Lord of the World

by Robert Hugh Benson

  II

  Oliver seemed altogether depressed at breakfast, half an hour later. Hismother, an old lady of nearly eighty, who never appeared till noon,seemed to see it at once, for after a look or two at him and a word, shesubsided into silence behind her plate.

  It was a pleasant little room in which they sat, immediately behindOliver's own, and was furnished, according to universal custom, in lightgreen. Its windows looked out upon a strip of garden at the back, andthe high creeper-grown wall that separated that domain from the next.The furniture, too, was of the usual sort; a sensible round table stoodin the middle, with three tall arm-chairs, with the proper angles andrests, drawn up to it; and the centre of it, resting apparently on abroad round column, held the dishes. It was thirty years now since thepractice of placing the dining-room above the kitchen, and of raisingand lowering the courses by hydraulic power into the centre of thedining-table, had become universal in the houses of the well-to-do. Thefloor consisted entirely of the asbestos cork preparation invented inAmerica, noiseless, clean, and pleasant to both foot and eye.

  Mabel broke the silence.

  "And your speech to-morrow?" she asked, taking up her fork.

  Oliver brightened a little, and began to discourse.

  It seemed that Birmingham was beginning to fret. They were crying outonce more for free trade with America: European facilities were notenough, and it was Oliver's business to keep them quiet. It was useless,he proposed to tell them, to agitate until the Eastern business wassettled: they must not bother the Government with such details just now.He was to tell them, too, that the Government was wholly on their side;that it was bound to come soon.

  "They are pig-headed," he added fiercely; "pig-headed and selfish; theyare like children who cry for food ten minutes before dinner-time: it isbound to come if they will wait a little."

  "And you will tell them so?"

  "That they are pig-headed? Certainly."

  Mabel looked at her husband with a pleased twinkle in her eyes. She knewperfectly well that his popularity rested largely on his outspokenness:folks liked to be scolded and abused by a genial bold man who danced andgesticulated in a magnetic fury; she liked it herself.

  "How shall you go?" she asked.

  "Volor. I shall catch the eighteen o'clock at Blackfriars; the meetingis at nineteen, and I shall be back at twenty-one."

  He addressed himself vigorously to his _entree_, and his mother lookedup with a patient, old-woman smile.

  Mabel began to drum her fingers softly on the damask.

  "Please make haste, my dear," she said; "I have to be at Brighton atthree."

  Oliver gulped his last mouthful, pushed his plate over the line, glancedto see if all plates were there, and then put his hand beneath thetable.

  Instantly, without a sound, the centre-piece vanished, and the threewaited unconcernedly while the clink of dishes came from beneath.

  Old Mrs. Brand was a hale-looking old lady, rosy and wrinkled, with themantilla head-dress of fifty years ago; but she, too, looked a littledepressed this morning. The _entree_ was not very successful, shethought; the new food-stuff was not up to the old, it was a triflegritty: she would see about it afterwards. There was a clink, a softsound like a push, and the centre-piece snapped into its place, bearingan admirable imitation of a roasted fowl.

  Oliver and his wife were alone again for a minute or two after breakfastbefore Mabel started down the path to catch the 14-1/2 o'clock 4th gradesub-trunk line to the junction.

  "What's the matter with mother?" he said.

  "Oh! it's the food-stuff again: she's never got accustomed to it; shesays it doesn't suit her."

  "Nothing else?"

  "No, my dear, I am sure of it. She hasn't said a word lately."

  Oliver watched his wife go down the path, reassured. He had been alittle troubled once or twice lately by an odd word or two that hismother had let fall. She had been brought up a Christian for a fewyears, and it seemed to him sometimes as if it had left a taint. Therewas an old "Garden of the Soul" that she liked to keep by her, thoughshe always protested with an appearance of scorn that it was nothing butnonsense. Still, Oliver would have preferred that she had burned it:superstition was a desperate thing for retaining life, and, as the brainweakened, might conceivably reassert itself. Christianity was both wildand dull, he told himself, wild because of its obvious grotesqueness andimpossibility, and dull because it was so utterly apart from theexhilarating stream of human life; it crept dustily about still, heknew, in little dark churches here and there; it screamed withhysterical sentimentality in Westminster Cathedral which he had onceentered and looked upon with a kind of disgusted fury; it gabbledstrange, false words to the incompetent and the old and the half-witted.But it would be too dreadful if his own mother ever looked upon it againwith favour.

  Oliver himself, ever since he could remember, had been violently opposedto the concessions to Rome and Ireland. It was intolerable that thesetwo places should be definitely yielded up to this foolish, treacherousnonsense: they were hot-beds of sedition; plague-spots on the face ofhumanity. He had never agreed with those who said that it was betterthat all the poison of the West should be gathered rather thandispersed. But, at any rate, there it was. Rome had been given up whollyto that old man in white in exchange for all the parish churches andcathedrals of Italy, and it was understood that mediaeval darknessreigned there supreme; and Ireland, after receiving Home Rule thirtyyears before, had declared for Catholicism, and opened her arms toIndividualism in its most virulent form. England had laughed andassented, for she was saved from a quantity of agitation by theimmediate departure of half her Catholic population for that island, andhad, consistently with her Communist-colonial policy, granted everyfacility for Individualism to reduce itself there _ad absurdum_. Allkinds of funny things were happening there: Oliver had read with abitter amusement of new appearances there, of a Woman in Blue andshrines raised where her feet had rested; but he was scarcely amused atRome, for the movement to Turin of the Italian Government had deprivedthe Republic of quite a quantity of sentimental prestige, and had haloedthe old religious nonsense with all the meretriciousness of historicalassociation. However, it obviously could not last much longer: the worldwas beginning to understand at last.

  He stood a moment or two at the door after his wife had gone, drinkingin reassurance from that glorious vision of solid sense that spreaditself before his eyes: the endless house-roofs; the high glass vaultsof the public baths and gymnasiums; the pinnacled schools whereCitizenship was taught each morning; the spider-like cranes andscaffoldings that rose here and there; and even the few pricking spiresdid not disconcert him. There it stretched away into the grey haze ofLondon, really beautiful, this vast hive of men and women who hadlearned at least the primary lesson of the gospel that there was no Godbut man, no priest but the politician, no prophet but the schoolmaster.

  Then he went back once more to his speech-constructing.

  * * * * *

  Mabel, too, was a little thoughtful as she sat with her paper on herlap, spinning down the broad line to Brighton. This Eastern news wasmore disconcerting to her than she allowed her husband to see; yet itseemed incredible that there could be any real danger of invasion. ThisWestern life was so sensible and peaceful; folks had their feet at lastupon the rock, and it was unthinkable that they could ever be forcedback on to the mud-flats: it was contrary to the whole law ofdevelopment. Yet she could not but recognise that catastrophe seemed oneof nature's methods....

  She sat very quiet, glancing once or twice at the meagre little scrapof news, and read the leading article upon it: that too seemedsignificant of dismay. A couple of men were talking in thehalf-compartment beyond on the same subject; one described theGovernment engineering works that he had visited, the breathless hastethat dominated them; the other put in interrogations and questions.There was not much comfort there. There were no windows through whichshe could look; on the main lines the speed was too great for the eyes;the long
compartment flooded with soft light bounded her horizon. Shestared at the moulded white ceiling, the delicious oak-framed paintings,the deep spring-seats, the mellow globes overhead that poured outradiance, at a mother and child diagonally opposite her. Then the greatchord sounded; the faint vibration increased ever so slightly; and aninstant later the automatic doors ran back, and she stepped out on tothe platform of Brighton station.

  As she went down the steps leading to the station square she noticed apriest going before her. He seemed a very upright and sturdy old man,for though his hair was white he walked steadily and strongly. At thefoot of the steps he stopped and half turned, and then, to her surprise,she saw that his face was that of a young man, fine-featured and strong,with black eyebrows and very bright grey eyes. Then she passed on andbegan to cross the square in the direction of her aunt's house.

  Then without the slightest warning, except one shrill hoot fromoverhead, a number of things happened.

  A great shadow whirled across the sunlight at her feet, a sound ofrending tore the air, and a noise like a giant's sigh; and, as shestopped bewildered, with a noise like ten thousand smashed kettles, ahuge thing crashed on the rubber pavement before her, where it lay,filling half the square, writhing long wings on its upper side that beatand whirled like the flappers of some ghastly extinct monster, pouringout human screams, and beginning almost instantly to crawl with brokenlife.

  Mabel scarcely knew what happened next; but she found herself a momentlater forced forward by some violent pressure from behind, till shestood shaking from head to foot, with some kind of smashed body of a manmoaning and stretching at her feet. There was a sort of articulatelanguage coming from it; she caught distinctly the names of Jesus andMary; then a voice hissed suddenly in her ears:

  "Let me through. I am a priest."

  She stood there a moment longer, dazed by the suddenness of the wholeaffair, and watched almost unintelligently the grey-haired young prieston his knees, with his coat torn open, and a crucifix out; she saw himbend close, wave his hand in a swift sign, and heard a murmur of alanguage she did not know. Then he was up again, holding the crucifixbefore him, and she saw him begin to move forward into the midst of thered-flooded pavement, looking this way and that as if for a signal. Downthe steps of the great hospital on her right came figures running now,hatless, each carrying what looked like an old-fashioned camera. Sheknew what those men were, and her heart leaped in relief. They were theministers of euthanasia. Then she felt herself taken by the shoulder andpulled back, and immediately found herself in the front rank of a crowdthat was swaying and crying out, and behind a line of police andcivilians who had formed themselves into a cordon to keep the pressureback.

  III

  Oliver was in a panic of terror as his mother, half an hour later, ranin with the news that one of the Government volors had fallen in thestation square at Brighton just after the 14-1/2 train had dischargedits passengers. He knew quite well what that meant, for he rememberedone such accident ten years before, just after the law forbiddingprivate volors had been passed. It meant that every living creature init was killed and probably many more in the place where it fell--andwhat then? The message was clear enough; she would certainly be in thesquare at that time.

  He sent a desperate wire to her aunt asking for news; and sat, shakingin his chair, awaiting the answer. His mother sat by him.

  "Please God---" she sobbed out once, and stopped confounded as he turnedon her.

  But Fate was merciful, and three minutes before Mr. Phillips toiled upthe path with the answer, Mabel herself came into the room, rather paleand smiling.

  "Christ!" cried Oliver, and gave one huge sob as he sprang up.

  She had not a great deal to tell him. There was no explanation of thedisaster published as yet; it seemed that the wings on one side hadsimply ceased to work.

  She described the shadow, the hiss of sound, and the crash.

  Then she stopped.

  "Well, my dear?" said her husband, still rather white beneath the eyesas he sat close to her patting her hand.

  "There was a priest there," said Mabel. "I saw him before, at thestation."

  Oliver gave a little hysterical snort of laughter.

  "He was on his knees at once," she said, "with his crucifix, even beforethe doctors came. My dear, do people really believe all that?"

  "Why, they think they do," said her husband.

  "It was all so--so sudden; and there he was, just as if he had beenexpecting it all. Oliver, how can they?"

  "Why, people will believe anything if they begin early enough."

  "And the man seemed to believe it, too--the dying man, I mean. I saw hiseyes."

  She stopped.

  "Well, my dear?"

  "Oliver, what do you say to people when they are dying?"

  "Say! Why, nothing! What can I say? But I don't think I've ever seen anyone die."

  "Nor have I till to-day," said the girl, and shivered a little. "Theeuthanasia people were soon at work."

  Oliver took her hand gently.

  "My darling, it must have been frightful. Why, you're trembling still."

  "No; but listen.... You know, if I had had anything to say I could havesaid it too. They were all just in front of me: I wondered; then I knewI hadn't. I couldn't possibly have talked about Humanity."

  "My dear, it's all very sad; but you know it doesn't really matter. It'sall over."

  "And--and they've just stopped?"

  "Why, yes."

  Mabel compressed her lips a little; then she sighed. She had an agitatedsort of meditation in the train. She knew perfectly that it was sheernerves; but she could not just yet shake them off. As she had said, itwas the first time she had seen death.

  "And that priest--that priest doesn't think so?"

  "My dear, I'll tell you what he believes. He believes that that man whomhe showed the crucifix to, and said those words over, is alivesomewhere, in spite of his brain being dead: he is not quite sure where;but he is either in a kind of smelting works being slowly burned; or, ifhe is very lucky, and that piece of wood took effect, he is somewherebeyond the clouds, before Three Persons who are only One although Theyare Three; that there are quantities of other people there, a Woman inBlue, a great many others in white with their heads under their arms,and still more with their heads on one side; and that they've all gotharps and go on singing for ever and ever, and walking about on theclouds, and liking it very much indeed. He thinks, too, that all thesenice people are perpetually looking down upon the aforesaidsmelting-works, and praising the Three Great Persons for making them.That's what the priest believes. Now you know it's not likely; that kindof thing may be very nice, but it isn't true."

  Mabel smiled pleasantly. She had never heard it put so well.

  "No, my dear, you're quite right. That sort of thing isn't true. How canhe believe it? He looked quite intelligent!"

  "My dear girl, if I had told you in your cradle that the moon was greencheese, and had hammered at you ever since, every day and all day, thatit was, you'd very nearly believe it by now. Why, you know in your heartthat the euthanatisers are the real priests. Of course you do."

  Mabel sighed with satisfaction and stood up.

  "Oliver, you're a most comforting person. I do like you! There! I mustgo to my room: I'm all shaky still."

  Half across the room she stopped and put out a shoe.

  "Why---" she began faintly.

  There was a curious rusty-looking splash upon it; and her husband sawher turn white. He rose abruptly.

  "My dear," he said, "don't be foolish."

  She looked at him, smiled bravely, and went out.

  * * * * *

  When she was gone, he still sat on a moment where she had left him. Dearme! how pleased he was! He did not like to think of what life would havebeen without her. He had known her since she was twelve--that was sevenyears ago-and last year they had gone together to the district officialto make their contract. She had really become very necess
ary to him. Ofcourse the world could get on without her, and he supposed that he couldtoo; but he did not want to have to try. He knew perfectly well, for itwas his creed of human love, that there was between them a doubleaffection, of mind as well as body; and there was absolutely nothingelse: but he loved her quick intuitions, and to hear his own thoughtechoed so perfectly. It was like two flames added together to make athird taller than either: of course one flame could burn without theother--in fact, one would have to, one day--but meantime the warmth andlight were exhilarating. Yes, he was delighted that she happened to beclear of the falling volor.

  He gave no more thought to his exposition of the Christian creed; it wasa mere commonplace to him that Catholics believed that kind of thing; itwas no more blasphemous to his mind so to describe it, than it would beto laugh at a Fijian idol with mother-of-pearl eyes, and a horse-hairwig; it was simply impossible to treat it seriously. He, too, hadwondered once or twice in his life how human beings could believe suchrubbish; but psychology had helped him, and he knew now well enough thatsuggestion will do almost anything. And it was this hateful thing thathad so long restrained the euthanasia movement with all its splendidmercy.

  His brows wrinkled a little as he remembered his mother's exclamation,"Please God"; then he smiled at the poor old thing and her patheticchildishness, and turned once more to his table, thinking in spite ofhimself of his wife's hesitation as she had seen the splash of blood onher shoe. Blood! Yes; that was as much a fact as anything else. How wasit to be dealt with? Why, by the glorious creed of Humanity--thatsplendid God who died and rose again ten thousand times a day, who haddied daily like the old cracked fanatic Saul of Tarsus, ever since theworld began, and who rose again, not once like the Carpenter's Son, butwith every child that came into the world. That was the answer; and wasit not overwhelmingly sufficient?

  Mr. Phillips came in an hour later with another bundle of papers.

  "No more news from the East, sir," he said.