Read Ebook: The Messiah of the Cylinder by Rousseau Victor Coll Joseph Clement Illustrator

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Ebook has 1457 lines and 75109 words, and 30 pages

"Herman, I repeat that I have given my life to scientific investigation," he replied. "But I have always recognized the validity of the metaphysical inquiry. I believe Faith and Science have found their paths convergent. Lodge thinks so, too. Kelvin took that stand. James, your great psychologist, shifted before he died. Science must confine her activities within their natural bounds and not seek to play a pontifical part, or the excesses of the Scholastics will be repeated in a new and darker age."

"I cannot agree with you," cried Lazaroff vehemently. "An age is dawning when, relieved from their chains, men will look open-eyed into Nature to learn her secrets. Today civilization is being choked to death by the effete, the defective, whom a too benign humanitarianism suffers to live beneath the shelter of a worn-out faith. The fearful menace of a race of defectives has laid hold of the popular imagination. Soon we shall follow the lead of progressive America, and forbid them to propagate their kind. Here any statesman who dared suggest sterilization would be hounded from office. But England is awakening.

"It will go, that relic of degrading, savage superstition called the soul, the barbarous legacy of the ages enshrined in a hundred fairy stories. Science will rule. Man will be free. The logical State, finely conceived by Wells, without its rudimentary appendixes and fish-gills, will be the nation of the future. For we are outgrowing childish things. Man is coming of age. If only I could live to see it! But I was born a century too soon!"

The expression on Lazaroff's face at that moment was so singular that I could not take my eyes away from it.

"It will be a world of physical and mental perfection, too," he cried. "Of free men and women, freely mating, separating when the mating impulse is dead--"

"Yes, he is right, Father," Esther interposed eagerly. "Whatever else may come, the hour of woman's liberation is striking."

"That hour struck many times in the ancient world, my dear," her father answered. "And it brought, not liberation, but slavery." He turned to Lazaroff. "You want a world of men and women reared like prize cattle and governed by laws as mechanistic as your universe," he said. "Well, Herman, you have had that world. That was the pre-Christian world. Your free love, your eugenics has been tried in Rome, in Sparta, in many an ancient kingdom. And we know what those civilizations were.

"If you eugenists only knew the dreadful crop of dragon's teeth that you are scattering today upon the fertile soil of the unthinking mind! Because we, fortunately, live in the millennial lull of a transitional age, you think that human nature has changed; that the fury of the Crusades will never be renewed in fantastic social wars, and the madness of religious fratricide in the madness of Science become Faith. All the old evils are lying low, lurking in the minds of men, ready to spring forth in all their ancient fury when the wise and illogical compromises, evolved through centuries of experience, have been discarded. I sometimes think that Holy Russia has man's future in her charge. For without Christianity the moral nature of man will be where it has been in ages past. Social and economic readjustments leave it unchanged."

"A religion of slaves, of the weak and incompetent," said Lazaroff loudly.

"You think, then, that human passions have become emulsified by education? What a delusion!"

"Unquestionably. Permit me to refer to myself as an example of the crass materialist. For I do not believe in anything but matter. Matter is soul, as Haeckel proves. Yet, I am not on that account a man of base impulses. I do not want to wound, to kill, to steal, to torture--"

"Are you quite sure you know yourself, Herman?"

"But I utterly reject the efficacy of your Christianity, except in this low order of civilization. It is a dead faith, with its foolish miracles, its preposterous and unscientific dualism."

"And I say," cried Sir Spofforth, rising out of his chair, "that it is precisely the Christian norm, the unattainable ideal of Christ, working in the human heart, that has freed civilization from cruelty and shame. Why, look backward before Christ lived, and forward: don't you see that we are actually indwelling in Him, according to His promise? Think of the Christians burned as living torches in Nero's time, and read the writings of contemporary Romans, men of disciplined lives and a mentality as great as ours. Read Pliny, Tacitus, Seneca; read of the hopelessness of life when Rome was at her highest, and see if this stirred them. Picture Marcus Aurelius, the noble Stoic, presiding over the amphitheater. Study the manners and morals of Athens when her light burned most brightly. Contrast a thousand years of man's abasement, and try to set the Inquisition against that.

"Future ages will say this: that nobody, not one of our statesmen saw the course that had been set when the civil State was first established. Never before in history had tribe or nation existed but grew up round the focus of some god. The churchless State is a body without a soul. Warnings multiply--in France and in America--but who can read them? When religion goes, the spirit of the race is dying. It is just the ideal of Christ, enshrined in the minds of a few leaders of character and trained conviction, that has kept the world on its slow course of progress. And nothing else saves us from the unstable tyrannies of ancient days."

I was so stirred by Sir Spofforth's eloquence that I clapped my hands vigorously, although I did not wholly agree with him. Esther was staring at Lazaroff; she was partly convinced and wanted him to answer her father. But Lazaroff, ignoring her gaze, scowled at me across the table.

"So you are of the same mind, are you, Pennell?" he asked, not trying to disguise his sneer. "And you don't imagine that it is your missing five centimeters? Well, I hope that you may have your chance to find out for yourself. I hope you may, indeed." He nodded and smiled in a rather evil fashion.

"Well, I must really offer you all an apology," said Sir Spofforth, penitently. "Enough of these debatable subjects for a week at least. We two shall never agree on politics or religion, Herman. Let us go upstairs."

Since Sir Spofforth was a little infirm, and leaned on my arm to make his slow ascent of the stairs, we entered the drawing-room a full minute after the others. The room was empty; Esther and Lazaroff had gone into the big conservatory that opened out of the south side. I heard the rustle of the girl's dress as she moved among the palms, and Lazaroff speaking earnestly in a low voice.

"Sit down, Arnold," said Sir Spofforth, subsiding stiffly into his arm chair. "Thank you, my boy. I feel old age coming swiftly upon me nowadays. No, I am not self-deceived. It is strange, this sense of the daily diminution of the physical powers, and not at all unpleasant, either. It seems familiar, too, as if one had passed through it plenty of times before. It is something like bedtime, Arnold, but I hope and believe there will be a tomorrow, for I assure you I have an almost boyish zest for life, though rather contemplative than energetic for a while, till I have rested. There is a little forgetfulness of names and places, but memory seems to become more luminous as it falls back upon itself. Well, some day you will experience this. You two must carry on the work of the Institute. Herman is an able fellow, in spite of his mechanistic notions. But I wonder whether any woman could be happy with him?"

He watched me rather keenly as he said that.

"There's only one thing makes me want to live a little longer, Arnold," he continued, "and that is Esther's future. It would be a great satisfaction to me to see her settled happily before I go. Forgive an old man's frankness if I say that sometimes I have almost thought you two cared for each other."

"You are quite right in part, sir," I replied. "I do care for Esther a good deal."

"And she, I am sure, has a very warm feeling for you, Arnold. There is nobody whom I would rather have for Esther's husband than yourself."

"Well, sir, the fact is, we are not sure that our views are altogether harmonious," I confessed. "I am, as you know, rather sceptical about the newest views for revolutionizing woman's status, while Esther--"

"Is a full-fledged suffragist and has exalted notions about the race of the future. Tush, my boy! Never hold back proposing marriage because of intellectual differences. The race spirit, sitting up aloft and pulling the strings, is laughing at you."

"But, Sir Spofforth, to be candid, it was not I who held back," I answered.

"Hum! I see!" he answered, nodding his head. Then, very seriously, "My boy, I want you to win her. It would embitter my last days to see my daughter the wife of Herman Lazaroff. I have watched and tried to study him: it isn't his materialism, Arnold, it's his infernal will. He'll break everything and everybody that conflicts with it when he wakes up and knows his powers. Now he doesn't understand himself at all. He can see nothing interiorly, as good old Swedenborg would say. I tell you, Herman Lazaroff, able fellow as he is, and splendid brain, is a machine of devilish energy, and, unfortunately, fashioned for purely destructive purposes."

Like most old men, he had the habit of falling into soliloquy, and toward the end of his speech his voice dropped, and he spoke rather to himself than to me. Though I remembered his words afterward, at the time I regarded his indictment as the prejudice of an octogenarian. He was in his eightieth year, and there was no doubt his keen mind was failing. I was searching for a reply when Esther and Lazaroff came back from the conservatory.

"Sir Spofforth, Miss Esther is interested in our new freezing-plant," he said. "I thought, with your permission, that I would take her to see it lit up by electricity. You'll come too, Pennell?"

"Wouldn't daytime be better, Lazaroff?" I suggested, and I did not know what was the cause of the vaguely felt distrust that prompted my words. Certainly I had no fears of any sort, or reason for any. Yet, looking at Lazaroff's face, now flushed and somehow sinister, I remembered Sir Spofforth's words again.

"Let us go tonight," said Esther, and it seemed to me that there was a note of penitence in her voice, as if she wished to make Lazaroff amends.

She came slowly across the room toward us. She looked at Lazaroff--I thought remorsefully, and at me with an expression of understanding that I never had seen in her eyes before. My heart leaped up to meet that message. But that was the instant signal-flash of souls, and the next moment I detected in her glance the same sense of foreboding that mine must have shown her.

It is strange how instantaneously such complexities present themselves with convincing power. Though the knowledge lay latent in my mind, I am sure now I was aware that I should never set eyes upon Sir Spofforth, in life or death, again.

He rose up slowly. "Don't be long, my dear," he said to Esther. "I shall not wait up for you. Good night, Herman. Good night, Arnold." He passed the door and began to ascend the stairs. He turned. "Arnold!" he began. "No, never mind. I will tell you tomorrow."

He never told me. He was gone, and we three went downstairs, out of the house, and crossed the garden toward the Institute, whose squat form blocked the view of the road. Croydon, in the distance, hummed like a huge dynamo. The Bear dipped slantingly above; the wind was shaking down the fading petals of the rambler roses. I remember the picture more vividly than I perceived it then; the intense darkness, the white lights of the distant town, the yellow lamp glow on the short grass, cut off squarely by the window-sash and trisected by the window-bars. Lazaroff led the way, walking a little distance in front of us, toward the annex, a building just completed, in which was the new freezing-plant, with our few guinea-pigs, and the monkeys that had been bought recently, out of our own money, for the great experiment. He drew a key from his pocket and began fumbling with the lock. Esther stopped in the shadows at my side.

"He asked me to marry him," she said. "I told him never--never! That was the word I used. I used to think that I could care for him, Arnold, but in that instant I knew--yes, I knew my heart."

I knew mine too, and I took her in my arms in the shadow of the Institute. She lifted her mouth to mine. All the while Lazaroff was fumbling with the lock. Yet I am sure he was aware, by virtue of that intuition which tells us all vital things.

When he had opened the door he turned a switch, and the interior leaped into view round twenty points of light that pierced the shadows.

"Come in, Arnold," he said, turning to me--and I thought there was blood on his lip. "I will lead, and you and Miss Esther can follow me. Don't be alarmed, Miss Esther, if you hear the monkeys screaming. They grow lonely at night."

"Poor little things! How dreadful!" Esther said.

"We shall not keep them here very long," Lazaroff answered in extenuation. He stooped over a cane chair and picked up a warm shawl. "You will need to put this about you," he continued, standing back and leaving me to adjust it about Esther's shoulders.

So he had planned to bring her here; his subtle mind had foreseen even this detail. He left nothing to the unexpected. He lived up to his principles.

We passed between two silent dynamos. The freezing-plant was already in operation, but George, the machinist, went off duty at six, after stopping the dynamos, and the temperature did not rise much during the night. It was very cold. The moisture on the brick walls had congealed to a thin film of ice, and a frosted network covered the ammonia pipes. Lazaroff stopped in front of a large wooden chest, with a glass door.

"In this very ordinary-looking icebox we keep our choicest specimens," he said to Esther.

"Don't open that!" I exclaimed.

He laughed disagreeably. "I had no intention of doing so," he answered. "You applauded Sir Spofforth's mediaeval vitalistic views tonight, Pennell, and the transition from the dream to the reality might prove too disturbing for your peace of mind. Dream on, by permission of those five missing centimeters. It is such an extinguisher of the soul theory to see parts of the organism flourishing in perfect health, all ready to work and grow, devoid of consciousness and brain attachments. We have two-fifths of a guinea-pig's heart, Miss Esther, that is yearning to begin its pulsations as soon as it is placed in a suitable medium."

He passed on. Esther's fingers gripped my wrist tightly. "What an abominable man!" she whispered. "Arnold--my dear--to think I didn't know my mind until an hour ago! When he asked me, something seemed to strip the mask from his face and the scales from my eyes. I hate him--but I'm afraid of him, Arnold."

I drew her arm through mine and held her hand. Lazaroff preceded us down a flight of new concrete steps which had just dried. The cellar into which we descended had been used for storing packing-cases, and we had always gone down by a short ladder. It was here that the experiment was to be made. I had been shown nothing of Lazaroff's preparations.

The cellar had been paved with concrete since my last visit, and I thought it looked smaller than formerly. As we went down we heard the monkeys begin to chatter. Lazaroff switched on a light. I saw a cage of guinea-pigs close at hand. They squealed and scurried among their straw. Two monkeys, awakened by the light, put their arms about each other and grimaced at me. A tiny marmoset stretched out its black, human-like arms between the bars appealingly. It looked very lonely and child-like as it blinked at us. What a terrific journey into the future Lazaroff, like some god, planned for that atom of flesh.

He stopped at the end of the cellar. I perceived now that the brick wall was new; it seemed to be an inner wall, bounding a partition; that was why the cellar looked smaller. The half-dried mortar clung flabbily to the interstices.

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