LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE 
 
 Ex Libris 
 ISAAC FOOT
 
 THE UNDYING FIRE
 
 ^ Mr. WELLS has also written the 
 
 following uovels : 
 
 LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM 
 
 KIPPS 
 
 MR. POLLY 
 
 THE \(rHEELS OF CHANCE 
 
 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 ANN VERONICA 
 
 TONO BUNGAY 
 
 MARRIAGE 
 
 BEALBY 
 
 THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS 
 
 THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN 
 
 THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 
 
 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 THE SOUL OF A BISHOP 
 
 JOAN AND PETER 
 
 ^ The followixig fantastic and imagina- 
 tive romances : 
 
 THE WAR OF THE WORLDS 
 
 THE TIME MACHINE 
 
 THE WONDERFUL VISIT 
 
 THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU 
 
 THE SEA LADY 
 
 THE SLEEPER AWAKES 
 
 THE FOOD OF THE GODS 
 
 THE WAR IN THE AIR 
 
 THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON 
 
 IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET 
 
 THE WORLD SET FREE 
 
 And numerous Short Stories now collected in 
 
 One Volume under the title of 
 
 THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND 
 
 fl A Series of books upon Social, ReU- 
 gious and Political questions : 
 
 ANTICIPATIONS (1900) 
 
 nLANKIND IN THE MAKING 
 
 FIRST AND LAST THINGS 
 
 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 A MODHRN UTOPIA 
 
 THE FUTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE 
 WORLD 
 
 WHAT IS COMING ? 
 
 WAR AND THE FUTURE 
 
 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING 
 
 IN THE FOURTH YEAR 
 
 q And two little books about children's 
 play, called : 
 
 FLOOK GAMES and LITTLE WARS
 
 THE UNDYING FIRE 
 
 A CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 
 
 -^' BY 
 
 H. G. WELLS 
 
 GASSRLL AND COMPANY, LTD 
 London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
 
 First published May 1919 
 Reprinted September 1919, March 1920
 
 All Schoolmasters and Schoolmistresses 
 
 and every 
 
 Teacher in the World
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 1. The Prologue in Heaven . . 1 
 
 2. At Sea View, Sundering on Sea . 18 
 
 3. The Three Visitors ... 42 
 
 4. Do We Truly Die ? . . . 109 
 
 5. Elihu Reproves Job . . . 146 
 
 6. The Operation . . . .220 
 
 7. Letters and a Telegram . . 236
 
 The Undying Fire 
 
 CHAF :er the first 
 
 THE PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN 
 
 § 1 
 
 Two eternal beings, magnificently enhaloed, 
 the one in a blinding excess of white radiance 
 and the other in a bewildering extravagance of 
 colours, converse amidst stupendous surround- 
 ings. These surroundings are by tradition 
 palatial, but there is now also a marked cosmic 
 tendency about them. They have no definite 
 locality ; they are above and comprehensive of 
 the material universe. 
 
 There is a quality in the scene as if a futur- 
 ist with a considerable knowledge of modern 
 chemical and physical speculation and some 
 obscure theological animus had repainted the 
 designs of a pre-Raphaclite. The vast pillars 
 vanish into unfathomable darknesses, and the
 
 2 The Undying Fire 
 
 complicated curves and whorls of the decora- 
 tions seem to have been traced by the flight of 
 elemental particles. Suns and planets spin 
 and glitter through the avanturine depths 
 of a floor of crystalline ether. Great winged 
 shapes are in attendance, wrought of irides- 
 cences and bearing globes, stars, rolls of the 
 law, flaming swords, and similar symbols. 
 The voices of the Cherubim and Seraphim can 
 be heard crying continually, " Holy, Holy, 
 Holy." 
 
 Now, as in the ancient story, it is a recep- 
 tion of the sons of God. 
 
 The Master of the gathering, to whom one 
 might reasonably attribute a sublime boredom, 
 seeing that everything that can possibly happen 
 is necessarily known to him, displays on the 
 contrary as lively an interest in his interlocutor 
 as ever. This interlocutor is of course Satan, 
 the Unexpected. 
 
 The contrast of these two eternal beings is 
 very marked ; while the Deity, veiled and 
 almost hidden in light, with his hair like wool 
 and his eyes like the blue of infinite space, 
 conveys an effect of stable, remote, and moun 
 tainous grandeur, Satan has the compact alert-
 
 The Prologue in Heaven 3 
 
 ness of habitual travel; he is as definite as a 
 grip-sack, and he brings a flavour of initiative 
 and even bustle upon a scene that would 
 otherwise be one of serene perfection. His 
 halo even has a slightly travelled look. He 
 has been going to and fro in the earth and 
 walking up and down in it ; his labels are still 
 upon him. His status in heaven remains asf 
 undefined as it was in the time of Job ; it it 
 uncertain to this day whether he is to be re- 
 garded as one of the sons of God or as an 
 inexplicable intruder among them. (But see 
 upon this question the Encyclopredia Biblica 
 under his name.) Whatever his origin there 
 can be little doubt of his increasing assurance 
 of independence and importance in the Divine 
 presence. His freedom may be sanctioned or 
 innate, but he himself has no doubt remaining 
 ot the security of his personal autonomy. He 
 believes that he is a necessary accessory to 
 God, and that his incalculable quality is an 
 indispensable relief to the acquiescences of the 
 Archangels. He never misses these reunions. 
 If God is omnipresent by a ralm necessity, 
 Satan is everywhere by an mtinite activity. 
 They engage in unending metaphysical dif-
 
 4 The Undying Fire 
 
 ferences into which Satan has imported a 
 tone of friendly badinage. They play chess 
 together. 
 
 But the chess they play is not the little 
 ingenious game that originated in India ; it is 
 on an altogether different scale. The Ruler 
 of the Universe creates the board, the pieces, 
 and the rules ; he makes all the moves ; he may 
 make as many moves as he likes whenever he 
 likes ; his antagonist, however, is permitted to 
 introduce a slight inexplicable inaccuracy into 
 each move, which necessitates further moves 
 in correction. The Creator determines and 
 conceals the aim of the game, and it is never 
 clear whether the purpose of the adversary is 
 to defeat or assist him in his unfathomable 
 project. Apparently the adversary cannot 
 win, but also he cannot lose so long as he can 
 keep the game going. But he is concerned, it 
 would seem, in preventing the development 
 of any reasoned scheme in the game.
 
 § 2 
 
 Celestial badinage is at once too high and 
 broad to come readily within the compass of 
 earthly print and understanding. The Satanic 
 element of unexpectedness can fill the whole 
 sphere of Being with laughter ; thrills begotten 
 of those vast reverberations startle our poor 
 wits at the strangest moments. It is the 
 humour of Satan to thrust upon the Master his 
 own title of the Unique and to seek to wrest 
 from him the authorship of life. (But such 
 jesting distresses the angels.) 
 
 " I alone create." 
 
 "But I— I ferment." 
 
 " Matter I made and all things." 
 
 " Stagnant as a sleeping top but for the 
 wabble I give it." 
 
 " You are just the little difference of the 
 individual. You are the little Uniqueness in 
 everyone and everything, the Unique that 
 breaks the law, a marginal idiosyncracy." 
 
 ** Sire, you are the Unique, the Uniqueness 
 of the whole." 
 
 5
 
 6 The Undying Fire 
 
 Heaven smiled, and there were halcyon 
 days in the planets. *' I shall average you out 
 in the end and you will disappear." 
 ' *' And everything will end." 
 
 "Will be complete." 
 
 "Without me! " 
 
 '* You spoil the symmetry of my universe." 
 
 "I give it life." 
 
 " Life comes from me." 
 
 " No, Sire, Hfe comes from me." 
 
 One of the great shapes in attendance be- 
 came distinct as Michael bearing his sword. 
 He blasphemes, O Lord. Shall I cast him 
 forth?" 
 
 " But you did that some time ago," 
 answered Satan, speaking carelessly over 
 his shoulder and not even looking at the 
 speaker. " You keep on doing it. And — 
 I am here." 
 
 " He returns," said the Lord soothingly. 
 " Perhaps I will him to return. What 
 should we be without him? " 
 
 "Without me, time and space would 
 freeze into crystalline perfection," said Satan, 
 and at his smile the criminal statistics of a 
 myriad planets displayed an upward wave.
 
 The Prologue in Heaven 7 
 
 " It is I who trouble the waters. I trouble all 
 things. I am the spirit of life." 
 
 " But the soul," said God. 
 
 Satan, sitting with one arm thrown over 
 the back of his throne towards Michael, raised 
 his eyebrows by way of answer. This talk 
 about the soul he regarded as a divine weak- 
 ness. He knew nothing of the soul. 
 
 " I made man in my own image," said 
 God. 
 
 " And I made him a man of the world. 
 If it had not been for me he would still be a 
 needless gardener — pretending to cultivate a 
 weedless garden that grew right because it 
 couldn't grow wrong — in ' those endless sum- 
 mers the blessed ones see.' Think of it, ye 
 Powers and Dominions ! Perfect flowers ! 
 Perfect fruits ! Never an autumn chill ! 
 Never a yellow leaf ! Golden leopards, noble 
 lions, carnivores unfulfilled, purring for his 
 caresses amidst the aimless friskings of lambs 
 that would never grow old ! Good Lord ! 
 How bored he would have been ! How bored ! 
 Instead of which, did I not launch him on the 
 most marvellous adventures? It was I who 
 gave him history. Up to the very limit of his
 
 ^ The Undying Fire 
 
 possibilities. Up to the very limit. . . . And 
 did not you, O Lord, by sending your angels 
 with their flaming swords, approve of what I 
 had done? " 
 
 God gave no answer. 
 
 *' But that reminds me," said Satan 
 unabashed.
 
 § 3 
 
 The great winged shapes drew nearer, for 
 Satan is the celestial raconteur. He alone 
 makes stories. 
 
 "There was a certain man in the land of 
 Uz whose name was Job." 
 
 "We remember him." 
 
 " We had a wager of sorts," said Satan. 
 " It was some time ago." 
 
 " The wager was never very distinct — and 
 now that you remind me of it, there is no 
 record of your paying." 
 
 "Did I lose or win? The issue was 
 obscured by discussion. How those men did 
 talk ! You intervened. There was no 
 decision." 
 
 " You lost, Satan," said a great Being 
 of Light who bore a book. " The wager was 
 whether Job would lose faith in God and 
 curse him. He was afflicted in every way, and 
 particularly by the conversation of his friends. 
 But there remains an undying fire in man." 
 
 9
 
 10 The Undying Fire 
 
 Satan rested his dark face on his hand, 
 and looked down between his knees through 
 the pellucid floor to that little eddying in the 
 ether which makes our world. "Job," he 
 said, " lives still." 
 
 Then after an interval : " The whole earth 
 is now — Job." 
 
 Satan delights equally in statistics and in 
 quoting scripture. He leant back in his seat 
 with an expression of quiet satisfaction. 
 "Job," he said, in easy narrative tones, 
 " lived to a great age. After his disagreeable 
 experiences he lived one hundred and forty 
 years. He had again seven sons and three 
 daughters, and he saw his offspring for four 
 generations. So much is classical. These 
 ten children brought him seventy grand- 
 children, who again prospered generally and 
 had large families. (It was a prolific strain.) 
 And now if we allow three generations to a 
 century, and the reality is rather more than 
 that, and if we take the survival rate as 
 roughly three to a family, and if we agree wiith 
 your excellent Bishop Usher that Job lived 
 about thirty-five centuries ago, that gives 
 us How many ? Three to the hundredth
 
 The Prologue in Heaven ii 
 
 and fifth power? ... It is at any rate a sum 
 vastly in excess of the present population of 
 the earth. . . . You have globes and rolls and 
 swords and siars here ; has anyone a slide 
 rule?" 
 
 But the computation was brushed aside. 
 
 " A thousand years in my sight are but as 
 yesterdar when it is past. I will grant what 
 you seek to prove ; that Job has become man- 
 kind,"
 
 § 4 
 
 The dark regard of Satan smote down 
 through the quivering universe and left the 
 toiling Hght waves behind. " See there," he 
 said pointing. " My old friend on his little 
 planet — Adam — Job — Man — like a roast on 
 a spit. It is time we had another wager." 
 
 God condescended to look with Satan at 
 mankind, circling between day and night. 
 " Whether he will curse or bless? '* 
 
 " Whether he will even remember God." 
 
 "I have given my promise that I will at 
 last restore Adam." 
 
 The downcast face smiled faintly. 
 
 " These questions change from age to 
 age," said Satan. 
 
 " The Whole remains the same." 
 
 "The story grows longer in either direc- 
 tion," said Satan, speaking as one who thinks 
 aloud ; " past and future unfold together. . . . 
 When the first atoms jarred I was there, and 
 so conflict was there — and progress. The 
 
 12
 
 The Prologue in Heaven 13 
 
 days of the old story have each expanded to 
 hundreds of millions of years now, and still I 
 am in them all. The sharks and crawling 
 monsters of the early seas, the first things that 
 crept out of the water into the jungle of fronds 
 and stems, the early reptiles, the leaping and 
 flying dragons of the great age of life, the 
 mighty beasts of hoof and horn that came 
 later; they all feared and suffered and were 
 perplexed. At last came this Man of yours, 
 out of the woods, hairy, beetle-browed and 
 blood-stained, peering not too hopefully for 
 that Eden-bower of the ancient story. It 
 wasn't there. There never had been a gar- 
 den. He had fallen before he arose, and the 
 weeds and thorns are as ancient as the flowers. 
 The Fall goes back in time now beyond man, 
 beyond the world, beyond iuiagination. The 
 very stars were born in sin. . . . 
 
 " If we can still call it sin," mused Satan. 
 
 " On a little planet this Thing arises, this 
 red earth, this Adam, this Edomite, this Job. 
 He builds cities, he tills the earth, he catches 
 the lightning and makes a slave of it, he 
 changes the breed of beast and grain. Clever 
 things to do, but sftill petty things. You say
 
 14 The Undying Fire 
 
 that in some manner he is to come up at last 
 to this. . . . He is too foolish and too weak. 
 His achievements only illmiiinate his limita- 
 tions. Look at his little brain boxed up from 
 gro\vth in a skull of bone ! Look at his bag 
 of a body full of rags and nidiments, a haggis 
 of diseases ! His life is decay. . . . Does he 
 grow? I do not see it. Has he made any 
 perceptible step forward in quality in the last 
 ten thousand years? He quarrels endlessly 
 and aimlessly with himself. ... In a little 
 while his planet will cool and freeze." 
 
 "In the end he will rule over the stars," 
 said the voice that was above Satan. " My 
 spirit is in him." 
 
 Satan shaded his face with his hand from 
 the effulgence about him. He said no more 
 for a time, but sat watching mankind as a boy 
 might sit on the bank of a stream and watch 
 the fry of minnows in the clear water of a 
 shallow. 
 
 " Nay," he said at last, " but it is in- 
 credible. It is impossible. I have disturbed 
 and afflicted h'm long enough. I have driven 
 him as far as he can be driven. But now T 
 am moved to pity. Let us end this dispute
 
 The Prologue in Heaven 15 
 
 It has been interesting, but now Is it 
 
 not enough? It grows cruel. He has reached 
 his limit. Let us give him a little peace now, 
 Lord, a little season of sunshine and plenty, 
 and then some painless universal pestilence 
 and so let him die." 
 
 " He is immortal and he does but begin." 
 
 " He is mortal and near his end. At times 
 no doubt he has a certain air that seems to 
 promise understanding and mastery in his 
 world ; it is but an air ; give me the power to 
 afflict and subdue him but a little, and after a 
 few squeaks of faith and hope he will whine 
 and collapse like any oUier bea«t. He will 
 behave like any kindred creature with a 
 smaller brain and a larger jaw ; he too is 
 doomed to suffer to no purpose, to stniggle by 
 instinct merely to live, to endure for a season 
 and then to pass. . . . Give me but the power 
 and you shall see his courage snap like a 
 rotten string." 
 
 " You may do all that you will to him, 
 only you must not slay him. For my spirit 
 is in him." 
 
 " That he will cast out of his own accord 
 — when I have ruined his hopes, mocked his
 
 i6 The Undying Fire 
 
 sacrifices, blackened his skies and filled his 
 veins with torture. . . . But it is too easy to 
 do. Let me just slay him now and end his 
 story. Then let us begin another, a different 
 one, and something more amusing. Let us, 
 for example, put brains — and this Soul of 
 yours — into the ants or the bees or the 
 beavers ! Or take up the octopus, already a 
 very tactful and intelligent creature! " 
 
 "No; but do as you have said, Satan. 
 For you also are my instrument. Try Man to 
 the uttermost. See if he is indeed no more 
 than a little stir amidst the shme, a fuss in 
 the mud that signifies nothing. ..."
 
 § 3 
 
 The Satan, his face hidden in shadow, 
 seemed not to hear this, but remained still and 
 intent upon the world of men. 
 
 And as that brown figure, with its vast 
 halo like the worn tail of some fiery peacock, 
 brooded high over the realms of being, this 
 that follows happened to a certain man upon 
 the earth. 
 
 i7
 
 CHAPTER THE SECOND 
 
 AT SEA VIEW, SUNDERING ON SEA 
 
 § 1 
 
 In an uncomfortable armchair of slippery black 
 horsehair, in a mean apartment at Sundering 
 on Sea, sat a sick man staring dully out of 
 the window. It was an oppressive day, hot 
 under a leaden sky ; there was scarcely a move- 
 ment in the air save for the dull thudding of 
 the gun practice at Shorehamstow. A multi- 
 tude of flies crawled and buzzed fitfully about 
 the room, and ever and again some chained- 
 up cur in the neighbourhood gave tongue to 
 its discontent. The window looked out upon 
 a vacant building lot, a wasite of scorched 
 grass and rusty rubbish surrounded by a fence 
 of barrel staves and barbed wire. Between 
 the ruinous notice-board of some pre-war 
 building enterprise and the gaunt verandah of 
 a convalescent home, on which the motionless 
 blue forms of two despondent wounded men in 
 
 i8
 
 Sea View, Sundering on Sea 19 
 
 deck chairs were visible, came the sea view 
 which justified the name of the house ; beyond 
 a wide waste of mud, over which quivered the 
 heat-tormented air, the still anger of the 
 heavens lowered down to meet in a line of hard 
 conspiracy, the steely criminality of the re- 
 mote deserted sea. 
 
 The man in the chair flapped his hand and 
 spoke. " You accursed creature," he said. 
 *' Why did God make flies? " 
 
 After a long interval he sighed deeply and 
 repeated: " TF/i?/ ? " 
 
 He made a fitful effort to assume a more 
 comfortable position, and relapsed at last into 
 his former attitude of brooding despondency. 
 
 When presently his landlady came in to 
 lay the table for lunch, an almost imperceptible 
 wincing alone betrayed his sense of the threat- 
 ening swish and emphasis of her movements. 
 She was manifestly heated by cooking, and a 
 smell of burnt potatoes had drifted in with her 
 appearance. She was a meagre little woman 
 with a resentful manner, glasses pinched her 
 sharp red nose, and as she spread out the grey- 
 white diaper and rapped down the knives and 
 forks in their places she glanced at him darkly
 
 20 The Undying Fire 
 
 as if his inattention aggrieved her. Twice she 
 was moved to speak and did not do so, but at 
 length she could endure his indifference no 
 longer. " Still feeling ill I suppose, Mr. 
 'Uss?" she said, in the manner of one who 
 knows only too well what the answer will be. 
 
 He started at the sound of her voice, and 
 gave her his attention as if with an effort. " I 
 beg your pardon, Mrs. Croome? " 
 
 The landlady repeated with acerbity, " I 
 arst if you was still feeling ill, Mr. 'Uss." 
 
 He did not look at her when he replied, but 
 glanced towards her out of the corner of his 
 eyes. " Yes," he said. " Yes, I am. I am afraid 
 I am ill." She made a noise of unfriendly 
 confirmation that brought his face round to 
 her. " But mind you, Mrs. Croome, I don't 
 ,want Mrs. Huss worried about it. She has 
 enough to trouble her just now. Quite 
 enough." 
 
 " Misfortunes don't ever come singly," 
 said Mrs. Croome with quiet satisfaction, lean- 
 ing across the table to brush some spilt salt 
 from off the cloth to the floor. She was not 
 going to make any rash promises about Mrs. 
 Huss.
 
 Sea View, Sundering on Sea 21 
 
 ** We 'ave to bear up with what is put 
 upon us," said Mrs. Croome. '* We 'ave to 
 find strength where strength is to be found." 
 
 She stood up and regarded him with pen- 
 sive malignity. " Very likely all you want is 
 a tonic of some sort. Very likely you've just 
 let yourself go. I shouldn't be surprised." 
 
 The sick man gave no welcome to this 
 suggestion. 
 
 " If you was to go round to the young 
 doctor at the corner — Barrack isnameis — very 
 likely he'd put you right. Everybody says 
 he's very clever. Not that me and Croome 
 put much faith in doctors. Nor need to. But 
 you're in a different position." 
 
 The man in the chair had been to see the 
 young doctor at the corner twice already, but 
 he did not want to discuss that interview with 
 Mrs. Croome just then. " I must think about 
 it," he said evasively. 
 
 " After all it isn't fair to yourself, it isn't 
 fair to others, to sicken for — it might be any- 
 think — without proper advice. Sitting there 
 and doing nothing. Especially in lodgings at 
 this time of year. It isn't, well — not what I 
 call considerate."
 
 22 The Undying Fire 
 
 ** Exactly," said Mr. Huss weakly. 
 
 '* There's homes and hospitals properly 
 equipped.'* 
 
 The sick man nodded his head apprecia- 
 tively. 
 
 " If things are nipped in the bud they're 
 nipped in the bud, otherwise they grow and 
 make trouble." 
 
 It was exactly what her hearer was 
 thinking. 
 
 Mrs. Croome ducked to the cellarette of a 
 gaunt sideboard and rapped out a whisky 
 bottle, a bottle of lime-juice, and a soda-water 
 syphon upon the table. She surveyed her 
 handiwork with a critical eye. " Cruet," she 
 w^hispered, and vanished from the room, leav- 
 ing the door, after a tormenting phase of 
 creaking, to slam by its own weight behind 
 her. . . . 
 
 The invalid raised his hand to his forehead 
 and found it wet with perspiration. His hand 
 was trembling violently. "My Godl^^ he 
 5\'hispered. . . .
 
 § 2 
 
 This man's name was Job Huss. His 
 father had been called Job before him, and so 
 far as the family tradition extended the eldest 
 son had always been called Job. Four weeks 
 ago he would have been esteemed by most 
 people a conspicuously successful and en- 
 viable man, and then had come a swift rush 
 of disaster. 
 
 He had been the headmaster of the great 
 modern public school at Woldingstanton in 
 Norfolk, a revived school under the Paper- 
 makers' Guild of the City of London ; he had 
 given himself without stint to its establish- 
 ment and he had made a great name in the 
 world for it and for himself. He had been 
 the first English schoolmaster to liberate the 
 modern side from the entanglement of its 
 lower forms with the classical masters ; it was 
 the only school in England where Spanish and 
 Kussian were honestly taught ; his science 
 laboratories were the best school laboratories 
 
 23
 
 24 The Undying Fire 
 
 in Great Britain and perhaps in the world, and 
 his new methods in the teaching of history 
 and politics broiiglit a steady stream of foreign 
 inquirers to Woldingstanton. The hand of 
 the adversary had touched him first jujit at the 
 end of the summer term. There had been an 
 epidemic of measles in which, through the 
 inexplicable negligence of a trusted nurse, 
 two boys had died. On the afternoon of the 
 second of these deaths an assistant master was 
 killed by an explosion in the chemical labora- 
 tory. Then on the very last night of the term 
 came the School House fire, in which two of 
 the younger boys were burnt to death. 
 
 Against any single one of these misfor- 
 tunes Mr. Huss and his school might have 
 maintained an unbroken front, but their quick 
 succession had a very shattering effect. Every 
 circumstance conspired to make these events 
 vividly dreadful to Mr. Huss. He had been 
 the first to come to the help of his chemistry 
 master, who had fallen among some carboys 
 of acid, and though still alive and struggling, 
 was blinded, nearly faceless, and hopelessly 
 mangled. The poor fellow died before he 
 rould be extrionted. On the night of the fire
 
 Sea View, Sundering on Sea 25 
 
 Mr. Huss strained himself internally and 
 bruised his foot very painfully, and he him- 
 self found and carried out the charred body 
 of one of the two little victims from the room 
 in which they had been trapped by the lock- 
 ing of a door during some " last day " rag- 
 ging. It added an element of exasperating 
 inconvenience to his greater distresses that all 
 his papers and nearly all his personal posses- 
 sions were burnt. 
 
 On the morning after the fire Mr. Huss's 
 solicitor committed suicide. He was an old 
 friend to whom Mr. Huss had entrusted the 
 complete control of the savings that were to 
 secure him and Mrs. Huss a dignified old age. 
 The lawyer was a man of strong political feel- 
 ings and liberal views, and he had bought 
 roubles to his utmost for Mr. Huss as for him- 
 self, in order to demonstrate his confidence in 
 the Russian revolution. 
 
 All these things had a quite sufficiently 
 disorganising effect upon Mr. Huss; upon 
 his wife the impression they made was alto- 
 gether disastrous. She was a .worthy but 
 emotional lady, effusive rather than steadfast. 
 Like the wives of most schoolmasters, she had
 
 36 The Undying Fire 
 
 been habitually preoccupied with matters of 
 domestic management for many years, and 
 her first reaction was in the direction of a 
 bitter economy, mingled with a display of 
 contempt she had never manifested hitherto 
 for her husband's practical ability. Far better 
 would it have been for Mr. Huss if she had 
 broken down altogether ; she insisted upon 
 directing everything, and doing so with a sort 
 of pitiful vehemence that brooked no contra- 
 diction. It was impossible to stay at Wold- 
 ingstanton through the vacation, in sight of 
 the tragic and blackened ruins of School 
 House, and so she decided upon Sundering 
 on Sea because of its nearness and its pre-war 
 reputation for cheapness. There, she an- 
 nounced, her husband must " pull himself 
 together and pick up," and then return to 
 the rebuilding of School House and the 
 rehabilitation of the school. Many formalities 
 had to be gone through before the building 
 could be put in hand, for in those days Britain 
 was at the extremity of her war effort, and 
 labour and material were unobtainable with- 
 out special permits and great exertion. Sun- 
 dering on Sea was as convenient a place as
 
 Sea View, Sundering on Sea 27 
 
 an5^where from >vhich to write letters, but his 
 idea of going to London to see influential 
 people was resisted by Mrs. Huss on the score 
 of the expense, and overcome when he per- 
 sisted in it by a storm of tears. 
 
 On her arrival at Sundering Mrs. Huss 
 put up at the Railway Hotel for the night, 
 and spent the next morning in a stern visita- 
 tion of possible lodgings. Something in the 
 unassuming outlook of Sea View attracted 
 her, and after a long dispute she was able to 
 beat down Mrs. Croome's demand from five 
 to four and a half guineas a week. That after- 
 noon some importunate applicant in an ex- 
 tremity of homelessness — for there had been a 
 sudden rush of visitors to Sundering — offered 
 six guineas. Mrs. Croome tried to call off her 
 first bargain, but Mrs. Huss was obdurate, 
 and thereafter all the intercourse of landlady 
 and her lodgers went to the unspoken refrain 
 of " I get four and a half guineas and I ought 
 to get six." To recoup herself Mrs. Croome 
 attempted to make extra charges for the use 
 of the bathroom, for cooking after five o'clock, 
 for cleaning Mr. Huss's brown boots with 
 specially bought brown cream instead of
 
 28 The Undying" Fire 
 
 blacking, and for the ink used by him in his 
 very voluminous correspondence ; upon all of 
 which points there was nmch argument and 
 bitterness. 
 
 But a heavier blow than any they had 
 hitherto experienced was now to fall upon Mr. 
 and Mrs. Huss. Job in the ancient story had 
 seven sons and three daughters, and they were 
 all swept away. This Job was to suffer a 
 sharper thrust ; he had but one dear only son, 
 a boy of great promise, who had gone into 
 the Royal Flying Corps. News came that he 
 had been shot down over the German lines. 
 
 Unhappily there had been a conflict 
 between Mr. and Mrs. Huss about this boy. 
 Huss had been proud that the youngster 
 should choose the heroic service; Mrs. Huss 
 had done her utmost to prevent his joining it. 
 The poor lady was now ruthless in her anguish. 
 She railed upon him as the murderer of their 
 child. She hoped he was pleased with his 
 handiwork. He could count one more name 
 on his hst; he could add it to the roll of 
 honour in the chapel " with the others." Her 
 baby boy ! This said, she went wailing from 
 the room.
 
 Sea View, Sundering on Sea 29 
 
 The wretched man sat confounded. That 
 " with the others " cut him to the heart. 
 For the school chapel had a list of V.C.'s, 
 D.C.M.'s and the like, second to none, and 
 it had indeed been a pride to him. 
 
 For some days his soul was stunned. He 
 was utterly exhausted and lethargic. He 
 could hardly attend to the most necessary 
 letters. From dignity, hope, and a great 
 sheaf of activities, his life had shrunken 
 abruptly to the compass of this dingy lodging, 
 pervaded by the squabbhng of two irrational 
 women ; his work in the world was in ruins ; 
 he had no strength left in him to struggle 
 against fate. And a vague internal pain 
 crept slowly into his consciousness. 
 
 His wife, insane now and cruel with 
 sorrow, tried to put a great quarrel upon him 
 about wearing mourning for their son. He 
 had always disliked and spoken against these 
 pomps of death, but she insisted that what- 
 ever callousness he might display she at least 
 must wear black. He might, she said, rest 
 assured that she would spend no more money 
 than the barest decency required; she would 
 buy the cheapest material, and make it up
 
 30 The Undying Fire 
 
 in her bedroom. But black she must have. 
 This resohition led straight to a conflict with 
 Mrs. Croome, who objected to her best bed- 
 room being littered with bits of black stuff, 
 and cancelled the loan of her sewing machine. 
 The mourning should be made, Mrs. Huss 
 insisted, though she had to sew every stitch 
 of it by hand. And the poor distraught lady 
 in her silly parsimony made still deeper 
 trouble for herself by cutting her material in 
 every direction half an inch or more short of 
 the paper pattern. She came almost to a 
 physical tussle with Mrs. Croome because of 
 the state of the carpet and counterpane, and 
 Mrs. Croome did her utmost to drag Mr. Huss 
 into an altercation upon the matter with her 
 husband. 
 
 " Croome don't interfere much, but some 
 things he or nobody ain't going to stand, Mr. 
 'Uss." 
 
 For some days in this battlefield of in- 
 satiable grief and petty cruelty, and with a 
 dull pain steadily boring its way to recog- 
 nition, Mr. Huss forced himself to carry on 
 in a fashion the complex of business necessi- 
 tated by the school disaster. Then in the
 
 Sea View, Sundering on Sea 31 
 
 night came a dream, as dreams sometimes 
 will, to enlighten him upon his bodily con- 
 dition. Projecting from his side he saw a 
 hard, white body that sent round, wormlike 
 tentacles into every corner of his being. A 
 number of doctors were struggling to tear 
 this thing away from him. At every effort 
 the pain increased. 
 
 He awoke, but the pain throbbed on. 
 
 He lay quite still. Upon the heavy dark- 
 ness he saw the word " Cancer," bright red 
 and glowing — as pain glows. . . . 
 
 He argued in the face of invincible con- 
 viction. He kept the mood conditional. *' If 
 it be so," he said, though he knew that the 
 thing was so. What should he do? There 
 would have to be operations, great expenses, 
 enfeeblement. . . . 
 
 Whom could he ask for advice? Who 
 would help him? . . . 
 
 Suppose in the morning he were to take 
 a bathing ticket as if he meant to bathe, and 
 struggle out beyond the mud-flats. He could 
 behave as though cramp had taken him 
 suddenly . . . 
 
 Five minutes of suffocation he would have
 
 32 The Undying Fire 
 
 to force himself through, and then peace — 
 endless peace ! 
 
 " No," he said, with a sudden gust of 
 courage. " I will fight it out to the end.*' 
 
 But his mind was too dull to form plans 
 and physically he was afraid. He would have 
 to find a doctor somehow, and even that little 
 task appalled him. 
 
 Then he would have to tell Mrs. Huss. . . . 
 
 For a time he lay quite still as if he 
 listened to the alternative swell and diminu- 
 endo of his pain. 
 
 " Oh ! if I had someone to help me ! " he 
 whispered, and was overcome by the lonely 
 misery of his position. " If I had someone ! ' * 
 
 For years he had never wept, but now 
 tears were wrung from him. He rolled over 
 and buried his face in the pillow and tried to 
 wriggle his body away from that steady gnaw- 
 ing ; he fretted as a child might do. 
 
 The night about him was as it were a great 
 watching presence that would not help nor 
 answer.
 
 §8 
 
 Behind the brass plate at the corner which 
 said " Dr. Elihu Barrack " Mr. Hiiss found 
 a hard, competent young man, who had 
 returned from the war to his practice at Sun- 
 dering after losing a leg. The mechanical 
 substitute seemed to have taken to him very 
 kindly. He appeared to be both modest and 
 resourceful ; his unfavourable diagnosis was 
 all the more convincing because it .was tenta- 
 tive and conditional. He knew the very 
 specialist for the case ; no less a surgeon than 
 Sir Alpheus Mengo came, it happened, quite 
 frequently to play golf on the Sundering 
 links. It would be easy to arrange for him 
 to examine Mr. Huss in Dr. Barrack's little 
 consulting room, and if an operation had to 
 be performed it could be managed with a 
 minimum of expense in Mr. Huss's own lodg- 
 ings without any extra charge for mileage and 
 the like. 
 
 "Of course," said Mr. Huss, '* of 
 
 ^ 33
 
 34 The Undying Fire 
 
 course," with a clear vision of Mrs. Croome 
 confronted with the proposal. 
 
 Sir Alpheus Mengo came down the next 
 Saturday, and made a clandestine examina- 
 tion. He decided to operate the following 
 week-end. Mr. IIuss was left at his own 
 request to break the news to his wife and to 
 make the necessary arrangements for this use 
 of Mrs. Croome's rooms. But it was two days 
 before he could bring himself to broach the 
 matter. 
 
 He sat now Hstening to the sounds of his 
 wife moving about in the bedroom overhead, 
 and to the muffled crashes that intimated the 
 climax of Mrs. Croome's preparation of the 
 midday meal. He heard her calling upstairs 
 to know whether Mrs. Huss was ready for her 
 to serve up. He was seized with panic as a 
 schoolboy might be who had not prepared his 
 lesson. He tried hastily to frame some intro- 
 ductory phrases, but nothing would come into 
 his mind save terms of disgust and lamenta- 
 tion. The sullen heat of the day mingled in 
 one impression with his pain. He was 
 nauseated by the smell of cooking. He felt 
 it would be impossible to sit up at table and
 
 Sea View, Sundering on Sea 35 
 
 pretend to eat the meal of burnt bacon and 
 potatoes that was all too evidently coming. 
 
 It came. Its progress along the passage 
 was announced by a clatter of dishes. The 
 door was opened by a kick. Mrs. Croome 
 put the feast upon the table with something 
 between defence and defiance in her manner. 
 " What else," she seemed to intimate, " could 
 one expect for four and a half guineas a week 
 in the very height of the season.^ From a 
 woman who could have got six ! " 
 
 " Your dinner's there," Mrs. Croome 
 called upstairs to Mrs. Huss in tones of 
 studied negligence, and then retired to her 
 own affairs in the kitchen, slamming the door 
 behind her. 
 
 The room quivered down to silence, and 
 then Mr. Huss could hear the footsteps of his 
 wife crossing the bedroom and descending the 
 staircase. 
 
 Mrs. Huss was a dark, graceful, and rather 
 untidy lady of seven and forty, .with the 
 bridling bearing of one who habitually repels 
 implicit accusations. She lifted the lid of the 
 vegetable dish. " I thought I smelt burn- 
 ing," she said. " The woman is impossible.''
 
 36 The Undying Fire 
 
 She stood by her chair, regarding her hus- 
 band and waiting. 
 
 He rose reluctantly, and transferred him- 
 self to a seat at table. 
 
 It had always been her custom to carve. 
 She now prepared to serve him. " No," he 
 said, full of loathing. '' I can't eat. I canH.^* 
 
 She put down the tablespoon and fork 
 she had just raised, and regarded him with 
 eyes of dark disapproval. 
 
 " It's all we can get," she said. 
 
 He shook his head. "It isn't that." 
 
 '* I don't know what you expect me to 
 get for you here," she complained. " The 
 tradesmen don't know us — and don't care." 
 
 " It isn't that. I'm ill." 
 
 " It's the heat. We are all ill. Everyone. 
 In such weather as this. It's no excuse for 
 not making an effort, situated as we are." 
 
 " I mean I am really ill. I am in pain." 
 
 She looked at him as one might look at 
 an unreasonable child. He was constrained 
 to more definite statement. 
 
 " I suppose I must tell you sooner or later. 
 I've had to see a doctor." 
 
 Without oonsultinjEf m<e! " 
 
 ((
 
 Sea View, Sundering on Sea 37 
 
 " I thought if it turned out to be fancy I 
 needn't bother you." 
 
 " But how did you find a doctor? " 
 
 *' There's a fellow at the corner. Oh ! it's 
 no good making a long story of it. I have 
 cancer. . . . Nothing v^all do but an opera- 
 tion." Self-pity wrung him. He controlled 
 a violent desire to crj^ " I am too ill to eat. 
 I ought to be lying down." 
 
 She flopped back in her chair and stared 
 at him as one stares at some hideous r.on- 
 strosity. " Oh! " she said. " To have cancer 
 now ! In these lodgings ! " 
 
 "I can't help it," he said in accents that 
 were almost a whine. " I didn't choose the 
 time." 
 
 *' Cancer! " she cried reproachfully. " The 
 horror of it ! " 
 
 He looked at her for a moment with hate 
 in his heart. He saw under her knitted brows 
 dark and hostile eyes that had once sparkled 
 with affection, he saw a loose mouth with 
 downturned comers that had been proud and 
 pretty, and this mask of dislike was projecting 
 forward upon a neck he had used to call her 
 head-stalk, so like had it seemed to the stem
 
 38 The Undying Fire 
 
 of some pretty flower. She had had lovely 
 shoulders and an impudent humour; and now 
 the skin upon her neck and shoulders had a 
 little loosened, and she was no longer impu- 
 dent but harsh. Her brows were moist with 
 heat, and her hair more than usually astray. 
 But these things did not increase, they miti- 
 gated his antagonism. They did not repel 
 him as defects; they hurt him as wounds 
 received in a common misfortune. Always 
 he had petted and spared and rejoiced in her 
 vanity and weakness, and now as he realized 
 the full extent of her selfish abandonment a 
 protective pity arose in his heart that over- 
 came his physical pain. It was terrible to see 
 how completely her delicacy and tenderness 
 of mind had been broken down. She had 
 neither the strength nor the courage left even 
 for an unselfish thought. And he could not 
 help her ; whatever power he had possessed 
 over her mind had gone long ago. His magic 
 had departed. 
 
 Latterly he had been thinking very much 
 of her prospects if he were to die. In some 
 ways his death might be a good thing for her. 
 He had an endowment assurance running that
 
 Sea View, Sundering on Sea 39 
 
 would bring in about seven thousand pounds 
 immediately at his death, but which would 
 otherwise involve heavy annual payments for 
 some years. So far, to die would be clear 
 gain. But who would invest this money for 
 her and look after her interests? She was, he 
 knew, very silly about property ; suspicious of 
 people she knew intimately, and greedy and 
 credulous with strangers. He had helped to 
 make her incompetent, and he owed it to her 
 to live and protect her if he could. And 
 behind that intimate and immediate reason 
 for living he had a strong sense of work in the 
 world yet to be done by him, and a task in 
 education still incomplete. 
 
 He spoke with his chin in his hand and 
 his eyes staring at the dark and distant sea. 
 " An operation," he said, " might cure me." 
 
 Her thoughts, it became apparent, had 
 been travelling through some broken and un- 
 beautiful country roughly parallel with the 
 course of his own. " But need there be an 
 operation?" she thought aloud. "Are they 
 ever any good? " 
 
 " I could die," he admitted bitterly, and 
 repented as he spoke.
 
 40 The Undying Fire 
 
 There had been times, he remembered, 
 when she had said and done sweet and gallant 
 things, poor soul ! poor broken companion ! 
 And now she had fallen into a darkness far 
 greater than his. He had feared that he had 
 hurt her, and then when he saw that she was 
 not hurt, and that she scrutinized his face 
 eagerly as if she weighed the sincerity of his 
 words, his sense of utter loneliness was com- 
 pleted. 
 
 Over his mean drama of pain and debase- 
 ment in its close atmosphere buzzing with 
 flies, it was as if some gigantic and remorse- 
 less being watched him as a man of science 
 might hover over some experiment, and 
 marked his life and all his world. " You are 
 alone," this brooding witness counselled, 
 " you are utterly alone. Curse God and die.'^ 
 
 It seemed a long time before Mr. Huss 
 answered this imagined voice, and when he 
 answered it he spoke as if he addressed his wife 
 alone. 
 
 " iNTo," he said wnth a sudden decisiveness. 
 *' No. I will face that operation. . . . We 
 are ill and our hearts are faint. Neither for 
 you, dear, nor for me must our story finish
 
 Sea View, Sundering on Sea 41 
 
 in this fashion. No. I shall go on to the 
 end." 
 
 " And have your operation here? " 
 
 " In this house. It is by far the most 
 convenient place, as things are." 
 
 " You may die here ! " 
 
 " Well, I shall die fighting." 
 
 " Leaving me here with Mrs. Croome." 
 
 His temper broke under her reply. 
 " Leaving you here with Mrs. Croome," he 
 said harshly. 
 
 He got up. "I can eat nothing," he 
 repeated, and dropped back sullenly into the 
 horsehair armchair. 
 
 There was a long silence, and then he 
 heard the little, almost mouselike, movements 
 of his wife as she began her meal. For a while 
 he had forgotten the dull ache within him, 
 but now, glowing and fading and glowing, it 
 made its way back into his consciousness. He 
 was helpless and perplexed ; he had not meant 
 to quarrel. He had hurt this poor thing who 
 had been his love and companion ; he had 
 bullied her. His clogged brain could think of 
 nothing to set matters right. He stared with 
 dull eyes at a world utterly hateful to him.
 
 CHAPTER THE THIRD 
 
 THE THREE VISITORS 
 
 § 1 
 
 While this unhappy conversation was occur- 
 ring at Sundering on Sea, three men were 
 discussing the case of Mr. Huss very earnestly 
 over a meatless but abundant lunch in the bow 
 window of a club that gives upon the trees and 
 sunshine of Carlton Gardens. Lobster salad 
 engaged them, and the ice in the jug of hock 
 cup clinked very pleasantly as they replenished 
 their glasses. 
 
 The host was Sir Eliphaz Burrows, the 
 patentee and manufacturer of those Temanite 
 building blocks which have not only revolu- 
 tionized the construction of army hutments, 
 but put the whole problem of industrial and 
 rural housing upon an altogether new footing ; 
 his guests were Mr. William Dad, formerly 
 the maker of the celebrated Dad and Showhite 
 car de luxe, and now one of the chief contrac- 
 
 43
 
 The Three Visitors 43 
 
 tors for aeroplanes in England ; and Mr. 
 Joseph Farr, the head of the technical section 
 of Woldingstanton School. Both the former 
 gentlemen were governors of that foundation 
 and now immensely rich, and Sir Eliphaz had 
 once been a pupil of the father of Mr. Huss 
 and had played a large part in the appoint- 
 ment of the latter to Woldingstanton. He 
 was a slender old man, with an avid vulturine 
 head poised on a long red neck, and he had 
 an abundance of parti-coloured hair, red and 
 white, springing from a circle round the 
 crown of his head, from his eyebrows, his face 
 generally, and the backs of his hands. He 
 .wore a blue soft shirt with a turn-down collar 
 within a roomy blue serge suit, and that and 
 something about his large loose black tie sug- 
 gested scholarship and refinement. His man- 
 ners were elaborately courteous. Mr. Dad 
 was a compacter, keener type, warily alert in 
 his bearing, an industrial fox-terrier from the 
 Midlands, silver-haired and dressed in ordinary 
 morning dress except for a tan vest with a 
 bright brown ribbon border. Mr. Farr was 
 big in a grey flannel Norfolk suit; he had « 
 large, round, white, shiny, clean-shaven face
 
 44 The Undying Fire 
 
 and uneasy hands, and it was apparent that 
 he carried pocket-books and suchlike Uiggage 
 in his breast pocket. 
 
 They consumed the lobster appreciatively, 
 and approached in a fragmentary and tenta- 
 tive manner the business that had assembled 
 them : namely, the misfortunes that had over- 
 whelmed Mr. Huss and their bearing upon 
 the future of the school. 
 
 " For my part I don't think there is such 
 a thing as misfortune," said Mr. Dad. " I 
 don't hold with it. Miscalculation if you 
 like." 
 
 *' In a sense," said Mr. F'lrr ambiguously, 
 glancing at Sir Eliphaz. 
 
 " If a man keeps his head screwed on the 
 right way," said Mr. Dad, and attacked a 
 claw with hope and appetite. Mr. Dad 
 affected the parsimony of unfinished sen- 
 tences. 
 
 " I can't help thinking," said Sir EHphaz, 
 putting down his glass and wiping his mous- 
 tache and eyebrows with care before resuming 
 his lobster, " that a man who entrusts his 
 affairs to a solicitor, after the fashion of the 
 widow and orphan, must be singularly lack-
 
 The Three Visitors 45 
 
 ing in judgment. Or reckless. Never in the 
 whole course of my life have I met a solicitor 
 who could invest money safely and profitably. 
 Clergymen I have known, women of all sorts, 
 savages, monomaniacs, criminals, but never 
 solicitors." 
 
 " I have known some smart business par- 
 sons," said Mr. Dad judicially. " One in 
 particular. Sharp as nails. They are a much 
 underestimated class." 
 
 " Perhaps it is natural that a solicitor 
 should be a wild investor," Sir Eliphaz pur- 
 sued his subject. "He lives out of the 
 ordinary world in a dirty little office in some 
 antiquated inn, his office fittings are fifty 
 years out of date, his habitual scenery consists 
 of tin boxes painted with the names of dead 
 and disreputable clients ; he has to take the 
 law courts, filled with horse-boxes and men 
 dressed up in gowns and horsehair wigs, quite 
 seriously ; nobody ever goes near him but 
 abnormal people or people in abnormal states : 
 people upset by jealousy, people upset by fear, 
 blackmailed people, cheats trying to dodge 
 the law, lunatics, litigants and legatees. The 
 only investments he ever discusses are queer
 
 46 The Undying Fire 
 
 investments. Nat\irally he loses all sense of 
 proportion. Naturally he becomes insanely 
 suspicious ; and when a client asks for positive 
 action he flounders and gambles." 
 
 " Naturally," said Mr. Dad. " And here 
 we find poor Huss giving all his business 
 
 over " 
 
 " Exactly," said Sir Eliphaz, and filled 
 his glass. 
 
 "There's been a great change in him in 
 the last two years," said Mr. Farr. " He let 
 the war worry him for one thing." 
 
 "No good doing that," said Mr. Dad. 
 
 " And even before the war," Sir Eliphaz 
 began. 
 
 "Even before the war," said Mr. Farr, 
 in a pause. 
 
 " There was a change," said Sir Eliphaz. 
 " He had been bitten by educational 
 theories." 
 
 " No business for a headmaster," said Mr. 
 Farr. 
 
 " Our intention had always been a great 
 scientific and technical school," said Sir 
 Eliphaz. "He introduced Logic into the 
 teaching of plain English — against my
 
 The Three Visitors 47 
 
 opinion. He encouraged some of the boys 
 to read philosophy." 
 
 " All he could," said Mr. Farr. 
 
 " I never held with his fad for teaching 
 history," said Mr. Dad. " He was history 
 mad. It got worse and worse. What's 
 history after all? At the best, it's over and 
 done with. . . . But he wouldn't argue upon 
 it — not reasonably. He was — overbearing. 
 He had a way of looking at you. ... It was 
 never our intention to make Woldingstanton 
 into a school of history." 
 
 "And now, Mr. Farr," said Sir Eliphaz, 
 what are the particulars of the fire? " 
 
 It isn't for me to criticise," said Mr. 
 Farr. 
 
 " What I say," said Mr. Dad, projecting 
 his muzzle with an appearance of great deter- 
 mination, " is, fix responsibility. Fix respon- 
 sibility. Here is a door locked that common 
 sense dictated should be open. Who was 
 responsible? " 
 
 " No one in School House seems to have 
 been especially responsible for that door so far 
 as I can ascertain," said Mr. Farr. 
 
 All responsibility," said Mr. Dad, with 
 
 
 ((
 
 48 The Undying Fire 
 
 an expression of peevish insistence, as though 
 Mr. Farr had annoyed him, " all responsibility 
 that is not delegated rests with the Head. 
 That's a hard and fast and primary rule of 
 business organization. In my factory I say 
 quite plainly to everyone who comes into it, 
 man or woman, chick or child . . ." 
 
 Mr. Dad was still explaining in a series 
 of imaginary dialogues, tersely but dramatic- 
 ally, his methods of delegating authority, 
 when Sir Eliphaz cut across the flow with, 
 Returning to Mr. Huss for a moment 
 
 5 J 
 
 The point that Sir Eliphaz wanted to get 
 at was whether Mr. Huss expected to con- 
 tinue headmaster at Woldingstanton. From 
 some chance phrase in a letter Sir Ehphaz 
 rather gathered that he did. 
 
 " Well," said Mr. Farr portentously, let- 
 ting the thing hang for a moment, " he 
 does." 
 
 ''Tcha!" said Mr. Dad, and shut his 
 mouth tightly and waved his head slowly from 
 side to side with knitted brows as if he had 
 bitten his tongue. 
 
 " I would be the first to recognize the
 
 The Three Visitors 49 
 
 splendid work he did for the school in his 
 opening years," said Mr. Farr. " I would be 
 the last to alter the broad lines of the work 
 as he set it out. Barring that I should replace 
 a certain amount of the biological teaching 
 and practically all this new history stuff by 
 chemistry and physics. But one has to admit 
 that Mr. Huss did not know when to relin- 
 quish power nor when to devolve responsi- 
 bihty. We, all of us, the entire staff — it is 
 no mere personal grievance of mine — were 
 kept, well, to say the least of it, in tutelage. 
 Rather than let authority go definitely out of 
 his hands, he would allow things to drift. 
 Witness that door, witness the business of the 
 nurse." 
 
 Mr. Dad, with his lips compressed, nodded 
 his head ; each nod hke the tap of a hammer. 
 
 " I never believed in all this overdoing 
 history in the school," Mr. Dad remarked 
 rather disconnectedly. " If you get rid of 
 Latin and Greek, why bring it all back again 
 in another form? Why, I'm told he taught 
 'em things about Assyria. Assyria! A 
 modern school ought to be a modern school — 
 business first and business last and business all 
 
 B
 
 50 The Undying Fire 
 
 the time. And teach boys to work. We shall 
 need it, mark my words." 
 
 " A certain amount of modern culture," 
 waved Sir Eliphaz. 
 
 *^ Modern y^^ said Mr. Farr softly. 
 
 Mr. Dad grunted. " In my opinion that 
 sort of thing gives the boys ideas." 
 
 Mr. Farr steered his way discreetly. 
 " Science with a due regard to its technical 
 applications should certainly be the substantial 
 part of a modern education." . . . 
 
 They were in the smoking-room and half 
 way through three princely cigars before they 
 got beyond such fragmentary detractions of 
 the fallen headmaster. Then Mr. Dad in the 
 clear-cut style of a business man, brought his 
 companions to action. " Well," said Mr. 
 Dad, turning abruptly upon Sir Eliphaz, 
 "what about it?" 
 
 "It is manifest that Woldingstanton has 
 to enter on a new phase ; what has happened 
 brings us to the parting of the ways," said 
 Sir Eliphaz. " Much as I regret the misfor- 
 tunes of an old friend." 
 
 "T/iat," said Mr. Dad, "spells Farr." 
 If he will shoulder the burthen," said 
 
 ((
 
 The Three Visitors 51 
 
 Sir Eliphaz, smiling upon Mr. Farr not so 
 much with his mouth as by the most engag- 
 ing convolutions, curvatures and waving 
 about of his various strands of hair. 
 
 " I don't want to see the school go 
 down," said Mr. Farr. " I've given it a 
 good slice of my life." 
 
 "Right," said Mr. Dad. "Right. File 
 that. That suits us. And now how do we 
 set about the affair? The next thing, I take 
 it, is to break it to Huss. . . . How? " 
 
 He paused to give the ideas of his com- 
 panions a fair chance. 
 
 " Well, my idea is this. None of us want 
 to be hard on Mr. Huss. Luck has been hard 
 enough as it is. We want to do this job as 
 gently as we can. It happens that I go and 
 play golf at Sundering on Sea ever and 
 again. Excellent links, well kept up all 
 things considered, and the big hotel close by 
 does you wonderfully, the railway company 
 sees to that; in spite of the war. Well, why 
 shouldn't we all, if Sir Eliphaz's engage- 
 ments permit, go down there in a sort of 
 casual way, and take the opportunity of a 
 good clear talk with him and settle it all up?
 
 52 The Undying Fire 
 
 The thing's got to be done, and it seems to 
 me altogether more kindly to go there 
 personally and put it to him than do it by 
 correspondence. Very likely we could put it 
 to him in such a .way that he himself would 
 suggest the very arrangement we want. You 
 particularly, Sir Eliphaz, being as you say an 
 old friend.'* . . .
 
 § 2 
 
 Since there was little likelihood of Mr. 
 Huss going away from Sundering on Sea, it 
 did not appear necessary to Mr. Dad to 
 apprise him of the projected visitation. And 
 so these three gentlemen heard nothing 
 about any operation for cancer until they 
 reached that resort. 
 
 Mr. Dad came down early on Friday after- 
 noon to the Golf Hotel, where he had already 
 engaged rooms for the party. He needed the 
 relaxation of the links very badly, the task of 
 accumulating a balance sufficiently large to 
 secure an opulent future for British industry, 
 with which Mr. Dad in his straightforward 
 way identified himself, was one that in a con- 
 trolled establishment between the Scylla of 
 aggressive labour and the Charybdis of the 
 war-profits tax, strained his mind to the 
 utmost. He was joined by Mr. Farr at 
 dinner-time, and Sir Eliphaz, who was de- 
 tained in London by some negotiations with 
 the American Governmen*^, arrived replete 
 by the dining-car train. Mr. Farr made a 
 
 53
 
 54 The Undying Fire 
 
 preliminarj^ reconnaisance at Sea View, and 
 was the first to hear of the operation. 
 
 Sir Alpheus Mengo was due at Sea View by 
 the first train on Saturday. lie had arranged 
 to operate before hinch. It was clear there- 
 fore that the only time available for a conver- 
 sation between the three and Mr. Huss was be- 
 tween breakfast and the arrival of Sir Alpheus. 
 
 Mr. Huss, whose lethargy had now de- 
 parted, displayed himself feverishly anxious to 
 talk about the school. " There are points I 
 must make clear," he said, " vital points," 
 and so a meeting was arranged for half-past 
 nine. This would give a full hour before the 
 arrival of the doctors. 
 
 " He feels that in a way it will be his testa- 
 ment, so to speak," said Mr. Farr. " Natur- 
 ally he has his own ideas about the future of 
 the school. We all have. I would be the last 
 person to suggest that he could say anything 
 about Woldingstanton that would not be well 
 worth hearing. Some of us may have heard 
 most of it before, and be better able to dis- 
 count some of his assertions. But that under 
 the present circuuistances is neither here nor 
 there."
 
 § 8 
 
 Matters in the confined space of Sea View, 
 were not nearly so strained as Mr. Huss had 
 feared. The prospect of an operation was 
 not without its agreeable side to Mrs. Croome. 
 Possibly she would have preferred that the 
 subject should have been Mrs. rather than Mr 
 Huss, but it was clear that she made no claim 
 to dictate upon this point. Her demand for 
 special fees to meet the inconveniences of the 
 occasion had been met quite liberally by Mr. 
 Huss. And there was a genuine appreciation 
 of order and method in Mrs. Croome ; she was 
 a furious spring-cleaner, a hurricane tidier-up, 
 her feeling for the discursive state of Mrs. 
 Huss's hair was almost as involuntary as a 
 racial animosity ; and the swift dexterous 
 preparations of the nurse who presently came 
 to convert the best bedroom to surgical uses, 
 impressed her deeply. She was allowed to 
 help. Superfluous hangings and furnishings 
 were removed, everything was thoroughly 
 
 55
 
 56 The Undying Fire 
 
 scrubbed, at the last moment clean linen sheets 
 ot a wonderful hardness were to be spread over 
 every exposed surface. They were to be 
 brought in sterilized drums. The idea of 
 sterilized drums fascinated her. She had 
 never heard of such things before. She 
 wished she could keep her own linen in a 
 sterilized drum always, and let her lodgers 
 have something else instead. 
 
 She felt that she was going to be a sort 
 of assistant priestess at a sacrifice, the sacrifice 
 of Mr. Huss. She had always secretly feared 
 his submissive quiet as a thing unaccountable 
 that might at any time turn upon her; she 
 suspected him of ironies ; and he would be 
 helpless, under chloroform, subject to exam- 
 ination with no possibilities of disconcerting 
 repartee. She did her best to persuade Dr. 
 Barrack that she would be useful in the room 
 during the proceedings. Her imagination 
 conjured up a wonderful vision of the Huss 
 interior as a great chest full of strange and 
 interesting viscera with the lid wide open and 
 Sir Alpheus picking thoughtfully, with depre- 
 catory remarks, amid its contents. But that 
 sight was denied her.
 
 The Three Visitors 57 
 
 She was very helpful and cheerful on the 
 Saturday morning, addressing herself to the 
 consolation of Mr. and the bracing-up of Mrs. 
 Huss. She assisted in the final transforma- 
 tion of the room. 
 
 " It might be a real 'ospital," she said. 
 " Nursing must be nice work. I never 
 thought of it like this before." 
 
 Mr. Huss ,was no longer depressed but 
 flushed and resolute, but Mrs. Huss, wounded 
 by the neglect of everyone — no one seemed to 
 consider for a moment what she must be feel- 
 ing — remained very much in her own room, 
 working inefficiently upon the mourning that 
 might now be doubly needed.
 
 § 4 
 
 Mr. Huss knew Mr. Farr very well. For 
 the last ten years it had been his earnest desire 
 to get rid of him, but he had been difficult to 
 replace because of his real accomplishment in 
 technical chemistry. In the course of their 
 five minutes' talk in his bedroom on Friday 
 evening, Mr. Huss grasped the situation. 
 Woldingstanton, his creation, his life work, 
 was to be taken out of his hands, and in favour 
 of this, his most soul-deadening assistant. He 
 had been foolish no doubt, but he had never 
 anticipated that. He had never supposed that 
 Farr would dare. 
 
 He thought hard through that long night 
 of Friday. His pain was no distraction. He 
 had his intentions very ready and clear in his 
 mind when his three visitors arrived. 
 
 He had insisted upon getting up and 
 dressing fully. 
 
 *' I can't talk about Woldingstanton in 
 bed," he said. The doctor was not there to 
 gainsay him. 
 
 58
 
 The Three Visitors 59 
 
 Sir Eliphaz was the first to arrive, and Mrs. 
 Huss retrieved him from Mrs. Croome in the 
 passage and brought him in. He was wearing 
 a Norfolk jacket suit of a coarse yet hairy con- 
 sistency and of a pale sage green colour. He 
 shone greatly in the eyes of Mrs. Huss. *' I 
 can't help thinking of you, dear lady," he 
 said, bowing over her hand, and all his hair 
 was for a moment sad and sympathetic like a 
 sick Skye terrier's. Mr. Dad and Mr. Farr 
 entered a moment later ; Mr. Farr in grey 
 flannel trousers and a brown jacket, and Mr. 
 Dad in a natty dark grey suit with a luminous 
 purple waistcoat. 
 
 " My dear," said Mr. Huss to his wife, *' I 
 must be alone with these gentlemen," and 
 when she seemed disposed to linger near the 
 understanding warmth of Sir Eliphaz, he 
 added, " Figures, my dear — Finance, ^^ and 
 drove her forth. . . . 
 
 " 'Pon my honour," said Mr. Dad, coming 
 close up to the armchair, wrinkling his muzzle 
 and putting through his compliments in good 
 business-like style before coming to the 
 harder stuff in hand ; " I don't like to see you 
 like this, Mr. Huss."
 
 6o The Undying Fire 
 
 *' Nor does Sir Eliphaz, I hope — nor Farr. 
 Please find yourselves chairs." 
 
 And while Mr. Farr made protesting noises 
 and Sir Eliphaz waved his hair about before 
 beginning the little speech he had prepared, 
 Mr. Huss took the discourse out of their 
 mouths and began : 
 
 " I know perfectly well the task you have 
 set yourselves. You have come to make 
 an end of me as headmaster of VVold- 
 ingstanton. And Mr. Farr has very 
 obligingly ..." 
 
 He held up his white and wasted hand as 
 Mr. Farr began to disavow. 
 
 "No," said Mr. Huss. " But before you 
 three gentlemen proceed with your office, I 
 should like to tell you something of what the 
 school and my work in it, and my work for 
 education, is to me. I am a man of little more 
 than fifty. A month ago I counted with a 
 reasonable confidence upon twenty years more 
 of work before I relaxed. . . . Then these 
 misfortunes rained upon me. I have lost all 
 my private independence ; there have been 
 these shocking deaths in the school ; my son, 
 my only son . . . killed . . . trouble has
 
 The Three Visitors 6i 
 
 darkened the love and kindness of my wife 
 . . . and now my body is suffering so that my 
 mind is Hke a swimmer striigghng through 
 waves of pain . . . far from land. . . . These 
 are heavy blows. But the hardest blow of all, 
 harder to bear than any of these others — I do 
 not speak rashly, gentlemen, I have thought 
 it out through an endless night — the last blow 
 will be this rejection of my Hfe work. That 
 will strike the inmost me, the heart and soul 
 of me. ..." 
 
 He paused. 
 
 ** You mustn't take it quite hke that, Mr. 
 Huss," protested Mr. Dad. " It isn't fair to 
 us to put it like that." 
 
 "I want you to listen to me," said Mr. 
 Huss. 
 
 " Only the very kindest motives," con- 
 tinued Mr. Dad. 
 
 " Let me speak," said Mr. Huss, with the 
 voice of authority that had ruled Wolding- 
 stanton for five and twenty years. " I cannot 
 wrangle and contradict. At most we have an 
 hour." 
 
 Mr. Dad made much the same sound that a 
 dog will make when it has proposed to l)ark
 
 62 The Undying Fire 
 
 and has been told to get under the table. 
 For a time he looked an ill-used man. 
 
 *' To end my work in the school will be 
 to end me altogether. ... I do not see why 
 I should not speak plainly to you, gentlemen, 
 situated as I am here. I do not see why I 
 should not talk to you for once in my own 
 language. Pain and death are our inter- 
 locutors ; this is a rare and raw and bleeding 
 occasion ; in an hour or so the women may be 
 laying out my body and I may be silent for 
 ever. I have hidden my religion, but why 
 should I hide it now? To you I have always 
 tried to seem as practical and self-seeking as 
 possible, but in secret I have been a fanatic ; 
 and Woldingstanton was the altar on which 
 I offered myself to God. I have done ill and 
 feebly there I know ; I have been indolent and 
 rash ; those were my weaknesses ; but I have 
 done my best. To the limits of my strength 
 and knowledge I have served God. . . . And 
 now in this hour of darkness where is this 
 God that I have served? Why does he not 
 stand here between me and this last injury you 
 would do to the work I have dedicated to 
 him? '»
 
 The Three Visitors 63 
 
 At these words Mr. Dad turned horrified 
 eyes to Mr. Farr. 
 
 But Mr. Huss went on as though talking 
 to himself. " In the night I have looked into 
 my heart ; I have sought in my heart for base 
 motives and secret sins. I have put myself 
 on trial to find why God should hide himself 
 from me now, and I can find no reason and 
 no justification. ... In the bitterness of my 
 heart I am tempted to give way to you and to 
 tell you to take the school and 10 do just what 
 you will with it. . . . The nearness of death 
 makes the familiar things of experience flimsy 
 and unreal, and far more real to me now is this 
 darkness that broods over me, as blight will 
 sometimes overhang the world at noon, and 
 mocks me day and night with a perpetual 
 challenge to curse Gk)d and die. . . . 
 
 " Why do I not curse God and die? Why 
 do I cling to my work when the God to whom 
 I dedicated it is — silent? Because, I suppose, 
 I still hope for some sign of reassurance. Be- 
 cause I am not yet altogether defeated. I 
 would go on telling you why I want Wolding- 
 stanton to continue on its present lines and 
 why it is impossible for you, why it will be a
 
 64 The Undying Fire 
 
 sort of murder for you to hand it over to Farr 
 here, if my pain were ten times what it is. . . ." 
 
 At the mention of his name, Mr. Farr 
 started and looked first at Mr. Dad, and then 
 at Sir EHphaz. " Really," he said, " really ! 
 One might think I had conspired " 
 
 " I am afraid, Mr. Huss," said Sir Eliphaz, 
 with a large reassuring gesture to the tech- 
 nical master, " that the suggestion that Mr. 
 Farr should be your successor, came in the 
 first instance from me." 
 
 " You must reconsider it," said Mr. Huss, 
 moistening his lips and staring steadfastly in 
 front of him. 
 
 Here Mr. Dad broke out in a querulous 
 voice : " Are you really in a state, Mr. Huss, 
 to discuss a matter like this — feverish and suf- 
 fering as you are? " 
 
 '' I could not be in a better frame for this 
 discussion," said Mr. Huss. ..." And now, 
 for what I have to say about the school : — 
 Woldingstanton, when I came to it, was a 
 humdrum school of some seventy boys, follow- 
 ing a worn-out routine. A little Latin was 
 taught and less Greek, chiefly in order to say 
 that Greek was taught ; some scraps of mathe-
 
 The Three Visitors 65 
 
 matical processes, a few rags of general know- 
 ledge, English history — not human history, 
 mind you, but just the national brand, cut 
 dried flowers from the past with no roots and 
 no meaning, a smattering of French. . . . 
 That was practically all ; it was no sort of 
 education, it was a mere education-like pos- 
 turing. And to-day, what has that school 
 become? " 
 
 " We never grudged you money," said Sir 
 Eliphaz. 
 
 " Nor loyal help," said Mr. Farr, but in a 
 half whisper. 
 
 '* I am not thinking of its visdble prosper- 
 ity. The houses and laboratories and museums 
 that have grown about that nucleus are nothing 
 in themselves. The reality of a school is not 
 in buildings and numbers but in matters of 
 the mind and soul. Woldingstanton has be- 
 come a torch at which lives are set aflame. I 
 have lit a candle there — the winds of fate may 
 yet blow it into a world-wide blaze." 
 
 As Mr. Huss said these things he was up- 
 lifted by enthusiasm, and his pain sank down 
 out of his consciousness . 
 
 "What," he said, "is the task of the
 
 66 The Undying Fire 
 
 teacher in the world ? It is the greatest of all 
 human tasks. It is to ensure that Man, Man 
 the Divine, grows in the souls of men. For 
 what is a man without instruction? He is 
 born as the beasts are born, a greedy egotism, 
 a clutching desire, a thing of lusts and fears. 
 He can regard nothing except in relation to 
 himself. Even his love is a bargain ; and his 
 utmost effort is vanity because he has to die. 
 And it is we teachers alone who can lift him 
 out of that self-preoccupation. We teachers 
 . . . We can release him into a .wider circle 
 of ideas beyond himself in which he can at 
 length forget himself and his meagre personal 
 ends altogether. We can open his eyes to the 
 past and to the future and to the undying life 
 of Man. So through us and through us only, 
 he escapes from death and futility. An un- 
 taught man is but himself alone, as lonely in 
 his ends and destiny as any beast ; a man 
 instructed is a man enlarged from that narrow 
 prison of self into participation in an undying 
 life, that began we know not when, that grows 
 above and beyond the greatness of the 
 stars. . . ." 
 
 He spoke as if he addressed some other
 
 The Three Visitors 67 
 
 hearer than the three before him. Mr. Dad, 
 with eyebrows raised and lips compressed, 
 nodded silently to Mr. Farr as if his worst sus- 
 picions were confirmed, and there were signs 
 and signals that Sir Eliphaz was about to 
 speak, when Mr. Huss resumed. 
 
 " For five and twenty years I have ruled 
 over Woldingstanton, and for all that time I 
 have been giving sight to the blind. I have 
 given understanding to some thousands of 
 boys. All those routines of teaching that had 
 become dead we made live again there. My 
 boys have learnt the history of mankind so that 
 it has become their own adventure ; they have 
 learnt geography so that the world is their 
 possession ; I have had languages taught to 
 make the past live again in their minds and to 
 be windows upon the souls of alien peoples. 
 Science has played its proper part ; it has taken 
 my boys into the secret places of matter and 
 out among the nebuhe. . . . Always I have 
 kept Farr and his utilities in their due subor- 
 dination. Some of my boys have already made 
 good business men — because they were more 
 than business men. . . . liut I have never 
 sougiit to make business men and I never willc
 
 68 The Undying Fire 
 
 My boys have gone into the professions, into 
 the services, into the great world and done 
 well — I have had dull boys and intractable 
 boys, but nearly all have gone into the world 
 gentlemen, broad-minded, good-mannered, 
 understanding and unselfish, masters of self, 
 servants of man, because the whole scheme of 
 their education has been to release them from 
 base and narrow things. . . . When the war 
 came, my boys were ready. . . . They have 
 gone to their deaths — how many have gone to 
 their deaths ! My own son among them. . . . 
 I did not grudge him. . . . Woldingstanton 
 is a new school ; its tradition has scarcely 
 begun ; the list of its old boys is now so terribly 
 depleted that its young tradition wilts like a 
 torn seedling. . . . But still we can keep on 
 with it, still that tradition will grow, if my 
 flame still burns. But my teaching must go on 
 as I have planned it. It must. It must. . . . 
 What has made my boys all that they are, has 
 been the history, the biological science, the 
 philosophy. For these things are wisdom. All 
 the rest is training and mere knowledge. If the 
 school is to live, the head must still be a man 
 who can teach history — history in the jvidest
 
 The Three Visitors 69 
 
 sense ; he must be philosopher, biologist, and 
 archaeologist as well as scholar. And you 
 would hand that task to Farr ! Farr ! Farr 
 here has never even touched the essential work 
 of the school. He does not know what it is. 
 His mind is no more opened than the cricket 
 professional's." 
 
 Mr. Dad made an impatient noise. 
 
 The sick man went on with his burning eyes 
 on Farr, his Hps bloodless. 
 
 "He thinks of chemistry and physics not 
 as a help to understanding but as a help to 
 trading. So long as he has been at Wolding- 
 stanton he has been working furtively with our 
 m.aterials in the laboratories, dreaming of 
 some profitable patent. Oh ! I know you, 
 Farr. Do you think I didn't see because I 
 didn't choose to complain.'' If he could have 
 discovered some profitable patent he would 
 have abandoned teaching the day he did so. 
 He would have been even as you are. But 
 with a lifeless imagination you cannot even 
 invent patentable things. He would talk to 
 the boys of the empire at times, but the empire 
 to him is no more than a trading conspiracy 
 fenced about with tariffs. It goes on to
 
 70 The Undying Fire 
 
 nothing. . . . And he thinks we are fighting 
 the Germans, he thinks my dear and precious 
 boy gave his Hfe and that all these other brave 
 lads beyond counting died, in order that we 
 might take the place of the Germans as the 
 chapman-bullies of the world. That is the 
 measure of his mind. He has no religion, no 
 faith, no devotion. Why does he want my 
 place? Because he wants to serve as I have 
 served ? No ! But because he envies my 
 house, my income, my headship. Whether I 
 live or die, it is impossible that Woldingstan- 
 ton, my Woldingstanton, should live under 
 his hand. Give it to him, and in a little while 
 it will be dead."
 
 § 5 
 
 (( 
 
 Gentlemen! " Mr. Farr protested with 
 a white perspiring face. 
 
 ** I had no idea," ejaculated Mr. Dad, 
 " I had no idea that things had gone so far." 
 
 Sir Eliphaz indicated by waving his hand 
 that his associates might allay themselves ; he 
 recognized that the time had come for him to 
 speak. 
 
 "It is deplorable," Sir Eliphaz began. 
 
 He put down his hands and gripped the 
 seat of his chair as if to hold himself on to it 
 very tightly, and he looked very hard at the 
 horizon as if he were trying to decipher some 
 remote inscription. " You have imported a 
 tone into this discussion," he tried. 
 
 He got off at the third attempt. " It is an 
 extremely painful thing to me, Mr. Huss, 
 that to you, standing as you do on the very 
 l)rink of the Great Chasm, it should be neces- 
 sary to speak in any but the most cordial and 
 helpful tones. But it is my duty, it is our 
 
 71
 
 72 The Undying Fire 
 
 duty, to hold firmly to those principles which 
 have always guided us as governors of the 
 Woldingstanton School. You speak, I must 
 say it, with an extreme arrogance of an in- 
 stitution to which all of here have in some 
 measure contributed ; you speak as though 
 you, and you alone, were its creator and guide. 
 You must pardon me, Mr. Huss, if I remind 
 you of the facts, the eternal verities of the 
 story. The school, sir, was founded in the 
 spacious days of Queen Elizabeth, and many a 
 good man guided its fortunes down to the time 
 when an unfortunate — a diversion of its en- 
 dowments led to its temporary cessation. 
 The Charity Commissioners revived it after 
 an inquiry some fifty years ago, and it has 
 been largely the lavish generosity of the 
 Papermakers' Guild, of which I and Dad are 
 humble members, that has stimulated its ex- 
 pansion under you. Loth as I am to cross 
 your mood, Mr. Huss, while you are in pain 
 and anxiety, I am bound to recall to you these 
 things which have made your work possible. 
 You could not have made bricks without 
 straw, you could not have built up Wolding- 
 stanton without the money obtained by that
 
 The Three Visitors 73 
 
 commercialism for which you display such 
 unqualified contempt. We sordid cits it was 
 who planted, who watered. ..." 
 
 Mr. Huss seemed about to speak, but said 
 nothing. 
 
 " Exactly what I say," said Mr. Dad, 
 turning for confirmation to Mr. Farr. 
 "The school is essentially a modern com- 
 mercial school. It should be run as tha«t." 
 
 Mr. Farr nodded his white face am- 
 biguously with his eye on Sir Eliphaz. 
 
 *' I should have been chary, Mr. Huss, of 
 wrangling about our particular shares and con- 
 tributions on an occasion so solemn as this, 
 but since you will have it so, since you 
 challenge discussion. ..." 
 
 He turned to his colleagues as if for 
 support. 
 
 "Go on," said Mr. Dad. "Facts are 
 facts."
 
 § 6 
 
 Sir Eliphaz cleared his throat, and con- 
 tinued to read the horizon. 
 
 "I have raised these points, Mr. Huss, by 
 way of an opening. The gist of what I have 
 to say Hes deeper. So far I have dealt with 
 the things you have said only in relation to 
 us ; as against us you assume your own 
 righteousness, you flout our poor judgments, 
 you sweep them aside ; the school must be 
 continued on your lines, the teaching must 
 follow your schemes. You can imagine no 
 alternative opinion. God forbid that I should 
 say a word in my own defence ; I have given 
 freely both of my time and of my money to 
 our school ; it would tax my secretaries now 
 to reckon up how much; but I make no 
 claims. . . . None. . . . 
 
 " But let me now put all this discussion 
 upon a wider and a graver footing. It is not 
 only us and our poor intentions you arraign. 
 Strange things have dropped from you, Mr. 
 
 74
 
 The Three Visitors 75 
 
 Huss, in this discussion, things it has at once 
 pained and astonished me to hear from you. 
 You have spoken not only of man's ingrati- 
 tude, but of God's. I could scarcely believe 
 my ears, but indeed I heard you say that God 
 was silent, unhelpful, and that he too had 
 deserted you. In spite of the most meritorious 
 exertions on your part. . . . Standing as you 
 do on the very margin of the Great Secret, I 
 want to plead very earnestly with you against 
 all that you have said.'* 
 
 Sir Eliphaz seemed to meditate remotely. 
 He returned like a soaring vulture to his 
 victim. " I would be the last man to obtrude 
 my religious feelings \ipon anyone. ... I 
 make no parade of religion, Mr. Huss, none 
 at all. Many people think me no better than 
 an unbeliever. But here I am bound to make 
 my confession. I owe much to God, Mr. 
 Huss. . . .*' 
 
 He glowered at the sick man. He aban- 
 doned his grip upon the seat of his chair for a 
 moment, to make a gesture with his hairy 
 claw of a hand. " Your attitude to my God 
 is a far deeper offence to me than any merely 
 personal attack could be. Under his chasten-
 
 76 The Undying Fire 
 
 ing blows, under trials that humbler spirits 
 would receive with thankfulness and construe 
 as lessons and warnings, you betray yourself 
 more proud, more self-assured, more — f re- 
 ward is not too harsh a word — more froward, 
 Mr. Huss, than you were even in the days 
 when we used to fret under you on Founder's 
 Day in the Great Hall, when you would 
 dictate to us that here you must have an 
 extension and there you must have a museum 
 or a picture room or what not, leaving 
 nothing to opinion, making our gifts a duty. 
 . . . You will not recognise the virtue of gifts 
 and graces either in man or God. . . . Cannot 
 you see, my dear Mr. Huss, the falsity of your 
 position? It is upon that point that I want 
 to talk to you now. God does not smite man 
 needlessly. This world is all one vast inten- 
 tion, and not a sparrow falls to the ground 
 unless He wills that sparrow to fall. Is your 
 heart so sure of itself? Does nothing that 
 has happened suggest to you that there may 
 be something in your conduct and direction of 
 Woldingstanton that has made it not quite so 
 acceptable an offering to God as you have 
 imagined it to be? "
 
 The Three Visitors 77 
 
 Sir Eliphaz paused with an air of giving 
 Mr. Huss his chance, but meeting with no 
 response, he resumed : "I am an old man, 
 Mr. Huss, and I have seen much of the world 
 and more particularly of the world of finance 
 and industry, a world of swift opportunities 
 and sudden temptations. I have watched the 
 careers of many young men of parts, who have 
 seemed to be under the impression that the 
 world had been waiting for them overlong ; I 
 have seen more promotions, schemes and 
 enterprises, great or grandiose, than I care to 
 recall. Developing Woldingsrtanton from the 
 mere endowed school of a market ^own it was, 
 to its present position, has been for me a 
 subordinate incident, a holiday task, a piece 
 of by-play uj)on a crowded scene. My ex- 
 periences have been on a far greater scale. 
 Far greater. And in all my experience I have 
 never seen what I should call a really right- 
 minded man perish or an innocent dealer — 
 provided, that is, that he took ordinary pre- 
 cautions — destroyed. Ups and downs no 
 doubt there are, for the good as well as the 
 bad. I hAve seen the foolish taking root for a 
 time — it was but tor a time. I have watched
 
 yS The Undying Fire 
 
 the manoeuvres of some exceedingly crafty 
 
 men. . . ." 
 
 Sir Eliphaz shook his head slowly from 
 side to side and all the hairs on his head waved 
 about. 
 
 He hesitated for a moment, and decided to 
 favour his hearers with a scrap of auto- 
 biography. 
 
 *' Quite recently/' he began, " there was 
 a fellow came to us, just as we were laying 
 down our plant for production on a large 
 scale. He was a very plausible, energetic 
 young fellow indeed, an American Armenian. 
 Well, he happened to know somehow that we 
 were going to use kaolin from felspar, a by- 
 product of the new potash process, and he had 
 got hold of a scheme for washing London clay 
 that produced, he assured us, an accessible 
 kaolin just as good for our purpose and not a 
 tenth of the cost of the Norwegian stuff. It 
 would have reduced our prime cost something 
 like thirty per cent. Let alone tonnage. 
 Excuse these technicalities. On the face of it 
 it was a thoroughly good thing. The point 
 was that I knew all along that his stuff re- 
 tained a certain amount of sulphur and
 
 The Three Visitors 79 
 
 couldn't possibly make a building block to 
 lasft. That wouldn't prevent us selling and 
 using the stuff with practical impunity. It 
 wasn't up to us to know. No one could have 
 made us liable. The thing indeed looked so 
 plain and safe that I admit it tempted me 
 sorely. And then, Mr. Huss, God came in. 
 I received a secret intimation. I want to tell 
 you of this in all good faith and simplicity. 
 In the night when all the world was deep in 
 sleep, I awoke. And I was in the extremest 
 terror ; my very bones were shaking ; I sat up 
 in my bed afraid almost to touch the switch 
 of the electric light ; my hair stood on end. I 
 could see nothing, I could hear nothing, but 
 it was as if a spirit passed in front of my face. 
 And in spite of the silence something seemed 
 to be saying to me : ' How about God, Sir 
 Eliphaz? Have you at last forgotten Him? 
 How can you, that would dwell in houses of 
 clay, whose foundation is the dust, escape His 
 judgments? ' That was all, Mr. Huss, just 
 that. ' Whose foundation is the dust ! ' 
 Straight to the point. Well, Mr. Huss, I am 
 not n religious man, but I threw over that 
 Armenian."
 
 8o The Undying Fire 
 
 Mr. Dad made a sound to intimate that 
 he would ha\ e done the same. 
 
 "I mention this experience, this inter- 
 vention — and it is not the only one of which 
 I could tell — because I want you to get my 
 view that if an enterprise, even though it is as 
 fair and honest-seeming a business as Wold- 
 ingstanton School, begins suddenly to crumple 
 and wilt, it means that somehow, somewhere 
 you must have been putting the wrong sort 
 of clay into it. It means not that God is 
 wrong and going back upon you, but that you 
 are wrong. You may be a great and famous 
 teacher now, Mr. Huss, thanks not a little to 
 the pedestal we have made for you, but God is 
 a greater and more famous teacher. He mani- 
 festly you have not convinced, even if you 
 could have convinced us, of Woldingstanton's 
 present perfection. . . . 
 
 *' That is practically all I have to say. 
 When we propose, in all humility, to turn the 
 school about into new and less pretentious 
 courses and you oppose us, that is our answer. 
 If you had done as well and wisely as you 
 declare, you would not be in this position and 
 this discussion would never have arisen.'*
 
 The Three Visitors 8i 
 
 He paused. 
 
 " Said with truth and dignity,'* said Mr. 
 Dad. "You have put my opinion, Sir 
 Eliphaz, better than I could have put it 
 myself. I thank you." 
 
 He coughed briefly. 
 
 G
 
 § 7 
 
 " The question you put to me I have 
 put to myself," said Mr. Huss, and thought 
 deeply for a little while. . . . 
 
 " No, I do not feel convicted of wrong- 
 doing. I still believe the work I set myself 
 to do was right, right in spirit and intention, 
 right in plan and method. You invite me to 
 confess my faith broken and in the dust; and 
 my faith was never so sure. There is a God 
 in my heart, in my heart at least there is a 
 God, who has always guided me to right and 
 who guides me now. My conscience remains 
 unassailable. These afflictions that you speak 
 of as trials and warnings I can only see as 
 inexplicable disasters. They perplex me, but 
 they do not cow me. They strike me as point- 
 less and irrelevant events." 
 
 "But this is terrible!" said Mr. Dad, 
 deeply shocked. 
 
 " You push me back. Sir Eliphaz, from the 
 discussion of our school affairs to more funda- 
 
 83
 
 The Three Visitors 83 
 
 mental questions. Vou have raised the prob- 
 lem of the moral government of the world, a 
 problem that has been distressing my mind 
 since I first came here to Sundering, whether 
 indeed failure is condemnation and success the 
 sunshine of God's approval. You beheve that 
 the great God of the stars and seas and moun- 
 tains is attentive to our conduct and responds 
 to it. His sense of right is the same sense of 
 right as ours ; he endorses a common aim. 
 Vour prosperity is the mark of your harmony 
 with that supreme God. ..." 
 
 " I wouldn't go so far as that," Mr. Dad 
 interjected. "No. No arrogance." 
 
 "And my misfortunes express his disap- 
 proval. Well, I have believed that; I have 
 believed that the rightness of a schoolmaster's 
 conscience must needs be the same thing as 
 the rightness of destiny, I too had fallen into 
 that comforting persuasion of prosperity ; but 
 this series of smashing experiences I have had, 
 cuhninating in your proposal to wipe out the 
 whole effect and significance of my life, brings 
 me face to face with the fundamental question 
 whether the order of the great universe, the 
 Gk)d of the stars, has any regard or relationship
 
 84 The Undying Fire 
 
 whatever to the problems of our consciences 
 and the efforts of man to do right. That is a 
 question that echoes to me down the ages. 
 So far I have always professed myself a 
 Christian. ..." 
 
 ** Well, I should hope so," said Mr. Dad, 
 " considering the terms of the school's founda- 
 tion." 
 
 " For, I take it, the creeds declare in a 
 beautiful symbol that the God who is present 
 in our hearts is one with the universal father 
 and at the same time his beloved Son, con- 
 tinually and eternally begotten from the 
 universal fatherhood, and crucified only to 
 conquer. He has come into our poor lives to 
 raise them up at last to Himself. But to be- 
 lieve that is to believe in the significance and 
 continuity of the whole effort of mankind. 
 The life of man must be like the perpetual 
 spreading of a fire. If right and wrong are 
 to perish together indifferently, if there is 
 aimless and fruitless suffering, if there opens 
 no hope for an eternal survival in consequences 
 of all good things, then there is no meaning in 
 such a belief as Christianity. It is a mere 
 superstition of priests and sacrifices, and I have
 
 The Three Visitors 85 
 
 read things into it that were never truly there. 
 The rushhght of our faith burns in a windy 
 darkness that will see no dawn." 
 
 " Nay," said Sir Eliphaz, " nay. If there 
 is Gk>d in your work we cannot destroy it." 
 
 *' You are doing your best," said Mr. 
 Huss, " and now I am not sure that you will 
 fail. ... At one time I should have defied 
 you, but now I am not sure. ... I have sat 
 here through some dreary and dreadful days, 
 and lain awake through some interminable 
 nights; I have thought of many things that 
 men in their days of prosperity are apt to 
 dismiss from their minds ; and I am no longer 
 sure of the goodness of the world without us 
 or in the plan of Fate. Perhaps it is only in 
 us within our hearts that the light of Giod 
 flickers — and flickers insecurely. Where we 
 had thought a God, somehow akin to ourselves, 
 ruled in the universe, it may be there is 
 nothing but black emptiness and a coldness 
 worse than cruelty." 
 
 Mr. Dad was about to interrupt, and 
 restrained himself by a great effort. 
 
 " It is a cou)monplace of pietistic worKs 
 that natural things are perfect things, and that
 
 86 The Undying Fire 
 
 the whole world of life, if it were not for the 
 sinfulness of man, would be perfect. Paley, 
 you will remember, Sir Eliphaz, in his 
 * Evidences of Christianity,' from which we 
 have both suffered, declares that this earth is 
 manifestly made for the happiness of the sen- 
 tient beings living thereon. But I ask you 
 to consider for a little and dispassionately, 
 whether life through all its stages, up to and 
 including man, is not rather a scheme of un- 
 easiness, imperfect satisfaction, and positive 
 
 miseries. . . ."
 
 § 8 
 
 *' Aren't we getting a bit out of our depth 
 in all this? " Mr. Dad burst out. " Put it at 
 that — out of our depth. . . . What does this 
 sort of carping and questioning amount to, 
 Mr. Huss.'* Does it do us any good? Does it 
 help us in the slightest degree? Why should 
 we go into all this? Why can't we be humble 
 and leave these deep questions to those who 
 make a speciality of dealing with them? We 
 don't know the ropes. We can't. Here are 
 you and Mr. Farr, for instance, both of you 
 whole-time schoohiias-ters so to speak ; here's 
 Sir Eliphaz toiling night and day to make 
 •.imple cheap suitable homes for the masse?, 
 who probably won't say thank you to him 
 when they see them ; here's me an over- 
 worked engineer and understaffed most 
 cruelly, not to speak of the most unfair and 
 impossible labour demands, so that you never 
 know where you are and what they won't ask 
 you next. And in the midst of it all we arc 
 
 87
 
 88 The Undying Fire 
 
 to start an argey-bargey about the goodness 
 of God ! 
 
 *' We're busy men, Mr. Huss. What do 
 we know of the .world being a scheme of im- 
 perfect satisfaction and what all? Where 
 does it come in? What's its practical value? 
 Words it is, all words, and getting away from 
 the plain and definite question we came to talk 
 over and settle and have done with. Such 
 talk, I will confess, makes me uncomfortable. 
 Give me the Bible and the simple religion I 
 learnt at my mother's knee. That's good 
 enough for me. Can't we just have faith and 
 leave all these questions alone? What are 
 men in reality? After all their arguments? 
 Worms. Just worms. Well then, let's have 
 the decency to behave as such and stick to 
 business, and do our best in that .state of life 
 unto which it has pleased God to call us. 
 That's what / say," said Mr. Dad. 
 
 He jerked his head back, coughed shortly, 
 adjusted his tie, and nodded to Mr. Farr in a 
 resolute manner. 
 
 "A simple, straightforward, commercial 
 and technical education," he added by way of 
 an explanatory colophon. "That's what 
 we're alter."
 
 § 9 
 
 Mr. Huss stared absently at Mr. Dad for 
 
 some moments, and then resumed : 
 
 " Let us look squarely at this world about 
 us. What is the true lot of life? Is there the 
 slightest justification for assuming that our 
 conceptions of right and happiness are re- 
 flected anywhere in the outward universe? 
 Is there, for instance, much animal happi- 
 ness? Do health and well-being constitute 
 the normal state of animals? " 
 
 He paused. Mr. Dad got up, and stood 
 looking out of the window with his back to 
 Mr. Huss. "Pulling nature to pieces," he 
 said over his shoulder. He turned and urged 
 further, with a snarl of bitterness in his 
 voice : " Suppose things are so, what is the 
 good of our calling attention to it? Where's 
 the benefit? " 
 
 Hut the attitude of Sir Eliphaz conveyed 
 a readine5>s to listen. 
 
 '* Before I became too ill to go out here," 
 
 89
 
 90 The Undying Fire 
 
 said Mr. Huss, *' I went for a walk in the 
 country behind this place. I was weary before 
 I started, but I was impelled to go by that 
 almost irresistible desire that will seize upon 
 one at times to get out of one's immediate 
 surroundings. I wanted to escape from this 
 wretched room, and I wanted to be alone, 
 secure from interruptions, and free to think in 
 peace. There was a treacherous promise in 
 the day outside, much sunshine and a breeze. 
 I had heard of woods a mile or so inland, and 
 that conjured up a vision of cool green shade 
 and kindly streams beneath the trees and of 
 the fellowship of shy and gentle creatures. So 
 I went out into the heat and into the dried and 
 salted east wind, through glare and inky 
 shadows, across many more fields than I had 
 expected, until I came to some woods and 
 then to a neglected park, and there for a time 
 I sat down to rest. . . . 
 
 '* But I could get no rest. The turf was 
 unclean through the presence of many sheep, 
 and in it there was a number of close-growing 
 but very sharply barbed thistles ; and after a 
 little time I realized that harvesters, those 
 minute red beasts that creep upon one in the
 
 The Three Visitors 91 
 
 chalk lands and burrow into the skin and pro- 
 duce an almost intolerable itching, abounded. 
 I got up again and went on, hoping in vain to 
 find some fence or gate on which I might rest 
 more comfortably. There were many flies and 
 gnats, many more than there are here and of 
 different sorts, and they persecuted me more 
 and more. They surrounded me in a hum- 
 ming cloud, and I had to wave my walking- 
 stick about my head all the time to keep them 
 off me. I felt too exhausted to walk back, but 
 there was, I knew, a village a mile or so ahead 
 where I hoped to find some conveyance in 
 which I might return by road. . . . 
 
 " And as I struggled along in this fashion 
 I came upon first one thing and then another, 
 so apt to my mood that they might have been 
 put there by some adversary. First it was a 
 very young rabbit indeed, it ,was scarcely as 
 long as my hand, which some cruel thing had 
 dragged from its burrow. The back of its 
 head had been bitten open and .was torn and 
 bloody, and the flies rose from its oozing 
 wounds to my face like a cloud of witnesses. 
 Then as I went on, trying to distract my mind 
 from the memory of this pitiful dead thing by
 
 92 The Undying Fire 
 
 looking about me for something more agree- 
 able, I discovered a row of little brown objeots 
 in a hawthorn bush, and going closer found 
 they were some half-dozen victims of a 
 butcher bird — beetles, fledgelings, and a mouse 
 or so — spiked on the thorns. They were all 
 twisted into painful attitudes, as if each had 
 suffered horribly and challenged me by the 
 last gesture of its limbs to judge between it 
 and its creator. . . . And a little further on a 
 gaunt, villainous-looking cat with rusty black 
 fur that had bare patches suddenly ran upon 
 me out of a side path ; it had something in its 
 mouth which it abandoned at the sight of me 
 and left writhing at my feet, a pretty crested 
 bird, very mangled, that flapped in flat circles 
 upon the turf, unable to rise. A fit of weak 
 and reasonless rage came upon me at this, and 
 seeing the cat halt some yards away and turn 
 to regard me and move as if to recover its 
 victim, I rushed at it and pursued it, shouting. 
 Then it occurred to me that it would be 
 kinder if, instead of a futile pursuit of the 
 wretched cat, I went back and put an end to 
 the bird's sufferings. For a time I could not 
 find it, and I searched for it in the bushes in
 
 The Three Visitors 93 
 
 a fever to get it killed, groaning and cursing 
 as I did so. When I found it, it fought at nie 
 with its poor bleeding wings and snapped its 
 beak at me, and made me feel less like a de- 
 liverer than a murderer. I hit it with my 
 stick, and as it still moved I stamped it to 
 death with my feet. I fled from its body in 
 an agony. 'And this,' I cried, 'this hell 
 revealed, is God's creation ! ' " 
 
 " Tcha! " exclaimed Mr. Dad. 
 
 " Suddenly it seemed to me that scales had 
 fallen from my eyes and that I saw the whole 
 world plain. It was as if the universe had put 
 aside a mask it had hitherto worn, and shown 
 me its face, and it was a face of boundless 
 evil. ... It was as if a power of darkness sat 
 over me and watched me with a mocking gaze, 
 and for the rest of that day I could think of 
 nothing but the feeble miseries of living 
 things. I was tortured, and all life was tor- 
 tured with me. I failed to find the village I 
 sought ; I strayed far, I got back here at last 
 long after dark, stopping sometimes by the 
 wayside to be sick, sometimes kneeling or 
 lying down for a time to rest, shivering and 
 burning with an increasing fever.
 
 94 The Undying Fire 
 
 " I had, as you know, been the first to find 
 poor Williamson lying helpless among the 
 acids ; that ghastly figure and the burnt bodies 
 of the two boys who died in School House 
 haunt my mind constantly ; but what was most 
 in my thoughts on that day when the world 
 of nature showed its teeth to me was the 
 wretchedness of animal life. I do not know 
 why that should have seemed more pitiful to 
 me, and more fundamental, but it did. 
 Human suffering, perhaps, is complicated by 
 moral issues ; man can look before and after 
 and find remote justifications and stern con- 
 solations outside his present experiences ; but 
 the poor birds and beasts, they have only their 
 present experiences and their individual fives 
 cut off and shut in. How can there be 
 righteousness in any scheme that aflfliots 
 them? I thought of one creature after an- 
 other, and I could imagine none that had more 
 than an occasional gleam of false and futile 
 satisfaction between suffering and suffering. 
 And to-day, gentlemen, as I sit here with you, 
 the same dark stream of conviction pours 
 through my mind. I feel that life is a weak 
 and inconsequent stirring amidst the dust of
 
 The Three Visitors 95 
 
 space and time, incapable of overcoming even 
 its internal dissensions, doomed to phases of 
 delusion, to irrational and undeserved punish- 
 ments, to vain complainings and at last to 
 extinction. 
 
 " Is there so much as one healthy living 
 being in the world? I question it. As I 
 wandered that day, I noted the trees as I had 
 never noted them before. There was not one 
 that did not show a stricken or rotten branch, 
 or that was not studded with the stumps of 
 lost branches decaying backwards towards 
 the main stem ; from every fork came dark 
 stains of corruption, the bark was twisted and 
 contorted, and fungoid protrusions proclaimed 
 the hidden mycelium of disease. The leaves 
 were spotted with warts and blemishes, and 
 gnawed and bitten by a myriad enemies. I 
 noted too that the turf under my feet was worn 
 and scor'"hed and weary ; gossamer threads 
 and spiders of a hundred sorts trapped the 
 multitudinous insects in the wilted autunmul 
 undergrowth ; the hedges were a slow conflict 
 of thrusting and strangulating plants in which 
 every individual was more or less crippled or 
 stunted. Most of these plants were armed like
 
 96 The Undying Fire 
 
 assassins; they had great thorns or stinging 
 hairs ; some ripened poisonous berries. And 
 this was the reality of hfe ; this was no excep- 
 tional mood of things, but a revelation of 
 things established. I had been blind and now 
 I saw. Even as these woods and thickets were, 
 so was all the world. . . . 
 
 " I had been reading in a book I had 
 chanced to pick up in this lodging about the 
 jungles of India, which many people think of as 
 a vast wealth of splendid and luxuriant vegeta- 
 tion. For the greater part of the year they 
 are hot and thorny wastes of brown, dead and 
 mouldering matter. Comes the steaming down- 
 pour of the rains ; and then for a Httle while 
 there is a tangled rush of fighting greenery, 
 jostling, choking, torn and devoured by a mul- 
 titude of beajsts and by a horrible variety of 
 insects that the hot morature has called to 
 activity. Then under the dry breath of the 
 destroyer the exuberance stales and withers, 
 everything ripens and falls, and the jungle 
 relapses again into sullen heat and gloomy fer- 
 mentation. And in truth everywhere the 
 growth season is a wild scramble into exist- 
 ence, the rest of the year a complicated mas-
 
 The Three Visitors 97 
 
 sacre. Even in our British climate is it not 
 plain to you how the summer outlasts the lavish 
 promise of the spring. In our spring there is no 
 doubt an air of hope, of budding and blossom- 
 ing ; there is the nesting and singing of birds, 
 a certain cleanness of the air, an emergence of 
 primary and comparatively innocent things ; 
 but hard upon that freshness follow the pests 
 and parasites, the creatures that corrupt and 
 sting, the minions of waste and pain and 
 lassitude and fever. . . . 
 
 " You may say that I am dwelling too 
 much upon the defects in the lives of plants, 
 which do not feel, and of insects and small 
 creatures which may feel in a dijffcrent manner 
 from ourselves ; but indeed their decay and 
 imperfection make up the common texture of 
 life. Even the things that live are only half 
 alive. You may argue that at least the rarer, 
 larger beasts bring with them a certain delight 
 and dignity into the world. But consider the 
 lives of the herbivora ; they are all hunted 
 creatures ; fear is their habit of mind ; even the 
 great Indian buffalo is given to panic flights. 
 They are incessantly worried by swarms of in- 
 sects. When they are not apathetic they 
 
 H
 
 gS The Undying Fire 
 
 appear to be angry, exasperated with life ; 
 their seasonal outbreaks of sex are evidently a 
 violent torment to them, an occasion for fierce 
 bello wings, mutual persecution and desperate 
 combats. Such beasts as the rhinoceros or the 
 buffalo are habitually in a rage ; they will run 
 amuck for no conceivable reason, and so too 
 will many elephants, betraying a sort of 
 organic spite against all other living things. . . . 
 
 "And if we turn to the great carnivores, 
 who should surely be the lords of the jungle 
 world, their lot seems to be not one whit more 
 happy. The tiger leads a life of fear ; a dirty 
 scrap of rag will turn him from his path. 
 Much of his waking life is prowling hunger; 
 when he kills he eats ravenously, he eats to the 
 pitch of discomfort ; he lies up afterwards in 
 reeds or bushes, savage, disinclined to move. 
 The hunter must beat him out, and he comes 
 out sluggishly and reluctantly to die. His 
 paws, too, are strangely tender ; a few miles 
 of rock will make them bleed, they gather 
 thorns. . . . His mouth is so foul that his bite 
 is a poisoned bite. . . . 
 
 " All that day I struggled against this per- 
 suasion that the utmost happiness of any
 
 The Three Visitors 99 
 
 animal is at best like a transitory smile on a 
 grim and inhuman countenance. I tried to 
 recall some humorous and contented-looking 
 creatures. ... 
 
 " That only recalled a fresh horror. . . . 
 
 " You will have seen pictures and photo- 
 graphs of penguins. They will have conveyed 
 to you the sort of effect I tried to recover. 
 They express a quaint and jolly gravity, an 
 aldermanic contentment. But to me now the 
 mere thought of a penguin raises a vision of 
 distress. I will tell you. . . . One of my old 
 boys came to me a year or so ago on his return 
 from a South Polar expedition ; he told me the 
 true story of these birds. Their lives, he said 
 — he was speaking more particularly of the 
 king penguin — are tormented by a monstrously 
 exaggerated maternal instinct, an instinct 
 shared by both sexes, which is a necessary 
 condition of survival in the crowded rookeries 
 of that frozen environment. And that instinct 
 makes life one long torment for them. There 
 is always a great smashing of eggs there 
 through various causes ; there is an excessive 
 mortality among the chicks ; they slip down 
 crevasses, they freeze to death and so forth,
 
 100 The Undying Fire 
 
 three-quarters of each year's brood perish, and 
 without this extravagant passion the species 
 would become extinct. So that every bird is 
 afflicted with desire and anxiety to brood upon 
 and protect a chick. But each couple pro- 
 duces no more than one egg a year ; eggs get 
 broken, they roll away into the water, there is 
 always a shortage, and every penguin that has 
 an egg has to guard it jealously, and each one 
 that has not an egg is impelled to steal or cap- 
 ture one. Some in their distress will mother 
 pebbles or scraps of ice, some fortunate in 
 possession will sit for days without leaving the 
 nest in spite of the gnawings of the intense 
 Antarctic hunger. To leave a nest for a 
 moment is to tempt a robber, and the intensity 
 of the emotions aroused is shown by the fact 
 that they will fight to the death over a stolen 
 egg. You see that these pictures of rookeries 
 of apparently comical birds are really pictures 
 of poor dim-minded creatures worried and 
 strained to the very limit of their powers. 
 That is what their lives have always been. . . . 
 " But the king penguin draws near the end 
 of its history. Let me tell you how its history 
 is ckxsing. Let me tell you of what is hap-
 
 The Three Visitors loi 
 
 pening in the peaceful Southern Seas — now. 
 This old boy of mine was in great distress 
 because of a vile traffic that has arisen. . . . 
 Unless it is stopped, it will destroy these 
 rookeries altogether. These birds are being 
 murdered wholesale for their oil. Parties of 
 men land and club them upon their nests, from 
 which the poor, silly things refuse to stir. The 
 dead and stunned, the living and the dead to- 
 gether, are dragged away and thrust into iron 
 crates to be boiled down for their oil. The 
 broken living with the dead. . . . Each bird 
 yields about a farthing's profit, but it pays to 
 kill them at that, and so the thing is done. 
 The people who run these operations, you see, 
 have had a sound commercial training. They 
 believe that when God gives us power He 
 means us to use it, and that what is profitable 
 is just." 
 
 '•Well really," protested Mr. Dad. 
 "Really! " 
 
 Mr. Farr also betrayed a disposition to 
 speak. He cleared his throat, his uneasy 
 hands worried the edge of the table, his face 
 shone. " Sir EHphaz," he said. . . . 
 
 *' Let me finish," said Mr. Huss, "for I
 
 102 The Undying Fire 
 
 have still to remind you of the most stubborn 
 facts of all in such an argument as this. Have 
 you ever thought of the significance of such 
 creatures as the entozoa, and the vast multi- 
 tudes of other sorts of specialized parasites 
 whose very existence is cruelty? There are 
 thousands of orders and genera of insects, 
 Crustacea, arachnids, worms, and lowlier 
 things, which are adapted in the most compli- 
 cated way to prey upon the living and suffering 
 tissues of their fellow creatures, and which can 
 live in no other way. Have you ever thought 
 what that means? If forethought framed 
 these horrors what sort of benevolence was 
 there in that forethought? I will not distress 
 you by describing the life cycles of any of these 
 creatures too exactly. You must know of many 
 of them. I will not dwell upon those wasps, for 
 example, which lay their eggs in the living 
 bodies of victims which the young will gnaw to 
 death slowly day by day as they develop, nor 
 will I discuss this unmeaning growth of cells 
 which has made my body its soil. . . . Nor any 
 one of our thousand infectious fevers that fall 
 upon us — without reason, without justice. . . . 
 " Man is of all creatures the least subjected
 
 The Three Visitors 103 
 
 to internal parasites. In the brief space of a 
 few hundred thousand years he has changed his 
 food, his habitat and every attitude and habit 
 of his hfe, and comparatively few species, 
 thirty or forty at most, I am told, have been 
 able to follow his changes and specialize them- 
 selves to him under these fresh conditions ; yet 
 even man can entertain some fearful guests. 
 Every time you drink open water near a sheep 
 pasture you may drink the larval liver fluke, 
 which will make your liver a little township of 
 vile creatures until they eat it up, until they 
 swarm from its oozing ruins into your body 
 cavity and destroy you. In Europe this is a 
 rare fate for a man, but in China there are 
 wide regions where the fluke abounds and rots 
 the life out of thousands of people. . . . The 
 fluke is but one sample of such feats of the 
 Creator. An unwashed leaf of lettuce may 
 be the means of planting a parasitic cyst in 
 your brain to dethrone your reason ; a feast of 
 underdone pork may transfer to you from the 
 swine the creeping death torture of trichinosis. 
 . . . But all that men suffer in these matters 
 is nothing to the suffering of the beasts. The 
 torments of the beasts are finished and com-
 
 104 The Undying Fire 
 
 plete. My biological master tells me that he 
 rarely opens a cod or dogfish without finding 
 bunches of some sort of worm or such like 
 pallid lodger in possession. He has rows of 
 little tubes with the things he has found in the 
 bodies of rabbits. . . . 
 
 " But I will not disgust you further. . . . 
 
 " Is this a world made for the happiness of 
 sentient things? 
 
 " I ask you, how is it possible for man to 
 be other than a rebel in the face of such facts? 
 How can he trust the Maker who has designed 
 and elaborated and finished these parasites in 
 their endless multitude and variety? For 
 these things are not in the nature of sudden 
 creations and special judgments ; they have 
 been produced fearfully and wonderfully by a 
 process of evolution as slow and deliberate as 
 our own. How can Man trust such a Maker 
 to treat him fairly? Why should we shut our 
 eyes to things that stare us in the face ? Either 
 the world of life is the creation of a being in- 
 spired by a malignancy at once filthy, petty 
 and enormous, or it displays a carelessness, an 
 indifference, a disregard for jiLstice. . . ." 
 
 The voice of Mr. Huss faded out.
 
 Q 
 
 10 
 
 For some time Mr. Farr had been mani- 
 festing signs of impatience. The pause gave 
 him his opportunity. He spoke with a sort of 
 restrained vohibility. 
 
 " Sir Eliphaz, Mr. Dad, after what has 
 passed in relation to myself, I would ha^•e pre- 
 ferred to have said nothing in this discussion. 
 Nothing. So far as I myself am concerned, I 
 will still say nothing. But upon some issues 
 it is impossible to keep silence. Mr. Huss 
 has said some terrible things, things that 
 must surely never be said at Woldingstan- 
 ton. . . . 
 
 " Think of what such teaching as this may 
 mean among young and susceptible boys ! 
 Think of such stuff in the school pulpit ! 
 Charv' as I am of all wrangling, and I would 
 not set myself up for a moment to wTangle 
 against Mr. IIuss, yet I feel that this ca\illing 
 against God's universe, this multitude of evil 
 words, must be ani>wercd. It is imperative bo 
 
 105
 
 io6 The Undying Fire 
 
 answer it, plainly and sternly. It is our duty 
 to God, who has made us what we are. . . . 
 
 *' Mr. Huss, in your present diseased state 
 you seem incapable of realizing the enormous 
 egotism of all this depreciation of God's mar- 
 vels. But indeed you have suffered from that 
 sort of incapacity always. It is no new thing. 
 Have I not chafed under your arrogant assur- 
 ance for twelve long years? Your right, now 
 as ever, is the only right ; your doctrine alone 
 is pure. Would that God could speak and 
 open his lips against you ! How his voice 
 would shatter you and us and everything 
 about us ! How you would shrivel amidst 
 your blasphemies ! 
 
 "Excuse me, gentlemen, if I am too 
 forcible," said Mr. Farr, moistening his white 
 lips, but Mr. Dad nodded fierce approval. 
 
 Thus encouraged, Mr. Farr proceeded. 
 " When first I came into this room, Mr. Huss, 
 I was full of pity for your affliction — I think 
 we all were — we were pitiful ; but now it is 
 clear to me that God exacts from you less 
 than your iniquity deserves. Surely the 
 supreme sin is pride. You criticize and be- 
 little God's universe, but what sort of a
 
 The Three Visitors 107 
 
 universe would you give us, Mr. Huss, if you 
 were the Creator? Pardon me if I startle 
 you, gentlemen, but that is a fair question to 
 ask. For it is clear to me now, Mr. Huss, 
 that no less than that will satisfy you. Wold- 
 ingstanton, for all the wonders you have 
 wrought there, in spite of the fact that never 
 before and never again can there be such a 
 head, in spite of the fact that you have lit such 
 a candle there as may one day set the world 
 ablaze, is clearly too small a field for you. 
 Headmaster of the universe is your position. 
 Then, and then alone, could you display your 
 gifts to the full. Then cats would cease to 
 eat birds, and trees grow on in perfect sym- 
 metry until they cumbered the sky. I can 
 dimly imagine the sort of world that it would 
 be ; the very fleas reformed and trained under 
 your hand, would be flushed with health and 
 happiness and doing the work of boy scouts ; 
 every blade of grass would be at least six feet 
 long. As for the liver fluke — but I cannot 
 solve the problem of the liver fluke. I sup- 
 pose you will provide euthanasia for all the 
 parasites. ..." 
 
 Abrui)lly Mr. Farr passed from this vein
 
 io8 The Undying Fire 
 
 of terrible humour to an earnest and pleading 
 manner. " Mr. Huss, with mortal danger so 
 close to you, I entreat you to reconsider all 
 this wild and wicked talk of yours. You take 
 a few superficial aspects of the world and frame 
 a judgment on them ; you try with the poor 
 foot-rule of your mind to measure the plans of 
 Gk>d, plans which are longer than the earth, 
 wider than the sea. I ask you, how can such 
 insolence help you in this supreme emergency? 
 There can be little time left. ..." 
 
 Providence was manifestly resolved to give 
 Mr. Farr the maximum of dramatic effect. 
 " But what is this? " said Mr. Farr. He stood 
 up and looked out of the window. 
 
 Somebody had rung the bell, and now, 
 with an effect of impatience, was rapping at 
 the knocker of Sea View.
 
 CHAPTER THE FOURTH 
 
 DO WE TRULY DIE? 
 
 § 1 
 
 Mrs. Croome was heard in the passage, some- 
 one was admitted, there were voices, and the 
 handle of the parlour door was turned. 
 " 'As'ent E come then?" they heard the 
 voice of Mrs. Croome through the open- 
 ing. Dr. Elihu Barrack appeared in the 
 doorway. 
 
 He was a round-headed young man with a 
 clean-shaven face, a mouth that was deter- 
 minedly determined and slightly oblique, a 
 short nose, and a general expression of reso- 
 lution ; the fact that he had an artificial leg 
 was scarcely perceptible in his bearing. He 
 considered the four men before him for a 
 moment, and then addressed himself to Mr. 
 Huss in a tone of brisk autlxority. " You 
 ought to be in bed," he said. 
 
 109
 
 no The Undying Fire 
 
 " I had this rather important discussion," 
 said Mr. Huss, with a gesture portending 
 introductions. 
 
 " But sitting up will fatigue you," the 
 doctor insisted, sticking to his patient. 
 
 " It won't distress me so much as leaving 
 these things unsaid would have done." 
 
 "Opinions may differ upon that," said 
 Mr. Farr darkly. 
 
 "We are still far from any settlement of 
 our difficulties," said Sir Eliphaz to the 
 universe. 
 
 " I have indicated my view at any rate," 
 said Mr. Huss. " I suppose now Sir Alpheus 
 is here " 
 
 " He isn't here," said Dr. Barrack neatly. 
 " He telegraphs to say that he is held up, and 
 will come by the next train. So you get a 
 reprieve, Mr. Huss." 
 
 " In that case I shall go on talking." 
 
 " You had better go to bed." 
 
 "No. I couldn't lie quiet." And Mr. 
 Huss proceeded to name his guests to Dr. 
 Barrack, who nodded shortly to each of them 
 in turn, and said: " Pleased-t-meet you." 
 His face betrayed no excess of pleasure. His
 
 Do We Truly Die? m 
 
 eye was hard. He remained standing, as if 
 waiting for them to display symptoms. 
 
 " Our discussion has wandered far," said 
 Sir Eliphaz. " Our original business here was 
 to determine the future development of 
 Woldingstanton School, which we think 
 should be made more practical and technical 
 than hitherto, and less concerned with history 
 and philosophy than it has been under Mr. 
 Huss. (Won't you sit down. Doctor?)" 
 
 The doctor sat down, still watching Sir 
 Eliphaz with hard intelligence. 
 
 "Well, we have drifted from that," Sir 
 Eliphaz continued. 
 
 "Not so far as you may think," said Mr. 
 Huss. 
 
 " At any rate Mr. Huss has been regaling 
 us with a discourse upon the miseries of life, 
 how we are all eaten up by parasites and 
 utterly wretched, and how everything is 
 wretched and this an accursed world ruled 
 either by a cruel God or a God so careless as 
 to be practically no God at all." 
 
 " Nice stuff for nineteen eighteen -i.A," 
 said Mr. Dad, putting much meaning into the 
 
 A.D.
 
 112 The Undying Fire 
 
 (< 
 
 Since I left Woldingstanton and came 
 here," said Mr. Huss, *' I have done Httle else 
 but think. I have not slept during the night, 
 I have had nothing to occupy me during the 
 day, and I have been thinking about funda- 
 mental things. I have been forced to revise 
 my faith, and to look more closely than I have 
 ever done before into the meaning of my be- 
 liefs and into my springs of action. I have 
 been vi^renched away from that liabitual con- 
 fidence in the order of things which seemed 
 the more natural state for a mind to be in. 
 But that has only widened a difference that 
 already existed between me and these three 
 gentlemen, and that was showing very plainly 
 in the days when success srt:ill justified my grip 
 upon Woldingstanton. Suddenly, swiftly, I 
 have had misfortune following upon misfor- 
 tune — without cause or justification. I am 
 thrown now into the darkest doubt and dis- 
 may ; the universe seems harsh and black to 
 me ; whereas formerly I believed that at the 
 core of it and universally pervading it was 
 the Will of a God of Light. ... I have 
 always denied, even when my faith was un- 
 dimmed, that the God of Righteousness ruled
 
 Do We Truly Die ? 113 
 
 this world in detail and entirety, giving us day 
 by day our daily rewards and punishments. 
 These gentlemen on the contrary do believe 
 that. They say that God does rule the world 
 traceably and directly, and that success is the 
 measure of his approval and pain and suffering 
 the fulfilment of unrighteousness. And as for 
 what has this to do with education — it has all 
 to do with education. You can settle no prac- 
 tical questions until you have settled such dis- 
 putes as this. Before you can prepare boys 
 to play their part in the world you must ask 
 what is this world for which you prepare them ; 
 is it a tragedy or comedy ? What is the nature 
 of this drama in which they are to play? " 
 
 Dr. Barrack indicated that this statement 
 was noted and approved. 
 
 " For clearly," said Mr. Huss, " if success 
 is the justification of hfe you must train for 
 success. There is no need for men to under- 
 stand life, then, so long as they do their job in 
 it. That is the opinion of these governors of 
 mine. It has been the opinion of most men 
 of the world — always. Obey the Thing that 
 Is ! that is the lesson they would have taught 
 tt my boys. Acquiesce. Life for them \s
 
 114 The Undying Fire 
 
 not an adventure, not a struggle, but simply 
 obedience and the enjoyment of rewards. . . . 
 That, Dr. Barrack, is what such a technical 
 education as they want set up at Wolding- 
 stanton really means. . . . 
 
 "But I have believed always and taught 
 always that what God demands from man is 
 his utmost effort to co-operate and under- 
 stand. I have taught the imagination, first 
 and most ; I have made knowledge, knowledge 
 of what man is and what man's world is and 
 what man may be, which is the adventure of 
 mankind, the substance of all my teaching. 
 At Woldingstanton I have taught philosophy ; 
 I have taught the whole history of mankind. 
 If I could not have done that without leaving 
 chemistry and physics, mathematics and 
 languages out of the curriculum altogether I 
 would have left them out. And you see why, 
 Dr. Barrack." 
 
 "I see your position certainly," said Dr. 
 Barrack. 
 
 " And now that my heavens are darkened, 
 now that my eyes have been opened to the 
 wretchedness, futility and horror in the tex- 
 ture of life, I still cling, I cling more than
 
 Do We Truly Die ? 115 
 
 ever, to the spirit of righteousness within me. 
 If there is no God, no mercy, no human kind- 
 liness in the great frame of space and time, if 
 life is a writhing torment, an itch upon one 
 little planet, and the stars away there in the 
 void no more than huge empty flares, signify- 
 ing nothing, then all the brighter shines the 
 flame of God in my heart. If the God in my 
 heart is no son of any heavenly father then is 
 he Prometheus the rebel ; it does not shake 
 my faith that he is the Master for whom I 
 will live and die. And all the more do I cHng 
 to this fire of human tradition we have lit upon 
 this little planet, if it is the one gleam of spirit 
 in all the windy vastness of a dead and empty 
 universe." 
 
 Dr. Barrack seemed about to interrupt 
 with some comment, and then, it was mani- 
 fest, deferred his interpolation. 
 
 "Loneliness and littleness," said Mr. 
 Huss, " harshness in the skies above and in 
 the texture of all things. If so it is that things 
 are, so we must see them. Every baby in its 
 mother's arms feels safe in a safe creation ; 
 every child in its home. Many men and 
 women have lived and died happy in that illu-
 
 ii6 The Undying Fire 
 
 sion of security. But this war has torn away 
 the veil of ilhision from millions of men. . . . 
 Mankind is coming of age. We can see life 
 at last for what it is and what it is not. Here 
 we spin upon a ball of rock and nickel-steel, 
 upon w^hich a film of water, a few score miles 
 of air, lie like the bloom upon a plum. All 
 about that ball is space unfathomable ; all the 
 suns and stars are mere grains of matter scat- 
 tered through a vastness that is otherwise 
 utterly void. To that thin bloom upon a 
 particle we are confined ; if we tunnel down 
 into the earth, presently it is too hot for us 
 to live ; if we soar five miles into the air we 
 freeze, the blood runs out of our vessels into 
 our lungs, we die suffocated and choked with 
 blood. . . . 
 
 " Out of the htter of muds and gravels that 
 make the soil of the world we have picked 
 some traces of the past of our race and the 
 past of life. In our obsei'vatories and labora- 
 tories we have gleaned some hints of its 
 future. We have a vision of the opening of 
 the story, but the first pages we cannot read. 
 We discover Hfe, a mere stir amidst the mud, 
 creeping along the littoral of warm and shal-
 
 Do We Truly Die ? 117 
 
 low seas in the brief nights and days of a 
 swiftly rotating earth. We follow through 
 vast ages the story of life's extension into the 
 waters, and its invasion of the air and land. 
 Plants creep upon the land and raise them- 
 selves by stems towards the sun ; a few worms 
 and crustaceans follow, insects appear ; and at 
 length come our amphibious ancestors, breath- 
 ing air by means of a swimming bladder used 
 as a lung. From the first the land animals are 
 patched-up creatures. They eke out the fish 
 ear they inherit by means of an ear drum made 
 out of a gill slit. You can trace scale and fin 
 in bone and limb. At last this green scum of 
 vegetable life with the beasts entangled in its 
 meshes creeps in the form of forests over the 
 hills ; grass spreads across the plains, and great 
 animals follow it out into the open. What 
 does it all signify? No more than green moss 
 spreading over an old tile. Steadily the earth 
 cools and the day lengthens. Through long 
 ages of warmth and moisture the wealth of 
 unmeaning life increases ; come ages of chill 
 and retrocession, glacial periods, and periods 
 when whole genera and orders die out. Comes 
 man at last, the destroyer, the war-maker,
 
 ii8 The Undying Fire 
 
 setting fire to the world, burning the forests, 
 exhausting the earth. What hope has he in 
 the end? Always the day drags longer and 
 longer and always the sun radiates its energy 
 away. A time will come when the sun will 
 glow dull red in the heavens, shorn of all its 
 beams, and neither rising nor setting. A day 
 will come when the earth will be as dead and 
 frozen as the moon. ... A spirit in our hearts, 
 the God of mankind, cries ' No ! ' but is there 
 any voice outside us in all the cold and empty 
 universe that echoes that ' No ' ? "
 
 § 2 
 
 "Ah, Mr. Huss, Mr. Huss ! " said Sir 
 Eliphaz. 
 
 His eye seemed seeking some point of 
 attachment, and found it at last in the steel 
 engraving of Queen Victoria giving a Bible to 
 a dusky potentate, which adorned the little 
 parlour. 
 
 "Your sickness colours your vision," said 
 Sir Eliphaz. " What you say is so profoundly 
 true and so utterly false. Mysteriously 
 evolved, living as you say in a mere bloom of 
 air and moisture upon this tiny planet, how. 
 could we exist, how could we continue, were 
 we not sustained in every moment by the 
 Mercy and Wisdom of God? The flimsier life 
 is, the greater the wonder of his Providence. 
 Not a sparrow," said Sir Eliphaz, and then 
 enlarging the metaphor with a boom in his 
 voice, " not a hair of my head, falls to the 
 ground without His knowledge and consent. 
 ... I am a man much occupied. 1 cannot do 
 
 119
 
 120 The Undying Fire 
 
 the reading I would. But while you have been 
 reviling the works of God I have been thinking 
 of some wonders. ..." 
 
 Sir Ehphaz lifted up a hand with thumb 
 and finger opposed as though he held some 
 exquisite thing therein. 
 
 " The human eye," said Sir Eliphaz, with 
 an intensity of appreciation that brought tears 
 to his own. . . . • 
 
 " The cross fertilization of plants. . . , 
 
 "The marvellous transformations of the 
 higher insects. . . . 
 
 " The highly elaborate wing scales of the 
 Lepidoptera. 
 
 " The mercy that tempers the wind to the 
 shorn lamb. . . . 
 
 ' ' The dark warm marvels of embryology ; 
 the order and rhythm and obedience with 
 which the cells of the fertilized ovum divide to 
 build up the perfect body of a living thing, 
 yea, even of a human being — in God's image. 
 First there is one cell, then two ; the process of 
 division is extremely beautiful and is called, I 
 believe, karyokinesis ; then after the two come 
 four, each knows his part, each divides cer- 
 tainly and marvellously ; eight, sixteen, thirty-
 
 Do We Truly Die ? 121 
 
 two. . . . Each of those thirty-two cells is a 
 complete thirty-second part of a man. Pre- 
 sently this cell says, ' I become a hair ' ; this, 
 ' a blood corpuscle,' this ' a cell in the brain 
 of a man, to mirror the universe.' Each goes 
 to his own appointed place. . . . 
 
 *' Would that we could do the like ! " said 
 Sir Eliphaz. 
 
 " Then consider water," said Sir Eliphaz. 
 " I am not deeply versed in physical science, 
 but there are certain things about water that 
 fill me with wonder and amaze. All other 
 liquids contract when they solidify. With 
 one or two exceptions — useful in the arts. 
 Water expands. Now water is a non-con- 
 ductor of heat, and if water contracted and 
 became heavier when it became ice, it would 
 sink to the bottom of the polar seas and 
 remain there unmelted. More ice would sink 
 down to it, until all the ocean was ice and life 
 ceased. But water does not do so. No ! . . . 
 Were it not for the vapour of water, which 
 catches and entangles the sun's heat, this world 
 would scorch by day and freeze by night. 
 Mercy upon mercy. I myself," said Sir 
 Ehphuz in tones of happy confession, "am
 
 122 The Undying Fire 
 
 ninety per cent, water. . . . We all are. 
 
 • • • 
 
 " And think how, mercifully winter is 
 tempered to us by the snow ! When water 
 freezes in the air in winter-time, it does not 
 come pelting down as lumps of ice. Conceiv- 
 ably it might, and then where should we be? 
 But it belongs to the hexagonal system — a 
 system prone to graceful frameworks. It 
 crystallizes into the most delicate and beauti- 
 ful lace of six-rayed crystals — wonderful 
 under the microscope. They flake delicately. 
 They lie loosely one upon another. Out of 
 ice is woven a warm garment like wool, white 
 like wool because like wool it is full of air 
 — a warm garment for bud and shoot. . . . 
 
 " Then again — you revile God for the 
 parasites he sends. But are they not sent to 
 teach us a great moral lesson? Each one for 
 himself and God for us all. Not so the para- 
 sites. They choose a life of base dependence. 
 With that comes physical degeneration, swift 
 and sure. They are the Socialists of nature. 
 They lose their limbs. They lose colour, 
 become bleached, unappetising beings, vile 
 creatures of sloth — often microscopic. Do
 
 Do We Truly Die? 123 
 
 they not urge us by their shameful lives to 
 self help and exertion? Yet even parasites 
 have a use ! I am told that were it not for 
 parasitic bacteria man could not digest his 
 food. A lichen again is made up of an alga 
 and a fungus, mutually parasitic. That is 
 called symbiosis — living together for a mutual 
 benefit. Maybe every one of those thousands 
 of parasites you deem so horrible is working 
 its way upward towards an arrangement " 
 
 Sir Eliphaz weighed his words : " Some 
 mutually advantageous arrangement with its 
 host. A paying guest. 
 
 " And finally," said Sir Eliphaz, with the 
 roll of distant thunder in his voice, " think of 
 the stately procession of life upon the earth, 
 through a myriad of forms the glorious 
 crescendo of evolution, up to its climax, man. 
 What a work is man ! The paragon of 
 creation, the microcosm of the cosmos, the 
 ultimate birth of time. . . . And you would 
 have us doubt the guiding hand! " 
 
 lie ceased with a gesture. 
 
 Mr. Dad made a noise like responses in 
 church.
 
 § 3 
 
 " A certain beauty in the world is no 
 mark of God's favour," said Mr. Huss. 
 *' There is no beauty one may not balance by 
 an equal ugliness. The wart-hog and the 
 hyaena, the tapeworm and the stinkhorn, are 
 equally God's creations. Nothing you have 
 said points to an>i;hing but a cold indifference 
 towards us of this order in which we live. 
 Beauty happens ; it is not given. Pain, 
 suffering, happiness ; there is no heed. Only 
 in the heart of man burns the fire of 
 righteousness." 
 
 For a time Mr. Huss was silent. Then 
 he went on answering Sir Eliphaz. 
 
 *' You spoke of the wonder of the cross- 
 fertilization of plants. But do you not know 
 that half these curious and elaborate adapta- 
 tions no longer work? Scarcely was their 
 evolution completed before the special need 
 that produced them ceased. Half the intricate 
 flowers you see are as futile as the ruins of 
 
 124
 
 Do We Truly Die? 125 
 
 Palmyra. Tliey are self-teitilized or wind- 
 fertilized. The transformation of the higher 
 insects which give us our gnats and wasps, our 
 malaria and apple-maggots in due season, are 
 a matter for human astonishment rather than 
 human gratitude. If there is any design in 
 these strange and intricate happenings, surely 
 it is the design of a misplaced and inhuman 
 ingenuity. The scales of the lepidoptera, 
 again, have wasted their glittering splendours 
 for millions of years. If they were meant for 
 man, why do the most beautiful species fly by 
 night in the tropical forests? As for the 
 human eye, oculists and opticians are scarcely 
 of your opinion. You hymn the peculiar 
 properties of water that make life possible. 
 They make it possible. Do they make it 
 other than it is? 
 
 " You have talked of the marvels of 
 embryonic growth in the egg. I admit the 
 wonderful precision of the process ; but how 
 does it touch my doubts? Rather it confuses 
 them, as though the Ciod who niles the world 
 nilcd not so much in love as in irony. Won- 
 derfully indeed do the cells divide and the 
 chromoplas'ts of the division slide along their
 
 126 The Undying Fire 
 
 spindle lines. They divide not as if a divine 
 hand guided them but with remorseless logic, 
 with the pitiless consistency of a mathe- 
 matical process. They divide and marshal 
 themselves and turn this way and that, to 
 make an idiot, to make a congenital cripple. 
 Millions of such cripples pile up — and pro- 
 duce the swaying drunkard at the pot-house 
 door. 
 
 " You talk of the crescendo of evolution, 
 of the first beginnings of life, and how the 
 scheme unfolds until it culminates in us — us, 
 here, under these circumstances, you and Mr. 
 Dad and Farr and me — waiting for the knife. 
 Would that I could see any such crescendo I 
 I see change indeed and change and change, 
 without plan and without heart. Consider 
 for example the migrations of birds across the 
 Mediterranean, and the tragic absurdity of its 
 incidents. Ages ago, and for long ages, there 
 stretched continuous land connexions from 
 Africa to Europe. Then the instinct was 
 formed ; the birds flew over land from the 
 heated south to the northern summer to build 
 and breed. Slowly age by age the seas crept 
 over those necks of land. Those linking tracts
 
 Do We Truly Die? 127 
 
 have been broken now for a hundred thousand 
 years, and yet over a constantly widening sea, 
 in which myriads perish exhausted, instinct, 
 bhnd and pitiless, still drives those birds. 
 And again think of those vain urgencies for 
 some purpose long since forgotten, that drive 
 the swarming lemmings to their fate. And 
 look at man, your evolution's crown ; con- 
 sider his want of balance, the invalidism of his 
 women, the extravagant disproportion of his 
 desires. Consider the Record of the Rocks 
 honestly and frankly, and where can you trace 
 this crescendo you suggest? There have been 
 great ages of marvellous tree-ferns and won- 
 derful forest swamps, and all those glorious 
 growths have died. They did not go on ; they 
 reached a climax and died ; another sort of 
 plant succeeded them. Then think of all that 
 wonderful fauna of the Mesozoic times, the 
 age of Leviathan ; the theriodonts, reptilian 
 beasts, the leaping dinosaurs, the mososaurs 
 and suchlike monsters of the deep, the bat- 
 winged pterodactyls, the plesiosaurs and 
 ichthyosaurs. Think of the marvels of the 
 Mesozoic seas ; the thousands of various 
 ammonites, the wealth of fish life. Across
 
 128 The Undying Fire 
 
 all that world of life swept death, as the wet 
 fingers of a child wipe a drawing from a slate. 
 They left no descendants, they clambered to 
 a vast variety and complexity and ceased. 
 The dawn of the Eocene was the bleak dawn 
 of a denuded world. Crescendo if you will, 
 but thereafter diminuendo, pianissimo. And 
 then once again from fresh obscure starting- 
 points far down the stem life swelled, and 
 swelled again, only to dwindle. The world we 
 live in to-day is a meagre spectacle beside the 
 abundance of the earlier Tertiary time, when 
 Behemoth in a thousand forms, Deinothe- 
 rium, Titanotherium, Helladotherium, sabre- 
 toothed tiger, a hundred sorts of elephant, 
 and the like, pushed through the jungles that 
 are now this mild world of to-day. Where is 
 that crescendo now ? Crescendo ! Through 
 those long ages our ancestors were hiding 
 under leaves and climbing into trees to be out 
 of the way of the crescendo. As the motif 
 of a crescendo they sang exceedingly small. 
 And now for a little w^hile the world is ours, 
 and we wax in our turn. To what good? 
 To what end? Tell me, you who say the 
 world is good, tell me the end. How can we
 
 Do We Truly Die ? 129 
 
 escape at last the common fate under the 
 darkling sky of a frozen world? " 
 
 He paused for some moments, weary 5\'ith 
 
 speaking. 
 
 " There is no comfort," he said, "in the 
 flowers or the stars ; no assurance in the past 
 and no sure hope in the future. There is 
 nothing but the God of faith and courage in 
 the hearts of men. . . . And He gives no 
 sign of power, no earnest of victory. . . . 
 He gives no sign. ..." 
 
 Whereupon Sir Eliphaz breathed the 
 word : '* Immortality I " 
 
 " Let me say a word or two upon 
 Immortality," said Sir Eliphaz, breaking 
 suddenly into eagerness, " for that, I pre- 
 simie, is the thing we have forgotten. That, 
 I see, is the difference between us and you, 
 Mr. Huss ; that is why we can sit here, con- 
 tent to play our partial roles, knowing full 
 surely that some day the V^roken lines and in- 
 consecutivenesses that perplex us in this life 
 will all be revealed and resolved into their 
 perfect circles, while you to whom this 
 earthly life is all and final, you must needs 
 be a rebel, you must needs preach a doctrine 
 J
 
 130 The Undying Fire 
 
 between defiance and despair. ... If 
 indeed death ended all! Ah! Then indeed 
 you might claim that reason was on your side. 
 The afflictions of man are very many. Why 
 should I deny it? " 
 
 The patentee and chief proprietor of the 
 Temanite blocks paused for a moment. 
 
 " Yes," he said, peering up through his 
 eyebrows at the sky, " that is the real issue. 
 Blind to that, you are blind to everything." 
 
 " I don't know whether I am with you on 
 this question of immortality. Sir Eliphaz," 
 warned Dr. Barrack, coughing shortly. 
 
 " For my part I'm altogether with him," 
 said Mr. Dad. " If there is no immortal Hfe 
 — well, what's the good of being temperate 
 and decent and careful for five and fifty 
 years? " 
 
 Sir Eliphaz had decided now to drop all 
 apologetics for the scheme of Nature. 
 
 " A place of trial, a place of stimulus and 
 training," he said. " Respice finem. The 
 clues are all — beyond.'" 
 
 " But if you really consider this world as 
 a place for soul making," said Mr. Huss, 
 '^ what do you think you are doing when you
 
 Do We Truly Die ? 131 
 
 propose to turn Woldingstanton over to 
 Farr? " 
 
 " At any rate," said Farr tartly, " we do 
 not want soul-blackening and counsels of 
 despair at Woldingstanton. We want the 
 boys taught to serve and help first in this 
 lowly economic sphere, cheerfully and enter- 
 prisingly, and then in higher things, before 
 they pass on " 
 
 (( 
 
 If death ends all, then what is the good 
 of trying? " Mr. Dad said, still brooding over 
 the question. " If I thought that ! " 
 
 He added with deep conviction, " I should 
 let myself go. . . . Anyone would." 
 
 He blew heavily, stuck his hands in his 
 pockets, and sat more deeply in his chair, an 
 indignant man, a business man asked to give 
 up something for nothing. 
 
 For a moment the little gathering hung, 
 only too manifestly contemplating the spec- 
 tacle of Mr. Dad amidst wine, women, and 
 waistcoats without restraint, letting himself 
 go, eating, drinking, and rejoicing, being a 
 perfect devil, because on the morrow he had 
 to die. . . . 
 
 *' Immortal," said Mr. IIuss. " I did not
 
 132 The Undying Fire 
 
 expect iininortality to come iuto this discus- 
 sion. . . . 
 
 *' Are tjou immortal, Farr? " he asked 
 abruptly. 
 
 " I hope so," said Mr. Farr. " Unworthy 
 though I be." 
 
 " Exactly," said Mr. Huss. *' And so 
 that is the way out for us. You and I, Mr. 
 Dad from his factory, and Sir Eliphaz from 
 his building office, are to soar. It is all 
 arranged for us, and that is why the tragic 
 greatness of life is to be hidden from my 
 boys. . . . 
 
 "Yet even so," continued Mr. Huss, *' I 
 do not see why you should be so anxious for 
 technical science and so hostile to the history 
 of mankind." 
 
 *' Because it is not a tme history," said 
 Sir Eliphaz, his hair waving about like the 
 hair of a man electrified by fresh ideas. 
 " Because it is a bunch of loose ends that are 
 really not ends at all, but only beginnings that 
 pass suddenly into the unseen. I admit that 
 in this world nothing is rationalized, nothing 
 is clearly just. I admit everything you say. 
 But the reason? The reason? Because this
 
 Do We Truly Die ? 133 
 
 life is only the first page of the great book we 
 have to read. We sit here, Mr. Huss, like 
 men in a waiting-room. . . . All this life is 
 like waiting outside, in a place of some dis- 
 order, before being admitted to the \vider 
 reality, the larger sphere, where all the cruel- 
 ties, all these confusions, everything — will be 
 explained, justified — and set right." 
 
 He paused, and then perceiving that Mr. 
 Huss was about to speak he resumed, raising 
 his voice slightly. 
 
 ** And I do not speak without my book 
 in these matters," he said. " I have been 
 greatly impressed — and, what is more. Lady 
 Burrows has been greatly impressed, by the 
 writings of two thoroughly scientific men, two 
 thoroughly scientific men. Dr. Conan Doyle 
 and Sir Oliver Lodge. Ever since she lost 
 her younger sister early in life Lady Burrows 
 has followed up this interest. It has been a 
 great consolation to her. And the point is, 
 as Sir Oliver insists in that wonderful book 
 ' Raymond,' that continued existence in an- 
 other world is as proven now as the atomic 
 theory in chemistry. It is not a matter of 
 faith, but knowledge. The partition is
 
 134 The Undying Fire 
 
 breached at last. We are in communication. 
 News is coming through. . . . Scientific 
 certainty. ..." 
 
 Sir Eliphaz cleared his throat. " We have 
 already evidences and descriptions of the life 
 into which we shall pass. Remember this is 
 no idle talk, no deception by Sludges and the 
 like ; it is a great English scientific man who 
 publishes these records; it is a great French 
 philosopher, no less a man than that wonder- 
 ful thinker — and how he thinks! — Professor 
 Bergson, who counselled their publication. A 
 glory of science and a glory of philosophy 
 combine to reassure us. We walk at last 
 upon a path of fact into that further world. 
 We know already much. We know, for 
 example, that those who have passed over to 
 that higher plane have bodies still. That I 
 found — comforting. Without that — one 
 would feel bleak. But, the messages say, the 
 internal organs are constituted differently. 
 Naturally. As one would have expected. 
 The dietary is, I gather, practically non- 
 existent. Needless. As the outline is the 
 same the space is, I presume, used for other 
 purposes. Some sort of astral storage. . . .
 
 Do We Truly Die? 135 
 
 They do not bleed. An interesting fact. 
 Lady Burrows' sister is now practically blood- 
 less. And her teeth — she had lost several, she 
 suffered greatly with her teeth — her teeth 
 have all been replaced — a beautiful set. Used 
 now only for articulate speech." 
 
 "* Raymond ' all over again," said the 
 doctor. 
 
 "You have read the book!" said Sir 
 Eliphaz. 
 
 The doctor grunted in a manner that 
 mingled assent and disapproval. His expres- 
 sion betrayed the scientific bigot. 
 
 '* We know now details of the passage," 
 said Sir Eliphaz. " We have some particu- 
 lars. We know, for instance, that people 
 blown to pieces take some little time to re- 
 constitute. There is a correlation between 
 this corruptible body and the spirit body that 
 replaces it. There is a sort of spirit doctor 
 over there, very helpful in such cases. And 
 burnt bodies, too, are a trouble. . . . The 
 sexes are still distinct, but all the coarseness 
 of sex is gone. The passions fade in that 
 better world. Every passion. Even the habit 
 of smoking and the craving for alcohol fade.
 
 136 The Undying Fire 
 
 Not at first. 'J'he newly dead will sometimes 
 ask for a cigar. They are given cigars, 
 higher-plane cigars, and they do not ask for 
 more. There are no children born there. 
 Nothing of that sort. That, it is very import- 
 ant to understand. He^e is the place of 
 birth ; this is jvhere lives begin. This coarse 
 little planet is the seed-bed of hfe. When it 
 has served its purpose and populated those 
 higher planes, then indeed it may freeze, as 
 you say. A mere empty hull. A seed-case 
 that has served its purpose, mattering nothing. 
 These are the thoughts, the comforting and 
 beautiful thoughts, that receive the endorse- 
 ment of our highest scientific and philosophical 
 intelligences. . . . One thinks of that life 
 there, no doubt in some other dimension of 
 space, that world arranged in planes — meta- 
 phorical planes, of course, in which people go 
 to and fro, living in a sort of houses, sur- 
 rounded by a sort of beautiful things, made, 
 so we are told, from the smells of the things 
 we have here. That is curious, but not 
 irrational. Our favourite doggies will be 
 there. Sublimated also. That thought has 
 been a great comfort to Lady Burrows. . . .
 
 Do We Truly Die? 137 
 
 We had a dog called Fido, a leetle, teeny 
 fellow — practically human. . . . 
 
 " These blessed ones engage very largely 
 in conversation. Other occupations I found 
 difficult to trace. Raymond attended a sort 
 of reception on the very highest plane. It 
 was a special privilege. Perhaps a compli- 
 ment to Sir Oliver. He met the truth of 
 revealed religion, so to speak, personally. It 
 was a wonderful moment. Sir Oliver sup- 
 presses the more solemn details. Lady 
 Burrows intends to write to him. She is 
 anxious for particulars. But I ,will not 
 dilate," said Sir Eliphaz. " I will not 
 dilate." 
 
 "And you believe this stuff ?^^ said the 
 doctor in tones of the deepest disgust. 
 
 Sir Eliphaz waved himself upon the 
 questioner. 
 
 " So far as poor earthly expressions can 
 body forth spiritual things," he hedged. 
 
 He regarded his colleagues with an eye of 
 florid defiance. Both Mr. Farr and Mr. Dad 
 had slightly shamefaced expressions, and Mr. 
 Dad's ears were red. 
 
 Mr. Dad cleared his throat. " I'm sure
 
 138 The Undying Fire 
 
 there's something in it — anyhow," said Mr. 
 Dad hoarsely, doing his best in support. 
 
 " If I was born with a hare hp," said the 
 doctor, " would that be put right. Do con- 
 genital idiots get sublimated? What becomes 
 of a dog one has shot for hydrophobia? " 
 
 " To all of such questions," said Sir 
 Eliphaz serenely, "the answer is — we donH 
 know. Why should we? "
 
 § 4 
 
 Mr. Huss seemed lost in meditation. His 
 pale and sunken face and crumpled pose con- 
 trasted strongly with the bristling intellectual 
 rectitude and mounting choler of Dr. Elihu 
 Barrack. 
 
 " No, Sir Eliphaz," said Mr. Huss, and 
 sighed. 
 
 "No," he repeated. 
 
 *' What a poor phantom of a world these 
 people conjure up ! What a mockery of loss 
 and love ! The very mothers and lovers who 
 mourn their dead will not believe these foolish 
 stories. Restoration ! It is a crowning in- 
 dignity. It makes me think of nothing in 
 the world but my dear boy's body, broken 
 and cnimpled, and some creature, half fool 
 and half impostor, sitting upon it, getting 
 between it and me, and talking cheap rubbish 
 over it about planes of being and astral 
 bodies. . . . 
 
 After ail, you teach me, Sir Eliphaz 
 
 139 
 
 ((
 
 140 The Undying Fire 
 
 that life, for all its grossness and pain and 
 horror, is not so bad as it might be — if such 
 things as this were true. But it needs no sift- 
 ing of the evidence to know they are untrue. 
 No sane man believes thi-s stuff for ten minutes 
 together. It is impossible to believe it. . . ." 
 
 Dr. Elihu Barrack applauded. Sir Eliphaz 
 acted a fine self-restraint. 
 
 " They are contrary to the texture of 
 everything we know," said Mr. Huss. " They 
 are less convincing than the wildest dreams. 
 By pain, by desire, by muscular effort, by the 
 feeling of sunshine or of rain in the face, by 
 their sense of justice and such-like essential 
 things do men test the reality of appearances 
 before them. This certainly is no reality. It 
 has none of the feel of reality. I will not even 
 argue about it. It is thrust now upon a suffer- 
 ing world as comfort, and even as comfort for 
 people stunned and uncritical with grief it 
 fails. You and Lady Burrows may be pleased 
 to think that somehow you two, with your 
 teeth restored and your complexions rejuven- 
 ated, will meet again the sublimation of your 
 faithful Fido. At any rate, thank God for 
 that, I know clearly that so I shall never
 
 Do We Truly Die ? 141 
 
 meet my son. Never! He has gone from 
 
 me. . . ." 
 
 For some moments mental and physical 
 suffering gripped him, and he could not speak ; 
 but his purpose to continue was so manifested 
 by sweating face and gripping hand that no 
 one spoke until he spoke again. 
 
 " Now let me speak plainly about Immor- 
 tality. For surely I stand nearest to that 
 possibility of all of us here. Immortality, 
 then, is no such dodging away as you imagine, 
 from this strange world which is so desolating, 
 so dreadful, so inexplicable — and at times so 
 utterly lonely. There may be a God in the 
 universe or there may not be. . . . God, if 
 he exists, can be terribly silent. . . . But if 
 there is a God, he is a coherent God. If there 
 is a God above and in the scheme of things, 
 then not only you and 1 and my dead son, 
 but the crushed frog and the trampled anthill 
 signify. On ihat the God in my heart insists. 
 There has to be an .inswer, not only to the 
 death of my son but to the dying penguin 
 roasted alive for a farthing's worth of oil. 
 There nmst be an answer to the men who go 
 in ships to do such things. There has to be
 
 142 The Undying Fire 
 
 a justification for all the filth and wretchedness 
 of louse and fluke. I will not have you slip- 
 ping by on the other side, chattering of planes 
 of living and sublimated atoms, while there is 
 a drunken mother or a man dying of cholera 
 in this world. I will not hear of a God who 
 is just a means for getting away. Whatever 
 foulness and beastliness there is, you must 
 square God with that. Or there is no uni- 
 versal God, but only a coldness, a vast 
 cruel indifference. . . . 
 
 *' I would not make my peace with such a 
 God if I could. . . . 
 
 " I tell you of these black and sinister 
 realities, and what do you reply? That it is 
 all right, because after death we shall get away 
 from them . Why ! if presently I go down 
 under the surgeon's knife, down out of this 
 hot and weary world, and then find myself 
 being put together by a spirit doctor in this 
 beyond of yours, waking up to n new world of 
 amiable conversations and artificial flowers, 
 having my hair restored and the gaps among 
 my teeth filled up, I shall feel like someone 
 who has deserted his kind, who has sneaked 
 from a sick-room into a party. . . . Well —
 
 Do We Truly Die? 143 
 
 my infection will go with me. I shall talk of 
 nothing but the tragedy out of which I have 
 come — which still remains — which continues 
 — tragedy. 
 
 " And yet 1 believe in Immortality ! " 
 Dr. Barrack, who had hitherto been 
 following Mr. Huss with evident approval, 
 started, sounded a note of surprise and pro- 
 test, and fixed accusing eyes upon him. For 
 the moment he did not interrupt. 
 
 " But it is not I that am immortal, but 
 the God within me. All this personal immor- 
 tality 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. . . . l^ut for a certain 
 (|ueer flush among his freckles, for a kind of 
 high crack in his voice ... a certain absurd 
 hopefulness in his talk . . . the sound of his
 
 144 The Undying Fire 
 
 footsteps, a little halt there was i- the rhythm 
 of them. These are the things we long for. 
 These are the things thiit 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
 
 Do We Truly Die ? 145 
 
 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 
 mo shut my eyes to sorrow, failure, or per- 
 plexity. 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, non- 
 sense upon both sides." 
 
 He turned to Sir Eliphaz. " This Spook 
 stuff," he said, and paused and compressed 
 his lips and shook his head. 
 
 146
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 147 
 
 " 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 subH- 
 mated bricks and spook dogs made of concen- 
 trated 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
 
 148 The Undying Fire 
 
 babble and rearranges it to make it seem 
 striking. Look at his critical ability ! Be- 
 cause many of the mediums are fairly respect- 
 able people who either make no money by 
 their — revelations, or at most a very ordinary 
 Hving — 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 prac- 
 tice, 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 minimise 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
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 149 
 
 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 cun- 
 ningly 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 hell the attention of a roomful of 
 people in their lives until they found out this 
 way of doing it. . . . What can you expect? " 
 Dl. 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 iiuality 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 whii-h we still know 
 nothing. Take the case of electricity. What 
 did men know of electricity in the days ol"
 
 150 The Undying Fire 
 
 Gilbert? Praotionlly nc^thincr- In the eurly 
 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. 13ut 
 that doesn't help the case of Sir Eiliphaz 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 lOur 
 Immortality, Sir Eliphaz, I am, you see, 
 entirely with Mr. Iluss. 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. F^ess even than a fancy ; it's a play 
 on words. Here is this Undying Flame, this 
 Spirit of Gk)d in man ; it's in him, he says, it's 
 ii you, Sir Eliphaz, ifs in you, Mr. — Dad,
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 151 
 
 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 pre- 
 fer 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 con- 
 cern 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 
 Inig under the wallpaper has in the deep, deep 
 sea. Possibly there are bugs under the wail-
 
 152 The Undying Fire 
 
 paper 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 wall-paper. . . , 
 
 " 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 him- 
 self 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
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 153 
 
 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 re[>roduce 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.
 
 154 The Undying Fire 
 
 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 unfold- 
 ing. 'I'he 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 subordin- 
 ate 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 ' prac- 
 tical,' made a noise of assent. But not a
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 155 
 
 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 every- 
 thing 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. 
 'Inhere 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 con- 
 duces to survival, we shall see them as beauti-
 
 156 The Undying Fire 
 
 fill 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
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 157 
 
 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 straightfor- 
 wardly, 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
 
 158 The Undying Fire 
 
 stomach-aches. 'I'he 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 any- 
 thing 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 oj
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 159 
 
 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 >vas 
 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 foot note. 
 
 *' 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 start- 
 ing point for a developing series of immortal 
 
 i6o
 
 Elihu Reproves Job i6i 
 
 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 trust- 
 fully — with a certain old-world courtesy, you 
 grimly — in the modern style. ..." 
 
 For some moments Mr. Huss sat with com- 
 pressed lips, as though he listened to the pain 
 within him. Then he said : '* I don't. 
 
 L
 
 i62 The Undying Fire 
 
 (( 
 
 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 .weak-
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 163 
 
 nesses 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 educa- 
 tion 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 them- 
 selves 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 happi- 
 ness, and when I have reminded you a little of 
 the unmasked horrors about us, you have
 
 i64 The Undying Fire 
 
 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. "Goon!" 
 
 " And now I come to you, Dr. Barrack, 
 and your modern fatalism. You hold this 
 universe is uncontrollable — anyhow. And in- 
 comprehensible. For good or ill — we can be 
 no more than our strenuous selves. You must, 
 you say, he 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,"
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 165 
 
 he said, " that there is a will in this Process 
 of yours which vnW take things somewhere, 
 somewhere definitely greater or better or on- 
 ward. 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 our- 
 selves 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 dis- 
 orderhness 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 shadov/s have fallen upon my 
 spirit. . . . 
 
 " Consider the posture of men's affairs 
 now, consider where they stand to-day, be- 
 cause they have not yet begun to look deeply 
 and frankly into realities ; because, as they put 
 it, they take life as they find it, because they 
 are themselves, heedless of history, and do not
 
 i66 The Undying Fire 
 
 realize that in truth they are but parts in one 
 great adventure in spare and time. For four 
 years now the world has been marching deeper 
 and deeper into tragedy. . . . Our life that 
 seemed so safe grows insecure and more and 
 more insecure. . . . Six million soldiers, six 
 million young men, have been killed on the 
 battlefields alone ; three times as many have 
 been crippled and mutilated ; as many agam 
 who were not soldiers have been destroyed. 
 That has been only the beginning of the disas- 
 ter that has come upon our race. All human 
 relationships have been strained ; roads, ships, 
 harvests destroyed ; and behind the red swift 
 tragedy of this warfare comes the gaunt and 
 desolating face of universal famine now, and 
 behind famine that inevitable follower of 
 famine, pestilence. Vou gentlemen who have 
 played so useful a part in supplying munitions 
 of war, who have every reason in days well 
 spent and energies well used to see a transi- 
 tory brightness upon these sombre things, you 
 may tell me that I lack faith when I say that 
 I can see nothing to redeem the waste and 
 destruction of the last four years and the still 
 greater waste and spiritless disorder and
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 167 
 
 poverty and disease ahead of us. You will tell 
 me that the world has learnt a lesson it could 
 learn in no other way, that we shall set up a 
 World League of Nations now and put an end 
 to war. But on what will you set up your 
 World League of Nations ? What foundations 
 have you made in the last four years but ruins ? 
 Is there any common idea, any common under- 
 standing yet in the minds of men? They are 
 still taking the world as they find it, they are 
 being their unmitigated selves more than ever, 
 and below the few who scramble for profits 
 now is a more and more wolfish multitude 
 scrambling for bread. There are no common 
 ideas in men's minds upon which we can build. 
 How can men be united except by common 
 ideas? The schools have failed the world. 
 What conunon thought is there in the world? 
 A loud bawling of base newspapers, a postur- 
 ing of politicians. You can see chaos coming 
 again over all the east of Europe now, and bit 
 by bit western Europe crumbles and drops 
 into the confusion. Art, science, reasoned 
 thought, creative effort, such things have 
 ceased altogether in Russia ; they may have 
 ceased there perhaps for centuries ; they die
 
 i68 The Undying Fire 
 
 now in Germany ; the universities of the west 
 are bloodless and drained of their youth. That 
 war that seemed at first so like the dawn of a 
 greater age has ceased to matter in the face 
 of this greater disaster. The French and 
 British and Americans are beating back the 
 Germans from Paris. Can they beat them back 
 to any distance? Will not this present 
 counter-thrust diminish and fail as the others 
 have done? Which side may first drop ex- 
 hausted now, will hardly change the supreme 
 fact. The supreme fact is exhaustion — 
 exhaustion, mental as well as material, failure 
 to grasp and comprehend, cessation even of 
 attempts to grasp and comprehend, slackening 
 of every sort of effort. ..." 
 
 '• What's the good of such despair? " said 
 Mr. Dad. 
 
 " I do not despair. No. But what is the 
 good of lying about hope and success in the 
 midst of failure and gathering disaster? What 
 is the good of saying that mankind wins — 
 automatically — against the spirit of evil, when 
 mankind is visibly losing point after point, is 
 visibly losing heart? What is the good of pre- 
 tending that there is order and benevolence or
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 169 
 
 some sort of splendid and incomprehensible 
 process in this festering waste, this windy 
 desolation of reasonless things? There is no 
 reason anywhere, there is no creation any- 
 where, except the undying fire, the spirit of 
 God in the hearts of men . . . which may fail 
 . . . which may fail . . . which seems to me 
 to fail."
 
 § 8 
 
 He paused. Dr. Barrack cleared his 
 throat. 
 
 " I don't want to seem obdurate," said 
 Dr. Barrack. "I want to respect deep feel- 
 ing. One must respect deep feeling. . . . But 
 for the life of me I can't put much meaning 
 into this phrase, the spirit of God in the hearts 
 of men. It's rather against my habits to 
 worry a patient, but this is so interesting — 
 this is an exceptional occasion. I would hke 
 to ask you, Mr. Huss — frankly — is there any- 
 thing very much more to it, than a phrase ? ' ' 
 
 There was no answer. 
 
 "Words," said Mr. Dad; " joost words. 
 If Mr. Huss had ever spent three months of 
 war time running a big engineering fac- 
 tory " 
 
 " My mind is a sceptical mind," Dr. Bar- 
 rack went on, after staring a moment to see if 
 Mr. Dad meant to finish his sentence. " I 
 want things I can feel and handle. I am an 
 
 170
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 171 
 
 Agnostic by nature and habit and profession. 
 A Doubting Thomas, born and bred. Well, 
 I take it that about the universe Mr. Huss is 
 very much of an Agnostic too. More so. He 
 doubts more than I do. He doubts whether 
 there is any trace of plan or purpose in it. 
 What I call a Process, he calls a windy desola- 
 tion. He sees Chaos still waiting for a creator. 
 But then he sets up against that this imdying 
 fire of his, this spirit of God, which is ht in him 
 and only waiting to be lighted in us, a sort of 
 insurgent apprentice creator. Well " 
 
 The doctor frowned and meditated on his 
 words. 
 
 " I want more of the practical outcome of 
 this fire. I admit a certain poetry in the idea, 
 but I am a plain and practical man. Give me 
 something to know this fire by and to recog- 
 nize it again when I see it. I won't ask why 
 ' undying.' T won't quibble about that. But 
 what does this undying fire mean in actual 
 things and our daily life? In some way it is 
 mixed up with teaching history in schools." 
 A faint note of derision made him glance at 
 the face to his right. " That doesn't strike 
 me as being so queer as it seems to strike Mr.
 
 172 The Undying Fire 
 
 Farr. It interests me. There is a case for 
 it. But I think there are several links Mr. 
 Huss hasn't shown and several vital points he 
 still has to explain. This undying fire is some- 
 thing that is burning in Mr. Huss, and I 
 gather from his pretty broad hints it ought, he 
 thinks, to be burning in me — and you, gentle- 
 men. It is something that makes us forget 
 our little personal differences, makes us forget 
 ourselves, and brings us all into line against — 
 what. That's my first point; — against what? 
 I don't see the force and value of this line-up. 
 7 think we struggle against one another by 
 nature and necessity ; that we polish one 
 another in the struggle and sharpen our edges. 
 I think that out of this struggle for existence 
 come better things and better. They may 
 not be better things by our standards now, but 
 by the standards of the Process, they are. 
 Sometimes the mills of the Process may seem 
 overpoweringly grim and high and pitiless; 
 that is a question of scale. But Mr. Huss 
 does not believe in the struggle. He wants to 
 take men's minds and teach them so that they 
 will not struggle against each other but live 
 and work all together. For what ? That is my
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 173 
 
 second point ; — for what ? There is a ration- 
 ality in my idea of an everlasting struggle 
 making incessantly for betterment, such an 
 idea does at any rate give a direction and take 
 us somewhere ; but there is no rationality in 
 declaring we are still fighting and fighting 
 more than ever, while in effect we are arranging 
 to stop that struggle which carries life on — if 
 we can — if we can. That is the paradox of 
 Mr. Huss. When there is neither competi- 
 tion at h(^me nor war abroad, when the cat and 
 the bird have come to a satisfactory under- 
 standing, when the spirit of his human God 
 rules even in the jungle and the sea, then 
 where shall we be heading? Time will be still 
 unfolding. But man will have halted. If he has 
 ceased to compete individually he will have 
 halted. Mr. Huss looks at me as if he thought 
 I wronged him in saying that. Well, then he 
 must answer my questions ; what will the 
 Human (iod be leading us against, and what 
 shall we be living jor^<^^^
 
 § 4 
 
 " Let me tell you first what the spirit of 
 God struggles against," said Mr. Huss. 
 
 " I will not dispute that this Process of 
 yours has made good things ; all the good 
 things in man it has made as well as all the 
 evil. It has made them indifferently. In us 
 — in some of us — it has made the will to seize 
 upon that chance-born good and separate it 
 from the chance-born evil. The spirit of God 
 rises out of your process as if he were a part of 
 your process. . . . Except for him, the good 
 and evil are inextricably mixed ; good things 
 flower into evil things and evil things wholly 
 or partially redeem themselves by good conse- 
 quences. ' Good ' and ' evil ' have meaning 
 only for us. The Process is indifferent ; it 
 makes, it destroys, it favours, it torments. 
 On its own account it preserves nothing and 
 continues nothing. It is just careless. But 
 for us it has made opportunity. Life is 
 opportunity. Unless we do now ourselves 
 
 174
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 175 
 
 seize hold upon life and the Process while 
 we are in it, the Process, becoming un- 
 controllable again, will presently sweep us 
 altogether away. In the back of your mind, 
 doctor, is the belief in a happy ending just as 
 much as in the mind of Sir Eliphaz. I see 
 deeper because I am not blinded by health. 
 You think that beyond man comes some sort 
 of splendid super-man. A healthy delusion ! 
 There is nothing beyond man unless men will 
 that something shall be. We shall be wiped 
 out as carelessly as we have been made, and 
 something else will come, as disconnected and 
 aimless, something neither necessarily better 
 nor necessarily worse but something different, 
 to be wiped out in its turn. Unless the spirit 
 of God that moves in us can rouse us to seize 
 this universe for Him and ourselves, that is the 
 nature of your Process. Your Process is just 
 Chaos ; man is the opportunity, the passing 
 opportunity for order in the waste. 
 
 " People write and tulk as if this great war 
 which is now wrecking the world, was a 
 dramatic and consecutive thing. They talk of 
 it as a purge, as a great lesson, as a phase in 
 history that marks the end of wars and
 
 176 The Undying Fire 
 
 divisions. So it might be ; but is it so and will 
 it be so ? I asked you a little time ago to look 
 straightly at the realities of animal life, of life 
 in general as we know it. I think I did a little 
 persuade you to my own sense of shallowness 
 of our assumption that there is any natural 
 happiness. The poor beasts and creatures 
 have to suffer. I ask you now to look as 
 straightly at the things that men have done 
 and endured in this war. It is plain that they 
 have shown extraordinary fertility and inge- 
 nuity in the inventions they have used and an 
 amazing capacity for sacrifice and courage ; 
 but it is, I argue, equally plain that the pains 
 and agonies they have undergone have taught 
 the race little or nothing, and that their 
 devices have been mainly for their own de- 
 struction. The only lesson and the only 
 betterment that can come out of this war will 
 come if men, inspired by the Divine courage, 
 say ' This and all such things must end.' . . . 
 But I do not perceive them saying that. On 
 the other hand I do perceive a great amount 
 of human energy and ability that has been 
 devoted and is still being devoted to things that 
 lead straight to futility and extinction.
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 177 
 
 " The most desolating thing about this war 
 is neither the stupidity nor the cruelty of it, 
 but the streak of perversion that has run 
 through it. Against the meagreness of the 
 intelligence that made the war, against the 
 absolute inability of the good forces in hfe to 
 arrest it and end it, I ask you to balance the 
 intelligence and devotion that has gone to such 
 an enterprise as the offensive use of poison gas. 
 Consider the ingenuity and the elaboration of 
 that ; the different sorts of shell used, the 
 beautifully finished devices to delay the release 
 ot the poison so as to catch men unawares after 
 their gas masks are removed. One method 
 much in favour with the Germans now involves 
 the use of two sorts of gas. They have a gas 
 now not very deadly but so subtle that it pene- 
 trates the gas mask and produces nausea and 
 retching. The man is overcome by the dread 
 of being sick so that he will clog his mask and 
 suffocate, and he snatches off his protection in 
 an ungovernable physical panic. Then the 
 second gas, of the coarser, more deadly type, 
 comes into play. That he breathes in fully. 
 His breath catches ; he realizes what he has 
 done but it is too late ; death has him by the 
 
 M
 
 178 The Undying Fire 
 
 throat ; he passes through horrible discomfort 
 and torment to the end. You cough, you 
 stagger, you writhe upon the ground and are 
 deadly sick. . . . You die heaving and pant- 
 ing, with staring eyes. . . . So it is men are 
 being killed now ; it is but one of a multitude 
 of methods, disgusting, undignified, and mon- 
 strous, but intelligent, technically admirable. 
 . . . You cannot deny. Doctor Barrack, that 
 this ingenious mixture is one of the last fruits 
 of your Process. To that your Process has at 
 last brought men from the hoeing and herding 
 of Neolithic days. 
 
 " Now tell me how is the onward progress 
 of mankind to anything, anywhere, secured 
 by this fine flower of the Process ? Intellectual 
 energy, industrial energy, are used up without 
 stint to make this horror possible ; multitudes 
 of brave young men are spoilt or killed. Is 
 there any selection in it? Along such lines 
 can you imagine men or life or the universe 
 getting anywhere at all? 
 
 ' ' Why do they do such things ? 
 
 *' They do not do it out of a complete and 
 organized impulse to evil. If you took the 
 series of researches and inventions that led at
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 179 
 
 last to this use of poison gas, you would find 
 they were the work of a multitude of mainly 
 amiable, fairly virtuous, and kindly-meaning 
 men. Each one was doing his hit, as Mr. Dad 
 would say ; each one, to use your phrase, 
 doctor, was being himself and utilizing the 
 gift that was in him in accordance with the 
 drift of the world about him ; each one. Sir 
 Eliphaz, was modestly taking the world as he 
 found it. They were living in an uninformed 
 world with no common understanding and no 
 collective plan, a world ignorant of its true 
 history and with no conception of its future. 
 Into these horrors they drifted for the want 
 of a world education. Out of these horrors 
 no lesson will be learnt, no will can arise, for 
 the same reason. Every man lives ignorantly 
 in his own circumstances, from hand to mouth, 
 from day to day, swayed first of all by this 
 catchword and then by that. 
 
 " Let me take another instance of the way 
 in which human al)ility and energy if they are 
 left to themselves, without co-ordination, with- 
 out a conmion basis of purpose, without a God, 
 will run into cul-de-sacs of mere horribleness ; 
 let me remind you a little of what the sub-
 
 i8o The Undying Fire 
 
 marine is and what it signifies. In this country 
 we think of the submarine as an instrument 
 of murder; but we think of it as something 
 ingeniously contrived and at any rate not 
 tormenting and destroying the hands that 
 guide it. I will not recall to you the stories 
 that fill our newspapers of men drowning in 
 the night, of crowded boatloads of sailors and 
 passengers shelled and sunken, of men forced 
 to clamber out of the sea upon the destroying 
 U-boat and robbed of their lifebelts in order 
 that when it submerged they should be more 
 surely drowned. I want you to think of the 
 submarine in itself. There is a kind of crazy 
 belief that killing, however cruel, has a kind 
 of justification in the survival of the killer; 
 we make that our excuse for instance for the 
 destruction of the native Tasmanians who were 
 shot whenever they were seen, and killed by 
 poisoned meat left in their paths. But the 
 marvel of these submarines is that they also 
 torture and kill their own crews. They are 
 miracles of short-sighted ingenuity for the 
 common unprofitable reasonless destruction 
 of Germans and their enemies. They are 
 almost quintessential examples of the elaborate
 
 Elihu Reproves Job i8i 
 
 futility and horror into which partial ideas 
 about life, combative and competitive ideas of 
 life, thrust mankind. 
 
 " Take some poor German boy with an 
 ordinary sort of intelligence, an ordinary 
 human disposition to kindliness, and some 
 gallantry, who becomes finally a sailor in one 
 of these craft. Consider his case and what we 
 do to him. You will find in him a sample of 
 what we are doing for mankind. As a child 
 he is ingenuous, teachable, plastic. He is also 
 egotistical, greedy, and suspicious. He is 
 easily led and easily frightened. He likes 
 making things if he knows how to make them ; 
 he is capable of affection and capable of re- 
 sentment. He is a sheet of white paper upon 
 which anything may be written. His parents 
 teach him, his companions, his school. Do 
 they teach him anything of the great history 
 of mankind? Do they teach him of his blood 
 brotherhood with all men? Do they tell 
 him anything of discovery, of exploration, of 
 human effort and achievement? No. They 
 teach him that he belongs to a blonde and 
 wonderful race, the only race that matters 
 on this planet. (No such distinct race ever
 
 i82 The Undying Fire 
 
 existed ; it is a lie for the damning of men.) 
 And these teachers incite him to suspicion and 
 hatred and contempt of all other races. They 
 fill his mind with fears and hostilities. Every- 
 thing German they tell him is good and 
 splendid. Everything not German is danger- 
 ous and wicked. They take that poor actor 
 of an emperor at Potsdam and glorify him 
 until he shines upon this lad's mind like a 
 sxar. ... 
 
 *' The boy grows up a mental cripple; his 
 capacity for devotion and self-sacrifice is run 
 into a mould of fanatical loyalty for the 
 Kaiser and hatred for foreign things. Comes 
 this war, and the youngster is only too eager 
 to give himself where he is most needed. He 
 is told that the submarine war is the sure way 
 of striking the enemies of his country a con- 
 clusive blow. To be in a submarine is to be 
 at the spear point. He dare scarcely hope 
 that he will be accepted for this vital service ; 
 to which princes might aspire. But he is 
 fortunate ; he is. He trains for a sub- 
 marine. . . . 
 
 ** I do not know how far you gentlemen 
 rememb'^j- your youth. A schoolmaster per-
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 183 
 
 haps remembers more of his early adolescence 
 than other men because he is being continu- 
 ally reminded of it. But it is a time of very 
 fine emotions, boundless ambitions, a newly 
 awakened and eager sense of beauty. This 
 youngster sees himself as a hero, fighting for 
 his half-divine Kaiser, for dear Germany, 
 against the cold and evil barbarians who resist 
 and would destroy her. He passes through 
 his drill and training. He goes down into a 
 submarine for the first time, clambers down 
 the narrow hatchway. It is a little cold, but 
 wonderful ; a marvellous machine. How can 
 such a nest of inventions, ingenuities, beauti- 
 ful metal- work, wonderful craftsmanship, be 
 anything but right? His mind is full of 
 dreams of proud enemy battleships smitten 
 and heeling over into the waters, while he 
 watches his handiwork with a stern pride, a 
 restrained exultation, a sense of Germany 
 vindicated. . . . 
 
 " ']'hat is how his mind has been made for 
 him. That is the sort of mind that has been 
 made and is being made in boys all over the 
 world. . . . Because there is no common 
 plan in the world, because each person in the
 
 1^4 The Undying Fire 
 
 making of this boy, just as each person in 
 the making of the submarine, had ' been him- 
 self and 'done his bit,' followed his own 
 impulses and interests without regard to the 
 whole, regardless of any plan or purpose in 
 human affairs, ignorant of the spirit of God 
 who would unify us and lead us to a common 
 use for all our gifts and energies. 
 
 " Let me go on with the story of this 
 youngster. . . . 
 
 " Comes a day when he realizes the reahty 
 of the work he is doing for his kind. He stands 
 by one of the guns of the submarine in an 
 attack upon some wretched ocean tramp. He 
 realizes that the war he wages is no heroic 
 attack on pride or predominance, but a mere 
 murdering of traffic. He sees the little ship 
 shelled, the wretched men killed and wounded, 
 no tyrants of the seas but sailor-men like him- 
 self ; he sees their boats smashed to pieces. 
 Mostly such sinkings are done at dawn oi 
 sundown, under a level light which displays a 
 world of black lines and black silhouettes 
 asway with the slow heaving and falling of 
 coldly shining water. These little black 
 things, he realizes incredulously, that struggle
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 185 
 
 and disappear amidst the wreckage are the 
 heads of men, brothers to himself. . . . 
 
 " For hundreds of thousands of men who 
 have come into this war expecting bright and 
 romantic and tremendous experiences their 
 first killing must have been a hideous dis- 
 illusionment. For none so much as for the 
 men of the submarines. All that sense of 
 being right and fine that carries men into 
 battle, that carries most of us through the 
 world, must have vanished completely at this 
 first vision of reality. Our man must have 
 asked himself, ' What am I doing ? ' . . . 
 
 " In the night he must have lain awake 
 and stared at that question in horrible 
 doubt. . . . 
 
 *' We scold too much at the German sub- 
 marine crews in this country. Most of us in 
 their places would be impelled to go on as 
 they go on. The work they do has been 
 reached step by step, logically, inevitably, 
 because our world has been content to drift 
 along on false premises and haphazard assump- 
 tions about nationality and race and the order 
 of things. These things have happened 
 because the technical education of men has
 
 i86 The Undying Fire 
 
 been better than their historical and social 
 education. Once men have lost touch with, 
 or failed to apprehend that idea of a single 
 human community, that idea which is the 
 substance of all true history and the essential 
 teaching of God, it is towards such organized 
 abominations as these that they drift — neces- 
 sarily. People in this country who are just 
 as incoherent in their minds, just as likely to 
 drift into some kindred cul-de-sac of conduct, 
 would have these U-boat men tortured — to 
 show the superiority of their own moral 
 standards. 
 
 *' But indeed these men are tortured. . . . 
 
 " Bear yet a little longer with this boy of 
 mine in the U-boat. I've tried to suggest 
 him to you with his conscience scared — at a 
 moment when his submarine had made a kill. 
 But those moments are rare. For most of its 
 time the U-boat is under water and a hunted 
 thing. The surface swarms with hostile craft ; 
 sea-planes and observation balloons are seek- 
 ing it. Every time a U-boat comes even near 
 to the surface it may be spotted by a sea-plane 
 and destruction may fall upon it. Even when 
 it is submerged below the limits of visibility
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 187 
 
 in the turbid North Sea waters, the noise of 
 its engines will betray it to a listening 
 apparatus and a happy guess with a depth- 
 charge may end its career. I want you to 
 think of the daily life of this youngster under 
 these conditions. I want you to see exactly 
 where wrong ideas, not his, but wrong ideas 
 ruling in the world about him, are driving 
 him. 
 
 " The method of detection by listening 
 apparatus improves steadily, and nowadays 
 our destroyers will follow up a U-boat some- 
 times for sixty or seventy hours, following her 
 sounds as a hound follows the scent of its 
 quarry. At last, if the U-boat cannot shake 
 off her pursuers she must come to the surface 
 and fight or surrender. That is the strangest 
 game of Blind-Man that ever human beings 
 played. The U-boat doubles and turns, listen- 
 ing also for the sounds of the pursuers at the 
 surface. Are they coming nearer? Are they 
 getting fainter? l^nless a helpful mud-bank 
 is available for it to lie up in silence for a 
 time, the U-boat must keep moving and using 
 up electrical force, so that ultimately it must 
 come to the surface to recharge its batteries.
 
 i88 The Undying Fire 
 
 As far as possible the crew of the U-boat are 
 kept in ignorance of the chase in progress. 
 They get hints from the anxiety or irritation 
 of the commander, or from the haste and 
 variety of his orders. Something is going on 
 — they do not know quite what — something 
 that may end disagreeably. If the pur- 
 suer tries a depth charge, then they know 
 for certain from the concussion that the 
 hand of death is feeling for them in the 
 darkness. . . . 
 
 " Always the dread of a depth charge must 
 haunt the imagination of the U-boat sailor. 
 Without notice, at any hour, may come thud 
 and concussion to warn him that the destroy- 
 ing powers are on his track. The fragile 
 ship jumps and quivers from end to end ; the 
 men are thrown about. That happens to our 
 youngster. He curses the damned Enghsh. 
 And if you think it over, what else can you 
 expect him to curse? A little nearer and the 
 rivets will start and actual leakage begin, 
 letting in a pressure of several atmospheres. 
 Yet a little nearer and the water wiU come 
 pressing in through cracks and breaches at a 
 score of points, the air will be compressed in
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 189 
 
 his lungs, the long death struggle of the 
 U-boat will begin, and after some hours of 
 hopeless suffering he will suffocate and drown 
 Hke a rat in a flooded tunnel. . . . 
 
 " Think of the life of endless apprehension 
 in that confined space below the waters. The 
 air is almost always stuffy and sometimes it 
 is poisonous. All sorts of evil chances may 
 occur in this crowded tinful of machinery to 
 release oppressive gases and evil odours. A 
 whiff of chlorine for instance may warn the 
 crew of flooded accumulators. At the first 
 sting of chlorine the U-boat must come up at 
 any risk. . . . And nothing can be kept 
 dry. The surfaces of the apparatus and the 
 furniture sweat continually ; except where the 
 machinery radiates a certain heat a clammy 
 chill pervades the whole contrivance. Have 
 you ever seen the thick blubber of a whale? 
 Only by means of that enormous layer of 
 non-conductor can a whale keep its body warm 
 in spite of the waters about it. A U-boat 
 cannot afford any layer of blubber. It is at 
 the temperature of the dark under-waters. 
 And this life of cold, fear, suffocation, head- 
 ache and nausea is not sustained by hot and
 
 iQo The Undying Fire 
 
 nourishing food. There is no blazing galley 
 fire for the cook of the U-boat. 
 
 " The U-boat rolls very easily; she is, of 
 course, no heavier nor lighter than the water 
 in which she floats, and if by chance she 
 touches bottom in shallow water, she bounds 
 about like a rubber ball on a pavement. Inside 
 the sailors are thrown about and dashed against 
 the machinery. 
 
 *'That is the quality of everyday life in a 
 U-boat retained below the surface. Now think 
 what an emergence involves. Up she comes 
 until the periscope can scrutinize the sky and 
 the nearer sea. Nothing in sight? Thank 
 God ! She rises out of the water and some of 
 the sailors get a breath of fresh air. Not all, 
 for there is no room nor time for all of them 
 to come out. But the fortunate ones who get 
 to the hatches may even have the luck of 
 sunshine. To come to the surface on a calm 
 open sea away from any traffic at all is the 
 secret hope of every U-boat sailor. But 
 suppose now there is something in sight. 
 Then the U-boat musft come up with infinite 
 discretion and examine the quarry. It looks 
 an innocent craft, a liner, a trawler, a cargo-
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 191 
 
 boat. But is that innocence certain? How 
 does the U-boat man know that she hasn't a 
 gun? What new contrivance of the hunter 
 may not hide behind that harmless-looking 
 mask? Until they have put a ship down, the 
 U-boat sailors never know what ugly surprise 
 she may not have in store for them. When 
 they approach a vessel they must needs be 
 ignorant of what counter-attack creeps upon 
 them from her unseen other side. As a con- 
 sequence these men are in terror of every ship 
 they hail. 
 
 "Is it any wonder then if their behaviour 
 is hasty and hysterical, if they curse and insult 
 the wretched people they are proposing to 
 drown, if they fire upon them unexpectedly 
 and do strange and abominable things? The 
 U-boat man is no fine captain on his quarter 
 deck. He is a man who lives a life of intense 
 physical hardship and extreme fear, who faces 
 overwhelming risks, in order to commit as 
 inglorious a crime as any man can commit. 
 He is a man already in hell. 
 
 '* The Germans do what they can to keep 
 up the spirit of these crews. An English 
 captain who spent a fortnight upon one as a
 
 192 The Undying Fire 
 
 prisoner and who was recently released by way 
 of Switzerland, says that when they had sunk 
 a merchant ship ' they played victory music 
 on the gramophone.' Imagine that bleak 
 festival ! 
 
 *'The inevitable end of the U-boat sailor, 
 unless he is lucky enough to get captured, is 
 death, and a very horrible and slow death 
 indeed. Sooner or later it is bound to come. 
 Some never return from their first voyage. 
 There is a brief spree ashore if they do ; then 
 out they go again. Perhaps they return a 
 second time, perhaps not. Some may even 
 have made a score of voyages, but sooner or 
 later they are caught. The average life of a 
 U-boat is less than five voyages — out and 
 home. Of the crews of the original U-boats 
 which began the U-boat campaign very few 
 men survive to-day. When our young hope- 
 ful left his home in Germany to join the 
 U-boat service, he left it for a certain death. 
 He learns that slowly from the conversation of 
 his mates. Men are so scarce now for this vile 
 work that once G^ermany has got a man she 
 will use him to the end. 
 
 "And that end ?
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 193 
 
 **I was given some particulars of the fate 
 of one U-boat that were told by two prisoners 
 who died at Harwich the other day. This par- 
 ticular boat was got by a mine which tore a 
 hole in her aft. She was too disabled to come 
 to the surface, and she began to sink tail 
 down. Now the immediate effect of a hole in 
 a U-boat is of course to bring the air pressure 
 within her to the same level as the pressure 
 of the water outside. For every ten yards 
 of depth this means an addition of fourteen 
 pounds to the square inch. The ears and blood 
 vessels are suddenly subjected to this enormous 
 pressure. There is at once a violent pain in 
 the ears and a weight on the chest. Cotton 
 wool has to be stuffed into ears and nostrils 
 to save the ear dnmi. Then the boat is no 
 longer on an even keel. The men stand and 
 slip about on the sides of things. They 
 clamber up the floor out of the way of the 
 slowly rising water. For the water does not 
 come nishing in to drown them speedily. It 
 cannot do that because there is no escape for 
 the air ; the water creeps in steadily and 
 stealthily as the U-boat goes deeper and 
 deeper. It is a process of slow and crushing 
 
 N
 
 194 The Undying Fire 
 
 submergence that has the cniel deliberation of 
 some story by Edgar Allan Poe ; it may last 
 for hours. A time comes when the lights go 
 out and the rising waters stop the apparatus 
 for keeping up the supply of oxygen and 
 absorbing the carbonic acid. Suffocation 
 begins. Think of what must happen in the 
 minds of the doomed men crowded together 
 amidst the machinery. In the particular case 
 these prisoners described, ^veral of the men 
 drowned themselves deliberately in the rising 
 waters inside the boat. And in another case 
 where the boat was recovered full of dead men, 
 they had all put their heads under the water 
 inside the boat. People say the U-boat men 
 carry poison against such mischances as this. 
 They don't. It would be too tempting. . . . 
 " When it becomes evident that the U-boat 
 can never recover the surface, there is usually 
 an attempt to escape by the hatches. The 
 hatches can be opened when at last the pressure 
 inside is equal to that of the water without. 
 The water of course rushes in and sinks the 
 U-boat to the bottom like a stone, but the men 
 who are nearest to the hatch have a chance 
 of escaping with the rush of air to the surface.
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 195 
 
 There is of course a violent struggle to get 
 nearest to the hatch. This is what happened 
 in the case of the particular U-boat from 
 which these prisoners came. The forward 
 hatch was opened. Our patrol boat cruising 
 above saw the waters thrown up by the air- 
 burst and then the heads of the men struggling 
 on the surface. Most of these men were 
 screaming with pain. All of them went under 
 before they could be picked up except two. 
 And these two died in a day or so. They died 
 because coming suddenly up to the ordinary 
 atmosphere out of the compressed air of the 
 sinking submarine had burst the tissues of 
 their lungs. They were choked with blood. 
 " Think of those poor creatures dying in 
 the hospital. They were worn out by fits of 
 coughing and hjcmorrhage, but there must 
 have been moments of exhausted quiet before 
 the end, when our youngster lay and stared at 
 the bleak walls of the ward and thought ; when 
 he asked himself, ' What have I been doing? 
 What have I done.'* What has this world done 
 for me? It has made me a murderer. It has 
 tortured me and wasted mc. . . . And I 
 meant well by it. . . /
 
 196 The Undying Fire 
 
 ** Whether he thought at all about the 
 making of the submarine, the numberless 
 ingenuities and devices, the patience and 
 devotion, that had gone to make that grim 
 trap in which he had been caught at last, I 
 cannot guess. . . . Probably he took it as 
 a matter of course. . . . 
 
 "So it was that our German youngster 
 who dreamt dreams, who had ambitions, who 
 wished to serve and do brave and honourable 
 things, died. ... So five thousand men at 
 least have died, English some of them as well 
 as German, in lost submarines beneath the 
 waters of the narrow seas. . . . 
 
 " There is a story and a true story. It is 
 more striking than the fate of most men and 
 women in the world, but is it, in its essence, 
 different? Is not the whole hfe of our time 
 in the vein of this story? Is not this story 
 of youth and hope and possibility misled, 
 marched step by step into a world miscon- 
 ceived, thrust into evil, and driven down to 
 ugliness and death, only a more vivid render- 
 ing of what is now the common fate of 
 great multitudes? Is there any one of us 
 who is not in some fashion aboard a sub-
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 197 
 
 marine, doing evil and driving towards an 
 evil end? . . . 
 
 "What are the businesses in which men 
 engage? How many of them have any like- 
 ness to freighted ships that serve the good of 
 mankind? Think of the lying and cornering, 
 the crowding and outbidding, the professional 
 etiquette that robs the common man, the 
 unfair advantage smugly accepted ! What 
 man among us can say, * All that I do is 
 service ' ? Our holding and our effort : is it 
 much better than the long interludes below 
 the surface, and when we come up to struggle 
 for our own hands, torpedoing competitors, 
 wrecking antagonists, how is it with us? The 
 submarine sailors stare in the twilight at 
 drowning men. Every day I stare at a world 
 drowning in poverty and ignorance, a world 
 awash in the seas of hunger, disease, and 
 misery. We have been given leisure, freedom, 
 and intelligence ; what have we done to prevent 
 these things? 
 
 *** I tell you all the world is a submarine, 
 and every one of us is something of a U-boat 
 man. These fools who squeal in the papers 
 for cruelties to the U-boat men do not realize
 
 198 The Undying Fire 
 
 their own part in the world. . . . We might 
 live in sunshine and freedom and security, 
 and we live cramped and cold, in bitter 
 danger, because we are at war with our fellow 
 men. . . . 
 
 '* But there, doctor, you have the answer \;o 
 the first part of your question. You asked 
 what the Spirit of God in Man was against. 
 It is against these mental confusions, these 
 ignorances, that thrust life into a frightful 
 cul-de-sac, that the God in our Hearts urges 
 us to fight. . . . He is crying out in our 
 hearts to save us from these blind alleys of 
 selfishness, darkness, cruelty, and pain in 
 which our race must die ; he is crying for the 
 high road which is salvation, he is commanding 
 the organized unity of mankind."
 
 § 5 
 
 The lassitude that had been earlier 
 apparent in the manner of Mr. Huss had 
 vanished. He was talking now with more 
 energy ; his eyes were bright and there was 
 a flush in his cheeks. His voice was low, but 
 his speech was clear and no longer broken by 
 painful pauses. 
 
 " But your question had a double edge," 
 he continued ; " you asked me not only what 
 it is that the Spirit of God in us fights against, 
 but what it is he fights for. Whither does the 
 high road lead ? I have told you what I think 
 the life of man is, a felted and corrupting mass 
 of tragic experiences ; let me tell you now a 
 little, if this pain at my side will still permit 
 it, what life upon this earth, under the 
 leadership of the Spirit of God our Captain, 
 might be. 
 
 " I will take it that men are still as they 
 are, that all this world is individually the same ; 
 I will suppose no miraculous change in human 
 nature ; but I will suppose that events in the 
 
 199
 
 200 The Undying Fire 
 
 past have run along different channels, so that 
 there has been much more thinking, much 
 more exchange of thought, far better teach- 
 ing. I want simply this world better taught, 
 so that wherever the flame of God can be lit 
 it has been lit. Everyone I will suppose 
 educated. By educated, to be explicit, I 
 mean a knowledge and understanding of 
 history. Yes, Mr. Farr — salvation by his- 
 tory. Everyone about the earth I will suppose 
 has been taught not merely to read and write 
 and calculate, but has been given all that can 
 be told simply and plainly of the past history 
 of the earth, of our place in space and time, 
 and the true history of mankind. I will not 
 suppose that there is any greater knowledge 
 of things than men actually possess to-day, 
 but instead of its being confusedly stored in 
 many minds and many books and many 
 languages, it has all been sorted out and set 
 out plainly so that it can be easily used. It 
 has been kept back from no one, mistold to 
 no one. Moreover I will suppose that instead 
 of a myriad of tongues and dialects, all men 
 can read the same books and talk together in 
 the same speech.
 
 EHhu Reproves Job 201 
 
 (( 
 
 These you may say are difficult suppo- 
 sitions, but they are not impossible sup- 
 positions. Quite a few resolute men could 
 set mankind definitely towards such a state of 
 affairs so that they would reach it in a dozen 
 generations or so. But think what a differ- 
 ence there would be from our conditions in 
 such a world. In a world so lit and opened 
 by education, most of these violent dissensions 
 that trouble mankind would be impossible. 
 Instead of men and communities behaving like 
 fever patients in delirium, striking at their 
 nurses, oversetting their food and medicine 
 and inflicting injuries on themselves and one 
 another, they would be alive to the facts of 
 their common origin, their common offspring 
 — for at last in our descendants all our lives 
 must meet again — and their common destiny. 
 In that more open and fresher air, the fire 
 that is God will burn more brightly, for most 
 of us who fail to know God fail through want 
 of knowledge. Many more men and women 
 will be happily devoted to the connnon work 
 of mankind, and the evil that is in all of us 
 will be more plainly seen and more easily 
 restrained. I doubt if any man is altogether
 
 202 The Undying Fire 
 
 evil, but in this dark world the good in men 
 is handicapped and sacrifice is mocked. Bad 
 example finishes what weak and aimless teach- 
 ing has begun. This is a world where folly 
 and hate can bawl sanity out of hearing. 
 Only the determination of schoolmasters and 
 teachers can hope to change that. How can 
 you hope to change it by anything but teach- 
 ing? Cannot you realize what teaching 
 means? . . . 
 
 " When I ask you to suppose a world 
 instructed and educated in the place of this 
 old traditional world of unguided passion and 
 greed and meanness and mean bestiality, a 
 world taught by men instead of a world neg- 
 lected by hirelings, I do not ask you to 
 imagine any miraculous change in human 
 nature. I ask you only to suppose that each 
 mind has the utmost enlightenment of which 
 it is capable instead of its being darkened and 
 overcast. Everyone is to have the best chance 
 of being his best self. Everyone is to be living 
 in the light of the acutest self-examination and 
 the clearest mutual criticism. Naturally we 
 shall be living under infinitely saner and more 
 helpful institutions. Such a state of things
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 203 
 
 will not indeed mitigate natural vanity or 
 natural self-love ; it will not rob the greedy 
 man of his greed, the fool uf his folly, the 
 eccentric of his abnormality, nor the lustful of 
 his lust. But it will rob them of excuses and 
 hiding places ; it will light them within and 
 cast a light round about them ; it will turn 
 their evil to the likeness of a disease of which 
 they themselves in their clear moments will 
 be ready to be cured and which they will 
 hesitate to transmit. That is the world which 
 such of us schoolmasters and teachers among 
 us as have the undying fire of God already Ut 
 in our hearts, do now labour, generation by 
 generation, against defeat and sometimes 
 against hope, to bring about; that is the 
 present work God has for us. And as we do 
 bring it about then the prospect opens out 
 before mankind to a splendour. . . . 
 
 " In this present world men live to be 
 themselves ; having their lives they lose them ; 
 in the world that we are seeking to make they 
 jvill give themselves to the God of Mankind, 
 and so they will live indeed. They will as a 
 matter of course change their institutions and 
 their methods so that all men may be used to
 
 204 The Undying Fire 
 
 the best effect, in the common work of man- 
 kind. They will take this little planet which 
 has been torn into shreds of possession, and 
 make it again one garden. . . . 
 
 *' The most perplexing thing about men 
 at the present time is their lack of under- 
 standing of the vast possibilities of power and 
 happiness that science is offering them " 
 
 "Then why not teach science f^^ cried 
 Mr. Farr. 
 
 " Provided only that they will unite their 
 efforts. They solve the problems of material 
 science in vain until they have solved their 
 social and political problems. When those 
 are solved, the mechanical and technical diflB- 
 culties are trivial. It is no occult secret; it 
 is a plain and demonstrable thing to-day that 
 the world could give ample food and ample 
 leisure to every human being, if only by a 
 world-wide teaching the spirit of unity could 
 be made to prevail over the impulse to dissen- 
 sion. And not only that, but it would then 
 be possible to raise the common health and 
 increase the common fund of happiness im- 
 measurably. Look plainly at the world as it 
 is. Most human beings when they are not
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 205 
 
 dying untimely, are suffering more or less 
 from avoidable disorders, they are ill or they 
 are convalescent, or they are suffering from 
 or crippled by some preventible taint in the 
 blood, or they are stunted or weakened by a 
 needlessly bad food supply, or spiritless and 
 feeble through bad housing, bad clothing, dull 
 occupations, or insecurity and anxiety. Few 
 enjoy for very long stretches at a time that 
 elementary happiness which is the natural 
 accompaniment of sound health. This almost 
 universal lowness of tone, which does not 
 distress us only because most of us are un- 
 able to imagine anything better, means an 
 enormous waste of human possibility ; less 
 work, less hopefulness. Isolated efforts will 
 never raise men out of this swamp of malaise. 
 At Woldingstanton we have had the best 
 hygienic arrangements we could find, we have 
 taken the utmost precautions, and yet there 
 has scarcely been a year when our work has 
 not been crippled and delayed by some 
 epidemic, infhienza one year, measles another, 
 and so on. VVe take our precautions; but the 
 townspeople, especially in the poorer quarters, 
 don't and can't. 1 think myself the wastage
 
 2o6 The Undying Fire 
 
 of these perennial petty pestilences is far 
 greater than that caused by the big epidemics 
 that sometimes sweep the world. But all such 
 things, great or petty, given a sufficient world 
 unanimity, could be absolutely banished from 
 human Hfe. Given a sufficient unanimity and 
 intelligent direction, men could hunt down all 
 these infectious diseases, one by one, to the 
 regions in which they are endemic, and from 
 which they start out again and again to distress 
 the world, and could stamp them out for ever. 
 It is not want of knowledge prevents this now 
 but want of a properly designed education, 
 which would give people throughout the world 
 the understanding, the confidence, and the 
 will needed for so collective an enterprise. 
 
 " The sufferings and mutual cruelties of 
 animals are no doubt a part of the hard aim- 
 lessness of nature, but men are in a position 
 to substitute aim for that aimlessness, they 
 have already all the knowledge and all the 
 resources needed to escape from these cul-de- 
 sacs of wrong-doing and suffering and ugly 
 futility into which they jostle one another. 
 But they do not do it because they have not 
 been sufficiently educated and are not being
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 207 
 
 sufficiently educated to sane understanding and 
 effort. The bulk of their collective strength is 
 dissipated in miserable squabbles and sus- 
 picions, in war and the preparation for war, 
 in lawsuits and bickering, in making little 
 sterile private hoards of wealth and power, in 
 chaflFering, in stupid persecutions and opposi- 
 tions and vanities. It is not only that they live 
 in a state of general infection and ill health 
 and bad temper, ill nourished, ill housed and 
 morally horrible, when the light is ready to 
 shine upon them and health and splendour is 
 within their grasp, but that all that they could 
 so attain would be but the prelude to still 
 greater attainments. 
 
 " Apart from and above the sweeping away 
 of the poverty, filthiness and misery of life that 
 would follow on an intelligent use of such 
 powers and such qualities as men possess now, 
 there would be a tremendous increase in happi- 
 ness due to the contentment of belonging to 
 one common comprehensible whole, of know- 
 ing that one played a part and a worthy part 
 in an immortal and universal task. The 
 merest handful of people can look with con- 
 tent upon the tenor of their lives to-day. A
 
 2o8 The Undying Fire 
 
 few teachers are perhaps aware that they 
 serve God rightly, a few scientific investi- 
 gators, a few doctors and bridge-builders and 
 makers of machinery, a few food-growers and 
 sailors and the like. They can believe that 
 thej^ do something that is necessary, or build 
 something which will endure. But most men 
 and women to-day are like beasts caught in a 
 tunnel ; they follow base occupations, they 
 trade and pander and dispute ; there is no peace 
 in their hearts ; they gratify their lusts and 
 seek excitements ; they know they spend their 
 lives in vain and they have no means of escape. 
 The world is full of querulousness and abuse, 
 derision and spite, mean tricks and flounder- 
 ing effort, vice without a gleam of pleasure 
 and vain display, because blind Nature spews 
 these people into being and there is no light to 
 guide their steps. Yet there is work to be 
 done by everyone, a plain reason for that work, 
 and happiness in the doing of it. . . . 
 
 " I do not know if any of us realize all that 
 a systematic organization of the human intel- 
 ligence upon the work of research would mean 
 for our race. People talk of the wonders that 
 scientific work has given us in the past two
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 209 
 
 hundred years, wonders of which for the most 
 part we are too disordered and fooHsh to avail 
 ourselves fully. But what scientific research 
 has produced so far must be as yet only the 
 smallest earnest of what scientific research can 
 presently give mankind. All the knowledge 
 that makes to-day different from the world of 
 Queen Elizabeth has been the work of a few 
 score thousand men, mostly poorish men, 
 w^orking with limited material and restricted 
 time, in a world that discouraged and misun- 
 derstood them. Many hundreds of thousands 
 of men with gifts that would have been of 
 the profoundest value in scientific work, have 
 missed the education or the opportunity to 
 use those gifts. But in a world clarified by 
 understanding, the net of research would miss 
 few of its born servants, there would be 
 the swiftest, clearest communication of results 
 from worker to worker, the readiest honour 
 and help for every gift. Poor science, which 
 goes abf)ut now amidst our crimes and con- 
 fusions like an ill-trimmed evil-smelling oil 
 lantern in a dark cavern in which men fight 
 and steal, her flickering light, snatched first 
 by this man and then by that, as often as not 
 Q
 
 210 The Undying Fire 
 
 a help to violence and robbery, would become 
 like the sunrise of a bright summer morning. 
 We do not realize what in a little while man- 
 kind could do. Our power over matter, our 
 power over life, our power over ourselves, 
 would increase year by year and day by day. 
 
 ** Here am I, after great suffering, waiting 
 here for an uncertain operation that may kill 
 me. It need not have been so. Here are we 
 all, sitting hot and uncomfortable in this ill- 
 ventilated, ill-furnished room, looking out 
 upon a vile waste. It need not have been so. 
 Such is the quality of our days. I sit here 
 wrung by pain, in the antechamber of death, 
 because mankind has suffered me to suffer. 
 . . . All this could have been avoided. 
 . . . Not for ever will such things endure, 
 not for ever will the Mocker of Mankind 
 prevail. . . . 
 
 "And such knowledge and power and 
 beauty as we poor watchers before the dawn 
 can guess at, are but the beginning of all that 
 could arise out of these shadows and this tor- 
 ment. Not for ever shall life be marooned 
 upon this planet, imprisoned by the cold and 
 incredible emptiness of space. Is it not plain
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 211 
 
 to you all, from what man in spite of every- 
 thing has achieved, that he is but at the begin- 
 ning of achievement? That presently he will 
 take his body and his life and mould them to his 
 will, that he will take gladness and beauty for 
 himself as a girl will pick a flower and twine it 
 in her hair. You have said, Doctor Barrack, 
 that when industrial competition ends among 
 men all change in the race will be at an end. 
 But you said that unthinkingly. For when a 
 collective will grows plain, there will be no 
 blind thrusting into life and no blind battle to 
 keep in life, like the battle of a crowd crushed 
 into a cul-de-sac, any more. The qualities 
 that serve the great ends of the race will be 
 cherished and increased ; the sorts of men and 
 women that have these qualities least will be 
 made to understand the necessary restraints of 
 their limitation. You said that when men 
 ceased to compete, they would stand still. 
 Rather is it tnie that when men cease their 
 internecine war, then and then alone can the 
 race sweep forward. The race will grow in 
 power and beauty swiftly, in every generation 
 it will grow, and not only the hiunan race. 
 All this world will man make a garden for him-
 
 212 The Undying Fire 
 
 self, niling not only his kind but all the lives 
 that live, banishing the cruel from Hfe, making 
 the others merciful and tame beneath his 
 hand. The flies and mosquitos, the thorns 
 and poisons, the fungus in the blood, and the 
 murrain upon his beasts, he will utterly end. 
 He will rob the atoms of their energy and the 
 depths of space of their secrets. He will break 
 his prison in space. He will step from star to 
 star as now we step from stone to stone across 
 a stream. Until he stands in the light of God's 
 presence and looks his Mocker and the 
 Adversary in the face. ..." 
 
 "Oh! Ravins!'' Mr. Dad burst out, 
 unable to contain himself. 
 
 " You may think my mind is fevered 
 because my body is in pain ; but never was my 
 mind clearer than it is now. It is as if I stood 
 already half out of this little life that has held 
 me so long. It is not a dream I tell, but a 
 reality. The world is for man, the stars in 
 their courses are for man — if only he will 
 follow the God who calls to him and take the 
 gift God offers. As I sit here and talk of these 
 things to you here, they become so plain to 
 me that I cannot understand your silence and
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 213 
 
 why you do not burn — as I burn — with the fire 
 of God's purpose. ..." 
 
 He stopped short. He seemed to have 
 come to the end of his strength. His chin 
 sank, and his voice when he spoke again was 
 the voice of a weak and weary man. 
 
 " I talk. ... I talk. . . . And then a 
 desolating sense of reality blows like a destroy- 
 ing gust through my mind, and my little lamp 
 of hope goes out. . . . 
 
 "It is as if some great adversary sat over 
 all my world, mocking me in every phrase I 
 use and every act I do. ..." 
 
 He sighed deeply. 
 
 *' Have I answered your questions, 
 doctor? " he asked.
 
 § 6 
 
 ii 
 
 You speak of God," said Dr. Barrack. 
 But this that you speak of as God, is it really 
 what men understand by God? It seems to 
 me, as I said to begin with, it is just a per- 
 sonification of the good will in us all. Why 
 bring in God ? God is a word that has become 
 associated with all sorts of black and cruel 
 things. It sets one thinking of priesthoods, 
 orthodoxies, persecutions. Why do you not 
 call this upward and onward power Humanity ? 
 Why do you not call the Spirit of Men? 
 Then it might be possible for an Agnostic like 
 myself to feel a sort of agreement. ..." 
 
 '* Because I have already shown you it is 
 not humanity, it is not the spirit of men. 
 Humanity, the spirit of men, made poison gas 
 and the submarine ; the spirit of man is jealous, 
 aggressive and partizan. Humanity has greed 
 and competition in grain, and the spirit of man 
 is fear and hatred, secrecy and conspiracy, 
 quite as much as, much more than, it is making 
 
 214
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 215 
 
 or order. But this spirit in me, this fire which 
 I call God, was lit, I know not how, but as if 
 it came from outside. . . . 
 
 " I use the phrases," said Mr. Huss, " that 
 come ready to the mind. But I will meet you 
 so far as to say that I know that I am meta- 
 phorical and inexact. . . . This spirit that 
 comes into life — it is more like a person than a 
 thing and so I call it He. And He is not a 
 feature, not an aspect of things, but a selection 
 among things. . . . He seizes upon and brings 
 out and confirms all that is generous in the 
 natural impulses of the mind. He condemns 
 cruelty and all evil. . . . 
 
 " I will not pretend to explain what I can- 
 not explain. It may be that God is as yet 
 only foreshadowed in life. You may reason, 
 Doctor Barrack, that this fire in the heart that 
 I call God, is as much the outcome of your 
 Process as all the other things in life. I can- 
 not argue against that. What I am telling 
 you now is not what I believe so much as what 
 I feel. To me it seems that the creative desire 
 that burns in me is a thing different in its 
 nature from the blind Process of matter, is a 
 force running contrariwise to the power of
 
 2i6 The Undying Fire 
 
 confusion. . . . But this I do know, that once 
 it is Ht in a man it is like a consuming fire. 
 Once it is ht in a man, then his mind is alight 
 ■ — thenceforth. It rules his conscience with 
 compelling power. It summons him to live 
 the residue of his days working and fighting 
 for the unity and release and triumph of man- 
 kind. He may be mean still, and cowardly 
 and vile still, but he will know himself for 
 what he is. . . . Some ancient phrases five 
 marvellously. Within my heart I know that 
 my Redeemer liveth. ..." 
 
 He stopped abruptly. 
 
 Dr. Barrack was unprepared with a reply. 
 But he shook his head obstinately. These 
 time-worn phrases were hateful to his soul. 
 They smacked to him of hypocrisy, of a bid- 
 ding for favour with obsolete and discredited 
 influences. Through such leaks it is super- 
 stition comes soaking back into the laboriously 
 bailed-out minds of men. Yet Mr. Huss was 
 a difficult controversiahst to grapple. " No," 
 said the doctor provisionally. " No. ..."
 
 § 7 
 
 Fate came to the relief of Dr. Barrack. 
 
 The little conference at Sea View was per- 
 vaded by the sense of a new personality. This 
 was a short and angry and heated little man, 
 with active dark brown eyes in a tan face, a 
 tooth-brush moustache of iron-grey, and a pro- 
 truded lower jaw. He was dressed in a bright 
 bluish-grey suit and bright brown boots, and 
 he carried a bright brown leather bag. 
 
 He appeared mouthing outside the win- 
 dow, beyond the range of distinct hearing. 
 His expression was blasphemous. He made 
 threatening movements with his bag. 
 
 '' Good God ! " cried Dr. Barrack. " Sir 
 Alpheus ! . . . I had no idea of the time ! " 
 
 He rushed out of the room and there was 
 a scuffle in the passage. 
 
 *' I ought to have been met," said Sir 
 Alpheus, entering, " I ought to have been 
 met. It's ridiculous to pretend you didn't 
 know the time. A general practitioner always
 
 2i8 The Undying Fire 
 
 knows the time. It is his first duty. I cannot 
 understand the incivility of this reception. I 
 have had to make my way to your surgery, Dr. 
 Barrack, without assistance ; not a cab free at 
 the station ; I have had to come down this road 
 in the heat, carrying everything myself, read- 
 ing all the names on the gates — the most 
 ridiculous and banal names. The Taj, Thyme 
 Bank, The Cedars, and Capernaum, cheek by 
 jowl ! It's worse than Freud." 
 
 Dr. Barrack expressed further regrets con- 
 fusedly and indistinctly. 
 
 "We have been talking. Sir Alpheus,'* 
 said Sir Eliphaz, advancing as if to protect the 
 doctor from his speciaHst, "upon some very 
 absorbing topics. That must be our excuse 
 for this neglect. We have been discussing 
 education — and the universe. Fate, free-will, 
 predestination absolute." It is not every 
 building contractor can quote Milton. 
 
 The great surgeon regarded the patentee 
 of Temanite. 
 
 "Fate — fiddlesticks!" said Sir Alpheus 
 suddenly and rudely. " That's no excuse for 
 not meeting me." His bright little eyes 
 darted round the company and re>''ognized
 
 Elihu Reproves Job 219 
 
 Mr. Huss. " What ! my patient not in bed ! 
 Not even in bed ! Go to bed, sir ! Go to 
 bed!'' 
 
 He became extremely abusive to Dr. 
 Barrack. " You treat an operation, Sir, with 
 a levity ! "
 
 CHAPTER THE SIXTH 
 
 THE OPERATION 
 
 § 1 
 
 While Sir Alpheus grumbled loudly at the 
 unpreparedness of everything, Mr. Huss, 
 with the assistance of Dr. Barrack, walked 
 upstairs and disrobed himself. 
 
 This long discussion had taken a very 
 powerful grip upon his mind. Much remained 
 uncertain in his thoughts. He had still a 
 number of things he wanted to say, and these 
 proceedings preliminary to his vivisection 
 seemed to him to be irrelevant and tiresome 
 rites interrupting something far more im- 
 portant. 
 
 The bed, the instruments, the preparation 
 for anaesthesia, were to him no more than new 
 contributions to the argument. While he lay 
 on the bed with Dr. Barrack handling the 
 funnel hood that was to go over nose and 
 mouth for the administration of the chloro- 
 
 220
 
 The Operation 221 
 
 form, he tried to point out that the very idea 
 of operative surgery was opposed to the 
 scientific fatalism of that gentleman. But Sir 
 Alpheus interrupted him. . . . 
 
 " Breathe deeply," said Dr. Barrack. . . . 
 
 " Breathe deeply.'^ . . . 
 
 The whole vast argumentative fabric that 
 had arisen in his mind swung with him 
 across an abyss of dread and mental inanity. 
 Whether he thought or dreamt what follows 
 it is impossible to say ; we can but record the 
 ideas that, like a crystalline bubble as great as 
 all things, filled his consciousness. He felt a 
 characteristic doubt whether the chloroform 
 would do its duty, and then came that twang 
 like the breaking of a violin string : — 
 Ploot. . . . 
 
 And still he did not seem to be insensible ! 
 He was not insensible, and yet things had 
 changed. Dr. Elihii was still present, but 
 somehow Sir Kliphaz and Mr. Dad and Mr. 
 Farr, whom he had left downstairs, had come 
 back and were sitting on the ground — on the 
 ashes ; they were all seated gravely on a mound 
 of ashes and beneath a sky that blazed with 
 light. Sir Alj)hcus, the nurse, the bedroom,
 
 222 The Undying Fire 
 
 had vanished. It seemed that they had been 
 the dream. 
 
 But this was the reahty, an enduring 
 reahty, this sackcloth and these reeking ash- 
 heaps outside the city gates. This was the 
 scene of an unending experiment and an im- 
 mortal argument. He was Job ; the same Job 
 who had sat here for thousands of years, and 
 this lean vulturous old man in the vast green 
 turban was Eliphaz the Temanite, the smaller 
 man who peered out of the cowl of a kind 
 of hooded shawl, was his friend Bildad the 
 Shuhite ; the eager, coarse face of the man in 
 unclean linen was Zophar the Naamathite; 
 and this fist-faced younger man who sat with 
 an air of false humility insolently judging them 
 all, was Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite 
 of the kindred of Ram. . . . 
 
 It was queer that there should have ever 
 been the fancy that these men were doctors or 
 schoolmasters or munition makers, a queer 
 veiling of their immortal quality in the tran- 
 sitory garments of a period. For ages they 
 had sat here and disputed, and for ages they 
 had still to sit. A little way off waited the 
 asses and camels and slaves of the three emirs,
 
 The Operation 223 
 
 and the two Ethiopian slaves of Eliphaz had 
 been coming towards them bearing bowls of 
 fine grey ashes. (For EHphaz for sanitary 
 reasons did not use the common ashes of the 
 midden upon his head.) There, far away, 
 splashed green with palms and pierced between 
 pylons by a glittering arm of the river, were 
 the low brown walls of sun-dried brick, the 
 flat-roofed houses, and the twisted temple 
 towers of the ancient city of Uz, where first 
 this great argument had begun. East and west 
 and north and south stretched the wide levels 
 of the world, dotted with small date trees, and 
 above them was the measureless dome of 
 heaven, set with suns and stars and flooded 
 with a light. 
 
 This light had shone out since Elihu had 
 spoken, and it was not only a light but a voice 
 clear and luminous, before which Job's very 
 soul bowed and was still. . . . 
 
 " Who is this that darkeneth counsel by 
 words without knowledge ? " 
 
 By a great effort Job lifted up his eyes 
 to the zenith. 
 
 It was as if one shone there who was all, 
 and yet who comprehended powers and king-
 
 224 The Undying Fire 
 
 doms, and it was as if a screen or shadow was 
 before his face. It was as if a dark figure 
 enhaloed in shapes and colours bent down 
 over the whole world and regarded it curi- 
 ously and malevolently, and it was as if this 
 dark figure was no more than a translucent 
 veil before an infinite and lasting radiance. 
 Was it a veil before the light, or did it not 
 rather nest in the very heart of the light and 
 spread itself out before the face of the light 
 and spread itself and recede and again expand 
 in a perpetual diastole and systole? It was 
 as if the voice that spoke was the voice of 
 God, and yet ever and again it was as if the 
 timbre of the voice was Satan. As the voice 
 spoke to Job, his friends listened and watched 
 him, and the eyes of Elihu shone like garnets 
 and the eyes of Eliphaz like emeralds, but the 
 eyes of Bildad were black like the eyes of a 
 lizard upon a wall, and Zophar had no eyes 
 but looked at him only with the dark shadows 
 beneath his knitted brows. As God spake 
 they all, and Job with them, became smaller 
 and smaller and shrank until they were the 
 minutest of conceivable things, until the 
 whole scene was a little toy ; they became
 
 The Operation 225 
 
 unreal like discolorations upon a floating 
 falling disc of paper confetti, amidst great- 
 nesses unfathomable. 
 
 " Who is this that darkeneth counsel hy 
 -words without knowledge ? " 
 
 But in this dream that was dreamt by Mr. 
 Huss while he was under the anaesthetic, God 
 did not speak by words but by light ; there 
 were no sounds in his ears, but thoughts ran 
 like swift rivulets of fire through his brain and 
 gathered into pools and made a throbbing 
 pattern of wavelets, curve within curve, that 
 interlaced. . . . 
 
 The thoughts that it seemed to him that 
 God was speaking through his mind, can be 
 [)ut into words only after a certain fashion and 
 with great loss, for they were thoughts about 
 things beyond and above this world, and our 
 words are all made out of the names of things 
 and feelings in this world. Things that were 
 contradictory had become compatible, and 
 things incomprehensible seemed straightfor- 
 ward, because he was in a dream. It was as 
 if the an.'csthetic had released his ideas from 
 their anchr)r;ige to words and |)hrases and their 
 gravitation towards sensible realities, l^it it 
 
 p
 
 226 The Undying Fire 
 
 was still the same line of thought he pursued 
 through the stars and spaces, that he had pur- 
 sued in the stuffy little room at Sundering on 
 Sea. 
 
 It was somewhat after this fashion that 
 things ran through the mind of Mr. Huss. It 
 seemed to him at first that he was answering 
 the challenge of the voice that filled the world, 
 not of his own will but mechanically. He was 
 saying : " Then give me knowledge." 
 
 To which the answer was in the voice of 
 Satan and in tones of mockery. For Satan 
 had become very close and definite to Job, as a 
 dark face, time-worn and yet animated, that 
 sent out circle after circle of glowing colour 
 towards the bounds of space as a swimmer 
 sends waves towards the bank. " But what 
 have you got in the way of a vessel to hold your 
 knowledge if we gave it you ? ' ' 
 
 " In the name of the God in my heart," 
 said Job, " I demand knowledge and power." 
 
 '* Who are you? A pedagogue who gives 
 ill-prepared lessons about history in frowsty 
 rooms, and dreams that he has been training 
 his young gentlemen to play leap-frog amidst 
 the stars."
 
 The Operation 227 
 
 "I am Man," said Job. 
 
 But that queer power of slipping one's 
 identity and losing oneself altogether which 
 dreams will give, had come upon Mr. Huss. 
 He answered with absolute conviction : " I am 
 Man. Down there I was Huss, but here I am 
 Man. I am every man who has ever looked 
 up towards this light of God. I am everyone 
 who has thought or worked or willed for the 
 race. I am all the explorers and leaders and 
 teachers that man has ever had." 
 
 The argument evaporated. He carried his 
 point as such points are carried in dreams. 
 The discussion slipped to another of the issues 
 that had been troubling him. 
 
 " You would plumb the deep of know- 
 ledge ; you would scale the heights of space. 
 . . . There is no limit to either." 
 
 " Then I will plumb and scale for ever. I 
 will defeat you." 
 
 " But you will never destroy nic." 
 
 " I will fight my way through you to 
 God." 
 
 "And never attain him." . . . 
 
 It seemed as though yet another voice w*:*
 
 228 The Undying Fire 
 
 speaking. For a while the veil of Satan was 
 drawn aside. The thoughts it uttered ran like 
 incandescent molten metal through the mind 
 of Job, but whether he was saying these things 
 to God or whether God was saying these things 
 to him, did not in any way appear. 
 
 " So life goes on for ever. And in no 
 other way could it go on. In no other way 
 could there- be such a being as life. For how 
 can you struggle if there is a certainty of 
 victory ? Why should you struggle if the end 
 is assured? How can you rise if there is no 
 depth into which you can fall? The black- 
 nesses and the evils about you are the warrants 
 of reahty. . . . 
 
 " Through the centuries the voice of Job 
 had complained and will complain. Through 
 the centuries the fire of his faith flares and 
 flickers and threatens to go out. But is Job 
 justified in his complaints? 
 
 '* Is Job indeed justified in his complaints? 
 His mind has been coloured by the colour of 
 misfortune. He has seen all the world reflect- 
 ing the sufferings of his body. He has dwelt 
 upon illness and cruelty and death. But is 
 there any evil or cruelty or suffering that is
 
 The Operation 229 
 
 beyond the possibility of human control? 
 Were that so then indeed he might complain 
 that God has mocked him. . . . Are sunsets 
 ugly and oppressive? Do mountains disgust, 
 do distant hills repel? Is there any flaw in the 
 starry sky? If the lives of beasts and men are 
 dark and ungracious, yet is not the texture of 
 their bodies lovely beyond comparison? You 
 have sneered because the beauty of cell and 
 tissue may build up an idiot. Why, oh Man, 
 do they build up an idiot? Have you no will, 
 have you no understanding, that you suffer 
 such things to be? The darkness and un- 
 graciousness, the evil and the cruelty, are no 
 more than a challenge to you. In you lies the 
 power to rule ail these things. ..." 
 
 Through the tumbled clouds of his mind 
 broke the sunlight of this phrase : " The power 
 to rule all these things. The power to 
 
 mle " 
 
 " You have dwelt overmuch upon pain. 
 Tain is a swift distress; it ends and is forgot- 
 ten. Without memory and fear pain is 
 nothing, a contradiction to be lieeded, a warn- 
 ing to be taken. Without pain what would 
 life become? Pain is the master only of
 
 230 The Undying Fire 
 
 craven men. It is in man's power to rule it. 
 It is in man's power to rule all things. . . ." 
 
 It was as if the dreaming patient debated 
 these ideas with himself ; and again it was as 
 if he were the universal all and Job and Satan 
 and God disputed together within him. The 
 thoughts in his mind raced faster and sud- 
 denly grew bright and glittering, as the 
 waters grow bright when they come racing 
 out of the caves at Han into the light of day. 
 Green-faced, he murmured and stirred in his 
 great debate while the busy speciahst plied his 
 scalpels, and Dr. Barrack whispered direc- 
 tions to the intent nurse. 
 
 '* Another whiff," said Doctor Barrack. 
 
 *' A cloud rolls back from my soul. . . ." 
 
 " I have been through great darkness. I 
 have been through deep waters. ..." 
 
 "Has not your life had laughter in it? 
 Has the freshness of the summer morning 
 never poured joy through your being? Do 
 you know nothing of the embrace of the lover, 
 cheek to cheek or lip to lip? Have you 
 never swum out into the sunlit sea or shouted 
 on a mountain slope? Is there no joy in a 
 handclasp? Your son, your son, you say,
 
 The Operation 231 
 
 is dead with honour. Is there no joy in 
 that honour? Clean and straight was your 
 son, and beautiful in his life. Is that 
 nothing to thank God for.f* Have you never 
 played with happy children? Has no boy 
 ever answered to your teaching — giving back 
 more than you gave him ? Dare you deny the 
 joy of your appetites : the first mouthful of 
 roast red beef on the frosty day and the deep 
 draught of good ale? Do you know nothing 
 of the task well done, nor of sleep after a day 
 of toil ? Is there no joy for the farmer in the 
 red ploughed fields, and the fields shooting 
 with green blades? When the great prows 
 smite the waves and the aeroplane hums in the 
 sky, is man still a hopeless creature? Can 
 you watch the beat and swing of machinery 
 and still despair? Your illness has coloured 
 the world ; a little season of misfortune has 
 hidden the light from your eyes.'* 
 
 It was as if the dreamer pushed his way 
 through the outskirts of a great forest and 
 approached the open, but it was not through 
 trees that he thnist his way but through l)ars 
 and nets and interlacing curves of blinding, 
 mnny-coloured light towards the clear promise
 
 232 The Undying Fire 
 
 beyond. He had grown now to an incredible 
 vastness so that it was no h)nger earth upon 
 which he set his feet but that crystalhne pave- 
 ment whose transkicent depths contain the 
 stars. Yet though he approached the open 
 he never reached the open ; the iridescent net 
 that had seemed to grow thin, grew dense 
 again; he was still struggling, and the black 
 doubts that had lifted for a moment swept 
 down upon his soul again. And he realized 
 he was in a dream, a dream that was d^il^^^ng 
 swiftly now to its close. 
 
 *'Oh God!" he cried, "answer me! 
 For Satan has mocked me sorely. Answer 
 me before I lose sight of you again. Am I 
 right to fight? Am I right to come out of my 
 little earth, here above the stars? " 
 Right if you dare." 
 
 Shall I conquer and prevail? Give me 
 your promise ! " 
 
 " Everlastingly you may conquer and find 
 fresh worlds to conquer." 
 
 "Mai/— but shall I?" 
 
 It was as if the torrent of molten thoughts 
 stopped suddenly. It was as if everything 
 stopped. 

 
 The Operation 233 
 
 (( 
 
 Answer me," he cried. 
 
 Slowly the shining thoughts moved on 
 again. 
 
 " So long as your courage endures you 
 will conquer. . . . 
 
 " If you have courage, although the night 
 be dark, although the present battle be bloody 
 and cruel and end in a strange and evil 
 fashion, nevertheless victory shall be yours — 
 in a way you will understand — when victory 
 comes. Only have courage. On the courage 
 in your heart all things depend. By courage 
 it is that the stars continue in their courses, 
 day by day. It is the courage of life alone 
 thai keeps sky and earth apart. ... If that 
 courage fail, if that sacred fire go out, then 
 all things fail and all things go out, all things 
 — good and evil, space and time." 
 
 " Leaving nothing? " 
 
 ''Nothing/' 
 
 " Nothing," he echoed, and the word 
 spread like a dark and darkening mask across 
 the face of all things. 
 
 And then as if to mark the meaning of the 
 word, it sccincfl to him that the whole universe 
 began lo move inwaril upon it-scIf, l.-istcr and
 
 234 The Undying Fire 
 
 faster, until at last with an incredible haste it 
 rushed together. He resisted this collapse in 
 vain, and with a sense of overwhelmed effort. 
 The white light of God and the whirling 
 colours of the universe, the spaces between the 
 stars — it was as if an unseen fist gripped them 
 together. They rushed to one point as water 
 in a clepsydra rushes to its hole. The whole 
 universe became small, became a little thing, 
 diminished to the size of a coin, of a spot, 
 of a pin-point, of one intense black mathe- 
 matical point, and — vanished. He heard his 
 own voice crying in the void like a little thing 
 blown before the wind : " But will my courage 
 endure? " The question went unanswered. 
 Not only the things of space but the things of 
 time swept together into nothingness. The 
 last moment of his dream rushed towards the 
 first, crumpled all the intervening moments 
 together and made them one. It seemed to 
 Mr. Huss that he was still in the instant of 
 insensibility. That sound of the breaking 
 string was still in his ears : — Ploot. . . . 
 
 It became part of that same sound which 
 came before the vision. . . . 
 
 He was aware of a new pain within him;
 
 The Operation 235 
 
 not that dull aching now, but a pain keen and 
 sore. He gave a fluttering gasp. 
 
 "Quick," said a voice. "He is coming 
 to! " 
 
 " He'll not wake for hours," said a second 
 voice. 
 
 " His mouth and eyes ! " 
 
 He lifted his eyelids as one lifts lead. He 
 found himself looking into the intelligent but 
 unsympathetic face of Sir Alpheus Mengo, he 
 tried to comprehend his situation but lie had 
 forgotten how he had got to it, he closed his 
 eyes and sank back consciously and wilfully 
 towards insensibility. . . .
 
 CHAPTER THE SEVENTH 
 
 LETTERS AND A TELEGRAM 
 
 § 1 
 
 It was three weeks later. 
 
 Never had there been so successful an 
 operation as an operation in the experience of 
 either Sir Alpheus Mengo or Dr. Barrack. 
 The growth that had been removed was a non- 
 malignant growth ; the diagnosis of cancer had 
 been unsound. Mr. Huss was still lying flat 
 in his bed in Mrs. Croome's house, but he was 
 already able to read books, letters and news- 
 papers, and take an interest in affairs. 
 
 The removal of his morbid growth had 
 made a very great change in his mental 
 atmosphere. He no longer had the same sense 
 of an invincible hostile power brooding over 
 all his life; his natural courage had returned. 
 And the world which had seemed a conspiracy 
 of misfortunes was now a hopeful world again. 
 The last great offensive of the Germans to- 
 
 236
 
 Letters and a Telegram 237 
 
 wards Paris had collapsed disastrously under 
 the counter attacks of Marshal Foch ; each 
 morning's paper told of fresh victories for the 
 Aihes, and the dark shadow of a German 
 Caesarism fell no longer across the future. The 
 imaginations of men were passing through a 
 phase of reasonableness and generosity ; the 
 idea of an organized world peace had seized 
 upon a multitude of minds ; there was now a 
 prospect of a new and better age such as would 
 have seemed incredible in the weeks when the 
 illness of Mr. Huss began to bear him down. 
 And it was not simply a general relief that 
 had come to his forebodings. His financial 
 position, for example, which had been wrecked 
 by one accident, had been restored by another. 
 A distant cousin of Mr. Huss, to whom how- 
 ever Mr. Huss was the nearest relative, had 
 died of softening of the brain, after a career 
 of almost imbecile speculation. He had left 
 his property partly to Mr. Huss and partly 
 to Woldiiigstanton School. For some years 
 before the war he had indulged in the wildest 
 buying of depreciated copper shares, and had 
 accumulated piles of what had seemed at the 
 time valueless paper. 'I'he war had changed
 
 238 The Undying Fire 
 
 all that. Instead of being almost insolvent, 
 the deceased in spite of heavy losses on 
 Canadian land deals was found by his executors 
 to be worth nearly thirty thousand pounds. 
 It is easy to underrate the good in money. 
 The windfall meant a hundred needed comforts 
 and freedoms, and a release for the mind of 
 Mrs. Huss that nothing else could have given 
 her. And the mind of Mr. Huss reflected the 
 moods of his wife much more than he 
 suspected. 
 
 But still better things seemed to be afoot 
 in the world of Mr. Huss. The rest of the 
 governors of Woldingstanton, it became appar- 
 ent, were not in agreement with Sir Eliphaz 
 and Mr. Dad upon their project of replacing 
 Mr. Huss by Mr. Farr ; and a number of the 
 old boys of the school at the front, getting 
 wind of what was going on, had formed a small 
 committee for the express purpose of defend- 
 ing their old master. At the head of this 
 committee, by a happy chance, was young 
 Kenneth Burrows, the nephew and heir of Sir 
 Eliphaz. At the school he had never been in 
 the front rank ; he had been one of those good- 
 all-round boys who end as a school prefect, a
 
 Letters and a Telegram 239 
 
 sound man in the first eleven, and second or 
 third in most of the subjects he took. Never 
 had he played a star part or enjoyed very much 
 of the head's confidences. It was all the more 
 delightful therefore to find him the most pas- 
 sionate and indefatigable champion of the 
 order of things that Mr. Huss had set up. He 
 had heard of the proposed changes at his 
 uncle's dinner-table when on leave, and he had 
 done something forthwith to shake that gentle- 
 man's resolves. Lady Burrows, who adored 
 him, became at once pro-Huss. She was all 
 the readier to do this because she did not like 
 Mr. Dad's rather emphatic table manners, nor 
 Mr. Farr's clothes. 
 
 '* You don't know what Mr. Huss was to 
 us, Sir," the young man repeated several 
 times, and returned to France with that sen- 
 tence growing and flowering in his mind. He 
 was one of thf)se good types for whom the war 
 was a powerful developer. Death, hardsliip, 
 and responsibility — he was still not two-and- 
 twenty, and a major in the artillery — had 
 already made an understanding man out of the 
 schoolboy ; he could imagine what disposses- 
 sion meant; his new maturitv made it seem a
 
 240 The Undying Fire 
 
 natural thing to write to comfort his old head 
 as one man writes to another. His pencilled 
 sheets, when first they came, made the en- 
 feebled recipient cry, not with misery but 
 happiness. They were re-read like a love- 
 letter ; they were now on the coverlet, and Mr. 
 Huss was staring at the ceiling and already 
 planning a new Woldingstanton rising from its 
 ashes, greater than the old.
 
 § 2 
 
 It is only in the last few weeks, the young 
 man wrote, that we have heard of all these 
 schemes to break up the tradition of Wolding- 
 stanton, and now there is a talk of your 
 resigning the headmastership in favour of Mr. 
 Farr. Personally, Sir, I canH imagine how 
 you can possibly dream of giving up your 
 work — and to him of all people; — I still have 
 a sort of doubt about it; but my uncle was 
 very positive that you were disposed to resign 
 (personally, he said, he had implored you to 
 stay), and it is on the off-chance of his being 
 right that I am bothering you with this letter. 
 Briefly it is to implore you to stand by the 
 school, which is as much as to say to stand by 
 yourself and us. You^ve taught hundreds of 
 us to stick it, and now you owe it to us to 
 stick it yourself. I know you^re ill, dreadfully 
 ill; I've heard about Ciilbcrt, and I know, 
 Sir, we all know, although he wasnt in the 
 school and you never betrayed a preference 
 
 Q 241
 
 242 The Undying Fire 
 
 or were led into an unfair thing through it, 
 how much you loved him; you^ve been put 
 through it, Sir, to the last degree. But, Sir, 
 there are some of us here who feel almost as 
 though they were your sons ; if you don't and 
 canH give us that sort of love, it doesn't alter 
 the fact that there are men out here who 
 think of you as they'd like to think of their 
 fathers. Men like myself particularly, who 
 were left as hoys without a father. 
 
 I'm no great hand at expressing myself; 
 I'm no credit to Mr. Cross and his English 
 class; generally I don't believe in saying too 
 much ; but I would like to tell you something 
 of what you have been to a lot of us, and why 
 Wolding Stanton going on will seem to us like a 
 flag still flying and Woldingstanton breaking 
 its tradition like a sort of surrender. And I 
 don't want a bit to flatter you, Sir, if you'll 
 forgive me, and set you up in what I am writ- 
 ing to you. One of the loveable things about 
 you to us is that you have always been so jolly 
 human to us. You've always been unequal. 
 I've seen you give lessons that were among 
 the best lessons in the world, and I've seen 
 you give some jolly bad lessons. And there
 
 Letters and a Telegram 243 
 
 were some affairs — that business of the 
 November fireworks for example — when we 
 thought you were harsh and wrong — 
 
 " I was wrong," said Mr. Huss. 
 
 That almost led to a mutiny. But that is 
 just where you score, and why Wolding- 
 stanton can't do without you. When that 
 firework row was on we called a meeting of 
 the school and house prefects and had up some 
 of the louts to it — you never heard of that 
 meeting — and we said, we all agreed you were 
 wrong and we all agreed that right or wrong 
 we stood by you, and wouldn't let the row go 
 further. Perhaps you remember how that 
 affair shut up all at once. But that is where 
 you've got us. You do wrong, you let us see 
 through you; there never was a schoolmaster 
 or a father gave himself away so freely as you 
 do, you never put up a sliam front on us and 
 consequently every one of us knows that what 
 he knows about you is the real thing in you; 
 the very kids in the lower fifth can get a 
 glimpse of it and grasp that you are driving 
 at something with all your heart and soid, and 
 that the school goes somewhere and has life in 
 it. We Woldingstanton boys have that in
 
 244 The Undying Fire 
 
 common when we meet; we understand one 
 another; we have something that a lot of the 
 other chaps one meets out here, even from 
 the crack schools^ don't seem to have. It 
 isnH a flourish with us, Sir, it is a simple state- 
 ment of fact that the life we joined up to at 
 WoJdingstaiiton is more important to us than 
 the life in our bodies. Just as it is more im- 
 portant to you. It isnH only the way you 
 taught it, though you taught it splendidly, it 
 is the way you felt it that got hold of us. You 
 made us think and feel that the past of the 
 world was our own history ; you made us feel 
 that we were in one living story with the rein- 
 deer men and the Egyptian priests, with the 
 soldiers of Caesar and the alchemists of Spain ; 
 nothing was dead and nothing alien; you 
 made discovery and civilization our adventure 
 and the whole future our inheritance. Most 
 of the men I meet here feel lost in this war; 
 they are like rabbits washed out of their bur- 
 rows by a flood, but we of Woldingstanton 
 have taken it in the day^s work, and when Me 
 peace comes and the new world begins, it will 
 still be in the story for us, the day^s work will 
 still join on. That's the essence of Wolding-
 
 Letters and a Telegram 245 
 
 Stanton, that it puts you on the high road that 
 goes on. The other chaps I talk to here from 
 other schools seem to be on no road at all. 
 They are tough and plucky by nature and 
 association; they are fighters and sturdy men; 
 but what holds them in it is either just habit 
 and the example of people about them or 
 something unsound that can't hold out to the 
 end ; a vague loyalty to the Empire or a desire 
 to punish the Hun or restore the peace of 
 Europe, some short range view of that sort, 
 motives that xvill leave them stranded at the 
 end of the war, anyhow, with nothing to go 
 on to. To talk of after the war to them is to 
 realize what blind alleys their teachers have 
 led them into. They can understand fighting 
 against things but not for things. Beyond an 
 impossible ambition to go back somewhere 
 and settle down as they used to be, there^s not 
 the ghost of an idea to them at all. The whole 
 value of Woldingstanton is that it steers a 
 man through and among the blind alleys ayid 
 sets him on a way out that he can follow for 
 all the rest of his days; it makes him a player 
 in a limitless team and one with the Creator. 
 We are all coming back to take up our jobs
 
 246 The Undying Fire 
 
 in that spirit, jobs that will all join up at last 
 tn making a real world state, a world civiliza- 
 tion and a new order of things, and unless we 
 can think of you, sir, away at Woldingstanton, 
 working away to make more of us, ready to 
 pick up the sons we shall send you presently — 
 Mr. Huss stopped reading.
 
 § 8 
 
 He lay thinking idly. 
 
 *' I was talking about blind alleys the other 
 day. Queer that he should have hit on the 
 same phrase. . . . 
 
 " Some old sermon of mine perhaps. . . . 
 No doubt I've had the thought before. . . . 
 
 " I suppose that one could define educa- 
 tion as the hfting of minds out of blind 
 alleys. . . . 
 
 ** A permissible definition anyhow. . . . 
 
 " I wish I could remember that talk bet- 
 ter. I said a lot of things about submarines. 
 I said something about the whole world really 
 being like the crew of a submarine. . . . 
 
 " It's tnie — universally. Everyone is in a 
 blind alley until we pierce a road. . . . 
 
 " That was a queer talk we had. . . . T 
 remember I wouldn't go to bed — a kind of 
 fever in the mind. . . . 
 
 " Then there was a dream. 
 
 " I wish I could remember more iA that 
 
 247
 
 248 The Undying Fire 
 
 dream. It was as if I could see round some 
 metaphysical corner. ... I seemed to be in 
 a great place — talking to God. . . . 
 
 " But how could one have talked to 
 God? ... 
 
 " No. It is gone. . . ." 
 
 His thought reverted to the letter of young 
 Burrows. 
 
 He began to scheme out the reinstatement 
 of Woldingstanton. He had an idea of re- 
 building School House with a map corridor to 
 join it to the picture gallery and the concert 
 hall, which were both happily still standing. 
 He wanted the maps on one side to show 
 the growth and succession of empires in the 
 western world, and on the other to present the 
 range of geographical knowledge and thought 
 at different periods in man's history. 
 
 As with many great headmasters, his idle 
 day-dreams were often architectural. He took 
 out another of his dream toys now and played 
 with it. This dream was that he could 
 organize a series of ethnological exhibits show- 
 ing various groups of primitive peoples in a 
 tri])le order ; first little models of them in their 
 savage state, then displays of their arts and
 
 Letters and a Telegram 249 
 
 manufactures to show their distinctive gifts and 
 aptitudes, and then suggestions of the part 
 such a people might play as artists or guides, 
 or beast tamers or the like, in a wholly civilized 
 world. Such a collection would be far beyond 
 the vastest possibilities to which Wolding- 
 stanton could ever attain — but he loved the 
 dream. 
 
 The groups would stand in well-lit bays, 
 side chapels, so to speak, in his museum build- 
 ing. There would be a crescent of seats and a 
 black-board, for it was one of his fantasies to 
 have a school so great that the classes would 
 move about it, like little parties of pilgrims in 
 a cathedral. . . . 
 
 From that he drifted to a scheme for group- 
 ing great schools for such common purposes 
 as the educational development of the 
 cinematograph, a central reference library, 
 and the like. . . . 
 
 For one great school leads to another. 
 Schools are living things, and like all living 
 things they nmst grow and reproduce their 
 kind and go on from conquest to conquest — or 
 fall under the sway of the Farrs and Dads and 
 stagnate, become diseased and malignant, and
 
 250 The Undying Fire 
 
 perish. But Woldingstanton was not to 
 perish. It was to spread. It was to call to 
 its kind across the Atlantic and throughout 
 the world. ... It was to give and receive ideas, 
 interbreed, and develop. . . . 
 
 Across the blue October sky the white 
 clouds drifted, and the air was full of the hum 
 of a passing aeroplane. The chained dog that 
 had once tortured the sick nerves of Mr. Huss 
 now barked unheeded. 
 
 " I would like to give one of the chapels 
 of the races to the memory of Gilbert," whis- 
 pered Mr. Huss. . . .
 
 § 4 
 
 The door at the foot of his bed opened, and 
 Mrs. Huss appeared. 
 
 She had an effect of appearing suddenly, 
 and yet she moved slowly into the room, 
 clutching a crumpled bit of paper in her hand. 
 Her face had undergone some extraordinary 
 change ; it was dead white, and her eyes were 
 wide open and very bright. She stood stiffly. 
 She might have been about to fall. She did 
 not attempt to close the door behind her. 
 
 Mrs. Croome became audible rattling her 
 pans downstairs. 
 
 When Mrs. Huss spoke, it was in an almost 
 noiseless whisper. " Job! " 
 
 He had a strange idea that Mrs. Croome 
 must have given them notice to quit instantly 
 or perpetrated some such brutality, a sus- 
 picion which his wife's gesture seemed to con- 
 firm. She was shaking the cnimpled scrap of 
 paper in an absurd maimer. He frowned In a 
 gust ol" impatience. 
 
 25^
 
 252 The Undying Fire 
 
 " I didn't open it," she said at last, ** not 
 till I had eaten some breakfast. I didn't dare. 
 I saw it was from the bank and I thought it 
 might be about the overdraft. . . . All the 
 while. . . ." 
 
 She was weeping. " All the while I was 
 eating my egg, ..." 
 
 "Oh«;/iatisit?" 
 
 She grimaced. 
 
 *' From him.'' 
 
 He stared. 
 
 "A cheque, Job — come through — from 
 him. From our boy." 
 
 His mouth fell open, he drew a deep 
 breath. His tears came. He raised himself, 
 and was reminded of his bandaged state and 
 dropped back again. He held out his lean 
 hand to her. 
 
 " He's a prisoner? " he gasped. 
 "A/we?" 
 
 She nodded. She seemed about to fling 
 herself violently upon his poor crumpled body. 
 Her arms waved about seeking for something 
 to embrace. 
 
 Then she flopped down in the narrow 
 space oecween bed and paper-adorned fire-
 
 Letters and a Telegram 253 
 
 place, and gathered the counterpane together 
 into a himp with her clutching hands. "Oh 
 my baby boy!" she wept. "My hahij 
 boy. . . . 
 
 "And I was so wicked about the mourn- 
 ing. ... I was so wicked. ..." 
 
 Mr. Huss lay stiff, as the doctor had 
 ordered him to do ; but the hand he 
 stretched down could just touch and caress 
 her hair.
 
 / 
 
 ^■'o' 
 
 Printed bt 
 
 Cassell a Company, Liuitbd, La Belle Sauvace, 
 
 LoNnoN, E.C.4 
 
 I5.320.
 
 uc 
 
 so^^^^-^^i^WaSniSiiSS 
 
 llllilliliiliililliiii'iiiiii"'''''"'**'''"^ 
 
 AA 000 642 606 8