by H. G. Wells
warily, now eagerly, now furiously, and always, as it seems,
unsuccessfully, tried to adapt itself to the maddening misfit of
its patched and ancient garments. And always in these books as
one draws nearer to the heart of the matter there comes a
disconcerting evasion. It was the fantastic convention of the
time that a writer should not touch upon religion. To do so was
to rouse the jealous fury of the great multitude of professional
religious teachers. It was permitted to state the discord, but
it was forbidden to glance at any possible reconciliation.
Religion was the privilege of the pulpit…
It was not only from the novels that religion was omitted. It was
ignored by the newspapers; it was pedantically disregarded in the
discussion of business questions, it played a trivial and
apologetic part in public affairs. And this was done not out of
contempt but respect. The hold of the old religious organisations
upon men's respect was still enormous, so enormous that there
seemed to be a quality of irreverence in applying religion to the
developments of every day. This strange suspension of religion
lasted over into the beginnings of the new age. It was the clear
vision of Marcus Karenin much more than any other contemporary
influence which brought it back into the texture of human life.
He saw religion without hallucinations, without superstitious
reverence, as a common thing as necessary as food and air, as
land and energy to the life of man and the well-being of the
Republic. He saw that indeed it had already percolated away from
the temples and hierarchies and symbols in which men had sought
to imprison it, that it was already at work anonymously and
obscurely in the universal acceptance of the greater state. He
gave it clearer expression, rephrased it to the lights and
perspectives of the new dawn…
But if we return to our novels for our evidence of the spirit of
the times it becomes evident as one reads them in their
chronological order, so far as that is now ascertainable, that as
one comes to the latter nineteenth and the earlier twentieth
century the writers are much more acutely aware of secular change
than their predecessors were. The earlier novelists tried to show
'life as it is,' the latter showed life as it changes. More and
more of their characters are engaged in adaptation to change or
suffering from the effects of world changes. And as we come up
to the time of the Last Wars, this newer conception of the
everyday life as a reaction to an accelerated development is
continually more manifest. Barnet's book, which has served us so
well, is frankly a picture of the world coming about like a ship
that sails into the wind. Our later novelists give a vast gallery
of individual conflicts in which old habits and customs, limited
ideas, ungenerous temperaments, and innate obsessions are pitted
against this great opening out of life that has happened to us.
They tell us of the feelings of old people who have been wrenched
away from familiar surroundings, and how they have had to make
peace with uncomfortable comforts and conveniences that are still
strange to them. They give us the discord between the opening
egotisms of youths and the ill-defined limitations of a changing
social life. They tell of the universal struggle of jealousy to
capture and cripple our souls, of romantic failures and tragical
misconceptions of the trend of the world, of the spirit of
adventure, and the urgency of curiosity, and how these serve the
universal drift. And all their stories lead in the end either to
happiness missed or happiness won, to disaster or salvation. The
clearer their vision and the subtler their art, the more
certainly do these novels tell of the possibility of salvation
for all the world. For any road in life leads to religion for
those upon it who will follow it far enough…
It would have seemed a strange thing to the men of the former
time that it should be an open question as it is to-day whether
the world is wholly Christian or not Christian at all. But
assuredly we have the spirit, and as surely have we left many
temporary forms behind. Christianity was the first expression of
world religion, the first complete repudiation of tribalism and
war and disputation. That it fell presently into the ways of more
ancient rituals cannot alter that. The common sense of mankind
has toiled through two thousand years of chastening experience to
find at last how sound a meaning attaches to the familiar phrases
of the Christian faith. The scientific thinker as he widens out
to the moral problems of the collective life, comes inevitably
upon the words of Christ, and as inevitably does the Christian,
as his thoughtgrows clearer, arrive at the world republic. As
for the claims of the sects, as for the use of a name and
successions, we live in a time that has shaken itself free from
such claims and consistencies.
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN
Section 1
The second operation upon Marcus Karenin was performed at the new
station for surgical work at Paran, high in the Himalayas above
the Sutlej Gorge, where it comes down out of Thibet.
It is a place of such wildness and beauty as no other scenery in
the world affords. The granite terrace which runs round the four
sides of the low block of laboratories looks out in every
direction upon mountains. Far below in the hidden depths of a
shadowy blue cleft, the river pours down in its tumultuous
passage to the swarming plains of India. No sound of its roaring
haste comes up to those serenities. Beyond that blue gulf, in
which whole forests of giant deodars seem no more than small
patches of moss, rise vast precipices of many-coloured rock,
fretted above, lined by snowfalls, and jagged into pinnacles.
These are the northward wall of a towering wilderness of ice and
snow which clambers southward higher and wilder and vaster to the
culminating summits of our globe, to Dhaulagiri and Everest.
Here are cliffs of which no other land can show the like, and
deep chasms in which Mt. Blanc might be plunged and hidden. Here
are icefields as big as inland seas on which the tumbled boulders
lie so thickly that strange little flowers can bloom among them
under the untempered sunshine. To the northward, and blocking
out any vision of the uplands of Thibet, rises that citadel of
porcelain, that gothic pile, the Lio Porgyul, walls, towers, and
peaks, a clear twelve thousand feet of veined and splintered rock
above the river. And beyond it and eastward and westward rise
peaks behind peaks, against the dark blue Himalayan sky. Far
away below to the south the clouds of the Indian rains pile up
abruptly and are stayed by an invisible hand.
Hither it was that with a dreamlike swiftness Karenin flew high
over the irrigations of Rajputana and the towers and cupolas of
the ultimate Delhi; and the lit
tle group of buildings, albeit the
southward wall dropped nearly five hundred feet, seemed to him as
he soared down to it like a toy lost among these mountain
wildernesses. No road came up to this place; it was reached only
by flight.
His pilot descended to the great courtyard, and Karenin assisted
by his secretary clambered down through the wing fabric and made
his way to the officials who came out to receive him.
In this place, beyond infections and noise and any distractions,
surgery had made for itself a house of research and a healing
fastness. The building itself would have seemed very wonderful to
eyes accustomed to the flimsy architecture of an age when power
was precious. It was made of granite, already a little roughened
on the outside by frost, but polished within and of a tremendous
solidity. And in a honeycomb of subtly lit apartments, were the
spotless research benches, the operating tables, the instruments
of brass, and fine glass and platinum and gold. Men and women
came from all parts of the world for study or experimental
research. They wore a common uniform of white and ate at long
tables together, but the patients lived in an upper part of the
buildings, and were cared for by nurses and skilled
attendants…
The first man to greet Karenin was Ciana, the scientific director
of the institution. Beside him was Rachel Borken, the chief
organiser. 'You are tired?' she asked, and old Karenin shook his
head.
'Cramped,' he said. 'I have wanted to visit such a place as
this.'
He spoke as if he had no other business with them.
There was a little pause.
'How many scientific people have you got here now?' he asked.
'Just three hundred and ninety-two,' said Rachel Borken.
'And the patients and attendants and so on?'
'Two thousand and thirty.'
'I shall be a patient,' said Karenin. 'I shall have to be a
patient. But I should like to see things first. Presently I will
be a patient.'
'You will come to my rooms?' suggested Ciana.
'And then I must talk to this doctor of yours,' said Karenin.
'But I would like to see a bit of this place and talk to some of
your people before it comes to that.'
He winced and moved forward.
'I have left most of my work in order,' he said.
'You have been working hard up to now?' asked Rachel Borken.
'Yes. And now I have nothing more to do-and it seems strange…
And it's a bother, this illness and having to come down to
oneself. This doorway and the row of windows is well done; the
gray granite and just the line of gold, and then those mountains
beyond through that arch. It's very well done…'
Section 2
Karenin lay on the bed with a soft white rug about him, and
Fowler, who was to be his surgeon sat on the edge of the bed and
talked to him. An assistant was seated quietly in the shadow
behind the bed. The examination had been made, and Karenin knew
what was before him. He was tired but serene.
'So I shall die,' he said, 'unless you operate?'
Fowler assented. 'And then,' said Karenin, smiling, 'probably I
shall die.'
'Not certainly.'
'Even if I do not die; shall I be able to work?'
'There is just a chance…'
'So firstly I shall probably die, and if I do not, then perhaps I
shall be a useless invalid?'
'I think if you live, you may be able to go on-as you do now.'
'Well, then, I suppose I must take the risk of it. Yet couldn't
you, Fowler, couldn't you drug me and patch me instead of all
this-vivisection? A few days of drugged and active life-and
then the end?'
Fowler thought. 'We are not sure enough yet to do things like
that,' he said.
'But a day is coming when you will be certain.'
Fowler nodded.
'You make me feel as though I was the last of
deformity-Deformity is uncertainty-inaccuracy. My body works
doubtfully, it is not even sure that it will die or live. I
suppose the time is not far off when such bodies as mine will no
longer be born into the world.'
'You see,' said Fowler, after a little pause, 'it is necessary
that spirits such as yours should be born into the world.'
'I suppose,' said Karenin, 'that my spirit has had its use. But
if you think that is because my body is as it is I think you are
mistaken. There is no peculiar virtue in defect. I have always
chafed against-all this. If I could have moved more freely and
lived a larger life in health I could have done more. But some
day perhaps you will be able to put a body that is wrong
altogether right again. Your science is only beginning. It's a
subtler thing than physics and chemistry, and it takes longer to
produce its miracles. And meanwhile a few more of us must die in
patience.'
'Fine work is being done and much of it,' said Fowler. 'I can
say as much because I have nothing to do with it. I can
understand a lesson, appreciate the discoveries of abler men and
use my hands, but those others, Pigou, Masterton, Lie, and the
others, they are clearing the ground fast for the knowledge to
come. Have you had time to follow their work?'
Karenin shook his head. 'But I can imagine the scope of it,' he
said.
'We have so many men working now,' said Fowler. 'I suppose at
present there must be at least a thousand thinking hard,
observing, experimenting, for one who did so in nineteen
hundred.'
'Not counting those who keep the records?'
'Not counting those. Of course, the present indexing of research
is in itself a very big work, and it is only now that we are
getting it properly done. But already we are feeling the benefit
of that. Since it ceased to be a paid employment and became a
devotion we have had only those people who obeyed the call of an
aptitude at work upon these things. Here-I must show you it
to-day, because it will interest you-we have our copy of the
encyclopaedic index-every week sheets are taken out and replaced
by fresh sheets with new results that are brought to us by the
aeroplanes of the Research Department. It is an index of
knowledge that growscontinually, an index that becomes
continually truer. There was never anything like it before.'
'When I came into the education committee,' said Karenin, 'that
index of human knowledge seemed an impossible thing. Research had
produced a chaotic mountain of results, in a hundred languages
and a thousand different types of publication…' He smiled
at his memories. 'How we groaned at the job!'
'Already the ordering of that chaos is nearly done. You shall
see.'
'I have been so busy with my own work--Yes, I shall be glad to
see.'
The patient regarded the surgeon for a time with interested eyes.
'You work here always?' he asked abruptly.
'No,' said Fowler.
'But mostly you work here?'
'I have worked about seven years out of
the past ten. At times I
go away-down there. One has to. At least I have to. There is a
sort of grayness comes over all this, one feels hungry for life,
real, personal passionate life, love-making, eating and drinking
for the fun of the thing, jostling crowds, having adventures,
laughter-above all laughter--'
'Yes,' said Karenin understandingly.
'And then one day, suddenly one thinks of these high mountains
again…'
'That is how I would have lived, if it had not been for
my-defects,' said Karenin. 'Nobody knows but those who have
borne it the exasperation of abnormality. It will be good when
you have nobody alive whose body cannot live the wholesome
everyday life, whose spirit cannot come up into these high places
as it wills.'
'We shall manage that soon,' said Fowler.
'For endless generations man has struggled upward against the
indignities of his body-and the indignities of his soul. Pains,
incapacities, vile fears, black moods, despairs. How well I've
known them. They've taken more time than all your holidays. It
is true, is it not, that every man is something of a cripple and
something of a beast? I've dipped a little deeper than most;
that's all. It's only now when he has fully learnt the truth of
that, that he can take hold of himself to be neither beast nor
cripple. Now that he overcomes his servitude to his body, he can
for the first time think of living the full life of his body…
Before another generation dies you'll have the thing in hand.
You'll do as you please with the old Adam and all the vestiges
from the brutes and reptiles that lurk in his body and spirit.
Isn't that so?'
'You put it boldly,' said Fowler.
Karenin laughed cheerfully at his caution… 'When,' asked
Karenin suddenly, 'when will you operate?'
'The day after to-morrow,' said Fowler. 'For a day I want you to
drink and eat as I shall prescribe. And you may think and talk
as you please.'
'I should like to see this place.'
'You shall go through it this afternoon. I will have two men
carry you in a litter. And to-morrow you shall lie out upon the
terrace. Our mountains here are the most beautiful in the
world…'
Section 3
The next morning Karenin got up early and watched the sun rise
