Fowler nodded assent.
'And then sleep again. When man with his blazing lights made an
end to night in his towns and houses-it is only a hundred years
or so ago that that was done-then it followed he would presently
resent his eight hours of uselessness. Shan't we presently take
a tabloid or lie in some field of force that will enable us to do
with an hour or so of slumber and rise refreshed again?'
'Frobisher and Ameer Ali have done work in that direction.'
'And then the inconveniences of age and those diseases of the
system that come with years; steadily you drive them back and you
lengthen and lengthen the years that stretch between the
passionate tumults of youth and the contractions of senility. Man
who used to weaken and die as his teeth decayed now looks forward
to a continually lengthening, continually fuller term of years.
And all those parts of him that once gathered evil against him,
the vestigial structures and odd, treacherous corners of his
body, you know better and better how to deal with. You carve his
body about and leave it re-modelled and unscarred. The
psychologists are learning how to mould minds, to reduce and
remove bad complexes of thought and motive, to relieve pressures
and broaden ideas. So that we are becoming more and more capable
of transmitting what we have learnt and preserving it for the
race. The race, the racial wisdom, science, gather power
continually to subdue the individual man to its own end. Is that
not so?'
Fowler said that it was, and for a time he was telling Karenin of
new work that was in progress in India and Russia. 'And how is
it with heredity?' asked Karenin.
Fowler told them of the mass of inquiry accumulated and arranged
by the genius of Tchen, who was beginning to define clearly the
laws of inheritance and how the sex of children and the
complexions and many of the parental qualities could be
determined.
'He can actually DO--?'
'It is still, so to speak, a mere laboratory triumph,' said
Fowler, 'but to-morrow it will be practicable.'
'You see,' cried Karenin, turning a laughing face to Rachel and
Edith, 'while we have been theorising about men and women, here
is science getting the power for us to end that old dispute for
ever. If woman is too much for us, we'll reduce her to a
minority, and if we do not like any type of men and women, we'll
have no more of it. These old bodies, these old animal
limitations, all this earthly inheritance of gross
inevitabilities falls from the spirit of man like the shrivelled
cocoon from an imago. And for my own part, when I hear of these
things I feel like that-like a wet, crawling new moth that still
fears to spread its wings. Because where do these things take
us?'
'Beyond humanity,' said Kahn.
'No,' said Karenin. 'We can still keep our feet upon the earth
that made us. But the air no longer imprisons us, this round
planet is no longer chained to us like the ball of a galley
slave…
'In a little while men who will know how to bear the strange
gravitations, the altered pressures, the attenuated, unfamiliar
gases and all the fearful strangenesses of space will be
venturing out from this earth. This ball will be no longer enough
for us; our spirit will reach out… Cannot you see how that
little argosy will go glittering up into the sky, twinkling and
glittering smaller and smaller until the blue swallows it up.
They may succeed out there; they may perish, but other men will
follow them…
'It is as if a great window opened,' said Karenin.
Section 9
As the evening drew on Karenin and those who were about him went
up upon the roof of the buildings, so that they might the better
watch the sunset and the flushing of the mountains and the coming
of the afterglow. They were joined by two of the surgeons from
the laboratories below, and presently by a nurse who brought
Karenin refreshment in a thin glass cup. It was a cloudless,
windless evening under the deep blue sky, and far away to the
north glittered two biplanes on the way to the observatories on
Everest, two hundred miles distant over the precipices to the
east. The little group of people watched them pass over the
mountains and vanish into the blue, and then for a time they
talked of the work that the observatory was doing. From that they
passed to the whole process of research about the world, and so
Karenin's thoughts returned again to the mind of the world and
the great future that was opening upon man's imagination. He
asked the surgeons many questions upon the detailed possibilities
of their science, and he was keenly interested and excited by the
things they told him. And as they talked the sun touched the
mountains, and became very swiftly a blazing and indented
hemisphere of liquid flame and sank.
Karenin looked blinking at the last quivering rim of
incandescence, and shaded his eyes and became silent.
Presently he gave a little start.
'What?' asked Rachel Borken.
'I had forgotten,' he said.
'What had you forgotten?'
'I had forgotten about the operation to-morrow. I have been so
interested as Man to-day that I have nearly forgotten Marcus
Karenin. Marcus Karenin must go under your knife to-morrow,
Fowler, and very probably Marcus Karenin will die.' He raised
his slightly shrivelled hand. 'It does not matter, Fowler. It
scarcely matters even to me. For indeed is it Karenin who has
been sitting here and talking; is it not rather a common mind,
Fowler, that has played about between us? You and I and all of
us have added thought to thought, but the thread is neither you
nor me. What is true we all have; when the individual has
altogether brought himself to the test and winnowing of
expression, then the individual is done. I feel as though I had
already been emptied out of that little vessel, that Marcus
Karenin, which in my youth held me so tightly and completely.
Your beauty, dear Edith, and your broad brow, dear Rachel, and
you, Fowler, with your firm and skilful hands, are now almost as
much to me as this hand that beats the arm of my chair. And as
little me. And the spirit that desires to know, the spirit that
resolves to do, that spirit that lives and has talked in us
to-day, lived in Athens, lived in Florence, lives on, I know, for
ever…
'And you, old Sun, with your sword of flame searing these poor
eyes of Marcus for the last time of all, beware of me! You think