Part 7

“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 personalities. What is there personal in us that can live? What makes us our very selves? It is all a matter of little mean things, small differences, 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 achievements?... 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 will be like the younger men. There is no personality in hope and honour and righteousness and truth.... My son has gone. He has gone 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 Universal, 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, without 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 universe torment and slay me, yet will I trust in Him. And if He also must die—Nevertheless 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 interestin’,” said Dr. Barrack, leaning forward upon his folded arms upon the table, and considering his words carefully.

“It’s interestin’,” 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 psychologist—a doctor has to be. Of course, Sir Eliphaz, you’re not responsible for all the nonsense you have been talking about sublimated bricks and spook dogs made of concentrated 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 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 exaggerate. 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’ll feel odd right enough; tell her to produce 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, 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 Gilbert? Practically nothing. In the early Neolithic 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 unknown things, as they become known, will join on to the things we do know. They’ll complicate or perhaps simplify our ideas, but they won’t contradict our general ideas. They’ll be things in the system. They won’t get you out of the grip of the arguments Mr. Huss has brought forward. So far, so far as concerns _your_ Immortality, Sir Eliphaz, I am, you 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, gentlemen. 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 Eliphaz, 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 personally 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 limitations of the human intelligence, who takes the world as he finds it, and who takes himself as 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 universes 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 Providence, 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.

“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 Providentialist—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. Barrack. “A struggle for existence. About that I ask a very plain and simple question: why try to get behind it? That is It. It made me. I study it and watch it. It put me up like a cockshy, 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—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 Evolution 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? 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.”

Mr. Dad, stirred by the word ‘practical,’ made a noise of assent. But not a very confident 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 something 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 intelligence 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 justice in Mr. Huss, but that is no enduring criterion 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 beautiful sooner or later, rest assured. I daresay the hyenas admire each other—in the rutting 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 uncertain.

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 perfectly logical to me. It’s one of the things I can never understand about schoolmasters and politicians and suchlike, the way they seem to take it for granted you can educate and not bring in religion and socialism and all your beliefs. What _is_ education? Teaching young people to talk and read and write and calculate in order that they may be told how they stand 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 anywhere 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 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 at the last words and lifted his hand as if to smite the table. But, so good a thing is professional 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 amiable. 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 from this you conclude that the part a human 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 you may.”

“But your view is a grimmer one, Dr. Barrack; you say that this Process is utterly beyond 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 emptiness 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. Huss sat with compressed 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 black disorder and cruelties of space and time, but for mastery. 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 repudiation altogether of that same voluntary death in life....”

He moistened his lips and resumed.

“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 common life and effort with God. The nature of God’s struggle is the essence of our dispute. It is a struggle, with 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 incomprehensible. For good or ill—we can be no more than our strenuous selves. You must, you say, _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, somewhere 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 ourselves’ 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 miseries that arise from the disorderliness of men and that must continue age after age until 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 shadows have fallen upon my spirit....