Chapter III (2)

Wedding went off very well. A number of strange people about. Naturally I watched with some interest to see what went into the dustbin. Rather disappointing. Servants are the deuce in a case like this. Can’t keep their hands off anything. Managed to get a tail of salmon myself, while they were hiding a few bottles of champagne. Secreted the salmon in the garden. It will come as a pleasant surprise to-night. Ethel cried when she started. My old ladies cried too. The man seemed pleased at what he’d managed. I’m afraid he’s a blackguard. My party begins about half-past eleven. There are about ten of us. The black girl with white paws is called “Tottie”--pretty name. Very shy and retiring. Pleasant voice. Jim and a grey cat, called “The Colonel,” have a rather unseemly row over an old tortoiseshell dowager. I wouldn’t have looked at her. No accounting for tastes. Music sets the dogs barking for miles. Our own dog chained up. Not that he would have interfered. Cook, or some other damned menial, flings a pot of pomatum into the very middle of the conversazione. Nobody hurt, thank God, but a good deal is said about it. Of course I make it clear that the fault is not mine. Fine moonlight. Hide-and-seek in the geraniums. Wish the gardener could see us. I seem very popular. Get a chat with Tottie, and take her off to where I hid the salmon. Gone! I had only mentioned it to Jim. So much for friendship. In another month I shall not be afraid to stand up to him. Then he’ll possibly wish he’d never been born. Party over at dawn. See Tottie home. She says that to meet a real gentleman is refreshing nowadays. True enough. They’re growing scarce.

* * * * *

Very cheap next morning, and my old ladies see I am. Unpleasant remarks and an inclination to withhold my saucer of milk. Some talk of giving me away. _Giving_ me away! How insulting human beings are. And then they turn round and say _we_ have no gratitude! Caught a young thrush in the afternoon. It was sitting with its back turned waiting for its mother. Mother came back with a worm, and when she saw what I’d been and done, she spoke her mind. Gardener noticed me too and seemed rather gratified than not. I shall go on catching young thrushes--not to please the gardener, but because I like them.

* * * * *

We are engaged. I sang to her for an hour in the moonlight. Henceforth we live for each other. Everybody is saying she angled for me and caught me. I am a catch and I know it; but, in a place like this, where there’s not another Persian within a radius of five hundred yards, we must do the best we can. And Tottie worships the wall I walk on. A very good, trustful, domesticated, little thing, and knows her luck. Am growing devilish handsome. My old ladies talk about sending me to the Crystal Palace Show next autumn. Had it out with Jim last night. He said I was ungrateful and never looked at him now that I was getting in with a better set. I knocked him out of a rain-shoot into a water-barrel; and when he came ashore we fought four rounds. He had some fur out of me certainly, but I took half his right ear off and hallmarked his nose for life. Now we pass on the same flower-bed and don’t know each other. A low-bred animal Jim, and blood will tell. After our difference my old ladies changed their mind about sending me for exhibition.

* * * * *

I am a father. Tottie has a fine family. Rather a bore. But of course there are no obligations. Two days later she meets me with a face as long as a chicken’s thigh-bone. The family has been drowned to a kitten before her eyes. Well, well, we must all die. Surprised to find how I bear this blow. Tottie hard to comfort. Of course, the murderers did not know that I was the father. Those kittens cannot have been worth less than five shillings each. I feel angry when I look at the matter from a business point of view. Tottie rather a nuisance about it. What’s the use of crying over dead kittens? I tell her not to try my patience too far. Females are so exacting. She is hurt. What does she expect? She surely doesn’t suppose that I am going to cry about it? She goes and gets one of her dead babes and lays it at my feet. Very harrowing, of course; but if the others were like this one, I am glad somebody drowned them. These mixed marriages are a mistake.

* * * * *

Ethel has come back to my old ladies. The dog and I were right about that man. Only been married six months, and he is tired of her, and has been brutal; and she must go through some legal business to be rid of him. What devils these men are to the weaker vessels! Tottie has gone off in appearance a good deal lately. Her spirit is broken. To see her crawl along a fence, you would think she was five years old. Her temper is soured too. There has come a blue French cat to the house next door but three. I introduced myself. She is young and attractive, and, thank Heaven, a lady of elegant extraction. Inclined to be extremely exclusive. Tell her she is right. Her name is “Sally B.” Pretty name. Has some English, but not much. Is teaching me French. Chic--very chic indeed. Had half a brickbat within two inches of me yesterday, next door but three. Her people are as exclusive as she is. Faint Persian never won fair French puss yet. Tottie growing quite impossible. Sorry, but had to speak. She fainted. You can only live your life once; therefore never let sentiment come between you and your ambitions. Sally B. says ours was a case of love at first sight. Very possibly. We are engaged, anyhow. Haven’t mentioned Tottie.

* * * * *

They are saying in the house that Ethel is going to die. If she does, they certainly ought to kill the fiend who is responsible for her misery. I’m sure I can feel for the poor girl. Sally B. has thrown me over for a lop-sided, yellow cat, with one eye and no tail--a paltry Manx thing that would disgrace Seven Dials. Oh yes, the beast can fight, I know; but I was dead out of training at the time. Not that I care. I might have known what to expect from a French cat. There are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it.

* * * * *

Shall give up keeping a diary. The thing only makes people laugh at you after you are gone. Besides, you often think of things you can’t even say to yourself, let alone write in a book.

* * * * *

Resume my diary after several years. I’ve felt very seedy lately and been getting worse every day for a year. Shabby and old. Don’t create any sensation as of yore. Vet comes to see me, and the case evidently interests him a good deal. He says a pinch of arsenic is the only thing for me, and my old ladies both begin to cry. I suppose it’s expensive. Still, as this is the only cure the man can suggest, they are bound in decency to allow me to have it. They agree to the vet’s proposal, though reluctantly. Disgusting to see meanness at such a time. However, it’s all right: I’m to have the arsenic to-morrow.

INOCULATION DAY

I had been reading far into the dim avenues of night, and when finally I cast from me the _Lancet_, with all its marvellous chronicles of the eternal battle between Science and Death, I passed into a dream-survey of therapeutics; wherein the subject, touched by a liberated imagination, launched me upon visions so real, so tremendous, that, waking once more, I arose and set them down in the dawn-light.

I seemed to wander by that road along which our mighty sons of healing will march in time to come. My phantom survey traversed the far past, the present, the remote future; it bore me through the whole history of medicine and surgery, of human diseases and their discovered remedies. From the science as indicated in Homeric poetry under the ægis of Æsculapius, to the system of Hippocrates; from the Alexandrian school and great empiric doctrines, to Roman methods--to Pliny, Galen, Aretæus, and other early lights--I progressed. I saw also the schemes of Arabic medicine; glanced at the science as expounded and practised in the Middle Ages; saw Paracelsus in his laboratory; Van Helmont, the mystic; and Bacon, the philosopher. Still sweeping forward upon the lightning pinions of a dream, I passed from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century and beheld new ideas, new theories, new systems plentiful as the sands upon the sea-shore.

A mechanical theory of disease was then the favoured conceit, and I noted Cheyne writing his survey of fever upon that basis; I saw Mead putting forth his treatise on _The Power of the Sun and Moon over Human Bodies_; I examined Keill’s application of Newtonian principles to the explanation of humanity’s physical machinery. Then arose that mighty Boerhaave and his school; Hoffmann of Halle, with his notion of a universal ether permeating all regions of the body; Stahl and his “animism”; Haller, Morgagni, Cullen, Brown, and Avenbrugger--a genius of Vienna, who invented the method by which ailments of the lungs were first investigated by percussion.

Then, through that astounding age of miracles, the Nineteenth Century, I passed, although to elaborate that spectacle of accumulated achievements were vain in this place. Suffice it that at length I reached the point whereat I closed my _Lancet_ before sleeping; and yet, contrary to my expectations, the panoramic vision still unrolled, still swiftly sped onwards and onwards to strange matters as yet hidden within the void of Time to come.

Now indeed might the unfolding phantasmagoria arrest my senses, for the Nineteenth Century was past, the Twentieth also (marked by a horror in its midst), with many successive ages--whose tremendous records were written and sealed--mere foundation stones, deep buried beneath the river of the Past, for the fair structure of the Present uplifted upon them.

I stood before a vast and imposing erection--an edifice of prodigious dimensions towering skywards, yet without one touch of imagination or trace of beauty. It was evidently well adapted to some enormous utilitarian needs; but a mud-heap or modern prison had been as fair to see. Squat as a toad it lay, yet the amazing size of it even its unlovely fabric and ungainly mass could not conceal.

Now from this pile my attention was attracted to the crowds of young persons who were streaming thither. The youth of the whole earth seemed to enter its enormous gates and vanish within them. Costume had clearly come upon a period of simplicity and earth colour. Dull beyond description, therefore, were these tremendous processions under the noon sunlight.

Then came one of the race of men and stood beside me and eyed me curiously; and I inquired of him the nature of this universal festival, and of these crowds of young men and women who entered the palace in orderly legions.

He seemed surprised.

“Truly, you have journeyed from a far country to ask such a question,” he answered; “and indeed your speech and raiment mark you for one from beyond the pale of civilisation. This is Inoculation Day--the highest festival and fête of the human year; and these you behold--the young men and maidens--are about to receive this vital rite, each according to his or her requirements as heredity’s archives indicate. But there is a talk of giving all up as needless now, for the evils to be eradicated have almost disappeared from human nature.”

“For God’s sake don’t give it up,” I said. “They did at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. A cowardly crew, with an irrational dialectician at their head, made Vaccination optional to catch votes for party purposes in the House of Commons. One generation of fools passed and were allowed to bring up their offspring unvaccinated. Then came the Day of Reckoning. That was in the Year of the Lord 1950. Britain suffered what she deserved; but it was an awful lesson--shade of Jenner!--an awful lesson.”

The stranger smiled.

“That is one of the few human names still cherished from a remote antiquity,” he observed.

“Then the great law has triumphed and of course you inoculate for every human ailment now--is it not so?” I inquired.

He smiled again.

“Ailments? No. The need for that has long since vanished. Humanity has no ailments now. The extremity of human life has been proved to stand at one hundred and forty-five years, three months, two weeks, one day, four hours, six minutes, and thirteen and two-fifths of a second. Everybody attains to that age as a matter of course. Then we stop, or cease, or, as you might say, die. Inoculation, pursued through the centuries, has banished every physical ill but Death itself; and that has no terrors at a hundred and forty-five. The hour of extinction once known, an orderly exit naturally follows. But surely you must have wakened from or be walking in a dream? I shall hear you speak of small-pox presently--indeed you have done so--and those other long-vanished curses bred out of the black night of man’s first ignorance. To-day, however, Inoculation has climbed heights beyond your primitive imagination, my friend; to-day--upon this glad anniversary--the rising generation, after having been from childhood subject to the study and scrutiny of our wisest ones, receives its finishing touch, its crown, its keystone--each man, each woman according to their need. _We inoculate for character now!_ Think of all that means, if your intellect has a power sufficiently vivid to do so. To-day we celebrate the stupendous discovery that rose naturally out of Jenner’s sublime achievement. Evolution, proceeding through the ages, has brought us face to face with the fact, and thus, having counteracted heredity and stamped out disease, man proceeded into the subtler psychological field of human character and temperament. To-day we create disposition and mould mind. Education has done all that education can do for the generation you behold passing in its youthful glory before you; now the necessary correctives of character will be administered by inoculation.”

“You can add or subtract, give or take away!” I cried; and he admitted that it was so and gazed curiously at my enthusiasm.

“You are excited,” he said. “I am fortunate to have witnessed such a phenomenon. The emotion of excitement has been removed from human nature for three or four hundred years. Yet I warn you: it shortens life.”

“Never mind that; tell me more, much more!” I begged.

“Well,” he continued kindly, “the truth is that man begins to know a little here and there. He would seem to be on the right track--but only just groping at the beginning of it. Of course you can perceive how Mental Inoculation works. Given a character, the problem is where to improve it. For generations all physical cowards were inoculated with Courage: therefore physical cowardice is practically unknown; a rash soul we tinge with Caution; one prone to hoard, receives the diluted virus of Thriftlessness; a fanatical character is dosed with Common Sense; and so forth. Indeed, Common Sense is a panacea. It is certain that we should again relapse into the chaos of a thousand years ago but for our stock of that. I who speak to you was inoculated with Charity. There were fears that by some streak of atavism I might repeat the errors of a selfish great-great-great-grandfather.”

“Do you inoculate with Truth?” I asked.

“Ah! the truth about Truth is at last determined; but only quite recently. Human Nature has not reached the power to grasp Absolute Truth. It exists, but no psychological chemist has ever succeeded in securing it. A race of empirics still seek for it in secret; but they are as mad as the alchemists of the prime. No, when Truth is reached, æons hence, the world will come to an end and the chain be completed. From the amorphous life-cell, from the protoplasm to Truth----but we need not pursue that. Let me return to Inoculation Day. Upon that notable anniversary each young human life receives a sort of compensating balance to character; and the result is such a high level of understanding, patience, self-control and general regularity that the human race already begins to approach the blissful perfection of a machine in its regularity and rapid progress.”

“And we used to say that, come what come may, human nature still remained unalterable!”

“One of the funny persistent fallacies of the old folks in the Nineteenth Century. It has been proved otherwise. Nothing happens now but the expected and anticipated.”

“It is glorious--magnificent--the supreme triumph of the human mind!” I ejaculated.

But he shook his head.

“A step in the right direction--scarcely more. Besides, there yet linger among us people who dare to declare that there exist objections to machine-made character. These poor weaklings seem to be the survival of a sort of madmen common in early times. They represent the aborted mental condition that went in its former dreadful development to produce poets and prophets and other unbalanced creatures, including all ‘great men,’ as they were called.”

“Geniuses, in fact.”

“That was the curious word. Great men are now not possible. A minority of twaddlers still pursue these shadows--not in the sane spirit of the antiquary, but with the affectation that the history and the rhymed nonsense of those dark ages may still be read with profit to-day.”

“Then Art is dead!” I gasped.

“Happily,” he answered.

“Romance?”

“Defunct long ago. Fiction in any sort is now practically impossible, because all life has been reduced to the glorious precision of mathematics. Given the starting-point, the rest admits of no two interpretations.”

“But, pardon me, I live by story-telling. It is all I am able to do. At this moment I am putting the finishing touches to my very best----”

“Your labour is in vain,” he answered civilly. “Such things only occur under glass in museums. Irregularity of conduct does not now enter within the bounds of the possible. Why, even the fame of the people who wrought your stories and rhymes is dead. We cannot understand the dreadful and chaotic conditions in the early morning of history where they worked.”

“Then smother your Inoculation Day!” I answered warmly. “Let me get back into yesterday, when people had imagination, and knew a good thing when they saw it, and--and--there, I cannot argue with you; and I cannot change my century, like my boots.”

The man very nearly showed astonishment. Recollect that I stood before a being who had never known hate, or love, or any sort of intellectual excitement. Yet he came as near to a surprise then as ever he did in his oyster-like life.

“You are very interesting,” he said. “I wish you would stop here and permit your passions to go on mastering you until I call some of our scientific men. It has for hundreds of years been a great speculation as to what was the appearance of a human being when he loses his temper. We might inoculate----”

“Oh no, you don’t!” I roared. “D’you think I’m going to have my character tinkered with at my age by a lot of perfect, passionless puppets?”

But here my emotions first choked me, then woke me, and I opened my eyes, not without thanksgivings, on a pleasant morning still very nigh the romantic dawn of the Twentieth Century.

A STORY WITHOUT AN END