The World Set Free, H. G. Wells [ereader for textbooks .txt] 📗

“I should like to see this place.”

“You shall go through it this afternoon. I will have two men carry you in a litter. And tomorrow you shall lie out upon the terrace. Our mountains here are the most beautiful in the world.⁠ ⁠…”

The next morning Karenin got up early and watched the sun rise over the mountains, and breakfasted lightly, and then young Gardener, his secretary, came to consult him upon the spending of his day. Would he care to see people? Or was this gnawing pain within him too much to permit him to do that?

“I’d like to talk,” said Karenin. “There must be all sorts of lively-minded people here. Let them come and gossip with me. It will distract me⁠—and I can’t tell you how interesting it makes everything that is going on to have seen the dawn of one’s own last day.”

“Your last day!”

“Fowler will kill me.”

“But he thinks not.”

“Fowler will kill me. If he does not, he will not leave very much of me. So that this is my last day anyhow; the days afterwards if they come at all to me, will be refuse. I know.⁠ ⁠…”

Gardener was about to speak when Karenin went on again.

“I hope he kills me, Gardener. Don’t be⁠—old-fashioned. The thing I am most afraid of is that last rag of life. I may just go on⁠—a scarred salvage of suffering stuff. And then⁠—all the things I have hidden and kept down or discounted or set right afterwards will get the better of me. I shall be peevish. I may lose my grip upon my own egotism. It’s never been a very firm grip. No, no, Gardener, don’t say that! You know better, you’ve had glimpses of it. Suppose I came through on the other side of this affair, belittled, vain, and spiteful, using the prestige I have got among men by my good work in the past just to serve some small, invalid purpose.⁠ ⁠…”

He was silent for a time, watching the mists among the distant precipices change to clouds of light, and drift and dissolve before the searching rays of the sunrise.

“Yes,” he said at last, “I am afraid of these anaesthetics and these fag-ends of life. It’s life we are all afraid of. Death!⁠—nobody minds just death. Fowler is clever⁠—but some day surgery will know its duty better and not be so anxious just to save something.⁠ ⁠… Provided only that it quivers. I’ve tried to hold my end up properly and do my work. After Fowler has done with me I am certain I shall be unfit for work⁠—and what else is there for me?⁠ ⁠… I know I shall not be fit for work.⁠ ⁠…

“I do not see why life should be judged by its last trailing thread of vitality.⁠ ⁠… I know it for the splendid thing it is⁠—I who have been a diseased creature from the beginning. I know it well enough not to confuse it with its husks. Remember that, Gardener, if presently my heart fails me and I despair, and if I go through a little phase of pain and ingratitude and dark forgetfulness before the end.⁠ ⁠… Don’t believe what I may say at the last.⁠ ⁠… If the fabric is good enough the selvage doesn’t matter. It can’t matter. So long as you are alive you are just the moment, perhaps, but when you are dead then you are all your life from the first moment to the last.⁠ ⁠…”

Presently, in accordance with his wish, people came to talk to him, and he could forget himself again. Rachel Borken sat for a long time with him and talked chiefly of women in the world, and with her was a girl named Edith Haydon, who was already very well known as a cytologist. And several of the younger men who were working in the place and a patient named Kahn, a poet, and Edwards, a designer of plays and shows, spent some time with him. The talk wandered from point to point and came back upon itself, and became now earnest and now trivial as the chance suggestions determined. But soon afterwards Gardener wrote down notes of things he remembered, and it is possible to put together again the outlook of Karenin upon the world and how he thought and felt about many of the principal things in life.

“Our age,” he said, “has been so far an age of scene-shifting. We have been preparing a stage, clearing away the setting of a drama that was played out and growing tiresome.⁠ ⁠… If I could but sit out the first few scenes of the new spectacle.⁠ ⁠…

“How encumbered the world had become! It was ailing as I am ailing with a growth of unmeaning things. It was entangled, feverish, confused. It was in sore need of release, and I suppose that nothing less than the violence of those bombs could have released it and made it a healthy world again. I suppose they were necessary. Just as everything turns to evil in a fevered body, so everything seemed turning to evil in those last years of the old time. Everywhere there were obsolete organisations seizing upon all the new fine things that science was giving to the world, nationalities, all sorts of political bodies, the churches and sects, proprietorship, seizing upon those treat powers and limitless possibilities and turning them to evil uses. And they would not suffer open speech; they would not permit of education; they would let no one be educated to the needs of the new time.⁠ ⁠… You who are younger cannot imagine the mixture of desperate hope and protesting despair in which we who could believe in the possibilities of science lived in those years before atomic energy came.⁠ ⁠…

“It was not only that the mass of people would not attend, would not understand, but that