DO WE TRULY DIE?
§ 1

Mrs. Croome was heard in the passage, someone was admitted, there were voices, and the handle of the parlour door was turned. “’Asn’t E come, then?” they heard the voice of Mrs. Croome through the opening. Dr. Elihu Barrack appeared in the doorway.

He was a round-headed young man with a clean-shaven face, a mouth that was determinedly determined and slightly oblique, a short nose, and a general expression of resolution; the fact that he had an artificial leg was scarcely perceptible in his bearing. He considered the four men before him for a moment, and then addressed himself to Mr. Huss in a tone of brisk authority. “You ought to be in bed,” he said.

“I had this rather important discussion,” 101said Mr. Huss, with a gesture portending introductions.

“But sitting up will fatigue you,” the doctor insisted, sticking to his patient.

“It won’t distress me so much as leaving these things unsaid would have done.”

“Opinions may differ upon that,” said Mr. Farr darkly.

“We are still far from any settlement of our difficulties,” said Sir Eliphaz to the universe.

“I have indicated my view at any rate,” said Mr. Huss. “I suppose now Sir Alpheus is here—”

“He isn’t here,” said Dr. Barrack neatly. “He telegraphs to say that he is held up, and will come by the next train. So you get a reprieve, Mr. Huss.”

“In that case I shall go on talking.”

“You had better go to bed.”

“No. I couldn’t lie quiet.” And Mr. Huss proceeded to name his guests to Dr. Barrack, who nodded shortly to each of them in turn, and said: “Pleased-t-meet you.” His face betrayed no excess of pleasure. His eye was hard. He remained standing, as if waiting for them to display symptoms.

“Our discussion has wandered far,” said Sir Eliphaz. “Our original business here was to 102determine the future development of Woldingstanton School, which we think should be made more practical and technical than hitherto, and less concerned with history and philosophy than it has been under Mr. Huss. (Won’t you sit down, Doctor?)”

The doctor sat down, still watching Sir Eliphaz with hard intelligence.

“Well, we have drifted from that,” Sir Eliphaz continued.

“Not so far as you may think,” said Mr. Huss.

“At any rate Mr. Huss has been regaling us with a discourse upon the miseries of life, how we are all eaten up by parasites and utterly wretched, and how everything is wretched and this an accursed world ruled either by a cruel God or a God so careless as to be practically no God at all.”

“Nice stuff for nineteen eighteen A.D.,” said Mr. Dad, putting much meaning into the “A.D.”

“Since I left Woldingstanton and came here,” said Mr. Huss, “I have done little else but think. I have not slept during the night, I have had nothing to occupy me during the day, and I have been thinking about fundamental things. I have been forced to revise my faith, and to look more closely than I have 103ever done before into the meaning of my beliefs and into my springs of action. I have been wrenched away from that habitual confidence in the order of things which seemed the more natural state for a mind to be in. But that has only widened a difference that already existed between me and these three gentlemen, and that was showing very plainly in the days when success still justified my grip upon Woldingstanton. Suddenly, swiftly, I have had misfortune following upon misfortune—without cause or justification. I am thrown now into the darkest doubt and dismay; the universe seems harsh and black to me; whereas formerly I believed that at the core of it and universally pervading it was the Will of a God of Light.... I have always denied, even when my faith was undimmed, that the God of Righteousness ruled this world in detail and entirely, giving us day by day our daily rewards and punishments. These gentlemen on the contrary do believe that. They say that God does rule the world traceably and directly, and that success is the measure of his approval and pain and suffering the fulfilment of unrighteousness. And as for what has this to do with education—it has all to do with education. You can settle no practical questions until you have settled 104such disputes as this. Before you can prepare boys to play their part in the world you must ask what is this world for which you prepare them; is it a tragedy or comedy? What is the nature of this drama in which they are to play?”

Dr. Barrack indicated that this statement was noted and approved.

“For clearly,” said Mr. Huss, “if success is the justification of life you must train for success. There is no need for men to understand life, then, so long as they do their job in it. That is the opinion of these governors of mine. It has been the opinion of most men of the world—always. Obey the Thing that Is! that is the lesson they would have taught to my boys. Acquiesce. Life for them is not an adventure, not a struggle, but simply obedience and the enjoyment of rewards.... That, Dr. Barrack, is what such a technical education as they want set up at Woldingstanton really means....

“But I have believed always and taught always that what God demands from man is his utmost effort to co-operate and understand. I have taught the imagination, first and most; I have made knowledge, knowledge of what man is and what man’s world is and what man may 105be, which is the adventure of mankind, the substance of all my teaching. At Woldingstanton I have taught philosophy; I have taught the whole history of mankind. If I could not have done that without leaving chemistry and physics, mathematics and languages out of the curriculum altogether I would have left them out. And you see why, Dr. Barrack.”

“I see your position certainly,” said Dr. Barrack.

“And now that my heavens are darkened, now that my eyes have been opened to the wretchedness, futility and horror in the texture of life, I still cling, I cling more than ever, to the spirit of righteousness within me. If there is no God, no mercy, no human kindliness in the great frame of space and time, if life is a writhing torment, an itch upon one little planet, and the stars away there in the void no more than huge empty flares, signifying nothing, then all the brighter shines the flame of God in my heart. If the God in my heart is no son of any heavenly father then is he Prometheus the rebel; it does not shake my faith that he is the Master for whom I will live and die. And all the more do I cling to this fire of human tradition we have lit upon this little planet, if it is the one gleam of spirit in all the windy vastness of a dead and empty universe.”

106Dr. Barrack seemed about to interrupt with some comment, and then, it was manifest, deferred his interpolation.

“Loneliness and littleness,” said Mr. Huss, “harshness in the skies above and in the texture of all things. If so it is that things are, so we must see them. Every baby in its mother’s arms feels safe in a safe creation; every child in its home. Many men and women have lived and died happy in that illusion of security. But this war has torn away the veil of illusion from millions of men.... Mankind is coming of age. We can see life at last for what it is and what it is not. Here we spin upon a ball of rock and nickel-steel, upon which a film of water, a few score miles of air, lie like the bloom upon a plum. All about that ball is space unfathomable; all the suns and stars are mere grains of matter scattered through a vastness that is otherwise utterly void. To that thin bloom upon a particle we are confined; if we tunnel down into the earth, presently it is too hot for us to live; if we soar five miles into the air we freeze, the blood runs out of our vessels into our lungs, we die suffocated and choked with blood....

“Out of the litter of muds and gravels that make the soil of the world we have picked some 107traces of the past of our race and the past of life. In our observatories and laboratories we have gleaned some hints of its future. We have a vision of the opening of the story, but the first pages we cannot read. We discover life, a mere stir amidst the mud, creeping along the littoral of warm and shallow seas in the brief nights and days of a swiftly rotating earth. We follow through vast ages the story of life’s extension into the waters, and its invasion of the air and land. Plants creep upon the land and raise themselves by stems towards the sun; a few worms and crustaceans follow, insects appear; and at length come our amphibious ancestors, breathing air by means of a swimming bladder used as a lung. From the first the land animals are patched-up creatures. They eke out the fish ear they inherit by means of an ear drum made out of a gill slit. You can trace scale and fin in bone and limb. At last this green scum of vegetable life with the beasts entangled in its meshes creeps in the form of forests over the hills; grass spreads across the plains, and great animals follow it out into the open. What does it all signify? No more than green moss spreading over an old tile. Steadily the earth cools and the day lengthens. Through long ages of warmth and moisture the wealth of 108unmeaning life increases; come ages of chill and retrocession, glacial periods, and periods when whole genera and orders die out. Comes man at last, the destroyer, the war-maker, setting fire to the world, burning the forests, exhausting the earth. What hope has he in the end? Always the day drags longer and longer and always the sun radiates its energy away. A time will come when the sun will glow dull red in the heavens, shorn of all its beams, and neither rising nor setting. A day will come when the earth will be as dead and frozen as the moon.... A spirit in our hearts, the God of mankind, cries ‘No!’ but is there any voice outside us in all the cold and empty universe that echoes that ‘No’?”
109
§ 2

“Ah, Mr. Huss, Mr. Huss!” said Sir Eliphaz.

His eye seemed seeking some point of attachment, and found it at last in the steel engraving of Queen Victoria giving a Bible to a dusky potentate, which adorned the little parlour.

“Your sickness colours your vision,” said Sir Eliphaz. “What you say is so profoundly true and so utterly false. Mysteriously evolved, living as you say in a mere bloom of air and moisture upon this tiny planet, how could we exist, how could we continue, were we not sustained in every moment by the Mercy and Wisdom of God? The flimsier life is, the greater the wonder of his Providence. Not a sparrow,” said Sir Eliphaz, and then enlarging the metaphor with a boom in his voice, “not a hair of my head, falls to the ground without His knowledge and consent.... I am a man much occupied. I cannot do the reading I would. But while you have been reviling the works of 110God I have been thinking of some wonders....”

Sir Eliphaz lifted up a hand with thumb and finger opposed, as though he held some exquisite thing therein.

“The human eye,” said Sir Eliphaz, with an intensity of appreciation that brought tears to his own....

“The cross-fertilization of plants....

“The marvellous transformations of the higher insects....

“The highly elaborate wing scales of the Lepidoptera.

“The mercy that tempers the wind to the shorn lamb....

“The dark warm marvels of embryology; the order and rhythm and obedience with which the cells of the fertilized ovum divide to build up the perfect body of a living thing, yea, even of a human being—in God’s image. First there is one cell, then two; the process of division is extremely beautiful and is called, I believe, karyokinesis; then after the two come four, each knows his part, each divides certainly and marvellously; eight, sixteen, thirty-two.... Each of those thirty-two cells is a complete thirty-second part of a man. Presently this cell says, ‘I become a hair’; this, ‘a blood corpuscle,’ 111this ‘a cell in the brain of a man, to mirror the universe.’ Each goes to his own appointed place....

“Would that we could do the like!” said Sir Eliphaz.

“Then consider water,” said Sir Eliphaz. “I am not deeply versed in physical science, but there are certain things about water that fill me with wonder and amaze. All other liquids contract when they solidify. With one or two exceptions—useful in the arts. Water expands. Now water is a non-conductor of heat, and if water contracted and became heavier when it became ice, it would sink to the bottom of the polar seas and remain there unmelted. More ice would sink down to it, until all the ocean was ice and life ceased. But water does not do so. No!... Were it not for the vapour of water, which catches and entangles the sun’s heat, this world would scorch by day and freeze by night. Mercy upon mercy, I myself,” said Sir Eliphaz in tones of happy confession, “am ninety per cent. water.... We all are....

“And think how mercifully winter is tempered to us by the snow! When water freezes in the air in winter-time, it does not come pelting down as lumps of ice. Conceivably it 112might, and then where should we be? But it belongs to the hexagonal system—a system prone to graceful frameworks. It crystallizes into the most delicate and beautiful lace of six-rayed crystals—wonderful under the microscope. They flake delicately. They lie loosely one upon another. Out of ice is woven a warm garment like wool, white like wool because like wool it is full of air—a warm garment for bud and shoot....

“Then again—you revile God for the parasites he sends. But are they not sent to teach us a great moral lesson? Each one for himself and God for us all. Not so the parasites. They choose a life of base dependence. With that comes physical degeneration, swift and sure. They are the Socialists of nature. They lose their limbs. They lose colour, become blenched, unappetising beings, vile creatures of sloth—often microscopic. Do they not urge us by their shameful lives to self help and exertion? Yet even parasites have a use! I am told that were it not for parasitic bacteria man could not digest his food. A lichen again is made up of an alga and a fungus, mutually parasitic. That is called symbiosis—living together for a mutual benefit. Maybe every one of those thousands of parasites you deem so horrible is working its way upward towards an arrangement—”

113Sir Eliphaz weighed his words: “Some mutually advantageous arrangement with its host. A paying guest.

“And finally,” said Sir Eliphaz, with the roll of distant thunder in his voice, “think of the stately procession of life upon the earth, through a myriad of forms the glorious crescendo of evolution, up to its climax, man. What a work is man! The paragon of creation, the microcosm of the cosmos, the ultimate birth of time.... And you would have us doubt the guiding hand!”

He ceased with a gesture.

Mr. Dad made a noise like responses in church.
114
§ 3

“A certain beauty in the world is no mark of God’s favour,” said Mr. Huss. “There is no beauty one may not balance by an equal ugliness. The wart-hog and the hyæna, the tapeworm and the stinkhorn, are equally God’s creations. Nothing you have said points to anything but a cold indifference towards us of this order in which we live. Beauty happens; it is not given. Pain, suffering, happiness; there is no heed. Only in the heart of man burns the fire of righteousness.”

For a time Mr. Huss was silent. Then he went on answering Sir Eliphaz.

“You spoke of the wonder of the cross-fertilization of plants. But do you not know that half these curious and elaborate adaptations no longer work? Scarcely was their evolution completed before the special need that produced them ceased. Half the intricate flowers you see are as futile as the ruins of Palmyra. They are self-fertilized or wind-fertilized. The transformation of the higher insects which give us 115our gnats and wasps, our malaria and apple-maggots in due season, are a matter for human astonishment rather than human gratitude. If there is any design in these strange and intricate happenings, surely it is the design of a misplaced and inhuman ingenuity. The scales of the lepidoptera, again, have wasted their glittering splendours for millions of years. If they were meant for man, why do the most beautiful species fly by night in the tropical forests? As for the human eye, oculists and opticians are scarcely of your opinion. You hymn the peculiar properties of water that make life possible. They make it possible. Do they make it other than it is?

“You have talked of the marvels of embryonic growth in the egg. I admit the wonderful precision of the process; but how does it touch my doubts? Rather it confuses them, as though the God who rules the world ruled not so much in love as in irony. Wonderfully indeed do the cells divide and the chromoplasts of the division slide along their spindle lines. They divide not as if a divine hand guided them but with remorseless logic, with the pitiless consistency of a mathematical process. They divide and marshal themselves and turn this way and that, to make an idiot, to make a congenital cripple. 116Millions of such miracles pile up—and produce the swaying drunkard at the pot-house door.

“You talk of the crescendo of evolution, of the first beginnings of life, and how the scheme unfolds until it culminates in us—us, here, under these circumstances, you and Mr. Dad and Farr and me—waiting for the knife. Would that I could see any such crescendo! I see change indeed and change and change, without plan and without heart. Consider for example the migrations of birds across the Mediterranean, and the tragic absurdity of its incidents. Ages ago, and for long ages, there stretched continuous land connexions from Africa to Europe. Then the instinct was formed; the birds flew over land from the heated south to the northern summer to build and breed. Slowly age by age the seas crept over those necks of land. Those linking tracts have been broken now for a hundred thousand years, and yet over a constantly widening sea, in which myriads perish exhausted, instinct, blind and pitiless, still drives those birds. And again think of those vain urgencies for some purpose long since forgotten, that drive the swarming lemmings to their fate. And look at man, your evolution’s crown; consider his want of balance, the invalidism of his women, the extravagant 117disproportion of his desires. Consider the Record of the Rocks honestly and............