Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

THE UNDYING FIRE

Mr. Wells has also written the following novels:

• LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
• KIPPS
• MR. POLLY
• THE WHEELS 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 following fantastic and imaginative 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

A series of books upon social, religious, and political questions:

• ANTICIPATIONS (1900)
• MANKIND IN THE MAKING
• FIRST AND LAST THINGS
• NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
• A MODERN UTOPIA
• THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
• AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
• WHAT IS COMING?
• ITALY, FRANCE, AND GREAT BRITAIN AT WAR
• GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
• IN THE FOURTH YEAR

And two little books about children’s play, called:

• FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS

THE UNDYING FIRE
A CONTEMPORARY NOVEL

BY

H. G. WELLS

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1919

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1919,

By H. G. WELLS.

Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1919.

Norwood Press

J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

To

All Schoolmasters and Schoolmistresses

and every

Teacher in the World

CONTENTS

THE UNDYING FIRE

CHAPTER 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 surroundings. 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 futurist with a considerable knowledge of modern chemical and physical speculation and some obscure theological animus had repainted the designs of a pre-Raphaelite. The vast pillars vanish into unfathomable darknesses, and the complicated curves and whorls of the decorations 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 iridescences 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 reception 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 mountainous grandeur, Satan has the compact alertness 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 as undefined as it was in the time of Job; it is uncertain to this day whether he is to be regarded as one of the sons of God or as an inexplicable intruder among them. (But see upon this question the Encyclopædia 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 of 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 calm necessity, Satan is everywhere by an infinite activity. They engage in unending metaphysical differences 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.”

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, life comes from me.”

One of the great shapes in attendance became 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. “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 weakness. 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 summers 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 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.”

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 grandchildren, 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 with your excellent Bishop Usher that Job lived about thirty-five centuries ago, that gives us——How many? Three to the hundred 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 stars here; has anyone a slide rule?”

But the computation was brushed aside.

“A thousand years in my sight are but as yesterday when it is past. I will grant what you seek to prove; that Job has become mankind.”

§ 4

The dark regard of Satan smote down through the quivering universe and left the toiling light 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 direction,” 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 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 garden. 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 imagination. 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 still petty things. You say that in some manner he is to come up at last to this.... He is too foolish and too weak. His achievements only illuminate his limitations. Look at his little brain boxed up from growth in a skull of bone! Look at his bag of a body full of rags and rudiments, 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 incredible. It is impossible. I have disturbed and afflicted him long enough. I have driven him as far as he can be driven. But now I am moved to pity. Let us end this dispute. 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 other beast. 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 struggle 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 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 slime, a fuss in the mud that signifies nothing....”

§ 5

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.

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 movement in the air save for the dull thudding of the gun practice at Shorehamstow. A multitude 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 waste 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 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 remote 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: “Why?”

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 threatening 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 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, leaning 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.

“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 pensive 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 anythink—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.”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Huss weakly.

“There’s homes and hospitals properly equipped.”

The sick man nodded his head appreciatively.

“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 whispered, and vanished from the room, leaving 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 God!” he whispered.

§ 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 enviable 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 Papermakers’ Guild of the City of London; he had given himself without stint to its establishment 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 Russian were honestly taught; his science laboratories were the best school laboratories in Great Britain and perhaps in the world, and his new methods in the teaching of history and politics brought a steady stream of foreign inquirers to Woldingstanton. The hand of the adversary had touched him first just 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 laboratory. 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 misfortunes 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 could be extricated. On the night of the fire Mr. Huss strained himself internally and bruised his foot very painfully, and he himself 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 locking of a door during some “last day” ragging. It added an element of exasperating inconvenience to his greater distresses that all his papers and nearly all his personal possessions 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 feelings and liberal views, and he had bought roubles to his utmost for Mr. Huss as for himself, in order to demonstrate his confidence in the Russian revolution.

All these things had a quite sufficiently disorganizing effect upon Mr. Huss; upon his wife the impression they made was altogether disastrous. She was a worthy but emotional lady, effusive rather than steadfast. Like the wives of most schoolmasters, she had 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 contradiction. It was impossible to stay at Woldingstanton 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 announced, 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 without special permits and great exertion. Sundering-on-Sea was as convenient a place as anywhere from which 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 persisted 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 visitation 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 afternoon some importunate applicant in an extremity 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 blacking, and for the ink used by him in his very voluminous correspondence; upon all of which points there was much 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 list; 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.

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 squabbling 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 whatever 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 in her bedroom. But black she must have. This resolution led straight to a conflict with Mrs. Croome, who objected to her best bedroom 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 insatiable grief and petty cruelty, and with a dull pain steadily boring its way to recognition, Mr. Huss forced himself to carry on in a fashion the complex of business necessitated by the school disaster. Then in the night came a dream, as dreams sometimes will, to enlighten him upon his bodily condition. 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 darkness he saw the word “Cancer,” bright red and glowing—as pain glows....

He argued in the face of invincible conviction. 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 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 diminuendo 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 gnawing; 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.

§ 3

Behind the brass plate at the corner which said “Dr. Elihu Barrack” Mr. Huss found a hard, competent young man, who had returned from the war to his practice at Sundering 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 tentative 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 lodgings without any extra charge for mileage and the like.

“Of course,” said Mr. Huss, “of course,” with a clear vision of Mrs. Croome confronted with the proposal.

Sir Alpheus Mengo came down the next Saturday, and made a clandestine examination. He decided to operate the following week-end. Mr. Huss 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 listening 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 introductory phrases, but nothing would come into his mind save terms of disgust and lamentation. 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 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 burning,” she said. “The woman is impossible.”

She stood by her chair, regarding her husband and waiting.

He rose reluctantly, and transferred himself 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 can’t.”

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 consulting me!”

“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 will do but an operation.” Self-pity wrung him. He controlled a violent desire to cry. “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 monstrosity. “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 corners 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 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 impudent but harsh. Her brows were moist with heat, and her hair more than usually astray. But these things did not increase, they mitigated 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 overcame 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 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 unbeautiful 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.

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 completed.

Over his mean drama of pain and debasement in its close atmosphere buzzing with flies, it was as if some gigantic and remorseless 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.

“No,” he said with 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 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 occurring 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 revolutionized 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 contractors 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 appointment 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 suggested scholarship and refinement. His manners 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 a large, round, white, shiny, clean-shaven face and uneasy hands, and it was apparent that he carried pocket-books and suchlike luggage in his breast pocket.

They consumed the lobster appreciatively, and approached in a fragmentary and tentative manner the business that had assembled them: namely, the misfortunes that had overwhelmed 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. Farr 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 sentences.

“I can’t help thinking,” said Sir Eliphaz, putting down his glass and wiping his moustache 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 lacking 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 parsons,” 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 pursued 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 horseboxes 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 investments. Naturally 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.

“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 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 criticize,” said Mr. Farr.

“What I say,” said Mr. Dad, projecting his muzzle with an appearance of great determination, “is, fix responsibility. Fix responsibility. 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 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 dramatically, his methods of delegating authority, when Sir Eliphaz cut across the flow with, “Returning to Mr. Huss for a moment....”

The point that Sir Eliphaz wanted to get at was whether Mr. Huss expected to continue headmaster at Woldingstanton. From some chance phrase in a letter Sir Eliphaz rather gathered that he did.

“Well,” said Mr. Farr portentously, letting 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 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 relinquish power nor when to devolve responsibility. 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 like 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 the time. And teach boys to work. We shall need it, mark my words.”

“A certain amount of modern culture,” waved Sir Eliphaz.

“Modern,” 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 misfortunes of an old friend.”

“That,” said Mr. Dad, “spells Farr.”

“If he will shoulder the burthen,” said Sir Eliphaz, smiling upon Mr. Farr not so much with his mouth as by the most engaging 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 companions 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 engagements 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? 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 afternoon 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 controlled 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 detained in London by some negotiations with the American Government, arrived replete by the dining-car train. Mr. Farr made a preliminary reconnaissance at Sea View, and was the first to hear of the operation.

Sir Alpheus Mengo was due at Sea View by the first morning train on Saturday. He had arranged to operate before lunch. It was clear therefore that the only time available for a conversation between the three and Mr. Huss was between breakfast and the arrival of Sir Alpheus.

Mr. Huss, whose lethargy had now departed, 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 testament, so to speak,” said Mr. Farr. “Naturally 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 discount some of his assertions. But that under the present circumstances is neither here nor there.”

§ 3

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 scrubbed, at the last moment clean linen sheets of 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 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 examination 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 deprecatory remarks, amid its contents. But that sight was denied her.

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 transformation 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 feeling—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.

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 consistency 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.”

“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 Woldingstanton. 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 darkened the love and kindness of my wife ... and now my body is suffering so that my mind is like a swimmer struggling 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 life work. That will strike the inmost me, the heart and soul of me....”

He paused.

“You mustn’t take it quite like 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,” continued Mr. Dad.

“Let me speak,” said Mr. Huss, with the voice of authority that had ruled Woldingstanton 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 bark 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 interlocutors; 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?”

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 to 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 God 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. Because I am not yet altogether defeated. I would go on telling you why I want Woldingstanton to continue on its present lines and why it is impossible for you, why it will be a 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 Eliphaz. “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 technical 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 suffering 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, following a worn-out routine. A little Latin was taught and less Greek, chiefly in order to say that Greek was taught; some scraps of mathematical processes, a few rags of general knowledge, 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 posturing. 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 visible prosperity. 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 become 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 uplifted by enthusiasm, and his pain sank down out of his consciousness.

“What,” he said, “is the task of the 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 untaught 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 hearer than the three before him. Mr. Dad, with eyebrows raised and lips compressed, nodded silently to Mr. Farr as if his worst suspicions 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 nebulæ.... Always I have kept Farr and his utilities in their due subordination. Some of my boys have already made good business men—because they were more than business men.... But I have never sought to make business men and I never will. 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 widest sense; he must be philosopher, biologist, and archæologist 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 lips 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 Woldingstanton he has been working furtively with our materials 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 nothing.... And he thinks we are fighting the Germans, he thinks my dear and precious boy gave his life 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 Woldingstanton, 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.