The World Set Free

ays of Mar

e new station for surgical work at Paran, high in the Himala

vast precipices of many-coloured rock, fretted above, lined by snowfalls, and jagged into pinnacles. These are the northward wall of a towering wilderness of ice and snow which clambers southward higher and wilder and vaster to the culminating summits of our globe, to Dhaulagiri and Everest. Here are cliffs of which no other land can show the like, and deep chasms in which Mt. Blanc might be plunged and hidden. Here are icefields as big as inland seas on which the tumbled boulders lie so thickly that strange lit

ultimate Delhi; and the little group of buildings, albeit the southward wall dropped nearly five hundred feet, seemed to him as he

ted by his secretary clambered down through the wing fabric a

made of granite, already a little roughened on the outside by frost, but polished within and of a tremendous solidity. And in a honeycomb of subtly lit apartments, were the spotless research benches, the operating tables, the instruments of brass, and fine glass and platinum

of the institution. Beside him was Rachel Borken, the chief orga

have wanted to visit

e had no other b

s a litt

people have you got

d and ninety-two,’

nts and attend

usand an

have to be a patient. But I should like to se

to my rooms?’ s

arenin. ‘But I would like to see a bit of this place a

and move

t of my work in

ng hard up to now?’

nd having to come down to oneself. This doorway and the row of windows is well done; the gray granite a

on the edge of the bed and talked to him. An assistant was seated quietly in the shadow behind the

’ he said, ‘unle

n,’ said Karenin, smiling

certa

t die; shall I b

just a cha

e, and if I do not, then perhap

you may be able to g

Fowler, couldn’t you drug me and patch me instead of all this — viv

ot sure enough yet to do

oming when you

er n

curacy. My body works doubtfully, it is not even sure that it will die or live. I suppose

ause, ‘it is necessary that spirits such

hafed against — all this. If I could have moved more freely and lived a larger life in health I could have done more. But some day perhaps you will be able to put a body that is wrong altogethe

understand a lesson, appreciate the discoveries of abler men and use my hands, but those others, Pigou, Masterton, Lie

‘But I can imagine the

present there must be at least a thousand thinking hard, obs

those who keep

me a devotion we have had only those people who obeyed the call of an aptitude at work upon these things. Here — I must show you it to-day, because it will interest you — we have our copy of the encyclopaedic index — every week sheets are taken out

possible thing. Research had produced a chaotic mountain of results, in a hundred languages and a tho

of that chaos is nearl

th my own work —— Yes,

the surgeon for a tim

always?’ he a

said F

ly you wo

There is a sort of grayness comes over all this, one feels hungry for life, real, personal passionate life, love-maki

Karenin unde

ly one thinks of these hi

se who have borne it the exasperation of abnormality. It will be good when you have nobody alive whose bod

age that soon

ery man is something of a cripple and something of a beast? I’ve dipped a little deeper than most; that’s all. It’s only now when he has fully learnt the truth of that, that he can take hold of himself to be neither beast nor cripple. Now that he overcomes his servitude to his bod

boldly,’ s

aution. . . . ‘When,’ asked Karenin

day I want you to drink and eat as I shall pres

ike to see

y you in a litter. And to-morrow you shall lie out upon the terra

lightly, and then young Gardener, his secretary, came to consult him upon the spending of his day.

Let them come and gossip with me. It will distract me — and I can’t tell you how intere

last

will k

e thin

ch of me. So that this is my last day anyhow, the days afterwa

to speak when Kar

n 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

distant precipices change to clouds of light, and drift

r — 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 proper

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. .

ytologist. 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 n

ng a stage, clearing away the setting of a drama that was played out and growing ti

evered 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 t

d, but that those who did understand lacked the power of real belief. They sai

pon us, spare our little ways of life from the fearful shaft of understanding. But do tricks for us, little limited tricks. Give us cheap lighting. And cure us of certain disagreeable things, cure us of cancer, cure us of consumption, cure our colds and relieve us after repletion. . . . ” We have ch

le to its former condition before the bombs fell. Perhaps they will dig out the old house in St John’s Wood to which my father went after his expulsion from Rus

eft standing?’ a

royed the Parliament, there are very few traces of the old thoroughfare of Whitehall or the Government region thereabout, but there are plentiful drawings to scale of its buildings, and the great hole in the east of London scar

distant to me,’

they have found the luggage of a lady covered up by falling rubble and unburnt, and she was equipped with nine different sorts of pill and tabloid. The pill-carrying age followed the weapon-carrying age. They are equally strange to us. People’s skins must have been in a vile state. Very few people were properly washed; they carried the filth of months on their clothes. All the clothes they wore were old clothes; our way of pulping our clothes again after a week or so of wear would have seemed fantastic to them. Their clothing hardly bears thinking ab

aid, ‘is a record o

d something touching. But so much of the old times makes one angry. So much they did seems gross

k moustache to hide a poor mouth. He aimed at nothing but Germany, Germany emphasised, indurated, enlarged; Germany and his class in Germany; beyond that he had no ideas, he was inaccessible to ideas; his mind never rose for a recorded instant above a bumpkin’s elaborate cunning. And he was the most influential man in the world, in the whole world, no man eve

f future welfare to follow the clatter of his sabre. The monstrous worship of that old fool’s “blood

e thinks of the megatherium,

on big guns and a hundred thousand complicat

e days,’ asked the young man, ‘

despair,’ sai

live still who were alive when Bismarck

ink of the mental food of Bismarck’s childhood; the humiliations of Napoleon’s victories, the crowded, crowning victory of the Battle of the Nations. . . . Everybody in those days, wise or foolish, believed that the division of the world under a multitude of governments was inevitable, and that it was going on for thousands of years more. It WAS inevitable until it was impossible. Any one who had denied that inevitability publicly would have been counted — oh! a SILLY fellow. Old Bismarck was only just a little — forcible, on the lines of the accepted ideas. That is all. He thought

id Edith st

each other across the smiling old administrator, and then presently one of the youn

ort of tin and copper. Their wheat areas were getting weary and populous, and many of the big towns had so lowered the water level of their available hills that they suffered a drought every summer. The whole system was rushing towards bankruptcy. And they were spending every year vaster and vaster amounts of power and energy upon military preparations, and continually expanding the debt of industry to capital. The system was already staggering when Holsten began his researches. So far as the world in general went there was no sense of danger and no desire for inquiry. They had no belief that science could save them, nor any idea that there was a need to be saved. They could not, they would not, see the gulf beneath their feet. It was pure good luck for mankind at large that any research at all was in progress. And as I say, sir, if that line of escape

ough away now,’

rty yea

een some similar man. If atomic energy had not come in one year it would have come in another. In decadent Rome the march of science had scarcely begun. . . . Nineveh, Babylon, Athens, Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first rough experiments in association that made a security, a breathing-space, in which inquiry was born. Man had to experiment before he found out the way to begin. But already two hundred years ago he had fairly begun. . . . The politics and dignities and wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were only the last phoenix blaze of the former civilisati

ardener knew would interest him. He remained alone for a little while after that, and then the two women came to him again. Afterwards Edwards and Kahn joined the group, and the talk fell upon love and the place of women in the renascent world. The cloudbanks of India lay under a quivering

ad begun, and now only was it becoming a possible experience. It had been a dream that generation after generation had pursued, that always men had lost on the verge of attainment. To most of

esently seemed to beat and fail. He had begun by addressing Karenin, but presently he was including Edith Haydon and

e, you interpret that to mean that the world is set free for love-making. Down there — under the clouds, the lovers foregather. I know your songs, Kahn, your half-mystical songs, in which you represent this old hard world dissolving into a luminous haze of love — sexual love. . . . I don’t think you are right or true in that

reedom and almost limitless power will put to the soul of our race. I can see now, all over the world, a beautiful ecstasy of waste; “Let us sing

ess, wild forest, eager desire, beating hearts, soaring wings and creeping terror flamed hotly and then were as though they had never been. Life was an uneasiness across which lights played and vanished. And then we came, man came, and opened eyes that were a question and hands that were a demand and began a mind and memory that dies not when men die, but lives a

ve,’ sa

e love of intimate persons. An

cannot stay at the roots and

You, too, Kahn! There are endless years yet for you — and all full of learning. . . . We carry an excessive burden of sex and sexual tradition still, and we have to free ourselves from it. We do free ourselves from it. We have learnt in a thousand different ways to hold back death, and this sex, which in the old barbaric days was just sufficient to balance our dying, is now like a hammer that has lost its anvil, it plunges through human life. You poets, you young people

of humanity, you have womankind, very much specialised for — for t

ised for love and repro

n carry the h

imaginations,’

e sexes is necessary. Isn’t it love, sexual love, which has released the imagination? Without that stir, without that impulse to go ou

or,’ said Karenin, ‘is not

the doors of the imagination for you men? Let us speak of this question now. It is a thing constantly i

ur future as intelligences, as parts of and contribution to the universal mind of the race. Humanity is not only naturally over-specialised in these matters, but all its institutions, its customs, everything, exaggerate, inte

achel Borken. ‘Need you remain

upon us,’ said

en, twist up your hair in the simplest fashion, go about your work as though there was only one sex in the world. You are just as much women, even if you are not so feminine, as the

t our work,’ sa

matter?’ a

eracy of blood relations, the first laws sexual taboos. Until a few years ago morality meant proper sexual behaviour. Up to within a few years of us the chief interest and motive of an ordinary man was to keep and rule a woman and her children and the chief concern of a woman was to get a man to do that. That was the drama, that was life. And the jealousy of these demands was the master motive in

l, ‘do you mean that w

have to becom

ds. That does not alter the fact that nearly the whole body of science is man made; that does not alter the fact that men do so predominatingly make history, that you could nearly write a complete history of the world without mentioning a woman’s name. And on the other hand we have a gift of devotion, of inspiration, a distinctive power for truly loving beautiful things, a care for life and a peculiar keen

the heroine, the sexual heroine. I want to abolish the woman whose support is jealousy and whose gift possession. I want to abolis

ing duels over the praises of women and ho

ddess, and three fine men, armed and dressed like the ancient paintings, sat on steps b

n’s doing,’ sai

sed for sex than the whole being of woman. What woman would do a t

n when they seem to react against that, they may do it still. I have been reading in the old papers of the movements to emancipate women that were going on before the discovery of atomic force. These things which began with a desire to escape from the limitations and servitude of sex, ended in an inflamed assertion of sex, and women more heroines than ever. Helen of Holloway was at last as big a nuisance in her way as Helen of Troy, and so long as you think of yourselves as women’— he held out a finger

or the love of knowledge. The next sciences to yield great harvests now will be psychology and neural physiology. These perplexities of the situation between man and woman and the trouble with the obstinacy of egotism, these are temporary troubles, the issue of our own times. Suddenly all th

had come out upon the terrace and seated

were tied to their city or their country, tied to

hat there is any final limit to

t in front of Karenin so that he could see his face. ‘There is no absolute lim

in a little time you will give us something that will hurry away the fatigue products and restore

Karenin. But ther

on and half living; don’t you think t

nodded

rs or so ago that that was done — then it followed he would presently resent his eight hours of uselessness. Shan’t we presentl

r Ali have done wor

ngthening, continually fuller term of years. And all those parts of him that once gathered evil against him, the vestigial structures and odd, treacherous corners of his body, you know better and better how to deal with. You carve his body about and leave it re-modelled and unscarred. The psychologists are learning how to mould minds,

Karenin of new work that was in progress in India and

hen, who was beginning to define clearly the laws of inheritance and how the sex of

actual

aboratory triumph,’ said Fowler, ‘b

we’ll reduce her to a minority, and if we do not like any type of men and women, we’ll have no more of it. These old bodies, these old animal limitations, all this earthly inheritance of gross inevitabilities falls from the spi

umanity,’

at made us. But the air no longer imprisons us, this round planet

will be venturing out from this earth. This ball will be no longer enough for us; our spirit will reach out. . . . Cannot you see how that little argosy will go glittering

reat window open

ep blue sky, and far away to the north glittered two biplanes on the way to the observatories on Everest, two hundred miles distant over the precipices to the east. The little group of people watched them pass over the mountains and vanish into the blue, and then for a time they talked of the work that the observatory was doing. From that they passed to the whole process of research about the world, and so

quivering rim of incandescence, an

e gave a li

sked Rach

rgotten,’

d you fo

a common mind, Fowler, that has played about between us? You and I and all of us have added thought to thought, but the thread is neither you nor me. What is true we all have; when the individual has altogether brought himself to the test and winnowing of expression, then the individual is done. I feel as though I had already been emptied out of that little vessel, that Marcus Karenin, which in my youth held me s

ipped and my disguises thrown away. Very soon now, old Sun, I shall launch myself at you, and I shall reach you and I shall put my foot on your spotted face and tug you about by your fiery locks. One step I shall take to the moon, and then I shall leap at you. I’ve talked to you before, old Sun, I’ve talk

persed so long. I gather my billion thoughts into science and my million wills into a commo

s given relief for a pain that began to trouble him and wrapped warmly about with furs, for a great coldness was creeping o

m unobtrusively lest he should be in want o

ven the moonrise cannot altogether quench, began their vigil. The moon rose behind the towering screen of dark precipices to the east, and long before it emerged above these,

cks, and then like a bubble that is blown and detaches itself

d remained for a time gazing up at that great silver disc, that silve

with his hands folded behind him, lo

acefully till the morning. And early in the morning they came to

till; and about seven days later a blood clot detached itself from the heal

nd