“And I hope you burn and freeze in hell!” muttered Jimmy, as his old enemy prepared to depart.
“And now,” said John, turning after Kaydick had gone, “you shall hear us. Will you speak first, Henry?”
The sombre heavy figure stirred, then put down the cigar, almost as if he were performing a symbolic act. But Andrea spoke first, rising hurriedly.
“Father,” she said faintly, “may I go? I’m sorry—but all this—now when it’s really here—I feel——”
“Yes, Andrea my dear,” he told her, “off you go.”
“Wait,” said John, rather sharply for him, turning his queer blind gaze on her. And Malcolm, his own blood stopping, saw her falter and blench. “What is in your heart, Andrea?”
“Oh!—let her go, John,” said his brother impatiently, and then waited until she had gone, the man stationed at the door opening it for her carefully. Malcolm breathed again.
“You think we’re mad,” said Henry heavily, addressing himself chiefly to Malcolm, probably because it was not long since they had talked together. “Well, we’re not. And we’re only doing what we are doing after many years of careful consideration. But I’ll speak for myself. I’m a man of business, of affairs, of action, and a very successful one. I began with many advantages, as you probably know, and I’ve improved on those advantages. There aren’t many things I couldn’t buy, even in these times. I can look at life not from the bottom, as a poor failure, but from the top, as a man of wealth and power, not kicked about the world but treated everywhere with respect. I don’t know what life’s always been like—I don’t pretend to have much imagination and I’ve never been interested in the past—but I say that as it is here and now life’s not worth having. It isn’t even for me, let alone the millions of poor devils who wonder where the next loaf of bread’s coming from, who sweat their guts out just continuing to exist and feel more misery. I’ve struck many a balance, not only with my own life but with hundreds of other people’s, and there’s always a debit, way down on the side of anxiety and disappointment and suffering and despair. They talk a lot about love, for instance, but even that only takes away your guard, leaves you wide open, to suffer not only for yourself but for somebody else, as I’ve seen twice in my own life. Then again, we may be inventive but we can’t grow up fast enough to use our inventions properly. I’ve gone over all the systems of production and distribution they try or clamour for, and not one of them represents a single grain in contentment and happiness. There’s always a snag that was forgotten. There’s always the iron law of diminishing returns. And the more there are of us in the world, the more anxiety and discontent and fear and misery. I pondered for years how to make the best use of my money. Patching people up in hospitals so that they’ll have more pain later on? Colleges where they teach the poor young devils to want more than they can ever get? Then I saw that the best thing I could do was to help put an end to it all. Why, there are millions and millions of poor fools now wondering when next they’ll have a good night’s sleep. Now, with luck, we’ll all sleep well to-morrow night.” And he gave a final shrug of his heavy shoulders.
Malcolm stared at him, his mind racing but finding no exact words to utter in protest. “It’s all so twisted,” he stammered, “so wrong—deep down—not mad in the ordinary way perhaps—but—but——”
John made a gesture to stop him. “Paul?”
Paul’s brooding clever face kindled with a sort of bright malice. He gave a mocking glance towards Hooker, to whom he chiefly addressed his curt sentences. “I’m a scientist. A good one, an honest one, who’s given his life to pure knowledge. I agree with with what my brother has just told you. And of course I have my own angle too. I have a chance of performing the last and greatest experiment known to science. To release the earth’s energy to destroy—I hope in a flash—the life on it. That life, in my opinion, was an accident. Here I differ from my brother John, who has mystical views, though fortunately we agree about what will happen, must happen, to-morrow morning. I’m a materialist. What we call life is matter so arranged that it begins to think and feel. And it has no business thinking and feeling. That’s the mistake. Man or any being like him is doomed from the start. He can’t possibly find a lasting place for himself in this universe, which if it has plans are not plans for us. Out of the eternal dance and changing patterns of light and energy,” he cried, now suddenly losing his curt cold tone and speaking with passion, “mind has somehow emerged, to acquire knowledge but also to understand its own noble despair. But it can still use that knowledge for one last triumphant stroke, one supreme act of defiance, refusing to wait until its long dreary death sentence is carried out, but deliberately timing its exit, with all humanity like a Socrates, grandly destroying itself, leaving the mindless cosmos to its own damned dance of blind energies, for ever.”
Malcolm looked across at Hooker and was startled to see that long, lean, sceptical face suddenly wet with tears. Hooker did not speak but continued to look down, twisting his big capable hands, as if there had been something in this speech of Paul’s—and something, too, that deeply stirred him—to which he could find no
reply.
It was Jimmy, snorting and nearly purple with suppressed indignation, who found his voice. “Do you know what’s the matter with you?” he cried, glaring from one to the other of the three dark brothers. “Partly conceit—thinking you know it all, not admitting most of it’s above your head. And partly staying in too much, shut in a room, thinking round and round. One sharp morning’s walk, with the sun shining, would teach you more than you all know put together, if you’d only keep your mind open and let it.”
They ignored this outburst. Paul had clearly finished. John had still to begin, and apparently was in no hurry. But he made a sign, and Jimmy stopped fuming and grunting.
The strange John turned on them his unseeing amber gaze, shook his head so that the dark lock trembled on his brow, then smiled. “My brother does not realise,” he said quietly, “that he himself is but an instrument in the grasp of a power whose very existence he will not acknowledge. This universe of his, with its blind dance of atoms, is only an illusion, and all our life here is only a kind of dream, a shadow play. And we can only be bewildered by the dream and the shadows if we imagine that science can give us any true vision of reality. The measurements of a house are not the house. The reading of a man’s weight on the scales does not give you the man himself. My brother looks out through his eyes and is in despair because nowhere can he see himself, forgetting that he is behind and not in front of his own eyes. But I have looked the other way—and found God. Now all that is happening in the world has long been foretold, for God warns us. But all the nations, one by one, are turning away, some to this idol, some to that, and like the men who built Babel or mocked at Noah, in an age not unlike ours, they imagine they can live without God. But God is not mocked. And this world is now the great Babylon that was foretold in the Book of Revelation. I have prayed that no more souls of men may be born into this later and greater captivity, and as it has happened many times before, by the divine irony, my prayer has been granted and the instrument of destruction and salvation placed in my hand by the errors of my own brothers. They go to seek death. I go to seek life. And we cannot be judged by such as you, who are not proud enough to prefer death, nor wise enough to know where life is. Mad?” concluded John MacMichael calmly. “Are we, who know what it is we seek and take the shortest road to it, to be called mad, by such as you, who, like all true madmen, live in an uneasy dream of life, pursued by and pursuing shadows? I tell you——”
“You’ll tell me nothing else, you crack-pot,” bellowed Jimmy, jumping up and looking as if he were about to charge like a maddened bull. John stared calmly, but the two men, at a quick signal from Henry, came forward, pointing their guns. And even the furious Jimmy shrank from being immediately minced by those point-blank wide charges of heav
y shot.
“Well, we’ve had our say,” said Henry wearily. “Take ’em away—shove ’em in one of those little end rooms—and don’t leave ’em until morning.”
Without another word from the three brothers, they were roughly hustled away, Jimmy still shouting protests, Malcolm and Hooker subdued and silent. As they were marched along the corridor, Malcolm had no sight of Andrea, and felt it dangerous to enquire for her. Hooker looked grim, and said nothing. Jimmy muttered curses on the three they had just left. The room they were given for the night had no window in it, was not properly furnished, and appeared to have been used as a minor store-room. In the sharp light of its two naked white bulbs, they looked at one another, seeing in each other’s eyes a growing and deepening despair, a dread of the coming hours of night, and a mounting vision of mountain peaks and desert valleys, of fields and gardens, rivers and forests, little towns and great cities, the whole familiar, stupid, beloved world, already passing away; and now they did not want to talk, but sat down, huddled together, on packing-cases and piled sacks, listening to their hearts, like time-pieces of rich curdling blood, registering and ticking away the moments of Doomsday Eve.
CHAPTER TEN
DOOMSDAY—AND AFTERWARDS
It was a morning no different from the others they had lately enjoyed. Some great shadow, left over from a night of terrible dreams, ought to have darkened the earth; but there was no sign of it. Lost Lake valley lay smiling under the bright sun and the flawless azure of the sky; the peaks to the west, in full light, glistened and shone, as if crammed with precious stones and metals, and those to the east, not yet facing the sun, wore plum-coloured shadows; the yellow cottonwoods trembled a little in the breeze; the distant sandy floor of the valley began to shimmer; and the air was very sweet and fresh, still with a cool sparkle in it. A few horses and cattle stirred in the narrow pastures. Now and then a red cardinal or a blue jay turned and flashed above the mesquite or among the grim tangle of the Joshua trees. Very high, one of the great birds of prey lazily circled in the blue. The place looked almost the same as usual. There had been no invasion from a terrified world; no cars filled with armed men tearing up the valley, or warplanes roaring down from the distant sky. If the messages to the broadcasting offices, last night, had been handed to the people in charge, then those people had merely laughed too, and may perhaps have passed on the information to the editors of the news service as a possible humorous little fill-up if they should happen to be short of items. If any outsiders had heard the news of the attempt and had taken it seriously, then they had not heard it in time to set out and arrive before the hour; which is not surprising, because Lost Lake was very remote and hard to reach. But a number of the brethren from the Coast, driving all night, were already here, and were now congregated on the hill-side, in small prayerful groups, like others of their kind before them, in this Western land, who had gone out to the hills to await the end of the world. The only difference was, as Hooker grimly pointed out to his two companions, as they too were taken up the hill-side, that whereas those other groups of fanatical believers had vainly looked for some miraculous piece of destruction, these were privileged to be on the spot where it was to be attempted. The two men who had been told to watch Malcolm and his two friends had been most formidably zealous, and even now, within half an hour of the appointed time, were still watching them, ready with their shot-guns. There had not been the smallest chance of escape, and there was none now. Other men, perhaps twenty altogether, and also armed, were posted round the tower.
Malcolm, staring out of heavy hot eyes, saw all three brothers now make their appearance on the platform of the tower; and though it was several hundred yards away, he could see that John was wearing some kind of white robe. But where was Andrea? He had not seen her, nor had any word from her, since she left the music room last night. Jimmy thought she must have been caught telephoning, and have been locked up somewhere. Malcolm kept staring from the tower to the house itself in the hope of catching a glimpse of her. He now saw that Henry and Paul MacMichael were no longer on the tower platform, and Hooker muttered that they must have gone below, where the great electrical apparatus was housed. John, a clear figure in his white robe, was now standing higher than he had been before, and had obviously mounted a small rostrum. To Malcolm’s astonishment, John’s voice suddenly came booming out to them all on the hillside: he must be using a powerful loud-speaker.
“Kneel down,” the voice commanded, “and give me your thoughts, for now I will pray.”
“I suppose we might as well too,” muttered Hooker.
“I’ve done plenty of praying already,” said Jimmy gloomily, “but a bit more won’t do me any harm.”
All the brethren, some of them already in a highly emotional state, were kneeling, and even the guards contrived a sort of compromise between prayer and sentry-duty, by dropping down on one knee and perhaps, as Malcolm could not help thinking, by keeping only one eye open. Malcolm had reached that queer exhausted condition in which a person wants either to cry or to giggle and is not certain which and swings idiotically between the two. But now he knelt, like the others, and tried to shut his ears and mind to what John was crying through the loud-speaker and to pray to another and less vengeful God than the one John invoked, not some jealous monster invented by fierce old Israelites who had spent their lives fighting for waterholes in the burning desert, a terrible patriarch of the tribe, but a patient and tolerant and infinitely wise Creator who had known ages ago that man was foolish and slow to learn and yet somehow gradually struggled upwards out of the slime. As he struggled to present before his mind some image of this Creator, he felt a sudden rush of somebody near him and then a warm sweet neighbouring presence. It was Andrea.
“I did telephone last night,” she whispered, “but it was awfully difficult and the man seemed all confused—it was hard to make him understand but I think he did in the end. But what can he do? Oh—Malcolm—what can we do? And I know now how wrong it’s all been.” She was terribly contrite.
“Never mind,” he whispered, very close to her ear, and putting an arm round her as she knelt beside him. “Are you frightened, Andrea?”
“Not much now, darling. It’s no longer quite real. You’re real—and being out here in the sun with you—that’s real. But not the rest of it.”
The high priest of the strange ceremony now temporarily concluded his prayer and left them to their meditations, which gave Malcolm a chance to tell Jimmy what had happened.
“He’s probably spent the last twelve hours trying to persuade people he’s not off his nut,” Jimmy said mournfully. “And he’s not the right sort of chap to do it. But who would be, with this packet to handle? Even me—and I’ve seen it coming and been damnably mixed up in it for days—even me—why, I feel half barmy. It just can’t be true. He’ll give the signal, and we’ll all wake up somewhere else.”
“If half of what he told me last night is true,” said Hooker grimly, “and unless somebody manages to interfere, there’ll be no waking up, unless it’s in heaven.”
There were strange cries, half mournful, half ecstatic, from the believers, for the most part simply-dressed middle-aged men and women, huddled together on the hill-side. They terrified Andrea, and rather frightened Malcolm, who began to talk to her quickly; while Jimmy and Hooker, whom the cries simply seemed to anger, glared across at the emotional brethren.
“Blast ’em!” muttered Jimmy. “What a crowd to go popping off with! And why didn’t I remember to send a message by Charlie to Rosalie Atwood?”
“Who’s she, Mr. Edlin?” asked Andrea, who could still be curious even on this doomsday morning. “I think that man said something about her.”
“She and I sort of started in this business together,” said Jimmy, “and if everybody’s going to go off—bang!—then I wish to God she was here with me, to see the finish of it together. There’s one grand li
ttle woman.”
“Were you going to marry her?”
“That I don’t know,” he replied gloomily, “and the less we talk about such things, it seems to me, the better. What’s the use? And I thought Charlie might have tried something, but they’ve probably got him in a strait-jacket and a padded cell by now.” But anxiously he searched the sky and listened for some sign of poor old Bendy.
“It’s ten minutes of ten,” said Hooker, with a fine appearance of being casual.
John MacMichael was now asking them to pray with him again, for the last time, and all his followers, with shouts and groans, threw themselves down and put up their clasped worn hands. And the sun still smiled out of a bright empty sky. Andrea gripped and squeezed Malcolm’s hand until it hurt. Hooker kept glancing from the tower to his watch. Jimmy stared angrily into the western blue.
“Let us now depart in peace, O Lord, from this earth, which is altogether lost in evil, to a new earth,” cried the voice from the tower, “an earth that is another Eden straight from Thy hand, where Thy word shall be fulfilled and we shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more—”
“Listen!” cried Jimmy. And as they listened, they heard, cutting through the voice from the tower, the sound of an approaching plane. They looked over the western hills, from which the sound came, and after a few moments the plane itself could be seen making straight towards them at a high speed. Before the prayer was ended, it had come roaring above the valley.
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