no belief that science could save them, nor any idea that there
was a need to be saved. They could not, they would not, see the
gulf beneath their feet. It was pure good luck for mankind at
large that any research at all was in progress. And as I say,
sir, if that line of escape hadn't opened, before now there might
have been a crash, revolution, panic, social disintegration,
famine, and-it is conceivable-complete disorder… The
rails might have rusted on the disused railways by now, the
telephone poles have rotted and fallen, the big liners dropped
into sheet-iron in the ports; the burnt, deserted cities become
the ruinous hiding-places of gangs of robbers. We might have been
brigands in a shattered and attenuated world. Ah, you may smile,
but that had happened before in human history. The world is still
studded with the ruins of broken-down civilisations. Barbaric
bands made their fastness upon the Acropolis, and the tomb of
Hadrian became a fortress that warred across the ruins of Rome
against the Colosseum… Had all that possibility of reaction
ended so certainly in 1940? Is it all so very far away even
now?'
'It seems far enough away now,' said Edith Haydon.
'But forty years ago?'
'No,' said Karenin with his eyes upon the mountains, 'I think you
underrate the available intelligence in those early decades of
the twentieth century. Officially, I know, politically, that
intelligence didn't tell-but it was there. And I question your
hypothesis. I doubt if that discovery could have been delayed.
There is a kind of inevitable logic now in the progress of
research. For a hundred years and more thought and science have
been going their own way regardless of the common events of life.
You see-they have got loose. If there had been no Holsten there
would have been some similar man. If atomic energy had not come
in one year it would have come in another. In decadent Rome the
march of science had scarcely begun… Nineveh, Babylon, Athens,
Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first rough experiments in
association that made a security, a breathing-space, in which
inquiry was born. Man had to experiment before he found out the
way to begin. But already two hundred years ago he had fairly
begun… The politics and dignities and wars of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries were only the last phoenix blaze of the
former civilisation flaring up about the beginnings of the new.
Which we serve… 'Man lives in the dawn for ever,' said
Karenin. 'Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning. It
begins everlastingly. Each step seems vaster than the last, and
does but gather us together for the nest. This Modern State of
ours, which would have been a Utopian marvel a hundred years ago,
is already the commonplace of life. But as I sit here and dream
of the possibilities in the mind of man that now gather to a head
beneath the shelter of its peace, these great mountains here seem
but little things…'
Section 6
About eleven Karenin had his midday meal, and afterwards he slept
among his artificial furs and pillows for two hours. Then he
awoke and some tea was brought to him, and he attended to a small
difficulty in connection with the Moravian schools in the
Labrador country and in Greenland that Gardener knew would
interest him. He remained alone for a little while after that,
and then the two women came to him again. Afterwards Edwards and
Kahn joined the group, and the talk fell upon love and the place
of women in the renascent world. The cloudbanks of India lay
under a quivering haze, and the blaze of the sun fell full upon
the eastward precipices. Ever and again as they talked, some vast
splinter of rock would crack and come away from these, or a wild
rush of snow and ice and stone, pour down in thunder, hang like a
wet thread into the gulfs below, and cease…
Section 7
For a time Karenin said very little, and Kahn, the popular poet,
talked of passionate love. He said that passionate, personal
love had been the abiding desire of humanity since ever humanity
had begun, and now only was it becoming a possible experience. It
had been a dream that generation after generation had pursued,
that always men had lost on the verge of attainment. To most of
those who had sought it obstinately it had brought tragedy. Now,
lifted above sordid distresses, men and women might hope for
realised and triumphant love. This age was the Dawn of Love…
Karenin remained downcast and thoughtful while Kahn said these
things. Against that continued silence Kahn's voice presently
seemed to beat and fail. He had begun by addressing Karenin, but
presently he was including Edith Haydon and Rachel Borken in his
appeal. Rachel listened silently; Edith watched Karenin and very
deliberately avoided Kahn's eyes.
'I know,' said Karenin at last, 'that many people are saying this
sort of thing. I know that there is a vast release of
love-making in the world. This great wave of decoration and
elaboration that has gone about the world, this Efflorescence,
has of course laid hold of that. I know that when you say that
the world is set free, you interpret that to mean that the world
is set free for love-making. Down there,-under the clouds, the
lovers foregather. I know your songs, Kahn, your half-mystical
songs, in which you represent this old hard world dissolving into
a luminous haze of love-sexual love… I don't think you are
right or true in that. You are a young, imaginative man, and you
see life-ardently-with the eyes of youth. But the power that
has brought man into these high places under this blue-veiled
blackness of the sky and which beckons us on towards the immense
and awful future of our race, is riper and deeper and greater
than any such emotions…
'All through my life-it has been a necessary part of my work-I
have had to think of this release of sexual love and the riddles
that perfect freedom and almost limitless power will put to the
soul of our race. I can see now, all over the world, a beautiful
ecstasy of waste; "Let us sing and rejoice and be lovely and
wonderful."… The orgy is only beginning, Kahn… It was
inevitable-but it is not the end of mankind…
'Think what we are. It is but a yesterday in the endlessness of
time that life was a dreaming thing, dreaming so deeply that it
forgot itself as it dreamt, its lives, its individual instincts,