§ 1
Mrs. Croome was heard in the passage, someone was admitted, there were voices, and the handle of the parlour door was turned. “’Asn’t E come, then?” they heard the voice of Mrs. Croome through the opening. Dr. Elihu Barrack appeared in the doorway.
He was a round-headed young man with a clean-shaven face, a mouth that was determinedly determined and slightly oblique, a short nose, and a general expression of resolution; the fact that he had an artificial leg was scarcely perceptible in his bearing. He considered the four men before him for a moment, and then addressed himself to Mr. Huss in a tone of brisk authority. “You ought to be in bed,” he said.
“I had this rather important discussion,” said Mr. Huss, with a gesture portending introductions.
“But sitting up will fatigue you,” the doctor insisted, sticking to his patient.
“It won’t distress me so much as leaving these things unsaid would have done.”
“Opinions may differ upon that,” said Mr. Farr darkly.
“We are still far from any settlement of our difficulties,” said Sir Eliphaz to the universe.
“I have indicated my view at any rate,” said Mr. Huss. “I suppose now Sir Alpheus is here—”
“He isn’t here,” said Dr. Barrack neatly. “He telegraphs to say that he is held up, and will come by the next train. So you get a reprieve, Mr. Huss.”
“In that case I shall go on talking.”
“You had better go to bed.”
“No. I couldn’t lie quiet.” And Mr. Huss proceeded to name his guests to Dr. Barrack, who nodded shortly to each of them in turn, and said: “Pleased-t-meet you.” His face betrayed no excess of pleasure. His eye was hard. He remained standing, as if waiting for them to display symptoms.
“Our discussion has wandered far,” said Sir Eliphaz. “Our original business here was to determine the future development of Woldingstanton School, which we think should be made more practical and technical than hitherto, and less concerned with history and philosophy than it has been under Mr. Huss. (Won’t you sit down, Doctor?)”
The doctor sat down, still watching Sir Eliphaz with hard intelligence.
“Well, we have drifted from that,” Sir Eliphaz continued.
“Not so far as you may think,” said Mr. Huss.
“At any rate Mr. Huss has been regaling us with a discourse upon the miseries of life, how we are all eaten up by parasites and utterly wretched, and how everything is wretched and this an accursed world ruled either by a cruel God or a God so careless as to be practically no God at all.”
“Nice stuff for nineteen eighteen A.D.,” said Mr. Dad, putting much meaning into the “A.D.”
“Since I left Woldingstanton and came here,” said Mr. Huss, “I have done little else but think. I have not slept during the night, I have had nothing to occupy me during the day, and I have been thinking about fundamental things. I have been forced to revise my faith, and to look more closely than I have ever done before into the meaning of my beliefs and into my springs of action. I have been wrenched away from that habitual confidence in the order of things which seemed the more natural state for a mind to be in. But that has only widened a difference that already existed between me and these three gentlemen, and that was showing very plainly in the days when success still justified my grip upon Woldingstanton. Suddenly, swiftly, I have had misfortune following upon misfortune—without cause or justification. I am thrown now into the darkest doubt and dismay; the universe seems harsh and black to me; whereas formerly I believed that at the core of it and universally pervading it was the Will of a God of Light.... I have always denied, even when my faith was undimmed, that the God of Righteousness ruled this world in detail and entirely, giving us day by day our daily rewards and punishments. These gentlemen on the contrary do believe that. They say that God does rule the world traceably and directly, and that success is the measure of his approval and pain and suffering the fulfilment of unrighteousness. And as for what has this to do with education—it has all to do with education. You can settle no practical questions until you have settled such disputes as this. Before you can prepare boys to play their part in the world you must ask what is this world for which you prepare them; is it a tragedy or comedy? What is the nature of this drama in which they are to play?”
Dr. Barrack indicated that this statement was noted and approved.
“For clearly,” said Mr. Huss, “if success is the justification of life you must train for success. There is no need for men to understand life, then, so long as they do their job in it. That is the opinion of these governors of mine. It has been the opinion of most men of the world—always. Obey the Thing that Is! that is the lesson they would have taught to my boys. Acquiesce. Life for them is not an adventure, not a struggle, but simply obedience and the enjoyment of rewards.... That, Dr. Barrack, is what such a technical education as they want set up at Woldingstanton really means....
“But I have believed always and taught always that what God demands from man is his utmost effort to co-operate and understand. I have taught the imagination, first and most; I have made knowledge, knowledge of what man is and what man’s world is and what man may be, which is the adventure of mankind, the substance of all my teaching. At Woldingstanton I have taught philosophy; I have taught the whole history of mankind. If I could not have done that without leaving chemistry and physics, mathematics and languages out of the curriculum altogether I would have left them out. And you see why, Dr. Barrack.”
“I see your position certainly,” said Dr. Barrack.
“And now that my heavens are darkened, now that my eyes have been opened to the wretchedness, futility and horror in the texture of life, I still cling, I cling more than ever, to the spirit of righteousness within me. If there is no God, no mercy, no human kindliness in the great frame of space and time, if life is a writhing torment, an itch upon one little planet, and the stars away there in the void no more than huge empty flares, signifying nothing, then all the brighter shines the flame of God in my heart. If the God in my heart is no son of any heavenly father then is he Prometheus the rebel; it does not shake my faith that he is the Master for whom I will live and die. And all the more do I cling to this fire of human tradition we have lit upon this little planet, if it is the one gleam of spirit in all the windy vastness of a dead and empty universe.”
Dr. Barrack seemed about to interrupt with some comment, and then, it was manifest, deferred his interpolation.
“Loneliness and littleness,” said Mr. Huss, “harshness in the skies above and in the texture of all things. If so it is that things are, so we must see them. Every baby in its mother’s arms feels safe in a safe creation; every child in its home. Many men and women have lived and died happy in that illusion of security. But this war has torn away the veil of illusion from millions of men.... Mankind is coming of age. We can see life at last for what it is and what it is not. Here we spin upon a ball of rock and nickel-steel, upon which a film of water, a few score miles of air, lie like the bloom upon a plum. All about that ball is space unfathomable; all the suns and stars are mere grains of matter scattered through a vastness that is otherwise utterly void. To that thin bloom upon a particle we are confined; if we tunnel down into the earth, presently it is too hot for us to live; if we soar five miles into the air we freeze, the blood runs out of our vessels into our lungs, we die suffocated and choked with blood....
“Out of the litter of muds and gravels that make the soil of the world we have picked some traces of the past of our race and the past of life. In our observatories and laboratories we have gleaned some hints of its future. We have a vision of the opening of the story, but the first pages we cannot read. We discover life, a mere stir amidst the mud, creeping along the littoral of warm and shallow seas in the brief nights and days of a swiftly rotating earth. We follow through vast ages the story of life’s extension into the waters, and its invasion of the air and land. Plants creep upon the land and raise themselves by stems towards the sun; a few worms and crustaceans follow, insects appear; and at length come our amphibious ancestors, breathing air by means of a swimming bladder used as a lung. From the first the land animals are patched-up creatures. They eke out the fish ear they inherit by means of an ear drum made out of a gill slit. You can trace scale and fin in bone and limb. At last this green scum of vegetable life with the beasts entangled in its meshes creeps in the form of forests over the hills; grass spreads across the plains, and great animals follow it out into the open. What does it all signify? No more than green moss spreading over an old tile. Steadily the earth cools and the day lengthens. Through long ages of warmth and moisture the wealth of unmeaning life increases; come ages of chill and retrocession, glacial periods, and periods when whole genera and orders die out. Comes man at last, the destroyer, the war-maker, setting fire to the world, burning the forests, exhausting the earth. What hope has he in the end? Always the day drags longer and longer and always the sun radiates its energy away. A time will come when the sun will glow dull red in the heavens, shorn of all its beams, and neither rising nor setting. A day will come when the earth will be as dead and frozen as the moon.... A spirit in our hearts, the God of mankind, cries ‘No!’ but is there any voice outside us in all the cold and empty universe that echoes that ‘No’?”