“It will be something to do, doctor, that will. Like taking hold of lightning. It will rack us body and soul; belief will strip us naked for a moment, leave us new-born and shaken and weak—as weak as Christ in the manger. And that day nothing can stand before us. Because, you see, we’ll know what we want.”
The doctor stood for a moment as he had been, a large, dark troubled body rocking slowly to the heave of the deck beneath him. He rubbed a hand over his face.
“Utopian!” he said.
“Utopian!” Hallett repeated after him. “To-day we are children of Utopia—or we are nothing. I tell you, doctor, to-day it has come down to this—Hamburg to Bagdad—or—Utopia!”
The other lifted his big arms and his face was red.
“You’re playing with words, Hallett. You do nothing but twist my words. When I say Utopian, I mean, precisely, impossible. Absolutely impossible. See here! You tell me this empire of theirs is a dream. I give you that. How long has it taken them to dream it? Forty years. Forty years! And this wild, transcendental empire of the spirit you talk about,—so much harder,—so many hundreds of times more incredible,—will you have us do that sort of a thing in a day? We’re a dozen races, a score of nations. I tell you it’s—it’s impossible!”
“Yes. Impossible.”
The silence came down between them, heavy with all the dark, impersonal sounds of passage, the rhythmical explosions of the waves, the breathing of engines, the muffled staccato of the spark in the wireless room, the note of the ship’s bell forward striking the hour and after it a hail, running thin in the wind: “Six bells, sir, and—all’s well!”
“All’s well!”
The irony of it! The infernal patness of it, falling so in the black interlude, like stage business long rehearsed.