by H. G. Wells
over the mountains, and breakfasted lightly, and then young
Gardener, his secretary, came to consult him upon the spending of
his day. Would he care to see people? Or was this gnawing pain
within him too much to permit him to do that?
'I'd like to talk,' said Karenin. 'There must be all sorts of
lively-minded people here. Let them come and gossip with me. It
will distract me-and I can't tell you how interesting it makes
everything that is going on to have seen the dawn of one's own
last day.'
'Your last day!'
'Fowler will kill me.'
'But he thinks not.'
'Fowler will kill me. If he does not he will not leave very much
of me. So that this is my last day anyhow, the days afterwards if
they come at all to me, will be refuse. I know…'
Gardener was about to speak when Karenin went on again.
'I hope he kills me, Gardener. Don't be-old-fashioned. The
thing Iam most afraid of is that last rag of life. I may just go
on-a scarred salvage of suffering stuff. And then-all the
things I have hidden and kept down or discounted or set right
afterwards will get the better of me. I shall be peevish. I may
lose my grip upon my own egotism. It's never been a very firm
grip. No, no, Gardener, don't say that! You know better, you've
had glimpses of it. Suppose I came through on the other side of
this affair, belittled, vain, and spiteful, using the prestige I
have got among men by my good work in the past just to serve some
small invalid purpose…'
He was silent for a time, watching the mists among the distant
precipices change to clouds of light, and drift and dissolve
before the searching rays of the sunrise.
'Yes,' he said at last, 'I am afraid of these anaesthetics and
these fag ends of life. It's life we are all afraid of.
Death!-nobody minds just death. Fowler is clever-but some day
surgery will know its duty better and not be so anxious just to
save something… provided only that it quivers. I've tried to
hold my end up properly and do my work. After Fowler has done
with me Iam certain I shall be unfit for work-and what else is
there for me?… I know I shall not be fit for work…
'I do not see why life should be judged by its last trailing
thread of vitality… I know it for the splendid thing it is-I
who have been a diseased creature from the beginning. I know it
well enough not to confuse it with its husks. Remember that,
Gardener, if presently my heart fails me and I despair, and if I
go through a little phase of pain and ingratitude and dark
forgetfulness before the end… Don't believe what I may say at
the last… If the fabric is good enough the selvage doesn't
matter. It can't matter. So long as you are alive you are just
the moment, perhaps, but when you are dead then you are all your
life from the first moment to the last…'
Section 4
Presently, in accordance with his wish, people came to talk to
him, and he could forget himself again. Rachel Borken sat for a
long time with him and talked chiefly of women in the world, and
with her was a girl named Edith Haydon who was already very well
known as a cytologist. And several of the younger men who were
working in the place and a patient named Kahn, a poet, and
Edwards, a designer of plays and shows, spent some time with him.
The talk wandered from point to point and came back upon itself,
and became now earnest and now trivial as the chance suggestions
determined. But soon afterwards Gardener wrote down notes of
things he remembered, and it is possible to put together again
the outlook of Karenin upon the world and how he thought and felt
about many of the principal things in life.
'Our age,' he said, 'has been so far an age of scene-shifting. We
have been preparing a stage, clearing away the setting of a drama
that was played out and growing tiresome… If I could but sit
out the first few scenes of the new spectacle…
'How encumbered the world had become! It was ailing as Iam
ailing with a growth of unmeaning things. It was entangled,
feverish, confused. It was in sore need of release, and I suppose
that nothing less than the violence of those bombs could have
released it and made it a healthy world again. I suppose they
were necessary. Just as everything turns to evil in a fevered
body so everything seemed turning to evil in those last years of
the old time. Everywhere there were obsolete organisations
seizing upon all the new fine things that science was giving to
the world, nationalities, all sorts of political bodies, the
churches and sects, proprietorship, seizing upon those treat
powers and limitless possibilities and turning them to evil uses.
And they would not suffer open speech, they would not permit of
education, they would let no one be educated to the needs of the
new time… You who are younger cannot imagine the mixture of
desperate hope and protesting despair in which we who could
believe in the possibilities of science lived in those years
before atomic energy came…
'It was not only that the mass of people would not attend, would
not understand, but that those who did understand lacked the
power of real belief. They said the things, they saw the things,
and the things meant nothing to them…
'I have been reading some old papers lately. It is wonderful how
our fathers bore themselves towards science. They hated it. They
feared it. They permitted a few scientific men to exist and
work-a pitiful handful… "Don't find out anything about us,"
they said to them; "don't inflict vision upon us, spare our
little ways of life from the fearful shaft of understanding. But
do tricks for us, little limited tricks. Give us cheap lighting.
And cure us of certain disagreeable things, cure us of cancer,
cure us of consumption, cure our colds and relieve us after
repletion…" We have changed all that, Gardener. Science is no
longer our servant. We know it for something greater than our
little individual selves. It is the awakeningmind of the race,
and in a little while--In a little while--I wish indeed I
could watch for that little while, now that the curtain has
risen…
'While I lie here they are clearing up what is left of the bombs
in London,' he said. 'Then they are going to repair the ruins
and make it all as like as possible to its former condition
before the bombs fell. Perhaps they will dig out the old house in
St John's Wood to which my father went after his expulsion from
Russia… That London of my memories seems to me like a place in
another world. For you younger people it must seem like a place
that could never have existed.'
'Is there much left standing?' asked Edith Haydon.
'Square miles that are scarcely shaken in the south and
north-west, they say; and most of the bridges and large areas of
dock. Westminster, which held most of the government offices,
suffered badly from the sm
all bomb that destroyed the Parliament,
there are very few traces of the old thoroughfare of Whitehall or
the Government region thereabout, but there are plentiful
drawings to scale of its buildings, and the great hole in the
east of London scarcely matters. That was a poor district and
very like the north and the south… It will be possible to
reconstruct most of it… It is wanted. Already it becomes
difficult to recall the old time-even for us who saw it.'
'It seems very distant to me,' said the girl.
'It was an unwholesome world,' reflected Karenin. 'I seem to
remember everybody about my childhood as if they were ill. They
were ill. They were sick with confusion. Everybody was anxious
about money and everybody was doing uncongenial things. They ate
a queer mixture of foods, either too much or too little, and at
odd hours. One sees how ill they were by their advertisements.
All this new region of London they are opening up now is
plastered with advertisements of pills. Everybody must have been
taking pills. In one of the hotel rooms in the Strand they have
found the luggage of a lady covered up by falling rubble and
unburnt, and she was equipped with nine different sorts of pill
and tabloid. The pill-carrying age followed the weapon-carrying
age. They are equally strange to us. People's skins must have
been in a vile state. Very few people were properly washed; they
carried the filth of months on their clothes. All the clothes
they wore were old clothes; our way of pulping our clothes again
after a week or so of wear would have seemed fantastic to them.
Their clothing hardly bears thinking about. And the congestion
of them! Everybody was jostling against everybody in those awful
towns. In an uproar. People were run over and crushed by the
hundred; every year in London the cars and omnibuses alone killed
or disabled twenty thousand people, in Paris it was worse; people
used to fall dead for want of air in the crowded ways. The
irritation of London, internal and external, must have been
maddening. It was a maddened world. It is like thinking of a
sick child. One has the same effect of feverish urgencies and
acute irrational disappointments.
'All history,' he said, 'is a record of a childhood…
'And yet not exactly a childhood. There is something clean and
keen about even a sick child-and something touching. But so much
of the old times makes one angry. So much they did seems grossly
stupid, obstinately, outrageously stupid, which is the very
opposite to being fresh and young.
'I was reading only the other day about Bismarck, that hero of
nineteenth-century politics, that sequel to Napoleon, that god of
blood and iron. And he was just a beery, obstinate, dull man.
Indeed, that is what he was, the commonest, coarsest man, who
ever became great. I looked at his portraits, a heavy, almost
froggish face, with projecting eyes and a thick moustache to hide
a poor mouth. He aimed at nothing but Germany, Germany
emphasised, indurated, enlarged; Germany and his class in
Germany; beyond that he had no ideas, he was inaccessible to
ideas; his mind never rose for a recorded instant above a
bumpkin's elaborate cunning. And he was the most influential man
in the world, in the whole world, no man ever left so deep a mark
on it, because everywhere there were gross men to resonate to the
heavy notes he emitted. He trampled on ten thousand lovely
things, and a kind of malice in these louts made it pleasant to
them to see him trample. No-he was no child; the dull, national
aggressiveness he stood for, no childishness. Childhood is
promise. He was survival.
'All Europe offered its children to him, it sacrificed education,
art, happiness and all its hopes of future welfare to follow the
clatter of his sabre. The monstrous worship of that old fool's
"blood and iron" passed all round the earth. Until the atomic
bombs burnt our way to freedom again…'
'One thinks of him now as one thinks of the megatherium,' said
one of the young men.
'From first to last mankind made three million big guns and a
hundred thousand complicated great ships for no other purpose but
war.'
'Were there no sane men in those days,' asked the young man, 'to
stand against that idolatry?'
'In a state of despair,' said Edith Haydon.
'He is so far off-and there are men alive still who were alive
when Bismarck died!'… said the young man…
Section 5
'And yet it may be Iam unjust to Bismarck,' said Karenin,
following his own thoughts. 'You see, men belong to their own
age; we stand upon a common stock of thought and we fancy we
stand upon the ground. I met a pleasant man the other day, a
Maori, whose great-grandfather was a cannibal. It chanced he had
a daguerreotype of the old sinner, and the two were marvellously
alike. One felt that a little juggling with time and either
might have been the other. People are cruel and stupid in a
stupid age who might be gentle and splendid in a gracious one.
The world also has its moods. Think of the mental food of
Bismarck's childhood; the humiliations of Napoleon's victories,
the crowded, crowning victory of the Battle of the Nations…
Everybody in those days, wise or foolish, believed that the
division of the world under a multitude of governments was
inevitable, and that it was going on for thousands of years more.
It WAS inevitable until it was impossible. Any one who had denied
that inevitability publicly would have been counted-oh! a SILLY
fellow. Old Bismarck was only just a little-forcible, on the
lines of the accepted ideas. That is all. He thought that since
there had to be national governments he would make one that was
strong at home and invincible abroad. Because he had fed with a
kind of rough appetite upon what we can see now were very stupid
ideas, that does not make him a stupid man. We've had advantages;
we've had unity and collectivism blasted into our brains. Where
should we be now but for the grace of science? I should have been
an embittered, spiteful, downtrodden member of the Russian
Intelligenza, a conspirator, a prisoner, or an assassin. You, my
dear, would have been breaking dingy windows as a suffragette.'
'NEVER,' said Edith stoutly…
For a time the talk broke into humorous personalities, and the
young people gibed at each other across the smiling old
administrator, and then presently one of the young scientific men
gave things a new turn. He spoke like one who was full to the
brim.
'You know, sir, I've a fancy-it is hard to prove such
things-that civilisation was very near disaster when the atomic
bombs came banging into it, that if there had been no Holsten and
no induced radio-activity, the world would have-smashed-much as
it did. Only instead of its being a smash that opened a way to
better things, it might have been a smash without a recovery. It
is part of my business to understand economics, and from that
point of view the century before Holsten was just a hundred
years' crescendo of waste. Only the extreme individualism of that
period, only its utter want of any collective understanding or
purpose can explain that waste. Mankind used up
material-insanely. They had got through three-quarters of all
the coal in the planet, they had used up most of the oil, they
had swept away their forests, and they were running short of tin
and copper. Their wheat areas were getting weary and populous,
and many of the big towns had so lowered the water level of their
available hills that they suffered a drought every summer. The
whole system was rushing towards bankruptcy. And they were
spending every year vaster and vaster amounts of power and energy
upon military preparations, and continually expanding the debt of
industry to capital. The system was already staggering when
Holsten began his researches. So far as the world in general went
there was no sense of danger and no desire for inquiry. They had
no belief that science could save them, nor any idea that there
was a need to be saved. They could not, they would not, see the
gulf beneath their feet. It was pure good luck for mankind at
large that any research at all was in progress. And as I say,
sir, if that line of escape hadn't opened, before now there might
have been a crash, revolution, panic, social disintegration,
famine, and-it is conceivable-complete disorder… The
rails might have rusted on the disused railways by now, the
telephone poles have rotted and fallen, the big liners dropped
into sheet-iron in the ports; the burnt, deserted cities become
the ruinous hiding-places of gangs of robbers. We might have been
brigands in a shattered and attenuated world. Ah, you may smile,
but that had happened before in human history. The world is still
studded with the ruins of broken-down civilisations. Barbaric
bands made their fastness upon the Acropolis, and the tomb of
Hadrian became a fortress that warred across the ruins of Rome
against the Colosseum… Had all that possibility of reaction
ended so certainly in 1940? Is it all so very far away even
now?'
'It seems far enough away now,' said Edith Haydon.
'But forty years ago?'
'No,' said Karenin with his eyes upon the mountains, 'I think you
underrate the available intelligence in those early decades of
