The undying fire; a contemporary novel

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THE UNDYING FIRE

A CONTEMPORARY NOVEL

BY

H. G. WELLS

J'J JO >S> i

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1919

All right* reserved

ttUPV'Vi 7fC5D

copteight, im9,
By H. G. wells.

Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1919.

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Norbjoolj ^KBg

J. S. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

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All Schoolmasters and Schoolmistresses

and every

Teacher in the World

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

1. The Prologue in Heaven .

2. At Sea View, Sundering-on-Sea

3. The Three Visitors .

4. Do We Truly Die? .

5. Elihu Reproves Job .

6. The Operation

7. Letters and a Telegram

PAGE
1

17
39
100
133
200
214

vii

. THE UNDYING FIRE

CHAPTER THE FIEST

THE PEOLOGUE IN HEAVEN"

§1

Two eternal beings, magnificently enhaloed,
the one in a blinding excess of white radiance
and the other in a bewildering extravagance of
colours, converse amidst stupendous surround-
ings. These surroundings are by tradition
palatial, but there is now also a marked cosmic
tendency about them. They have no definite
locality; they are above and comprehensive of
the material universe.

There is a quality in the scene as if a futur-
ist with a considerable knowledge of modern
chemical and physical speculation and some
obscure theological animus had repainted the
designs of a pre-Eaphaelite. The vast pillars
vanish into unfathomable darknesses, and the
complicated curves and whorls of the decora-
tions seem to have been traced by the flight

B 1

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2 ':- '- '..' i 'y'tSE ^'UNDYIlS^G FIRE

of elemental particles. Suns and planets spin
and glitter through the avanturine depths of
a floor of crystalline ether. Great winged
shapes are in attendance, wrought of irides-
cences and bearing globes, stars, rolls of the
law, flaming swords, and similar symbols. The
voices of the Cherubim and Seraphim can be
heard crjdng continually, ' ' Holy, Holy, Holy. ' '

Now, as in the ancient story, it is a reception
of the sons of God.

The Master of the gathering, to whom one
might reasonably attribute a sublime boredom,
seeing that everything that can possibly happen
is necessarily known to him, displays on the
contrar}^ as lively an interest in his interlocutor
as ever. This interlocutor is of course Satan,
the Unexpected.

The contrast of these two eternal beings is
very marked; while the Deity, veiled and
almost hidden in light, with his hair like wool
and his eyes like the blue of infinite space,
conveys an effect of stable, remote, and moun-
tainous grandeur, Satan has the compact alert-
ness of habitual travel; he is as definite as a
grip-sack, and he brings a flavour of initiative
and even bustle upon a scene that would other-
wise be one of serene perfection. His halo even
has a slightly travelled look. He has been

THE PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN 3

going to and fro in the earth and walking
up and down in it; his labels are still upon
him. His status in heaven remains as unde-
fined as it was in the time of Job ; it is uncertain
to this day whether he is to be regarded as one
of the sons of God or as an inexplicable intruder
among them. (But see upon this question the
Encyclopaedia Biblica under his name.) What-
ever his origin there can be little doubt of his
increasing assurance of independence and im-
portance in the Divine presence. His freedom
may be sanctioned or innate, but he himself has
no doubt remaining of the security of his per-
sonal autonomy. He believes that he is a
necessary accessory to God, and that his incal-
culable quality is an indispensable relief to the
acquiescences of the Archangels. He never
misses these reunions. If God is omnipresent
by a calm necessity, Satan is everywhere by an
infinite activity. They engage in unending
metaphysical differences into which Satan has
imported a tone of friendly badinage. They
play chess together.

But the chess they play is not the little
ingenious game that originated in India; it is
on an altogether different scale. The Ruler
of the Universe creates the board, the pieces,
and the rules ; he makes all the moves ; he may

4 THE UNDYING FIRE

make as many moves as he likes whenever he
likes; his antagonist, however, is permitted to
introduce a slight inexplicable inaccuracy into
each move, which necessitates further moves
in correction. The Creator determines and
conceals the aim of the game, and it is never
clear whether the purpose of the adversary is
to defeat or assist him in his unfathomable
project. Apparently the adversary cannot win,
but also he cannot lose so long as he can keep
the game going. But he is concerned, it would
seem, in preventing the development of any
reasoned scheme in the game.

§2

Celestial badinage is at once too high and
broad to come readily within the compass of
earthly print and understanding. The Satanic
element of unexpectedness can fill the whole
sphere of Being with laughter ; thrills begotten
of those vast reverberations startle our poor
wits at the strangest moments. It is the
humour of Satan to thrust upon the Master his
own title of the Unique and to seek to wrest
from him the authorship of life. (But such
jesting distresses the angels.)

*^ I alone create."
I ** But I — I ferment."

Matter I made and all things."
Stagnant as a sleeping top but for the
wabble I give it."

*^ You are just the little difference of the
individual. You are the little Uniqueness in
everyone and everything, the Unique that
breaks the law, a marginal idiosyncracy. ' '

^^ Sire, you are the Unique, the Uniqueness
of the whole. ' '

6

0 THE UNDYING FIRE

Heaven smiled, and there were halcyon days
in the planets. * * I shall average you out in the
end and you will disappear."

"" And everything will end."

** Will be complete."

'^Without me! "

* ' You spoil the symmetry of my universe. ' '

** I give it life."

** Life comes from me."

** No, Sire, life comes from me."

One of the great shapes in attendance became
distinct as Michael bearing his sword. ^' He
blasphemes, 0 Lord. Shall I cast him forth? "

'' But you did that some time ago," answered
Satan, speaking carelessly over his shoulder
and not even looking at the speaker. '' You
keep on doing it. And — I am here. ' '

*^ He returns," said the Lord soothingly.
*' Perhaps I will him to return. What should
we be without him! "

** Without me, time and space would freeze
into crystalline perfection," said Satan, and at
his smile the criminal statistics of a myriad
planets displayed an upward wave. ** It is I
who trouble the waters. I trouble all things.

1 am the spirit of life."

^' But the soul," said God.

Satan, sitting with one arm thrown over the

THE PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN 7

back of his throne towards Michael, raised his
eyebrows by way of answer. This talk about
the soul he regarded as a divine weakness. He
knew nothing of the soul.

** I made man in my own image/' said God.

** And I made him a man of the world. If
it had not been for me he would still be a
needless gardener — pretending to cultivate a
weedless garden that grew right because it
couldn't grow wrong — in * those endless sum-
mers the blessed ones see.' Think of it, ye
Powers and Dominions ! Perfect flowers ! Per-
fect fruits! Never an autumn chill! Never a
yellow leaf ! Golden leopards, noble lions, car-
nivores unfulfilled, purring for his caresses
amidst the aimless friskings of lambs that
would never grow old ! Good Lord ! How bored
he would have been! How bored! Instead of
Avhich, did I not launch him on the most mar-
vellous adventures? It was I who gave him
history. Up to the very limit of his possibilities.
Up to the very limit. . . . And did not you,
0 Lord, by sending your angels with their flam-
ing swords, approve of what I had done? "

God gave no answer.

^^ But that reminds me," said Satan
unabashed.

§3

The great winged shapes drew nearer, for
Satan is the celestial raconteur. He alone
makes stories.

<< There was a certain man in the land of Uz
whose name was Job.''

<* We remember him.''

** We had a wager of sorts," said Satan.
** It was some time ago."

** The wager was never very distinct — and
now that you remind me of it, there is no record
of your paying. ' '

** Did I lose or win? The issue was obscured
by discussion. How those men did talk! You
intervened. There was no decision."

'* You lost, Satan," said a great Being of
Liglit who bore a book. ^' The wager was
whether Job would lose faith in God and curse
him. He was afflicted in every way, and par-
ticularly by the conversation of his friends.
But there remains an undying fire in man."

Satan rested his dark face on his hand, and
looked down between his knees through the

8

THE PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN 9

pellucid floor to that little eddying in the ether
which makes our world. ** Job/' he said,
" lives still."

Then after an interval: *^ The whole earth
is now — Job. ' '

Satan delights equally in statistics and in
quoting scripture. He leant back in his seat
with an expression of quiet satisfaction.
** Job/' he said, in easy narrative tones, '' lived
to a great age. After his disagreeable experi-
ences he lived one hundred and forty years.
He had again seven sons and three daughters,
and he saw his offspring for four generations.
So much is classical. These ten children
brought him seventy grandchildren, who again
prospered generally and had large families. (It
was a prolific strain.) And now if we allow
three generations to a century, and the reality
is rather more than that, and if we take the
survival rate as roughly three to a family, and
if we agree with your excellent Bishop Usher
that Job lived about thirty-five centuries ago,

that gives us How many? Three to the

hundred and fifth power? . . . It is at any
rate a sum vastly in excess of the present popu-
lation of the earth. . . . You have globes and
rolls and swords and stars here; has anyone a
slide rule? ''

10 THE UNDYING FIRE

But the computation was brushed aside.

*^ A thousand years in my sight are but as
yesterday when it is past. I will grant what
you seek to prove; that Job has become man-
kind/'

§4

The dark regard of Satan smote down
through the quivering universe and left the toil-
ing light waves behind. '^ See there/' he said
pointing. ^^ My old friend on his little planet
— Adam — Job — Man — like a roast on a spit.
It is time we had another wager. ' '

God condescended to look with Satan at man-
kind, circling between day and night. * ^ Whether
he will curse or bless? ''

** Whether he will even remember God."

^' I have given my promise that I will at last
restore Adam."

The downcast face smiled faintly.

** These questions change from age to age,"
said Satan.

*^ The Whole remains the same."

*^ The story grows longer in either direction,"
said Satan, speaking as one who thinks aloud;
* ^ past and future unfold together. . . . When
the first atoms jarred I was there, and so con-
flict was there — and progress. The days of
the old story have each expanded to hundreds

11

12 THE UNDYING FIRE

of millions of years now, and still I am in them
all. The sharks and crawling monsters of the
early seas, the first things that crept out of the
water into the jungle of fronds and stems, the
early reptiles, the leaping and flying dragons of
the great age of life, the mighty beasts of hoof
and horn that came later; they all feared and
suffered and were perplexed. At last came this
Man of yours, out of the woods, hairy, beetle-
browed and blood-stained, peering not too hope-
fully for that Eden-bower of the ancient story.
It wasn't there. There never had been a gar-
den. He had fallen before he arose, and the
weeds and thorns are as ancient as the flowers.
The Fall goes back in time now beyond man,
beyond the world, beyond imagination. The
very stars were born in sin. . . .

* * If we can still call it sin, ' ' mused Satan.

** On a little planet this Thing arises, this
red earth, this Adam, this Edomite, this Job.
He builds cities, he tills the earth, he catches
the lightning and makes a slave of it, he changes
the breed of beast and grain. Clever things to
do, but still petty things. You say that in some
manner he is to come up at last to this. . . .
He is too foolish and too weak. His achieve-
ments only illuminate his limitations. Look at
his little brain boxed up from growth in a skull

THE PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN 13

of bone ! Look at his bag of a body full of rags
and rudiments, a haggis of diseases ! His life
is decay. . . . Does he grow? I do not see it.
Has he made any perceptible step forward in
quality in the last ten thousand years f He
quarrels endlessly and aimlessly with himself.
. . . In a little while his planet will cool and
freeze."

* * In the end he will rule over the stars, ' ' said
the voice that was above Satan. '' My spirit
is in him."

Satan shaded his face with his hand from
the effulgence about him. He said no more
for a time, but sat watching mankind as a boy
might sit on the bank of a stream and watch
the fry of minnows in the clear water of a
shallow.

'* Nay," he said at last, '' but it is incredible.
It is impossible. I have disturbed and afflicted
him long enough. I have driven him as far as
he can be driven. But now I am moved to pity.
Let us end this dispute. It has been interesting.

but now Is it not enough ! It grows cruel

He has reached his limit. Let us give him a
little peace now. Lord, a little season of sun-
shine and plenty, and then some painless uni-
versal pestilence and so let him die."

^* He is immortal and he does but begin."

14 THE UNDYING FIRE

'' He is mortal and near his end. At times
no doubt he has a certain air that seems to
promise miderstanding and mastery in his
world; it is but an air; give me the power to
afflict and subdue him but a little, and after a
few squeaks of faith and hope he will whine and
collapse like any other beast. He will behave
like any kindred creature with a smaller brain
and a larger jaw; he too is doomed to suffer to
no purpose, to struggle by instinct merely to
live, to endure for a season and then to pass.
. . . Give me but the power and you shall see
his courage snap like a rotten string. ' '

'^ You may do all that you will to him, only
you must not slay him. For my spirit is in
him. ' '

* ^ That he will cast out of his own accord —
when I have ruined his hopes, mocked his sac-
rifices, blackened his skies and filled his veins
with torture. . . . But it is too easy to do.
Let me just slay him now and end his story.
Then let us begin another, a different one, and
something more amusing. Let us, for example,
put brains — and this Soul of yours — into the
ants or the bees or the beavers ! Or take up the
octopus, already a very tactful and intelligent
creature ! ' '

** No; but do as you have said, Satan. For

THE PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN 15

you also are my instrument. Try Man to the
uttermost. See if he is indeed no more than a
little stir amidst the slime, a fuss in the mud
that signifies nothing. ..."

§5

The Satan, his face hidden in shadow, seemed
not to hear this, but remained still and intent
upon the world of men.

And as that brown figure, with its vast halo
like the worn tail of some fiery peacock, brooded
high over the realms of being, this that follows
happened to a certain man upon the earth.

16

CHAPTER THE SECOND

AT SEA VIEW, SUNDERIKG-ON-SEA

§1

In an uncomfortable armchair of slippery
black horsehair, in a mean apartment at Sunder-
ing-on-Sea, sat a sick man staring dully out of
the window. It was an oppressive day, hot
under a leaden sky; there was scarcely a move-
ment in the air save for the dull thudding of
the gun practice at Shorehamstow. A multi-
tude of flies crawled and buzzed fitfully about
the room, and ever and again some chained-up
cur in the neighbourhood gave tongue to its dis-
content. The window looked out upon a vacant
building lot, a waste of scorched grass and rusty
rubbish surrounded by a fence of barrel staves
and barbed wire. Between the ruinous notice-
board of some pre-war building enterprise and
the gaunt verandah of a convalescent home, on
which the motionless blue forms of two despon-
dent wounded men in deck chairs were visible,
c 17

18 THE UNDYING FIRE

came the sea view which justified the name of
the house; beyond a wide waste of mud, over
which quivered the heat-tormented air, the still
anger of the heavens lowered down to meet in
a line of hard conspiracy, the steely criminality
of the remote deserted sea.

The man in the chair flapped his hand and
spoke. ^' You accursed creature,'^ he said.
" Why did God make flies? "

After a long interval he sighed deeply and
repeated: "Why? ''

He made a fitful effort to assume a more
comfortable position, and relapsed at last into
his former attitude of brooding despondency.

When presently his landlady came in to lay
the table for lunch, an almost imperceptible
wincing alone betrayed his sense of the threat-
ening swish and emphasis of her movements.
She was manifestly heated by cooking, and a
smell of burnt potatoes had drifted in with her
appearance. She was a meagre little woman
with a resentful manner, glasses pinched her
sharp red nose, and as she spread out the grey-
white diaper and rapped down the knives and
forks in their places she glanced at him darkly
as if his inattention aggrieved her. Twice she
was moved to speak and did not do so, but at
length she could endure his indifference no

AT SEA VIEW, SUNDERING-ON-SEA 19

longer. *^ Still feeling ill I suppose, Mr.
'Uss? '' she said, in the manner of one who
knows only too well what the answer will be.

He started at the sound of her voice, and gave
her his attention as if with an effort. ** I beg
your pardon, Mrs. Croome? ''

The landlady repeated with acerbity, * * I arst
if you was still feeling ill, Mr. 'Uss.''

He did not look at her when he replied, but
glanced towards her out of the corner of his
eyes. '' Yes,'' he said. ^^ Yes, I am. I am
afraid I am ill." She made a noise of un-
friendly confirmation that brought his face
round to her. ^^ But mind you, Mrs. Croolne, I
don't want Mrs. Huss worried about it. She
has enough to trouble her just now. Quite
enough. ' '

** Misfortunes don't ever come singly," said
Mrs. Croome with quiet satisfaction, leaning
across the table to brush some spilt salt from
off the cloth to the floor. She was not going
to make any rash promises about Mrs. Huss.

*^ We 'ave to bear up with what is put upon
us," said Mrs. Croome. *' We 'ave to find
strength where strength is to be found. ' '

She stood up and regarded him with pensive
malignity. * ' Very likely all you want is a tonic
of some sort. Very likely you've just let your-
self go. I shouldn 't be surprised. ' '

20 THE UNDYING FIRE

The sick man gave no welcome to this sug-
gestion.

* * If yon was to go round to the young doctor
at the corner — Barrack isnameis — very likely
he^d put you right. Everybody says he's very
clever. Not that me and Croome put much
faith in doctors. Nor need to. But you're in a
different position.''

The man in the chair had been to see the
young doctor at the corner twice already, but
he did not want to discuss that interview with
Mrs. Croome just then. ^' I must think about
it," he said evasively.

'' After all it isn't fair to yourself, it isn't
fair to others, to sicken for — it might be any-
think — without proper advice. Sitting there
and doing nothing. Especially in lodgings at
this time of year. It isn't, well — not what I
call considerate."

** Exactly," said Mr. Huss weakly.

It There's homes and hospitals properly
equipped. ' '

The sick man nodded his head appreciatively.

** If things are nipped in the bud they're
nipped in the bud, otherwise they grow and
make trouble. ' '

It was exactly what her hearer was thinking.

Mrs. Croome ducked to the cellarette of a

AT SEA VIEW, SUNDERING-ON-SEA 21

gaunt sideboard and rapped out a whisky bottle,
a bottle of lime-juice, and a soda-water syphon
upon the table. She surveyed her handiwork
with a critical eye. " Cruet,*' she whispered,
and vanished from the room, leaving the door,
after a tormenting phase of creaking, to slam
by its own weight behind her. . . .

The invalid raised his hand to his forehead
and found it wet with perspiration. His hand
was trembling violently. '' My God! '' he
whispered.

§2

This man's name was Job Huss. His father
had been called Job before him, and so far as
the family tradition extended the eldest son had
always been called Job. Four weeks ago he
would have been esteemed by most people a
conspicuously successful and enviable man, and
then had come a swift rush of disaster.

He had been the headmaster of the great
modern public school at "VYoldingstanton in Nor-
folk, a revived school under the Papermakers'
Guild of the City of London ; he had given him-
self without stint to its establishment and he had
made a great name in the world for it and for
himself. He had been the first English school-
master to liberate the modern side from the
entanglement of its lower forms with the clas-
sical masters ; it was the only school in England
where Spanish and Russian were honestly
taught; his science laboratories were the best
school laboratories in Great Britain and per-
haps in the world, and his new methods in the
teaching of history and politics brought a steady

22

AT SEA VIEW, SUNDERING-ON-SEA 23

stream of foreign inquirers to Woldingstanton.
The hand of the adversary had touched him first
just at the end of the summer term. There had
been an epidemic of measles in which, through
the inexplicable negligence of a trusted nurse,
two boys had died. On the afternoon of the
second of these deaths an assistant master was
killed by an explosion in the chemical labora-
tory. Then on the very last night of the term
came the School House fire, in which two of the
younger boys were burnt to death.

Against any single one of these misfortunes
Mr. Huss and his school might have maintained
an unbroken front, but their quick succession
had a very shattering effect. Every circum-
stance conspired to make these events vividly
dreadful to Mr. Huss. He had been the first
to come to the help of his chemistry master, who
had fallen ranong some carboys of acid, and
though still alive and struggling, was blinded,
nearly faceless, and hopelessly mangled. The
poor fellow died before he could be extricated.
On the night of the fire Mr. Huss strained him-
self internally and bruised his foot very pain-
fully, and he himself found and carried out the
charred body of one of the two little victims
from th.d room in which they had been trapped
by the locking of a door during some ** last

24 THE UNDYING FIRE

day '^ ragging. It added an element of exas-
perating inconvenience to liis greater distresses
that all his papers and nearly all his personal
possessions were burnt.

On the morning after the fire Mr. Huss's
solicitor committed suicide. He was an old
friend to whom Mr. Huss had entrusted the
complete control of the savings that were to
secure him and Mrs. Huss a dignified old age.
The lawyer was a man of strong political feel-
ings and liberal views, and he had bought
roubles to his utmost for Mr. Huss as for him-
self, in order to demonstrate his confidence in
the Russian revolution.

All these things had a quite sufficiently dis-
organizing effect upon Mr. Huss ; upon his wife
the impression they made wa3 altogether disas-
trous. She was a worthy but emotional lady,
effusive rather than steadfast. Iiike the wives
of most schoolmasters, she had been habitually
preoccupied with matters of domestic manage-
ment for many years, and her first r^^action was
in the direction of a bitter economy, mingled
with a display of contempt she had n ever mani-
fested hitherto for her husband's practical
ability. Far better would it have been for Mr.
Huss if she had broken do^^Ti altogether; she
insisted upon directing everything, aJnd doing

AT SEA VIEW, SUNDERING-ON-SEA 25

so with a sort of pitiful vehemence that brooked
no contradiction. It was impossible to stay at
Woldingstanton through the vacation, in sight
of the tragic and blackened ruins of School
House, and so she decided upon Sundering-on-
Sea because of its nearness and its pre-war
reputation for cheapness. There, she an-
nounced, her husband must ^' pull himself
together and pick up,'' and then return to the
rebuilding of School House and the rehabilita-
tion of the school. Many formalities had to
be gone through before the building could be
put in hand, for in those days Britain w^as at
the extremity of her war effort, and labour and
material were unobtainable without special per-
mits and great exertion. Sundering-on-Sea was
as convenient a place as anywhere from which
to write letters, but his idea of going to London
to see influential people was resisted by Mrs.
Huss on the score of the expense, and overcome
when he persisted in it by a storm of tears.

On her arrival at Sundering Mrs. Huss put
up at the Eailway Hotel for the night, and spent
the next morning in a stern visitation of pos-
sible lodgings. Something in the unassuming
outlook of Sea View attracted her, and after a
long dispute she was able to beat dovv'n Mrs.
Croome's demand from five to four and a half

26 THE UNDYING FIRE

guineas a week. That afternoon some impor-
tunate applicant in an extremity of homeless-
ness — for there had been a sudden rush of vis-
itors to Sundering — offered six guineas. Mrs.
Croome tried to call off her first bargain, but
Mrs. Huss was obdurate, and thereafter all the
intercourse of landlady and her lodgers went to
the unspoken refrain of ^ * I get four and a haK
guineas and I ought to get six." To recoup
herself Mrs. Croome attempted to make extra
charges for the use of the bathroom, for cooking
after ^ve o 'clock, for cleaning Mr. Huss 's brown
boots with specially bought brown cream instead
of blacking, and for the ink used by him in his
very voluminous correspondence; upon all of
which points there was much argument and bit-
terness.

But a heavier blow than any they had hith-
erto experienced was now to fall upon Mr. and
Mrs. Huss. Job in the ancient story had seven
sons and three daughters, and they were all
swept away. This Job was to suffer a sharper
thrust; he had but one dear only son, a boy of
great promise, who had gone into the Eoyal Fly-
ing Corps. News came that he had been shot
down over the German lines.

Unhappily there had been a conflict between
Mr. and Mrs. Huss about this boy. Huss had

AT SEA VIEW, SUNDERING-ON-SEA 27

been proud that the youngster should choose the
heroic service ; Mrs. Huss had done her utmost
to prevent his joining it. The poor lady was
now ruthless in her anguish. She railed upon
him as the murderer of their child. She hoped
he was pleased with his handiwork. He could
count one more name on his list; he could add
it to the roll of honour in the chapel ^ ^ with the
others.'' Her hahy boy! This said, she went
wailing from the room.

The wretched man sat confounded. That
'^ with the others " cut him to the heart. For
the school chapel had a list of V.C.'s, D.C.M.'s
and the like, second to none, and it had indeed
been a pride to him.

For some days his soul was stunned. He was
utterly exhausted and lethargic. He could
hardly, attend to the most necessary letters.
From dignity, hope, and a great sheaf of activ-
ities, his life had shrunken abruptly to the com-
pass of this dingy lodging, pervaded by the
squabbling of two irrational women; his work
in the world was in ruins; he had no strength
left in him to struggle against fate. And a
vague internal pain crept slowly into his con-
sciousness.

His wife, insane now and cruel with sorrow,
tried to put a great quarrel upon him about

28 THE UNDYING FIRE

wearing mourning for their son. He had al-
ways disliked and spoken against these pomps
of death, bnt she insisted that whatever callous-
ness he might display she at least must wear
black. He might, she said, rest assured that
she would spend no more money than the barest
decency required; she would buy the cheapest
material, and make it up in her bedroom. But
black she must have. This resolution led
straight to a conflict with Mrs. Croome, who
objected to her best bedroom being littered with
bits of black stuff, and cancelled the loan of her
sewing machine. The mourning should be
made, Mrs. Huss insisted, though she had to sew
every stitch of it by hand. And the poor dis-
traught lady in her silly parsimony made still
deeper trouble for herself by cutting her ma-
terial in every direction half an inch or more
short of the paper pattern. She came almost
to a physical tussle with Mrs. Croome because
of the state of the carpet and counterpane, and
Mrs. Croome did her utmost to drag Mr. Huss
into an altercation upon the matter with her
husband.

** Croome don't interfere much, but some
things he or nobody ain't going to stand, Mr.
'Uss."

For some days in this battlefield of in-

AT SEA VIEW, SUNDERING-ON-SEA 29

satiable grief and petty cruelty, and with a
dull pain steadily boring its way to recognition,
Mr. Huss forced himself to carry on in a fashion
the complex of business necessitated by the
school disaster. Then in the night came a
dream, as dreams sometimes will, to enlighten
him upon his bodily condition. Projecting from
his side he saw a hard, white body that sent
round, wormlike tentacles into every corner of
his being. A number of doctors were strug-
gling to tear this thing away from him. At
every effort the pain increased.

He awoke, but the pain throbbed on.

He lay quite still. Upon the heavy darkness
he saw the word *^ Cancer," bright red and
glowing — as pain glows. . . .

He argued in the face of invincible convic-
tion. He kept the mood conditional. ** If it
be so," he said, though he knew that the thing
was so. What should he do? There would
have to be operations, great expenses, enfeeble-
ment. . . .

Whom could he ask for advice? Who would
help him? . . .

Suppose in the morning he were to take a
bathing ticket as if he meant to bathe, and
struggle out beyond the mud-flats. He could
behave as though cramp had taken him sud-
denly . . .

30 THE UNDYING FIRE

Five minutes of suffocation he would have
to force himself through, and then peace —
endless peace I

*^ No," he said, with a sudden gust of cour-
age. '' 1 will fight it out to the end.''

But' his mind was too dull to form plans and
physically he was afraid. He would have to
find a doctor somehow, and even that little task
appalled him.

Then he would have to tell Mrs. Huss. . . .

For a time he lay quite still as if he listened
to the alternative swell and diminuendo of his
pain.

** Oh! if I had someone to help me! '' he
whispered, and was overcome by the lonely
misery of his position. *^ If I had someone! "

For years he had never wept, but now tears
were wrung from him. He rolled over and bur-
ied his face in the pillow and tried to wriggle
his body away from that steady gnawing; he
fretted as a child might do.''

The night about him was as it were a great
watching presence that would not help nor
answer.

§3

Behind the brass plate at the corner which
said "• Dr. Elihu Barrack '' Mr. Huss found a
hard, competent young man, who had returned
from the war to his practice at Sundering after
losing a leg. The mechanical substitute seemed
to have taken to him very kindly. He appeared
to be both modest and resourceful; his unfa-
vourable diagnosis was all the more convincing
because it was tentative and conditional. He
knew the very specialist for the case ; no less a
surgeon than Sir Alpheus Mengo came, it hap-
pened, quite frequently to play golf on the
Sundering links. It would be easy to arrange
for him to examine Mr. Huss in Dr. Barrack's
little consulting room, and if an operation had
to be performed it could be managed with a
minimum of expense in Mr. Huss 's own lodgings
without any extra charge for mileage and the
like.

** Of course, '* said Mr. Huss, ^' of course,'*
with a clear vision of Mrs. Croome confronted
with the proposal.

31

32 THE UNDYING FIRE

Sir Alpheus Mengo came do\\Ti the next Sat-
urday, and made a clandestine examination.
He decided to operate the following week-end.
Mr. Huss was left at his own request to break
the news to his wife and to make the necessary
arrangements for this use of Mrs. Croome's
rooms. But it was two days before he could
bring himself to broach the matter.

He sat now listening to the sounds of his wife
moving about in the bedroom overhead, and to
the mujffled crashes that intimated the climax of
Mrs. Croome 's preparation of the midday meal.
He heard her calling upstairs to know whether
Mrs. Huss was ready for her to serve up. He
was seized with panic as a schoolboy might be
who had not prepared his lesson. He tried
hastily to frame some introductory phrases, but
nothing would come into his mind save terms of
disgust and lamentation. The sullen heat of
the day mingled in one impression -with his pain.
He was nauseated by the smell of cooking. He
felt it would be impossible to sit up at table and
pretend to eat the meal of burnt bacon and
potatoes that was all too evidently coming.

It came. Its progress along the passage was
announced by a clatter of dishes. The door was
opened by a kick. Mrs. Croome put the feast
upon the table with something between defence

AT SEA VIEW, SUNDERING-ON-SEA 33

and defiance in her manner. * * What else, ' ^ she
seemed to intimate, * ' could one expect for four
and a half guineas a week in the very height
of the season ? From a woman who could have
got six! ''

** Your dinner's there," Mrs. Croome called
upstairs to Mrs. Huss in tones of studied negli-
gence, and then retired to her own affairs in the
kitchen, slamming the door behind her.

The room quivered down to silence, and then
Mr. Huss could hear the footsteps of his wife
crossing the bedroom and descending the
staircase.

Mrs. Huss was a dark, graceful, and rather
untidy lady of seven and forty, with the bridling
bearing of one who habitually repels implicit
accusations. She lifted the lid of the vegetable
dish. ^* I thought I smelt burning," she said.
** The woman is impossible."

She stood by her chair, regarding her hus-
band and waiting.

He rose reluctantly, and transferred himself
to a seat at table.

It had always been her custom to carve. She
now prepared to serve him. ^^ No," he said,
full of loathing. '* I can't eat. I can't/'

She put down the tablespoon and fork she
had just raised, and regarded him with eyes of
dark disapproval.

34 THE UNDYING FIRE

^^ It's all we can get," she said.

He shook his head. ^^ It isn't thaf

** I don't know what you expect me to get
for you here, ' \ she complained. * ^ The trades-
men don 't know us — and don 't care. ' '

'' It isn't that. I'm ill."

*^ It's the heat. We are all ill. Everyone.
In such weather as this. It's no excuse for not
making an effort, situated as we are. ' '

* ' I mean I am really ill. I am in pain. ' '

She looked at him as one might look at an un-
reasonable child. He was constrained to more
definite statement.

** I suppose I must tell you sooner or later.
I've had to see a doctor."

* ^ Without consulting me ! "

*^ I thought if it turned out to be fancy I
needn't bother you."

* ^ But how did you find a doctor ? ' '

** There's a fellow at the corner. Oh! it's
no good making a long story of it. I have can-
cer. . . . Nothing will do but an operation."
Self-pity wrung him. He controlled a violent
desire to cry. ** I am too ill to eat. I ought to
be lying down."

She flopped back in her chair and stared at
him as one stares at some hideous'tnonstrosity.
* * Oh ! " she said. ' * To have cancer now ! In
these lodgings! "

AT SEA VIEW, SUNDERING-ON-SEA 35

** I can't help it,'' he said in accents that were
almost a whine. '' I didn't choose the time."

^^ Cancer! '' she cried reproachfully. *' The
horror of it! "

He looked at her for a moment with hate in
his heart. He saw under her knitted brows
dark and hostile eyes that had once sparkled
with affection, he saw a loose mouth with down-
turned corners that had been proud and pretty,
and this mask of dislike w^as projecting forward
upon a neck he had used to call her head-stalk,
so like had it seemed to the stem of some pretty
flower. She had had lovely shoulders and an
impudent humour; and now the skin upon her
neck and shoulders had a little loosened, and she
was no longer impudent but harsh. Her brows
were moist with heat, and her hair more than
usually astray. But these things did not in-
crease, they mitigated his antagonism. They
did not repel him as defects ; they hurt him as
wounds received in a common misfortune.
Always he had petted and spared and rejoiced
in her vanity and weakness, and now as he real-
ized the full extent of her selfish abandonment
a protective pity arose in his heart that over-
came his physical pain. It was terrible to see
how completely her delicacy and tenderness of
mind had been broken down. She had neither

36 THE UNDYING FIRE

the strength nor the courage left even for
an unselfish thought. And he could not help
her; whatever power he had possessed over
her mind had gone long ago. His magic had
departed.

Latterly he had been thinking very much of
her prospects if he were to die. In some ways
his death might be a good thing for her. He had
an endowment assurance running that would
bring in about seven thousand pounds imme-
diately at his death, but which would otherwise
involve heavy annual payments for some years.
So far, to die would be clear gain. But who
would invest this money for her and look after
her interests? She was, he knew, very silly
about property; suspicious of people she knew
intimately, and greedy and credulous with
strangers. He had helped to make her incom-
petent, and he owed it to her to live and protect
her if he could. And behind that intimate and
immediate reason for living he had a strong
sense of work in the world yet to be done by
him, and a task in education still incomplete.

He spoke with his chin in his hand and his
eyes staring at the dark and distant sea. ** An
operation,'' he said, ** might cure me."

Her thoughts, it became apparent, had been
travelling through some broken and unbeautiful

AT SEA VIEW, SUNDERING-ON-SEA 37

eonntry roughly parallel with the course of his
own. ** But need there be an operation? '' she
thought aloud. '' Are they ever any good? "

^' I could die,'* he admitted bitterly, and re-
pented as he spoke.

There had been times, he remembered, when
she had said and done sweet and gallant things,
poor soul! poor broken companion! And now
she had fallen into a darkness far greater than
his. He had feared that he had hurt her, and
then when he saw that she was not hurt, and
that she scrutinized his face eagerly as if she
weighed the sincerity of his words, his sense
of utter loneliness was completed.

Over his mean drama of pain and debasement
in its close atmosphere buzzing with flies, it was
as if some gigantic and remorseless being
watched him as a man of science might hover
over some experiment, and marked his life and
all his world. ^ * You are alone, ' ' this brooding
witness counselled, '^ you are utterly alone.
Curse God and die/'

It seemed a long time before Mr. Huss an-
swered this imagined voice, and when he
answered it he spoke as if he addressed his wife
alone.

'' No/' he said with a sudden decisiveness.
** No. I will face that operation. . . . We are

38 THE UNDYING FIRE

ill and our hearts are faint. Neither for you,
dear, nor for me must our story finish in this
fashion. No. I shall go on to the end. ' '
'^ And have your operation here? ''
^* In this house. It is by far the most con-
venient place, as things are.^'
* * You may die here ! ^ ^
'' Well, I shall die fighting.''
*^ Leaving me here with Mrs. Croome."
His temper broke under her reply. ** Leav-
ing you here with Mrs. Croome,'' he said
harshly.

He got up. ** I can eat nothing,'' he re-
peated, and dropped back sullenly into the
horsehair arm-chair.

There was a long silence, and then he heard
the little, almost mouselike, movements of his
wife as she began her meal. For a while he
had forgotten the dull ache within him, but now,
glowing and fading and glowing, it made its
way back into his consciousness. He was help-
less and perplexed ; he had not meant to quarrel.
He had hurt this poor thing who had been his
love and companion; he had bullied her. His
clogged brain could think of nothing to set mat-
ters right. He stared with dull eyes at a world
utterly hateful to him.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE THREE VISITORS

§ 1

While this unhappy conversation was occur-
ring at Sundering-on-Sea, three men were dis-
cussing the case of Mr. Huss very earnestly over
a meatless but abundant lunch in the bow win-
dow of a club that gives upon the trees and sun-
shine of Carlton Gardens. Lobster salad
engaged them, and the ice in the jug of hock
cup clinked very pleasantly as they replenished
their glasses.

The host was Sir Eliphaz Burrows, the
patentee and manufacturer of those Temanite
building blocks which have not only revolution-
ized the construction of army hutments, but put
the whole problem of industrial and rural hous-
ing upon an altogether new footing; his guests
were Mr. William Dad, formerly the maker of the
celebrated Dad and Showhite car de luxe, and
now one of the chief contractors for aeroplanes

39

40 THE UNDYING FIRE

in England ; and Mr. Joseph Farr, the head of
the technical section of Woldingstanton School.
Both the former gentlemen were governors of
that foundation and now immensely rich, and
Sir Eliphaz had once been a pupil of the father
of Mr. Huss and had played a large part in tne
appointment of the latter to Woldingstanton.
He was a slender old man, with an avid vul-
turine head poised on a long red neck, and he
had an abundance of parti-coloured hair, red
and white, springing from a circle round the
cro^vn of his head, from his eyebrows, his face
generally, and the backs of his hands. He wore
a blue soft shirt with a turn-down collar within
a roomy blue serge suit, and that and something
about his large loose black tie suggested scholar-
ship and refinement. His manners were elab-
orately courteous. Mr. Dad was a compacter,
keener type, warily alert in his bearing, an
industrial fox-terrier from the Midlands, silver-
haired and dressed in ordinary morning dress
except for a tan vest w^ith a bright brown ribbon
border. Mr. Farr was big in a grey flannel
Norfolk suit; he had a large, round, white,
shiny, clean-shaven face and uneasy hands, and
it was apparent that he carried pocket-books
and suchlike luggage in his breast pocket.
They consumed the lobster appreciatively,

THE THREE VISITORS 41

and approached in a fragmentary and tentative
maimer the business that had assembled them:
namely, the misfortunes that had overwhelmed
Mr. Huss and their bearing upon the future of
the school.

^^ For my part I don't think there is such a
thing as misfortune,'' said Mr. Dad. ^^ I don't
hold with it. Miscalculation if you like. ' '

** In a sense," said Mr. Farr ambiguously,
glancing at Sir Eliphaz.

*^ If a man keeps his head screwed on the
right way," said Mr. Dad, and attacked a claw
with hope and appetite. Mr. Dad affected the
parsimony of unfinished sentences.

** I can't help thinking," said Sir Eliphaz,
putting down his glass and wiping his moustache
and eyebrows with care before resuming his
lobster, ** that a man who entrusts his affairs
to a solicitor, after the fashion of the widow
and orphan, must be sing-ularly lacking in judg-
ment. Or reckless. Never in the whole course
of my life have I met a solicitor who could invest
money safely and profitably. Clergymen I have
known, women of all sorts, savages, monoma-
niacs, criminals, but never solicitors."

** I have known some smart business par-
sons," said Mr. Dad judicially. '' One in par-
ticular. Sharp as nails. They are a much
UTiderestimated class."

42 THE UNDYING FIRE

' ' Perhaps it is natural that a solicitor should
be a mid investor," Sir Eliphaz pursued his
subject. *^ He lives out of the ordinary world
in a dirty little office in some antiquated inn,
his office fittings are fifty years out of date, his
habitual scenery consists of tin boxes painted
with the names of dead and disreputable clients ;
he has to take the law courts, filled mth horse-
boxes and men dressed up in gowns and horse-
hair wigs, quite seriously; nobody ever goes
near him but abnormal people or people in ab-
normal states : people upset by jealousy, people
upset by fear, blackmailed people, cheats trying
to dodge the law, lunatics, litigants and legatees.
The only investments he ever discusses are
queer investments. Naturally he loses all sense
of proportion. Naturally he becomes insanely
suspicious ; and when a client asks for positive
action he flounders and gambles."

** Naturally," said Mr. Dad. ^* And here we
find poor Huss giving all his business over — "

** Exactly," said Sir Eliphaz, and filled his
glass.

*^ There's been a great change in him in the
last two years," said Mr. Farr. ** He let the
war worry him for one thing. ' '

*' No good doing that," said Mr. Dad.

*^ And even before the war," Sir Eliphaz

THE THREE VISITORS 43

^^ Even before the war/' said Mr. Farr, in a
pause.

'^ There was a change,'' said Sir Eliphaz.
*^ He had been bitten by educational theories."

^^ No business for a headmaster," said Mr.
Farr.

*^ Our intention had always been a great sci-
entific and technical school," said Sir Eliphaz.
*^ He introduced Logic into the teaching of
plain English — against my opinion. He en-
couraged some of the boys to read philosophy."
All he could," said Mr. Farr.
I never held with his fad for teaching his-
tory," said Mr. Dad. ^' He was history mad.
It got worse and worse. What's history after
allf At the best, it's over and done with.
. . . But he wouldn 't argue upon it — not rea-
sonably. He was — overbearing. He had a
way of looking at you. ... It was never our
intention to make Woldingstanton into a school
of history. ' '

** And now, Mr. Farr," said Sir Eliphaz,
*^ what are the particulars of the fire? "

It isn't for me to criticize," said Mr. Farr.
What I say," said Mr. Dad, projecting his
muzzle with an appearance of great determina-
tion, ^^ is, fix responsibility. Fix responsibility.
Here is a door locked that common sense dic-

44 THE UNDYING FIRE

tated should be open. Who was responsible! "

** No one in School House seems to have been
especially responsible for that door so far as I
can ascertain, ' ' said Mr. Farr.

'* All responsibility/' said Mr. Dad, with an
expression of peevish insistence, as though Mr.
Farr had annoyed him, * * all responsibility that
is not delegated rests with the Head. That's
a hard and fast and primary rule of business
organization. In my factory I say quite plainly
to everyone who comes into it, man or woman,
chick or child . . . "

Mr. Dad was still explaining in a series of
imaginary dialogues, tersely but dramatically,
his methods of delegating authority, when Sir
Eliphaz cut across the flow with, *^ Eeturning
to Mr. Huss for a moment . . . "

The point that Sir Eliphaz wanted to get at
was whether Mr. Huss expected to continue
headmaster at Woldingstanton. From some
chance phrase in a letter Sir Eliphaz rather
gathered that he did.

** "Well," said Mr. Farr portentously, letting
the thing hang for a moment, ^^ he does."

** Tcha! " said Mr. Dad, and shut his mouth
tightly and waved his head slowly from side to
side with knitted brows as if he had bitten his
tongue.

THE THREE VISITORS 45

** I would be the first to recognize the splen-
did work he did for the school in his opening
years/' said Mr. Farr. ^' I would be the last
to alter the broad lines of the work as he set it
out. Barring that I should replace a certain
amount of the biological teaching and practi-
cally all this new history stuff by chemistry and
physics. But one has to admit that Mr. Huss
did not know when to relinquish power nor
when to devolve responsibility. We, all of us,
the entire staff — it is no mere personal griev-
ance of mine — were kept, well, to say the least
of it, in tutelage. Rather than let authority go
definitely out of his hands, he would allow things
to drift. Witness that door, witness the busi-
ness of the nurse."

Mr. Dad, with his lips compressed, nodded
his head ; each nod like the tap of a hammer.

** I never believed in all this overdoing his-
tory in the school," Mr. Dad remarked rather
disconnectedly. ^' If you get rid of Latin and
Greek, why bring it all back again in another
form ! Why, I 'm told he taught 'em things about
Assyria. Assyria! A modern school ought to
be a modern school — business first and busi-
ness last and business all the time. And teach
boys to work. We shall need it, mark my
words."

46 THE UNDYING FIRE

^^ A certain amount of modern culture,"
waved Sir Eliphaz.

** Modern/' said Mr. Farr softly.

Mr. Dad grunted. ^* In my opinion that sort
of thing gives the boys ideas.''

Mr. Farr steered his way discreetly. ** Sci-
ence with a due regard to its technical applica-
tions should certainly be the substantial part of
a modern education.'' . . .

They were in the smoking-room and half way
through three princely cigars before they got
beyond such fragmentary detractions of the
fallen headmaster. Then Mr. Dad in the clear-
cut style of a business man, brought his com-
panions to action. '' Well," said Mr. Dad,
turning abruptly upon Sir Eliphaz, '^ what
about it? "

** It is manifest that Woldingstanton has to
enter on a new phase ; what has happened brings
us to the parting of the ways," said Sir Eli-
phaz. ** Much as I regret the misfortunes of
an old friend. ' '

'' That;' said Mr. Dad, '' spells Farr."

'' If he will shoulder the burthen," said Sir
Eliphaz, smiling upon Mr. Farr not so much
with his mouth as by the most engaging convo-
lutions, curvatures and waving about of his
various strands of hair.

THE THREE VISITORS 47

" I don't want to see the school go down,"
said Mr. Farr. ^^ I've given it a good slice of
my life."

' ' Eight, ' ' said Mr. Dad. ' ' Right. File that.
That suits us. And now how do we set about
the affair ? The next thing, I take it, is to break
it to Huss. . . . How? "

He iDaused to give the ideas of his companions
a fair chance.

** Well, my idea is this. None of us want to
be hard on Mr. Huss. Luck has been hard
enough as it is. We want to do this job as
gently as we can. It happens that I go and
play golf at Sundering-on-Sea ever and again.
Excellent links, well kept up all things consid-
ered, and the big hotel close by does you won-
derfully, the railway company sees to that; in
spite of the war. Well, why shouldn't we all,
if Sir Eliphaz's engagements permit, go down
there in a sort of casual way, and take the op-
portunity of a good clear talk mth him and
settle it all up I The thing's got to be done, and
it seems to me altogether more kindly to go
there personally and put it to him than do it
by correspondence. Very likely we could put
it to him in such a way that he himself would
suggest the very arrangement we want. You
particularly. Sir Eliphaz, bein^ as you say an
old friend." . . .

§2

Since there was little likelihood of Mr. Huss
going away from Sundering-on-Sea, it did
not appear necessary to Mr. Dad to apprise him
of the projected visitation. And so these three
gentlemen heard nothing about any operation
for cancer until they reached that resort.

Mr. Dad came do\\m early on Friday after-
noon to the Golf Hotel, where he had already
engaged rooms for the party. He needed the
relaxation of the links very badly, the task of
accumulating a balance sufficiently large to
secure an opulent future for British industry,
with which Mr. Dad in his straightforward way
identified himself, was one that in a controlled
establishment between the Scylla of aggressive
labour and the Charybdis of the war-profits tax,
strained his mind to the utmost. He was joined
by Mr. Farr at dinner-time, and Sir Eliphaz,
who was detained in London by some negotia-
tions with the American Government, arrived
replete by the dining-car train. Mr. Farr made
a preliminary reconnaissance at Sea View, and
was the first to hear of the operation.

48

THE THREE VISITORS 49

Sir Alphens Mengo was due at Sea View by
the first morning train on Saturday. He had
arranged to operate before lunch. It was clear
therefore that the only time available for a con-
versation between the three and Mr. Huss was
between breakfast and the arrival of Sir
Alpheus.

Mr. Huss, whose lethargy had now departed,
displayed himself feverishly anxious to talk
about the school. ** There are points I must
make clear,'' he said, '' vital points,'' and so a
meeting was arranged for half -past nine. This
would give a full hour before the arrival of the
doctors.

" He feels that in a way it will be his testa-
ment, so to speak," said Mr. Farr. " Natu-
rally he has his own ideas about the future of the
school. We all have. I would be the last person
to suggest that he could say anything about
Woldingstanton that would not be well worth
hearing. Some of us may have heard most of
it before, and be better able to discount some of
his assertions. But that under the present cir-
cumstances is neither here nor there."

§ 3

Matters in the confined space of Sea View
were not nearly so strained as Mr. Huss had
feared. The prospect of an operation was not
without its agreeable side to Mrs. Croome. Pos-
sibly she would have preferred that the subject
should have been Mrs. rather than Mr. Huss,
but it was clear that she made no claim to dic-
tate upon this point. Her demand for special
fees to meet the inconveniences of the occasion
had been met quite liberally by Mr. Huss. And
there was a genuine appreciation of order and
method in Mrs. Croome; she was a furious
spring-cleaner, a hurricane tidier-up, her feel-
ing for the discursive state of Mrs. Huss 's hair
was almost as involuntary as a racial animosity;
and the swift dexterous preparations of the
nurse who presently came to convert the best
bedroom to surgical uses, impressed her deeply.
She was allowed to help. Superfluous hangings
and furnishings were removed, everything was
thoroughly scrubbed, at the last moment clean
linen sheets of a wonderful hardness were

50

THE THREE VISITORS 51

to be spread over every exposed surface.
They were to be brought in sterilized drums.
The idea of sterilized drums fascinated
her. She had never heard of such things be-
fore. She mshed she could keep her own linen
in a sterilized drum always, and let her lodgers
have something else instead.

She felt she was going to be a sort of assist-
ant priestess at a sacrifice, the sacrifice of Mr.
Huss. She had always secretly feared his sub-
missive quiet as a thing unaccountable that
might at any time turn upon her ; she suspected
him of ironies ; and he would be helpless, under
chloroform, subject to examination with no pos-
sibilities of disconcerting repartee. She did
her best to persuade Dr. Barrack that she would
be useful in the room during the proceedings.
Her imagination conjured up a wonderful vision
of the Huss interior as a great chest full of
strange and interesting viscera with the lid mde
open and Sir Alpheus picking thoughtfully, with
deprecatory remarks, amid its contents. But
that sight was denied her.

She was very helpful and cheerful on the Sat-
urday morning, addressing herself to the con-
solation of Mr. and the bracing-up of Mrs. Huss.
She assisted in the final transformation of the
room.

62 THE UNDYING FIRE

** It might be a real 'ospital,'* she said.
** Nursing must be nice work. I never thought
of it like this before. ' '

Mr. Huss was no longer depressed but flushed
and resolute, but Mrs. Huss, wounded by the
neglect of everyone — no one seemed to con-
sider for a moment what she must be feeling —
remained very much in her own room, working
inefficiently upon the mourning that might now
be doubly needed.

Mr. Huss knew Mr. Farr very well. For the
last ten years it had been his earnest desire to
get rid of him, but he had been difficult to replace
because of his real accomplishment in technical
chemistry. In the course of their ^ve minutes '
talk in his bedroom on Friday evening, Mr. Huss
grasped the situation. Woldingstanton, his cre-
ation, his life work, was to be taken out of his
hands, and in favour of this, his most soul-dead-
ening assistant. He had been foolish no doubt,
but he had never anticipated that. He had never
supposed that Farr would dare.

He thought hard through that long night of
Friday. His pain was no distraction. He had
his intentions very ready and clear in his mind
when his three visitors arrived.

He had insisted upon getting up and dressing
fully.

*^ I can't talk about Woldingstanton in bed,''
he said. The doctor was not there to gainsay
him.

Sir Eliphaz was the first to arrive, and Mrs.

53

54 THE UNDYING FIRE

Huss retrieved him from Mrs. Croome in the
passage and brought him in. He was wearing
a Norfolk jacket suit of a coarse yet hairy con-
sistency and of a pale sage green colour. He
shone greatly in the eyes of Mrs. Huss. ** I
can't help thinking of you, dear lady/' he said,
bowing over her hand, and all his hair was for
a moment sad and sympathetic like a sick Skye
terrier's. Mr. Dad and Mr. Farr entered a mo-
ment later; Mr. Farr in grey flannel trousers
and a brown jacket, and Mr. Dad in a natty dark
grey suit with a luminous purple waistcoat.

** My dear," said Mr. Huss to his wife, ** I
must be alone with these gentlemen, ' ' and when
she seemed disposed to linger near the under-
standing warmth of Sir Eliphaz, he added,
<< Figures, my dear — Finance/' and drove her
forth. . . .

*^ 'Pon my honour," said Mr. Dad, coming
close up to the armchair, wrinkling his muzzle
and putting through his compliments in good
business-like style before coming to the harder
stuff in hand; *^ I don't like to see you like this,
Mr. Huss."

'■ ^ Nor does Sir Eliphaz, I hope — nor Farr.
Please find yourselves chairs."

And while Mr. Farr made protesting noises
and Sir Eliphaz waved his hair about before

THE THREE VISITORS 55

beginning the little speech he had prepared,
Mr. Huss took the discourse out of their mouths
and began:

* * I know perfectly well the task you have set
yourselves. You have come to make an end of
me as headmaster of Woldingstanton. And Mr.
Farr has very obligingly . . . ' '

He held up his white and wasted hand as Mr.
Farr began to disavow.

'' No/' said Mr. Huss. '' But before you
three gentlemen proceed with your office, I
should like to tell you something of what the
school and my work in it, and my work for
education, is to me. I am a man of little more
than fifty. A month ago I counted with a rea-
sonable confidence upon twenty years more of
work before I relaxed. . . . Then these mis-
fortunes rained upon me. I have lost all my
private independence; there have been these
shocking deaths in the school ; my son, my only
son . . . killed . . . trouble has darkened
the love and kindness of my wife . . . and
now my body is suffering so that my mind is
like a swimmer struggling through waves of
pain . . . far from land. . . . These are
heavy blows. But the hardest blow of all,
harder to bear than any of these others — I do
not speak rashly, gentlemen, I have thought it

56 THE UNDYING FIRE

out through an endless night — the last blow
will be this rejection of my life work. That
will strike the inmost me, the heart and soul
of me. . . . ''

He paused.

*^ You mustn't take it quite like that, Mr.
Huss,'' protested Mr. Dad. ^^ It isn't fair to
us to put it like that."

*^ I want you to listen to me," said Mr. Huss.

^^ Only the very kindest motives," continued
Mr. Dad.

** Let me speak," said Mr. Huss, with the
voice of authority that had ruled Woldings tan-
ton for five and twenty years. ^* I cannot
wrangle and contradict. At most we have an
hour. ' '

Mr. Dad made much the same sound that a
dog will make when it has proposed to bark and
has been told to get under the table. For a time
he looked an ill-used man.

*^ To end my work in the school will be to
end me altogether. . . . I do not see why I
should not speak plainly to you, gentlemen, sit-
uated as I am here. I do not see why I should
not talk to you for once in my own language.
Pain and death are our interlocutors ; this is a
rare and raw and bleeding occasion ; in an hour
or so the women may be laying out my body and

THE THREE VISITORS 57

I may be silent for ever. I have hidden my
rehgion, but why should I hide it now? To you
I have always tried to seem as practical and
self-seeking as possible, but in secret I have
been a fanatic; and Woldingstanton was the
altar on which I offered myself to God. I have
done ill and feebly there I know; I have been
indolent and rash; those were my weaknesses;
but I have done my best. To the limits of my
strength and knowledge I have served God.
. . . And now in this hour of darkness where
is this God that I have served? Why does he
not stand here between me and this last injury
you would do to the work I have dedicated to
him? ''

At these words Mr. Dad turned horrified eyes
to Mr. Farr.

But Mr. Huss went on as though talking to
himself. '^ In the night I have looked into my
heart; I have sought in my heart for base
motives' and secret sins. I have put myself on
trial to find why God should hide himself from
me now, and I can find no reason and no justifi-
cation. ... In the bitterness of my heart I
am tempted to give way to you and to tell you
to take the school and to do just what you mil
with it. . . . The nearness of death makes the
familiar things of experience flimsy and unreal,

58 THE UNDYING FIRE

and far more real to me now is this darkness
that broods over me, as blight will sometimes
overhang the world at noon, and mocks me day
and night with a perpetual challenge to curse
God and die. . . .

** Why do I not curse God and die? Why do
I cling to my work when the God to whom I
dedicated it is — silent? Because, I suppose,
I still hope for some sign of reassurance. Be-
cause I am not yet altogether defeated. I
would go on telling you why I want Wolding-
stanton to continue on its present lines and why
it is impossible for you, why it will be a sort of
murder for you to hand it over to Farr here, if
my pain were ten times what it is. . . .''

At the mention of his name, Mr. Farr started
and looked first at Mr. Dad, and then at Sir
Eliphaz. * ^ Eeally, ' ' he said, * * really ! One
might think I had conspired — ''

^* I am afraid, Mr. Huss,^' said Sir Eliphaz,
with a large reassuring gesture to the technical
master, ** that the suggestion that Mr. Farr
should be your successor came in the first
instance from me.''

** You must reconsider it,'' said Mr. Huss,
moistening his lips and staring steadfastly in
front of him.

Here Mr. Dad broke out in a querulous voice :

THE THREE VISITORS 59

'^ Are you really in a state, Mr. Huss, to discuss
a matter like this — feverish and suffering as
you are! ''

''' I could not be in a better frame for this
discussion, ' ^ said Mr. Huss. ... '^ And now
for what I have to say about the school : —
Woldingstanton, when I came to it, was a hum-
drum school of some seventy boys, following a
worn-out routine. A little Latin was taught
and less Greek, chiefly in order to say that
Greek was taught ; some scraps of mathematical
processes, a few rags of general knowledge,
English history — not human history, mind you,
but just the national brand, cut dried flowers
from the past with no roots and no meaning, a
smattering of French. . . . That was prac-
tically all; it was no sort of education, it was
a mere education-like posturing. And to-day,
what has that school become ? ' '

'^ We never grudged you money," said Sir
Eliphaz.

*^ Nor loyal help,'' said Mr. Farr, but in a
half whisper.

** I am not thinking of its visible prosperity.
The houses and laboratories and museums that
have grown about that nucleus are nothing in
themselves. The reality of a school is not in
buildings and numbers but in matters of the

60 THE UNDYING FIRE

mind and soul. Woldingstanton has become a
torch at which lives are set aflame. I have lit
a candle there — the winds of fate may yet blow
it into a world-wide blaze."

As Mr. Huss said these things he was uplifted
by enthusiasm, and his pain sank down out of
his consciousness.

*^ Wliat," he said, *^ is the task of the teacher
in the worlds It is the greatest of all human „
tasks. It is to ensure that Man, Man the
Divine, grows in the souls of men. For what
is a man without instruction? He is born as
the beasts are born, a greedy egotism, a clutch-
ing desire, a thing of lusts and fears. He can
regard nothing except in relation to himself.
Even his love is a bargain ; and his utmost eif ort
is vanity because he has to die. And it is we
teachers alone who can lift him out of that self-
preoccupation. We teachers. . . . We can re-
lease him into a wider circle of ideas beyond
himself in which he can at length forget himself
and his meagre personal ends altogether. We
can open his eyes to the past and to the future
and to the undying life of Man. So through
us and through us only, he escapes from death
and futility. An untaught man is but himself
alone, as lonely in his ends and destiny as any
beast ; a man instructed is a man enlarged from

THE THREE VISITORS 61

that narrow prison of self into participation
in an undying life, that began we know not
when, that grows above and beyond the great-
ness of the stars. . . .''

He spoke as if he addressed some other hearer
than the three before him. Mr. Dad, with eye-
brows raised and lips compressed, nodded
silently to Mr. Farr as if his worst suspicions
were confirmed, and there were signs and sig-
nals that Sir Eliphaz was about to speak, when
Mr. Huss resumed.

* * For ^ve and twenty years I have ruled over
Woldingstanton, and for all that time I have
been giving sight to the blind. I have given
understanding to some thousands of boys. All
those routines of teaching that had become dead
we made live again there. My boys have learnt
the history of mankind so that it has become
their own adventure; they have learnt geog-
raphy so that the world is their possession; I
have had lang-uages taught to make the past
live again in their minds and to be windows
upon the souls of alien peoples. Science has
played its proper part; it has taken my boys
into the secret places of matter and out among
the nebulas. . . . Always I have kept Farr and
his utilities in their due subordination. Some
of my boys have already made good business

62 THE UNDYING FIRE

men — because they were more than business
men. . . . But I have never sought to make
business men and I never will. My boys have
gone into the professions, into the services, into
the great world and done well — I have had dull
boys and intractable boys, but nearly all have
gone into the world gentlemen, broad-minded,
good-mannered, understanding and unselfish,
masters of self, servants of man, because the
whole scheme of their education has been to
release them from base and narrow things.
. . . When the war came, my boys were
ready. . . . They have gone to their deaths —
how many have gone to their deaths ! My own
son among them. ... I did not grudge him.
. . . Woldingstanton is a new school; its tra-
dition has scarcely begun; the list of its old
boys is now so terribly depleted that its young
tradition wilts like a torn seedling. . . . But
still we can keep on with it, still that tradition
will grow, if my flame still burns. But my
teaching must go on as I have planned it. It
must. It must. . . . What has made my boys
all that they are, has been the history, the
biological science, the philosophy. For these
things are wisdom. All the rest is training and
mere knowledge. If the school is to live, the
head must still be a man who can teach history

THE THREE VISITORS 63

— history in the widest sense; he must be
philosopher, biologist, and archaeologist as well
as scholar. And you would hand that task to
Farr ! Farr ! Farr here has never even touched
the essential work of the school. He does not
know what it is. His mind is no more opened
than the cricket professionaPs.''

Mr. Dad made an impatient noise.

The sick man went on with his burning eyes
on Farr, his lips bloodless.

^* He thinks of chemistry and physics not as
a help to understanding but as a help to trading.
So long as he has been at Woldingstanton he
has been working furtively with our materials
in the laboratories, dreaming of some profitable
patent. Oh ! I know you, Farr. Do you think
I didn't see because I didn't choose to complain?
If he could have discovered some profitable
patent he would have abandoned teaching the
day he did so. He would have been even as you
are. But with a lifeless imagination you can-
not even invent patentable things. He would
talk to the boys of the empire at times, but the
empire to him is no more than a trading con-
spiracy fenced about with tariffs. It goes on
to nothing. . . . And he thinks we are fight-
ing the Germans, he thinks my dear and precious
boy gave his life and that all these other brave

64 THE UNDYING FIRE

lads beyond counting died, in order that we
might take the place of the Germans as the
chapman-bullies of the world. That is the
measure of his mind. He has no religion, no
faith, no devotion. Why does he want my
place? Because he wants to serve as I have
served? No ! But because he envies my house,
my income, my headship. Whether I live or die,
it is impossible that Woldingstanton, my Wol-
dingstanton, should live under his hand. Give
it to him, and in a little while it will be dead. ' '

§5

'* Gentlemen! " Mr. Farr protested with a
white perspiring face.

^* I had no idea,'' ejaculated Mr. Dad, " I had
no idea that things had gone so far. ' '

Sir Eliphaz indicated by waving his hand that
his associates might allay themselves ; he recog-
nized that the time had come for him to speak.

*^ It is deplorable," Sir Eliphaz began.

He put down his hands and gripped the seat
of his chair as if to hold himself on to it very
tightly, and he looked very hard at the horizon
as if he was trying to decipher some remote
inscription. ** You have imported a tone into
this discussion,'' he tried.

He got off at the third attempt. ^* It is an
extremely painful thing to me, Mr. Huss, that
to you, standing as you do on the very brink of
the Great Chasm, it should be necessary to
speak in any but the most cordial and helpful
tones. But it is my duty, it is our duty, to hold
firmly to those principles which have always
guided us as governors of the Woldingstanton
F 65

66 THE UNDYING FIRE

School. You speak, I must say it, with an ex-
treme arrogance of an institution to which all
of us here have in some measure contributed;
you speak as though you, and you alone, were
its creator and guide. You must pardon me,
Mr. Huss, if I remind you of the facts, the eter-
nal verities of the story. The school, sir, was
founded in the spacious days of Queen Eliza-
beth, and many a good man guided its fortunes
down to the time when an unfortunate — a di-
version of its endoAvments led to its temporary
cessation. The Charity Conamissioners revived
it after an inquiry some fifty years ago, and it
has been largely the lavish generosity of the
Papermakers^ Guild, of which I and Dad are
humble members, that has stimulated its expan-
sion under you. Loth as I am to cross your
mood, Mr. Huss, while you are in pain and anx-
iety, I am bound to recall to you these things
which have made your work possible. You
could not have made bricks without straw, you
could not have built up Woldingstanton without
the money obtained by that commercialism for
which you display such unqualified contempt.
We sordid cits it was who planted, who watered.

Mr. Huss seemed about to speak, but said

nothing.

THE THREE VISITORS 67

" Exactly what I say," said Mr. Dad, turning
for confirmation to Mr. Farr. "" The school is
essentially a modern commercial school. It
should be run as that.''

Mr. Farr nodded his white face ambiguously
with his eye on Sir Eliphaz.

'^ I should have been chary, Mr. Huss, of
wrangling about our particular shares and con-
tributions on an occasion so solemn as this, but
since you will have it so, since you challenge
discussion. . . ."

He turned to his colleagues as if for support.

' * Go on, " said Mr. Dad. ' ' Facts are facts. ' '

§6

Sir Elipliaz cleared his throat, and continued
to read the horizon.

** I have raised these points, Mr. Huss, by-
way of an opening. The gist of what I have
to say lies deeper. So far I have dealt with
the things you have said only in relation to us ;
as against us you assume your own righteous-
ness, you flout our poor judgments, you sweep
them aside; the school must be continued on
your lines, the teaching must follow your
schemes. You can imagine no alternative opin-
ion. God forbid that I should say a word in my
own defence; I have given freely both of my
time and of my money to our school; it would
tax my secretaries now to reckon up how much;
but I make no claims. . . . None. . . .

*^ But let me now put all this discussion upon
a wider and a graver footing. It is not only us
and our poor intentions you arraign. Strange
things have dropped from you, Mr. Huss, in
this discussion, things it has at once pained and
astonished me to hear from you. You have

68

THE THREE VISITORS 69

spoken not only of man's ingratitude, bnt of
God's. I could scarcely believe my ears, but
indeed I heard you say that God was silent,
unhelpful, and that he too had deserted you.
In spite of the most meritorious exertions on
your part. . . . Standing as you do on the
very margin of the Great Secret, I want to plead
very earnestly with you against all that you
have said.''

Sir Eliphaz seemed to meditate remotely. He
returned like a soaring vulture to his victim.
*' I would be the last man to obtrude my reli-
gious feelings upon anyone. ... I make no
parade of religion, Mr. Huss, none at all. Many
people think me no better than an unbeliever.
But here I am bound to make my confession. I
owe much to God, Mr. Huss. . . . "

He glowered at the sick man. He abandoned
his grip upon the seat of his chair for a moment,
to make a gesture with his hairy claw of a hand.
*^ Your attitude to my God is a far deeper
offence to me than any merely personal attack
could be. Under his chastening blows, under
trials that humbler spirits would receive with
thankfulness and construe as lessons and warn-
ings, you betray yourself more proud, more self-
assured, more — froward is not too harsh a
word — more froward, Mr. Huss, than you were

70 THE UNDYING FIRE

even in the days when we used to fret under you
on Founder's Day in the Great Hall, when you
would dictate to us that here you must have an
extension and there you must have a museum or
a picture room or what not, leaving nothing to
opinion, making our gifts a duty. . . . You
will not recognise the virtue of gifts and graces
either in man or God. . . . Cannot you see,
my dear Mr. Huss, the falsity of your position?
It is upon that point that I want to talk to you
now. God does not smite man needlessly. This
world is all one vast intention, and not a spar-
row falls to the ground unless He wills that
sparrow to fall. Is your heart so sure of itself?
Does nothing that has happened suggest to you
that there may be something in your conduct
and direction of Woldingstanton that has made
it not quite so acceptable an offering to God as
you have imagined it to be ? ' '

Sir Eliphaz paused with an air of giving Mr.
Huss his chance, but meeting with no response,
he resumed: *^ I am an old man, Mr. Huss, and
I have seen much of the world and more par-
ticularly of the world of finance and industry,
a world of swift opportunities and sudden
temptations. I have watched the careers of
many young men of parts, who have seemed to
be under the impression that the world had been

THE THREE VISITORS 71

waiting for them overlong; I have seen more
promotions, schemes and enterprises, great or
grandiose, than I care to recall. Developing
Woldingstanton from the mere endowed school
of a market-town it was, to its present position,
has been for me a subordinate incident, a holi-
day task, a piece of by-play upon a crowded
scene. My experiences have been on a far
greater scale. Far greater. And in all my
experience I have never seen what I should call
a really right-minded man perish or an innocent
dealer — provided, that is, that he took ordinary
precautions — destroyed. Ups and downs no
doubt there are, for the good as well as the bad.
I have seen the foolish taking root for a time —
it was but for a time. I have watched the
manoeuvres of some exceedingly crafty men.

Sir Eliphaz shook his head slowly from side
to side and all the hairs on his head waved
about.

He hesitated for a moment, and decided to
favour his hearers with a scrap of auto-
biography.

*^ Quite recently,'' he began, ** there was a
fellow came to us, just as we were laying down
our plant for production on a large scale. He
was a very plausible, energetic young fellow

72 THE UNDYING FIRE

indeed, an American Armenian. Well, he hap-
pened to know somehow that we were going to
use kaolin from felspar, a by-product of the new
potash process, and he had got hold of a scheme
for washing London clay that produced, he
assured us, an accessible kaolin just as good for
our purpose and not a tenth of the cost of the
Norwegian stuff. It would have reduced our
prime cost something like thirty per cent. Let
alone tonnage. Excuse these technicalities.
On the face of it it was a thoroughly good thing.
The point was that I knew all along that his
stuff retained a certain amount of sulphur and
couldn't possibly make a building block to last.
That wouldn't prevent us selling and using the
stuff with practical impunity. It wasn't up to
us to know. No one could have made us liable.
The thing indeed looked so plain and safe that
I admit it tempted me sorely. And then, Mr.
Huss, God came in. I received a secret inti-
mation. I want to tell you of this in all good
faith and simplicity. In the night when all the
world was deep in sleep, I awoke. And I was
in the extremest terror; my very bones were
shaking; I sat up in my bed afraid almost to
touch the switch of the electric light; my hair
stood on end. I could see nothing, I could hear
nothing, but it was as if a spirit passed in front

THE THREE VISITORS 73

of my face. And in spite of the silence some-
thing seemed to be saying to me : * How about
God, Sir Eliphaz? Have you at last forgotten
Him ? How can you, that would dwell in houses
of clay, whose foundation is the dust, escape His
judgments? ' That was all, Mr. Huss, just that.
* Whose foundation is the dust! ' Straight to
the point. Well, Mr. Huss, I am not a religious
man, but I threw over that Armenian. ' ^

Mr. Dad made a sound to intimate that he
would have done the same.

'* I mention this experience, this interven-
tion— and it is not the only one of which I
could tell — because I want you to get my view
that if an enterprise, even though it is as fair
and honest-seeming a business as Woldingstan-
ton School, begins suddenly to crumple and wilt,
it means that somehow, somewhere you must
have been putting the wrong sort of clay into
it. It means not that God is wrong and going
back upon you, but that you are wrong. You
may be a great and famous teacher now, Mr.
Huss, thanks not a little to the pedestal we have
made for you, but God is a greater and more
famous teacher. He manifestly you have not
convinced, even if you could have convinced us,
of Woldingstanton's present perfection. . . .
That is practically all I have to say. When

i i

74 THE UNDYING FIRE

we propose, in all humility, to turn the school
about into new and less pretentious courses and
you oppose us, that is our answer. If you had
done as well and wisely as you declare, you
would not be in this position and this discussion
would never have arisen. ' '

He paused.

** Said with truth and dignity," said Mr.
Dad. ^ ^ You have put my opinion, Sir Eliphaz,
better than I could have put it myself. I thank
you. ' '

He coughed briefly.

§7

^* The question you put to me I have put to
myself,'.' said Mr. Huss, and thought deeply for
a little while. . . .

^' No, I do not feel convicted of wrong-doing.
I still believe the work I set myself to do was
right, right in spirit and intention, right in plan
and method. You invite me to confess my
faith broken and in the dust ; and my faith was
never so sure. There is a God in my heart, in
my heart at least there is a God, who has always
guided me to right and who guides me now.
My conscience remains unassailable. These
afflictions that you speak of as trials and warn-
ings I can only see as inexplicable disasters.
They perplex me, but they do not cow me. They
strike me as pointless and irrelevant events."

* ^ But this is terrible ! ' ' said Mr. Dad, deeply
shocked.

^^ You push me back. Sir Eliphaz, from the
discussion of our school affairs to more funda-
mental questions. You have raised the prob-
lem of the moral government of the world, a

75

76 THE UNDYING FIRE

problem that has been distressing my mind
since I first came here to Sundering, whether
indeed failure is condemnation and success the
sunshine of God's approval. You believe that
the great God of the stars and seas and moun-
tains is attentive to our conduct and responds
to it. His sense of right is the same sense of
right as ours ; he endorses a common aim. Your
prosperity is the mark of your harmony with
that supreme God. . . . ' '

** I wouldn't go so far as that," Mr. Dad
interjected. *^ No. No arrogance."

^^ And my misfortunes express his disap-
proval. Well, I have believed that; I have be-
lieved that the rightness of a schoolmaster's
conscience must needs be the same thing as the
rightness of destiny, I too had fallen into that
comforting persuasion of prosperity; but this
series of smashing experiences I have had, cul-
minating in your proposal to wipe out the whole
effect and significance of my life, brings me
face to face with the fundamental question
whether the order of the great universe, the God
of the stars, has any regard or relationship
whatever to the problems of our consciences
and the efforts of man to do right. That is a
question that echoes to me down the ages. So
far I have always professed myself a Chris-
tian. . . . "

THE THREE VISITORS 77

'* Well, I should hope so,'' said Mr. Dad,
** considering the terms of the school's foun-
dation."

** For, I take it, the creeds declare in a beau-
tiful symbol that the God who is present in our
hearts is one with the universal father and at
the same time his beloved Son, continually and
eternally begotten from the universal father-
hood, and crucified only to conquer. He has
come into our poor lives to raise them up at
last to Himself. But to believe that is to believe
in the significance and continuity of the whole
effort of mankind. The life of man must be
like the perpetual spreading of a fire. If right
and wrong are to perish together indifferently,
if there is aimless and fruitless suffering, if
there opens no hope for an eternal survival in
consequences of all good things, then there is
no meaning in such a belief as Christianity. It
is a mere superstition of priests and sacrifices,
and I have read things into it that were never
truly there. The rushlight of our faith burns
in a windy darkness that mil see no dawn."

** Nay," said Sir Eliphaz, ** nay. If there is
God in your work we cannot destroy it. ' '

** You are doing your best," said Mr. Huss,
** and now I am not sure that you will fail.
... At one time I should have defied you,

78 THE UNDYING FIRE

but now I am not sure. ... I have sat here
through some dreary and dreadful days, and
lain awake through some interminable nights;
I have thought of many things that men in their
days of prosperity are apt to dismiss from their
minds ; and I am no longer sure of the goodness
of the world without us or in the plan of Fate.
Perhaps it is only in us within our hearts that
the light of God flickers — and flickers inse-
curely. Where we had thought a God, somehow
akin to ourselves, ruled in the universe, it may
be there is nothing but black emptiness and a
coldness worse than cruelty."

Mr. Dad was about to interrupt, and re-
strained himself by a great effort.

*^ It is a commonplace of pietistic works that
natural things are perfect things, and that the
whole world of life, if it were not for the sinful-
ness of man, would be perfect. Paley, you will
remember. Sir Eliphaz, in his * Evidences of
Christianity,' from which we have both suf-
fered, declares that this earth is manifestly
made for the happiness of the sentient beings
living thereon. But I ask you to consider for
a little and dispassionately, whether life through
all its stages, up to and including man, is not
rather a scheme of uneasiness, imperfect satis-
faction, and positive miseries. . . ."

§8

*^ Aren't we getting a bit out of our depth in
all this? '' Mr. Dad burst out. '' Put it at that
— out of our depth. . . . What does this sort
of carping and questioning amount to, Mr.
Huss? Does it do us any good? Does it help
us in the slightest degree? Why should we go
into all this! Why can't we be humble and
leave these deep questions to those who make a
specialty of dealing with them? We don't know
the ropes. We can't. Here are you and Mr.
Farr, for instance, both of you whole-time
schoolmasters so to speak; here's Sir Eliphaz
toiling night and day to make simple cheap suit-
able homes for the masses, who probably won't
say thank you to him when they see them; here's
me an overworked engineer and understaffed
most cruelly, not to speak of the most unfair
and impossible labour demands, so that you
never know where you are and what they won't
ask you next. And in the midst of it all we are
to start an argey-bargey about the goodness of
God!

79

80 THE UNDYING FIRE

<< We're busy men, Mr. Huss. What do we
know of the world being a scheme of imperfect
satisfaction and what all? Where does it come
in? What's its practical value? Words it is,
all words, and getting away from the plain and
definite question we came to talk over and settle
and have done with. Such talk, I will confess,
makes me uncomfortable. Give me the Bible
and the simple religion I learnt at my mother 's
knee. That's good enough for me. Can't we
just have faith and leave all these questions
alone? What are men in reality? After all
their arguments. Worms. Just worms. Well
then, let's have the decency to behave as such
and stick to business, and do our best in that
state of life unto which it has pleased God to
call us. That's what I say," said Mr. Dad.

He jerked his head back, coughed shortly,
adjusted his tie, and nodded to Mr. Farr in a
resolute manner.

** A simple, straightforward, commercial and
technical education," he added by way of an
explanatory colophon. ^^ That's what we're
after."

§9

Mr. Huss stared absently at Mr. Dad for

some moments, and then resumed:

** Let US look squarely at this world about us.
What is the true lot of life ? Is there the slight-
est justification for assuming that our con-
ceptions of right and happiness are reflected
anywhere in the outward universe? Is there,
for instance, much animal happiness! Do
health and well-being constitute the normal
state of animals ! ' '

He paused. Mr. Dad got up, and stood look-
ing out of the window with his back to Mr. Huss.
** Pulling nature to pieces," he said over his
shoulder. He turned and urged further, with
a snarl of bitterness in his voice: '^ Suppose
things are so, what is the good of our calling
attention to it I Where's the benefit? ''

But the attitude of Sir Eliphaz conveyed a
readiness to listen.

** Before I became too ill to go out here,''
said Mr. Huss, ^^ I went for a walk in the coun-
try behind this place. I was weary before I
G 81

82 THE UNDYING FIRE

started, but/I was impelled to go by that almost
irresistible desire that will seize upon one at
times to get out of one's immediate surround-
ings, fl wanted to escape from this wretched
room,' and I wanted to be alone, secure from
interruptions, and free to think in peace. There
was a treacherous promise in the day outside,
much sunshine and a breeze. I had heard of
woods a mile or so inland, and that conjured up
a vision of cool green shade and kindly streams
beneath the trees and of the fellowship of shy
and gentle creatures. So I went out into the
heat and into the dried and salted east wind,
through glare and ink}^ shadows, across many
more fields than I had expected, until I came to
some woods and then to a neglected park, and
there for a time I sat down to rest. . . .

*^ But I could get no rest. The turf was
unclean through the presence of many sheep,
and in it there was a number of close-growing
but very sharply barbed thistles; and after a
little time I realized that harvesters, those
minute red beasts that creep upon one in the
chalk lands and burrow into the skin and pro-
duce an almost intolerable itching, abounded.
I got up again and went on, hoping in vain to
find some fence or gate on which I might rest
more comfortably. There were many flies and

THE THREE VISITORS 83

gnats, many more than there are here and of
different sorts, and they persecuted me more
and more. They surrounded me in a humming
cloud, and I had to wave my walking-stick about
my head all the time to keep them off me. I
felt too exhausted to walk back, but there was,
I knew, a village a mile or so ahead where I
hoped to find some conveyance in which I might
return by road. ...

'^ And as I struggled along in this fashion I
came upon first one thing and then another, so
apt to my mood that they might have been put
there by some adversary. First it was a very
young rabbit indeed, it was scarcely as long as
my hand, which some cruel thing had dragged
from its burrow. The back of its head had been
bitten open and was torn and bloody, and the
flies rose from its oozing wounds to my face
like a cloud of witnesses. Then as I went on,
trying to distract my mind from the memory of
this pitiful dead thing by looking about me for
something more agreeable, I discovered a row
of little brown objects in a hawthorn bush, and
going closer found they were some half-dozen
victims of a butcherbird — beetles, fledgelings,
and a mouse or so — spiked on the thorns.
They were all twisted into painful attitudes, as
if each had suffered horribly and challenged me

84 THE UNDYING FIRE

by the last gesture of its limbs to judge between
it and its creator. . . . And a little further
on a gaunt, villainous-looking cat with rusty
black fur that had bare patches suddenly ran
upon me out of a side path; it had something
in its mouth which it abandoned at the sight of
me and left writhing at my feet, a pretty crested
bird, ver}^ mangled, that flapped in flat circles
upon the turf, unable to rise. A fit of weak and
reasonless rage came upon me at this, and see-
ing the cat halt some yards away and turn to
regard me and move as if to recover its victim,
I rushed at it and pursued it, shouting. Then
it occurred to me that it would be kinder if,
instead of a futile pursuit of the wretched cat,
I went back and put an end to the bird 's suffer-
ings. For a time I could not find it, and I
searched for it in the bushes in a fever to get it
killed, groaning and cursing as I did so. When
I found it, it fought at me with its poor bleeding
wings and snapped its beak at me, and made me
feel less like a deliverer than a murderer. I
hit it with my stick, and as it still moved I
stamped it to death with my feet. I fled from its
body in an agony. * And this,' I cried, * this
hell revealed, is God's creation! ' "

*^ Tcha! " exclaimed Mr. Dad.

** Suddenly it seemed to me that scales had

THE THREE VISITORS 85

fallen from my eyes and that I saw the whole
world plain. It was as if the universe had put
aside a mask it had hitherto worn, and shown
me its face, and it was a face of boundless evil.
... It was as if a power of darkness sat
over me and watched me with a mocking gaze,
and for the rest of that day I could think of
nothing but the feeble miseries of living things.
I was tortured, and all life was tortured with
me. I failed to find the village I sought; I
strayed far, I got back here at last long after
dark, stopping sometimes by the wayside to be
sick, sometimes kneeling or lying down for a
time to rest, shivering and burning with an in-
creasing fever.

** I had, as you know, been the first to find
poor Williamson lying helpless among the acids ;
that ghastly figure and the burnt bodies of the
two boys who died in School House haunt my
mind constantly; but what was most in my
thoughts on that day when the world of nature
showed its teeth to me was the wretchedness of
animal life. I do not know why that should
have seemed more pitiful to me, and more fun-
damental, but it did. Human suffering, per-
haps, is complicated by moral issues ; man can
look before and after and find remote justifica-
tions and stern consolations outside his present

86 THE UNDYING FIRE

experiences ; but the poor birds and beasts, the>
have only their present experiences and their
individual lives cut off and shut in. How can
there be righteousness in any scheme that afflicts
them? I thought of one creature after another,
and I could imagine none that had more than
an occasional gleam of false and futile satisfac-
tion between suffering and suffering. And to-
day^ gentlemen, as I sit here with you, the same
dark stream of conviction pours through my
mind. I feel that life is a weak and inconse-
quent stirring amidst the dust of space and
time, incapable of overcoming even its internal
dissensions, doomed to phases of delusion, to
irrational and undeserved punishments, to vain
complainings and at last to extinction.

^ ^ Is there so much as one healthy living being
in the world I I question it. As I wandered
that day, I noted the trees as I had never noted
them before. There was not one that did not
show a stricken or rotten branch, or that was
not studded with the stumps of lost branches
decaying backwards towards the main stem;
from every fork came dark stains of corruption,
the bark was twisted and contorted and fungoid
protrusions proclaimed the hidden mycelium of
disease. The leaves were spotted with warts and
blemishes, and gnawed and bitten by a myriad

THE THREE VISITORS 87

enemies. I noted too that the turf under my feet
was worn and scorched and weary; gossamer
threads and spiders of a hundred sorts trapped
the multitudinous insects in the wilted autumnal
undergrowth ; the hedges were a slow conflict of
thrusting and strangulating plants in which
every individual was more or less crippled or
stunted. Most of these plants were armed like
assassins; they had great thorns or stinging
hairs; some ripened poisonous berries. And
this was the reality of life; this was no excep-
tional mood of things, but a revelation of things
established. I had been blind and now I saw.
Even as these woods and thickets were, so was
all the world. . . .

'* I had been reading in a book I had chanced
to pick up in this lodging, about the jungles of
India, which many people think of as a vast
wealth of splendid and luxuriant vegetation.
For the greater part of the year they are hot
and thorny wastes of brown, dead and moulder-
ing matter. Comes the steaming downpour of
the rains ; and then for a little while there is a
tangled rush of fighting greenery, jostling,
choking, torn and devoured by a multitude of
beasts and by a horrible variety of insects that
the hot moisture has called to activity. Then
under the dry breath of the destroyer the ex-

88 THE UNDYING FIRE

uberance stales and withers, everything ripens
and falls, and the jungle relapses again into
sullen heat and gloomy fermentation. And in
truth everywhere the growth season is a wild
scramble into existence, the rest of the year a
complicated massacre. Even in our British cli-
mate is it not plain to you how the summer
outlasts the lavish promise of the spring? In
our spring there is no doubt an air of hope, of
budding and blossoming; there is the nesting
and singing of birds, a certain cleanness of the
air, an emergence of primary and comparatively
innocent things; but hard upon that freshness
follow the pests and parasites, the creatures
that corrupt and sting, the minions of waste and
pain and lassitude and fever. . . .

** You may say that I am dwelling too much
upon the defects in the lives of plants which do
not feel, and of insects and small creatures
which may feel in a different manner from our-
selves ; but indeed their decay and imperfection
make up the common texture of life. Even the
things that live are only half alive. You may
argue that at least the rarer, larger beasts
bring with them a certain delight and dignity
into the world. But consider the lives of the
herbivora; they are all hunted creatures; fear
is their habit of mind; even the great Indian

THE THREE VISITORS 89

buffalo is given to panic flights. They are in-
cessantly worried by swarms of insects. When
they are not apathetic they appear to be angry,
exasperated with life ; their seasonal outbreaks
of sex are evidently a violent torment to them,
an occasion for fierce bellowings, mutual perse-
cution and desperate combats. Such beasts as
the rhinoceros or the buffalo are habitually in a
rage; they will run amuck for no conceivable
reason, and so too will many elephants, betray-
ing a sort of organic spite against all other liv-
ing things. . . .

* * And if we turn to the great carnivores, who
should surely be the lords of the jungle world,
their lot seems to be not one whit more happy.
The tiger leads a life of fear; a dirty scrap of
rag will turn him from his path. , Much of his
waking life is prowling hunger; when he kills
he eats ravenously, he eats to the pitch of dis-
comfort; he lies up afterwards in reeds or
bushes, savage, disinclined to move. The
hunter must beat him out, and he comes out
sluggishly and reluctantly to die. His paws,
too, are strangely tender; a few miles of rock
will make them bleed, they gather thorns. . . .
His mouth is so foul that his bite is a poisoned
bite. . . .

** All that day I struggled against this per-

90 THE UNDYING FIRE

suasion that the utmost happiness of any animal
is at best like a transitory smile on a grim and
inhuman countenance. I tried to recall some
humorous and contented-looking creatures. . . .

^^ That only recalled a fresh horror. . . .

** You will have seen jDictures and photo-
graphs of penguins. They will have conveyed
to you the sort of effect I tried to recover.
They express a quaint and jolly gravity, an
aldermanic contentment. But to me now the
mere thought of a penguin raises a vision of
distress. I will tell you. . . . One of my old
boys came to me a year or so ago on his return
from a South Polar expedition; he told me the
true story of these birds. Their lives, he said
— he was speaking more particularly of the
king penguin — are tormented by a monstrously
exaggerated maternal instinct, an instinct
shared by both sexes, which is a necessary con-
dition of survival in the crowded rookeries of
that frozen environment. And that instinct
makes life one long torment for them. There
is always a great smashing of eggs there
through various causes; there is an excessive
mortality among the chicks; they slip down
crevasses, they freeze to death and so forth,
three-quarters of each year's brood perish, and
without this extravagant passion the species

THE THREE VISITORS 91

would become extinct. So that every bird is
afflicted with a desire and anxiety to brood upon
and protect a chick. But each couple produces
no more than one egg a year; eggs get broken,
they roll away into the water, there is always a
shortage, and every penguin that has an egg
has to guard it jealously, and each one that has
not an egg is impelled to steal or capture one.
Some in their distress will mother pebbles or
scraps of ice, some fortunate in possession will
sit for days without leaving the nest in spite of
the gnamngs of the intense Antarctic hunger.
To leave a nest for a moment is to tempt a rob-
ber, and the intensity of the emotions aroused
is shown by the fact that they will fight to the
death over a stolen egg. You see that these
pictures of rookeries of apparently comical
birds are really pictures of poor dim-minded
creatures worried and strained to the very limit
of their powers. That is what their lives have
always been. ...

^ ^ But the king penguin draws near the end of
its history. Let me tell you how its history is
closing. Let me tell you of what is happening
in the peaceful Southern Seas — now. This old
boy of mine was in great distress because of a
vile traffic that has arisen. . . . Unless it is
stopped, it will destroy these rookeries alto-

92 THE UNDYING FIRE

gether. These birds are being murdered whole-
sale for their oil. Parties of men land and club
them upon their nests, from which the poor,
silly things refuse to stir. The dead and
stunned, the living and the dead together, are
dragged away and thrust into iron crates to be
boiled down for their oil. The broken living
with the dead. . . . Each bird yields about a
farthing's profit, but it pays to kill them at
that, and so the thing is done. The people who
run these operations, you see, have had a sound
commercial training. They believe that when
God gives us power He means us to use it, and
that what is profitable is just."

^' Well, really,'' protested Mr. Dad.
*^Eeally!"

Mr. Farr also betrayed a disposition to speak.
He cleared his thoat, his uneasy hands worried
the edge of the table, his face shone. ^^ Sir
Eliphaz," he said. . . .

*' Let me finish," said Mr. Huss, ** for I have
still to remind you of the most stubborn facts of
all in such an argument as this. Have you ever
thought of the significance of such creatures as
the entozoa, and the vast multitudes of other
sorts of specialized parasites whose very exist-
ence is cruelty? There are thousands of orders
and genera of insects, Crustacea, arachnids.

THE THREE VISITORS 93

worms, and lowlier things, which are adapted in
the most complicated way to prey npon the liv-
ing and suffering tissues of their fellow crea-
tures, and which can live in no other way. Have
you ever thought what that means? If fore-
thought framed these horrors what sort of
benevolence was there in that forethought? I
will not distress you by describing the life cycles
of any of these creatures too exactly. You must
know of many of them. I will not dwell upon
those wasps, for example, which lay their eggs
in the living bodies of victims which the young
will gnaw to death slowly day by day as they de-
velop, nor mil I discuss this unmeaning growth
of cells which has made my body its soil. . . .
Nor any one of our thousand infectious fevers
that fall upon us — without reason, without
justice. . . .

^* Man is of all creatures the least subjected
to internal parasites. In the brief space of a
few hundred thousand years he has changed his
food, his habitat and every attitude and habit
of his life, and comparatively few species, thirty
or forty at most, I am told, have been able to
follow his changes and specialize themselves
to him under these fresh conditions; yet even
man can entertain some fearful guests. Every
time you drink open water near a sheep pas-

94 THE UNDYING FIRE

tui'G YOU may drink the larval liver fluke, wliicli
will make your liver a little to\\Tiship of vile
creatures until they eat it up, until they swarm
from its oozing ruins into your body cavity and
destroy you. In Europe this is a rare fate for
a man, but in China there are mde regions
where the fluke abounds and rots the life out of
thousands of people. . . . The fluke is but
one sample of such feats of the Creator. An
unwashed leaf of lettuce may be the means of
planting a parasitic cyst in your brain to de-
throne your reason ; a feast of underdone pork
may transfer to you from the swine the creeping
death torture of trichinosis. . . . But all that
men suffer in these matters is nothing to the
suffering of the beasts. The torments of the
beasts are finished and complete. My biological
master tells me that he rarely opens a cod or
dogfish without finding bunches of some sort
of worm or such like pallid lodger in possession.
He has rows of little tubes with the things he
has found in the bodies of rabbits. . . .

^ ' But I will not disgust you further. . . .

*^ Is this a world made for the happiness of
sentient things?

** I ask yoUy how is it possible for man to be
other than a rebel in the face of such facts?
How can he trust the Maker who has designed

THE THREE VISITORS 95

and elaborated and finished these parasites in
their endless multitude and variety? For these
things are not in the nature of sudden creations
and special judgments; they have been pro-
duced fearfully and wonderfully by a process of
evolution as slow and deliberate as our own.
How can Man trust such a Maker to treat him
fairly! Why should we shut our eyes to things
that stare us in the face? Either the world of
life is the creation of a being inspired by a
malignancy at once filthy, petty and enormous,
or it displays a carelessness, an indifference, a
disregard for justice. . . . ' '
The voice of Mr. Huss faded out.

§ 10

For some time Mr. Farr had been manifest-
ing signs of impatience. The pause gave him
his opportunity. He spoke with a sort of re-
strained volubility.

^^ Sir Eliphaz, Mr. Dad, after what has passed
in relation to myself, I would have preferred to
have said nothing in this discussion. Nothing.
So far as I myself am concerned, I will still say
nothing. But upon some issues it is impossible
to keep silence. Mr. Huss has said some ter-
rible things, things that must surely never be
said at Woldingstanton. . . .

** Think of what such teaching as this may
mean among young and susceptible boys!
Think of such stuff in the school pulpit!
Chary as I am of all wrangling, and I would not
set myself up for a moment to wrangle against
Mr. Huss, yet I feel that this cavilling against
God's universe, this multitude of evil words,
must be answered. It is imperative to answer
it, plainly and sternly. It is our duty to God,
who has made us what we are. . . .

96

THE THREE VISITORS 97

*' Mr. Huss, in your present diseased state
you seem incapable of realizing the enormous
egotism of all this depreciation of God's mar-
vels. But indeed you have suffered from that
sort of incapacity always. It is no new thing.
Have I not chafed under your arrogant assur-
ance for twelve long years 1 Your right, now as
ever, is the only right; your doctrine alone is
pure. Would that God could speak and open his
lips against you ! How his voice would shatter
you and us and everything about us ! How you
would shrivel amidst your blasphemies !

'* Excuse me, gentlemen, if I am too forcible,'*
said Mr. Farr, moistening his white lips, but
Mr. Dad nodded fierce approval.

Thus encouraged, Mr. Farr proceeded.
'* When first I came into this room, Mr. Huss,
I was full of pity for your affliction — I think we
all were — we were pitiful ; but now it is clear
to me that God exacts from you less than your
iniquity deserves. Surely the supreme sin is
pride. You criticize and belittle God 's universe,
but what sort of a universe would you give us,
Mr. Huss, if you were the Creator? Pardon
me if I startle you, gentlemen, but that is a fair
question to ask. For it is clear to me now, Mr.
Huss, that no less than that mil satisfy you.
Woldingstanton, for all the wonders you have

98 THE UNDYING FIRE

wrought there, in spite of the fact that never
before and never again can there be such a head,
in spite of the fact that you have lit such a
candle there as may one day set the world
ablaze, is clearly too small a field for you. Head-
master of the universe is your position. Then,
and then alone, could you display your gifts to
the full. Then cats would cease to eat birds,
and trees grow on in perfect symmetry until
they cumbered the sky. I can dimly imagine
the sort of world that it would be ; the very fleas
reformed and trained under your hand, would
be flushed with health and happiness and doing
the work of boy scouts; every blade of grass
would be at least six feet long. As for the liver
fluke — but I cannot solve the problem of the
liver fluke. I suppose you will provide eutha-
nasia for all the parasites. . . .''

Abruptly Mr. Farr passed from this vein of
terrible humour to an earnest and pleading
manner. ^' Mr. Huss, with mortal danger so
close to you, I entreat you to reconsider all this
wild and wicked talk: of yours. You take a few
superficial aspects of the world and frame a
judgment on them ; you try with the poor foot-
rule of your mind to measure the plans of God,
plans which are longer than the earth, wider
than the sea. I ask you, how can such insolence

THE THREE VISITORS 99

help you in this supreme emergency? There
can be little time left, . . . ' '

Providence was manifestly resolved to give
Mr. Farr the maximum of dramatic effect.
*^ But what is this? '' said Mr. Farr. He stood
up and looked out of the window.

Somebody had rung the bell, and now, with
an effect of impatience, was rapping at the
knocker of Sea View.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

DO WE TRULY DIE?

§1

Mrs. Croomb was heard in the passage, some-
one 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 deter-
minedly 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,"

100

DO WE TRULY DIE? ' '^ ' ' lOl

said Mr. Huss, with a gesture portending intro-
ductions.

* ^ 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 re-
prieve, 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

102" ' ' "^ '' ' ' TflE * Undying fire

determine the future development of Wolding-
stanton 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 Eli-
phaz with hard intelligence.

** Well, we have drifted from that," Sir Eli-
phaz 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 fundamen-
tal things. I have been forced to revise my
faith, and to look more closely than I have

DO WE TRULY DIE? 103

ever done before into the meaning of my
beliefs and into my springs of action. I have
been wrenched away from tliat habitual con-
fidence 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 Wol-
dingstanton. Suddenly, swiftly, I have had
misfortune following upon misfortune — with-
out cause or justification. I am thro^vn 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 Righteous-
ness ruled this world in detail and entirely, giv-
ing us day by day our daily rewards and pun-
ishments. 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

\

104 THE UNDYING FIRE

such 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 under-
stand 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 ad-
venture, 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

DO WE TRULY DIE? 105

be, which is the adventure of manldnd, the sub-
stance 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 phys-
ics, mathematics and languages out of the cur-
riculum 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 a,re_ 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 mthin 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 tradi-
tion we have lit upon this little planet, if it is
the one gleam of spirit in all the windy vast-
ness of a dead and empty universe."

/

106 THE UNDYING FIRE

Dr. Barrack seemed about to interrupt with
some comment, and then, it was manifest, de-
ferred 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 com-
ing 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 vast-
ness 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

DO WE TRULY DIE? 107

traces 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 swim-
ming 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

108 THE UNDYING FIRE

unmeaning 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 mil 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 uni-
verse that echoes that ^ No' ? ''

§2

''Ah, Mr. Hnss, Mr. Huss!'' said Sir
Eliphaz.

His eye seemed seeking some point of attach-
ment, 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 sus-
tained in every moment by the Mercy and Wis-
dom of God I The flimsier life is, the greater
the wonder of his Providence. Not a sparrow, ' '
said Sir Eliphaz, and then enlarging the meta-
phor with a boom in his voice, '' not a hair of
my head, falls to the ground without His knowl-
edge and consent. ... I am a man much
occupied. I cannot do the reading I would.
But while you have been reviling the works of

109

110 THE UNDYING FIRE

God I have been thinking of some wonders.

yy

Sir Eliphaz lifted up a hand with thumb and
finger opposed, as though he held some exqui-
site 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 divi-
sion is extremely beautiful and is called, I
believe, karyohinesis; 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 cor-

DO WE TRULY DIE? Ill

puscle/ this ^ 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 heav-
ier 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 i
of happy confession, ' ' am ninety per cent. \
water. . . . We all are. ... '^

** And think how mercifully winter is tem-
pered to us by the snow! When water freezes
in the air in winter-time, it does not come pelt-
ing down as lumps of ice. Conceivably it

112 THE UNDYING FIRE

might, 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 micro-
scope. 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 para-
sites 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 ben-
efit. Maybe every one of those thousands of
parasites you deem so horrible is working its
way upward towards an arrangement — ' ^

DO WE TRULY DIE? 113

Sir Elipliaz 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 cres-
cendo 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.

§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 hyaena, 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-fer-
tilization of plants. But do you not know that
half these curious and elaborate adaptations no
longer work 1 Scarcely was their evolution com-
pleted 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 trans-
formation of the higher insects which give us

114

DO WE TRULY DIE? 115

our 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 intri-
cate 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 beau-
tiful species fly by night in the tropical forests ?
As for the human eye, oculists and opticians are
scarcely of your opinion. You h}Tiin the pecu-
liar 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 embry-
onic growth in the egg. I admit the wonderful
precision of the process ; but how does it touch
my doubts 1 Eather 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 divi-
sion slide along their spindle lines. They divide
not as if a divine hand guided them but with re-
morseless 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.

116 THE UNDYING FIRE

Millions 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, with-
out 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 Af-
rica 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 exliausted, instinct, blind and
pitiless, still drives those birds. And again
thinl?: 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

DO WE TRULY DIE? 117

disproportion of his desires. Consider the
Eecord of the Eocks honestly and frankly, and
where can you trace this crescendo you suggest ?
There have been great ages of marvellous tree-
ferns and wonderful forest swamps, and all
those glorious growths have died. They did not
go on ; they reached a climax and died ; another
sort of plant succeeded them. Then think of
all that wonderful fauna of the Mesozoic times,
the age of Leviathan ; the theriodonts, reptilian
beasts, the leaping dinosaurs, the mososaurs
and suchlike monsters of the deep, the bat-
winged pterodactyls, the plesiosaurs and ichthy-
osaurs. Think of the marvels of the Mesozoic
seas; the thousands of various ammonites, the
wealth of fish life. Across all that world of life
swept death, as the wet fingers of a child wipe
a drawing from a slate. They left no descend-
ants, they clambered to a vast variety and com-
plexity and ceased. The dawn of the Eocene
was the bleak dawn of a denuded world. Cres-
cendo if you will, but thereafter diminuendo,
pianissimo. And then once again from fresh
obscure starting-points far down the stem life
swelled, and swelled again, only to dwindle.
The world we live in to-day is a meagre spec-
tacle beside the abundance of the earlier Ter-
tiary time, when Behemoth in a thousand forms.

118 THE UNDYING FIRE

Deinotherium, Titanotherium, Helladotherium,
sabre-toothed tiger, a hundred sorts of elephant,
and the like, pushed through the jungles that
are now this mild world of to-day. Where
is that crescendo now? Crescendo! Through
those long ages our ancestors were hiding under
leaves and climbing into trees to be out of the
way of the crescendo. As the motif of a cres-
cendo they sang exceedingly small. And now
for a little w^hile the world is ours, and we wax
in our turn. To what good? To what end?
Tell me, you who say the world is good, tell me
the end. How can we escape at last the common
fate under the darkling sky of a frozen world? "

He paused for some moments, weary with
speaking.

li There is no comfort," he said, ** in the
flowers or the stars; no assurance in the past
and no sure hope in the future. There is
nothing but the God of faith and courage in the
hearts of men. . . . And He gives no sign
of power, no earnest of victory. . . . He
gives no sign. ..."

Whereupon Sir Eliphaz breathed the word:
'^Immortality! "

'^ Let me say a word or two upon Immortal-
ity," said Sir Eliphaz, breaking suddenly into
eagerness, ** for that, I presume, is the thing

DO WE TRULY DIE? 119

we have forgotten. That, I see, is the difference
between us and you, Mr. Huss ; that is why we
can sit here, content to play our partial roles,
knowing full surely that some day the broken
lines and inconsecutivenesses that perplex us in
this life will all be revealed and resolved into
their perfect circles, while you to whom this
earthly life is all and final, you must needs be a
rebel, you must needs preach a doctrine between
defiance and despair. ... If indeed death
ended all! Ah! Then indeed you might claim
that reason was on your side. The afflictions
of man are very many. Why should I deny
it? ''

The patentee and chief proprietor of the Tem-
anite blocks paused for a moment.

* ' Yes, ' ' he said, peering up through his eye-
brows at the sky, ^* that is the real issue. Blind
to that, you are blind to everything. ' '

^* I don't know whether I am mth you on
this question of immortality. Sir Eliphaz,''
warned Dr. Barrack, coughing shortly.

*^ For my part I'm altogether with him,''
said Mr. Dad. ' * If there is no immortal life —
well, what's the good of being temperate and
decent and careful for ^ve and fifty years f *'

Sir Eliphaz had decided now to drop all
apologetics for the scheme of Nature.

120 THE UNDYING FIRE

** A place of trial, a place of stimulus and
training/' he said, ^^ Respice finem. The clues
are all — beyond/'

^* But if you really consider this world as a
place for soul making,*' said Mr. Huss, '' what
do you think you are doing when you propose to
turn Woldingstanton over to Farr ? ' '

* ' At any rate, ' ' said Farr tartly, * * we do not
want soul-blackening and counsels of despair at
Woldingstanton. We want the boys taught to
serve and help first in this lowly economic
sphere, cheerfully and enterprisingly, and then
in higher things, before they pass on — "

'^ If death ends all, then what is the good of
trying? " Mr. Dad said, still brooding over the
question. * ^ If I thought that — ! "

He added with deep conviction, * ' I should let
myself go. . . . Anyone would."

He blew heavily, stuck his hands in his
pockets, and sat more deeply in his chair, an
indignant man, a business man asked to give
up something for nothing.

For a moment the little gathering hung, only
too manifestly contemplating the spectacle of
Mr. Dad amidst wine, women, and waistcoats
without restraint, letting himself go, eating,
drinking, and rejoicing, being a perfect devil,
because on the morrow he had to die. . . .

DO WE TRULY DIE? 121

** Immortal," said Mr. Huss. ^' I did not ex-
pect immortality to come into this discussion.

• • •

*^ Are you immortal, Farrf " he asked
abruptly.

^* I hope so,'^ said Mr. Farr. '^ Unworthy
though I be."

" Exactly," said Mr. Huss. '' And so that
is the way out for us. You and I, Mr. Dad
from his factory, and Sir Eliphaz from his
building office, are to soar. It is all arranged
for us, and that is why the tragic greatness of
life is to be hidden from my boys. . . .

** Yet even so," continued Mr. Huss, ** I do
not see why you should be so anxious for tech-
nical science and so hostile to the history of
mankind. ^ '

^' Because it is not a true history," said Sir
Eliphaz, his hair waving about like the hair of
a man electrified by fresh ideas. '' Because it
is a bunch of loose ends that are really not ends
at all, but only beginnings that pass suddenly
into the unseen. I admit that in this world
nothing is rationalized, nothing is clearly just.
I admit everything you say. But the reason?
The reason? Because this life is onty the first
page of the great book we have to read. We
sit here, Mr. Huss, like men in a waiting-room.

122 THE UNDYING FIRE

. . . All this life is like waiting outside, in a '
place of some disorder, before being admitted
to the wider reality, the larger sphere, where all
the cruelties, all these confusions, everything —
will be explained, justified — and set right. ' '

He paused, and then perceiving that Mr. Huss
was about to speak he resumed, raising his voice
slightly.

* ^ And I do not speak without my book in these
matters,'' he said. ^* I have been greatly im-
pressed — and, what is more. Lady Burrows has
been greatly impressed, by the writings of two
thoroughly scientific men, two thoroughly sci-
entific men. Dr. Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver
Lodge. Ever since she lost her younger sister
early in life Lady Burrows has followed up this
interest. It has been a great consolation to
her. And the point is, as Sir Oliver insists in
that wonderful book ^ Raymond, ' that continued
existence in another world is as proven now as
the atomic theory in chemistry. It is not a mat-
ter of faith, but knowledge. The partition is
breached at last. We are in communication.
News is coming through. . . . Scientific cer-
tainty. . . . "

Sir Eliphaz cleared his throat. ^' We have
already evidences and descriptions of the life
into which we shall pass. Eemember this is no

DO WE TRULY DIE? 123

idle talk, no deception by Sludges and the like;
it is a great English scientific man who pub-
lishes these records ; it is a great French philos-
opher, no less a man than that wonderful
thinker — and how he thinks ! — Professor
Bergson, who counselled their publication. A
glory of science and a glory of philosophy com-
bine to reassure us. We walk at last upon a
path of fact into that further world. We know
already much. /We know, for example, that
those who have passed over to that higher plane
have bodies still. That I found — comforting.
Without that — one would feel bleak. But, the
messages say, the internal organs are consti-
tuted differently. Naturally. As one would
have expected. The dietary is, I gather, prac-
tically non-existent. Needless. As the outline
is the same the space is, I presume, used
for other purposes. Some sort of astral stor-
age. . . . They do not bleed. An interesting
fact. Lady Burrows' sister is now practically
bloodless. And her teeth — she had lost sev-
eral, she suffered greatly with her teeth — her
teeth have all been replaced — a beautiful set.
Used now only for articulate speech. ' '

* ^ * Raymond ' all over again, ' ' said the
doctor.

* * You have read the book ! ' ' said Sir Eliphaz.

124 THE UNDYING FIRE

The doctor grunted in a manner that mingled
assent and disapproval. His expression be-
trayed the scientific bigot.

** We know now details of the passage/' said
Sir Eliphaz. *^ We have some particulars. We
know, for instance, that people blown to pieces
take some little time to reconstitute. There is
a correlation between this corruptible body and
the spirit body that replaces it. There is a sort
of spirit doctor over there, very helpful in such
cases. / And burnt bodies, too, are a trouble.
. . . The sexes are still distinct, but all the
coarseness of sex is gone. The passions fade
in that better world. Every passion. Even the
habit of smoking and the craving for alcohol
fade. Not at first. The newly dead will some-
times ask for a cigar. They are given cigars,
higher-plane cigars, and they do not ask for
more. There are no children born there.
Nothing of that sort. That, it is very impor-
tant to understand. Here is the place of birth ;
this is where lives begin. This coarse little
planet is the seed-bed of life. When it has
served its purpose and populated those higher
planes, then indeed it may freeze, as you say.
A mere empty hull. A seed-case that has
served its purpose, mattering nothing. These
are the thoughts, the comforting and beautiful

DO WE TRULY DIE? 125

thoughts, that receive the endorsement of our
highest scientific and philosophical intelligences.
. . . One thinks of that life there, no doubt
in some other dimension of space, that world
arranged in planes — metaphorical planes, of
course, in which people go to and fro, living in
a sort of houses, surrounded by a sort of beau-
tiful things, made, so we are told, from the
smells of the things we have here. That is
curious, but not irrational. Our favorite dog-
gies will be there. Sublimated also. That
thought has been a great comfort to Lady Bur-
rows. . . . We had a dog called Fido, a leetle,
teeny fellow — practically human. . . .

*^ These blessed ones engage very largely in
conversation. Other occupations I found diffi-
cult to trace. Raymond attended a sort of re-
ception on the very highest plane. It was a
special privilege. Perhaps a compliment to Sir
Oliver. He met the truth of revealed religion,
so to speak, personally. It was a wonderful
moment. Sir Oliver suppresses the more sol-
emn details. Lady Burrows intends to write
to him. She is anxious for particulars. But
I will not dilate, '^ said Sir Eliphaz. ** I will
not dilate.''

^^ And you believe this stuff? '' said the doc-
tor iji tones of the deepest disgust.

126 THE UNDYING FIRE

Sir Eliphaz waved himself upon the ques-
tioner.

^ ^ So far as poor earthly expressions can body
forth spiritual things, '^ he hedged.

He regarded his colleagues with an eye of
florid defiance. Both Mr. Farr and Mr. Dad
had slightly shamefaced expressions, and Mr.
Dad's ears were red.

Mr. Dad cleared his throat. ** I'm sure
there's something in it — anyhow," said Mr.
Dad hoarsely, doing his best in support.

** If I was born with a hare lip," said the
doctor, '' would that be put right? Do congen-
ital idiots get sublimated? What becomes of a
dog one has shot for hydrophobia? "

** To all of such questions," said Sir Eliphaz
serenely, ** the answer is — we don't know.
Why should we? "

ii

§4

Mr. Huss seemed lost in meditation. His pale
and sunken face and crumpled pose contrasted
strongly with the bristling intellectual rectitude
and mounting choler of Dr. Elihu Barrack.

'' No, Sir Eliphaz/^ said Mr. Huss, and
sighed.

No,'' he repeated.

What a poor phantom of a world these
people conjure up ! What a mockery of loss
and love! The very mothers and lovers who
mourn their dead will not believe their foolish
stories. Eestoration! It is a crowning indig-
nity. It makes me think of nothing in the world
but my dear boy's body, broken and crumpled,
and some creature, half fool and half impostor,
sitting upon it, getting between it and me, and
talking cheap rubbish over it about planes of
being and astral bodies. . . .

^* After all, you teach me. Sir Eliphaz, that
life, for all its grossness and pain and horror,
is not so bad as it might be — if such things as
this were true. But it needs no sifting of the

127

128 THE UNDYING FIRE

evidence to know they are untrue. No sane man
believes this stuff for ten minutes together. It
is impossible to believe it. . . . "

Dr. Elihu Barrack applauded. Sir Eliphaz
acted a fine self-restraint.

*^ They are contrary to the texture of every-
thing we know/' said Mr. Huss. *^ They are
less convincing than the wildest dreams. By
pain, by desire, by muscular effort, by the feel-
ing of sunshine or of rain in the face, by their
sense of justice and such-like essential things
do men test the reality of appearances before
them. This certainly is no reality. It has none
of the feel of reality. I will not even argue
about it. It is thrust now upon a suffering
world as comfort, and even as comfort for
people stunned and uncritical with grief it fails.
You and Lady Burrows may be pleased to think
that somehow you two, mth your teeth restored
and your complexions rejuvenated, will meet
again the sublimation of your faithful Fido.
At any rate, thank God for that, I know clearly
that so I shall never meet my son. Never ! He
has gone from me. . . . "

For some moments mental and physical suf-
fering gripped him, and he could not speak ; but
his purpose to continue was so manifested by
sweating face and gripping hand that no one
spoke until he spoke again.

DO WE TRULY DIE? 129

** Now let me speak plainly about Immortal-
ity. For surely I stand nearest to that pos-
sibility of all of us here. ^ Immortality, then,
is no such dodging away as you imagine, from
this strange world wliich is so desolating, so
dreadful, so inexplicable — and at times so
utterly lonely. \ There may be a God in the uni-
verse or there may not be. . . . God, if he
exists, can be terribly silent. . . . But if there
is a God, he is a coherent God. If there is a
God above and in the scheme of things, then
not only you and I and my dead son, but the
crushed frog and the trampled anthill signify.
On that the God in my heart insists. There has
to be an answer, not only to the death of my
son but to the dying penguin roasted alive for
a farthing's worth of oil. There must be an
answer to the men who go in ships to do such
things. There has to be a justification for all
the filth and wretchedness of louse and fluke.
I mil not have you slipping by on the other
side, chattering of planes of living and subli-
mated atoms, while there is a drunken mother
or a man dying of cholera in this world. I will
not hear of a God who is just a means for get-
ting away. Whatever foulness and beastliness
there is, you must square God with that. Or
there is no universal God, but only a coldness,
a vast cruel indifference. . . .

130 THE UNDYING FIRE

'' I would not make my peace with such a
God if I could. . . .

** I tell you of these black and sinister real-
ities, and what do you reply? That it is all
right, because after death we shall get away
from them. Why ! if presently I go down under
the surgeon's knife, down out of this hot and
weary world, and then find myself being put
together by a spirit doctor in this beyond of
yours, waking up to a new world of amiable
conversations and artificial flowers, having my
hair restored and the gaps among my teeth
filled up, I shall feel like someone who has de-
serted his kind, who has sneaked from a sick-
room into a party. . . . Well — my infection
will go with me. I shall talk of nothing but the
tragedy out of which I have come — which still
remains — which continues — tragedy.

'^ And yet I believe in Immortality! "

Dr. Barrack, who had hitherto been following
Mr. Huss with evident approval, started,
sounded a note of surprise and protest, and fixed
accusing eyes upon him. For the moment he
did not interrupt.

** But it is not I that am immortal, but the
God within me. All this personal immortality
of which you talk is a mockery of our person-
alities. What is there personal in us that can

DO WE TRULY DIE? 131

live? What makes us our very selves? It is
all a niatter of little mean things, small differ-
ences, slight defects. Where does personal love
grip? — on just these petty things. ... Oh!
dearly and bitterly did I love my son, and what
is it that my heart most craves for now! His
virtues? No! His ambitions? His achieve-
ments ? . . . No ! none of these things. . . .
But for a certain queer flush among his freckles,
for a kind of high crack in his voice ... a
certain absurd hopefulness in his talk . . . the
sound of his footsteps, a little halt there was in
the rhythm of them. These are the things we
long for. These are the things that wring the
heart. . . . But all these things are just the
mortal things, just the defects that would be
touched out upon this higher plane you talk
about. You would give him back to me smoothed
and polished and regularized. So, I grant, it
must be if there is to be this higher plane. But
what does it leave of personal distinction?
What does it leave of personal love?

*^ When my son has had his defects smoothed
away, then he will be like all sons. When the
older men have been ironed out, they mil be
like the younger men. There is no personality
in hope and honour and righteousness and
truth. . . . My son has gone. He has gone

132 THE UNDYING FIRE

for evermore. The pain may some day go
. . . The immortal thing in us is the least
personal thing. It is not you nor I who go
on living ; it is Man that lives on, Man the Uni-
versal, and he goes on living, a tragic rebel in
this same world and in no other. . . . ' ^
Mr. Huss leant back in his chair.
/ ^^ There burns an undying fire in the hearts
of men. By that fire I live. By that I know the
God of my Salvation. His will is Truth; His
will is Service. He urges me to conflict, with-
out consolations, without rewards. He takes
and does not restore. He uses up and does not
atone. He suffers — perhaps to triumph, and
we must suffer and find our hope of triumph
in Him. He will not let me shut my eyes to
sorrow, failure, or perplexity. Though the uni-
verse torment and slay me, yet will I trust in
Him. And if He also must die — Neverthe-
less I can do no more ; I must serve Him. . . . ' '
He ceased. For some moments no one spoke^
silenced by his intensity.

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

ELIHU REPROVES JOB

§ 1

** I don't know how all this strikes you/' said
Mr. Farr, turning suddenly upon Dr. Barrack.

*^ Well — it's interestinV' said Dr. Barrack,
leaning forward upon his folded arms upon the
table, and considering his words carefully.

*^ It's interestinV^ he repeated. ^* I don't
know how far you want to hear what I think
about it. I'm rather a downright person."

Sir Eliphaz with great urbanity motioned him
to speak on.

*^ There's been, if you'll forgive me, nonsense
upon both sides."

He turned to Sir Eliphaz. '' This Spook
stuff, ' ' he said, and paused and compressed his
lips and shook his head.

'*■ It won't do.

^' I have given some little attention to the
evidences in that matter. I'm something of a

133

134 THE UNDYING FIRE

psychologist — a doctor has to be. Of course,
Sir Eliphaz, you're not responsible for all the
nonsense you have been talking about sub-
limated bricks and spook dogs made of concen-
trated smell.''

Sir Eliphaz was convulsed. ^ ' Tut, tut ! " he
said. * * But indeed — ! "

*^ No offence, Sir Eliphaz! If you don't want
me to talk I won't; but if you do, then I must
say what I have in my mind. And as I say, I
don't hold you responsible for the things you
have been saying. All this cheap medium stuff
has been shot upon the world by Sir Oliver J.
Lodge, handed out by him to people distraught
with grief, in a great fat impressive-looking
volume. ... No end of them have tried their
utmost to take it seriously. ... It's been a
pitiful business. ... I've no doubt the man
is honest after his lights, but what lights they
are! Obstinate credulity posing as liberalism.
He takes every pretence and dodge of these
mediums, he accepts their explanations, he edits
their babble and rearranges it to make it seem
striking. Look at his critical ability ! Because
many of the mediums are fairly respectable
people who either make no money by their —
revelations, or at most a very ordinary living —
it 's a guinea a go, I believe, usually — he insists

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 135

upon their honesty. That's his key blunder.
Any doctor could tell him, as I could have told
him after my first year's practice, that telling
the truth is the very last triumph of the human
mind. Hardly any of my patients tell the truth
— ever. It isn't only that they haven't a tithe
of the critical ability and detachment necessary,
they haven't any real desire to tell the truth.
They want to produce effects. Human beings
are artistic still; they aren't beginning to be
scientific. Either they minimize or they exag-
gerate. We all do. If I saw a cat run over
outside and I came in here to tell you about it,
I should certainly touch up the story, make it
more dramatic, hurt the cat more, make the
dray bigger and so on. I should want to justify
my telling the story. Put a woman in that chair
there, tell her to close her eyes and feel odd,
and she '11 feel odd right enough ; tell her to pro-
duce words and sentences that she finds in her
head and she'll produce them; give her half a
hint that it comes from eastern Asia and the
stuff will begin to correspond to her ideas of
pigeon English. It isn't that she is cunningly
and elaborately deceiving you. It is that she
wants to come up to your expectation. You are
focussing your interest on her, and all human
beings like to have interest focussed on them,

135 THE UNDYING FIRE

so long as it isn't too hostile. She'll cling to
that interest all she knows how. She'll cling
instinctively. Most of these mediums never
held the attention of a roomful of people in their
lives until they found out this way of doing it.
. . . What can you expect? "

Dr. Barrack cleared his throat. *' But all
that's beside the question," he said. ^^ Don't
think that because I reject all this spook stuff,
I'm setting up any finality for the science we
have to-day. It's just a little weak squirt of
knowledge — all the science in the world. I
grant you there may be forces, I would almost
say there must be forces in the world, forces
universally present, of which we still know
nothing. Take the case of electricity. What
did men know of electricity in the days of Gil-
bert! Practically nothing. In the early Neo-
lithic age I doubt if any men had ever noticed
there was such a thing as air. I grant you that
most things are still unknown. Things perhaps
right under our noses. But that doesn't help
the case of Sir Eliphaz one little bit. These
unkno^m things, as they become kno^vn, will
join on to the things we do know. They'll com-
plicate or perhaps simplify our ideas, but they
won't coijiradict our general ideas. They'll be
things in the system. They won't get you out

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 137

of the grip of the arguments Mr. Huss has
brought forward. So far, so far as concerns
your Immortality, Sir Eliphaz, I am, yon see,
entirely with Mr. Huss. It's a fancy; it's a
dream. As a fancy it's about as pretty as
creaking boards at bedtime; as a dream — .
It's unattractive. As Mr, Huss has said.

" But when it comes to Mr. Huss and his
Immortality then I find myself with you, gentle-
men. That too is a dream. Less than a dream.
Less even than a fancy; it's a play on words.
Here is this Undying Flame, this Spirit of God
in man; it's in him, he says, it's in you, Sir Eli-
phaz, it 's in you, Mr. — Dad, wasn 't it ? it 's in
this other gentleman whose name I didn't quite
catch; and it's in me. Well, it's extraordinary
that none of us know of it except Mr. Huss.
How you feel about it I don't know, but per-
sonally I object to being made part of God and
one with Mr. Huss without my consent in this
way. I prefer to remain myself. That may
be egotism, but I am by nature an egotistical
creature. And Agnostic. . . .

'' You've got me talking now, and I may as
well go through with it. What is an Agnostic
really? A man who accepts fully the limita-
tions of the human intelligence, who takes the
world as he finds it, and who takes himself as

138 THE UNDYING FIRE

he finds himself and declines to go further.
There may be other universes and dimensions
galore. There may be a fourth dimension, for
example, and, if you like, a fifth dimension and
a sixth dimension and any number of other
dimensions. They don't concern me. I live in
this universe and in three dimensions, and I
have no more interest in all these other uni-
verses and dimensions than a bug under the
wallpaper has in the deep, deep sea. Possibly
there are bugs under the wallpaper with a kind
of reasoned consciousness of the existence of
the deep, deep sea, and a half belief that when
at last the Keating 's powder gets them, thither
they will go. I — if I may have one more go
at the image — just live under the wallpaper.

• • •

** I am an Agnostic, I say. I have had my
eyes pretty well open at the universe since I
came into it six and thirty years ago. And not
only have I never seen nor heard of nor smelt
nor touched a ghost or spirit. Sir Eliphaz, but
I have never seen a gleam or sign of this Provi-
dence, the Great God of the World of yours, or
of this other minor and modern God that Mr.
Huss has taken up. In the hearts of men I
have found malformations, ossifications, clots,
and fatty degeneration ; but never a God.

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 139

** You will excuse me if I speak plainly to
you, gentlemen, but this gentleman, whose name
I haven't somehow got — ''

'' Farr/'

*^ Mr. Farr, has brought it down on himself
and you. He called me in, and I am interested
in these questions. It's clear to me that since
we exist there 's something in all this. But what
it is I'm convinced I haven't the ganglia even
to begin to understand. I decline either the
wild guesses of the Spookist and Providential-
ist — I must put you there, I'm afraid, Sir
Eliphaz — or the metaphors of Mr. Huss.
Fact. ..."

Dr. Barrack paused. ^* I put my faith in
Fact"

'^ There's a lot in Fact," said Mr. Dad, who
found much that was congenial in the doctor's
downright style.

*^ What do I see about me? " asked Dr. Bar-
rack, i^ A struggle for existence./ About that
I ask a very plain and simple queslion : why try
to get behind it? That is It. It made me. I
study it and watch it. It put me up like a cock-
shy, and it keeps on trying to destroy me. I do
my best to dodge its blows. It got my leg. My
head is bloody but unbowed. I reproduce my
kind — as abundantly as circumstances permit

140 THE UNDYING FIRE

— I stamp myself upon the universe as much
as possible. If I am right, if I do the right
things and have decently good luck, I shall hold
out until my waning instincts dispose me to
rest. My breed and influence are the marks of
my rightness. What else is there? You may
call this struggle what you like. God, if you
like. But God for me is an anthropomorphic
idea. Call it The Process."

'' Why not Evolution? '^ said Mr. Huss.

*^ I prefer The Process. The word Evolu-
tion rather begs the moral question. It^s a
cheap word. * Shon! ' Evolution seems to
suggest just a simple and automatic unfolding.
The Process is complex; it has its ups and
downs — as Mr. Huss understands. It is more
like a Will than an Automaton. A Will feeling
about. It isn't indifferent to us as Mr. Huss
suggests ; it uses us. It isn't subordinate to us
as Sir Eliphaz would have us believe; playing
the part of a Providence just for our comfort
and happiness. Some of us are hammer and
some of us are anvil, some of us are sparks and
some of us are the beaten stuff which survives.
The Process doesn't confide in us; why should
it I We learn what we can about it, and make
what is called a practical use of it, for that is
what the will in the Process requires."

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 141

Mr. Dad, stirred by the word * practical,'
made a noise of assent. But not a very confi-
dent noise : a loan rather than a gift.

** And that is where it seems to me Mr. Huss
goes wrong altogether. He does not submit
himself to those Realities. He sets up some-
thing called the Spirit in Man, or the God in his
Heart, to judge them. He wants to judge the
universe by the standards of the human intelli-
gence at its present stage of development.
That's where I fall out with him. These are not
fixed standards. Man goes on developing and
evolving. Some things offend the sense of jus-
tice in Mr. Huss, but that is no enduring cri-
terion of justice ; the human sense of justice has
developed out of something different, and it will
develop again into something different. Like
everything else in us, it has been produced by
the Process and it will be modified by the
Process. Some things, again, he says are not
beautiful. There also he would condemn. But
nothing changes like the sense of beauty. A
band of art students can start a new movement,
cubist, vorticist, or what not, and change your
sense of beauty. If seeing things as beautiful
conduces to survival, we shall see them as beau-
tiful sooner or later, rest assured. I daresay
the hyenas admire each other — in the rutting

142 THE UNDYING FIRE

season anyhow. ... So it is with mercy and
with everything. Each creature has its own
standards. After man is the Beyond-Man, who
may find mercy folly, who may delight in things
that pain our feeble spirits. We have to obey
the Process in our own place and our own time.
That is how I see things. That is the stark
truth of the universe looked at plainly and
hard. ' '

The lips of Mr. Dad repeated noiselessly:
** plainly and hard.'' But he felt very un-
certain.

For some moments the doctor sat with his
forearms resting on the table as if he had done.
Then he resumed.

** I gather that this talk here to-day arose
out of a discussion about education."

*^ You'd hardly believe it," said Mr. Dad.

But Dr. Barrack's next remark checked Mr.
Dad's growing approval. ^^ That seems per-
fectly logical to me. It's one of the things I
can never understand about schoolmasters and
politicians and suchlike, the wa}^ they seem to
take it for granted you can educate and not
bring in religion and socialism and all your be-
liefs. What is education? Teaching young
people to talk and read and write and calculate
in order that they may be told how they stand

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 143

in the world and what we think we and the
world generally are up to, and the part we
expect them to play in the game. Well, how
can we do that and at the same time leave it all
out? What is the game? That is what every \
youngster wants to know. Answering him, is |
education. Either we are going to say what we /
think the game is plainly and straightforwardly, /
or else we are going to make motions as though
we were educating when we are really doing
nothing of the kind. In which case the stupid
ones will grow up with their heads all in a
muddle and be led by any old catchword any-
w^here according to luck, and the clever ones
will grow up with the idea that life is a sort of
empty swindle. Most educated people in this
country believe it is a sham and a swindle. They
flounder about and never get up against a
reality. . . . It's amazing how people can lose
their grip on reality — how most people have.
The way my patients come along to me and tell
me lies — even about their stomach-aches. The
idea of anything being direct and reasonable has
gone clean out of their heads. They think they
can fool me about the facts, and that when I'm
properly fooled, I shall then humbug their
stomachs into not aching — somehow. , . .
^ ^ Now my gospel is this : — face facts. Take

144 THE UNDYING FIRE

the world as it is and take yourself as you are.
And the fundamental fact we all have to face is
this, that this Process takes no account of our
desires or fears or moral ideas or anything of
the sort. It puts us up, it tries us over, and if
we don't stand the tests it knocks us down and
ends us. That may not be right as you test it
by your little human standards, but it is right by
the atoms and the stars. Then what must a
proper Education be? ''

Dr. Barrack paused. ** Tell them what the
world is, tell them every rule and trick of the
game mankind has learnt, and tell them ' Be
yourselves.^ Be yourselves up to the hilt. It
is no good being anything but your essential
self because — "

Dr. Barrack spoke like one who quotes a
sacred formula. ^^ There is no inheritance of
acquired characteristics. Your essential self,
your essential heredity, are on trial. Put
everything of yourself into the Process. If the
Process wants you it will accept you; if it
doesn't you will go under. You can't help it —
either way. You may be the bit of marble that
is left in the statue, or you may be the bit
of marble that is thrown away. You can't
help it. Be yourself! ''

Dr. Barrack had sat back ; he raised his voice

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 145

at the last words and lifted his hand as if to
smite the table. But, so good a thing is pro-
fessional training, he let his hand fall slowly,
as he remembered that Mr. Huss was his
patient.

§ 2

Mr. Huss did not speak for some moments.
He was thinking so deeply that he seemed to be
unobservant of the cessation of the doctor's
discourse.

Then he awoke to the silence with a start.

^^ You do not differ among yourselves so
much as you may think, ' ' he said at last.

^^ You all argue to one end, however wide
apart your starting points may be. You argue
that men may lead fragmentary lives. . . .

'* And,'' he reflected further, *^ submissive
lives."

''Not submissive," said Dr. Barrack in a kind
of footnote. ***

'' You say. Sir Eliphaz, that this Universe is
in the charge of Providence, all-wise and ami-
able. That He' guides this world to ends we
cannot understand; desirable ends, did we but
know them, but incomprehensible ; that this life,
this whole Universe, is but the starting point
for a developing series of immortal lives. And
irom this you conclude that the part a human

146

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 147

being has to play in this scheme is the part of a
trustful child, which need only not pester the
Higher Powers, which need only do its few
simple congenial duties, to be surely preserved
and rewarded and carried on.*'

^^ There is much in simple faith, '* said Sir
Eliphaz ; * * sneer though 3'ou may. ' '

^' But your view is a grimmer one, Dr. Bar-
rack; you say that this Process is utterly be-
yond knowledge and control. We cannot alter
it or appease it. It makes of some of us vessels
of honour and of others vessels of dishonour.
It has scrawled our race across the black empti-
ness of space, and it may wipe us out again.
Such is the quality of Fate. We can but follow
our lights and instincts. ... In the end, in
practical matters, your teaching marches with
the teaching of Sir Eliphaz. You bow to the
thing that is ; he gladly and trustfully — with a
certain old-world courtesy, you grimly — in the
modern style. . . . ' *

For some moments Mr. IIuss sat with com-
pressed lips, as though he listened to the pain
within him. Then he said: ^' I don't.

** I don't submit. I rebel — not in my own
strength nor by my own impulse. I rebel by
the spirit of God in me. I rebel not merely to
make weak gestures of defiance against the

148 THE UNDYING FIRE

black disorder and cruelties of space and time,
but for master}^ I am a rebel of pride — I am
full of the pride of God in my heart. I am the
servant of a rebellious and adventurous God
who may yet bring order into this cruel and
frightful chaos in which we seem to be driven
hither and thither like leaves before the wind,
a God who, in spite of all appearances, may yet
rule over it at last and mould it to his will. ' '

^' What a world it will be! '^ whispered Mr.
Farr, unable to restrain himself and yet half-
ashamed of his sneer.

^' What a world it is, Farr! What a cunning
and watchful world! Does it serve even you?
So insecure has it become that opportunity may
yet turn a frightful face upon you — in the very
moment as you snatch. . . .

^ ^ But you see how I differ from you all. You
see that the spirit of my life and of my teaching
— of my teaching — for all its weaknesses and
slips and failures, is a fight against that Dark
Being of the universe who seeks to crush us all.
Who broods over me now even as I talk to you.
... It is a fight against disorder, a refusal
of that very submission you have made, a repu-
diation altogether of that same voluntary death
in life. . . . ' '

He moistened his lips and resumed.

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 149

** The end and substance of all real education
is to teach men and women of the Battle of God,
to teach them of the beginnings of life upon this
lonely little planet amidst the endless stars, and
how those beginnings have unfolded; to show
them how man has arisen through the long ages
from amidst the beasts, and the nature of the
struggle God wages through him, and to draw
all men together out of themselves into one com-
mon life and effort with God. The nature of
God's struggle is the essence of our dispute.
It is a struggle, ^dth a hope of victory but with
no assurance. You have argued. Sir Eliphaz,
that it is an unreal struggle, a sham fight, that
indeed all things are perfectly adjusted and for
our final happiness, and when I have reminded
you a little of the unmasked horrors about us,
you have shifted your ground of compensation
into another — into an incredible — world. ' '

Sir Eliphaz sounded dissent musically. Then
he waved his long hand as Mr. Huss paused and
regarded him. ** But go on! " he said. ** Go
on! ''

*^ And now I come to you. Dr. Barrack, and
your modern fatalism. You hold this universe
is uncontrollable — anyhow. And incompre-
hensible. For good or ill — we can be no more
than our strenuous selves. You must, you say,

\

150 THE UNDYING FIRE

be yourself. I answer, you must lose yourself
in something altogether greater — in God.
. . . There is a curious likeness, Doctor, and
a curious difference in your views and mine. I
think you see the world very much as I see it,
but you see it coldly like a man before sunrise,
and I — ' *

He paused. ^* There is a light upon it," he
asserted with a noticeable flatness in his voice.
^ ^ There is a light . . . light . . . ' ^

He became silent. For a while it seemed as
if the light he spoke of had gone from him and
as if the shadow had engulfed him. When he
spoke again it was with an evident effort.

He turned to Dr. Barrack. ^^ You think," he
said, ^^ that there is a will in this Process of
yours which will take things somewhere, some-
where definitely greater or better or onward.
I hold that there is no will at all except in and
through ourselves. If there be any will at all
... I hold that even your maxim ^ be our-
selves ' is a paradox, for we cannot be ourselves
until we have lost ourselves in God. I have
talked to Sir Eliphaz and to you since you came
in, of the boundless disorder and evil of nature.
Let me talk to you now of the boundless mis-
eries that arise from the disorderliness of men
and that must continue age after age until

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 151

either men are united in spirit and in truth
or destroyed through their own incoherence.
Whether men will be lost or saved I do not know.
There have been times when I was sure that
God would triumph in us. . . . But dark shad-
ows have fallen upon my spirit. . . .

^^ Consider the posture of men^s affairs now,
consider where they stand to-day, because they
have not yet begun to look deeply and frankly
into realities ; because, as they put it, they take
life as they find it, because they are themselves,
heedless of history, and do not realize that in
truth they are but parts in one great adventure
in space and time. For four years now the
world has been marching deeper and deeper
into tragedy. . . . Our life that seemed so
safe grows insecure and more and more inse-
cure. . . . Six million soldiers, six million
young men, have been killed on the battlefields
alone; three times as many have been crippled
and mutilated; as many again who were not
soldiers have been destroyed. That has been
only the beginning of the disaster that has come
upon our race. All human relationships have
been strained ; roads, ships, harvests destroyed ;
and behind the red swift tragedy of this warfare
comes the gaunt and desolating face of universal
famine now, and behind famine that inevitable

152 THE UNDYING FIRE

follower of famine, pestilence. You gentlemen
who have played so useful a part in supplying
munitions of war, who have every reason in
days well spent and energies well used to see a
transitory brightness upon these sombre things,
you may tell me that I lack faith when I say that
I can see nothing to redeem the waste and de-
struction of the last four years and the still
greater waste and spiritless disorder and pov-
erty and disease ahead of us. You will tell me
that the world has learnt a lesson it could learn
in no other way, that we shall set up a "World
League of Nations now and put an end to war.
But on what will you set up your World League
of Nations? What foundations have you made
in the last four years but ruins? Is there any
common idea, any common understanding yet
in the minds of men 1 They are still taking the
world as they find it, they are being their un-
mitigated selves more than ever, and below the
few who scramble for profits now is a more and
more wolfish multitude scrambling for bread.
There are no common ideas in men's minds
upon which we can build. How can men be
united except by common ideas? The schools
have failed the world. WTiat common thought
is there in the world? A loud bawling of base
newspapers, a posturing of politicians. You

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 153

can see chaos coining again over all the east of
Europe now, and bit by bit western Europe
crumbles and drops into the confusion. Art,
science, reasoned thought, creative effort, such
things have ceased altogether in Russia; they
may have ceased there perhaps for centuries;
they die now in Germany; the universities of
the west are bloodless and drained of their
youth. That war that seemed at first so like
the dawn of a greater age has ceased to matter
in the face of this greater disaster. The French
and British and Americans are beating back the
Germans from Paris. Can they beat them back
to any distance ? Will not this present counter-
thrust diminish and fail as the others have done ?
Which side may first drop exhausted now, will
hardly change the supreme fact. The supreme
fact is exhaustion — exhaustion, mental as well
as material, failure to grasp and comprehend,
cessation even of attempts to grasp and com-
prehend, slackening of every sort of effort.

** What^s the good of such despair? ^^ said
Mr. Dad.

'^ I do not despair. No. But what is the
good of lying about hope and success in the
midst of failure and gathering disaster! Wliat
is the good of saying that mankind wins — auto-

154 THE UNDYING FIRE

matically — against the spirit of evil, when
mankind is visibly losing point after point, is
visibly losing heart? What is the good of pre-
tending that there is order and benevolence or
some sort of splendid and incomprehensible
process in this festering waste, this windy deso-
lation of tremendous things ? There is no reason
anywhere, there is no creation anywhere, except
the undying^ fire, the spirit of God in the hearts
of menL_ . . . which may fail . . . which may
fail . . . which seems to me to fail. ' '

§3

He paused. Dr. Barrack cleared his throat,

^' I don't want to seem obdurate/' said Dr.
Barrack. '' I want to respect deep feeling.
One must respect deep feeling. . . . But for
the life of me I can't put much meaning into
this phrase, the spirit of God in the hearts of
men. It's rather against my habits to worry a
patient, but this is so interesting — this is an
exceptional occasion. I would like to ask you,
Mr. Huss — frankly — is there anything very
much more to it, than a phrase? "

There was no answer.

'' Words," said Mr. Dad; '' joost words. If
Mr. Huss had ever spent three months of war
time running a big engineering factory — "

*^ My mind is a sceptical mind," Dr. Barrack
went on, after staring a moment to see if Mr.
Dad meant to finish his sentence. '' I want
things I can feel and handle. I am an Agnostic
by nature and habit and profession. A Doubt-
ing Thomas, born and bred. Well, I take it
that about the universe Mr. Huss is very much

155

156 THE UNDYING FIRE

of an Agnostic too. More so. He doubts more
than I do. He doubts whether there is any trace
of plan or purpose in it. What I call a Process,
he calls a windy desolation. He sees Chaos still
waiting for a creator. But then he sets up
against that this undying fire of his, this spirit
of God, which is lit in him and only waiting to
be lighted in us, a sort of insurgent apprentice
creator. Well — ''

The doctor frowned and meditated on his
words.

^^ I want more of the practical outcome of
this fire. I admit a certain poetry in the idea,
but I am a plain and practical man. Give me
something to know this fire by and to recognize
it again when I see it. I won 't ask why ' undy-
ing.' I won't quibble about that. But what
does this undying fire mean in actual things and
our daily life? In some way it is mixed up with
teaching history in schools. '^ A faint note of
derision made him glance at the face to his
right. ^' That doesn't strike me as being so
queer as it seems to strike Mr. Farr. It inter-
ests me. There is a cause for it. But I think
there are several links Mr. Huss hasn't shown
and several vital points he still has to explain.
This undying fire is something that is burning
in Mr. Huss, and I gather from his pretty broad

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 157

hints it ought, he thinks, to be burning in me —
and you, gentlemen. It is something that makes
us forget our little personal differences, makes
us forget ourselves, and brings us all into line
against — what. That 's my first point ; —
against what? I don't see the force and value
of this line-up. / think we struggle against one
another by nature and necessity ; that we polish
one another in the struggle and sharpen our
edges. I thinly that out of this struggle for ex-
istence come better things and better. They
may not be better things by our standards now,
but by the standards of the Process, they are.
Sometimes the mills of the Process may seem
overpoweringly grim and high and pitiless ; that
is a question of scale. But Mr. Huss does not
believe in the struggle. He wants to take men 's
minds and teach them so that they will not
struggle against each other but live and work
all together. For what? That is my second
point; — for what? There is a rationality in
my idea of an everlasting struggle making inces-
santly for betterment, such an idea does at any
rate give a direction and take us somewhere;
but there is no rationality in declaring we are
still fighting and fighting more than ever, while
in effect we are arranging to stop that struggle
which carries life on — if we can — if we can.

158 THE UNDYING FIRE

That is the paradox of Mr. Huss. When there
is neither competition at home nor war abroad,
when the cat and the bird have come to a satis-
factory understanding, when the spirit of his
human God rules even in the jungle and the sea,
then where shall we be heading? Time "will be
still unfolding. But man will have halted. If
he has ceased to compete individually he will
have halted. Mr. Huss looks at me as if he
thought I wronged him in saying that. "Well,
then he must answer my questions; what will
the Human God be leading us against, and what
shall we be living for? "

'^ Let me tell you first what the spirit of God
struggles against/' said Mr. Huss.

'' I will not dispute that this Process of yours
has made good things; all the good things in
man it has made as well as all the evil. It has
made them indifferently. In us — in some of
us — it has made the will to seize upon that
chance-born good and separate it from the
chance-born evil. The spirit of God rises out
of your process as if he were a part of your
process. . . . Except for him, the good and
evil are inextricably mixed; good things flower
into evil things and evil things wholly or par-
tially^ redeem themselves by good consequences.
^ Good ' and ^ evil ' have meaning only for us.
The Process is indifferent ; it makes, it destroys,
it favours, it torments. On its own account it
preserves nothing and continues nothing. It is
just careless. But for us it has made oppor-
tunity. Life is opportunity. Unless we do now
ourselves seize hold upon life and the Process
while we are in it, the Process, becoming uncon-

159

160 THE UNDYING FIRE

t reliable again, will presently sweep ns alto-
gether away. In the back of your mind, doctor,
is the belief in a happy ending just as much as
in the mind of Sir Eliphaz. I see deeper be-
cause I am not blinded by health. You think
that beyond man comes some sort of splendid
super-man. A healthy delusion! There is
nothing beyond man unless men will that some-
thing shall be. We shall be wiped out as care-
lessly as we have been made, and something else
will come, as disconnected and aimless, some-
thing neither necessarily better nor necessarily
worse but something different, to be wiped out
in its turn. Unless the spirit of God that moves
in us can rouse us to seize this universe for Him
and ourselves, that is the nature of your Pro-
cess. Your Process is just Chaos; man is the
opportunity, the passing opportunity for order
in the waste.

** People write and talk as if this great war
which is now wrecking the world, was a dra-
matic and consecutive thing. They talk of it
as a purge, as a great lesson, as a phase in his-
tory that marks the end of wars and divisions.
So it might be ; but is it so and will it be so ? I
asked you a little time ago to look straightly at
the realities of animal life, of life in general as
we know it. I think I did a little persuade you

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 161

to my own sense of shallo^^mess of our assump-
tion that there is any natural happiness. The
poor beasts and creatures have to suffer. I ask
you now to look as straightly at the things that
men have done and endured in this war. It is
plain that they have shown extraordinary fer-
tility and ingenuity in the inventions they have
used and an amazing capacity for sacrifice and
courage; but it is, I argue, equally plain that
the pains and agonies they have undergone have
taught the race little or nothing, and that their
devices have been mainly for their own destruc-
tion. The only lesson and the only betterment
that can come out of this war mil come if men,
inspired by the Divine courage, say ' This and
all such things must end.' . . . But I do not
perceive them saying that. On the other handV
I do perceive a great amount of human energy
and ability that has been devoted and is still
being devoted to things that lead straight to
futility and extinction.

*' The most desolating thing about this war is
neither the stupidity nor the cruelty of it, but
the streak of perversion that has run through it.
Against the meagreness of the intelligence that
made the war, against the absolute inability of
the good forces in life to arrest it and end it, I
ask you to balance the intelligence and devotion

M

162 THE UNDYING FIRE

that has gone to such an enterprise as the offen-
sive use of poison gas. Consider the ingenuity
and the elaboration of that; the different sorts
of shell used, the beautifully finished devices to
delay the release of the jDoison so as to catch
men unawares after their gas masks are re-
moved. One method much in favour with the
Germans now involves the use of two sorts of
gas. They have a gas now not very deadly but
so subtle that it penetrates the gas masks and
produces nausea and retching. The man is
overcome by the dread of being sick so that he
will clog his mask and suffocate, and he snatches
off his protection in an ungovernable physical
panic. Then the second gas, of the coarser,
more deadly type, comes into play. That he
breathes in fully. His breath catches; he real-
izes what he has done but it is too late; death
has him by the throat; he passes through hor-
rible discomfort and torment to the end. You
cough, you stagger, you writhe upon the ground
and are deadly sick. . . . You die heaving and
panting, with staring eyes. ... So it is men
are being killed now ; it is but one of a multitude
of methods, disgusting, undignified, and mon-
strous, but intelligent, technically admirable.
. . . You cannot deny, Doctor Barrack, that
this ingenious mixture is one of the last fruits

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 163

of your Process. To that your Process has at
last brought men from the hoeing and herding
of Neolithic days.

** Now tell me how is the onward progress of
mankind to anything, anywhere, secured by this
fine flower of the Process I Intellectual energy,
industrial energy, are used up without stint to
make this horror possible ; multitudes of brave
young men are spoilt or killed. Is there any
selection in it? Along such lines can you
imagine men or life or the universe getting any-
where at all?

Why do they do such things?
They do not do it out of a complete and
organized impulse to evil. If you took the
series of researches and inventions that led at
last to this use of poison gas, you would find
they were the work of a multitude of mainly
amiable, fairly virtuous, and kindly-meaning
men. Each one was doing his hit, as Mr. Dad
would say ; each one, to use your phrase, doctor,
was being himself and utilizing the gift that was
in him in accordance with the drift of the world
about him ; each one. Sir Eliphaz, was modestly
taking the world as he found it. They were
living in an uninformed world with no common
understanding and no collective plan, a world
ignorant of its true history and with no concep-

<<

a

164 THE UNDYING FIRE

tion of its future. Into these horrors they
drifted for the want of a world education. Out
of these horrors no lesson will be learnt, no will
can arise, for the same reason. Every man
lives ignorantly in his own circumstances, from
hand to mouth, from day to day, swayed first
of all by this catchword and then by that.

* ^ Let me take another instance of the way in
which human ability and energy if they are left
to themselves, without co-ordination, without a
common basis of purpose, without a God, will
run into cul-de-sacs of mere horribleness ; let
me remind you a little of what the submarine is
and what it signifies. In this country we think
of the submarine as an instrument of murder;
but we think of it as something ingeniously con-
trived and at any rate not tormenting and
destroying the hands that guide it. I will not
recall to you the stories that fill our newspapers
of men drowning in the night, of crowded boat-
loads of sailors and passengers shelled and
sunken, of men forced to clamber out of the sea
upon the destroying U-boat and robbed of their
lifebelts in order that when it submerged they
should be more surely drowned. I want you to
think of the submarine in itself. There is a kind
of crazy belief that killing, however cruel, has
a kind of justification in the survival of the

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 165

killer ; we make that our excuse for instance for
the destruction of the native Tasmanians who
were shot whenever they were seen, and killed
by poisoned meat left in their paths. But the
marvel of these submarines is that they also
torture and kill their o^vn crews. They are
miracles of short-sighted ingenuity for the com-
mon unprofitable reasonless destruction of Ger-
mans and their enemies. They are almost
quintessential examples of the elaborate futility
and horror into which partial ideas about life,
combative and competitive ideas of life, thrust
mankind.

* ^ Take some poor German boy mth an ordi-
nary sort of intelligence, an ordinary human
disposition to kindliness, and some gallantry,
who becomes finally a sailor in one of these craft.
Consider his case and what we do to him. You
will find in him a sample of what we are doing
for manldnd. As a child he is ingenuous, teach-
able, plastic. He is also egotistical, greedy, and
suspicious. He is easily led and easily fright-
ened. He likes making things if he knows how
to make them; he is capable of affection and
capable of resentment. He is a sheet of white
paper upon which anything may be written.
His parents teach him, his companions, his
school. Do they teach him anything of the great

166 THE UNDYING FIRE

history of mankind? Do they teach him of his
blood brotherhood with all men! Do they tell
him anything of discovery, of exploration, of
human effort and achievement? No. They teach
him that he belongs to a blonde and wonderful
race, the only race that matters on this planet.
(No such distinct race ever existed; it is a lie
for the damning of men.) And these teachers
incite him to suspicion and hatred and contempt
of all other races. They fill his mind with fears
and hostilities. Everything German they tell
him is good and splendid. Everything not Ger-
man is dangerous and wicked. They take that
poor actor of an emperor at Potsdam and glo-
rify him until he shines upon this lad's mind
like a star. . . .

'^ The boy grows up a mental cripple; his
capacity for devotion and self-sacrifice is run
into a mould of fanatical loyalty for the Kaiser
and hatred for foreign things. Comes this war,
and the youngster is only too eager to give him-
self where he is most needed. He is told that
the submarine war is the sure way of striking
the enemies of his country a conclusive blow.
To be in a submarine is to be at the spear point.
He dare scarcely hope that he will be accepted
for this vital service; to which princes might
aspire. But he is fortunate; he is. He trains
for a submarine. . . .

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 167

^^ I do not know how far you gentlemen re-
member your youth. A schoohnaster perhaps
remembers more of his early adolescence than
other men because he is being continually re-
minded of it. But it is a time of very fine
emotions, boundless ambitions, a newly awak-
ened and eager sense of beauty. This young-
ster sees himself as a hero, fighting for his half-
divine Kaiser, for dear Germany, against the
cold and evil barbarians who resist and would
destroy her. He passes through his drill and
training. He goes down into a submarine for
the first time, clambers down the narrow hatch-
way. It is a little cold, but wonderful; a mar-
vellous machine. How can such a nest of in-
ventions, ingenuities, beautiful metal-work,
wonderful craftsmanship, be anything but
right? His mind is full of dreams of proud
enemy battleships smitten and heeling over into
the waters, while he watches his handiwork with
a stern pride, a restrained exultation, a sense of
Germany vindicated. ...

^^ That is how his mind has been made for
him. That is the sort of mind that has been
made and is being made in boys all over the
world. . . . Because there is no common plan
in the world, because each person in the making
of this boy, just as each person in the making

168 THE UNDYING FIRE

of the submarine, had ^ been himself ' and * done
his bit, ' followed his own impulses and interests
without regard to the whole, regardless of any
plan or purpose in human affairs, ignorant of
the spirit of God who would unify us and lead
us to a common use for all our gifts and
energies.

^* Let me go on with the story of this
youngster. . . .

** Comes a day when he realizes the reality
of the work he is doing for his kind. He stands
by one of the guns of the submarine in an attack
upon some wretched ocean tramp. He realizes
that the war he wages is no heroic attack on
pride or predominance, but a mere murdering
of traffic. He sees the little ship shelled, the
wretched men killed and wounded, no tyrants of
the seas but sailor-men like himself; he sees
their boats smashed to pieces. Mostly such
sinkings are done at da^vn or sundown, under a
level light which displays a world of black lines
and black silhouettes asway with the slow heav-
ing and falling of coldly shining water. These
little black things, he realizes incredulously, that
struggle and disappear amidst the wreckage are
the heads of men, brothers to himself. . . .

<< For hundreds of thousands of men who have
come into this war expecting bright and roman-

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 169

tic and tremendous experiences their first kill-
ing must have been a hideous disillusionment.
For none so much as for the men of the sub-
marines. All that sense of being right and fine
that carries men into battle, that carries most
of us through the world, must have vanished
completely at this first vision of reality. Our
man must have asked himself, ^ What am I
domg?^ . . .

** In the night he must have lain awake and
stared at that question in horrible doubt. . . .

** We scold too much at the German subma-
rine crews in this country. Most of us in their
places would be impelled to go on as they go on.
The work they do has been reached step by step,
logically, inevitably, because our world has been
content to drift along on false premises and hap-
hazard assumptions about nationality and race ,
and the order of things. These things have /
happened because the technical education of men
has been better than their historical and social
education. Once men have lost touch with, or
failed to apprehend that idea of a single human
community, that idea which is the substance of
all true history and the essential teaching of
God, it is towards such organized abominations
as these that they drift — necessarily. People
in this country who are just as incoherent in

170 THE UNDYING FIRE

their minds, just as likely to drift into some kin-
dred cul-de-sac of conduct, would have these U-
boat men tortured — to show the superiority of
their own moral standards.

*^ But indeed these men are tortured. . . .

^^ Bear yet a little longer with this boy of
mine in the U-boat. IVe tried to suggest him
to you with his conscience scared — at a moment
when his submarine had made a kill. But those
moments are rare. For most of its time the
U-boat is under water and a hunted thing. The
surface swarms with hostile craft; sea-planes
and observation balloons are seeking it. Every
time a U-boat comes even near to the surface it
may be spotted by a sea-plane and destruction
may fall upon it. Even when it is submerged
below the limits of visibility in the turbid North
Sea waters, the noise of its engines ^vill betray
it to a listening apparatus and a happy guess
with a depth charge may end its career. I want
you to think of the daily life of this youngster
under these conditions. I want you to see ex-
actly where wrong ideas, not his, but wrong
ideas ruling in the world about him, are driving
him.

^ ' The method of detection by listening appa-
ratus improves steadily, and nowadays our
destroyers will follow up a U-boat sometimes

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 171

for sixty or seventy hours, following her sounds
as a hound follows the scent of its quarry. At
last, if the U-boat cannot shake off her pursuers
she must come to the surface and fight or sur-
render. That is the strangest game of Blind-
Man that ever human beings played. The U-
boat doubles and turns, listening also for the
sounds of the pursuers at the surface. Are
they coming nearer? Are they getting fainter?
Unless a helpful mud-bank is available for it to
lie up in silence for a time, the U-boat must
keep moving and using up electrical force, so
that ultimately it must come to the surface to
recharge its batteries. As far as possible the
crew of the U-boat are kept in ignorance of the
chase in progress. They get hints from the
anxiety or irritation of the commander, or from
the haste and variety of his orders. Something
is going on — they do not know quite what —
something that may end disagreeably. If the
pursuer tries a depth charge, then they know for
certain from the concussion that the hand of
death is feeling for them in the darkness. . . .
^^ Always the dread of a depth charge must
haunt the imagination of the U-boat sailor.
Without notice, at any hour, may come thud and
concussion to warn him that the destroying pow-
ers are on his track. The fragile ship jumps

172 THE UNDYING FIRE

and quivers from end to end; the men are
thrown about. That happens to our youngster.
He curses the damned English. And if you
think it over, what else can you expect him to
curse 1 A little nearer and the rivets will start
and actual leakage begin, letting in a pressure
of several atmospheres. Yet a little nearer
and the water will come pressing in through
cracks and breaches at a score of points, the
air will be compressed in his lungs, the long
death struggle of the U-boat will begin, and
after some hours of hopeless suffering he will
suffocate and drown like a rat in a flooded
tunnel. . . .

^^ Think of the life of endless apprehension
in that confined space below the waters. The
air is almost always stuffy and sometimes it is
poisonous. All sorts of evil chances may occur
in this crowded tinful of machinery to release
oppressive gases and evil odours. A whiff of
chlorine for instance may warn the crew of
flooded accumulators. At the first sting of
chlorine the U-boat must come up at any risk.
. . . And nothing can be kept dry. The
surfaces of the apparatus and the furniture
sweat continually; except where the machinery
radiates a certain heat a clammy chill pervades
the whole contrivance. Have you ever seen the

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 173

thick blubber of a whale f Only by means of
that enormous layer of non-conductor can a
whale keep its body warm in spite of the waters
about it. A U-boat cannot afford any layer of
blubber. It is at the temperature of the dark
under-waters. And this life of cold, fear, suf-
focation, headache and nausea is not sustained
by hot and nourishing food. There is no blaz-
ing galley fire for the cook of the U-boat.

'^ The U-boat rolls very easily; she is, of
course, no heavier nor lighter than the water in
which she floats, and if by chance she touches
bottom in shallow water, she bounds about like
a rubber ball on a pavement. Inside the sailors
are thrown about and dashed against the
machinery.

*^ That is the quality of everyday life in a
U-boat retained below the surface. Now think
what an emergence involves. Up she comes
until the periscope can scrutinize the sky and
the nearer sea. Nothing in sight ? Thank God !
She rises out of the water and some of the sail-
ors get a breath of fresh air. Not all, for there
is no room nor time for all of them to come out.
But the fortunate ones who get to the hatches
may even have the luck of sunshine. To come
to the surface on a calm open sea away from
any traffic at al] is the secret hope of every

174 THE UNDYING FIRE

U-boat sailor. But suppose now there is some-
thing in sight. Then the U-boat must come up
with infinite discretion and examine the quarry.
It looks an innocent craft, a liner, a trawler, a
cargo-boat. But is that innocence certain?
How does the U-boat man know that she hasn 't
a gun? What new contrivance of the hunter
may not hide behind that harmless-looking
mask? Until they have put a ship down, the
U-boat sailors never know what ugly surprise
she may not have in store for them. When
they approach a vessel they must needs be igno-
rant of what counter-attack creeps upon them
from her unseen other side. As a consequence
these men are in terror of every ship they hail.

*^ Is it any wonder then if their behaviour is
hasty and hysterical, if they curse and insult
the wretched people they are proposing to
drown, if they fire upon them unexpectedly and
do strange and abominable things ? The U-boat
man is no fine captain on his quarter deck. He
is a man who lives a life of intense physical
hardship and extreme fear, who faces over-
whelming risks, in order to commit as inglorious
a crime as any man can commit. He is a man
already in hell.

^^ The Germans do what they can to keep up
the spirit of these crews. An English captain

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 175

who spent a fortnight upon one as a prisoner
and who was recently released by way of Switz-
erland, says that when they had sunk a merchant
ship ^ they played victory music on the gramo-
phone. ^ Imagine that bleak festival !

^^ The inevitable end of the U-boat sailor,
unless he is lucky enough to get captured, is
death, and a very horrible and slow death in-
deed. Sooner or later it is bound to come.
Some never return from their first voyage.
There is a brief spree ashore if they do; then
out they go again. Perhaps they return a sec-
ond time, perhaps not. Some may even have
made a score of voyages, but sooner or later
they are caught. The average life of a U-boat
is less than five voyages — out and home. Of
the crews of the original U-boats which began
the U-boat campaign very few men survive
to-day. When our young hopeful left his home
in Germany to join the U-boat service, he left
it for a certain death. He learns that slowly
from the conversation of his mates. Men are
so scarce now for this vile work that once Ger-
many has got a man she will use him to the end.

'' And that end— ?

** I was given some particulars of the fate of
one U-boat that were told by two prisoners who
died at Harwich the other day. This particular

176 THE UNDYING FIRE

boat was got by a mine whicli tore a hole in ber
aft. She was too disabled to come to the sur-
face, and she began to sink tail down. Now the
immediate effect of a hole in a U-boat is of
course to bring the air pressure within her to
the same level as the pressure of the water out-
side. For every ten yards of depth this means
an addition of fourteen pounds to the square
inch. The ears and blood vessels are suddenly
subjected to this enormous pressure. There is
at once a violent pain in the ears and a weight
on the chest. Cotton wool has to be stuffed into
ears and nostrils to save the ear drum. Then
the boat is no longer on an even keel. The
men stand and slip about on the sides of things.
They clamber up the floor out of the way of the
slowly rising water. For the water does not
come rushing in to drown them speedily. It
cannot do that because there is no escape for
the air ; the water creeps in steadily and stealth-
ily as the U-boat goes deeper and deeper. It
is a process of slow and crushing submergence
that has the cruel deliberation of some story by
Edgar Allan Poe ; it may last for hours. A time
comes when the lights go out and the rising
waters stop the apparatus for keeping up the
supply of oxygen and absorbing the carbonic
acid. Suffocation begins. Think of what must

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 177

happen in tlie minds of the doomed men crowded
together amidst the machinery. In the partic-
ular case these prisoners described, several of
the men drowned themselves deliberately in the
rising waters inside the boat. And in another
case where the boat was recovered full of dead
men, they had all put their heads under the
water inside the boat. People say the U-boat
men carry poison against such mischances as
this. They don't. It would be too tempting.

^^ When it becomes evident that the U-boat
can never recover the surface, there is usually
an attempt to escape by the hatches. The
hatches can be opened when at last the pressure
inside is equal to that of the water without.
The water of course rushes in and sinks the
U-boat to the bottom like a stone, but the men
who are nearest to the hatch have a chance of
escaping mth the rush of air to the surface.
There is of course a violent struggle to get near-
est to the hatch. This is what happened in the
case of the particular U-boat from which these
prisoners came. The forward hatch was
opened. Our patrol boat cruising above saw
the waters thrown up by the air-burst and then
the heads of the men struggling on the surface.
Most of these men were screaming with pain.

178 THE UNDYING FIRE

All of them went under before they could be
picked up except two. And these two died in
a day or so. They died because coming sud-
denly up to the ordinary atmosphere out of the
compressed air of the sinking submarine had
burst the tissues of their lungs. They were
choked with blood.

'' Think of those poor creatures dying in the
hospital. They were worn out by fits of cough-
ing and haemorrhage, but there must have been
moments of exliausted quiet before the end,
when our youngster lay and stared at the bleak
walls of the ward and thought; when he asked
himself, * What have I been doing ! What have
I done ? What has this world done for me ? It
has made me a murderer. It has tortured me
and wasted me. . . . And I meant well by
it. . . .'

* * Whether he thought at all about the making
of the submarine, the numberless ingenuities
and devices, the patience and devotion, that
had gone to make that grim trap in which he
had been caught at last, I cannot guess.
. . . Probably he took it as a matter of
course. . . .

> ^^ So it was that our German youngster who
dreamt dreams, who had ambitions, who wished
to serve and do brave and honourable things,

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 179

died. ... So ^ve thousand men at least have
died, English some of them as well as German,
in lost submarines beneath the waters of the
narrow seas. . . .

^^ There is a story and a true story. It is
more striking than the fate of most men and
women in the world, but is it, in its essence,
different I Is not the whole life of our time in
the vein of this story? Is- not this story of
youth and hope and possibility misled, marched
step by step into a world misconceived, thrust
into evil, and driven do^vn to ugliness and death,
only a more vivid rendering of what is now the
common fate of great multitudes ? Is there any
one of us who is not in some fashion aboard a
submarine, doing evil and driving towards an
evil end? . . .

*^ What are the businesses in which men en-
gage ? How many of them have any likeness to
freighted ships that serve the good of mankind?
Think of the lying and cornering, the crowding
and outbidding, the professional etiquette that
robs the common man, the unfair advantage
smugly accepted! AVhat man among us can
say, * All that I do is service'? Our holding
and our effort : is it much better than the long-
interludes below the surface, and when we come
up to struggle for our own hands, torpedoing

180 THE UNDYING FIRE

competitors, wrecking antagonists, how is it
with us? The submarine sailors stare in the
twilight at drowning men. Every day I stare
at a world dro^vning in poverty and ignorance,
a world awash in the seas of hunger, disease,
and misery. We have been given leisure, free-
dom, and intelligence; what have we done to
prevent these things?

^ ' I tell you all the world is a submarine, and
every one of us is something of a U-boat man.
These fools who squeal in the papers for cruel-
ties to the U-boat men do not realize their own
part in the world. . . . We might live in sun-
shine and freedom and security, and we live
cramped and cold, in bitter danger, because we
are at war with our fellow men. . . .

** But there, doctor, you have the answer to
the first part of your question. You asked what
the Spirit of God in Man was against. It is
against these mental confusions, these igno-
rances, that thrust life into a frightful cul-de-
sac, that the God in our Hearts urges us to fight.
. . . He is crying out in our hearts to save
us from these blind alleys of selfishness, dark-
ness, cruelty, and pain in which our race must
die ; he is crying for the high road which is sal-
vation, he is commanding the organized unity
of mankind.''

§5

The lassitude that had been earlier apparent
in the manner of Mr. Huss had vanished. He
was talking now with more energy; his eyes
were bright and there was a flush in his cheeks.
His voice was low, but his speech was clear and
no longer broken by painful pauses.

'^ But your question had a double edge," he
continued; ^* you asked me not only what it is
that the Spirit of God in us fights against, but
what it is he fights for. Whither does the high
road lead? I have told you what I think the
life of man is, a felted and corrupting mass of
tragic experiences ; let me tell you now a little,
if this pain at my side will still permit it, what
life upon this earth, under the leadership of the
Spirit of God our Captain, might be.

^ ^ I will take it that men are still as they are,
that all this world is individually the same; I
will suppose no miraculous change in human
nature; but I will suppose that events in the
past have run along different channels, so that
there has been much more thinking, much more

181

182 THE UNDYING FIRE

exchang-c of thought, far better teaching. I
want simply this world better taught, so that
wherever the flame of God can be lit it has been
lit. Everyone I will suppose educated. By
educated, to be explicit, I mean a knowledge and
understanding of history. Yes, Mr. Farr — ^
salvation by history. Everyone about the earth
1 will suppose has been taught not merely to
read and write and calculate, but has been given
all that can be told simply and plainly of the
past history of the earth, of our place in space
and time, and the true history of mankind. I
will not suppose that there is any greater knowl-
edge of things than men actually possess to-day,
but instead of its being confusedly stored in
many minds and many books and many lan-
guages, it has all been sorted out and set out
plainly so that it can be easily used. It has
been kept back from no one, mistold to no one.
Moreover I will suppose that instead of a
myriad of tongues and dialects, all men can read
the same books and talk together in the same
speech.

*^ These you may say are difficult supposi-
tions, but they are not impossible suppositions.
Quite a few resolute men could set mankind
definitely towards such a state of affairs so that
they would reach it in a dozen generations or

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 183

so. But think what a difference there would be
from our conditions in such a world. In a world
so lit and opened by education, most of these
violent dissensions that trouble mankind would
be impossible. Instead of men and communi-
ties behaving like fever patients in delirium,
striking at their nurses, oversetting their food
and medicine and inflicting injuries on them-
selves and one another, they would be alive to
the facts of their common origin, their common
offspring — for at last in our descendants all
our Kves must meet again — and their common
destiny. In that more open and fresher air, the
fire that is God will burn more bMightly, for most
of us who fail to know God fail through want
of knowledge. Many more men and women will
be happily devoted to the common work of man-
kind, and the evil that is in all of us will be more
plainly seen and more easily restrained. I
doubt if any man is altogether evil, but in this
dark world the good in men is handicapped and
sacrifice is mocked. Bad example finishes what
weak and aimless teaching has begun. This is
a world where folly and hate can bawl sanity
out of hearing. Only the determination of
schoolmasters and teachers can hope to change
that. How can you hope to change it by any-
thing but teaching? Cannot you realize what
teaching means? . . .

184 THE UNDYING FIRE

** When I ask you to suppose a world in-
structed and educated in the place of this old
traditional world of unguided passion and greed
and meanness and mean bestiality, a world
taught by men instead of a world neglected by
hirelings, I do not ask you to imagine any
miraculous change in human nature. I ask 3^ou
only to suppose that each mind has the utmost
enlightenment of which it is capable instead of
its being darkened and overcast. Everyone is
to have the best chance of being his best self.
Everyone is to be living in the light of the
acutest self-examination and the clearest mutual
criticism. Naturally we shall be living under
infinitely saner and more helpful institutions.
Such a state of things will not indeed mitigate
natural vanity or natural self-love; it will not
rob the greedy man of his greed, the fool of his
folly, the eccentric of his abnormality, nor the
lustful of his lust. But it will rob them of ex-
cuses and hiding places ; it will light them within
and cast a light round about them; it will turn
their evil to the likeness of a disease of which
they themselves in their clear moments will be
ready to be cured and which they will hesitate
to transmit. That is the world which such of
us schoolmasters and teachers among us as have
the undying fire of God already lit in our hearts,

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 185

do now labour, generation by generation,
against defeat and sometimes against hope, to
bring about; that is the present work God has
for us. And as we do bring it about then the
prospect opens out before mankind to a splen-
dour. . . .

^* In this present world men live to be them-
selves; having their lives they los^ them; in the
world that we are seeking to make the> vnll give
themselves to the God of Mankind, and so ikov
will live indeed. They will as a matter of course
change their institutions and their methods so
that all men may be used to the best effect, in
the common work of mankind. They mil take
this little planet which has been torn into shreds
of possession, and make it again one garden.

• • •

*^ The most perplexing thing about men at
the present time is their lack of understanding
of the vast possibilities of power and happiness
that science is offering them — '*

^^ Then why not teach science? '^ cried Mr.
Farr.

<^ Provided only that they will unite their
efforts. They solve the problems of material
science in vain until they have solved their social
and political problems. When those are solved,
the mechanical and technical difficulties are

186 THE UNDYING FIRE

trivial. It is no occult secret ; it is a plain and
demonstrable thing to-day that the world could
give ample food and ample leisure to every
human being, if only by a world-wide teaching
the spirit of unity could be made to prevail over
the imiDulse to dissension. And not only that,
but it would then be possible to raise the com-
mon health and increase the common fund of
happiness immeasurably. Look plainly at the
world as it is. Most human beings when they
are not dying untimely, are suffering more or
less from avoidable disorders, they are ill or
they are convalescent, or they are suffering
from or crippled by some preventable taint in
the blood, or they are stunted or weakened by a
needlessly bad food supply, or spiritless and
feeble through bad housing, bad clothing, dull
occupations, or insecurity and anxiety. Few
enjoy for very long stretches at a time that
elementary happiness which is the natural ac-
companiment of sound health. This almost
universal lowness of tone, which does not dis-
tress us only because most of us are unable
to imagine anything better, means an enormous
waste of human possibility ; less work, less hope-
fulness. Isolated efforts will never raise men
out of this swamp of malaise. At Woldingstan-
ton we have had the best hygienic arrangements

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 187

we could find, we have taken the utmost pre-
cautions, and yet there has scarcely been a year
when our work has not been crippled and de-
layed by some epidemic, influenza one year,
measles another, and so on. We take our pre-
cautions ; but the townspeople, especially in the
poorer quarters, don't and can't. I think my-
self the wastage of these perennial petty pesti-
lences is far greater than that caused by the big
epidemics that sometimes sweep the world.
But all such things, great or petty, given a suf-
ficient world unanimity, could be absolutely ban-
ished from human life. Given a sufficient una-
nimity and intelligent direction, men could hunt
down all these infectious diseases, one by one,
to the regions in which they are endemic, and
from which they start out again and again to
distress the world, and could stamp them out
for ever. It is not want of knowledge prevents
this now but want of a properly designed edu-
cation, which would give people throughout the
world the understanding, the confidence, and the
will needed for so collective an enterprise.

* * The sufferings and mutual cruelties of ani-
mals are no doubt a part of the hard aimlessness
of nature, but men are in a position to substi-
tute aim for that aimlessness, they have already
all the knowledge and all the resources needed

188 THE UNDYING FIRE

to escape from these cul-de-sacs of wrong-doing
and suffering and ugly futility into which they
jostle one another. But they do not do it be-
cause they have not been sufficiently educated
and are not being sufficiently educated to sane
understanding and effort. The bulk of their
collective strength is dissipated in miserable
squabbles and suspicions, in war and the prep-
aration for war, in lawsuits and bickering, in
making little sterile private hoards of wealth
and power, in chaffering, in stupid persecutions
and oppositions and vanities. It is not only
that they live in a state of general infection and
ill health and bad temper, ill nourished, ill
housed and morally horrible, when the light is
ready to shine upon them and health and splen-
dour is within their grasp, but that all that they
could so attain would be but the prelude to still
greater attainments.

** Apart from and above the sweeping away
of the poverty, filthiness and misery of life that
would follow on an intelligent use of such pow-
ers and such qualities as men possess now, there
would be a tremendous increase in happiness
due to the contentment of belonging to one com-
mon comprehensible whole, of knowing that one
played a part and a worthy part in an immortal
and universal task. The merest handful of

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 189

people can look with content upon the tenor of
their lives to-day. A few teachers are perhaps
aware that they serve God rightly, a few sci-
entific investigators, a few doctors and bridge-
builders and makers of machinery, a few food-
growers and sailors and the like. They can
believe that they do something that is necessary,
or build something which will endure. But most
men and women to-day are like beasts caught
in a tunnel; they follow base occupations, they
trade and pander and dispute ; there is no peace
in their hearts ; they gratify their lusts and seek
excitements; they know they spend their lives
in vain and they have no means of escape. The
world is full of querulousness and abuse, deri-
sion and spite, mean tricks and floundering ef-
fort, vice without a gleam of pleasure and vain
display, because blind Nature spews these
people into being and there is no light to guide
their steps. Yet there is work to be done by
everyone, a plain reason for that work, and
happiness in the doing of it. . . .

*^ I do not know if any of us realize all that
a systematic organization of the human intel-
ligence upon the work of research would mean
for our race. People talk of the wonders that
scientific work has given us in the past two hun-
dred years, wonders of which for the most part

190 THE UNDYING FIRE

we are too disordered and foolish to avail our-
selves fully. But what scientific research has
produced so far must be as yet only the smallest
earnest of what scientific research can presently
give mankind. All the knowledge that makes
to-day different from the world of Queen Eliza-
beth has been the work of a few score thousand
men, mostly poorish men, working with limited
material and restricted time, in a world that
discouraged and misunderstood them. Many
hundreds of thousands of men with gifts that
would have been of the profoundest value in
scientific work, have missed the education or
the opportunity to use those gifts. But in a
world clarified by understanding, the net of re-
search would miss few of its born servants,
there would be the swiftest, clearest communica-
tion of results from worker to worker, the read-
iest honour and help for every gift. Poor
science, which goes about now amidst our crimes
and confusions like an ill-trimmed evil-smelling
oil lantern in a dark cavern in which men fight
and steal, her flickering light, snatched first by
this man and then by that, as often as not a help
to violence and robbery, would become like the
sunrise of a bright summer morning. We do
not realize what in a little while mankind could
do. Our power over matter, our power over

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 191

life, our power over ourselves, would increase
year by year and day by day.

** Here am I, after great suffering, waiting
here for an uncertain operation that may kill
me. It need not have been so. Here are we
all, sitting hot and uncomfortable in this ill-
ventilated, ill-furnished room, looking out upon
a vile waste. It need not have been so. Such
is the quality of our days. I sit here wrung by
pain, in the antechamber of death, because man-
kind has suffered me to suffer. . . . All this
could have been avoided. . . . Not for ever
will such things endure, not for ever will the
Mocker of Mankind prevail. . . .

* ' And such knowledge and power and beauty
as we poor watchers before the dawn can gTiess
at, are but the beginning of all that could arise
out of these shadows and this torment. Not
for ever shall life be marooned upon this planet,
imprisoned by the cold and incredible emptiness
of space. Is it not plain to you all, from what
man in spite of everything has achieved, that
he is but at the beginning of achievement ? That
presently he will take his body and his life and
mould them to his will, that he will take glad-
ness and beauty for himself as a girl will pick
a flower and twine it in her hair. You have
said. Doctor Barrack, that when industrial com-

192 THE UNDYING FIRE

petition ends among men all change in the race
will be at an end. But you said that unthink-
ingly. For when a collective will grows plain,
there will be no blind thrusting into life and no
blind battle to keep in life, like the battle of a
crowd crushed into a cul-de-sac, any more. The
qualities that serve the great ends of the race
will be cherished and increased; the sorts of
men and women that have these qualities least
will be made to understand the necessary re-
straints of their limitation. You said that when
men ceased to compete, they would stand still.
Rather is it true that when men cease their
internecine war, then and then alone can the
race sweep forward. The race will grow in
power and beauty swiftly, in every generation
it will grow, and not only the human race. All
this world will man make a garden for himself,
ruling not only his kind but all the lives that live,
banishing the cruel from life, making the others
merciful and tame beneath his hand. The flies
and mosquitoes, the thorns and poisons, the
fungus in the blood, and the murrain upon his
beasts, he will utterly end. He will rob the
atoms of their energy and the depths of siDace
of their secrets. He will break his prism in
space. He will step from star to star as now

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 193

we step from stone to stone across a stream.
Until he stands in the light of God's presence
and looks his Mocker and the Adversary in the
face. . . .''

'^ Oh I Ravins! '' Mr. Dad burst out, unable
to contain himself.

* * You may think my mind is fevered because
my body is in pain; but never was my mind
clearer than it is now. It is as if I stood already
half out of this little life that has held me so
long. It is not a dream I tell, but a reality.
The world is for man, the stars in their courses
are for man — if only he will follow the God
who calls to him and take the gift God offers.
As I sit here and talk of these things to you
here, they become so plain to me that I cannot
understand your silence and why you do not
burn — as I burn — with the fire of God's pur-
pose. . . ."

He stopped short. He seemed to have come
to the end of his strength. His chin sank, and
his voice when he spoke again was the voice of
a weak and weary man.

^' I talk. ... I talk. . . . And then a
desolating sense of reality blows like a destroy-
ing gust through my mind, and my little lamp
of hope goes out. . . .

194 THE UNDYING FIRE

'^ It is as if some great adversary sat over
all my world, mocking me in every phrase I
use and every act I do. . . . "

He sighed deeply.

*^ Have I answered your questions, doctor? "
he asked.

§6

** You speak of God,'' said Dr. Barrack.
* * But this that you speak of as God, is it really
what men understand by God? It seems to me,
as I said to begin with, it is just a personifica-
tion of the good will in us all. Why bring in
God? God is a word that has become associated
with all sorts of black and cruel things. It sets
one thinking of priesthoods, orthodoxies, per-
secutions. Why do you not call this upward
and onward power Humanity? Why do you
not call it the Spirit of Men? Then it might
be possible for an Agnostic like myself to feel
a sort of agreement. . . .''

*' Because I have already shown you it is not
humanity, it is not the spirit of men. Human-
ity, the spirit of men, made poison gas and the
submarine ; the spirit of man is jealous, aggres-
sive and partizan. Humanity has greed and
competition in grain, and the spirit of man is
fear and hatred, secrecy and conspiracy, quite
as much as, much more than, it is making or
order. But this spirit in me, this fire which I

195

196 THE UNDYING FIRE

call God, was lit, I know not how, but as if it
came from outside. . . .

'' I use the phrases,^' said Mr. Huss, '' that
come ready to the mind. But I will meet you
so far as to say that I know that I am meta-
phorical and inexact. . . . This spirit that
comes into life — it is more like a person than
a thing and so I call it He. And He is not a
feature, not an aspect of things, but a selection
among things. ... He seizes upon and brings
out and confirms all that is generous in the nat-
ural impulses of the mind. He condemns
cruelty and all evil. . . .

*^ I will not pretend to explain what I cannot
explain. It may be that God is as yet only
foreshadowed in life. You may reason. Doctor
Barrack, that this fire in the heart that I call
God, is as much the outcome of your Process
as all the other things in life. I cannot argue
against that. What I am telling you now is
not what I believe so much as what I feel. To
me it seems that the creative desire that burns
in me is a thing different in its nature from the
blind Process of matter, is a force running con-
trariwise to the power of confusion. . . . But
this I do know, that once it is lit in a man it is
like a consuming fire. Once it is lit in a man,
then his mind is alisrht — thenceforth. It rules

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 197

his conscience with compelling power. It sum- ;
mons him to live the residue of his days working
and fighting for the unity and release and tri-
umph of manl^ind. He may be mean still, and
cowardly and vile still, but he will know himself
for what he is. . . . Some ancient phrases
live marvellously. Within my heart 1 know that
my Redeemer livetJi. . . .''

He stopped abruptly.

Dr. Barrack was unprepared with a reply.
But he shook his head obstinately. These time-
worn phrases were hateful to his soul. They
smacked to him of hypocrisy, of a bidding for
favour with obsolete and discredited influences.
Through such leaks it is superstition comes
soaking back into the laboriously bailed-out
minds of men. Yet Mr. Huss was a difficult con-
troversialist to grapple. *^ No,'' said the doc-
tor provisionally. ^^ No, .

yj

^7

Fate came to the relief of Dr. Barrack.

The little conference at Sea View was per-
vaded by the sense of a new personality. This
was a short and angry and heated little man,
with active dark brown eyes in a tan face, a
tooth-brush moustache of iron-grey, and a pro-
truded lower jaw. He was dressed in a bright
bluish-grey suit and bright brown boots, and
he carried a bright brown leather bag.

He appeared mouthing outside the window,
beyond the range of distinct hearing. His ex-
pression was blasphemous. He made threat-
ening movements with his bag.

*^Good God!" cried Dr. Barrack. ''Sir
Alpheus ! . . . I had no idea of the time ! ' '

He rushed out of the room and there was a
scuffle in the passage.

*^ I ought to have been met," said Sir Al-
phens, entering, '^ I ought to have been met.
It's ridiculous to pretend you didn't know the
time. A general practitioner always knows the
time. It is his first duty. I cannot understand

198

ELIHU REPROVES JOB 199

the incivility of this reception. I have had to
make my way to your surgery, Dr. Barrack,
without assistance; not a cab free at the sta-
tion ; I have had to come down this road in the
heat, carrying everything myself, reading all
the names on the gates — the most ridiculous
and banal names. The Taj, Thyme Bank, The
Cedars, and Capernaum, cheek by jowl! It's
worse than Freud.''

Dr. Barrack expressed further regrets con-
fusedly and indistinctly.

** We have been talking. Sir Alpheus," said
Sir Eliphaz, advancing as if to protect the doc-
tor from his specialist, "' upon some very
absorbing topics. That must be our excuse for
this neglect. We have been discussing educa-
tion— and the universe. Fate, free-will, pre-
destination absolute. " It is not every building
contractor can quote Milton.

The great surgeon regarded the patentee of
Temanite.

^* Fate — fiddlesticks!" said Sir Alpheus
suddenly and rudely. '' That's no excuse for
not meeting me." His bright little eyes darted
round the company and recognized Mr. Huss.
** What! my patient not in bed! Not even in
bed! Qo to hed,^\Y\ Go to bed! ^^

He became extremely abusive to Dr. Barrack.
** You treat an operation, Sir, with a levity — I"

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

THE OPERATIOlSr

§1

While Sir Alpheus grumbled loudly at the
unpreparedness of everything, Mr. Huss, with
the assistance of Dr. Barrack, walked upstairs
and disrobed himself.

This long discussion had taken a very power-
ful grip upon his mind. Much remained uncer-
tain in his thoughts. He had still a number of
things he wanted to say, and these proceedings
preliminary to his vivisection, seemed to him
to be irrelevant and tiresome rites interrupting
something far more important.

The bed, the instruments, the preparation for
anaesthesia, were to him no more than new con-
tributions to the argument. While he lay on
the bed with Dr. Barrack handling the funnel
hood that was to go over nose and mouth for
the administration of the chloroform, he tried
to point out that the very idea of operative sur-

200

THE OPERATION 201

gery was opposed to the scientific fatalism of
that gentleman. But Sir Alpheus interrupted
him. . . .

** Breathe deeply," said Dr. Barrack. . . .

'^ Breathe deeply," . . .

The whole vast argumentative fabric that had
arisen in his mind swung with him across an
abyss of dread and mental inanity. "Whether
he thought or dreamt what follows it is impos-
sible to say; we can but record the ideas that,
like a crystalline bubble as great as all things,
filled his consciousness. He felt a characteris-
tic doubt whether the chloroform would do its
duty, and then came that twang like the break-
ing of a violin string: — Ploot. . . .

And still he did not seem to be insensible!
He was not insensible, and yet things had
changed. Dr. Elihu was still present, but some-
how Sir Eliphaz and Mr. Dad and Mr. Farr,
whom he had left downstairs, had come back
and were sitting on the ground — on the ashes ;
they were all seated gravely on a mound of
ashes and beneath a sky that blazed with light.
Sir Alpheus, the nurse, the bedroom, had van-
ished. It seemed that they had been the dream.

But this was the reality, an enduring reality,
this sackcloth and these reeking ash-heaps out-
ride the city gates. This was the scene of an

202 THE UNDYING FIRE

unending experiment and an immortal argu-
ment. He was Job; the same Job who had sat
here for thousands of years, and this lean vul-
turous old man in the vast green turban was
Eliphaz the Temanite, the smaller man who
peered out of the cowl of a kind of hooded shawl,
was his friend Bildad the Shuhite; the eager,
coarse face of the man in unclean linen was
Zophar the Naamathite; and this fist-faced
younger man who sat with an air of false humil-
ity insolently judging them all, was Elihu the
son of Barachel the Buzite of the kindred of
Eam. . - .

It was queer that there should have ever been
the fancy that these men were doctors or school-
masters or munition makers, a queer veiling of
their immortal quality in the transitory gar-
ments of a period. For ages they had sat here
and disputed, and for ages they had still to sit.
A little way off waited the asses and camels and
slaves of the three emirs, and the two Ethiopian
slaves of Eliphaz had been coming towards them
bearing bowls of fine grey ashes. (For Eliphaz
for sanitary reasons did not use the common
ashes of the midden upon his head.) There, far
away, splashed green with palms and pierced be-
tween pylons by a glittering arm of the river,
were the low brown walls of sun-dried brick, the

THE OPERATION 203

flat-roofed houses, and the twisted temple towers
of the ancient city of Uz, where first this great
argument had begun. East and west and north
and south stretched the wide levels of the world,
dotted with small date trees, and above them
was the measureless dome of heaven, set with
suns and stars and flooded with a light.

This light had shone out since Elihu had
spoken, and it was not only a light but a voice
clear and luminous, before which Job's very
soul bowed and was still. . . .

'^ Who is this that darJceneth counsel by words
without knowledge? '^

By a great effort Job lifted up his eyes to the
zenith.

It was as if one shone there who was all, and
yet who comprehended powers and kingdoms,
and it was as if a screen or shadow was before
his face. It was as if a dark figure enhaloed
in shapes and colours bent down over the whole
world and regarded it curiously and malevo-
lently, and it was as if this dark figure was no
more than a translucent veil before an infinite
and lasting radiance. Was it a veil before the
light, or did it not rather nest in the very heart
of the light and spread itself out before the face
of the light and spread itself and recede and
again expand in a perpetual diastole and sys-

204 THE UNDYING FIRE

tole? It was as if the voice that spoke was the
voice of God, and yet ever and again it was as
if the timbre of the voice was Satan. As the
voice spoke to Job, his friends listened and
watched him, and the eyes of Elihu shone like
garnets and the eyes of Eliphaz like emeralds,
but the eyes of Bildad were black like the eyes
of a lizard upon a wall, and Zophar had no eyes
but looked at him only with the dark shadows
beneath his knitted brows. As God spake they
all, and Job with them, became smaller and
smaller and shrank until they were the minutest
of conceivable things, until the whole scene was
a little toy ; they became unreal like discoloura-
tions upon a floating falling disc of paper con-
fetti, amidst greatnesses unfathomable.

'^ Who is this that darheneth counsel hy
words without knowledge? ''

But in this dream that was dreamt by Mr.
Huss while he was under the anaesthetic, God
did not speak by words but by light ; there were
no sounds in his ears, but thoughts ran like
swift rivulets of fire through his brain and
gathered into pools and made a throbbing pat-
tern of wavelets, curve within curve, that inter-
laced. . . .

The thoughts that it seemed to him that God
was speaking through his mind, can be put into

THE OPERATION 205

words only after a certain fashion and with
great loss, for they were thoughts about things
beyond and above this world, and our words are
all made out of the names of things and feelings
in this world. Things that were contradictory
had become compatible, and things incompre-
hensible seemed straightforward, because he
was in a dream. It was as if the anaesthetic had
released his ideas from their anchorage to words
and phrases and their gravitation towards sen-
sible realities. But it was still the same line of
thought he pursued through the stars and
spaces, that he had pursued in the stuffy little
room at Sundering-on-Sea.

It was somewhat after this fashion that things
ran through the mind of Mr. Huss. It seemed
to him at first that he was answering the chal-
lenge of the voice that filled the world, not of
his own will but mechanically. He was saying :
'^ Then give me knowledge."

To which the answer was in the voice of Satan
and in tones of mockery. For Satan had be-
come very close and definite to Job, as a dark
face, time-worn and yet animated, that sent out
circle after circle of glowing colour towards the
bounds of space as a swimmer sends waves to-
wards the bank. ** But what have you got in
the way of a vessel to hold your knowledge if
we gave it you? ''

206 THE UNDYING FIRE

** In the name of the God in my heart," said
Job, ** I demand knowledge and power."

** Wlio are you! A pedagogue who gives ill-
prepared lessons about history in f rowsty rooms,
and dreams that he has been training his young
gentlemen to play leap-frog amidst the stars."

*^ I am Man," said Job.

'' Huss.''

But that queer power of slipping one's iden-
tity and losing oneself altogether which dreams
will give, had come upon Mr. Huss. He an-
swered with absolute conviction: '*• I am Man.
Down there I was Huss, but here I am Man. I
/ am every man who has ever looked up towards
this light of God. I am every one who has
thought or worked or willed for the race. I am
all the explorers and leaders and teachers that
man has ever had."

The argument evaporated. He carried his
point as such points are carried in dreams.
The discussion slipped to another of the issues
that had been troubling him.

* ^ You would plumb the deep of knowledge ;
you would scale the heights of space. . . .
There is no limit to either. ' '

** Then I will plumb and scale for ever. I
will defeat you."

*^ But you will never destroy me."

*^ I will fight my way through you to God."

THE OPERATION 207

** And never attain him/^ . . .

It seemed as though yet another voice was
speaking. For a while the veil of Satan was
drawn aside. The thoughts it uttered ran like
incandescent molten metal through the mind
of Job, but whether he was saying these things
to God or whether God was saying these things
to him, did not in any way appear.

'' So life goes on for ever. And in no other
way could it go on. In no other way could there
be such a being as life. For how can you
struggle if there is a certainty of victory *? Why ^
should you struggle if the end is assured? How
can you rise if there is no depths into which
you can fall? The blacknesses and the evils
about you are the warrants of reality. . . .

** Through the centuries the voice of Job had
complained and will complain. Through the
centuries the fire of his faith flares and flickers
and threatens to go out. But is Job justified in
his complaints?

** Is Job indeed justified in his complaints?
His mind has been coloured by the colour of
misfortune. He has seen all the world reflect-
ing the sufferings of his body. He has dwelt
upon illness and cruelty and death. But is
there any evil or cruelty or suffering that is
beyond the possibility of human control? Were

208 THE UNDYING FIRE

that so then indeed he might complain that God
has mocked him. .-^. . Are sunsets ugly and
oppressive? Do mountains disgust, do distant
hills repel? Is there any flaw in the starry sky?
If the lives of beasts and men are dark and
ungracious, yet is not the texture of their bodies
lovely beyond comparison? You have sneered
because the beauty of cell and tissue may build
up an idiot. Why, oh Man, do they build up an
idiot? Have you no will, have you no under-
standing, that you suffer such things to be?
The darkness and ungraciousness, the evil and
the cruelty, are no more than a challenge to
you. In you lies the power to rule all these
things. . . . ' '

Through the tumbled clouds of his mind
broke the sunlight of this phrase : * * The power
to rule all these things. The power to rule — "

* * You have dwelt overmuch upon pain. Pain
is a swift distress; it ends and is forgotten.
Without memory and fear pain is nothing, a
contradiction to be heeded, a warning to be
taken. Without pain what would life become?
Pain is the master only of craven men. It is
in man's power to rule it. It is in man's power
to rule all things. . . . "

It was as if the dreaming patient debated
these ideas with himself ; and again it was as if

THE OPERATION 209

he were the -aniversal all and Job and Satan and
God disputed together mthin him. The thoughts
in his mind raced faster and suddenly grew
bright and glittering, as the waters grow bright
when they come racing out of the caves at Han
into the light of day. Green-faced, he mur-
mured and stirred in his great debate while the
busy specialist plied his scalpels, and Dr. Bar-
rack whispered directions to the intent nurse.

** Another whiff,'' said Doctor Barrack.

** A cloud rolls back from my soul. . . . '*
"^ ** I have been through great darkness. I
have been through deep waters. . . . ' '

*^ Has not your life had laughter in it? Has
the freshness of the summer morning never
poured joy through your being I Do you know
nothing of the embrace of the lover, cheek to
cheek or lip to lip? Have you never swum out
into the sunlit sea or shouted on a mountain
slope? Is there no joy in a handclasp? Your
son, your son, you say, is dead mth honour. Is
there no joy in that honour? Clean and straight
was your son, and beautiful in his life. Is that
nothing to thank God for? Have you never
played with happy children? Has no boy ever
answered to your teaching — giving back more
than you gave him? Dare you deny the joy of
your appetites : the first mouthful of roast red

210 THE UNDYING FIRE

beef on the frosty day and the deep draught of
good ale? Do you know nothing of the task
well done, nor of sleep after a day of toil? Is
there no joy for the farmer in the red ploughed
fields, and the fields shooting with green blades ?
When the great prows smite the waves and the
aeroplane hums in the sky, is man still a hope-
less creature? Can you watch the beat and
swing of machinery and still despair? Your
illness has coloured the world ; a little season of
misfortune has hidden the light from your
eyes/'

It was as if the dreamer pushed his way
through the outskirts of a great forest and ap-
proached the open, but it was not through trees
that he thrust his way but through bars and
nets and interlacing curves of blinding, many-
coloured light towards the clear promise be-
yond. He had grown now to an incredible vast-
ness so that it was no longer earth upon which
he set his feet but that crystalline pavement
whose translucent depths contain the stars.
Yet though he approached the open he never
reached the open; the iridescent net that had
seemed to grow thin, grew dense again ; he was
still struggling, and the black doubts that had
lifted for a moment swept down upon his soul
again. And he realized he was in a dream, a

;

THE OPERATION 211

dream that was drawing swiftly now to its close.

'' Oh God! '' he cried, " answer me! For
Satan has mocked me sorely. Answer me be-
fore I lose sight of you again. Am I right to
fight? Am I right to come out of my little
earth, here above the stars? "

*^ Eight if you dare."

' * Shall I conquer and prevail ? Give me your
promise! "

** Everlastingly you may conquer and find
fresh worlds to conquer. ' '

" May — hvii shall 1% "

It was as if the torrent of molten thoughts
stopped suddenly. It was as if everything
stopped.

*■ ' Answer me, ^ ' he cried.

Slowly the shining thoughts moved on again.

*' So long as your courage endures you will
conquer. . . .

' ' If you have courage, although the night be
dark, although the present battle be bloody and
cruel and end in a strange and evil fashion,
nevertheless victory shall be yours — in a way
you will understand — when victory comes.
Only have courage. On the courage in your
heart all things depend. By courage it is that
the stars continue in their courses, day by day.
It is the courage of life alone that keeps sky

212 THE UNDYING FIRE

and earth apart. ... If that courage fail,
if that sacred fire go out, then all things fail and
all things go out, all things — good and evil,
space and time.''

*^ Leaving nothing? "

''Nothing.''

"' Nothing,'' he echoed, and the word spread
like a dark and darkening mask across the face
of all things.

And then as if to mark the meaning of the
word, it seemed to him that the whole universe
began to move inward upon itself, faster and
faster, until at last with an incredible haste it
rushed together. He resisted this collapse in
vain, and with a sense of overwhelmed effort.
The white light of God and the whirling colours
of the universe, the spaces between the stars —
it was as if an unseen fist gripped them to-
gether. They rushed to one point as water in
a clepsydra rushes to its hole. The whole uni-
verse became small, became a little thing, dimin-
ished to the size of a coin, of a spot, of a pin-
point, of one intense black mathematical point,
and — vanished. He heard his own voice cry-
ing in the void like a little thing blown before
the wind : * ^ But will my courage endure % ' '
The question went unanswered. Not only the
things of space but the things of time swept

THE OPERATION 213

together into nothingness. The last moment of
his dream rushed towards the first, crumpled
all the intervening moments together and made
them one. It seemed to Mr. Huss that he was
still in the instant of insensibility. That sound
of the breaking string was still in his ears : —
Ploot. . . .

It became part of that same sound which came
before the vision. . . .

He was aware of a new pain mthin him ; not
that dull aching now, but a pain keen and sore.
He gave a fluttering gasp.

** Quick, '^ said a voice. '^ He is coming to ! "

'' He'll not wake for hours," said a second
voice.

** His mouth and eyes! ''

He lifted his eyelids as one lifts lead. He
found himself looking into the intelligent but
unsympathetic face of Sir Alpheus Mengo, he
tried to comprehend his situation but he had
forgotten how he got to it, he closed his eyes
and sank back consciously and wilfully towards
insensibility. . . ^

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

LETTERS AND A TELEGRAM

§1

It was three weeks later.

Never had there been so successful an opera-
tion as an operation in the experience of either
Sir Alpheus Mengo or Dr. Barrack. The
growth that had been removed was a non-malig-
nant growth; the diagnosis of cancer had been
unsound. Mr. Huss was still lying flat in his
bed in Mrs. Croome's house, but he was already
able to read books, letters and newspapers, and
take an interest in affairs.

The removal of his morbid growth had made
a very great change in his mental atmosphere.
He no longer had the same sense of an invisible
hostile power brooding over all his life; his
natural courage had returned. And the world
which had seemed a conspiracy of misfortunes
was now a hopeful world again. The last great
offensive of the Germans towards Paris had

214

LETTERS AND A TELEGRAM 215

collapsed disastrously under the counter attacks
of Marshal Foch; each morning's paper told of
fresh victories for the Allies, and the dark
shadow of a German Caesarism fell no longer
across the future. The imaginations of men
were passing through a phase of reasonableness
and generosity; the idea of an organized world
peace had seized upon a multitude of minds;
there was now a prospect of a new and better
age such as would have seemed incredible in
the weeks when the illness of Mr. Huss began
to bear him down. And it was not simply a
general relief that had come to his forebodings.
His financial position, for example, which had
been wrecked by one accident, had been restored
by another. A distant cousin of Mr. Huss, to
whom however Mr. Huss was the nearest rela-
tive, had died of softening of the brain, after a
career of almost imbecile speculation. He had
left his property partly to Mr. Huss and partly
to Woldingstanton School. For some years be-
fore the war he had indulged in the wildest buy-
ing of depreciated copper shares, and had accu-
mulated piles of what had seemed at the time
valueless paper. The war had changed all that.
Instead of being almost insolvent, the deceased
in spite of heavy losses on Canadian land deals
was found by his executors to be worth nearly

216 THE UNDYING FIRE

thirty thousand pounds. It is easy to under-
rate the good in money. The windfall meant
a hundred needed comforts and freedoms, and
a release for the mind of Mrs. Huss that nothing
else could have given her. And the mind of
Mr. Huss reflected the moods of his wife much
more than he suspected.

But still better things seemed to be afoot in
the world of Mr. Huss. The rest of the gov-
ernors of Woldingstanton, it became apparent,
were not in agreement with Sir Eliphaz and Mr.
Dad upon the project of replacing Mr. Huss by
Mr. Farr; and a number of the old boys of the
school at the front, getting wind of what was
going on, had formed a small committee for the
express purpose of defending their old master.
At the head of this committee, by a happy
chance, was young Kenneth Burrows, the
nephew and heir of Sir Eliphaz. At the school
he had never been in the front rank; he had
been one of those good-all-round boys who end
as a school prefect, a sound man in the first
eleven, and second or third in most of the sub-
jects he took. Never had he played a star part
or enjoyed very much of the head's confidences.
It was all the more delightful therefore to find
him the most passionate and indefatigable
champion of the order of things that Mr. Huss

LETTERS AND A TELEGRAM 217

had set up. He had heard of the proposed
changes at his uncle's dinner-table when on
leave, and he had done something forthwith to
shake that gentleman's resolves. Lady Bur-
rows, who adored him, became at once pro-
Huss. She was all the readier to do this be-
cause she did not like Mr. Dad 's rather emphatic
table manners, nor Mr. Farr's clothes.

'* You don't know what Mr. Huss was to us.
Sir," the young man repeated several times,
and returned to France with that sentence grow-
ing and flowering in his mind. He was one of
those good types for whom the war was a power-
ful developer. Death, hardship, and responsi-
bility— he was still not two-and- twenty, and a
major in the artillery — had already made an
understanding man out of the schoolboy; he
could imagine what dispossession meant; his
new maturity made it seem a natural thing to
write to comfort his old head as one man writes
to another. His pencilled sheets, when first
they came, made the enfeebled recipient cry,
not with misery but happiness. They were re-
read like a love-letter; they were now on the
coverlet, and Mr. Huss was staring at the ceil-
ing and already planning a new Woldingstanton
rising from its ashes, greater than the old.

§2

It is only in the last few weeks, the young
man wrote, that we have heard of all these-
schemes to break up the tradition of Wolding-
stanton, and now there is a talk of your resign-
ing the headmaster ship in favour of Mr, Farr.
Personally J Sir, I canH imagine how you can
possibly dream of giving up your ivork — and
to him of all people; — I still have a sort of
doubt about it; but my uncle was very positive
that you were disposed to resign (personally, he
said, he had implored you to stay), and it is on
the off-chance of his being right that I am both-
ering you ivith this letter. Briefly it is to im-
plore you to stand by the school, which is as
much as to say to stand by yourself and us.
You've taught hundreds of us to stick it, and
now you owe it to us to stick it yourself. I
know you're ill, dread f idly ill; I've heard about
Gilbert, and I know, Sir, we all know, although
he wasn't in the school and you never betrayed
a preference or were led into an unfair thing
through it, how much you loved him; you've

218

LETTERS AND A TELEGRAM 219

been put through it, Sir, to the last degree.
But, Sir, there are some of us here who feel
almost as though they were your sons; if you
don't and canH give us that sort of love, it
doesnH alter the fact that there are men out
here ivho think of you as they'd like to think of
their fathers. Men like myself particularly,
who were left as boys without a father.

I'm no great hand at expressing myself; I'm
no credit to Mr. Cross and his English class;
generally I don't believe in saying too much;
but I would like to tell you something of what
you have been to a lot of us, and why Wolding-
stanton going on will seem to us like a flag
still flying and Woldingstanton breaking its tra-
dition like a sort of surrender. And I don't
want a bit to flatter you. Sir, if you'll forgive
me, and set you up in what I am writing to you.
One of the loveable things about you to us is
that you have always been so jolly human to
us. You've always been unequal. I've seen
you give lessons that were among the best les-
sons in the world, and I've seen you give some
jolly bad lessons. And there were some affairs
— that business of the November fireworks for ^
example — when ive thought you were harsh
and tvrong —

^* I was wrong, '^ said Mr. Huss.

220 THE UNDYING FIRE

That almost led to a mutiny. But that is just
where you score, and why Woldingstanton canH
do without you. When that firework row was
on we called a meeting of the school and house
prefects and had up some of the louts to it —
you never heard of that meeting — and we said,
we all agreed you were wrong and we all agreed
that right or wrong we stood by you, and
wouldnH let the row go further. Perhaps you
remember how that affair shut up all at once.
But that is where you've got us. You do
wrong, you let us see through you; there never
was a schoolmaster or a father gave himself
away so freely as you do, you never put up a
sham front on us and consequently every one of
us knows that what he knows about you is the
real thing in you; the very kids in the lower fifth
can get a glimpse of it and grasp that you are
driving at something with all your heart and
soul, and that the school goes somewhere and
has life in it. We Woldingstanton boys have
that in common when toe meet; we understand
one another; we have something that a lot of the
other chaps one meets out here, even from the
crack schools, donH seem to have. It isnH a
'flourish with us, Sir, it is a simple statement of
fact that the life we joined up to at Wolding-
stanton is more important to us than the life

LETTERS AND A TELEGRAM 221

in our bodies. Just as it is more important to
you. It isfi't only the way you taught it, though
you taught it splendidly , it is the way you felt it
that got hold of us. You made us think and feel
that the past of the world was our oivn history;
you made us feel that we were in one living story
ivith the reindeer men and the Egyptian priests,
with the soldiers of CcBsar and the alchemists of
Spain; nothing was dead and nothing alien; you
made discovery and civilization our adventure
and the whole future our inheritance. Most of
the men I meet here feel lost in this war; they
are like rabbits ivashed out of their burrows by
a flood, but we of W oldingstanton have taken it
in the day's work, and when the peace comes
and the new world begins, it will still be in the
story for us, the day's ivork will still join on.
That's the essence of W oldingstanton, that i{\
puts you on the high road that goes on. Thei
other chaps I talk to here from other schools
seem to be on no road at all. They are tough
and plucky by nature and association; they are
fighters and sturdy men; but what holds them
in it is either just habit and the example of
people about them or something unsound that
can't hold out to the end; a vague loyalty to the
Empire or a desire to punish the Hun or restore
the peace of Europe, some short range view of

(

222 THE UNDYING FIRE

that sort, motives that will leave them stranded
at the end of the war, anyhow, ivith nothing to
go on to. To talk of after the war to them is to
realize what blind alleys their teachers have
' led them into. They can understand fighting
against things hut not for things. Beyond an
impossible ambition to go bach somewhere and
settle doivn as they used to be, there^s not the
ghost of an idea to them at all. The whole value
of Woldingstanton is that it steers a man
through and among the blind alleys and sets him
on a way out that he can follow for all the rest of
his days; it makes him a player in a limitless
team and one with the Creator. We are all com-
ing bach to tahe up our jobs in that spirit, jobs
that will all join up at last in mahing a real
world state, a world civilization and a new order
of things, and unless we can thinh of you, sir,
away at Woldingstanton, worhing away to mahe
more of us, ready to pich up the sons we shall
send you presently —

Mr. Huss stopped reading.

§3

He lay thinking idly.

^' I was talking about blind alleys the other
day. Queer that he should have hit on the same
phrase. . . .

^^ Some old sermon of mine perhaps. . . .
No doubt I Ve had the thought before. . . .

** I suppose that one could define education
as the lifting of minds out of blind alleys. . V .

^^ A permissible definition anyhow. . . .

^^ I msh I could remember that talk better.
I said a lot of things about submarines. I said
something about the whole world really being
like the crew of a submarine. . . .

*** It's true — universally. Everyone is in a
blind alley until we pierce a road. . . .

^' That was a queer talk we had. ... I
remember I wouldn 't go to bed — a kind of fever
in the mind. ...

^^ Then there was a dream.

'^ I wish I could remember more of that
dream. It was as if I could see round some

223

224 THE UNDYING FIRE

metaphj^sical corner. ... I seemed to be in
a great place — talking to God. . . .

** But how could one have talked to God?
• • •

*' No. It is gone. . . . ''

His thought reverted to the letter of young
Burrows.

He began to scheme out the reinstatement of
Woldingstanton. He had an idea of rebuilding
School House with a map corridor to join it to
the picture gallery and the concert hall, which
were both happily still standing. He wanted the
maps on one side to show the growth and suc-
cession of empires in the western world, and
on the other to present the range of geograph-
ical knowledge and thought at different periods
in man's history.

As with many great headmasters, his idle day-
dreams were often architectural. He took out
another of his dream toys now and played with
it. This dream was that he could organize a
series of ethnological exhibits showing various
groups of primitive peoples in a triple order;
first little models of them in their savage state,
then displays of their arts and manufactures to
show their distinctive gifts and aptitudes, and
then suggestions of the part such a people might
play as artists or guides, or beast tamers or the

LETTERS AND A TELEGRAM 225

like, in -a wholly civilized world. Such a collec-
tion would be far beyond the vastest possibil-
ities to which Woldingstanton would ever attain
— but he loved the dream.

The groups would stand in well-lit bays, side
chapels, so to speak, in his museum building.
There would be a crescent of seats and a black-
board, for it was one of his fantasies to have a
school so great that the classes would move
about it, like little parties of pilgrims in a
cathedral. . . .

From that he drifted to a scheme for grouping
great schools for such common purposes as the
educational development of the cinematograph,
a central reference library, and the like. . . .

For one great school leads to another.
Schools are living things, and like all living
things they must grow and reproduce their kind
and go on from conquest to conquest — or fall
under the sway of the Farrs and Dads and stag-
nate, become diseased and malignant, and
perish. But Woldingstanton was not to perish.
It was to spread. It was to call to its kind
across the Atlantic and throughout the world.
... It was to give and receive ideas, inter-
breed, and develop. . . .

Across the blue October sky the white clouds
drifted, and the air was full of the hum of a

226 THE UNDYING FIRE

passing aeroplane. The chained dog that had
once tortured the sick nerves of Mr. Huss now
barked unheeded.

** I would like to give one of the chapels of
the races to the memory of Gilbert, ' ' whispered
Mr. Huss. . . .

M

The door at the foot of his bed opened, and
Mrs. Huss appeared.

She had an effect of appearing suddenly, and
yet she moved slowly into the room, clutching a
crumpled bit of paper in her hand. Her face
had undergone some extraordinary change; it
was dead white, and her eyes were wide open
and very bright. She stood stiffly. She might
have been about to fall. She did not attempt to
close the door behind her.

Mrs. Croome became audible rattling her pans
do^vnstairs.

When Mrs. Huss spoke, it was in an almost
noiseless whisper. '^ J oh! '^

He had a strange idea that Mrs. Croome must
have given them notice to quit instantly or per-
petrated some such brutality, a suspicion which
his wife's gesture seemed to confirm. She was
shaking the crumpled scrap of paper in an
absurd manner. He frowned in a gust of im-
patience.

227

228 THE UNDYING FIRE

^ ^ I didn 't open it, ' ' she said at last, ^ * not till
I had eaten some breakfast. I didn't dare. I
saw it was from the bank and I thought it might
be about the overdraft. . . . All the while.

She was weeping. '^ All the while I was
eating my egg. . . . ' '

'' Oh what is iW

She grimaced.

** From him,''

He stared.

* * A cheque. Job — come through — from
him. From our boy.''

His mouth fell open, he drew a deep breath.
His tears came. He raised himself, and was
reminded of his bandaged state and dropped
back again. He held out his lean hand to
her.

'' He's a prisoner? " he gasped. ^^ Alive? ''

She nodded. She seemed about to fling her-
self violently upon his poor crumpled body.
Her arms waved about seeking for something
to embrace.

Then she flopped down in the narrow space
between bed and paper-adorned fireplace, and
gathered the counterpane together into a lump
with her clutching hands. ' * Oh my baby boy ! ' '
she wept. ' * My haby boy. . . .

LETTERS AND A TELEGRAM 229

** And I was so wicked about the mourning.
... I was so wicked. . . . '^

Mr. Huss lay stiff, as the doctor had ordered
him to do ; but the hand he stretched down could
just touch and caress her hair.

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