CHAPTER I - OVER THE COFFEE CUPS
If I recall the conversation of that evening so minutely as to appear tedious, I must plead that this was the last occasion on which I saw Sir Spofforth alive. In such a case, one naturally remembers incidents and recalls words that otherwise might have been forgotten; besides, here were the two opposed opinions of life, as old as Christianity, confronting each other starkly. And, as will be seen, the test was to come in such manner as only one of us could have imagined.
I picture old Sir Spofforth as on that evening: courteous, restrained, yet with the heat of conviction burning in his measured phrases; and Esther listening with quaint seriousness, turning from her father to Lazaroff and back, and sometimes to me, as each of us spoke. Outside, in the moonlight, the shadow of the Institute lay black across the garden of Sir Spofforth’s house. The dining-room was fragrant with the scent of the tea-roses that grew beneath the windows.
The Biological Institute was less than five years old, but the London smoke, which drifted beyond Croydon, already had darkened the bright-red bricks to a tolerable terra cotta. The ivy had grown a good way up the walls. The Institute was accommodating itself to the landscape, as English buildings had the knack of doing. Lazaroff and I had been there under Sir Spofforth since the foundation, and there never had been any others upon the staff, the Institute being organized for specialized work of narrow scope, though of immense perspective.
It was devoted to private research into the nature of life, in the application of the Mendelian law to vertebrates. The millionaire who had endowed it for this purpose and then died opportunely, had not had time to hamper us with restrictions. Next to endowing us, his death was, perhaps, the most imaginative thing that he had ever accomplished. The Government concerned itself only about our vivisection certificates. But our animal experimentation was too innocuous for these to be much more than a safeguard. Carrel’s investigations in New York, a year or two before, had shown the world that cell and tissue can not only survive the extinction of the general vital quantity, but, under proper conditions, proliferate indefinitely. We were investigating tissue life, and our proceedings were quite innocuous. It will be seen that we already had gotten away from Mendel, though we did breed Belgian hares, whose disappearance always caused Esther distress, and we made fanciful annotations inside ruled margins about “agoutis” and “allelomorphs.”
I am conscious now that we worked constantly under a sense of constraint; there was an unnecessary secrecy in all our plans and actions. Why? I think, when I look back, that it was not because of what we were doing, but rather of what it might become necessary some day to do. The work was so near to sacrilege—I mean, we viewed the animal structure as a mechanism rather than as a temple. That, of course, was then the way of all biologists; but that, I think, was the cause of our rather furtive methods. We were hot on the trail of the mystery of life, and never knew upon what intimacies we might stumble. We sought to discover how and where consciousness is born out of unconscious tissue vitality. Lazaroff had the intuition of genius, and his inductions were amazing. Still, that problem baffled him.
“Pennell,” I hear him say, “at a certain period of growth, when millions of cells, working cooperatively, have grouped themselves in certain patterns, completing the design, consciousness comes into play. Why? Is it a by-product, the creak that accompanies the wheel? But Nature produces nothing in vain. Then why should we know that we exist? Why?”
Lazaroff was a Prussian Pole, I believe, though he spoke half a dozen languages fluently. Keen and fanatical, daring, inflexible, he seemed to me the sort of man who would welcome the chance to proclaim a Holy War for Science and die in the front rank. He had the strange old German faith that was called monism, and his hope for the human race was as strong as his contempt for the man of our day.
“The race is all, Pennell,” I hear him say again. “We of this age, who pride ourselves on our accomplishments, are only emerging from the dawn of civilization. We are still encumbered with all the ghostly fears that obsessed our ancestors of the Stone Age. But others will build the Temple of Truth upon the foundations that we are rearing. Oh, if I could have been born a hundred years ahead! For the change is coming fast, Pennell!”
And, when I professed to doubt the nearness of that change: “If your frontal area varied by only five centimeters, Pennell, you would believe. That is your tragedy, to fall short of the human norm by five centimeters of missing forehead.”
I can see his well-proportioned figure, and the mane of black hair thrown back; the flashing eyes. Animated by religious impulse, Lazaroff would have gone to the stake as unconcernedly as he would certainly have burned others. He had invented a system of craniometry by which he professed to discover the mentality of his subject, and I was his first.
Certainly the conditions were ideal for our work. We were both young men, enthusiasts; and Sir Spofforth Moore, our chief, was nearing eighty. The Trustees had picked him for the post because of his great name in the medical world. He was an ideal chief. He interfered with us no more than the Trustees did. He asked for no results. The Institute existed only for patient research. Yes, the millionaire had certainly displayed imagination for a millionaire, and it was fortunate that he died before his hobby, whose inception came to him, I believe, from reading sensational newspaper articles, grew into an obsession.
The Trustees refused to accept Sir Spofforth’s resignation when he became infirm. He lent the Institute dignity and prestige. I doubt whether he knew much of Mendelism, or had followed the work of the past five years. He knew little of what we were doing, and initialed our vouchers without ever demurring. Of course he tried to keep in touch with us, and I will confess that our routine work was mainly a cover for the daring plan that Lazaroff had, bit by bit, outlined to me.
“You see, Pennell,” he explained in self-justification, “the work must be done. And where are there such opportunities as here? Science cannot be bound by the provisions of a dead man’s deed. It is not likely that Sir Spofforth would object, either, but the Trustees might have intelligence enough to pick up the idea from the quarterly reports if we were entirely frank, and a biologist with imagination is called a charlatan. And we must work quickly, while we have this chance. When Sir Spofforth dies the Trustees will probably pick some fussy little busybody who will want to poke his nose into everything and take personal charge. Then—what of our experiment?”
The idea aroused me to as much enthusiasm as Lazaroff. And yet there was disappointment in the knowledge that we should never know the results of it.
In brief, Lazaroff’s scheme was this: If animal tissues, removed from the entire organism, can exist in a condition of suspended vitality for an indefinite time, at a temperature suited to them in conditions which forbid germ life to flourish, why not the living animal? Lazaroff had selected three monkeys from among our stock for the experiment. They were to be sealed each in a vacuum cylinder of special design, and left for a century.
“The more I think about the plan, the more enthusiastic I become, Pennell,” Lazaroff cried. “If the unconscious cell life survives indefinitely, why not the entire organism plus consciousness?”
“Much may happen in a hundred years, Lazaroff,” I answered.
“True, Pennell. But they will never find the vault. Even now, before it is sealed, it would not be looked for, built as it is into the cellar wall beneath the freezing-plant. It was to this end, you know, that I brought down workmen from London, instead of employing local talent. Well—we shall leave papers. Earthquakes and revolutions may happen overhead, but a hundred years hence, when the papers are opened, a search will be made. Our traveling simians will be found by a very different world, I assure you, Pennell!”
He had the light of an enthusiast in his eyes, and his mood aroused my own imagination.
“What use is that, Lazaroff?” I cried. “We shall not know the results of our experiment. And what message can monkeys carry to that world concerning ours? If monkeys, why not men?”
He looked at me fixedly, smiling ever so little, and I perceived that he had drawn the expression of that thought out of the depths of my own mind by his strong will. Now he nodded in approbation.
“Pennell—” he began, with hesitation, “do you want to know why I myself do not—?” He stopped. “I am almost ashamed to tell you what it is that makes me wish to live out my life among my contemporaries,” he continued. “How strong the primal instincts are in all of us, Arnold! Nature, with her blind, but perfectly directed will, warring on mind, and mind rising slowly to dominate her, armed, as she is, with her dreadful arsenal of a thousand superstitions, instincts, terrors. It is a fearful battle, Arnold, and many of us fall by the way.”
He turned aside abruptly, as if he regretted the half-confidence. I thought I knew what he meant, and I was stirred too.
We dined that night with Sir Spofforth and Esther in their new house within a stone’s throw of the Institute. Esther was the only child; her mother had died during her infancy. We four had been intimates during the whole five years of the Institute’s existence; strangely alone, we four, in the busy Surrey town. The memory of that last night is the most poignant that remains to me. How far away it seems, and how long ago! If I could have known then that our companionship was ended!
The argument to which I have referred began after dinner, over our coffee. It was our usual hour for disputations, but they had never been so keen, nor Lazaroff so outspoken. Sir Spofforth was a man of the old school of thought, religious, tolerant, and withal more disquieted than he himself was aware, by the dominant materialism of the younger men; and Lazaroff had all the tactlessness of his Jena training. There were rumors of war with Germany, but Sir Spofforth was too old to adjust his mind immediately to this conception. He grew heated, as always, on the cynical scheme of the democratic government, dictated by its greed for power, to force Ulster beneath an alien yoke, upon the loud and stunning silence of our English pacifists and lovers of oppressed nations where their sincerity would be best proved. He deplored the new and dangerous doctrines that were permeating society, the decay of morals, the loss of reverence and pride in service. Civilization, he said, seemed dying, and democracy its murderer.
“Dying! It is still struggling in its birth throes!” cried Lazaroff impetuously. “I grant that the democracy of today has proved its futility. But there is a new democracy to come. We are enslaved by the traditions of the past, by a worn-out religious system based upon the primitive animistic notion of a soul. There is the fatal weakness of our democracy. Science has never found the smallest trace of a soul; on the contrary, we know beyond doubt that we live in a mechanistic universe of absolute determinism.”
I see Sir Spofforth’s tolerant, yet eager look as he answered him.
“I grant you that the soul is not to be found in the dissecting-room, Herman,” he answered. “I, as you know, have devoted my life to the empirical investigation of truth, and I do not decry the method. But you cannot ignore the interior way of analysis, through the one thing we know most intimately—consciousness.”
“A by-product of matter,” answered Lazaroff contemptuously. “Or, if we want to be precisely true, the sum and substance of cell consciousness.”
“Well, throw the blame on the cell, then, in the modern fashion,” said Sir Spofforth, smiling. “I doubt, though, whether you have solved the one big problem by creating some million smaller ones. On the contrary, you are postulating a hierarchy of intelligences, quite in the Catholic fashion. If brain consciousness is not a specialized form of omniscient consciousness, how does the brainless amoeba find its food and engulf it, or the vine its supports? If you have robbed us of the abortive hope of saving the little empire of the brain beyond the change of death—and I deny even that entirely—some of us have identified consciousness with a non-material personality functioning through all life and fashioning it.”
“Vitalism!” scoffed Lazaroff.
I watched Esther’s eager face as she looked from one speaker to the other. Sir Spofforth seemed more agitated than the situation warranted, and I saw him glance at his daughter a little nervously before he answered.
“Herman, I repeat that I have given my life to scientific investigation,” he replied. “But I have always recognized the validity of the metaphysical inquiry. I believe Faith and Science have found their paths convergent. Lodge thinks so, too. Kelvin took that stand. James, your great psychologist, shifted before he died. Science must confine her activities within their natural bounds and not seek to play a pontifical part, or the excesses of the Scholastics will be repeated in a new and darker age.”
“I cannot agree with you,” cried Lazaroff vehemently. “An age is dawning when, relieved from their chains, men will look open-eyed into Nature to learn her secrets. Today civilization is being choked to death by the effete, the defective, whom a too benign humanitarianism suffers to live beneath the shelter of a worn-out faith. The fearful menace of a race of defectives has laid hold of the popular imagination. Soon we shall follow the lead of progressive America, and forbid them to propagate their kind. Here any statesman who dared suggest sterilization would be hounded from office. But England is awakening.
“It will go, that relic of degrading, savage superstition called the soul, the barbarous legacy of the ages enshrined in a hundred fairy stories. Science will rule. Man will be free. The logical State, finely conceived by Wells, without its rudimentary appendixes and fish-gills, will be the nation of the future. For we are outgrowing childish things. Man is coming of age. If only I could live to see it! But I was born a century too soon!”
The expression on Lazaroff’s face at that moment was so singular that I could not take my eyes away from it.
“It will be a world of physical and mental perfection, too,” he cried. “Of free men and women, freely mating, separating when the mating impulse is dead—”
“Yes, he is right, Father,” Esther interposed eagerly. “Whatever else may come, the hour of woman’s liberation is striking.”
“That hour struck many times in the ancient world, my dear,” her father answered. “And it brought, not liberation, but slavery.” He turned to Lazaroff. “You want a world of men and women reared like prize cattle and governed by laws as mechanistic as your universe,” he said. “Well, Herman, you have had that world. That was the pre-Christian world. Your free love, your eugenics has been tried in Rome, in Sparta, in many an ancient kingdom. And we know what those civilizations were.
“If you eugenists only knew the dreadful crop of dragon’s teeth that you are scattering today upon the fertile soil of the unthinking mind! Because we, fortunately, live in the millennial lull of a transitional age, you think that human nature has changed; that the fury of the Crusades will never be renewed in fantastic social wars, and the madness of religious fratricide in the madness of Science become Faith. All the old evils are lying low, lurking in the minds of men, ready to spring forth in all their ancient fury when the wise and illogical compromises, evolved through centuries of experience, have been discarded. I sometimes think that Holy Russia has man’s future in her charge. For without Christianity the moral nature of man will be where it has been in ages past. Social and economic readjustments leave it unchanged.”
“A religion of slaves, of the weak and incompetent,” said Lazaroff loudly.
“You think, then, that human passions have become emulsified by education? What a delusion!”
“Unquestionably. Permit me to refer to myself as an example of the crass materialist. For I do not believe in anything but matter. Matter is soul, as Hæckel proves. Yet, I am not on that account a man of base impulses. I do not want to wound, to kill, to steal, to torture—”
“Are you quite sure you know yourself, Herman?”
“But I utterly reject the efficacy of your Christianity, except in this low order of civilization. It is a dead faith, with its foolish miracles, its preposterous and unscientific dualism.”
“And I say,” cried Sir Spofforth, rising out of his chair, “that it is precisely the Christian norm, the unattainable ideal of Christ, working in the human heart, that has freed civilization from cruelty and shame. Why, look backward before Christ lived, and forward: don’t you see that we are actually indwelling in Him, according to His promise? Think of the Christians burned as living torches in Nero’s time, and read the writings of contemporary Romans, men of disciplined lives and a mentality as great as ours. Read Pliny, Tacitus, Seneca; read of the hopelessness of life when Rome was at her highest, and see if this stirred them. Picture Marcus Aurelius, the noble Stoic, presiding over the amphitheater. Study the manners and morals of Athens when her light burned most brightly. Contrast a thousand years of man’s abasement, and try to set the Inquisition against that.
“Future ages will say this: that nobody, not one of our statesmen saw the course that had been set when the civil State was first established. Never before in history had tribe or nation existed but grew up round the focus of some god. The churchless State is a body without a soul. Warnings multiply—in France and in America—but who can read them? When religion goes, the spirit of the race is dying. It is just the ideal of Christ, enshrined in the minds of a few leaders of character and trained conviction, that has kept the world on its slow course of progress. And nothing else saves us from the unstable tyrannies of ancient days.”
I was so stirred by Sir Spofforth’s eloquence that I clapped my hands vigorously, although I did not wholly agree with him. Esther was staring at Lazaroff; she was partly convinced and wanted him to answer her father. But Lazaroff, ignoring her gaze, scowled at me across the table.
“So you are of the same mind, are you, Pennell?” he asked, not trying to disguise his sneer. “And you don’t imagine that it is your missing five centimeters? Well, I hope that you may have your chance to find out for yourself. I hope you may, indeed.” He nodded and smiled in a rather evil fashion.
“Well, I must really offer you all an apology,” said Sir Spofforth, penitently. “Enough of these debatable subjects for a week at least. We two shall never agree on politics or religion, Herman. Let us go upstairs.”
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