Denis learned to love the gentle, gracious people—and one smiling fair girl in particular—and it distressed him greatly that they could not visualize the benefits of modern science—“the product of a century of study and research”—that he had brought from Earth with him.
One day, one early morning, the Father (as they called the Governor) of the community in which Denis was residing, came and invited him to take a long walk with him. Denis was already up and at work trying to establish radar communication with Earth in preparation for what he hoped would be his return journey to Earth, and he was reluctant to waste time in mere walking. But so gentle was the old man and so apparently wishful for his company, Denis could not refuse him.
The Father led him through and over the low green hills that cradled the little town until they came to a dark grove of tall trees in a small, sunlit valley. They moved leisurely through the shadow of the trees. Though their journey seemed casual and almost desultory, Denis sensed before they had been long on it that it had a purpose. The Father asked many questions of Denis, especially about life on Earth, but after a while Denis realized they were merely courteous questions and the Father’s interest in the answers was not profound. Denis was, naturally, a little irked because it had been given to no one on that planet before to hear of such marvels as thinking machines, vehicular speed far surpassing that of sound, pilotless missiles finding targets across the world, space ships such as he had sailed, atomic power, hydrogen bombs with a potency undreamed of in the history of man, and the many other wonders of modern scientific research.
Meanwhile, as Denis talked, trying hard in the presence of the Father’s graciousness to conceal his annoyance, they came to a small sunny clearing in the dark of the grove.
Across the clearing stretched a long, low, many-windowed, gray-stone building. The Father led the way to the building and opened the massive wooden door with a key.
As the Father opened the door, he said, “This is what we call our Museum of Science. No one ever comes here. No one is interested. I am bringing you only because I have seen in the eyes of one of our maidens her love for you.”
I have a copy of Dan’s tale before me as I write (about this copy, more later) and what I am putting down here now is taken from it.
The Father pushed back the door and bowed Denis into the long room beyond. The building was one long room, gray-stoned on the inside as it was on the outside. The brilliant morning sunlight struck down through the windows in solid shafts that broke and spilled like water over the room’s furnishings and floor.
Denis stopped abruptly, astounded at what he saw. The room was like a large laboratory. Books, drawings, mechanical models, exhibits of all sorts were glass-enclosed on long tables that extended the length of the room. Denis’ incredulous eyes darted from one glass case to another.
“No! It can’t be!” He turned to the Father, hardly able to speak. “It’s fantastic, incredible. Your research is centuries in advance of ours! You have everything here—dreams we dared not dream are realized in this room.” He moved into the room, waved to an exhibit before him. “Look! Compared to this, my space ship, the pride of Earth, is like one of the wooden carts in your village!”
He moved farther into the room, stopped suddenly, before a table. In a glass case were colored projections of matter structure, vivid graphs, formulae.
Denis’ voice was a hoarse whisper, and now and then there was fear in his eyes. “You have the secret of complete and final fission, the disintegration of matter itself, the destruction of the Universe. Our hydrogen bomb beside it is little more than a firecracker.”
The Father spoke quietly. “I do not know much about what is here. Nor, I must confess, am I much interested.”
“You are not much interested?” Denis tried to control a sudden anger. “All this priceless knowledge—all this incredible power? I do not understand you.”
The Father nodded slowly. “I imagine it is hard for you to understand, coming from Earth as you do,” he said gently. “In ancient days, our history tells us, our scientists used to watch the people on your planet.” He looked around the room. “There is a model of the instrument somewhere here—”
“Television—interplanetary television,” Denis murmured in awe.
“I don’t know what they called it,” the Father went on. “It is because of it that we here had an idea of your language. In those ancient days—in those foolish days—we used to feel sorry for you on Earth because you were not as advanced as we in the pursuit of knowledge.”
“You—you consider the pursuit of knowledge folly?”
The Father smiled a little smile. “Folly for us, certainly.”
“But—” Denis turned back toward the room “—but here, with these discoveries we feared were impossible, with these achievements we were afraid could exist only in fantasy, you have power incredible! The triumphs possible for you approach the infinite. You can rule the Universe!”
The Father shrugged. “Would that make us happier? Our history tells us our experience is against it. Years ago when we possessed knowledge of the things you see here, we discovered they did not bring peace. They brought only hate and insatiable ambition, tension and strife and fear. Our people were constantly at war with their environment and with themselves, and, too often, with their neighbors. Somehow the concentrated pursuit of knowledge seemed usually to lead to unhappiness.
“Even in the matter of the treatment of disease where progress seemed good, it was discovered that for old diseases cured, new ones appeared, sprung usually from conflict with the false, artificial environment of our scientific world; and (this was even more serious) our people began to be body conscious and health conscious and disease conscious. If the body was improved, it was almost always at the expense of character. But worst of all, new instruments of death were devised, instruments that destroyed more, in peace as well as in war, than had been destroyed by all the plagues and famines in our history. Finally, and not too long before it would have been too late, for we were approaching that point where we very well might have destroyed the planet, all these—” he nodded to the exhibits in the room “—and allied pursuits were ruled out by law and abandoned.”
Denis was aghast. “You mean abandoned completely?”
The Father smiled again. “Even if we wanted to resume these pursuits—which is forbidden and which, happily, no one wants to resume—we could not. No one on our planet nowadays has the first idea of how to go about the study of the sciences that produced these accomplishments. We have a principle of education here: ‘Knowledge without wisdom is ruin, and knowledge without character is death.’ And on that principle is our whole system of education now founded. We discovered it is much better for our happiness that we know hidden values rather than apparent values, for that is wisdom. To know, for example, that to love an enemy makes you happy—and possibly him, too—while to hate brings you only discontent and deterioration and, often, disease, that we call wisdom. Our schools and colleges are dedicated to teaching this wisdom. They are also dedicated to the teaching of character. Kindness, we have discovered—and I know this will sound strange to you—is more important than chemistry, and humility of far greater value than higher mathematics.”
Denis looked wistfully about the room. “How long ago is it since you gave all this up?”
“A thousand years ago and a little more, as you on Earth measure time,” the Father answered quietly. “We celebrated the anniversary of the beginning of our new era not long ago.” Then, as Denis stared at him, he bowed him to the door. “Come. It is not good to stay in this mausoleum too long. Already, I imagine I feel the chill of death.”
They went out together into the sunny clearing. Denis, profoundly moved, was pensively quiet on the long walk back to the town.
That night Denis and the girl sat in the fragrant dark of her rose garden and looked up at the starry heavens. One star shone a little more brightly than the others, not much more but enough to cat
ch the eye. It was Earth.
He looked up at his former home, laughed softly.
She gave him a quick glance. “That is the first time I have heard you laugh.” She was smiling. “You sound at ease, like one of us.”
“Good,” he said. Then, after a pause, he added, “I shot my space ship back into space today.”
“No?” She stared incredulously at him.
“It is roaring wildly up there in the heavens now, going nowhere. It will burn itself out and vanish in infinitude.” He took the girl in his arms. “I am beginning to see how love might well be far more important than knowledge.”
She smiled up into his eyes. “What is knowledge?” she asked.
Chapter 6
Dan lived in a plain section of Newton not far from a streetcar line, in a conventionally designed, two-story frame house. But the design was all that was conventional about it. The moment we turned the corner into Dan’s street I saw the house and immediately I knew it had to be his. Painted a luminous yellow, topped with a roof painted a similarly luminous green, it rose flamboyantly into the gray evening rain. There was no mistaking it, standing there, an almost theatrical challenge to the coming of dark. All around the house was a luxuriant disorder of trees, flowers and vines, all already in almost summer profusion. Budding elm and maple trees and flowering lilac bushes crowded the small lawn before the house and jostled one another along the sides. The little entrance porch was thickly mantled with the dark green of a prolific trumpet vine. The house and everything near it seemed possessed of an almost bumptious vitality. It was Dan’s house, no question about that.
Henry, an aging, extraordinarily lean and erect Negro, admitted us. He was modishly casual in dark gray flannels and a white sports shirt open at the neck. Henry, I was to learn later, was an important member of Dan’s household, as important in many ways as Dan himself. Henry cooked for the house but he was in no sense of the phrase “the cook.” After Henry served the dinner he would sit in his special place at one end of the table and dine with the rest. Dan would stand at the other end of the table before the meal began and say grace, but Henry, being an unbeliever (or, so he said), would sit and merely bow his head.
Henry had a low opinion of most of Dan’s guests and missed no opportunity of expressing it.
“Henry must be excused,” Dan would always explain. “He is an agnostic, and agnostics are almost always gentlemen with fine standards of perfection. To them, we poor stumbling believers cannot but appear weaklings and, often, hypocrites. Henry always makes me ponder on the sincerity of my convictions and worry about the salvation of my soul.”
Once, when Dan was making some such apology as this, Henry, who often disputed Dan’s declarations, replied, “Mr. Dan, you just don’t want to see the truth about these people who sponge on you here. You just think, as you’re always saying, it’s wise to be foolish, and I don’t. And don’t quote Scripture to me, Mr. Dan, because I don’t believe in Scripture.”
Dan was amused. “Henry, you should know by now I’m naturally and incurably foolish, and I quote Scripture only to justify myself.” He turned to me. “Henry, unlike most agnostics, has no inclination to pride and so, of course, has no real inclination to sin, and it is hard for him to understand sinners.” Then his eyes twinkled as he added, “I’m afraid Henry has no inclination to humility, either.”
Henry was a man of many accomplishments. He played the piano by ear, and it was he who supplied the music for the group singing on Saturday nights, a regular event at the house. Dan was a great believer in singing in chorus. The success of Luther he maintained was due in great measure to his revival of the congregational hymn singing of the Medieval Church.
“We should,” Dan said, “always bear in mind Belloc’s praise of habits buried for centuries in our blood. One should, from time to time, go hunting and should, to use his words, ‘always drink some kind of fermented liquor with one’s food—and especially deeply upon great feast days; one should go on the water from time to time; and one should dance on occasions; and one should sing in chorus.’”
In Dan’s usual fashion, he followed only such of Belloc’s precepts as suited his inclinations. He passed over hunting and dancing and confined himself to those activities that were near to his heart such as the drinking of wine and, as I said, singing in chorus. The Saturday night song program ranged widely from ancient Latin hymns to barroom ballads so that, as Dan declared with a twinkle, “there would be soul exercise for all.”
Henry was also an artist of sorts and was daily making tentative sketches of illustrations for Dan’s book of stories. (That was the book Dan was going to write in the “radiant language of his immortal soul.”) The drawings were primitive flourishes in charcoal, but their childlike distortions caught in a fashion the fabulous quality of Dan’s tales. As Dan regularly introduced each new story as the one he was about to write for his book, Henry was regularly inspired to immediate creation. He worked feverishly on the sketches, determined he would not be found wanting, and the illustrations would be ready when the manuscript was ready. As time passed and Dan had not yet got around to writing his book, the many sketches, hung all over the house, gave constant assurance that the book was on its way.
Henry also fancied himself quite a cook. He read Brillat-Savarin and looked upon him as a fellow artist, and he industriously studied Escoffier. He discussed sauces endlessly. “In his sauces, the chef reveals his genius,” he told me. But where and when he practiced his art, and what sauces his genius inspired, I was never able to discover. All that I ever saw on the table at Dan’s house was beef, greens, and potatoes, and the beef was almost always roast beef. After dinner, invariably there was cheese.
Dan was similarly misleading—or misled. He boasted quite often of his palate. “God has been good to me,” he would say, “for He has made me the rarest of creatures—a gormandizer who is still a gourmet.”
But all I ever saw him drink was California red Burgundy, and about all I ever saw him eat was the beef, greens, and potatoes. I must admit he surrounded his common fare with much ritual. He always said grace before meals and after them, and he would rarely lift a goblet of wine without a toast of some sort. His favorite toast, by the way, was:
Remember this when the dark days fall:
The compass and callipers lie!—
Your life is great or your life is small
By your dreams that live or die!
It was a toast he had written himself, and he loved to fill the room with it.
Henry bowed us in that spring evening and, while at that time I knew nothing of Henry and his cold appraisal of Dan’s guests, I could sense he was giving me a sharp and careful scrutiny. Briggs was on amiable terms with him and after we were into the hall he left us to our own resources. Dan was upstairs working and would not be down for a few minutes. Briggs led me into the living room, and I had the feeling he did so with considerable pride.
As I moved toward the living room, I observed on the wall of the entrance hall some typewritten words in a small frame. The words were from St. Paul:
It is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; and the prudence of the prudent I will reject.”
The words were the first thing to catch the eye as you entered the house, and they were obviously placed where they were as a sort of greeting, a significant greeting, and the simple typescript seemed to make them even more significant.
Dan’s living room was an identification of himself, even more vivid and unmistakable than the house itself. The battered, heavily draped room was in exuberant disorder with books and pictures. There were books everywhere; on shelves, tables, chairs, the piano, window sills, on the floor, even. The whole house I was to learn later, as I saw more of it, was similarly bewildering with books.
And even more bewildering than the number and disorder of the books were the diversity and divergency of their subjects. On that first visit, on a window seat that followed the curve of a small bay window, I noted
in a single pile, one on the other, these books: the Life of St. Francis in water colors by Subercaseaux, in the special, limited, autographed edition; the three-volume Life of Beethoven by Thayer; You Know Me, Al by Ring Lardner; Art and Scholasticism by Jacques Maritain; La Bas by Huysman; a textbook for police called, as I remember it, Modern Criminal Investigation; and The Living Flame of Love by St. John of the Cross. So it was everywhere in the room and so it was everywhere in the house.
I soon learned not to be surprised if I found Freud rubbing elbows with Ignatius, or Rabelais with Thomas More, or Baudelaire with Francis Thompson, or Marx with Belloc, and all of them on friendly terms with O. Henry and Kipling and P. G. Wodehouse.
Once, for example, some weeks after my first visit when I spent the night at Dan’s house, I found these books on the table by the bed: Huxley’s Scientific Memoirs; Rostand’s The Last Night of Don Juan; Kotto by Lafcadio Hearn; Inside Football by Frank Cavanaugh; Basic Verities by Peguy; a book on American wines; Cobbett’s History of the Reformation; two books called New York Murders and Detroit Murders; a history of Boston College; The Flying Inn by Chesterton; Chevreul’s book on colors (a first edition, by the way); and The Autobiography of the Little Flower. It is a strange assembly but it is the assembly that was there. I made a list of the books, and I have it before me as I write. I had, even then, an idea that some day I might be writing of Dan and I had already begun to make notes.
The pictures on the walls, though not many, were of the same remarkable contrariety. Reproductions of the fleshiest, most earthy of old Pieter Brueghel’s peasants looked across at Giotto’s ascetic saints and seraphs, and Gauguin’s barbaric colors stained the wall not far from the white innocencies of Fra Angelico.
The music stacked on top of the ancient upright piano carried out the same universality, so to speak, ranging from children’s hymns and chants Gregorian to such barbershop ballads as “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree” and “Sweet Adeline.”
Dan England and the Noonday Devil Page 5
