Chapter II: Prologue (2)

From the over-conscientious mind such criticisms as this tear away the last hopes of stability. One loses faith in the Cosmos. But my friend smiles his pity for all such damfoolishness. His solid feet are planted on the solid earth. He knows that two and two make four. His ancestors have proved it by their actions. And if such silly questioning of sound principles is persisted in, he waves it aside and asserts himself in his usual effective way.

Nevertheless, as I have said, it seems that that form of barrage was once unnecessary.

THE INTROVERT

Nothing is more dispiriting than the practice of classifying humanity according to “types.” Your professional psychologist does it for his own purposes. This is his way of collating material for the large generalisation he is always chasing. His ideal is a complete record. He would like to present us as so many samples on a labelled card--the differences between the samples on any one card being ascribed to an initial carelessness in manufacture. His method is the apotheosis of that of the gay Italian fortune-teller one used to see about the streets, with her little cage of love-birds that sized you up and picked you out a suitable future. Presently, we hope, the psychologist will be able to do that for us with a greater discrimination. He will take a few measurements, test our reaction times, consult an index, and hand us out an infallible analysis of our “type.” After that we shall know precisely what we are fitted for, and whether our ultimate destination is the Woolsack or the Workhouse.

But your psychologist has his uses, and it is the amateur in this sort, particularly the novel-writing amateur, who arouses our protest. He--I use the pronoun asexually--does not spend himself in prophecy, but he deals us out into packs with an air of knowing just where we belong. And his novels prove how right he was, because you can prove anything in a novel. His readers like this method. It is easy to understand, and it provides them with an articulate description of the inevitable Jones.

I cling to that as some justification for the habit, as an excuse for my own exhibition of the weakness, however dispiriting. It is so convenient to have a shorthand reference for Jones and other of our acquaintances. The proper understanding of any one of them might engage the leisure of a lifetime; and if for general purposes we can tuck our friends into some neat category, we serve the purposes of lucidity.

Lastly, to conclude this apology, I would plead that a new scheme of classification, such as that provided by psycho-analysis, is altogether too fascinating to be resisted.

There is, for example, my friend David Wince, the typical “introvert,” and an almost perfect foil for my friend the “extrovert,” previously described. The two men loathe the sight of one another. Contempt on one side and fear on the other is a sufficient explanation of their mutual aversion. Wince, indeed, has an instinctive fear of anything that bellows, and a rooted distrust of most other things. He suffers from a kind of spiritual agoraphobia that makes him scared and suspicious of large generalisations, broad horizons and cognate phenomena. He likes, as he says, to be “sure of one step” before he takes the next. The open distances of a political argument astound and terrify him. He takes all discussions with a great seriousness, and displays an obstructive passion for definition and the right use of words. “What I should like to understand” is a favourite opening of his, and the thing he would like to understand is almost invariably some abstruse and fundamental definition.

The _á priori_ method is anathema to him. He is, in fact, characteristically unable to comprehend it. He has little respect for a syllogism as such, because his mind seems to work backwards, and all his logical faculty is used in the dissection of premisses. When my exasperation reaches the stage at which I say: “But, my dear fellow, let us take it for granted, for the sake of argument ...” he wrings his hands in despair and replies: “But that’s the whole point. We _can’t_ take these things for granted. If you don’t examine your premisses, where _are_ you?” He has a habit in conversation of emphasizing such words as those I have underlined, and a look of desolation comes into his face when he plaintively enquires where we _are_. At those times I see his timid, irresolute spirit momentarily staring aghast at the threat of this world’s immense distances; before it ducks back with a sigh of relief into the shelter afforded by his introspective analyses. “Let us be quite sure of our ground,” he says, “before we draw any deductions.” His ground is, I fancy, a kind of “dug-out.”

He has had an unfortunate matrimonial experience. His wife ran away with another man, some three or four years ago, and he is trying to screw himself up to the pitch of divorcing her. For a man of his sensitiveness, the giving of evidence in Court upon such a delicate subject will be a very trying ordeal. He has confided very little of his trouble to me, but occasional hints of his, and the reports of another friend who knew Mrs. Wince personally, lead me to suppose that she was rather a large-minded, robust sort of woman. Perhaps he bored her. I can imagine that he would bore anyone who had a lust for action; and as they had been married for eight years and had no children, I am not prepared to condemn Mrs. Wince, off-hand, for her desertion of him. I have no doubt that Wince might be able to make out a good ethical case for himself. I picture his attitude towards his wife as being extremely self-denying, deprecatory and almost passionately virtuous. But I prefer to reserve judgment on the issue between them. I can imagine that his habit of procrastinating may have annoyed her to desperation. He has told me with a kind of meek pride that he has often been to the door of a shop, and then postponed the purchase he had come to make until the next day. He loathes shopping. He finds the mildest shopkeeper an intimidating creature. I do not know what would happen to him if his hairdresser died. He has been to the same man for over twenty years.

In politics he is a conscientious Radical, and his one test of politicians is “Are they sincere?” He distrusts the Tories because he believes that they must be working for their own personal ends, but he has had a private weakness for Mr. Balfour ever since he read _The Foundations of Belief_. His hero is W. E. Gladstone, whose opinions represent to him, I fancy, some aspect of his own, while Gladstone’s courage, Wince says, was “perfectly glorious.”

He adores courage, but only when it is the self-conscious kind. Our friend Bellows, for instance, does not appear to Wince as brave, but as callous, thick-skinned, or “simply a braggart.” All Wince’s resentment comes to the surface when the two men meet by some untoward accident. On one such occasion he magnificently left the room and slammed the door after him, but I think that he probably regretted that act of violence before he reached home. He has a nervous horror of making enemies. He need have no fear in this case. Bellows considers Wince as beneath his notice, and always speaks of him to me as “your hair-splittin’ friend.”

Now that I have documented Wince I feel chiefly sorry for him, but when I am in his company I frequently have a strong desire to shake him. I wonder if his wife began by being sorry for him, and if her escapade was incidentally intended as a shaking? Did she flaunt her wickedness at him in the hope of “rousing him up”? If so, she failed, ignominiously. Shakings of that sort only aggravate his terror of life. Indeed, I do not think that anything can be done for him. If he survives the war, the coming of the New Democracy will certainly finish him. Talking of the possibility of a November Election, he told me that he meant to abstain from voting. He said that he could not vote for Lloyd George, and was afraid of putting too much power into the hands of the Labour Party. He did not think that they had yet had enough experience of government to be trusted with the control of a nation.

In the hallowed protections of the Victorian era he had his place and throve after his fashion. Life was so secure and the future apparently so certain. But he was not fitted to stand the strain of coming out into the open. He is horrified by the war, but in his heart he is still more horrified by the thought of the conditions that will come with peace. He sees the future, I know, as a vast, formless threat. He sees life exposed to a great gale of revolution. He is afraid that his retreat will be no longer available, that one day he will find his burrow stopped and himself called upon to face, and to work with, his fellow-men.

But no doubt his natural timidity tends to over-estimate the probability of these dangers.

THE BARRIER

The body seems to have a separate and industrious life of its own. It carries on works of amazing intricacy beyond the reach of consciousness; works, the very existence of which are unknown to us so long as they are being successfully performed. Only when there is some hitch or impediment, is the consciousness crudely signalled by the message of pain. Attention is demanded, but no detail is given of the nature of the trouble, nor of how it may be overcome. All that the message conveys is a plea for rest, for the suspension of those activities within the consciousness which are--may we assume?--using up energy from some additional source that the workers now wish to draw upon themselves.

Can we assume further, that this corporate life of the cells is not entirely mechanical; is not a series of chemico-biological reflexes or reactions, somehow mysteriously initiated at the birth of life and continued by the stimulus of some unknown unconscious force so long as this plastic, suggestible association of cells remains active? For example, it would appear that although strangers from another like community will be accepted and treated as fellow members, some lack of sympathy, or different habit of work mars the perfection of the building. In renewing the bone structure after trephining, for instance, it has been found that a graft from the patient’s own body--thin slices from the tibia are now being used--produces better results than can be achieved by the workers with strange material. The graft in this case is only used as a scaffolding. (Our assumed workers with all their ingenuity are not equal to the task of throwing out cantilevers into the void.) But the planks of the scaffolding become an organic part of the new structure, and when the new material used is foreign, we find the marks of divided purpose in plan and construction. The new bone takes longer to form and the work is not so well done.

(Incidentally, it is interesting to notice how impossible our mechanical metaphors become when we are speaking of this work of the cells. I have spoken of throwing out a cantilever, and incorporating the planks of a scaffold in the new structure, but cantilevers and planks are themselves, also, workers! And, indeed, the fact that the process cannot be truly stated or even conceived in mechanical terms may be taken as a contribution to the metaphysical argument.)

Yet astounding and difficult as is this problem of the civic, corporate life that is being lived without our knowledge, a still more inconceivable partnership awaits our investigation. So far, we have touched only on two domains; the first peculiar to those who study the body from a more or less mechanical aspect, such as the surgeon or the histologist; the second to the psychologist. There remains, I believe, a third peculiar to the practical experiments of biology and psychology.

Such reflections as these have often haunted me, and my mind was confusedly feeling for some key to the whole mystery as I stood by the death-bed of old Henry Sturton. He had been fatally injured by a motor omnibus as he stood in the gutter with his pitiful tray of useless twopenny toys. No one else had been hurt; the accident would have been no accident, nothing more than a violent and harmless skidding of the juggernaut, if Henry Sturton had not been standing on that precise spot. A difference of a few inches either way would have saved him. As it was the whole performance seemed to have been fastidiously planned in order to destroy him. And in his pocket they had found a begging letter addressed to me that he had perhaps forgotten to post. Or it may be that for once he had honestly intended to stamp it? I had egotistically wondered if I was the person for whose benefit this casual killing had been undertaken.

When I reached the hospital, he was either asleep or unconscious, but they allowed me to wait within the loop of the screen that was to hide the spectacle of his passing from the other patients in the ward. And I stood there pondering on the marvel of the bodily functions. I got no further than that until he opened his eyes and I saw my vision.

He had been a gross man. I had always disliked and despised him since a certain occasion on which I had lunched with him at his Club. That was more than twenty years ago. I was young then, full of eagerness for the spiritual adventure of life, and he was a successful business man of nearly fifty, coarse and stupid, drugged by his perpetual indulgence in physical satisfactions. But, indeed, he had always been stupid. He was, I have heard, the typical lout of his school, too lethargic to be vicious, living entirely, as it seemed, for his stomach and his bed. Heaven knows what his life would have been, if he had always been forced to work for his bare living, but Providence has a habit of pandering to fat men, and he succeeded to his father’s business, and let it run itself on its own familiar lines.

He had never married. He was too selfish for that, but he had, so someone told me, bought and mistreated more than one young woman for his own office--his only positive sin in the eyes of the moralists; though I used to feel that his whole existence was one vast overwhelming sin from first to last. That, however, is the common error of judgment of the ascetic, self-immolating type.

He found no friends when his business failed. His intimates were men of the same calibre as himself, and rejected him in those circumstances as he would have rejected them. The failure itself was an unlucky accident. The man who ran the business proved unfaithful; he was the victim of a confidence that begot in him the lust for power. He gambled, lost, and absconded.

Sturton’s descent into the gutter was delayed for a few years by a clerical appointment he begged from some firm with whom he had traded before his bankruptcy. The appointment could not have been lucrative. He attended the office every day, but nothing else seemed to have been expected of him. He could have been capable of nothing else. Whatever his potentialities may once have been, they were hopelessly stultified by then. I used to meet him now and again in those days of his clerkship; and let him gorge himself at my expense. That was his single pleasure and desire. Poverty had exaggerated the cravings of his gluttony.

And as I stood respectfully within the fold of the screen and looked down at the flabby coarseness of the horrible old man in the bed, I reflected that his body must in its own way have represented a highly successful community of cells. There had been no distractions of purpose in the entity we knew as Henry Sturton; no rending uncertainties to upset his nerves and interfere with the steady industry of his bodily functions.

I was thinking that when he opened his eyes and I caught a glimpse of the fierce and splendid thing his body had always hidden from us. I saw it then, beyond any shadow of doubt--the spirit that had been imprisoned for seventy years, lying in wait eternally patient and vigilant, for this one brief instant of expression. It looked at me without recognition, yet with an amazing intensity, as if it knew that all its long agony of suppression would find no other compensation than this. So near release, his soul, still longing to touch life at some point, had seized its opportunity when that intolerably gross barrier of his body had been mangled and dislocated by this long-delayed accident.

Then Henry Sturton coughed, and I saw the beautiful eager stare die out of his eyes, and give place to that look of gross desire I had always loathed. Even then, I believe, he craved for food. But the next moment his eyes closed and his lips spurted a stream of blood.

The nurse was with him instantly, pushing me aside. I took advantage of her preoccupation to stay till the end. I hoped for one more sight of his soul. I thought it might take advantage of another intermission before the work of the community was abruptly closed. But I did not see it again.

He spoke once, two minutes before he died.

“God blast,” was what he said.

THE CONVERT

For the first time in his life, Henry Wolverton had been seriously upset.

His had been an orderly life. Even when he was at Shrewsbury, he had escaped bullying and other disturbances. He had been marked out as a future scholar who would be a credit to the school; and his calm air of reserve had also protected him. He might be classed as a “swat,” but he was not the kind of swat who gets singled out for bullying. He was no good at games, but he had a handsome, dignified presence, and he was never known to put on side.

At Oxford he passed from triumph to triumph. After he got his fellowship at Balliol, he married a girl-graduate from Lady Margaret Hall, and they worked happily together on his research. He was writing in many volumes, the _Economic History of the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries_; and at twenty-nine he was already an authority. His wife died rather incidentally when they had been married three years, but that had not seriously interfered with his life work.

Nor did the war, although it was a terrible nuisance, have any considerable effect upon him. He undertook work of “national importance” in Whitehall, and when he returned home in the afternoon to the house he had taken at the corner of Bedford Square, he found that he could still put in four or five valuable hours’ work on his history. And if he wanted extra time for research in the British Museum library, he could always get leave. Everyone in his department recognized the fact that he was an exceptional man, and that the work he was engaged upon would be a lasting monument to English scholarship.

By comparison, the war itself was almost an ephemeral thing.

Since the signing of the armistice, he had settled down to make up for lost time. He had his whole future planned. He hoped to finish his immediate task by the time he was sixty-five, but he foresaw that there would still be other work for him to do. He would, for example, almost certainly find it necessary by then to make revision in his earlier volumes.

It was no trifle that had upset him on this particular day. But even the fact that the English revolution had at last broken into the flame of civil war would not have disturbed him so seriously, if he had not conclusively proved in the course of the past five weeks that the revolution was impossible. Throughout the welter of the national strike disturbances, editors of any importance from the editor of the _Times_ downwards had begged him for articles. Although he had specialized upon a study of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he was regarded as the first authority on the entire history of the English people. And in his articles, he had proved conclusively from his vast knowledge of precedents and tradition, that the temper of the English people would never seek the arbitrament of an armed revolution.

He was still convinced of that, although, so far as he could judge, the revolution had already begun.

He had been startled in the middle of his best hours of the day, by what he had at first imagined to be the back-firing of a rapidly driven motor-bicycle. He went to the window, opened it wide (he always kept it closed when he was working, to shut out the noise of the traffic), and listened with an anxious attention. He had a peculiar and unprecedented feeling of nervousness. He felt, for no assignable reason, as if someone had discovered a bad anachronism in his book. And then he was reluctantly driven to the conclusion that, indeed, some mistake had been committed, although he could not admit that it was his own. For the motor-bicycle continued to back-fire in short, spasmodic bursts, while it remained stationary; and he could do longer avoid the inference that it was as a matter of fact a machine gun, no further away than Oxford Street. He could, also, hear dim and terrible shouting, and more faintly, occasional cries of dismay, of anger, or of fear.

The Square was completely deserted, but when he saw a scattered rout of people flying north, up Bloomsbury Street, he closed the window and began to pace up and down his well-fitted writing room, sanctified now, by the five years’ work he had done there.

What so annoyed and disturbed him was that some officious, political fool should have upset his scholarly deductions from the vast precedents of history. He would not admit for one moment that he had been mistaken; his chain of reasoning was unassailable. But, so he inferred, some blundering, malicious idiot had made a gross error in the conduct of the negotiations that, no longer ago than yesterday, had promised so hopefully. The result of that error was incalculable. There could be no doubt that the rioters had been fired upon, and so given a sound cause, and what would perhaps be more effective still, a rallying cry, to the great mass of unemployed workers. And the army could not be depended upon. The more loyal part of it was in Germany enforcing the peace terms. It was just possible in the circumstances that there might be something very like an armed revolution, despite the fact that his arguments had been so indubitably sound and right. Henry Wolverton was exceedingly annoyed and upset.

His troubles did not end there. Just as he had succeeded, by a masterly effort of concentration, in putting away the thought of this stupid anomaly and returning to his work, his housekeeper came and tapped at his door--a thing she had been explicitly forbidden to do, at that time of day, in any circumstances whatever.

He ignored the first knock, and then she knocked again, more loudly.

He frowned, and bade her come in. She was stupid, like most women, and would probably continue to pester him until she was admitted.

She came in trembling with agitation.

“Oh! I’m sure I beg your pardon, sir, coming now, against all orders,” she said; “but William has just come in--it’s his evening off, you know, sir--and he says there’s been firin’ in Oxford Circus, and people killed, and--”

“I inferred that,” Henry Wolverton interrupted her calmly. “I heard the machine guns. You had better tell William not to go out again.”

“Oh! sir, but he says we’re none of us safe,” the housekeeper wailed, on the verge of hysterics. “He says there’ll be looting and Heaven only knows what, and us so near Oxford Street.”

“I do not anticipate any effects of that kind, to-night, Mrs. Perry,” Wolverton replied frigidly. “And, by the way, I should be glad if you could let me have dinner half an hour earlier, this evening. After these annoying disturbances, I may not be able to settle down again until I have dined, and I shall work longer afterwards to make up for lost time. Can you arrange that?”

“Yes, sir,” gasped Mrs. Perry. “Then, you don’t believe, sir--”

“I do not,” Wolverton returned with the dignity of the assured. “You may lock the outer doors, if it gives you any sense of security. I shall expect dinner in half an hour from now.”

Mrs. Perry returned to the kitchen greatly comforted by her master’s magnificent confidence. She told William that things were not so bad as he was afraid of! And William in his turn derived a sense of security from the knowledge that he was living in the house of Henry Wolverton.

Nevertheless, they locked and bolted all the doors with a fine attention to detail.

Henry Wolverton worked rather intermittently after dinner that night. He was not disturbed by any noises from without. London was quieter than he had ever known it. He could hear no sound of traffic either along Bloomsbury Street or Tottenham Court Road. No paper boys came. No one passed his window. He could not even hear the sound of the policeman on his beat. But he found the absence of noise on this occasion more disturbing than the presence of it would have been. He found himself hailed out of his profoundest efforts of attention by his consciousness of this abiding, deathly silence. He would discover himself, sitting idly, listening to the stillness of the night.

A little after twelve o’clock, he got up and went to the front door. And after he had somewhat impatiently unlocked it, drawn back the bottom bolt and the top bolt, released the night latch, and undone the chain, he opened the door and stood on the top step, looking out over the darkness of the Square. After a moment or two, he realized with a little shock of dismay why the Square looked unfamiliar to him. The street lamps had not been lighted. Only a clear and brilliant moon in its second quarter, brooded over the unprecedented silence; weakly illuminating the apparently deserted city....

The thin scream of fear that suddenly pierced the stillness, came with an effect of audacious irreverence.

Henry Wolverton stiffened and a cold thrill of apprehension ran down his spine.

The scream was succeeded by a faint, eager patter of hurrying feet; and then more distantly, by the brutal intrusion of hoarse shouts, and the clutter of heavy boots vehemently running.

Wolverton did not move. Until now fear had never entered his life and he had the courage of a man who has never faced a real danger.

The lighter footsteps were approaching very rapidly, coming up Bloomsbury Street; and the sound of them seemed suddenly to lift and acquire precision as a figure came round the corner and turned swiftly into the Square. Wolverton could see then that the runner was a young woman in a light dress.

He would have let her pass without trying to attract her attention. He was watching the whole incident with the detached and careful interest of the historian. But the young woman, herself, had evidently seen the beacon of his open door before she actually reached it, and had settled upon her course of action. She came straight up the steps without an instant’s hesitation, pushed Henry Wolverton back into the hall, and closed the door with the intent and silent urgency of a conspirator.

He made no attempt to speak, and the young woman crouched in silence behind the door, until they had heard the clutter of heavy footsteps pass by and hurry on, up the Square. The men were not shouting now, but even through the heavy door, Wolverton could hear them gasping and panting as they ran. The sound of it made him think of the hoarse panting of great dogs.

When the flurry of that passing had dwindled again into silence, the young woman got up, locked and bolted the door and faced Henry Wolverton under the light of the hall lamp.

“So, that’s all right,” she said, with a little laugh of exultation.

“Do I understand--?” Wolverton began.

“Probably, I should imagine,” she interrupted him. “The scum’s let loose--the hooligans; the Apaches. After the fighting comes pillage and rapine.” She frowned slightly as she added, “I suppose rapine has got to do with rape?”

“It is not used specifically in that sense, now,” Wolverton replied. “But it had that meaning, earlier.”

“Oh, thanks! Well that was what I meant,” the young woman said. “Do you mind if I come in and sit down? Is that your room? I’m a bit blown.”

Wolverton stood aside for her to enter the sacred places of his writing-room.

She nodded by way of thanks, as she passed him, went in, looked round the room and then having thrown herself with a sigh of relief into his reading chair, proceeded to take off her hat.

“Jolly room,” she remarked pleasantly, as her deft fingers twitched and patted at her hair. “You a writer?”

“My name is Henry Wolverton,” he informed her with a modest dignity.

“What?” she exclaimed, sitting bolt upright and staring at him eagerly. “Henry Wolverton, the historian?”

He nodded gravely.

“Oh, Lord!” she said, and went on, “Well, I was wrong about one thing. I said you must be a dried up little mummy of a man, all beard and spectacles. And you’re not a bit like that. In fact you’re quite unusually goodlooking.”

The faintest adumbration of a flush tinged Wolverton’s white forehead. “My name appears to be known to you,” he remarked, ignoring the compliment.

“Obviously,” his visitor retorted. “Pretty well known to everyone, I should imagine, just now.”

“May I ask why?” he put in.

“Well, considering that you’re the man who’s responsible for the revolution, I suppose you’re more famous at the present moment than any man in Great Britain,” she said. “Though you’re not exactly popular with either side, to-night, I should think,” she added thoughtfully.

Henry Wolverton made a little noise in his throat that sounded like an asthmatic cough. With him that noise did duty for a laugh. “I’m afraid I don’t follow you,” he said.

“Do you mean that you don’t admit your own responsibility for the revolution?” she asked.

“I cannot see that I am even remotely connected with it,” he replied.

The young woman pursed her lovely mouth, and clasped her hands round her knee. After a reflective pause she remarked with apparent inconsequence, “My name is Susan Jeffery; but I don’t suppose that conveys anything to you.”

“I believe I saw the name on a committee list of the ‘League of Youth,’” Wolverton said.

“Lord, what a memory he has,” commented Susan Jeffery in a soft voice.

“But I must plead ignorance of the general scope of your activities,” he continued.

“But you know something about our league?” she put in.

“Something,” he admitted.

“Such as our policy of percolation?”

“I understand that your endeavour is to be represented in every imaginable grade of society.”

“Precisely. From royalty down to the criminal and the gutter-snipe,” Susan confirmed. “We have only one qualification for membership; we admit no one over twenty-five.”

“And have you many members, now?” Wolverton inquired politely.

“Nine thousand, eight hundred and forty-three,” Susan replied. “We admitted a hundred and seven new members after our grand meeting to-night, including a royal prince and two hooligans.”

Henry Wolverton nodded his head encouragingly.

“Most satisfactory,” he murmured.

Susan dropped her knee and sat up.

“I’m telling you this,” she said in a firm voice, “for your own good. We discussed you at our meeting, and it was resolved unanimously that you were largely responsible for the revolution that broke out to-day, and will end God knows where or when.”

Wolverton made his noise again--Susan had not yet recognized it as a laugh. “I must confess that I don’t quite follow your train of reasoning,” he said.

“You don’t _look_ like a fool, either,” Susan commented, frankly. “I suppose that’s just your one blind spot. Most of us have one.”

“Perhaps you would explain,” Wolverton suggested.

“It’s so bally obvious,” Susan replied. “You’ve been writing articles for the last six weeks--they’ve appeared all over the shop--rubbing it in about the English temper. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been anybody else, but people believe _you_. All sorts of people. We know that, through the activities of the league, because we’re represented everywhere. Well, what has been the effect of those articles? One side, the side in power, has believed you and decided on your authority not to give way. The other side, the workers, has believed you, too, and they’re so annoyed to think that you are right that they’ve determined to prove you’re wrong.”

“But, in that case, I was right,” Wolverton put in with his first sign of excitement.

“You were, until you put your opinion on record,” Susan corrected him. “You see,” she explained, “it’s like knowing the future. You can only know it for certain about other people as long as you keep it to yourself. If you tell a man that next Friday he’ll walk under a ladder in Fleet Street, and that a brick will drop on his head and kill him, he’ll keep out of Fleet Street next Friday, if he believes you.”

“I admit the instance,” Wolverton murmured.

“Well, it’s just the same in your case. The workers have been saying, ‘Here’s that chap Wolverton convincing everybody that there’ll be no revolution, that we’ll have to give in, in the end, and make terms. And all the politicians, and the owners and the middle classes believe him, and they’ll stick it out to the last minute, because they’re sure we have got the “English temper” and won’t fight. Well, we’ll jolly well prove that Mr. Wolverton is wrong for once.’ You see,” Susan concluded with a graceful gesture. “Our league knows these things. And it comes to this: if you want your prophecies to come off, you must keep them to yourself until after the event. Hasn’t your study of history taught you that much?”

Henry Wolverton leaned forward in his chair and covered his face with his hands.

“I’m sorry if I’ve upset you,” Susan said gently. “I’m sure you’re a very nice man, really.”

Wolverton groaned. “I’m finally discredited,” he muttered.

“Oh, no!” Susan comforted him. “Not in your own line. Remember the motto of our League: ‘These things are hidden from the wise and prudent and revealed unto babes.’ No man, however clever he is, can be expected to know everything.”

Henry Wolverton lifted his head.

“I shall never write again,” he said, in the tone of one who makes the great renunciation; and he looked at Susan a trifle nervously, as if he feared this immense announcement might be a little too much for her.

“Just as well,” she replied soothingly. “In any case we’ve pretty well scrapped history now. It was never any practical use except as a reference for precedents; and now we’re chucking precedents down the sink as fast as we can. We’re all going to begin again presently--when the fighting is over--on a new basis.”

Henry Wolverton jumped to his feet and began to pace up and down the room.

“It’s sure to be a wrench at first, of course,” Susan consoled him. “These things always are. But if I can help you in any way--”

He turned on her with the first sign of emotional passion he had ever displayed.

“You!” he said fiercely. “Don’t you realize that you’ve destroyed my whole life’s work; that you’ve robbed me in ten minutes of every happiness and satisfaction I’ve ever had. Good God, if I’d known, I’d have slammed the door in your face, just now. I would have delivered you over to the scum of London to do what they would with you.”

Susan blushed. “I don’t think that’s a very nice thing to say,” she remarked, gently. “But perhaps it’s just as well for you to blow off steam a bit. It does help when you’ve had a real facer. And honestly, you know, although I’m very sorry in a way, I do think it’s all for your good that I came in to-night; because you would have been bound to find it out for yourself sooner or later.”

Henry Wolverton stared at her, and his look of anger slowly gave place to one of bewilderment.

“But what am I to _do_?” he asked. “I’ve always worked for ten hours a day. I can’t live without work of some kind, and now....”

Susan got up and came across the room to him, with an expression of bright and eager helpfulness.

“Oh! look here, we’ll find a use for you,” she said, laying her hand on his arm. “You’re too old to join the league, of course--”

“I’m thirty-seven,” he interpolated.

“It’s quite young, really,” she comforted him. “I’m twenty-three. But what I was going to say was that we are founding a reference committee of experts of all kinds to advise the league. The members of that committee will have no voice in our decisions, you understand; they’ll be simply advisory. And it would be absolutely splendid to have you as chairman. I shall get no end of prestige from the league for having found you.” Her face shone with the joy of the successful discoverer.

“I understand you to suggest,” Henry Wolverton commented dryly, “that I should devote the rest of my life, and the--er--fruits of my scholarship, to instructing young men and women under twenty-five years of age in the lessons of history; always with the distinct understanding that they are in no way pledged to apply my advice in the prosecution of their own policy?”

Susan did not miss the implications of his tone. “My dear man,” she said, “whatever is the good of scholarship, if it isn’t to advise the young? Surely you haven’t been studying history all these years just in order to swap opinions with all the other old fogies?”

Henry Wolverton turned his back on her and walked over to the window. After a short pause he faced her again and said, “You have a remarkable power of statement, Miss Jeffery. I must admit that I have never before considered the precise use, in the pragmatical sense, to which I might apply my--er--scholarship; and I am ready to grant that your point is a good one. Where your otherwise admirable logic seems to fail, however, is in the admission that though I might turn my knowledge to good effect by advising youth, I may be wasting all my effort since youth will probably not be guided by my teaching.”

“I don’t know much about logic,” replied Susan, “but I should have thought it must be pretty evident to you, to-day of all days, that if we were going to be guided only by the lessons of history, our league would be a back-number in a week. Isn’t it possible for you to get it into your head that history isn’t everything?”

She put her last question with the appealing gesture of a mother addressing a refractory and rather stupid child.

“How is history going to get us out of the mess you’ve landed us in, for example?” she continued, as Henry Wolverton made no attempt to answer her. “How is history, alone, going to help us presently to start everything afresh on a new basis? You must know, yourself, that it’s no good trying to get back to the old way of doing things. That could only mean, by your own showing, that we should just be preparing the way for all this to happen again.”

Henry Wolverton threw up his hands with a gesture of despair.

“But if I admit that you’re right,” he said, “I have to face the conclusion that I’ve wasted my whole life.”

“Well, in a way, I’m afraid you have, rather,” Susan admitted. “It’s a great pity, for instance, about this revolution of yours. It means such a lot of blood and disorder; and people do get so out of hand when there’s fighting going on. Now if the owners and the middle-classes hadn’t been so cocksure, and had given way, we could have started in on our new methods of government without any bother.”

She paused a moment, before she added,

“We’ve got it all worked out, you know, but, of course, I can’t tell you anything about it, yet.”

“I am, in fact, what you would call a back-number,” Henry Wolverton said.

Susan puckered her forehead. “I think there’s still a hope for you,” she remarked.

“After all these years?” he asked.

“If you’d let me take you in hand for a bit,” she said. “You seem willing to learn.”

“But you have surely more important work to do? You couldn’t spare time to teach me?” he suggested.

“I think I might work it in,” she said reflectively. “I’d take you about with me and show you things--real things, you know. What’s chiefly wrong with you is that you’ve spent all your time over your old books.”

“You suggest that I ought to study life in--in action?” Henry Wolverton inquired.

“Rather,” Susan agreed. “You ought to come to one of our meetings.”

She stopped abruptly, and her hand went up to her mouth with a gesture of dismay.

“Oh! Great Scott!” she ejaculated; “that reminds me, I was going on to another frightfully important meeting when those hooligans started chasing me; and that and our talk put it right out of my head.”

“At what time was this important meeting to be held?” Henry Wolverton asked, looking at his watch.

“One o’clock,” she told him.

“You still have ten minutes,” he said.

Susan shuddered. “I daren’t go out again alone,” she confessed. “I simply daren’t. I’d--I’d sooner stay here all night with you.”

“I shall be delighted to come with you,” Henry Wolverton said.

“You!” Susan exclaimed. “But don’t you understand the risk? The mob’s loose. What good would you be against three or four chunky hooligans?”

Henry Wolverton squared his shoulders. He was a tall, finely-built man, and his face had the cool assurance of one who has never known fear.

“I am not afraid of hooligans,” he said.

Susan gazed at him with frank admiration.

“You know you’re a perfect topper in some ways,” she complimented him.

He bowed gravely. “If I might be admitted to this meeting of yours,” he said; “it would perhaps afford me an opportunity to begin my education.”

“If you’re sure you’re not afraid,” Susan replied, picking up her hat.

“I’m not in the least afraid,” he said. “Will you take my arm?”

At the open door they paused a moment, looking out into the darkness; listening to the profound silence of the empty night--creative youth and patient scholarship, hand-in-hand, facing the immense void of the unforetellable future.

A NEGLIGIBLE EXPERIMENT

“I can’t get him right, somehow,” the young sculptor said, but he looked tenderly at the little figure of the man he was modelling in plasticine, as if, despite its very obvious defects, he found something to admire in his creation.

“Wants stiffening, doesn’t he?” I suggested. “Couldn’t you put a wire or something up his legs and back?”

“Well, you see,” my young friend explained, “I could if I knew beforehand exactly what I was going to do with him. Only I don’t. I like to make him up as I go along. I’m no good at it really. I can’t think it all out ahead and then sit down and do it right off. I have to experiment and--see how it comes, you know. Do you think his head is too big?”

I thought it was rather big.

The young modeller regarded his creation with a look in which fondness still seemed to preponderate.

“Perhaps if....” he said; then speech died out of him as his hands again began to fashion and improve his little image of humanity.

And as I watched him a vision came to me. I lost consciousness of the boy and his workshop. I wandered away into a dreamland of the imagination, following the lure of a fantasy deeper and more satisfying than the reality of life.

* * * * *

When I read in my morning’s paper of the “Nova” in the constellation of Sagittarius, I thought first of H. G. Wells’s story of “The New Star,” and smiled. Later, I turned with a little shiver of anxiety to that chapter in Professor Lowell’s _Evolution of Worlds_ in which he describes the possible coming of a “dark stranger” out of the depths of space. Already there were points of striking resemblance between Lowell’s imaginative account and the details that were appearing casually, in the intervals between more important news, in the newspapers. This new star differed from those other _novæ_ so many of which have been recorded at various times. _They_ brought us tidings of a collision that had already occurred, blazing out suddenly into a short-lived splendour and quickly waning again to invisibility. This stranger, astronomers were agreed, shone not by its own light but by the reflected light of the sun. Then it must be, relatively, near. Lowell’s calculations gave us something like thirty years to prepare before the invader wrought the destruction of the solar system. But, obviously, that calculation depended on various assumptions that the reality need not verify. This strange visitor might be much smaller than he had assumed--he had taken the enormous mass of the sun as his standard--its albedo might be lower; its speed greater. Also Lowell’s stranger was assumed to be coming at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic; this one would, as it were, skim the edge of that swimming saucer. Would any of the outer planets be interposed between us and this dreadful visitor? Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, might any of them be a buffer to us--provide us, perhaps, with some stupendous display in the heavens, but save us from ultimate disaster?

Everyone treated the thing so lightly. Here and there alarmist paragraphs appeared, but they only displayed the hand of the sensation-monger. No one took the threat seriously. And yet the astronomers must know? They had had more than a week, now, in which to make their calculations.

And then the shadow fell with such suddenness that it was impossible to say how the certainty had come to us. Everyone knew. The astronomers confirmed one another without a dissentient. And there was nothing in the way. With a horrible unanimity the outer planets had left a clear space for the intruder, while the Earth, with that blundering indifference which is surely its chief characteristic, was stolidly marching straight into the path of destruction. Is there any esoteric significance in the fact that the Earth has a greater density than any other member of the solar system?

Everyone knew, but little was changed. We went on with our affairs; with little zest, no doubt--we could never forget the deepening shadow. But what else was there for us to do but go on? We could not instantly alter ourselves or our way of life. Religions blazed into a spasmodic fever as men and women sought refuge from the dreadful reality. Crimes of lust and greed increased for the same reason. But for the most part we continued in the old ways by sheer inertia, though there was a new and smaller moon visible to us in the night sky, a moon that waxed with infinite slowness towards the full, and grew larger night by night. We knew by then that the stranger was as big as Jupiter, and with a density little less than that of the Earth.

The first portents of disaster came when our own moon was approaching the new. The stranger’s mass had begun to affect the tides, and we were warned to evacuate all low lands, near the sea, upon the estuaries, and incidentally the river level in London. Four days before the highest tide the Thames flooded Farringdon Street, Westminster, and great districts on the south bank, and the retreating river laid bare the river-bed as far down as Greenwich.

The population of London had fled to the heights North and South before the great floods that devastated all the low lands of Essex, Kent, Surrey, and Middlesex. And with that rush for safety and the rapidly increasing portents of disaster the routine of civilisation was definitely broken. It seemed as if in the mass we were being gradually stripped of all our tediously-acquired virtues and vices, until but one instinct remained, the instinct for self-preservation. That, however, was only the effect produced by the panic movement of the crowd; when one came to individuals....

I can, however, only speak of two, myself and another man. We sat together on a hill in Derbyshire and watched through the last night.

A certain calmness had come to me, then, mingled with the queerest feelings of excitement and expectation. Within sight of death, I could still enjoy this amazing celestial adventure. The new planet that was rushing in upon us had already torn us from our steady path about the sun, and our old familiar moon dwindled to the size of a sixpence, and, diminishing almost visibly, was within a few hours of destruction. For the moon had fled its old allegiance to the Earth and was rushing to the arms of this great stranger like some passionate, unfaithful lover.

But the new planet itself drowned all consciousness of lesser things when it rose magnificently above the eastern horizon. That night it was a full circle of yellow light, and across its great expanse moved one circle of intense blackness, the size of our old moon, a circle that was slowly increasing in size, the shadow of our own Earth. So great a thing appeared this new planet, then, that when its lower rim was at last clear of the horizon, its upper limb towered half-way to the zenith. It had few markings, but from one pole, which was turned markedly towards us, radiated uneven, dark lines--chains of mountains, perhaps--that definitely produced the effect of a solid globe long before its actual convexity was recognisable. All the rest of the planet presented a smooth, unbroken expanse, possibly the vast bed of some long-vanished sea.

For an hour or more my companion and I had sat in silence watching this gigantic spectacle; then he said quietly, “We are witnessing the failure of a negligible experiment.”

I did not answer at once. I had not caught his drift. I was struggling with a foolish preoccupation, the result of an almost lifelong habit. As I watched I was searching for words to describe what I saw. I wanted to write my experience; yes, even there, under the sentence of death pronounced not only upon me, but upon all humanity, I was struggling with this meaningless desire to create a record that none could ever read.

I made an effort and roused myself from this inane preoccupation. “Negligible?” I said, grasping at what seemed to be his most prominent word.

“Proved to be negligible,” he asserted. “You are a serious man? You don’t cling to straws? You have no doubt that this is the end of the Earth? Very well then, you know that we are to be destroyed? By an accident? Possibly. Or it may be that this arrow that has been discharged at us was shot deliberately; with a definite purpose.

“It isn’t as if the same thing had not happened before,” he continued after a pause. “We have seen it--seen the effects at least. When some temporary star blazed up in the sky, we inferred some such collision as this. It may very well be that from a planet in some other system men may catch sight of this tiny blaze of ours--and wonder. It will be relatively a very small affair. Some of those we’ve seen must have been many thousand times greater.

“But the point is that this experiment of making men upon the Earth is now proved to be negligible. In a few hours it will be finished, wiped out. And whether that termination is the result of accident or design makes no difference to the effect. This is an answer to all our philosophies and religions. Either we are the creatures of some chance evolutionary process, or we are an experiment that has failed.”

I looked at him, and noted with a curious stir of unplaceable recollection that his head was too large.

“It is certain that we shall go off like an exploded shell?” I asked.