Читать книгу The Holy Terror - H.G. Wells - Страница 17

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Old Doctor Carstall, whom Mrs. Whitlow considered so big and deliberate, had often wanted to talk things over with his son, things in general, fundamental things, what everything was for and what one thought one was up to, and things of that sort, and like all intelligent fathers he was afraid of his son and shy of him. These young people, he felt, know so much more than we do and so much less than we do; one ought to make some sort of show-down to them and get some idea of what they thought they were doing. There ought to be that much continuity between the generations. His son's visit to his home en route for the Alps, that trite and wholesome and not too expensive playground for the earnest young don, seemed to give just the occasion needed. They sat at dinner, an excellent dinner, for the doctor was an easy and stimulating master to his cook.

"The world seems in a queer state nowadays," the old man began. "What do you make of it all, Dick?"

"An old world dying, a new one unable to get born—Who was it said something like that?"

"Only worlds don't die and get born again," said the doctor. "If a world dies, it dies, and there's an end to it. There's no more on its line...You might perhaps—Of course, if you're thinking of obstetrics, the image might just pass...Died in childbirth...Something of that sort...Is your world dying, Dick? And what are you doing about it?"

Young Carstall had been sitting at his ease and he had answered his father after the manner of casual conversation. Now he sat up a little. He felt the slovenliness of his previous response. "No one of my age, sir, thinks his world is dying," he said. "It isn't natural. But we're certainly in for troubled times. Dangerous times.

"Those fellows who lecture to us about the world and who talk on the radio and write in the magazines and papers and all that have got hold of a phrase lately; what is it? Ah!—imperfect adaptation.

"Not bad as an elementary statement. Don't you agree, Father? Imperfect adaptation to all the new powers and implements in the world. Following them up clumsily, using them vulgarly and not keeping pace with the new possibilities and dangers. Particularly the dangers. Air-war and disorganisation generally. It seems fairly obvious."

"A few years ago we used to talk about morality failing to keep its ascendency over—what was it?—material progress?"

"Said by bishops usually, Father. I don't attach much value to all that scolding of aeroplanes and the cinema and the radio and motor cars and so on. No. It's the moral side which has to adapt. It always has had to adapt. There's no such thing as a fixed and final morality. Though the bishops like to think so. The immutable laws of Heaven! They're like obstinate men with a dying patent—or a vanishing trade. Their stuff doesn't go any more and they won't give it up. No, they won't give it up. Until the Church files its petition in bankruptcy and there are no more stipends forthcoming. But their game is pretty nearly over, all the same. We have to get new values and ideas to fit these inflexible new facts we've got ourselves up against. Or come a cropper."

"You mean?"

"Political ideas. Religion. History. Ownership. All the ideas we have about such things are threadbare and rotten and splitting. I suppose they've all got to be changed. The material facts won't change."

"Such facts as?"

"Three hundred miles an hour travel. News almost instantaneous. Limitless power. Over-production—whenever you try in the least, that is. Health control. Population control. No animal has ever faced such changes in what it can do and what it can bring down on itself, and survived."

"I know that song, Dick. Yes. I can sing it almost in unison with you. I guess we agree pretty completely about all that. Man is now a new animal, a new and different animal; he can jump a hundred miles, see through brick walls, bombard atoms, analyse the stars, set about his business with the strength of a million horses. And so forth and so on. Yes. Yes. But all the same he goes on behaving like the weak little needy ape he used to be. He grabs, snarls, quarrels, fears, stampedes and plays in his immense powder magazine until he seems likely to blow up the whole damned show. Eh?"

"That's on the face of things, Father."

"That's where we stand. That's our situation."

"That's our situation. Yes...You read your Nature, I see. You keep up with the times."

"I shan't do that much longer, Dick."

"You're good for another twenty years. I don't need to be a doctor to tell you that."

"Not very good for action now. Retiring from active practice. Quite soon. Yes. I see the distant land of the future like Moses, but you—you have to carry on...The problem comes to you. Sixty years of life may be in front of you. Sixty tremendous years. What are you going to do about it, Dick? Is it all going to happen to you or are you going to do something about it? It's for your generation now, you know, to do something about it. No good blaming us. That won't help you."

"Inform ourselves, I suppose. Readjust our imaginations. Think out a new behaviour."

For an interval the elder man answered nothing.

"I suppose," he resumed presently, "that some sort of mental renascence is possible. A sufficient renascence. I hope so. But I see very few signs of it. That adaptation you talk about...There's a lot of unteachable stuff in humanity. Down here I've been watching a little section of mankind, bringing new individuals into the world, seeing the old ones drop out of it, seeing the insides and the undersides and the backsides of the creatures. Queer stuff and weak stuff, they are. Mean. A lot of malice in them. And also a sort of obduracy. Do you know that almost always they lie to me about themselves. Their doctor, I am, and they lie to me. Out of self-protective vanity—mostly. They come for advice and then they fake their facts and dodge their medicine. Only just a few work with me. Silly stuff, they are. Intricately silly."

"All of them?"

"Most. There's differences. Considerable differences. They vary. Their imaginations vary. And their go. Very widely. So widely that at times I seem to be dealing with different species of creature. But on the whole I don't see that renascence of will and understanding which is needed to head off catastrophe. No..."

He paused, but his son remained silently attentive.

"Maybe it isn't altogether hopeless. Maybe there are different species in mankind—all mixed up. That idea seems to be getting about, Dick. You must have heard of it. Maybe the real differences in men lie in the kinks of their brains. Scattered about among the silly multitudes there may be men of a different quality—with a different power of vision."

"A sort of anonymous unsuspected aristocrats?"

"Exactly."

"So you don't believe in democracy any longer?"

"I never did. Look at 'em! Do you?"

"I'd like to."

"But you don't."

"But during your forty years of practice," said the younger man, "hasn't there been a certain amount of general, all over, mental progress? More education, more books, more information? Not enough, I admit, but some. If only we were able to increase the tempo of that sort of thing?..."

The old man shook his head with a smile of unbelief.

"You'll never get the whole lot intelligent. You'll only widen the gap. A born fool is a fool to the end. Maybe there will be more and more of the right sort proportionally. As they get opportunities to emerge. But the crowd will remain a crowd and behave like a mob...That's where I stand, Dick."

"I don't like to feel that is right. Somehow—at my age—and with a sort of implicit reservation about our noble selves, you know, Daddy..."

He made a grimace.

"You don't like that, and neither do I. At my age, too, Dick. It makes me feel—uncomfortable, to admit even to myself that there are these differences. But if the truth is that all men are not equal, then is it fair to treat an inferior as an equal? Even at golf you give a handicap. And I don't ask my patients to vote on their treatment and then blame them for the result."

Then with a change of manner that his son found very characteristic, he said: "This is getting academic..."

Dick didn't seem to mind. He was plainly interested in this evidently long-meditated discourse. He waited for his father to resume.

"Well, anyhow, the practical outcome of all these crude democratic ideas, is that men of our quality—yes, damn it! we have a quality—excuse themselves from the hard and thankless service they owe—not to the crowd, Dick, but to the race. (Much good it will do us to shirk like that in the long run.) We will not presume, we say, no. We shrug our shoulders and leave the geese, the hungry sheep, the born followers, call them what you will, to the leaders who haven't our scruples. The poor muts swallow those dead old religions no longer fit for human consumption, and we say 'let 'em'. They devour their silly newspapers. They let themselves be distracted from public affairs by games, by gambling, by shows and coronations and every sort of mass stupidity, while the stars in their courses plot against them. We say nothing. Nothing audible. We mustn't destroy the simple faith that is marching them to disaster. We mustn't question their decisions. That wouldn't be democratic. And then we sit here and say privately that the poor riff-raff are failing to adapt themselves to those terrible new conditions—as if they had had half a chance of knowing how things stand with them. They are shoved about by patriotisms, by obsolete religious prejudices, by racial delusions, by incomprehensible economic forces. Amidst a growth of frightful machinery..."

He stopped short and stared at his son and his son smiled back at him faintly and nodded for him to go on.

"You haven't been watching a community for four full decades, Dick. I have. My practice here is a fair sample of mankind...I have seen a sort of self-confidence fading out of this world. Like a twilight. When I bought this practice everyone who came to me, every man Jack of them, felt he had a place in the world, that there were things he ought to do, and things he mustn't do. Maybe people were a little lower then, nearer the earth, but that was how things were. A normal man got along in a system he thought he understood. Now—

"Dick, people aren't nearly as straight in business as they were. They've ceased to feel that honesty is the best policy. They've found themselves put out of business by competition they think unfair. They try to get even by counter-cheating. And they aren't clever enough. They find the incomes they had counted on, their pay or what not, raided by taxation, shattered by currency manipulation and slumps, knocked to pieces by all this messing about with money, this inflation, deflation, and all the rest of it. Even the wages-earners never know now what their money can buy. And more and more of them are pottering about with poor little parcels of stocks and shares, hunting after Capital Appreciation. That's the great phrase now. I've heard it three times from three separate people this past fortnight. There's ten men speculating in a small miserable way for one who knew his way to a broker forty years ago. Ten, do I say?—fifty! They lie awake at nights. They get chronic indigestion. They get neurasthenia and neuritis. Some are frankly betting. These football pools are a sort of disease of vain hopes, social dropsy. The women bet. It was unheard of in the old days. There's hardly a man in my area now, Dick, under fifty, who finds any satisfaction in a job well done, or believes that it will secure him any sort of reward. Think of what that means in social stability...

"And the women I have to deal with, Dick, the younger women; they're all demoralised as we understood demoralisation. They don't understand themselves. There was a certain amount of sly adultery and still slyer fornication going on then, but it didn't disturb the even surface of things. It was just healthy incontinence...Chastity now is out of fashion. Children are an encumbrance. The women want, or feel they ought to want, a sort of gadding-about amusement and a man has to pay for it. They sell themselves almost frankly, wholesale or retail. They aren't steady because the men aren't steady. The men are insecure and rattled and the women follow suit. You'd be amazed, Dick, at the people who come along nowadays hinting at abortion..."

He hesitated and plunged. "What are you making of women, Dick? What are you going to do about all that?"

"I like them," said Dick after a long, downcast pause for reflection. "I like them a lot."

"And they like you?" said his father.

"Things have changed, Father."

"Mutual comfort, eh? That's all got relaxed. It's all different from the repressions of my time. Perhaps it's not worse, perhaps it's better, but it's all shockingly different...And that sort of thing is not going to eat you up?"

"I don't think so. No. So far it hasn't done any harm to my work, and I don't think it will."

"Sex," his father reflected, "used to have a certain biological significance. And social aspects. And a kind of idea of mating. Is all that changed?"

"It's changed in a way, yes."

"And what becomes of your young women in the end? Rather jaded little bitches, eh? Some, anyhow. Some don't seem to suffer much damage, but most who go loose stay loose. And a loose woman who is getting old is a damn nasty thing...And yourself, Dick, as you grow older?"

"I think I shall marry. Long before I grow nasty. You ought to have some grandchildren, you know. It won't be a grand passion...Maybe it's a defect, Father, but the truth is I don't like romance in love. I like humour...

"I'm not so sure of that mating business either. Women's minds don't seem to move with ours. They don't keep step with us. I've seen that. I guess I shall have time to think about it some more before I fix myself. When Adam delved and Eve span, there was a sort of partnership. But now—do men and women hunt in couples? Can they? Under the new conditions. My work...I'd hate to have a wife who knew too much about my work. When I was going slack, when I was casting about in my mind, preoccupied, in that sort of exasperating, dissatisfied worry one must go through, when one is feeling about for something missing. Think of the horror of a nice intelligent question at the breakfast-table! 'Tell me all about it, darling'...But all the same I'd hate to have a wife who knew nothing about it."

"There's a middle way," said his father. "Maybe you'll not marry, Dick, maybe you'll never find a wife at all, but all the same some woman will come along, who will think you over and decide to marry you. And do it. I'm inclined to think that's the way things are going. Anyway it's the way things ought to go. It's their business really. Damn it! What else are they for? You aren't likely to be too rich or too conspicuous, to attract the exploiting sort. But you're not unattractive, Dick."

"I take after you, Father, a bit."

"You'll be picked all right. But it will be more her business than yours, and if things go on as they are going, she'll probably ask you. I've watched people. Picking out women by men is silly. They don't give their minds to it. Far better have it the other way about. Though I doubt whether they ought to pick much before two or three and twenty. That's by the way. Be sure she has our sense of humour, Dick, and then marry her and thank God for her—even if she gives you moments of doubt. A woman with unsatisfied desires or a craving vanity is the worst thing in life, but a woman with living and responsive things to protect and take care of, is the best. Believe me..."

And then the doctor made what he firmly believed was an entirely original, outstanding and remarkable statement—the statement that a countless multitude of widowers in his position have been moved to make.

"There never was a woman in the whole world," he said, "so good and uncomplicated, so generous and self-forgetful, as your mother. I wonder if you remember her. I never knew anyone with so swift and sure a judgment of character. You couldn't harbour a mean thought when she was about. And yet she regarded politics as a kind of male silliness—like a hunt or race-meeting—she thought science was woolgathering and she hadn't the slightest idea of the—the blundering uncertainties of medical practice. She thought I cured whenever a cure was possible. Fifteen years ago, she died, and I talk to her in my dreams still. I think of things I should like to tell her. Sometimes when I am in trouble and sometimes just because I want to share something with her. But one can't do things like that, Dick. So that's that...I'm wandering, Dick, from what we were talking about..."

He mused for a moment and returned to his original drift.

"You think your scientific work is good enough to hold your imagination and carry you on? It opens out, eh? That second paper of yours certainly had a periscope. It ranged...Sometimes I think we biologists may find ourselves coming into politics from our own angle. If things go on as they are going—We may have to treat the whole world as a mental hospital. The entire species is going mad; for what is madness but a complete want of mental adaptation to one's circumstances? Sooner or later, young man, your generation will have to face up to that."

He stopped and looked at his son's face.

"Those—what was it we said?—anonymous unsuspected aristocrats," said the younger man, and thought.

He leant forward on the table and picked his way among his ideas as he spoke. "I have an idea, Father, a half-formed idea, that before we can go on to a sane new order, there has to be a far more extensive clearing-up of old institutions...The world needs some sort of scavenging, a burning-up of the old infected clothes, before it can get on to a new phase. At present it is enormously encumbered...This is just a shadowy idea in my mind...Something like breaking down condemned, old houses. We can't begin to get things in order until there has been this scavenging phase. And, you see, what one might call civilised men can't do that sort of rough work."

"I suppose it has to be rough work?"

"What do you think? Conservatism insists on it. The old order of things, the patriots, the priests and the old laws won't deal with reasonable men. They won't hear of it. They're cunning, they're subtle in their way. Subtly stupid. They've got an unintelligent suicidal instinct for what they think is self-preservation. They won't stand criticism; they won't adapt. They'll listen and seem to agree and they'll play tricks. They're afraid of any light, any clearness. They fog education. They obstruct. What! Deal with us! They're much more disposed to deal with the roughs and turn them against us. You've got to capture the rough from them, you've got to use the rough against them, educate him, civilise him—as far as he will stand it."

"A bit roundabout and underhand," said the old man. "Modern jesuitry. Rather on old Marx's lines, eh? Call these roughs 'proletarian' and there you are! Flatter them until you've organised their discipline. Maybe I misunderstand you?"

"I'm telling you my ideas, Father, as well as I can. You've asked for it. But I see no way out of the present break-up, but 'Let the best rough win'. Then so soon as you've got a top rough in the world, he'll have to organise efficiently to save himself from the next possible rough, and he'll have to be quick about it. The bigger he grows—and you know the next rough may be world-wide—the less of the administration, the less of the planning he and his gang will be able to control, and the more he'll have to use and trust the able, resolute, relatively unambitious type..."

"Meaning our sort? Our virtuous sort? Eh?"

"Well—yes."

"After the democracies, the demagogues who become dictators and after them a World Civil Service? Fabian permeation and all that. And I'm not so sure of that Civil Service. It may develop a high standard of comfort and a taste for dependants."

The young man reconsidered it. "All sorts of complications and interludes," he said, "but, like it or not, that I take it is the general shape of the story ahead. A World Civil Service if you like—but based, that's the restraining force—on a World Public Opinion."

"Something of that sort," said the doctor, with a grape in his mouth, "existed in Egypt. In Ancient Egypt. Which was practically a world in itself. B.C. two thousand. Charming cultivated people."

For a time they gave their attention to dessert.

"Civilisation has always been something of a patch-up," reflected the doctor. "You seem pretty convinced that it has to be worse before it is better...I agree...This particular earthquake looks likely to be the biggest so far. How do you see it in terms of yourself, Dick? You may not be able to keep out of the way of these—what do you call them?—scavengers. Concentration camp or prison examination. You cannot smash and remake a social system without breaking men—incidentally and accidentally—and the chances may pick on you to be broken. It may degrade you, Dick. You won't be able to help yourself if your skull gets burst open or your brain or your mind gets exhausted or poisoned. After all, it won't be the end of the world, but it may be the end of your world. That's as may be, you say...I agree...It will mean you will begin your decay before you are dead. A slight but nowadays not an uncommon inversion of the normal order. But an end comes to all of us. Until then and while you are yourself, you mean to keep a stiff backbone. Eh? No cringing, no compromise."

"I want that," said his son. "A stiff backbone, I mean. As long as possible I will keep out of money-making and politics and the scrambles and stampedes, and go on with my special work. You've made it possible. But if a straight challenge comes, if I'm absolutely prevented from working or if I see a plain occasion before me and my sort..."

"Working, waiting and watching for something that may call you and compel you...Waiting for the time when dictators dwindle and roughs relax...You might do worse...For the life of me, I don't see what else there is to do now. If you fight them now you'll only fight for the old system."

With a palpable effort not to seem self-indulgent and to throw a sacramental flavour about the gesture, Doctor Carstall poured himself some of his own very excellent brandy. "Good luck to you, my son. I'm glad we've had this talk."