupting mass of tragic

experiences; let me tell you now a little, if this pain at my side will

still permit it, what life upon this earth, under the leadership of the

Spirit of God our Captain, might be.

“I will take it that men are still as they are, that all this world is

individually the same; I will suppose no miraculous change in human

nature; but I will suppose that events in the past have run along

different channels, so that there has been much more thinking, much more

exchange of thought, far better teaching. I want simply this world

better taught, so that wherever the flame of God can be lit it has been

lit. Everyone I will suppose _educated_. By _educated_, to be explicit,

I mean a knowledge and understanding of history. Yes, Mr. Farr—salvation

by history. Everyone about the earth I will suppose has been taught not

merely to read and write and calculate, but has been given all that can

be told simply and plainly of the past history of the earth, of our

place in space and time, and the true history of mankind. I will not

suppose that there is any greater knowledge of things than men actually

possess to-day, but instead of its being confusedly stored in many minds

and many books and many languages, it has all been sorted out and set

out plainly so that it can be easily used. It has been kept back from no

one, mistold to no one. Moreover I will suppose that instead of a myriad

of tongues and dialects, all men can read the same books and talk

together in the same speech.

“These you may say are difficult suppositions, but they are not

impossible suppositions. Quite a few resolute men could set mankind

definitely towards such a state of affairs so that they would reach it

in a dozen generations or so. But think what a difference there would be

from our conditions in such a world. In a world so lit and opened by

education, most of these violent dissensions that trouble mankind would

be impossible. Instead of men and communities behaving like fever

patients in delirium, striking at their nurses, oversetting their food

and medicine and inflicting injuries on themselves and one another, they

would be alive to the facts of their common origin, their common

offspring—for at last in our descendants all our lives must meet

again—and their common destiny. In that more open and fresher air, the

fire that is God will burn more brightly, for most of us who fail to

know God fail through want of knowledge. Many more men and women will be

happily devoted to the common work of mankind, and the evil that is in

all of us will be more plainly seen and more easily restrained. I doubt

if any man is altogether evil, but in this dark world the good in men is

handicapped and sacrifice is mocked. Bad example finishes what weak and

aimless teaching has begun. This is a world where folly and hate can

bawl sanity out of hearing. Only the determination of schoolmasters and

teachers can hope to change that. How can you hope to change it by

anything but teaching? Cannot you realize what teaching means?...

“When I ask you to suppose a world instructed and educated in the place

of this old traditional world of unguided passion and greed and meanness

and mean bestiality, a world taught by men instead of a world neglected

by hirelings, I do not ask you to imagine any miraculous change in human

nature. I ask you only to suppose that each mind has the utmost

enlightenment of which it is capable instead of its being darkened and

overcast. Everyone is to have the best chance of being his best self.

Everyone is to be living in the light of the acutest self-examination

and the clearest mutual criticism. Naturally we shall be living under

infinitely saner and more helpful institutions. Such a state of things

will not indeed mitigate natural vanity or natural self-love; it will

not rob the greedy man of his greed, the fool of his folly, the

eccentric of his abnormality, nor the lustful of his lust. But it will

rob them of excuses and hiding places; it will light them within and

cast a light round about them; it will turn their evil to the likeness

of a disease of which they themselves in their clear moments will be

ready to be cured and which they will hesitate to transmit. That is the

world which such of us schoolmasters and teachers among us as have the

undying fire of God already lit in our hearts, do now labour, generation

by generation, against defeat and sometimes against hope, to bring

about; that is the present work God has for us. And as we do bring it

about then the prospect opens out before mankind to a splendour....

“In this present world men live to be themselves; having their lives

they lose them; in the world that we are seeking to make they will give

themselves to the God of Mankind, and so they will live indeed. They

will as a matter of course change their institutions and their methods

so that all men may be used to the best effect, in the common work of

mankind. They will take this little planet which has been torn into

shreds of possession, and make it again one garden....

“The most perplexing thing about men at the present time is their lack

of understanding of the vast possibilities of power and happiness that

science is offering them—”

“Then why not teach _science_?” cried Mr. Farr.

“Provided only that they will unite their efforts. They solve the

problems of material science in vain until they have solved their social

and political problems. When those are solved, the mechanical and

technical difficulties are trivial. It is no occult secret; it is a

plain and demonstrable thing to-day that the world could give ample food

and ample leisure to every human being, if only by a world-wide teaching

the spirit of unity could be made to prevail over the impulse to

dissension. And not only that, but it would then be possible to raise

the common health and increase the common fund of happiness

immeasurably. Look plainly at the world as it is. Most human beings when

they are not dying untimely, are suffering more or less from avoidable

disorders, they are ill or they are convalescent, or they are suffering

from or crippled by some preventable taint in the blood, or they are

stunted or weakened by a needlessly bad food supply, or spiritless and

feeble through bad housing, bad clothing, dull occupations, or

insecurity and anxiety. Few enjoy for very long stretches at a time that

elementary happiness which is the natural accompaniment of sound health.

This almost universal lowness of tone, which does not distress us only

because most of us are unable to imagine anything better, means an

enormous waste of human possibility; less work, less hopefulness.

Isolated efforts will never raise men out of this swamp of malaise. At

Woldingstanton we have had the best hygienic arrangements we could find,

we have taken the utmost precautions, and yet there has scarcely been a

year when our work has not been crippled and delayed by some epidemic,

influenza one year, measles another, and so on. We take our precautions;

but the townspeople, especially in the poorer quarters, don’t and can’t.

I think myself the wastage of these perennial petty pestilences is far

greater than that caused by the big epidemics that sometimes sweep the

world. But all such things, great or petty, given a sufficient world

unanimity, could be absolutely banished from human life. Given a

sufficient unanimity and intelligent direction, men could hunt down all

these infectious diseases, one by one, to the regions in which they are

endemic, and from which they start out again and again to distress the

world, and could stamp them out for ever. It is not want of knowledge

prevents this now but want of a properly designed education, which would

give people throughout the world the understanding, the confidence, and

the will needed for so collective an enterprise.

“The sufferings and mutual cruelties of animals are no doubt a part of

the hard aimlessness of nature, but men are in a position to substitute

aim for that aimlessness, they have already all the knowledge and all

the resources needed to escape from these cul-de-sacs of wrong-doing and

suffering and ugly futility into which they jostle one another. But they

do not do it because they have not been sufficiently educated and are

not being sufficiently educated to sane understanding and effort. The

bulk of their collective strength is dissipated in miserable squabbles

and suspicions, in war and the preparation for war, in lawsuits and

bickering, in making little sterile private hoards of wealth and power,

in chaffering, in stupid persecutions and oppositions and vanities. It

is not only that they live in a state of general infection and ill

health and bad temper, ill nourished, ill housed and morally horrible,

when the light is ready to shine upon them and health and splendour is

within their grasp, but that all that they could so attain would be but

the prelude to still greater attainments.

“Apart from and above the sweeping away of the poverty, filthiness and

misery of life that would follow on an intelligent use of such powers

and such qualities as men possess now, there would be a tremendous

increase in happiness due to the contentment of belonging to one common

comprehensible whole, of knowing that one played a part and a worthy

part in an immortal and universal task. The merest handful of people can

look with content upon the tenor of their lives to-day. A few teachers

are perhaps aware that they serve God rightly, a few scientific

investigators, a few doctors and bridge-builders and makers of

machinery, a few food-growers and sailors and the like. They can believe

that they do something that is necessary, or build something which will

endure. But most men and women to-day are like beasts caught in a

tunnel; they follow base occupations, they trade and pander and dispute;

there is no peace in their hearts; they gratify their lusts and seek

excitements; they know they spend their lives in vain and they have no

means of escape. The world is full of querulousness and abuse, derision

and spite, mean tricks and floundering effort, vice without a gleam of

pleasure and vain display, because blind Nature spews these people into

being and there is no light to guide their steps. Yet there is work to

be done by everyone, a plain reason for that work, and happiness in the

doing of it....

“I do not know if any of us realize all that a systematic organization

of the human intelligence upon the work of research would mean for our

race. People talk of the wonders that scientific work has given us in

the past two hundred years, wonders of which for the most part we are

too disordered and foolish to avail ourselves fully. But what scientific

research has produced so far must be as yet only the smallest earnest of

what scientific research can presently give mankind. All the knowledge

that makes to-day different from the world of Queen Elizabeth has been

the work of a few score thousand men, mostly poorish men, working with

limited material and restricted time, in a world that discouraged and

misunderstood them. Many hundreds of thousands of men with gifts that

would have been of the profoundest value in scientific work, have missed

the education or the opportunity to use those gifts. But in a world

clarified by understanding, the net of research would miss few of its

born servants, there would be the swiftest, clearest communication of

results from worker to worker, the readiest honour and help for every

gift. Poor science, which goes about now amidst our crimes and

confusions like an ill-trimmed evil-smelling oil lantern in a dark

cavern in which men fight and steal, her flickering light, snatched

first by this man and then by that, as often as not a help to violence

and robbery, would become like the sunrise of a bright summer morning.

We do not realize what in a little while mankind could do. Our power

over matter, our power over life, our power over ourselves, would

increase year by year and day by day.

“Here am I, after great suffering, waiting here for an uncertain

operation that may kill me. _It need not have been so._ Here are we all,

sitting hot and uncomfortable in this ill-ventilated, ill-furnished

room, looking out upon a vile waste. _It need not have been so._ Such is

the quality of our days. I sit here wrung by pain, in the antechamber of

death, because mankind has suffered me to suffer.... All this could have

been avoided.... Not for ever will such things endure, not for ever will

the Mocker of Mankind prevail....

“And such knowledge and power and beauty as we poor watchers before the

dawn can guess at, are but the beginning of all that could arise out of

these shadows and this torment. Not for ever shall life be marooned upon

this planet, imprisoned by the cold and incredible emptiness of space.

Is it not plain to you all, from what man in spite of everything has

achieved, that he is but at the beginning of achievement? That presently

he will take his body and his life and mould them to his will, that he

will take gladness and beauty for himself as a girl will pick a flower

and twine it in her hair. You have said, Doctor Barrack, that when

industrial competition ends among men all change in the race will be at

an end. But you said that unthinkingly. For when a collective will grows

plain, there will be no blind thrusting into life and no blind battle to

keep in life, like the battle of a crowd crushed into a cul-de-sac, any

more. The qualities that serve the great ends of the race will be

cherished and increased; the sorts of men and women that have these

qualities least will be made to understand the necessary restraints of

their limitation. You said that when men ceased to compete, they would

stand still. Rather is it true that when men cease their internecine

war, then and then alone can the race sweep forward. The race will grow

in power and beauty swiftly, in every generation it will grow, and not

only the human race. All this world will man make a garden for himself,

ruling not only his kind but all the lives that live, banishing the

cruel from life, making the others merciful and tame beneath his hand.

The flies and mosquitoes, the thorns and poisons, the fungus in the

blood, and the murrain upon his beasts, he will utterly end. He will rob

the atoms of their energy and the depths of space of their secrets. He

will break his prison in space. He will step from star to star as now we

step from stone to stone across a stream. Until he stands in the light

of God’s presence and looks his Mocker and the Adversary in the

face....”

“Oh! _Ravins!_” Mr. Dad burst out, unable to contain himself.

“You may think my mind is fevered because my body is in pain; but never

was my mind clearer than it is now. It is as if I stood already half out

of this little life that has held me so long. It is not a dream I tell,

but a reality. The world is for man, the stars in their courses are for

man—if only he will follow the God who calls to him and take the gift

God offers. As I sit here and talk of these things to you here, they

become so plain to me that I cannot understand your silence and why you

do not burn—as I burn—with the fire of God’s purpose....”

He stopped short. He seemed to have come to the end of his strength. His

chin sank, and his voice when he spoke again was the voice of a weak and

weary man.

“I talk.... I talk.... And then a desolating sense of reality blows like

a destroying gust through my mind, and my little lamp of hope goes

out....

“It is as if some great adversary sat over all my world, mocking me in

every phrase I use and every act I do....”

He sighed deeply.

“Have I answered your questions, doctor?” he asked.

§ 6

“You speak of God,” said Dr. Barrack. “But this that you speak of as

God, is it really what men understand by God? It seems to me, as I said

to begin with, it is just a personification of the good will in us all.

Why bring in God? God is a word that has become associated with all

sorts of black and cruel things. It sets one thinking of priesthoods,

orthodoxies, persecutions. Why do you not call this upward and onward

power Humanity? Why do you not call it the Spirit of Men? Then it might

be possible for an Agnostic like myself to feel a sort of agreement....”

“Because I have already shown you it is not humanity, it is not the

spirit of men. Humanity, the spirit of men, made poison gas and the

submarine; the spirit of man is jealous, aggressive and partizan.

Humanity has greed and competition in grain, and the spirit of man is

fear and hatred, secrecy and conspiracy, quite as much as, much more

than, it is making or order. But this spirit in me, this fire which I

call God, was lit, I know not how, but as if it came from outside....

“I use the phrases,” said Mr. Huss, “that come ready to the mind. But I

will meet you so far as to say that I know that I am metaphorical and

inexact.... This spirit that comes into life—it is more like a person

than a thing and so I call it He. And He is not a feature, not an aspect

of things, but a selection among things.... He seizes upon and brings

out and confirms all that is generous in the natural impulses of the

mind. He condemns cruelty and all evil....

“I will not pretend to explain what I cannot explain. It may be that God

is as yet only foreshadowed in life. You may reason, Doctor Barrack,

that this fire in the heart that I call God, is as much the outcome of

your Process as all the other things in life. I cannot argue against

that. What I am telling you now is not what I believe so much as what I

feel. To me it seems that the creative desire that burns in me is a

thing different in its nature from the blind Process of matter, is a

force running contrariwise to the power of confusion.... But this I do

know, that once it is lit in a man it is like a consuming fire. Once it

is lit in a man, then his mind is alight—thenceforth. It rules his

conscience with compelling power. It summons him to live the residue of

his days working and fighting for the unity and release and triumph of

mankind. He may be mean still, and cowardly and vile still, but he will

know himself for what he is.... Some ancient phrases live marvellously.

Within my heart _I know that my Redeemer liveth_....”

He stopped abruptly.

Dr. Barrack was unprepared with a reply. But he shook his head

obstinately. These time-worn phrases were hateful to his soul. They

smacked to him of hypocrisy, of a bidding for favour with obsolete and

discredited influences. Through such leaks it is superstition comes

soaking back into the laboriously bailed-out minds of men. Yet Mr. Huss

was a difficult controversialist to grapple. “No,” said the doctor

provisionally. “_No_....”

§ 7

Fate came to the relief of Dr. Barrack.

The little conference at Sea View was pervaded by the sense of a new

personality. This was a short and angry and heated little man, with

active dark brown eyes in a tan face, a tooth-brush moustache of

iron-grey, and a protruded lower jaw. He was dressed in a bright

bluish-grey suit and bright brown boots, and he carried a bright brown

leather bag.

He appeared mouthing outside the window, beyond the range of distinct

hearing. His expression was blasphemous. He made threatening movements

with his bag.

“Good God!” cried Dr. Barrack. “Sir Alpheus!... I had no idea of the

time!”

He rushed out of the room and there was a scuffle in the passage.

“I ought to have been met,” said Sir Alpheus, entering, “I ought to have

been met. It’s ridiculous to pretend you didn’t know the time. A general

practitioner _always_ knows the time. It is his first duty. I cannot

understand the incivility of this reception. I have had to make my way

to your surgery, Dr. Barrack, without assistance; not a cab free at the

station; I have had to come down this road in the heat, carrying

everything myself, reading all the names on the gates—the most

ridiculous and banal names. The Taj, Thyme Bank, The Cedars, and

Capernaum, cheek by jowl! It’s worse than Freud.”

Dr. Barrack expressed further regrets confusedly and indistinctly.

“We have been talking, Sir Alpheus,” said Sir Eliphaz, advancing as if

to protect the doctor from his specialist, “upon some very absorbing

topics. That must be our excuse for this neglect. We have been

discussing education—and the universe. Fate, free-will, predestination

absolute.” It is not every building contractor can quote Milton.

The great surgeon regarded the patentee of Temanite.

“Fate—fiddlesticks!” said Sir Alpheus suddenly and rudely. “That’s no

excuse for not meeting me.” His bright little eyes darted round the

company and recognized Mr. Huss. “What! my patient not in bed! Not even

in bed! Go to _bed_, sir! Go to _bed_!”

He became extremely abusive to Dr. Barrack. “You treat an operation,

Sir, with a levity—!”

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

THE OPERATION

§ 1

While Sir Alpheus grumbled loudly at the unpreparedness of everything,

Mr. Huss, with the assistance of Dr. Barrack, walked upstairs and

disrobed himself.

This long discussion had taken a very powerful grip upon his mind. Much

remained uncertain in his thoughts. He had still a number of things he

wanted to say, and these proceedings preliminary to his vivisection,

seemed to him to be irrelevant and tiresome rites interrupting something

far more important.

The bed, the instruments, the preparation for anæsthesia, were to him no

more than new contributions to the argument. While he lay on the bed

with Dr. Barrack handling the funnel hood that was to go over nose and

mouth for the administration of the chloroform, he tried to point out

that the very idea of operative surgery was opposed to the scientific

fatalism of that gentleman. But Sir Alpheus interrupted him....

“Breathe deeply,” said Dr. Barrack....

“_Breathe deeply._”...

The whole vast argumentative fabric that had arisen in his mind swung

with him across an abyss of dread and mental inanity. Whether he thought

or dreamt what follows it is impossible to say; we can but record the

ideas that, like a crystalline bubble as great as all things, filled his

consciousness. He felt a characteristic doubt whether the chloroform

would do its duty, and then came that twang like the breaking of a

violin string:—_Ploot_....

And still he did not seem to be insensible! He was not insensible, and

yet things had changed. Dr. Elihu was still present, but somehow Sir

Eliphaz and Mr. Dad and Mr. Farr, whom he had left downstairs, had come

back and were sitting on the ground—on the ashes; they were all seated

gravely on a mound of ashes and beneath a sky that blazed with light.

Sir Alpheus, the nurse, the bedroom, had vanished. It seemed that they

had been the dream.

But this was the reality, an enduring reality, this sackcloth and these

reeking ash-heaps outside the city gates. This was the scene of an

unending experiment and an immortal argument. He was Job; the same Job

who had sat here for thousands of years, and this lean vulturous old man

in the vast green turban was Eliphaz the Temanite, the smaller man who

peered out of the cowl of a kind of hooded shawl, was his friend Bildad

the Shuhite; the eager, coarse face of the man in unclean linen was

Zophar the Naamathite; and this fist-faced younger man who sat with an

air of false humility insolently judging them all, was Elihu the son of

Barachel the Buzite of the kindred of Ram....

It was queer that there should have ever been the fancy that these men

were doctors or schoolmasters or munition makers, a queer veiling of

their immortal quality in the transitory garments of a period. For ages

they had sat here and disputed, and for ages they had still to sit. A

little way off waited the asses and camels and slaves of the three

emirs, and the two Ethiopian slaves of Eliphaz had been coming towards

them bearing bowls of fine grey ashes. (For Eliphaz for sanitary reasons

did not use the common ashes of the midden upon his head.) There, far

away, splashed green with palms and pierced between pylons by a

glittering arm of the river, were the low brown walls of sun-dried

brick, the flat-roofed houses, and the twisted temple towers of the

ancient city of Uz, where first this great argument had begun. East and

west and north and south stretched the wide levels of the world, dotted

with small date trees, and above them was the measureless dome of

heaven, set with suns and stars and flooded with a light.

This light had shone out since Elihu had spoken, and it was not only a

light but a voice clear and luminous, before which Job’s very soul bowed

and was still....

“_Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?_”

By a great effort Job lifted up his eyes to the zenith.

It was as if one shone there who was all, and yet who comprehended

powers and kingdoms, and it was as if a screen or shadow was before his

face. It was as if a dark figure enhaloed in shapes and colours bent

down over the whole world and regarded it curiously and malevolently,

and it was as if this dark figure was no more than a translucent veil

before an infinite and lasting radiance. Was it a veil before the light,

or did it not rather nest in the very heart of the light and spread

itself out before the face of the light and spread itself and recede and

again expand in a perpetual diastole and systole? It was as if the voice

that spoke was the voice of God, and yet ever and again it was as if the

timbre of the voice was Satan. As the voice spoke to Job, his friends

listened and watched him, and the eyes of Elihu shone like garnets and

the eyes of Eliphaz like emeralds, but the eyes of Bildad were black

like the eyes of a lizard upon a wall, and Zophar had no eyes but looked

at him only with the dark shadows beneath his knitted brows. As God

spake they all, and Job with them, became smaller and smaller and shrank

until they were the minutest of conceivable things, until the whole

scene was a little toy; they became unreal like discolourations upon a

floating falling disc of paper confetti, amidst greatnesses

unfathomable.

“_Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?_”

But in this dream that was dreamt by Mr. Huss while he was under the

anæsthetic, God did not speak by words but by light; there were no

sounds in his ears, but thoughts ran like swift rivulets of fire through

his brain and gathered into pools and made a throbbing pattern of

wavelets, curve within curve, that interlaced....

The thoughts that it seemed to him that God was speaking through his

mind, can be put into words only after a certain fashion and with great

loss, for they were thoughts about things beyond and above this world,

and our words are all made out of the names of things and feelings in

this world. Things that were contradictory had become compatible, and

things incomprehensible seemed straightforward, because he was in a

dream. It was as if the anæsthetic had released his ideas from their

anchorage to words and phrases and their gravitation towards sensible

realities. But it was still the same line of thought he pursued through

the stars and spaces, that he had pursued in the stuffy little room at

Sundering-on-Sea.

It was somewhat after this fashion that things ran through the mind of

Mr. Huss. It seemed to him at first that he was answering the challenge

of the voice that filled the world, not of his own will but

mechanically. He was saying: “They _give_ me knowledge.”

To which the answer was in the voice of Satan and in tones of mockery.

For Satan had become very close and definite to Job, as a dark face,

time-worn and yet animated, that sent out circle after circle of glowing

colour towards the bounds of space as a swimmer sends waves towards the

bank. “But what have you got in the way of a vessel to hold your

knowledge if we gave it you?”

“In the name of the God in my heart,” said Job, “I demand knowledge and

power.”

“Who are you? A pedagogue who gives ill-prepared lessons about history

in frowsty rooms, and dreams that he has been training his young

gentlemen to play leap-frog amidst the stars.”

“I am Man,” said Job.

“_Huss._”

But that queer power of slipping one’s identity and losing oneself

altogether which dreams will give, had come upon Mr. Huss. He answered

with absolute conviction: “I am Man. Down there I was Huss, but here I

am Man. I am every man who has ever looked up towards this light of God.

I am every one who has thought or worked or willed for the race. I am

all the explorers and leaders and teachers that man has ever had.”

The argument evaporated. He carried his point as such points are carried

in dreams. The discussion slipped to another of the issues that had been

troubling him.

“You would plumb the deep of knowledge; you would scale the heights of

space.... There is no limit to either.”

“Then I will plumb and scale for ever. I will defeat you.”

“But you will never destroy me.”

“I will fight my way through you to God.”

“And never attain him.”...

It seemed as though yet another voice was speaking. For a while the veil

of Satan was drawn aside. The thoughts it uttered ran like incandescent

molten metal through the mind of Job, but whether he was saying these

things to God or whether God was saying these things to him, did not in

any way appear.

“So life goes on for ever. And in no other way could it go on. In no

other way could there be such a being as life. For how can you struggle

if there is a certainty of victory? Why should you struggle if the end

is assured? How can you rise if there is no depths into which you can

fall? The blacknesses and the evils about you are the warrants of

reality....

“Through the centuries the voice of Job had complained and will

complain. Through the centuries the fire of his faith flares and

flickers and threatens to go out. But is Job justified in his

complaints?

“Is Job indeed justified in his complaints? His mind has been coloured

by the colour of misfortune. He has seen all the world reflecting the

sufferings of his body. He has dwelt upon illness and cruelty and death.

But is there any evil or cruelty or suffering that is beyond the

possibility of human control? Were that so then indeed he might complain

that God has mocked him.... Are sunsets ugly and oppressive? Do

mountains disgust, do distant hills repel? Is there any flaw in the

starry sky? If the lives of beasts and men are dark and ungracious, yet

is not the texture of their bodies lovely beyond comparison? You have

sneered because the beauty of cell and tissue may build up an idiot.

Why, oh Man, do they build up an idiot? Have you no will, have you no

understanding, that you suffer such things to be? The darkness and

ungraciousness, the evil and the cruelty, are no more than a challenge

to you. In you lies the power to rule all these things....”

Through the tumbled clouds of his mind broke the sunlight of this

phrase: “The power to rule all these things. The power to rule—”

“You have dwelt overmuch upon pain. Pain is a swift distress; it ends

and is forgotten. Without memory and fear pain is nothing, a

contradiction to be heeded, a warning to be taken. Without pain what

would life become? Pain is the master only of craven men. It is in man’s

power to rule it. It is in man’s power to rule all things....”

It was as if the dreaming patient debated these ideas with himself; and

again it was as if he were the universal all and Job and Satan and God

disputed together within him. The thoughts in his mind raced faster and

suddenly grew bright and glittering, as the waters grow bright when they

come racing out of the caves at Han into the light of day. Green-faced,

he murmured and stirred in his great debate while the busy specialist

plied his scalpels, and Dr. Barrack whispered directions to the intent

nurse.

“Another whiff,” said Doctor Barrack.

“A cloud rolls back from my soul....”

“I have been through great darkness. I have been through deep

waters....”

“Has not your life had laughter in it? Has the freshness of the summer

morning never poured joy through your being? Do you know nothing of the

embrace of the lover, cheek to cheek or lip to lip? Have you never swum

out into the sunlit sea or shouted on a mountain slope? Is there no joy

in a handclasp? Your son, your son, you say, is dead with honour. Is

there no joy in that honour? Clean and straight was your son, and

beautiful in his life. Is that nothing to thank God for? Have you never

played with happy children? Has no boy ever answered to your

teaching—giving back more than you gave him? Dare you deny the joy of

your appetites: the first mouthful of roast red beef on the frosty day

and the deep draught of good ale? Do you know nothing of the task well

done, nor of sleep after a day of toil? Is there no joy for the farmer

in the red ploughed fields, and the fields shooting with green blades?

When the great prows smite the waves and the aeroplane hums in the sky,

is man still a hopeless creature? Can you watch the beat and swing of

machinery and still despair? Your illness has coloured the world; a

little season of misfortune has hidden the light from your eyes.”

It was as if the dreamer pushed his way through the outskirts of a great

forest and approached the open, but it was not through trees that he

thrust his way but through bars and nets and interlacing curves of

blinding, many-coloured light towards the clear promise beyond. He had

grown now to an incredible vastness so that it was no longer earth upon

which he set his feet but that crystalline pavement whose translucent

depths contain the stars. Yet though he approached the open he never

reached the open; the iridescent net that had seemed to grow thin, grew

dense again; he was still struggling, and the black doubts that had

lifted for a moment swept down upon his soul again. And he realized he

was in a dream, a dream that was drawing swiftly now to its close.

“Oh God!” he cried, “answer me! For Satan has mocked me sorely. Answer

me before I lose sight of you again. Am I right to fight? Am I right to

come out of my little earth, here above the stars?”

“Right if you dare.”

“Shall I conquer and prevail? Give me your promise!”

“Everlastingly you may conquer and find fresh worlds to conquer.”

“_May_—but _shall_ I?”

It was as if the torrent of molten thoughts stopped suddenly. It was as

if everything stopped.

“Answer me,” he cried.

Slowly the shining thoughts moved on again.

“So long as your courage endures you will conquer....

“If you have courage, although the night be dark, although the present

battle be bloody and cruel and end in a strange and evil fashion,

nevertheless victory shall be yours—in a way you will understand—when

victory comes. Only have courage. On the courage in your heart all

things depend. By courage it is that the stars continue in their

courses, day by day. It is the courage of life alone that keeps sky and

earth apart.... If that courage fail, if that sacred fire go out, then

all things fail and all things go out, all things—good and evil, space

and time.”

“Leaving nothing?”

“_Nothing._”

“Nothing,” he echoed, and the word spread like a dark and darkening mask

across the face of all things.

And then as if to mark the meaning of the word, it seemed to him that

the whole universe began to move inward upon itself, faster and faster,

until at last with an incredible haste it rushed together. He resisted

this collapse in vain, and with a sense of overwhelmed effort. The white

light of God and the whirling colours of the universe, the spaces

between the stars—it was as if an unseen fist gripped them together.

They rushed to one point as water in a clepsydra rushes to its hole. The

whole universe became small, became a little thing, diminished to the

size of a coin, of a spot, of a pinpoint, of one intense black

mathematical point, and—vanished. He heard his own voice crying in the

void like a little thing blown before the wind: “But will my courage

endure?” The question went unanswered. Not only the things of space but

the things of time swept together into nothingness. The last moment of

his dream rushed towards the first, crumpled all the intervening moments

together and made them one. It seemed to Mr. Huss that he was still in

the instant of insensibility. That sound of the breaking string was

still in his ears:—_Ploot_....

It became part of that same sound which came before the vision....

He was aware of a new pain within him; not that dull aching now, but a

pain keen and sore. He gave a fluttering gasp.

“Quick,” said a voice. “He is coming to!”

“He’ll not wake for hours,” said a second voice.

“His mouth and eyes!”

He lifted his eyelids as one lifts lead. He found himself looking into

the intelligent but unsympathetic face of Sir Alpheus Mengo, he tried to

comprehend his situation but he had forgotten how he got to it, he

closed his eyes and sank back consciously and wilfully towards

insensibility....

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

LETTERS AND A TELEGRAM

§ 1

It was three weeks later.

Never had there been so successful an operation as an operation in the

experience of either Sir Alpheus Mengo or Dr. Barrack. The growth that

had been removed was a non-malignant growth; the diagnosis of cancer had

been unsound. Mr. Huss was still lying flat in his bed in Mrs. Croome’s

house, but he was already able to read books, letters and newspapers,

and take an interest in affairs.

The removal of his morbid growth had made a very great change in his

mental atmosphere. He no longer had the same sense of an invisible

hostile power brooding over all his life; his natural courage had

returned. And the world which had seemed a conspiracy of misfortunes was

now a hopeful world again. The last great offensive of the Germans

towards Paris had collapsed disastrously under the counter attacks of

Marshal Foch; each morning’s paper told of fresh victories for the

Allies, and the dark shadow of a German Cæsarism fell no longer across

the future. The imaginations of men were passing through a phase of

reasonableness and generosity; the idea of an organized world peace had

seized upon a multitude of minds; there was now a prospect of a new and

better age such as would have seemed incredible in the weeks when the

illness of Mr. Huss began to bear him down. And it was not simply a

general relief that had come to his forebodings. His financial position,

for example, which had been wrecked by one accident, had been restored

by another. A distant cousin of Mr. Huss, to whom however Mr. Huss was

the nearest relative, had died of softening of the brain, after a career

of almost imbecile speculation. He had left his property partly to Mr.

Huss and partly to Woldingstanton School. For some years before the war

he had indulged in the wildest buying of depreciated copper shares, and

had accumulated piles of what had seemed at the time valueless paper.

The war had changed all that. Instead of being almost insolvent, the

deceased in spite of heavy losses on Canadian land deals was found by

his executors to be worth nearly thirty thousand pounds. It is easy to

underrate the good in money. The windfall meant a hundred needed

comforts and freedoms, and a release for the mind of Mrs. Huss that

nothing else could have given her. And the mind of Mr. Huss reflected

the moods of his wife much more than he suspected.

But still better things seemed to be afoot in the world of Mr. Huss. The

rest of the governors of Woldingstanton, it became apparent, were not in

agreement with Sir Eliphaz and Mr. Dad upon the project of replacing Mr.

Huss by Mr. Farr; and a number of the old boys of the school at the

front, getting wind of what was going on, had formed a small committee

for the express purpose of defending their old master. At the head of

this committee, by a happy chance, was young Kenneth Burrows, the nephew

and heir of Sir Eliphaz. At the school he had never been in the front

rank; he had been one of those good-all-round boys who end as a school

prefect, a sound man in the first eleven, and second or third in most of

the subjects he took. Never had he played a star part or enjoyed very

much of the head’s confidences. It was all the more delightful therefore

to find him the most passionate and indefatigable champion of the order

of things that Mr. Huss had set up. He had heard of the proposed changes

at his uncle’s dinner-table when on leave, and he had done something

forthwith to shake that gentleman’s resolves. Lady Burrows, who adored

him, became at once pro-Huss. She was all the readier to do this because

she did not like Mr. Dad’s rather emphatic table manners, nor Mr. Farr’s

clothes.

“You don’t know what Mr. Huss was to us, Sir,” the young man repeated

several times, and returned to France with that sentence growing and

flowering in his mind. He was one of those good types for whom the war

was a powerful developer. Death, hardship, and responsibility—he was

still not two-and-twenty, and a major in the artillery—had already made

an understanding man out of the schoolboy; he could imagine what

dispossession meant; his new maturity made it seem a natural thing to

write to comfort his old head as one man writes to another. His

pencilled sheets, when first they came, made the enfeebled recipient

cry, not with misery but happiness. They were reread like a love-letter;

they were now on the coverlet, and Mr. Huss was staring at the ceiling

and already planning a new Woldingstanton rising from its ashes, greater

than the old.

§ 2

_It is only in the last few weeks_, the young man wrote, _that we have

heard of all these schemes to break up the tradition of Woldingstanton,

and now there is a talk of your resigning the headmastership in favour

of Mr. Farr. Personally, Sir, I can’t imagine how you can possibly dream

of giving up your work—and to him of all people;—I still have a sort of

doubt about it; but my uncle was very positive that you were disposed to

resign (personally, he said, he had implored you to stay), and it is on

the off-chance of his being right that I am bothering you with this

letter. Briefly it is to implore you to stand by the school, which is as

much as to say to stand by yourself and us. You’ve taught hundreds of us

to stick it, and now you owe it to us to stick it yourself. I know

you’re ill, dreadfully ill; I’ve heard about Gilbert, and I know, Sir,

we all know, although he wasn’t in the school and you never betrayed a

preference or were led into an unfair thing through it, how much you

loved him; you’ve been put through it, Sir, to the last degree. But,

Sir, there are some of us here who feel almost as though they were your

sons; if you don’t and can’t give us that sort of love, it doesn’t alter

the fact that there are men out here who think of you as they’d like to

think of their fathers. Men like myself particularly, who were left as

boys without a father._

_I’m no great hand at expressing myself; I’m no credit to Mr. Cross and

his English class; generally I don’t believe in saying too much; but I

would like to tell you something of what you have been to a lot of us,

and why Woldingstanton going on will seem to us like a flag still flying

and Woldingstanton breaking its tradition like a sort of surrender. And

I don’t want a bit to flatter you, Sir, if you’ll forgive me, and set

you up in what I am writing to you. One of the loveable things about you

to us is that you have always been so jolly human to us. You’ve always

been unequal. I’ve seen you give lessons that were among the best

lessons in the world, and I’ve seen you give some jolly bad lessons. And

there were some affairs—that business of the November fireworks for

example—when we thought you were harsh and wrong—_

“I _was_ wrong,” said Mr. Huss.

_That almost led to a mutiny. But that is just where you score, and why

Woldingstanton can’t do without you. When that firework row was on we

called a meeting of the school and house prefects and had up some of the

louts to it—you never heard of that meeting—and we said, we all agreed

you were wrong and we all agreed that right or wrong we stood by you,

and wouldn’t let the row go further. Perhaps you remember how that

affair shut up all at once. But that is where you’ve got us. You do

wrong, you let us see through you; there never was a schoolmaster or a

father gave himself away so freely as you do, you never put up a sham

front on us and consequently every one of us knows that what he knows

about you is the real thing in you; the very kids in the lower fifth can

get a glimpse of it and grasp that you are driving at something with all

your heart and soul, and that the school goes somewhere and has life in

it. We Woldingstanton boys have that in common when we meet; we

understand one another; we have something that a lot of the other chaps

one meets out here, even from the crack schools, don’t seem to have. It

isn’t a flourish with us, Sir, it is a simple statement of fact that the

life we joined up to at Woldingstanton is more important to us than the

life in our bodies. Just as it is more important to you. It isn’t only

the way you taught it, though you taught it splendidly, it is the way

you felt it that got hold of us. You made us think and feel that the

past of the world was our own history; you made us feel that we were in

one living story with the reindeer men and the Egyptian priests, with

the soldiers of Cæsar and the alchemists of Spain; nothing was dead and

nothing alien; you made discovery and civilization our adventure and the

whole future our inheritance. Most of the men I meet here feel lost in

this war; they are like rabbits washed out of their burrows by a flood,

but we of Woldingstanton have taken it in the day’s work, and when the

peace comes and the new world begins, it will still be in the story for

us, the day’s work will still join on. That’s the essence of

Woldingstanton, that it puts you on the high road that goes on. The

other chaps I talk to here from other schools seem to be on no road at

all. They are tough and plucky by nature and association; they are

fighters and sturdy men; but what holds them in it is either just habit

and the example of people about them or something unsound that can’t

hold out to the end; a vague loyalty to the Empire or a desire to punish

the Hun or restore the peace of Europe, some short range view of that

sort, motives that will leave them stranded at the end of the war,

anyhow, with nothing to go on to. To talk of after the war to them is to

realize what blind alleys their teachers have led them into. They can

understand fighting against things but not for things. Beyond an

impossible ambition to go back somewhere and settle down as they used to

be, there’s not the ghost of an idea to them at all. The whole value of

Woldingstanton is that it steers a man through and among the blind

alleys and sets him on a way out that he can follow for all the rest of

his days; it makes him a player in a limitless team and one with the

Creator. We are all coming back to take up our jobs in that spirit, jobs

that will all join up at last in making a real world state, a world

civilization and a new order of things, and unless we can think of you,

sir, away at Woldingstanton, working away to make more of us, ready to

pick up the sons we shall send you presently—_

Mr. Huss stopped reading.

§ 3

He lay thinking idly.

“I was talking about blind alleys the other day. Queer that he should

have hit on the same phrase....

“Some old sermon of mine perhaps.... No doubt I’ve had the thought

before....

“I suppose that one could define education as the lifting of minds out

of blind alleys....

“A permissible definition anyhow....

“I wish I could remember that talk better. I said a lot of things about

submarines. I said something about the whole world really being like the

crew of a submarine....

“It’s true—universally. Everyone is in a blind alley until we pierce a

road....

“That was a queer talk we had.... I remember I wouldn’t go to bed—a kind

of fever in the mind....

“Then there was a dream.

“I wish I could remember more of that dream. It was as if I could see

round some metaphysical corner.... I seemed to be in a great

place—talking to God....

“But how could one have talked to God?...

“No. It is gone....”

His thought reverted to the letter of young Burrows.

He began to scheme out the reinstatement of Woldingstanton. He had an

idea of rebuilding School House with a map corridor to join it to the

picture gallery and the concert hall, which were both happily still

standing. He wanted the maps on one side to show the growth and

succession of empires in the western world, and on the other to present

the range of geographical knowledge and thought at different periods in

man’s history.

As with many great headmasters, his idle daydreams were often

architectural. He took out another of his dream toys now and played with

it. This dream was that he could organize a series of ethnological

exhibits showing various groups of primitive peoples in a triple order;

first little models of them in their savage state, then displays of

their arts and manufactures to show their distinctive gifts and

aptitudes, and then suggestions of the part such a people might play as

artists or guides, or beast tamers or the like, in a wholly civilized

world. Such a collection would be far beyond the vastest possibilities

to which Woldingstanton would ever attain—but he loved the dream.

The groups would stand in well-lit bays, side chapels, so to speak, in

his museum building. There would be a group of seats and a blackboard,

for it was one of his fantasies to have a school so great that the

classes would move about it, like little groups of pilgrims in a

cathedral....

From that he drifted to a scheme for grouping great schools for such

common purposes as the educational development of the cinematograph, a

central reference library, and the like....

For one great school leads to another. Schools are living things, and

like all living things they must grow and reproduce their kind and go on

from conquest to conquest—or fall under the sway of the Farrs and Dads

and stagnate, become diseased and malignant, and perish. But

Woldingstanton was not to perish. It was to spread. It was to call to

its kind across the Atlantic and throughout the world.... It was to give

and receive ideas, interbreed, and develop....

Across the blue October sky the white clouds drifted, and the air was

full of the hum of a passing aeroplane. The chained dog that had once

tortured the sick nerves of Mr. Huss now barked unheeded.

“I would like to give one of the chapels of the races to the memory of

Gilbert,” whispered Mr. Huss....

§ 4

The door at the foot of his bed opened, and Mrs. Huss appeared.

She had an effect of appearing suddenly, and yet she moved slowly into

the room, clutching a crumpled bit of paper in her hand. Her face had

undergone some extraordinary change; it was dead white, and her eyes

were wide open and very bright. She stood stiffly. She might have been

about to fall. She did not attempt to close the door behind her.

Mrs. Croome became audible rattling her pans downstairs.

When Mrs. Huss spoke, it was in an almost noiseless whisper. “_Job!_”

He had a strange idea that Mrs. Croome must have given them notice to

quit instantly or perpetrated some such brutality, a suspicion which his

wife’s gesture seemed to confirm. She was shaking the crumpled scrap of

paper in an absurd manner. He frowned in a gust of impatience.

“I didn’t open it,” she said at last, “not till I had eaten some

breakfast. I didn’t dare. I saw it was from the bank and I thought it

might be about the overdraft.... All the while....”

She was weeping. “All the while I was eating my egg....”

“Oh _what_ is it?”

She grimaced.

“From _him_.”

He stared.

“A cheque, Job—come through—from _him_. From our boy.”

His mouth fell open, he drew a deep breath. His tears came. He raised

himself, and was reminded of his bandaged state and dropped back again.

He held out his lean hand to her.

“He’s a prisoner?” he gasped. “_Alive?_”

She nodded. She seemed about to fling herself violently upon his poor

crumpled body. Her arms waved about seeking for something to embrace.

Then she flopped down in the narrow space between bed and paper-adorned

fireplace, and gathered the counterpane together into a lump with her

clutching hands. “Oh my baby boy!” she wept. “My _baby_ boy....

“And I was so wicked about the mourning.... I was so _wicked_....”

Mr. Huss lay stiff, as the doctor had ordered him to do; but the hand he

stretched down could just touch and caress her hair.

Printed in the United States of America.

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