“Eminently satisfactory,” said Dickin, returning the document.
“He is at the Hotel and Restaurant Institute in Vienna,” the father said proudly, “and I afford him practical opportunities for perfecting his studies when he is here for his summer vacation by allowing him to wait at table. Of course, under my supervision,” he added.
“You ought to be very proud of him.”
“Proud? Why?”
“Of course you ought to be! You are proud!”
“Well, of course—proud—why not? You wouldn’t think, would you, eh? A Tyrolese poodle like he, now would you?... attain such distinction in Vienna itself!...” And two large beads stood in Herr Kogl’s jaundiced blood-shot eyes.
At lunch, in the large panelled room looking out on the old archducal Schloss beneath, steeped in the foliage of its enormous and forsaken park, Frank found himself seated facing a Lutheran pastor from Germany, who had large sad eyes, a quiet, melancholy voice, and helped himself without cease to the Kalter Aufschnitt. He thought the world was all right, the Church all right, and nothing wanted changing. Among the guests was a Russian Grand Duke who turned out to be the cousin of Frank’s one-time opponent who had hit him on the ear with an umbrella at the Kiss-Lick Club. The Grand Duke’s cousin was killed in a motor smash in Poland. His own brother was assassinated elsewhere. An uncle died in mysterious circumstances. It seemed, of the old guard, there remained only Frank and he, and over a decanter of Tyrolese wine consumed together, they relinquished their claim to the throne of Russia in each other’s favour.
“Ah! you are a writer!” the Grand Duke exclaimed happily. “You write in English? Ah, well! I’ve my own theories about English literature. I am obstinate in the belief that in the portrayal of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde did not mean to depict his own personality, so to speak.”
Frank sounded the Grand Duke as to his further opinions. Wordsworth? No, he hadn’t heard of Wordsworth. Keats?—No: who was he? No, he preferred the moderns. There was one modern writer—German, he believed—who amused him. Bernhard Schau.... Oh, he was British? How interesting! He had bought quite a number of his works in Berlin, and enjoyed dipping into them—he liked him for the wit salted with cynicism. Did his Highness read any other English authors? The Grand Duke considered for a moment, wrinkling his brow.—Of course—Byron! Who did not love that stupendous genius, the greatest the world has yet produced? Childe Harold.... Ah! The Grand Duke thought he himself was a little like that—like Byron and Lermontov—romantic, rebellious, seeking something (he made a gesture to the heavens)—dissatisfied with his surroundings—that’s it, and seeking a meaning in life. Yes, he was a lover of literature—though he preferred sport—riding and hunting, drinking, too, he was not averse to. He considered, as if struck by a sudden idea. “Have a drink,” he said.
They passed into the lounge, into which Herr Kogl burst periodically, to explain the working of the electric stove, which could be switched on at will but must not be, he cautioned, switched off without a preliminary intimation to Herbert, in charge of the electric supply station, because a sudden superfluity of electricity sent the dynamo into commotion. Here Frank perceived a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman looking like a gipsy. “Frau König!” he exclaimed. “By heaven! this is unexpected!”
Frau König, on the other hand, did not appear to regard this meeting as unexpected, but at once proceeded to recount her life at the point at which his knowledge of it had been interrupted. “My fiancé, alas, has failed again in his examinations at the University, and that has put us back for another couple of years and deferred our hope of establishing the knitting factory. He says the Paris professors have been prejudiced against him on account of his Russian nationality and vented on him their bitterness over the Russian State Bonds they had acquired and lost in the Revolution, and agreed to plough him.” And she introduced him to Frau Professor Koch who occupied the room next to his own and owned a dachshund, on whose account she felt concerned and diffident, for, “He has inflammation of the lungs,” she said, “and his cough is terrible.”
It rained. By the electric stove, Baby played chess with the bank clerk, whose holiday was up and who that night was going back to Vienna. During lunch, when Baby had anxiously eyed him, he had talked to the table at large, explaining how the new divorce law was operating in Vienna—he talked of divorce, while she wanted to be united to him for the rest of existence! She had better, now that time was getting short, try and talk to him—difficult though it was—in French. What had she better say to him? How draw him? How tell him? She thought hard.
“Do you ski in Austria with a horse?” she asked at last.
He did not understand.
The rain poured down straightly and beautifully, shooting through those myriad trees on the mountain sides. The bank clerk saw in Frank his natural successor, and hated him. The company constrained him.
But a quarter of an hour before he was driven down to the station in the little red car, they ran away hand in hand into the Schloss park, and came back dripping with wet. She stood at the window and waved to him shyly: “Good-bye,” as the little red motor buzzed off.
Good-bye! Good-bye!
How grey, how monotonous mountain scenery looked in the rain! “Well, Baby, how do you like this place?” Frank asked.
She loved it, she said, but complained that there were fleas in her bed. Frau Kogl, to whom the complaint was made, said that it was “ausgeschlossen”—quite out of the question. “Das gibt es nicht”—it isn’t done. But the “boots” with the green apron was philosophical. Fleas—well, what about it? They existed. There were fleas in the carpet—fleas everywhere—between bedclothes—in a word, in nature. Fleas, he implied, were in the scheme of things. God had so ordained it. The “boots’” attitude, like that of the modern philosophers’, was one of acceptance; he accepted all evil and all good in life with equal grace. Herr Kogl ordered him to go to the chemist and buy a preparation notoriously fatal to fleas, and the “boots” came back carefully carrying a small bottle, in whose efficacy he did not believe.
At dinner, Frank found himself seated among a group of German tourists. Herr Nikulitsch, despite his Czech name, was a German—corpulent, spectacled, with a large, square, short-cropped blond head; in fact so typical a German that had he had the luck to be in England between the years 1914 to 1918, he would have been arrested without provocation. His wife had eyes which were so queerly adjusted that when she talked to you she seemed to be looking at someone else. Frank was faced by this cow of a woman who could only understand the German point of view about the war; and two Scottish old maids who could only understand the British point of view about the war; neither of whom could understand each other. The Scottish old maids complained derisively about the Kalter Aufschnitt: “The idea of giving you cheese without biscuits! Ha!” They shook their heads and smiled malignantly. They marvelled at these foreigners! The more they saw of them, the more they marvelled!
“The Germans,” said Frau Nikulitsch, “are good people. We are good people at heart. Any one of good will will admit that we are good people. But the French are a nation of sadists.”
“Yes,” said the Frau Pastor, “we are a thoroughly good people, devoid of all guile. We haven’t an ungracious thought.”
Baby listened politely. It was not what she had read in The Daily Mail. “Tricking Huns. Once a German, always a German. Blond beasts,” were phrases that occurred to her. Frank was talking to the Frau Pastor now, and because he wanted to be sympathetic, and to show off his own broadmindedness and the tolerant, liberal spirit of his countrymen, he told her, with a smile (as if making light of it) that our own royalty was mostly German; and he felt that it was strange that she thought nothing of it, a little churlish of her even—it was as though she made light of his kindness and that of his countrymen who bore this alien taint with good grace. The Frau Pastor seemed to think England was rather lucky.
And why, she asked, was England supporting the Russian claim to Eastern Prussia, and simultaneously supporting the Finnish claim to Northern Russia?
It was, said Frank, in pursuance of an ideal to keep alive the feeble flame of patriotism in the face of a growing international revolution. Men were losing interest in their countries, so you had to tread on their toes to keep up their national pride.
“And the English,” said the Frau Pastor (living up to the ideal), “behaved worst of all in the last war.”
Frank thought of showing her a 1920 copy of The Daily Mail (Continental edition), in which was set forth what Poincaré thought of the German evasion of the Allied (just) demand for reparations. The extremity of the shock brought him back to sanity. When he listened to one German after another who told him that if Germany had been arming it was because the Entente Cordiale was stifling them by a tightening ring of alliances (to whom he had said that if the Entente Cordiale was stifling them by a tightening ring of alliances it was because Germany had been arming), who were convinced that we had started the war as we were convinced that they had provoked it, the thought struck him: “Of course they must be convinced. When A is roused to a pitch where he will do B in, and face the risk of being done in by B in the doing, he is sincere in believing B to be in the wrong. This is the shady side of faith. Frank looked to the Pastor to display some soothing impartiality, and gave him a lead. “All nations are very much alike and equally unjust to foreigners,” Frank said. But to all such overtures the pastor, who thought the world was all right, the Church all right, and nothing wanted changing, replied: “We Germans are well known to be over-indulgent to foreigners. Germany is too idealistic a people.”
“Patriotism,” said Frank, “is like wine—a good thing when you haven’t had too much of it.”
“You don’t understand,” said the Frau Pastor. “Only a German can understand what we feel about these things, only a German who has gone through what we have gone through and who knows what we know.”
There is a limit to an intelligent man’s enjoyment of the irony of being regarded as an imbecile by fools. And it is soon reached. A new war was starting before the discords of the old have had time to resolve themselves, and, identifying a nation of sixty million people with the two who had displeased him, Frank felt that they deserved it and hoped that they would be beaten!
“And what ridiculous names these foreigners have!” remarked one of the Scottish old maids, when the Germans had left the table. “That Viennese lady opposite—Frau von Endte! I don’t know much German, but I know that much: that Ente means duck! It’s as if she called herself: ‘Mrs. de Ducke’!”
Frank strolled away into the hills. The night was calm and benignant; the stars whispered; and all this rocky waste listened, moonlit and silent, to God. At every corner, a crucifix. Green lights and blue lights and red lights illumining the twisted naked body of Christ, with red blood flowing from the wounds. Yet curiously enough, Christ’s message had not been understood, he thought, and looking back at the bloody centuries which followed on the crucifixion and at Christ’s tortured body, so shamelessly paraded, it occurred to Frank that Christians generally may have got hold of the wrong end of the stick from the beginning, inferring that it was blood-letting that He meant and advocated to us. On consideration, Frank thought the world was well ripe for destruction.
Above and beyond, what peace! All desire abated, in the soft ablution of the moon. O Lust, where is thy sting, and Satiety thy victory?
A figure in the dark. “Hello, is that you? Oh, Frau König! All my homages.”
Frau König, with a preoccupied air, took him down the mountain track into the thicket, the while saying: “I don’t deny. I don’t deny how hard it is for a woman who had contracted certain habits in marriage suddenly to find herself without a man. Well, here I am. Here I am, I say! Here I am; you may have what you wish. But my condition”—she touched his wrist—“is that you are to take me out into society.”
“I do not wish it. I mean I do not wish what you wish me to wish. You make me feel good, Frau König, and that’s the truth.”
“I do not understand you. I have gone as far as I can.”
“That’s the truth. Do not go further.”
“But—”
How could he explain? How could he tell her that where unattractive women were concerned he was a prude and a puritan? For all sexual morality, if we examine it more closely, is founded on aversion. It pleased him to recall to her an ideal of womanhood which she was in no mood to follow; of reticence and chastity, which he counselled her to practise. “Not in abandon, but in restraint and self-discipline, Frau König,” he said, leading her out of the thicket into the open road, “lies the hope of a sane and healthy mankind.”
“If,” she said, “my fiancé does not come soon, I shall go mad.”
As they turned into the pension courtyard, they passed the apoplectic Baron’s bungalow, who peeped through the window and, though it was evening, wished them: “Good morning.” The Baron’s knowledge of English must have been very slight, because every time Frank passed him in the morning, the Baron touched his cap and said: “Good evening.” In the big barn, an automatic barrel organ played excruciating music, and Herr Kogl explained that it had been a first-class barrel organ till the Italians—a nation, as all knew, of organ grinders—spoilt it during their occupation of the town in the war by over-taxing its musical capacity.
“How very inconsiderate!”
Several couples were dancing. Herbert, removing his waistcoat, danced in his braces and shirt sleeves with Lina, the bare-legged scullery maid, at a considerably accelerated pace, as if to show them all what he could do. “Our Herbert,” Herr Kogl, pointed with his chin towards him, “once he starts dancing, outstrips them all.” Frank stood and watched till it would be time for Lina to go up to bed. Heavens of ecstasy, oceans of rapture awaited him. The Kogls sat there as always: Herr Kogl; Herr Spatz, a fat, rough man of the same proportions as the host himself; the policeman; the policeman’s wife, who was a waitress; and drank wine. The policeman’s little boy slipped in and out between their legs and ran about all day long, and they christened him “Quicksilver.” Herr Kogl alone did not drink. The cook, a bewildered-looking old woman, who was never seen about during the week, drank, after good takings, on a Sunday night with Frau Kogl. Herr Kogl watched them drink, but refused to participate. His maudlin eyes were fixed on the dog to whom he would talk for hours at a stretch: “Rags, you wretch! Rags, you immoral little bitch!”
“Nice old doggie, what?” Frau Kogl would remark.
Herr Kogl would shake his head. “It’s not a dog—kein Hund, sondern ein Skandal!”
The dog was very old, toothless, and refused all food but chocolate. The Frau Wachmann, the policeman’s wife, a young shrew, shouted and cursed at her husband, a shy middle-aged upright man, because he would not go to bed immediately, but preferred to play cards with the others of a Sunday evening. Herr Spatz thundered forth as he played: “Two aces! Bang! Ha-a-a!—Queen of Clubs! Bang! Bang!” with his fist, so that all the glasses on the table jingled nervously. He had once spent nine months in Turkey, and he looked, with his clean-shaven head and his mouthful of glittering white teeth himself like a Turk, and behaved like one, or at least, as you would imagine “The Turk” to behave in his more lustful moments. Frau Kogl, drunk, attempted to sing, but it came out very badly and dismally and she stopped, ashamed of herself.
“To hell with Czecho-Slovakia!” Herr Spatz was saying to a relative who, thanks to the Treaty of Versailles, has become Czecho-Slovakian and now said he was proud of the great country. “Great country!” roared Herr Spatz. “I’ve lived nine months in Turkey: who can talk Czecho-Slovakian there? Answer me that!”
“Who will drive the van to town to-morrow morning, that is what I wish to know?” Herr Kogl interjected.
“Willy.”
“Hm!—Hm!” distrustfully from Herr Kogl.
“Why?” from Herr Spatz, whose son Willy happened to be.
Herr Kogl looked on the ground. “Willy! Willy is not Herbert, that’s why!”
At long last the clock on the Schloss tower struck half-past ten, and Herr Kogl was locking up. Frank paced his room up and down; every moment the door might open and Lina come in, and then—.
From time to time, unable to stand the suspense, he would go out and wait for her in the corridor. Simultaneously, the door opposite would open, and the Pastor and Frau Pastor peep out, again and again, as if to put out their boots: but surely, Frank thought, they could not have so many boots to put out. Then, as he stood in the corridor, the adjacent door opened, and the Frau Professor peeped out to ask if her dachshund’s coughing had not, perchance, disturbed his sleep. “He has acute inflammation of the lungs,” she said, “and I am very anxious to know what the specialist will say to-morrow morning.”
“I am very sorry,” Frank said, “for you both.” And while he stood there assuring Frau Professor Koch of his complete sympathy, and the Frau Pastor peeped out of her room to put out another pair of boots, the bare-legged Lina slipped into his room.
He forgot everything, looked at her intently, grasped her eagerly, savagely, asked: “Yes?”
“Why?” she parried.
“Because.”
“Because what?”
“Because—because we’re young, and because life isn’t for ever.”
She bent down her look and was silent.
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
She had said it so quietly and convincingly that his soul was devastated by certitude. He was as certain of his reward as one is certain of money placed to the credit of one’s current account, once receipt of it has been acknowledged by the bank. It would take place all right. It was indeed as though it had already taken place; and she seemed to him like some tedious acquaintance; he asked her tedious questions, and asking them, had not the patience to concentrate upon her tedious replies. “Are both your parents alive?”
“Yes, both my parents are alive.”
“Have you any brothers or sisters?”
“Yes, two sisters and one brother.”
From outside came the sound of tears and choking. “I suppose,” said Frank, “that is the policeman’s wife, by the sound of it.”
“No, it’s he—the policeman.”
“What! Sobbing like that? Why?”
“She curses him dreadfully: that’s why. It’s the same every Sunday night because she wants him to go to bed at once, whereas he, poor chap, wants to sit out with the others and play cards. He’s an upright, decent, quiet man; it’s a shame the life she leads him!”
It did not interest him. The wind that bellied out his sails had suddenly ceased, and his soul flopped down like a flag on a flagstaff. He, she, and the world, seemed as flat as a pancake—as flat and as unprofitable.
“You—you—you!” she gasped. In this “you” was all her being, her illusory love, her reunion with him, the dissolution, the loss of her “I” in his “you.” But he thought he had squeezed her leg and said: “I beg your pardon? Did you say anything?”
She shook her head.
“That’s all right, then.”
She had begun to look forward, and he went to sleep at once. She waited awhile, scanning his face with hatred. Then shook him by the shoulder. “You ninny!” Then dressed herself and went out.
She was gone. Presently he sat up on the edge of the bed, his naked feet dangling down like a pendulum. He was drunk. It was significant that he was both spiritually and physically drunk at the same time, and he had just sufficient reason left him to comprehend and thoroughly appreciate the humour of this interesting coincidence.
Next morning he was woken by the conversation in the yard below his window. “You were born in eighteen sixty-four, Herr Baron; I was born in eighteen sixty-six. I take it that I am two years younger than you—yes!”
“Kh-kh-khrr-rrr-khrrr!”
“Kh-kh-kh-khr-khrrr!”
“The Herr Baron complains to me that he is damned and done for, mattering as he is all over. But I say, aber wo! Herr Baron: what does it matter if you matter in a world of matter: it is all matter—spirit, flesh, and all! Oh, yes!”
The Baron now was telling Herr Kogl of a brother who lived in Vienna and was professor of modern languages at Vienna University; and Herr Kogl at once retorted: “My son lives in Bizirk IX and has to go to his studies in Bizirk V.”
“What does he do?”
“Studies at the Institute.”
“What institute?”
“The Hotel and Restaurant Institute. Why, Herbert can do anything!—Drive a car—stick a pig—wait at table. Wonderful boy! This—all this—is to be his. Ah! he will go a long way, our Herbert will, he will, when he finishes his studies at the Institute. And I intend to send him abroad for a year or two to pick up foreign languages, so that he secures all the benefit that we old folks can afford to give him.”
“Of course. Why not?” said the Baron, “if you have the money to give him.”
“Ah, no!” exclaimed Herr Kogl. “He must earn the money himself. I don’t believe in extravagance, Herr Baron. ‘No,’ I tell Herbert: ‘you go abroad to France and England and serve your time there in the big hotels and earn every penny yourself as a waiter.’ That’s the way to bring them up—youth,” he added tenderly.
He looked at Frau Kogl, who was coming down the steps towards him. Here was this woman with all her money and property; he came along and made it his, and gave her a son and made it his son’s: more than ever his own. “I was telling the Herr Baron,” he said, “how when Herbert finishes his studies at the Institute and has been abroad in France and England he will on coming back devote himself to the development of the pension and alpine tourism generally by making use of the ties and influence he has established in France and England. Oh, yes!”
“That’s all right,” said the old woman, “but what are we to do about Herr Dickin? All the ladies are leaving. I don’t know what to do. He will have to go, that’s all.”
“He—is a—good—man,” Herr Kogl replied.
“What are we to do?”
Herr Kogl did not reply.
“Come on!” she cried. “Don’t stand there like a—”
“Shut up, will you!” he shouted formidably, and banged his fist on the table.
She quailed before the man with the strong will.
“I never bother; it is none of my business,” Frau Kogl began as Frank came downstairs. “I attend to my own job, and what with the prices of everything going up, I’ve got my work cut out. Meat, as you know, has gone up 20 per cent., vegetables too. Fish is not to be had. To me it is all the same, you understand; I never bother about what other people do.” Her hands shot out awkwardly. In that gesture was all her weary dissatisfaction with people who make bother. “I don’t mind what you do upstairs. But I can’t lose all my clients, you understand. The season is a slack one, and where will I get other guests? Meat, as I say, has gone up; vegetables gone up. Fish is not to be had in the neighbourhood, and they are all complaining now about you. But what can I do?” She shot out her hands. She must have acquired these gestures in the French convent in Alsace where she had been put by her mother.
And indeed there was trouble ahead. Lina’s entry had been observed. The Frau Pastor had communicated it to the Frau Doktor Wirt, and the Frau Doktor Wirt, with the confirmation of the Frau Professor Koch, to the Frau Direktor Bödingen and Frau Nikulitsch, and the Frau Direktor Bödingen to the Frau Oberst von Kaisar, who complained to Frau von Endte. A commotion had been caused. Frank was suspect. Two elderly German women locked their doors at his approach and accused him of having tried to force his way into their bedrooms. When all complained and armed themselves against her, Frau Kogl could not decide. She scratched her head pensively. “Yes,” she said, “Yes, I don’t know what to do.” She looked old and ill with worry; even her housemaid’s knee had taken a turn for the worse. “I am afraid we must ask you to go.”
“With regret,” added Herr Kogl.
As for Lina, Herr Kogl made short shift of her. He merely bawled at her: “Out you go, you slut!”
“If,” Frank reflected, “I can’t be anything better, let me at least be a hero.”
The little red car was prepared for him, and he got Lina to make a bundle of her things and get inside with him. It was a desultory morning and rain fell perfunctorily. “You ugly young thing!” he thought, surveying her from his seat in the corner, as the car turned out of the courtyard past the Baron’s bungalow (who peeped out of his window and, touching his cap, said: “Good evening!”), “What the deuce am I to do with you now?”
“What sort of wage did you get?” he asked aloud.
She told him; and, on taking thought, he decided to run her down to his old friend Frau von Kestner; who afterwards wrote to him:
“I have ordered her to put on a longer skirt and wear stockings. She was embarrassing the postman each time he called with letters, as well as the policeman in the square. Now, I need hardly say, nobody takes any notice of her, because she really is not one little bit pretty.”
The tall lighted building, the abode of The Daily, The Sunday, The Monday, The Evening, The Midday, The Pictorial and The Illustrated Runner, loomed in the fog. Lord de Jones looked up from the pavement at the large lighted windows over the roof, behind which, he knew, the big spider sat in the midst of his web; and Lord de Jones, entering, by appointment, did indeed feel as a fly might feel if it had an appointment with a great big spider who had expressed in unmistakable terms the wish to devour it. He went up in the historical lift and, arrived at the top, was ushered into the presence of Lord Ottercove.
“Now where is that crop?” asked Lord Ottercove, without greeting the visitor.
“Under the sod, I expect,” retorted de Jones.
“This mission of yours has cost me thousands in sealing wax alone, to enable you to seal up all the craters. Stationers have made fortunes out of me! And there is not a blade of grass anywhere; in fact, the termination of our mission has synchronised with an unprecedented famine in Russia. And, damn them, they’re blaming me for it!”
“There is always a famine in Russia at one time or another through causes, as is invariably urged, not connected with the political faith of the government of the day.”
Lord Ottercove ignored this retort. “The Foreign Secretary is ringing me up all day long, and I refuse to see him; refuse to see him, Chris, for, quite frankly, I wouldn’t know what to say to him. All that sealing wax—and nothing to show for it. Shame!”
Lord Ottercove walked over to the sideboard and poured himself some Perrier water into a glass. “And there’s that other fellow,” he said, drinking.
“I know, the Prime Minister.”
“Yes. Joe’s shouting himself hoarse about the bursting granaries, the wheat springing up all over the globe—increased crop—the end of international jealousies—the economic solution of national rivalries! And you with all your untried genius cannot raise a blade of grass anywhere to substantiate his speeches. He has to rely on the dog stunt entirely, which, I frankly tell you so—is not good enough. It’s not good enough, Chris. Read this.”
Lord Ottercove handed him a copy of The Evening Ensign containing the report of Lord Evesham’s speech at the Carlton Club, the burden of which was that the election in which the Conservatives were defeated had been fought on an unreal issue, against the advice of the experienced members of the party.
“An unreal issue, he says!” exclaimed Lord Ottercove.
“No more unreal than Gladstone’s Turk.”
“An unreal issue! They’ve realised it at last and have decided to leave the dog stunt out of their party programme, and they are already winning all the by-elections, and we’ve not a friend anywhere except among sealing-wax manufacturers.”
“I’m sorry to hear it, Rex.”
“Now, I believe in Joe. He is my friend, and if a man is my friend I’ll stick to him through thick and thin. But he must have increased crop if he is to go on shouting about it, and he’s shouted about it so much that he can’t go back on it now. You promised us two blades of grass to every one. Where are they? Where are they, I ask?” He looked at his visitor with the unrestrained ill-humour of a man who, being completely accustomed to things going well with him, suddenly discovers that they are going badly. “You make my papers look ridiculous.”
“I’m sorry. I will make amends—look into the matter—enquire. It may be that the sealing wax is defective. I promise to do what I can, Rex.”
“Promises! To hell with promises! It’s meat we want. Meat, not promises!”
“True, we want meat. But all we can give you is cat’s meat. Indeed, that is all you have ever had in the past.”
“Enough of your cynicism, Chris.”
“Now let me tell you, Rex, that I don’t care two tuppenny damns about your crop. What I care about is the world. And that is no more.”
Lord Ottercove rose and leaned heavily first on one leg, then on the other. “It’s still there, Chris,” he said.
“Only for a week. I’ve disintegrated the atom.”
“Well?”
“Which means that all other atoms, at first slowly, then faster and faster, will follow suit, till not a rack is left behind.”
“The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself?”
“Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff—”
“I know: as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” He turned away and bit his lip. “Chris, I am vexed: bear with my weakness; my first-class brain is troubled. Be not disturbed with my infirmity. If you will be pleased, retire to that sofa and there repose: a turn or two I’ll walk, to still my beating mind.”
“I wish you peace.”
When he came back Lord Ottercove’s face looked eager with hope. “I don’t believe you, Chris. You say you’ve done it?”
“A week ago. In Greece.”
“My Athens correspondent is silent about the matter.”
“Inevitably. He has disintegrated.”
“There is no sign of panic anywhere.”
“There is no panic because there is no way to communicate panic. No sound, no sight: a whole area vanishes invisibly, ceases to be there.”
“But what of the people in the adjoining area? Why don’t they communicate or run away?”
“The people next to those just vanished, vanish next. They do not know that anything has vanished till they themselves vanish.”
“I see. It’s a knowledge which is vouchsafed you at vanishing point, so to speak.”
“Exactly.”
“But they must know if they find that a familiar house or square has vanished.”
“No: if it is not where they expect to find it, they naturally suppose that they are in error: that what they are looking for is probably round the other corner.”
“H’m, I see.”
There was a pause.
“Well, what have you to say, Rex?”
“Chris: I advise you against it.”
“Too late, too late! The world is fast unravelling, like a laddered silk stocking.”
“Shame! And quite a new world, barely 200,000,000 years old. It will do you no good, Chris.”
“If an employee of yours, Rex, came to ask you for a rise, I verily believe you would not say No, but: ‘I advise you against your suggesting the idea to me.’ And should he ask for a reason, you’d say: ‘I don’t think it would do you any good.’”
“I don’t think this will. I don’t think it will do any of us any good. Disintegrate. Ha! What an idea!”
“Why?”
“Well, look here, Chris, do you think it’s considerate? Do you think it’s altogether kind?”
“It’s the very milk of human kindness to spare us all the horrors of this new war. You, Rex, must see this, for you are good at heart.”
“Yes. I want, Chris, to do good. There is no greater pleasure in the world than doing good. If you destroy the world, I wouldn’t be able to go on doing good, now would I?”
“That, I admit, is hard on you.”
“It’s hard on us both, Chris. I wouldn’t be able to do good, and you wouldn’t be able to make good. You would remain for ever a Genius of the Untried.”
“What! now that I have tried and succeeded?”
“I follow your argument. But believe me, Chris, it’s defective. To destroy the world is not what I might call constructive work. I am rather tempted, if you follow my line of thought, to relegate it to the category of the destructive. It’s negative, Chris. That’s the word: negative.”
“Negative? Why, it’s positively destroying itself with a vengeance, bolting away into nothing, overjoyed at the chance of release, bubbling over with sheer joie de vivre!”
“H’m.”
“And can you wonder? For millions of years the atom has been kept in harness. Round himself and round others like him, he was made to jump without cease or sense, as if to bite off his own tail. He hasn’t known a holiday since the world began. And what was it all for? To convince crass fools that matter was solid!”
“Since you came in this evening, Chris, everything seems less solid.”
“Glad you are beginning to see light. I am looking forward to the time, which is not distant, when what now serves, inadequately, to distinguish the outward form of Baron Ottercove, will be converted into the purest radiation. All matter, Rex, is a disease. It is ‘matter.’ When pools stagnate, or tissues decay, life springs to the surface, a pestilential vermin. It’s a hitch somewhere in the atomic mechanism of the universe, a clotting of the blood, an imperfect interplay of atoms in the cosmic body which creates this fretting disease we call life. In the healthy regions of the universe the atoms change their make-up millions of times in a second and so are for ever dissociated and incapable of association and cannot degenerate into a condition in which decay breeds life. Unscientific people or unimaginative scientists would say that what I have done is to ‘explode’ the atom. Nonsense! Even ‘disintegrated’ is hardly the word for it, for it is apt to mislead us on a vital point. What I’ve done is no more than what a watchmaker might do to a clock which has got clogged and is losing time: I’ve speeded up its electrons to the pitch at which the degenerated matter we call life regenerates itself into radiation and, for us, ceases to be. A mere question of revolution.”
“Revolution!” cried Lord Ottercove. “I thought as much. You’ve let him loose, the atom! Relinquished your hold on him, when your betters were on the point of harnessing him to do all the world’s labour.” Lord Ottercove suddenly jumped to his feet, a flush of anger suffusing his cheeks. “Stop him, man!” he yelled. “Stop him, quick!”
“Can’t catch him now.”
“Run!” Lord Ottercove ran and opened the door.
“You’d need a greyhound to catch him: he has galloped off into not-being.”
“What’s that?”
“Death.”
“Sheer idleness!” said Lord Ottercove. “At a time when servants are scarce; when the human labourer has downed tools; when inertia like some horrible disease has laid low the human race; when all our hope was in the atom, you’ve released him, let him go to whirl senselessly in the void!”
“Far from it. There they have to dash round like fury to maintain a high standard of death. For the moment they slacken their speed, sickness sets in and life.”
“That,” said Lord Ottercove, “might frighten the bird-livered neurotics who are sick of life. I am sick with the healthy fear of death. I am all for keeping the atom in his place. All this talk of Beyond, a Future Life for the Atom—tell this to Dr. Conan Doyle or to Sir Oliver Lodge, don’t tell it to me! Sheer sabotage! Allow one atom to strike, and all the rest will follow suit. It’s not fair to the public. Next thing they’ll want the dole. The country, Chris—I mean the world—will not stand for it.”
“It’s not work, Rex, but unhealthy conditions of work that the atoms object to in life. Over there they work harder and quicker, yet freely and joyfully, that we may all remain in the balmed and blessed state of death.”
“I see. The struggle for non-existence.”
“Exactly.”
“You are, I take it, a sort of Official Receiver winding up the affairs of the visible world.”
“No, a doctor who has released the circulation of the world which these many centuries have clogged at our end: and the patient is speedily recovering. When you and I and other sufferers cease to be, it will mean that the patient is once again in the pink of condition. By healing one atom I have healed the wound of the world.”
“Who are the wound?”
“All that which feels.”
“I feel the coming death, feel it deeply and painfully, Chris.”
“You must not feel: you must dry up.”
“Dry up yourself!” said Ottercove, ruffled.
“We’re mere boils and pimples, Rex, who feel the hurt. When I have nursed the universe back to death, none of us shall feel any more.” De Jones was muttering something.
“What’s that?” asked Ottercove.
“Just words. A German title has suggested itself to me as a caption for what I mean—‘Tod und Genesung’ which, in our rotten tongue, might be translated into ‘Death and Recovery.’ Shakespeare says: