Wyndham Smith

by S. Fowler Wright

  To the first proposal of universal euthanasia there were few who had responded with a more ready affirmative than had Vinetta (a name which, individual and with no following numerals, proclaimed her, in spite of the recognition of her intellectual status, as outcast among her kind), which is not surprising in consideration of the life of watchful repression which had been hers since, as a child of three, she had overheard the remark of a female keeper: “That’s the one, if you ask me; the little misborn girl.”

  From that hour she had moved and spoken in cautious dread lest some development of character, even some trick of gesture, might betray her, as having been that of the mother whom, with a growing confidence, she believed to have been her own. For who could say that the doom which had been suspended before might not still fall upon her, if her development should appear to supply sufficient evidence of the parent from whom she came? Her own destruction, and the release of her companions from disabilities which were not justly theirs, might have been considered measures of an equal and obvious equity.

  So she had moved, watchful, imitative, among the tepid emotions of aimless, emulationless, dreadless surrounding lives, till the hints of her unwary childhood were forgotten or negatived by the restraints and repressions of later years. Saved from sourness or malignity of temper by a nature which would have been buoyant, joyous, adventurous, in more normal circumstances, her thoughts were yet darkened by the bitter knowledge of her mother’s murder, and by a mental aloofness, half hatred and half contempt, towards the civilization which she had entered through no legal door.

  Of all the millions who were united in passive recognition of the fact that their uncoloured lives had drifted into a calm that was worse than wreck, she may have been the only woman whose heart beat hard at times with a rebellion she dared not show. She assented at once to the Colpeck project, not as thinking it a gesture by which the Creator must take rebuke, but rather as one which He would accept with the same willingness as herself, and with entire approval of the self-judgment by which the human race had saved Him the trouble of staging their appropriate end.

  When Wyndham Smith had proposed his second objection to the resolution, her heart had leaped to a sudden hope, which might, in a different environment, have given birth to incautious words. But she was saved from that by the custom which discouraged unpondered speech, and by the repressions of two decades.

  The quick hope had died as she had silently recognized the absence of response among those around her, and then—at last had leaped again to the flame of wild audacity of which she saw that she must not give the faintest sign. Inwardly she congratulated herself on the wisdom of her earlier silence, for it was clear that the resolution would only have been accepted in the form in which it was finally passed with the certain confidence that one man alone would elect to live—even if he would do so after considering the solitude which would be before him, with the discomforts which his isolation would inevitably involve.

  She did not dare to look up the table to Wyndham Smith, lest their eyes should meet and her glance betray to others the emotions she must not show. She sat passive, with downcast eyes, striving to isolate herself in her own thoughts, and as she reflected thus there came a doubt, and a quietening fear.

  Welcome as the proposal had been, gladly as she would have accepted the adventure of living in the old dangerous, doubtful ways, she did not like the direction from which it came. She had a special aversion, not to this Colpeck alone, but to the whole Colpeck clan. It was a Colpeck who had been active in the investigation which had exposed her mother’s escapade, and another Colpeck who had proposed the verdict by which she died. It was peculiarly the Colpeck policies, the Colpeck attitude, which had brought her race to this point from which it sought escape by the road of death. Passion towards an individual, either of hate or love, she had been taught to regard as a vulgar criminality such as had long ceased to degrade her kind. But she knew herself to have many criminal impulses which she dared not show. Her existence was an impropriety in itself. She had the lawless mind, the unnatural emotions of a sixth child: she had the blood of one who had played the outlaw among her kind.

  Now she thought to make secret approach to the one man who refused the wisdom of all his race, and, in doing this, to flout their will, even as her mother had done before, and as he had no purpose to do. What he did—whether he should stand out, or cease to oppose that which he could not stay—would be done with the permission of all. What she would propose to him would be to make derision of the gesture of refusal which they had planned to make in the face of God, so that it might rouse no more than derisive laughter in the Heaven which they defied.

  Like her mother, she would declare lonely war upon the will and wisdom of all her kind, but now in a larger way, by which she might defeat the settled purpose of all. Was it to this great end that she was born, and that her mother had sinned? But—what would a Colpeck say? Might he not decline the offer with horror or contempt? She felt that this was what the Colpeck who was fourth in the intellectual order—the Colpeck of yesterday—would be likely to do. He was not one to condone anything of a lawless kind. And she felt that he disliked and distrusted in his tepid way, as she disliked him with the pulse of a freer blood. She wished it had been almost any but he. But—the Colpeck of yesterday? He had seemed somewhat different in the last hour. And then she remembered—and it was then that she was aware of a sharp fear—where the difference lay, she knew that the hours of sleep of the coming night were to see the reversal of the operation of the night before. The ego of the primitive man which now ruled over the Colpeck brain would be restored to the savage from whom it came, and he would be returned to his own time, with no more than the vexation of a dream that he could not clearly recall. The restored Colpeck ego would be able to review the memory of what he had thought and said today, but would he approve and adopt? It was doubtful—or it might be said that it was less likely than that. It was an improbable thing. Vinetta went to her own room with sombre and thoughtful eyes.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Wyndham Smith—or let us say the body that had been his when he walked in another world—paced with a restless impotence the limits of that confining room, which it seemed that those who would visit him could enter or leave at will, but which met him at every point with smooth, impenetrable walls, through which he could find no breach.

  He knew—for he had been told, and he half believed—that he was no more than the one-day occupant of a body that was not his; that this strange-seeming environment was his familiar home; and the memories, that seemed so natural and so near, were no more than those of an alien ego, which himself had never experienced, and which tomorrow would be outside his knowledge or recollection, when he should have resumed control of his native body and brain.

  He half believed—indeed, more than half—for his memory revealed that which had been spoken in this same room on the previous night, when it had been Wyndham Smith himself who had listened and made response. And, beyond that, he was conscious of some discords of feeling and judgment, some reluctances of his own ego to accept the explosive standards of life and conduct which were approved by the brain which he now controlled. Without knowledge or memory of the life of the world which was round him now, he felt, though he was debarred from its actual contact or sight, that he would control the body of Wyndham Smith to somewhat different purposes than those which had produced the accumulated experiences of which he was conscious now. He was roused from these thoughts by a woman’s voice.

  “I suppose,” it said, “you do not know who I am?”

  He turned to see a girl’s form, with a face the beauty of which was saddened by a shadow of self-restraint, even of self-repression, but was yet serene, as being assured of its own efficiency to meet the challenge of life in whatever form. The shadow was not one that would have been seen except by one who looked with the eyes of another world. “No,” he said, with a slow deliberation, “I do not know you at all.”

&nbs
p; “So,” she said, speaking as slowly as he had done, though from a different cause, for she was using language which was strange to her, and she saw that the error of but one word might be fatal to all she hoped—“so I supposed it would be. Yet you know enough to guess that you may have seen me with other eyes.”

  “Yes, I can guess that.”

  “Yet” she went on, “it is as strangers that we must meet now. Do you think me one who would be likely to lie?”

  He weighed the slow gravity of her speech with such wits as he had, and in the light of the experiences of Wyndham Smith in another world. He looked into eyes of a very clear grey, under darker brows, which it would be easier to love than to disbelieve.

  “No,” he said, “I do not think you would lie.”

  “Then I can say that which would give life to me, and, it may be, also to you. Do you wish to die, either in your own body, or in that which you now wear?”

  “No,” he said, “I would rather live.” In the body of Wyndham Smith there could be no doubt about that.

  “Then if you will listen to me, you may both live, as may I. I should warn you first that you must not mention that I have been here, from whatever cause. It would be fatal to me, and to that body to which you may return at your next sleep, nor could I say what result it would have to that in which you are now. But I tell you that which must be known by the brain which you now rule, for its use at a later time.”

  She went on in clear, careful, unemotional words, and with an economical brevity of explanation that allowed no obtrusive detail to obscure the outline of that which she had to say. She told of the conditions of life in her own world, and the despair which had risen at last into a common resolve to end the appalling quiet of its stormless seas. She told of how the ego which had belonged to the body of Wyndham Smith had inspired that into which it had been transferred to a rejection of what would else have been no less than the universal will. She told of other things which it is needless to detail here.

  She said at last, “What I must ask you is this, and you must know that the choice is yours, for I will have nothing done by a trick, or against your will. Would you retain the body you now have, or resume that which was yours till the last hour, of which I have told you all that I can in a little space? And before you answer that, I would show you my own fear that if you should return to the brain and body you had before, you may lack the resolution to take the hard path of continuing life, which it is my purpose to share.”

  “I do not think you need fear that.”

  “Yet I do; and, if you feel that you love life, you may fear it for yourself. For you must consider that you had no will to make stand against the common resolve, when you had that body before.”

  The Colpeck ego that was in the body of Wyndham Smith considered this. He could not think that he would embrace death in a needless way; yet the argument had a force that he could not deny, and he would be fool indeed if he should ask his return to a body that lacked courage to guard the existence he valued now. And he thought that, whether this were a real danger or not, it was a transfer of very doubtful advantage to him. Now that he had the knowledge and memories that were Wyndham Smith’s, he knew that he had a good life, and one to be guarded with care, even though it might have its pains, its perils, its frustrations and toils. The alternative of a time which had become so barren of pain and grief that men had come to an end of joy would have had little allure, even without the further knowledge that this life was, at the best, to be cast aside for an experimental solitary reversion to more primitive things.

  “I am content,” he said, “to be where I am, and to go thus to the backward days, if you can bring it to that.”

  Vinetta was glad to hear him say that, for it took her forward a short way on her chosen road, but she was not greatly surprised, and she knew that the part that was still ahead was of a more dangerous kind, and might be far harder to win.

  “I can promise nothing,” she said; “for it must be arranged, if at all, so that he will also agree, to whom I must go now. I must talk to him in a straight way, as I have done here, and what I offer he may refuse and perhaps denounce. But I shall not be easy to thwart, for I try for a stake which is great to me, being a better life than I thought ever to have, besides that it will bring that which my mother did to a great end, such as she would have been glad to foresee.

  “As for you, if I fail, you will know well enough, when those who have charge will come to put you to sleep as they did before; but if I succeed, I suppose that you may go to sleep when you next will; and, beyond that, you will know nothing at all.”

  Having said that, she went, with no further words or regard for him whom she left behind, with whom she had no concern, whether for evil or good. Except that she had a bitter thought: “He is Colpeck still, in whatever body he be, it is all one; and he had no liking for me, for the dream that we two might have been as one in a world alone, though it stirred (in a faint way) the body which another ego had ruled, left him cold of soul, as he ever was.

  “Am I the only one of my race who has living blood? And will the new ego that is in the Colpeck body today be of strength to rouse it to better ends, or will its own cowardice prevail, when he considers what may be the toils of a lonely life? Will he be glad of the offer I make, as giving comradeship, and a further hope than could be his, if they should leave him alone? Or will his brain still work in the Colpeck way, so that he will see outrage in the lawless course by which I think to mock the will of the race, and make Heaven’s jest of that which they seek to do?

  “Well, it will be soon known, and if I fail, we must all go to the common doom; for there has been enough of the life we live. They are right in that, having weighed themselves, as I think, in a true scale.”

  With these thoughts she went. As for Wyndham Smith, he waked in his bed, being aware that he had slept too long, for broad daylight was in the room.

  “I have had,” he said, “a most silly dream.”

  And, if, after that day, he was somewhat different from what he had been before, and ordered his life to more futile ends, it was no more than may often be seen, that men will change as the years go by; and there may be many reasons for that, and among them one that we do not guess.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Vinetta knew that what she did next must be at some risk to herself, but it was the path to the sole hope that she had. Nor may the risk at this stage have been very great. She had the advantage of being under no suspicion at all. Her lawless birth (which was no more than a doubt against which the odds were forty-four to one) had long ceased to be questioned, in view of the discretions of recent years. And her own vote had been given in the popular, expected direction. Nor did suspicion readily stir among those who, however intellectually eminent they might be in comparison with their contemporaries, had long ceased to be alert to the possibilities of rebellion in a world where lawless impulses had become as rare as noxious weeds in their glasshouses of husbandry.

  Her dread was less that she might be observed to seek conference with Colpeck-4XP than that she might fail to persuade him to what she would.

  She knew that the operation which would restore the twentieth-century ego to its barbarous body would be timed for eight a.m., and would involve preparations by which its subjects would be isolated for a previous hour. It was shortly after nine when she returned to her own apartment, after visiting the body of Wyndham Smith. She had chosen a time at which she had known that the routines of her own companions, which were of an absolute regularity, would secure her from observation.

  Now she would wait until ten, at which hour the ninety-nine other members of her hundred (and therefore the co-occupants of a single residence) would be engaged at their solitary meals. She was of a disposition to outrage convention, and test the quality of this alien ego, by visiting Colpeck-4XP at a time which would certainly be unobserved, but which would be considered fundamentally indecent by any human being now living, except perhaps herself—she was
less than sure of that—and, even more doubtfully, him.

  But she would try. And if he should refuse to talk under such conditions, or to be observed during the taking of food, he might, at least, understand that there must be urgent cause for such an intrusion and consent to meet her at a later hour, for which there would still be time. And that decision gave her a clear period of leisure in which to arrange her own thoughts; to face boldly her lawless desires, and the criminalities by which she contemplated their realization; and to order the arguments by which she must endeavour to win this alluringly barbarous stranger who had come into possession of Colpeck body and Colpeck brain to co-operate with her.

  And as she thought during the next hour, her mind busy with many arguments and doubts, many speculations and fears, she would have said that she was oppressed by the greatest trouble her life had known, which would be hard to deny, she being faced by the twilight of all her race, and with no more than precarious hope of avoiding the common death. Yet the fact was that she had been waked to a more vivid mood than she had known in the years behind. Life roused itself at the nearness of death, as, in those who deserve its boon, it will ever do. If she had more fear than her life had known till that hour, she had also more active hope. Fear and hope fed from the same dish, on which they equally thrived. She had more fear than when she had voted for her own end, for resignation was gone.

  There came a time when her evening meal slid on to the table, as it would ever do at the same hour, by which she knew that the time for which she waited had come.

  She must not stay to eat, though the routines of life had become so absolute that she had a puzzled wonder as to what the consequences of such abstention might prove to be. She rose at once from the pneumatic couch on which she had reclined in the relaxation of thought, and made a way to the apartment of Colpeck-4XP which no bolts obstructed, and which was independent of opening doors.