CHAPTER XXXI
"'The tea will be ready in a minute,' said the witch, yawning. 'Flecker has a curious little triangular room in a pension on the rue d'Assas.' She began telling me a lot of things about you.
"Finally she brought tea and cakes from some place in the note-book room and filled her cup, forgetting mine.
"'You are wondering about these documents,' she said. 'I have more than ten thousand note-books. I am writing a history of the world.' She sipped her tea and began on her second cake.
"When it is finished it will fill about 550 quarto volumes. Unlike the scientists I postulate no magical beginnings.... 'Lo, there was life upon the Earth!'—that's the way other histories begin. But for me, poor old witch though I am, this is too unreasonable.... Napoleon's great-great-great grandparent was, so to speak, a jelly fish, languid in a warm sea, and Napoleon was the flower and the fruit of the jelly fish's dreams! N'est ce pas?"
She laughed loudly. "Therefore a Ford is more beautiful than a horse!... Oh, dear!"
"'Please may I have some tea?' I asked.
"'Oh! I am so sorry!' She was embarrassed. 'What will you think of me?'
"Life comes from life," she went on, pouring me half a cup of tea. "Life is continuous. 'Progress,' my dear, is an idea invented by a clock in collaboration with an engine. In the beginning the world was part of another world, as that had been a part of another, as a son was once part of his mother.
"After the beginning there were no animals upon the earth.... They came from a world which was over-crowded, pacified, complete. Five hundred and fifty set forth when the time came. They lounged in deep armchairs, glancing through round windows at this constellation and that, wondering with no great interest, what earth they'd find.
"The men were six feet, the women five feet five. All dressed alike; all talked alike; and every thirty minutes throughout that long journey five different newspapers were published. They were called The Darkness, The Light, The Down, The Up—and The Sideways, but every one printed exactly the same news, the same pictures, the same jokes and puzzles. Life had become secure, regular, comfortable. And if you imagine the spectacle was ugly, you are wrong. To see them in their perfection, moving with the perfect grace of a wheel turning slowly, you would have seen Beauty. At least, in that they were so soon to change, you would have remembered Beauty, and that is the same thing.
"The ship swung by Saturn. What do you suppose makes the rings of Saturn?"
I looked interested.
"The Midnight Express makes them. On Saturn they had first a machine, then ever more and more machines. The more you have the more and faster you make them, and the more sure, the more independent they become. It was some millions of years before the machines could repair themselves, before the automatic process was unbroken from the first click of the first thermostatic valve warning of a hot bearing, right up to the mine where the iron for the steel for the bearing was obtained. But then, the men were gone. The Midnight Express, always on time, wholly automatic, survived.
"You stand alone in darkness under a starry sky. In the silence of a man-less world, the distant shriek of a whistle. The earth shakes. Like the rising of the sun the headlight breasts the planet's curve. The train roars by, its whistle incessant, sparks flying back; the lighted windows of fifty cars are empty every one. Hoo-o-ot! The Midnight Express speeds round and round the world—perfect, unchanging, held prisoner on an empty planet. The trees far off tremble as it passes.
"It happened before," the witch continued, yawning, showing her long gray teeth. "And ended as it will end on Saturn, I make no doubt. Round went the Midnight Express, round and round and round, for millions of years repairing itself, digging iron and coal for itself,—self-starting engines joined in an endless chain from the train and back, cog to cog, valve to wire to valve, to switch, feeding itself, cleaning itself. And round it went until one day came a gleam of consciousness. And then what happened?
"What happened! What happens when life comes into the world? A long-drawn cry of protest; a scream of pain! Feeling weary in axle and wheel; its headlight aching, its whistle rasped and sore, the Midnight Express neglected a warning from a thermostatic valve. (Was it suicide?) Bearings melted. A spread rail pitched the Midnight Express into a ravine.
"Through the trees ran a breath and a trembling. Soon they were growing over the streaks of rust that had been the perfect rails. They stood in the sunlight, bowed to wind and rain, lived and died—immune to the temptation of speed, careless of schedules....