The Fall of the House of Heron (Prologue Science Fiction)

by Eden Phillpotts

  Sir Hector listened with his usual tolerance.

  “That clears the contention, Faraday,” he answered. “if any real contention exists. I knew, of course, you were a freethinker and should be the last to deny your right to be one. I differ from free thought but do not quarrel with it. But if faith lacks what you call reason, how much the more narrow and purblind is the reason that lacks faith and finds itself unable to accept the miracles of revealed religion and the eternal truth that comes as a direct message and ordinance from God to man. Banish revelation and what remains to lead us through the darkness? What substitute shall science ever discover to guide civilization and direct human progress?”

  “I’m glad you asked that question, Father,” replied the young man, “and I’ll answer it to-morrow morning, not to-night. I want a chat before I go back to the hospital and I know you’ll spare me time for it after breakfast. Then, if you please, we’ll push on from this point and perhaps I shall have the luck to interest you.”

  “You always interest me, boy, and I dare say I can guess what’s in your mind. Indeed, the time is coming when it will be in my mind too,” answered the elder. “What it may have to do with a proper composition between religion and science, no doubt you will tell me.”

  “I’ll try — to-morrow,” promised Faraday, and soon afterwards he left them on the plea of some nocturnal reading. He did not play games and was not known to have any recreation.

  Faraday’s family discussed him after he had gone. None had seen him for a year and not one of them could record any indication of a change.

  “I feel sorry for him in a way,” said Greta. “He has the anxious, miserable look of a genius on his face sometimes. One saw such a number of young men at Cambridge who looked like that — hungering for something or other — and I’d often wonder what was driving them, where they wanted to get to and whether they ever would.

  “He lives for science, not himself,” she continued. “We went for a walk yesterday and he said that all the really fruitful and precious tasks calling for science were neglected because we would not set research first in our ideals. He thinks that many purposes to which we put public money are sickening and utterly wasteful, while channels crying for exploration promise immense advantages to civilization but cannot be pursued for lack of funds.”

  “He has sounded me on that subject as a general principle,” Sir Hector told them, “and admits that the money necessary is very considerable. I have heard about these things elsewhere and it seems to be agreed by thoughtful people that much remains to be worth doing for experimental science. But those in a position to find big money, like myself, for the most part, if so disposed, turn to more immediate and practical giving. No doubt many questions of science ask to be answered, but whether the capital necessary before an answer can be reached may not be put to more immediate and valuable uses, the rich and benevolent must decide for themselves.”

  “When you think what we do with our new discoveries and inventions, you feel sometimes that we have less to thank science for than Faraday imagines,” said Greta and her father agreed with her. Then Alfred made a suggestion.

  “If he could only conduct his life like other people, get some fun out of it and find what really matters is so much better than his frozen way of living,” he said. “If he could go in for some sport, or fall in love, for instance, he’d see like a shot what it really was to be alive and worth fighting for.”

  His sister laughed and Sir Hector spoke.

  “Youth is apt to be self-centred,” he declared, “but not usually in a manner so cold-blooded as Faraday. He entertains the clearest ideas as to where he wants to get to, I fancy, and looks amazingly far ahead. But education shouldn’t teach young people to put such complete trust in themselves. To conduct your existence from within is a mistake. You should seek the scaffolding for what you hope to build from without. We cannot spin our webs, like spiders, from inside ourselves, or conduct our planning without the moral support religion has to offer. So I found it, and never a man owed more to his faith on heaven and human nature than have I.”

  “You had the art to win trust by giving trust, Father,” said Greta. “You have believed in the goodness and honour of people so completely that they would have been ashamed to disappoint you. Faraday is not very quick to trust people unless they are men of science.”

  “He feels his existence to be in a flux,” explained her father. “As yet no solid ground lies under his feet and no notice-boards appear upon his path which he is prepared to heed. He has yet to learn that we cannot trespass upon holy ground without danger.”

  “He denies there is any such a thing as holy ground,” said Greta. “Nothing is sacred to science and, if you don’t believe in spiritual mandates of any sort, then, of course, nothing can be sacred at all. He’d only say that what we call ‘revelation’ was a mirage to blind you to truth.”

  “He’s keen about money, though,” suggested Alfred. “That seems to be his only weakness as far as I can see. Yet you wouldn’t think a man would bank on science if he cared twopence for money. Let’s pray he’ll fall in love: that would clear the course for him.”

  “He’ll never do that,” said Greta. “I’ve often thought the same thought about him and tried to picture the girl he could fall in love with, or the girl who could fall in love with him.”

  “I can picture her,” declared Alfred. “The sort of calculating girl who would recognize that Faraday was going to be an almighty swell some day. She would take him for future reflected fame and, if brilliant herself, be really useful to him. But he’s too much in love with science to fall in love with a girl I’m afraid. He’s a sexless chap, really.”

  “He shows no genuine love for men and women so far,” admitted Faraday’s father, “yet I have heard him say things that indicated a sort of vague regard for humanity as a whole. Never individuals, but the mass. It doesn’t, however, amount to much and his indifference shows something wrong in his outlook as yet.”

  “Nature displays it, Father,” said Greta.

  “Nature is beside the question,” he answered. “Nature is beyond our good and evil, or any line of conduct we may arrive at; but no man can operate outside our standards with impunity. Knowledge — Knowledge — Alas for the knowledge that brings with it neither pity nor good willing. Such a man, given a fine intellect, becomes a menace, as we have seen great statesmen and dictators in human affairs. To be a tyrant you must be created with certain terrible defects and I should mourn to discover any evidence of them in Faraday. He does not wear his heart on his sleeve, but we have no right to declare he lacks a heart.”

  “Even though it certainly does not beat for us,” laughed Alfred.

  “In a queer way he does show glimpses of a heart sometimes,” declared Greta. “He is not sentimental, heaven knows, but I have seen a sort of ghost of compassion in his eyes — not for man, woman or child, but for unconscious things. He’ll shrug his shoulders at the sound of a distant shot that means death to a partridge, or pheasant. I saw him once, though he didn’t know it, look into the eyes of a trapped rat and frown. I thought he was going to set the creature free, but he didn’t do that — too reasonable: he killed it and put the poor thing out of its troubles. In the woods he actually regretted that one of the great spruces was marked for the woodman’s axe. But I never heard him sympathize with human woe in his life. He deplores our terrible low average of brain power, but never the suffering it brings to us.”

  “He lacks compassion,” agreed Sir Hector, “but has not as yet to my observation uttered any harsh censure or inhuman judgment. But he is impatient of common sense, as dreamers are apt to be. To the highly imaginative, common sense is often an irritant poison.”

  “I don’t think Faraday has much imagination,” suggested Greta. “Truth is the boundary that hems him in. Naked truth frightens imagination away. But it’s idle really to waste time trying to get to the bottom of him. He may be a very commonplace person really.”
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br />   “No,” decided her father. “You can’t get round the problem of our Faraday that way. For good or ill he has a spark of genius and, be that as it may, to-morrow I hope to advance our inquiries and hear a little more to illuminate them before he’s off again.”

  CHAPTER II

  FARADAY dismissed his father’s unanswered question briefly next morning, for the reason that he was now largely concerned with his own affairs.

  “Touching last night, I’m afraid we can only agree to differ, Father,” he began. “Your faith is built on certain static foundations which do not permit of scientific verification and so won’t satisfy us. But since you cannot sacrifice your foundations and we are unable to trust them, we must each follow his own road and leave time to prove which leads to more truth and the increased happiness and progress of mankind.

  “And that,” he continued, “brings me to what I want to tell you. I have reached a point now when I had to make a tremendous choice: not between different theories of truth, but between two branches of science. With one I have been so far occupied and now, after a pretty deep contention, have decided to abandon it and devote the rest of my life to another. Don’t think, however, that this is a foolish fad. From the very first I never felt to regard medicine as my ultimate goal and, for the last ten years, while valuing the wisdom, the discipline and training I have won through it and the purely scientific attitude of mind it has created for me, I feel this is not enough. Now I want to join the pioneers and devote my brains to inquiry, experiment and research, where in my opinion lies still concealed the real road that waits to be discovered.”

  Sir Hector regarded his son blankly.

  “Go on — finish,” he said.

  “I feel very deeply about this, of course, or I should not bother you with myself for a moment,” promised Faraday, his eyes on his father; “but if ever I had a clear picture of what is awaiting us, it is now — something that to me is probably what your eternal verities are to you. I believe that the time is ripe for tremendous advances and that we may be fast approaching another milestone on the road to truth. And far greater minds than mine are already on the road to it. Mysterious discoveries await us, Father, and they might hold the key to much happiness for the human race. We have struggled, step by step through the ages of Stone and Bronze, of Iron and Darkness to the sunshine of the Golden Ages — through the ages of steam and electricity, to the age of the air, where we now claim to be; and soon, we may find ourselves the inheritors of a future age which science approaches. There is sometimes a long era between these distinctive periods and sometimes a short one. Our activities on the air were swiftly turned to good purpose, for we learned to fly in it and also discovered the Hertzian rays, so that we could speak to each other round the equator and from pole to pole; but there is something greater yet waiting for us, and men like Professor Rutherford are on the very threshold of it. Therefore, I want to join those engaged in storming that threshold and be among the destined to enter, where may yet await us something so tremendous and almighty that it will throw open the doors to a changed world, confound all our old values and advance our eternal quest of truth.”

  Nothing but deep doubt clouded his father’s face.

  “Have you done?” he asked.

  “Very nearly, Father,” answered Faraday. “You see we have discovered vast natural energies one after another and tamed them, one by one, to our needs and our huge advantage. So future energies yet awaiting us are to be welcomed, not feared. That is a great point. Had I dreaded this tremendous venture I might have been content to remain a physician all my life; but I am convinced we have reached a standpoint in human knowledge and reasoning powers where any immense new phenomena will be measured from the outset and controlled as carefully as we control earlier discoveries: things we call the laws of Nature.”

  “What have such laws to do with human happiness?” asked Sir Hector. “The law of gravitation continues to break human necks and destroy human life, though we have discovered it.”

  Faraday ignored this diversion.

  “No matter for that,” continued his father. “Now let me speak and get your present position clear. I had thought you were going to ask me about your own future. I imagined the time was come when you would wish to go into practice and, fortified by your splendid degrees and your house-physicianship — which amounts to another degree in itself — you were now going to ask me for an increased income and whether I was prepared, either to buy you a practice, or see you start work in Harley Street with me behind you to leave your mind free from petty questions, as I have done all your life, and so enable you to continue with every energy and endowment devoted to your profession. And now you tell me that your design is to abandon your profession for the jack o’ lantern business of research and waste ten years that you have devoted to the noblest and sanest occupation in reach of any young man with brains.”

  “Not wasted, Father. Please don’t say, or imagine any such thing,” begged Faraday. “I have gained enormously in a thousand ways by my introduction to the life of a scientist. It has taught me method, given me wide knowledge and furnished me with a sense of proportion and exactitude and understanding of Nature’s ways. I shall be putting all that I have learned to good purpose and I am starting on no jack o’ lantern adventure, but on a road, as I said before, already followed by very great scientists — a road that may lead us many strides forward and reorient the whole human outlook.”

  “Such progress, if God so wills, must come gradually through the advance of evolution,” said Sir Hector. “In evolution I believe as much as you do; but there are no short cuts in Nature and they will not be made by the activities of human chemists, or alchemists, or mistaken savants, who squander their lives trying to find elixirs, or attempting to turn lead into gold. My own instincts are all against this probing and burrowing into the secrets of Nature. You say you are about to abandon medicine and you very well know what I think about that. But you would not have unveiled your intentions without a purpose. What is it? You are a very clever man, but not, I should judge, capable of discoveries destined to hasten the progress of evolution. What do you propose to do?”

  “That will depend upon you; but I’m afraid your attitude makes it look as if the decision is to be made at once,” answered his son. “I had hoped that you would be on my side and enable me to fit out my own laboratory and work alone, of course, keeping in close touch with other physicists engaged in the same work; but if you feel averse from doing that, I can join up where I shall be very welcome and enlist under one of the swells. To start as I should like to start would require a lot of money. Speaking generally, I should love to see some of the millions this nation spends devoted to scientific research and so poured out for healthier and saner purposes than are supported at present. You are tremendously rich and amazingly generous, too; but, from my angle of vision, you waste hundreds of thousands on old causes and vested interests that were far better starved to death. That, of course, is no business of mine and if you don’t feel my future ambitions worthy of support, then I must pursue them without your help, Father.”

  Sir Hector pulled up his riding-boots. He had dressed in pink this morning and was going with Alfred to a meet of hounds in half an hour.

  “I am certainly quite unprepared to subsidize a big laboratory that you may spend the rest of your life searching for something that probably doesn’t exist,” he said. “What do you expect to find and how can you assume that it will advance the welfare of the world at large even if you do find it?”

  The younger answered with one of his rare, wintry smiles.

  “Franklin is my hero, just as Michael Faraday is yours, Father,” he replied. “Franklin loved research and was interested in every form of it. On the subject of balloons he spent much time and thought and, when somebody asked him ‘What is the use of balloons?’ he answered, ‘What is the use of a new-born baby?’ The good of anything depends on what we make of it in the long run; but science is only c
oncerned with new truth, not the use we make of a new truth.”

  “And is quite likely to discover new truths which faulty mankind will apply to evil rather than good. Many of your new truths are open to question. One sees much to give one pause in the world,” replied Sir Hector. “We can seek at least to educate our babies into usefulness, but science, in the shape of the motor car, slaughters our babies by the thousand annually on their way to school.”

  “Not science, Father: our idiotic inability to regulate the pace of motor cars,” answered Faraday. “If science were permitted to make the laws governing motor traffic, you’d find a very different state of things. There may come a time when science will think twice before trusting laymen with its secrets, any more than we trust an imbecile, or an infant, with a box of matches.”

  His father rose to end the interview.

  “I must be on my way,” he said. “It’s a five-mile ride to the meet. I’m sorry I cannot pleasure you, or find the money you want; but I do not refuse out of any disappointment at your intentions, though I feel very great disappointment. I’ve given you a thousand a year ever since you were qualified to practise medicine and I shall go on doing so; but am not-disposed to furnish large capital that you may gamble with it on doubtful research. In my view science must be controlled. Any existence under the heel of science might well prove as free of liberty and self-respect as the socialists themselves would wish it to be — and doubtless will make it when they get the chance. Good-bye, Faraday, and I hope you may find time to come and see me and my gardens again during next pring. You have never beheld the beauties of Cliff in May and June since you were a youngster and I should not like to think the love of natural beauty was left out of you.”