The World Set Free

Section 4

Presently, in accordance with his wish, people came to talk to him, and he could forget himself again.  Rachel Borken sat for a long time with him and talked chiefly of women in the world, and with her was a girl named Edith Haydon who was already very well known as a cytologist.  And several of the younger men who were working in the place and a patient named Kahn, a poet, and Edwards, a designer of plays and shows, spent some time with him.  The talk wandered from point to point and came back upon itself, and became now earnest and now trivial as the chance suggestions determined.  But soon afterwards Gardener wrote down notes of things he remembered, and it is possible to put together again the outlook of Karenin upon the world and how he thought and felt about many of the principal things in life.

‘Our age,’ he said, ’has been so far an age of scene-shifting.  We have been preparing a stage, clearing away the setting of a drama that was played out and growing tiresome….  If I could but sit out the first few scenes of the new spectacle….

’How encumbered the world had become!  It was ailing as I am ailing with a growth of unmeaning things.  It was entangled, feverish, confused.  It was in sore need of release, and I suppose that nothing less than the violence of those bombs could have released it and made it a healthy world again.  I suppose they were necessary.  Just as everything turns to evil in a fevered body so everything seemed turning to evil in those last years of the old time.  Everywhere there were obsolete organisations seizing upon all the new fine things that science was giving to the world, nationalities, all sorts of political bodies, the churches and sects, proprietorship, seizing upon those treat powers and limitless possibilities and turning them to evil uses.  And they would not suffer open speech, they would not permit of education, they would let no one be educated to the needs of the new time….  You who are younger cannot imagine the mixture of desperate hope and protesting despair in which we who could believe in the possibilities of science lived in those years before atomic energy came….

’It was not only that the mass of people would not attend, would not understand, but that those who did understand lacked the power of real belief.  They said the things, they saw the things, and the things meant nothing to them….

’I have been reading some old papers lately.  It is wonderful how our fathers bore themselves towards science.  They hated it.  They feared it.  They permitted a few scientific men to exist and work—­a pitiful handful….  “Don’t find out anything about us,” they said to them; “don’t inflict vision upon us, spare our little ways of life from the fearful shaft of understanding.  But do tricks for us, little limited tricks.  Give us cheap lighting.  And cure us of certain disagreeable things, cure us of cancer, cure us of consumption, cure our colds and relieve us after repletion….”  We have changed all that, Gardener.  Science is no longer our servant.  We know it for something greater than our little individual selves.  It is the awakening mind of the race, and in a little while——­In a little while——­I wish indeed I could watch for that little while, now that the curtain has risen….

’While I lie here they are clearing up what is left of the bombs in London,’ he said.  ’Then they are going to repair the ruins and make it all as like as possible to its former condition before the bombs fell.  Perhaps they will dig out the old house in St John’s Wood to which my father went after his expulsion from Russia….  That London of my memories seems to me like a place in another world.  For you younger people it must seem like a place that could never have existed.’

‘Is there much left standing?’ asked Edith Haydon.

’Square miles that are scarcely shaken in the south and north-west, they say; and most of the bridges and large areas of dock.  Westminster, which held most of the government offices, suffered badly from the small bomb that destroyed the Parliament, there are very few traces of the old thoroughfare of Whitehall or the Government region thereabout, but there are plentiful drawings to scale of its buildings, and the great hole in the east of London scarcely matters.  That was a poor district and very like the north and the south. . . .  It will be possible to reconstruct most of it. . . .  It is wanted.  Already it becomes difficult to recall the old time—­even for us who saw it.’

‘It seems very distant to me,’ said the girl.

‘It was an unwholesome world,’ reflected Karenin.  ’I seem to remember everybody about my childhood as if they were ill.  They were ill.  They were sick with confusion.  Everybody was anxious about money and everybody was doing uncongenial things.  They ate a queer mixture of foods, either too much or too little, and at odd hours.  One sees how ill they were by their advertisements.  All this new region of London they are opening up now is plastered with advertisements of pills.  Everybody must have been taking pills.  In one of the hotel rooms in the Strand they have found the luggage of a lady covered up by falling rubble and unburnt, and she was equipped with nine different sorts of pill and tabloid.  The pill-carrying age followed the weapon-carrying age.  They are equally strange to us.  People’s skins must have been in a vile state.  Very few people were properly washed; they carried the filth of months on their clothes.  All the clothes they wore were old clothes; our way of pulping our clothes again after a week or so of wear would have seemed fantastic to them.  Their clothing hardly bears thinking about.  And the congestion of them!  Everybody was jostling against everybody in those awful towns.  In an uproar.  People were run over and crushed by the hundred; every year in London the cars and omnibuses alone killed or disabled twenty thousand people, in Paris it was worse; people used to fall dead for want of air in the crowded ways.  The irritation of London, internal and external, must have been maddening.  It was a maddened world.  It is like thinking of a sick child.  One has the same effect of feverish urgencies and acute irrational disappointments.

‘All history,’ he said, ’is a record of a childhood….

’And yet not exactly a childhood.  There is something clean and keen about even a sick child—­and something touching.  But so much of the old times makes one angry.  So much they did seems grossly stupid, obstinately, outrageously stupid, which is the very opposite to being fresh and young.

’I was reading only the other day about Bismarck, that hero of nineteenth-century politics, that sequel to Napoleon, that god of blood and iron.  And he was just a beery, obstinate, dull man.  Indeed, that is what he was, the commonest, coarsest man, who ever became great.  I looked at his portraits, a heavy, almost froggish face, with projecting eyes and a thick moustache to hide a poor mouth.  He aimed at nothing but Germany, Germany emphasised, indurated, enlarged; Germany and his class in Germany; beyond that he had no ideas, he was inaccessible to ideas; his mind never rose for a recorded instant above a bumpkin’s elaborate cunning.  And he was the most influential man in the world, in the whole world, no man ever left so deep a mark on it, because everywhere there were gross men to resonate to the heavy notes he emitted.  He trampled on ten thousand lovely things, and a kind of malice in these louts made it pleasant to them to see him trample.  No—­he was no child; the dull, national aggressiveness he stood for, no childishness.  Childhood is promise.  He was survival.

’All Europe offered its children to him, it sacrificed education, art, happiness and all its hopes of future welfare to follow the clatter of his sabre.  The monstrous worship of that old fool’s “blood and iron” passed all round the earth.  Until the atomic bombs burnt our way to freedom again. . . .’

‘One thinks of him now as one thinks of the megatherium,’ said one of the young men.

’From first to last mankind made three million big guns and a hundred thousand complicated great ships for no other purpose but war.’

‘Were there no sane men in those days,’ asked the young man, ’to stand against that idolatry?’

‘In a state of despair,’ said Edith Haydon.

’He is so far off—­and there are men alive still who were alive when Bismarck died!’ . . . said the young man….