Again I ask, Do We Truly Die?

The Undying Fire by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. DO WE TRULY DIE?

DO WE TRULY DIE?

Mrs. Croome was heard in the passage, someone was admitted, there were voices, and the handle of the parlour door was turned. “’Asn’t E come, then?” they heard the voice of Mrs. Croome through the opening. Dr. Elihu Barrack appeared in the doorway.

He was a round-headed young man with a clean-shaven face, a mouth that was determinedly determined and slightly oblique, a short nose, and a general expression of resolution; the fact that he had an artificial leg was scarcely perceptible in his bearing. He considered the four men before him for a moment, and then addressed himself to Mr. Huss in a tone of brisk authority. “You ought to be in bed,” he said.

“I had this rather important discussion,” 101said Mr. Huss, with a gesture portending introductions.

“But sitting up will fatigue you,” the doctor insisted, sticking to his patient.

“It won’t distress me so much as leaving these things unsaid would have done.”

“Opinions may differ upon that,” said Mr. Farr darkly.

“We are still far from any settlement of our difficulties,” said Sir Eliphaz to the universe.

“I have indicated my view at any rate,” said Mr. Huss. “I suppose now Sir Alpheus is here—”

“He isn’t here,” said Dr. Barrack neatly. “He telegraphs to say that he is held up, and will come by the next train. So you get a reprieve, Mr. Huss.”

“In that case I shall go on talking.”

“You had better go to bed.”

“No. I couldn’t lie quiet.” And Mr. Huss proceeded to name his guests to Dr. Barrack, who nodded shortly to each of them in turn, and said: “Pleased-t-meet you.” His face betrayed no excess of pleasure. His eye was hard. He remained standing, as if waiting for them to display symptoms.

“Our discussion has wandered far,” said Sir Eliphaz. “Our original business here was to 102determine the future development of Woldingstanton School, which we think should be made more practical and technical than hitherto, and less concerned with history and philosophy than it has been under Mr. Huss. (Won’t you sit down, Doctor?)”

The doctor sat down, still watching Sir Eliphaz with hard intelligence.

“Well, we have drifted from that,” Sir Eliphaz continued.

“Not so far as you may think,” said Mr. Huss.

“At any rate Mr. Huss has been regaling us with a discourse upon the miseries of life, how we are all eaten up by parasites and utterly wretched, and how everything is wretched and this an accursed world ruled either by a cruel God or a God so careless as to be practically no God at all.”

“Nice stuff for nineteen eighteen A.D.,” said Mr. Dad, putting much meaning into the “A.D.”

“Since I left Woldingstanton and came here,” said Mr. Huss, “I have done little else but think. I have not slept during the night, I have had nothing to occupy me during the day, and I have been thinking about fundamental things. I have been forced to revise my faith, and to look more closely than I have 103ever done before into the meaning of my beliefs and into my springs of action. I have been wrenched away from that habitual confidence in the order of things which seemed the more natural state for a mind to be in. But that has only widened a difference that already existed between me and these three gentlemen, and that was showing very plainly in the days when success still justified my grip upon Woldingstanton. Suddenly, swiftly, I have had misfortune following upon misfortune—without cause or justification. I am thrown now into the darkest doubt and dismay; the universe seems harsh and black to me; whereas formerly I believed that at the core of it and universally pervading it was the Will of a God of Light.... I have always denied, even when my faith was undimmed, that the God of Righteousness ruled this world in detail and entirely, giving us day by day our daily rewards and punishments. These gentlemen on the contrary do believe that. They say that God does rule the world traceably and directly, and that success is the measure of his approval and pain and suffering the fulfilment of unrighteousness. And as for what has this to do with education—it has all to do with education. You can settle no practical questions until you have settled 104such disputes as this. Before you can prepare boys to play their part in the world you must ask what is this world for which you prepare them; is it a tragedy or comedy? What is the nature of this drama in which they are to play?”

Dr. Barrack indicated that this statement was noted and approved.

“For clearly,” said Mr. Huss, “if success is the justification of life you must train for success. There is no need for men to understand life, then, so long as they do their job in it. That is the opinion of these governors of mine. It has been the opinion of most men of the world—always. Obey the Thing that Is! that is the lesson they would have taught to my boys. Acquiesce. Life for them is not an adventure, not a struggle, but simply obedience and the enjoyment of rewards.... That, Dr. Barrack, is what such a technical education as they want set up at Woldingstanton really means....

“But I have believed always and taught always that what God demands from man is his utmost effort to co-operate and understand. I have taught the imagination, first and most; I have made knowledge, knowledge of what man is and what man’s world is and what man may 105be, which is the adventure of mankind, the substance of all my teaching. At Woldingstanton I have taught philosophy; I have taught the whole history of mankind. If I could not have done that without leaving chemistry and physics, mathematics and languages out of the curriculum altogether I would have left them out. And you see why, Dr. Barrack.”

“I see your position certainly,” said Dr. Barrack.

“And now that my heavens are darkened, now that my eyes have been opened to the wretchedness, futility and horror in the texture of life, I still cling, I cling more than ever, to the spirit of righteousness within me. If there is no God, no mercy, no human kindliness in the great frame of space and time, if life is a writhing torment, an itch upon one little planet, and the stars away there in the void no more than huge empty flares, signifying nothing, then all the brighter shines the flame of God in my heart. If the God in my heart is no son of any heavenly father then is he Prometheus the rebel; it does not shake my faith that he is the Master for whom I will live and die. And all the more do I cling to this fire of human tradition we have lit upon this little planet, if it is the one gleam of spirit in all the windy vastness of a dead and empty universe.”

106Dr. Barrack seemed about to interrupt with some comment, and then, it was manifest, deferred his interpolation.

“Loneliness and littleness,” said Mr. Huss, “harshness in the skies above and in the texture of all things. If so it is that things are, so we must see them. Every baby in its mother’s arms feels safe in a safe creation; every child in its home. Many men and women have lived and died happy in that illusion of security. But this war has torn away the veil of illusion from millions of men.... Mankind is coming of age. We can see life at last for what it is and what it is not. Here we spin upon a ball of rock and nickel-steel, upon which a film of water, a few score miles of air, lie like the bloom upon a plum. All about that ball is space unfathomable; all the suns and stars are mere grains of matter scattered through a vastness that is otherwise utterly void. To that thin bloom upon a particle we are confined; if we tunnel down into the earth, presently it is too hot for us to live; if we soar five miles into the air we freeze, the blood runs out of our vessels into our lungs, we die suffocated and choked with blood....

“Out of the litter of muds and gravels that make the soil of the world we have picked some 107traces of the past of our race and the past of life. In our observatories and laboratories we have gleaned some hints of its future. We have a vision of the opening of the story, but the first pages we cannot read. We discover life, a mere stir amidst the mud, creeping along the littoral of warm and shallow seas in the brief nights and days of a swiftly rotating earth. We follow through vast ages the story of life’s extension into the waters, and its invasion of the air and land. Plants creep upon the land and raise themselves by stems towards the sun; a few worms and crustaceans follow, insects appear; and at length come our amphibious ancestors, breathing air by means of a swimming bladder used as a lung. From the first the land animals are patched-up creatures. They eke out the fish ear they inherit by means of an ear drum made out of a gill slit. You can trace scale and fin in bone and limb. At last this green scum of vegetable life with the beasts entangled in its meshes creeps in the form of forests over the hills; grass spreads across the plains, and great animals follow it out into the open. What does it all signify? No more than green moss spreading over an old tile. Steadily the earth cools and the day lengthens. Through long ages of warmth and moisture the wealth of 108unmeaning life increases; come ages of chill and retrocession, glacial periods, and periods when whole genera and orders die out. Comes man at last, the destroyer, the war-maker, setting fire to the world, burning the forests, exhausting the earth. What hope has he in the end? Always the day drags longer and longer and always the sun radiates its energy away. A time will come when the sun will glow dull red in the heavens, shorn of all its beams, and neither rising nor setting. A day will come when the earth will be as dead and frozen as the moon.... A spirit in our hearts, the God of mankind, cries ‘No!’ but is there any voice outside us in all the cold and empty universe that echoes that ‘No’?”

109§ 2

“Ah, Mr. Huss, Mr. Huss!” said Sir Eliphaz.

His eye seemed seeking some point of attachment, and found it at last in the steel engraving of Queen Victoria giving a Bible to a dusky potentate, which adorned the little parlour.

“Your sickness colours your vision,” said Sir Eliphaz. “What you say is so profoundly true and so utterly false. Mysteriously evolved, living as you say in a mere bloom of air and moisture upon this tiny planet, how could we exist, how could we continue, were we not sustained in every moment by the Mercy and Wisdom of God? The flimsier life is, the greater the wonder of his Providence. Not a sparrow,” said Sir Eliphaz, and then enlarging the metaphor with a boom in his voice, “not a hair of my head, falls to the ground without His knowledge and consent.... I am a man much occupied. I cannot do the reading I would. But while you have been reviling the works of 110God I have been thinking of some wonders....”

Sir Eliphaz lifted up a hand with thumb and finger opposed, as though he held some exquisite thing therein.

“The human eye,” said Sir Eliphaz, with an intensity of appreciation that brought tears to his own....

“The cross-fertilization of plants....

“The marvellous transformations of the higher insects....

“The highly elaborate wing scales of the Lepidoptera.

“The mercy that tempers the wind to the shorn lamb....

“The dark warm marvels of embryology; the order and rhythm and obedience with which the cells of the fertilized ovum divide to build up the perfect body of a living thing, yea, even of a human being—in God’s image. First there is one cell, then two; the process of division is extremely beautiful and is called, I believe, karyokinesis; then after the two come four, each knows his part, each divides certainly and marvellously; eight, sixteen, thirty-two.... Each of those thirty-two cells is a complete thirty-second part of a man. Presently this cell says, ‘I become a hair’; this, ‘a blood corpuscle,’ 111this ‘a cell in the brain of a man, to mirror the universe.’ Each goes to his own appointed place....

“Would that we could do the like!” said Sir Eliphaz.

“Then consider water,” said Sir Eliphaz. “I am not deeply versed in physical science, but there are certain things about water that fill me with wonder and amaze. All other liquids contract when they solidify. With one or two exceptions—useful in the arts. Water expands. Now water is a non-conductor of heat, and if water contracted and became heavier when it became ice, it would sink to the bottom of the polar seas and remain there unmelted. More ice would sink down to it, until all the ocean was ice and life ceased. But water does not do so. No!... Were it not for the vapour of water, which catches and entangles the sun’s heat, this world would scorch by day and freeze by night. Mercy upon mercy, I myself,” said Sir Eliphaz in tones of happy confession, “am ninety per cent. water.... We all are....

“And think how mercifully winter is tempered to us by the snow! When water freezes in the air in winter-time, it does not come pelting down as lumps of ice. Conceivably it 112might, and then where should we be? But it belongs to the hexagonal system—a system prone to graceful frameworks. It crystallizes into the most delicate and beautiful lace of six-rayed crystals—wonderful under the microscope. They flake delicately. They lie loosely one upon another. Out of ice is woven a warm garment like wool, white like wool because like wool it is full of air—a warm garment for bud and shoot....

“Then again—you revile God for the parasites he sends. But are they not sent to teach us a great moral lesson? Each one for himself and God for us all. Not so the parasites. They choose a life of base dependence. With that comes physical degeneration, swift and sure. They are the Socialists of nature. They lose their limbs. They lose colour, become blenched, unappetising beings, vile creatures of sloth—often microscopic. Do they not urge us by their shameful lives to self help and exertion? Yet even parasites have a use! I am told that were it not for parasitic bacteria man could not digest his food. A lichen again is made up of an alga and a fungus, mutually parasitic. That is called symbiosis—living together for a mutual benefit. Maybe every one of those thousands of parasites you deem so horrible is working its way upward towards an arrangement—”

113Sir Eliphaz weighed his words: “Some mutually advantageous arrangement with its host. A paying guest.

“And finally,” said Sir Eliphaz, with the roll of distant thunder in his voice, “think of the stately procession of life upon the earth, through a myriad of forms the glorious crescendo of evolution, up to its climax, man. What a work is man! The paragon of creation, the microcosm of the cosmos, the ultimate birth of time.... And you would have us doubt the guiding hand!”

He ceased with a gesture.

Mr. Dad made a noise like responses in church.

114§ 3

“A certain beauty in the world is no mark of God’s favour,” said Mr. Huss. “There is no beauty one may not balance by an equal ugliness. The wart-hog and the hyæna, the tapeworm and the stinkhorn, are equally God’s creations. Nothing you have said points to anything but a cold indifference towards us of this order in which we live. Beauty happens; it is not given. Pain, suffering, happiness; there is no heed. Only in the heart of man burns the fire of righteousness.”

For a time Mr. Huss was silent. Then he went on answering Sir Eliphaz.

“You spoke of the wonder of the cross-fertilization of plants. But do you not know that half these curious and elaborate adaptations no longer work? Scarcely was their evolution completed before the special need that produced them ceased. Half the intricate flowers you see are as futile as the ruins of Palmyra. They are self-fertilized or wind-fertilized. The transformation of the higher insects which give us 115our gnats and wasps, our malaria and apple-maggots in due season, are a matter for human astonishment rather than human gratitude. If there is any design in these strange and intricate happenings, surely it is the design of a misplaced and inhuman ingenuity. The scales of the lepidoptera, again, have wasted their glittering splendours for millions of years. If they were meant for man, why do the most beautiful species fly by night in the tropical forests? As for the human eye, oculists and opticians are scarcely of your opinion. You hymn the peculiar properties of water that make life possible. They make it possible. Do they make it other than it is?

“You have talked of the marvels of embryonic growth in the egg. I admit the wonderful precision of the process; but how does it touch my doubts? Rather it confuses them, as though the God who rules the world ruled not so much in love as in irony. Wonderfully indeed do the cells divide and the chromoplasts of the division slide along their spindle lines. They divide not as if a divine hand guided them but with remorseless logic, with the pitiless consistency of a mathematical process. They divide and marshal themselves and turn this way and that, to make an idiot, to make a congenital cripple. 116Millions of such miracles pile up—and produce the swaying drunkard at the pot-house door.

“You talk of the crescendo of evolution, of the first beginnings of life, and how the scheme unfolds until it culminates in us—us, here, under these circumstances, you and Mr. Dad and Farr and me—waiting for the knife. Would that I could see any such crescendo! I see change indeed and change and change, without plan and without heart. Consider for example the migrations of birds across the Mediterranean, and the tragic absurdity of its incidents. Ages ago, and for long ages, there stretched continuous land connexions from Africa to Europe. Then the instinct was formed; the birds flew over land from the heated south to the northern summer to build and breed. Slowly age by age the seas crept over those necks of land. Those linking tracts have been broken now for a hundred thousand years, and yet over a constantly widening sea, in which myriads perish exhausted, instinct, blind and pitiless, still drives those birds. And again think of those vain urgencies for some purpose long since forgotten, that drive the swarming lemmings to their fate. And look at man, your evolution’s crown; consider his want of balance, the invalidism of his women, the extravagant 117disproportion of his desires. Consider the Record of the Rocks honestly and frankly, and where can you trace this crescendo you suggest? There have been great ages of marvellous tree-ferns and wonderful forest swamps, and all those glorious growths have died. They did not go on; they reached a climax and died; another sort of plant succeeded them. Then think of all that wonderful fauna of the Mesozoic times, the age of Leviathan; the theriodonts, reptilian beasts, the leaping dinosaurs, the mososaurs and suchlike monsters of the deep, the bat-winged pterodactyls, the plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs. Think of the marvels of the Mesozoic seas; the thousands of various ammonites, the wealth of fish life. Across all that world of life swept death, as the wet fingers of a child wipe a drawing from a slate. They left no descendants, they clambered to a vast variety and complexity and ceased. The dawn of the Eocene was the bleak dawn of a denuded world. Crescendo if you will, but thereafter diminuendo, pianissimo. And then once again from fresh obscure starting points far down the stem life swelled, and swelled again, only to dwindle. The world we live in to-day is a meagre spectacle beside the abundance of the earlier Tertiary time, when Behemoth in a thousand forms, 118Deinotherium, Titanotherium, Helladotherium, sabre-toothed tiger, a hundred sorts of elephant, and the like, pushed through the jungles that are now this mild world of to-day. Where is that crescendo now? Crescendo! Through those long ages our ancestors were hiding under leaves and climbing into trees to be out of the way of the crescendo. As the motif of a crescendo they sang exceedingly small. And now for a little while the world is ours, and we wax in our turn. To what good? To what end? Tell me, you who say the world is good, tell me the end. How can we escape at last the common fate under the darkling sky of a frozen world?”

He paused for some moments, weary with speaking.

“There is no comfort,” he said, “in the flowers or the stars; no assurance in the past and no sure hope in the future. There is nothing but the God of faith and courage in the hearts of men.... And He gives no sign of power, no earnest of victory.... He gives no sign....”

Whereupon Sir Eliphaz breathed the word: “Immortality!”

“Let me say a word or two upon Immortality,” said Sir Eliphaz, breaking suddenly into eagerness, “for that, I presume, is the thing 119we have forgotten. That, I see, is the difference between us and you, Mr. Huss; that is why we can sit here, content to play our partial rôles, knowing full surely that some day the broken lines and inconsecutivenesses that perplex us in this life will all be revealed and resolved into their perfect circles, while you to whom this earthly life is all and final, you must needs be a rebel, you must needs preach a doctrine between defiance and despair.... If indeed death ended all! Ah! Then indeed you might claim that reason was on your side. The afflictions of man are very many. Why should I deny it?”

The patentee and chief proprietor of the Temanite blocks paused for a moment.

“Yes,” he said, peering up through his eyebrows at the sky, “that is the real issue. Blind to that, you are blind to everything.”

“I don’t know whether I am with you on this question of immortality, Sir Eliphaz,” warned Dr. Barrack, coughing shortly.

“For my part I’m altogether with him,” said Mr. Dad. “If there is no immortal life—well, what’s the good of being temperate and decent and careful for five and fifty years?”

Sir Eliphaz had decided now to drop all apologetics for the scheme of Nature.

120“A place of trial, a place of stimulus and training,” he said, “Respice finem. The clues are all—beyond.”

“But if you really consider this world as a place for soul making,” said Mr. Huss, “what do you think you are doing when you propose to turn Woldingstanton over to Farr?”

“At any rate,” said Farr tartly, “we do not want soul-blackening and counsels of despair at Woldingstanton. We want the boys taught to serve and help first in this lowly economic sphere, cheerfully and enterprisingly, and then in higher things, before they pass on—”

“If death ends all, then what is the good of trying?” Mr. Dad said, still brooding over the question. “If I thought that—!”

He added with deep conviction, “I should let myself go.... Anyone would.”

He blew heavily, stuck his hands in his pockets, and sat more deeply in his chair, an indignant man, a business man asked to give up something for nothing.

For a moment the little gathering hung, only too manifestly contemplating the spectacle of Mr. Dad amidst wine, women, and waistcoats without restraint, letting himself go, eating, drinking, and rejoicing, being a perfect devil, because on the morrow he had to die....

121“Immortal,” said Mr. Huss. “I did not expect immortality to come into this discussion....

“Are you immortal, Farr?” he asked abruptly.

“I hope so,” said Mr. Farr. “Unworthy though I be.”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Huss. “And so that is the way out for us. You and I, Mr. Dad from his factory, and Sir Eliphaz from his building office, are to soar. It is all arranged for us, and that is why the tragic greatness of life is to be hidden from my boys....

“Yet even so,” continued Mr. Huss, “I do not see why you should be so anxious for technical science and so hostile to the history of mankind.”

“Because it is not a true history,” said Sir Eliphaz, his hair waving about like the hair of a man electrified by fresh ideas. “Because it is a bunch of loose ends that are really not ends at all, but only beginnings that pass suddenly into the unseen. I admit that in this world nothing is rationalized, nothing is clearly just. I admit everything you say. But the reason? The reason? Because this life is only the first page of the great book we have to read. We sit here, Mr. Huss, like men in a waiting-room.... 122All this life is like waiting outside, in a place of some disorder, before being admitted to the wider reality, the larger sphere, where all the cruelties, all these confusions, everything—will be explained, justified—and set right.”

He paused, and then perceiving that Mr. Huss was about to speak he resumed, raising his voice slightly.

“And I do not speak without my book in these matters,” he said. “I have been greatly impressed—and, what is more, Lady Burrows has been greatly impressed, by the writings of two thoroughly scientific men, two thoroughly scientific men, Dr. Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge. Ever since she lost her younger sister early in life Lady Burrows has followed up this interest. It has been a great consolation to her. And the point is, as Sir Oliver insists in that wonderful book ‘Raymond,’ that continued existence in another world is as proven now as the atomic theory in chemistry. It is not a matter of faith, but knowledge. The partition is breached at last. We are in communication. News is coming through.... Scientific certainty....”

Sir Eliphaz cleared his throat. “We have already evidences and descriptions of the life into which we shall pass. Remember this is no 123idle talk, no deception by Sludges and the like; it is a great English scientific man who publishes these records; it is a great French philosopher, no less a man than that wonderful thinker—and how he thinks!—Professor Bergson, who counselled their publication. A glory of science and a glory of philosophy combine to reassure us. We walk at last upon a path of fact into that further world. We know already much. We know, for example, that those who have passed over to that higher plane have bodies still. That I found—comforting. Without that—one would feel bleak. But, the messages say, the internal organs are constituted differently. Naturally. As one would have expected. The dietary is, I gather, practically non-existent. Needless. As the outline is the same the space is, I presume, used for other purposes. Some sort of astral storage.... They do not bleed. An interesting fact. Lady Burrows’ sister is now practically bloodless. And her teeth—she had lost several, she suffered greatly with her teeth—her teeth have all been replaced—a beautiful set. Used now only for articulate speech.”

“‘Raymond’ all over again,” said the doctor.

“You have read the book!” said Sir Eliphaz.

124The doctor grunted in a manner that mingled assent and disapproval. His expression betrayed the scientific bigot.

“We know now details of the passage,” said Sir Eliphaz. “We have some particulars. We know, for instance, that people blown to pieces take some little time to reconstitute. There is a correlation between this corruptible body and the spirit body that replaces it. There is a sort of spirit doctor over there, very helpful in such cases. And burnt bodies, too, are a trouble.... The sexes are still distinct, but all the coarseness of sex is gone. The passions fade in that better world. Every passion. Even the habit of smoking and the craving for alcohol fade. Not at first. The newly dead will sometimes ask for a cigar. They are given cigars, higher-plane cigars, and they do not ask for more. There are no children born there. Nothing of that sort. That, it is very important to understand. Here is the place of birth; this is where lives begin. This coarse little planet is the seed-bed of life. When it has served its purpose and populated those higher planes, then indeed it may freeze, as you say. A mere empty hull. A seed-case that has served its purpose, mattering nothing. These are the thoughts, the comforting and beautiful 125thoughts, that receive the endorsement of our highest scientific and philosophical intelligences.... One thinks of that life there, no doubt in some other dimension of space, that world arranged in planes—metaphorical planes, of course, in which people go to and fro, living in a sort of houses, surrounded by a sort of beautiful things, made, so we are told, from the smells of the things we have here. That is curious, but not irrational. Our favorite doggies will be there. Sublimated also. That thought has been a great comfort to Lady Burrows.... We had a dog called Fido, a leetle, teeny fellow—practically human....

“These blessed ones engage very largely in conversation. Other occupations I found difficult to trace. Raymond attended a sort of reception on the very highest plane. It was a special privilege. Perhaps a compliment to Sir Oliver. He met the truth of revealed religion, so to speak, personally. It was a wonderful moment. Sir Oliver suppresses the more solemn details. Lady Burrows intends to write to him. She is anxious for particulars. But I will not dilate,” said Sir Eliphaz. “I will not dilate.”

“And you believe this stuff?” said the doctor in tones of the deepest disgust.

126Sir Eliphaz waved himself upon the questioner.

“So far as poor earthly expressions can body forth spiritual things,” he hedged.

He regarded his colleagues with an eye of florid defiance. Both Mr. Farr and Mr. Dad had slightly shamefaced expressions, and Mr. Dad’s ears were red.

Mr. Dad cleared his throat. “I’m sure there’s something in it—anyhow,” said Mr. Dad hoarsely, doing his best in support.

“If I was born with a hare lip,” said the doctor, “would that be put right? Do congenital idiots get sublimated? What becomes of a dog one has shot for hydrophobia?”

“To all of such questions,” said Sir Eliphaz serenely, “the answer is—we don’t know. Why should we?”

127§ 4

Mr. Huss seemed lost in meditation. His pale and sunken face and crumpled pose contrasted strongly with the bristling intellectual rectitude and mounting choler of Dr. Elihu Barrack.

“No, Sir Eliphaz,” said Mr. Huss, and sighed.

“No,” he repeated.

“What a poor phantom of a world these people conjure up! What a mockery of loss and love! The very mothers and lovers who mourn their dead will not believe their foolish stories. Restoration! It is a crowning indignity. It makes me think of nothing in the world but my dear boy’s body, broken and crumpled, and some creature, half fool and half impostor, sitting upon it, getting between it and me, and talking cheap rubbish over it about planes of being and astral bodies....

“After all, you teach me, Sir Eliphaz, that life, for all its grossness and pain and horror, is not so bad as it might be—if such things as this were true. But it needs no sifting of the 128evidence to know they are untrue. No sane man believes this stuff for ten minutes together. It is impossible to believe it....”

Dr. Elihu Barrack applauded. Sir Eliphaz acted a fine self-restraint.

“They are contrary to the texture of everything we know,” said Mr. Huss. “They are less convincing than the wildest dreams. By pain, by desire, by muscular effort, by the feeling of sunshine or of rain in the face, by their sense of justice and suchlike essential things do men test the reality of appearances before them. This certainly is no reality. It has none of the feel of reality. I will not even argue about it. It is thrust now upon a suffering world as comfort, and even as comfort for people stunned and uncritical with grief it fails. You and Lady Burrows may be pleased to think that somehow you two, with your teeth restored and your complexions rejuvenated, will meet again the sublimation of your faithful Fido. At any rate, thank God for that, I know clearly that so I shall never meet my son. Never! He has gone from me....”

For some moments mental and physical suffering gripped him, and he could not speak; but his purpose to continue was so manifested by sweating face and gripping hand that no one spoke until he spoke again.

129“Now let me speak plainly about Immortality. For surely I stand nearest to that possibility of all of us here. Immortality, then, is no such dodging away as you imagine, from this strange world which is so desolating, so dreadful, so inexplicable—and at times so utterly lonely. There may be a God in the universe or there may not be.... God, if he exists, can be terribly silent.... But if there is a God, he is a coherent God. If there is a God above and in the scheme of things, then not only you and I and my dead son, but the crushed frog and the trampled anthill signify. On that the God in my heart insists. There has to be an answer, not only to the death of my son but to the dying penguin roasted alive for a farthing’s worth of oil. There must be an answer to the men who go in ships to do such things. There has to be a justification for all the filth and wretchedness of louse and fluke. I will not have you slipping by on the other side, chattering of planes of living and sublimated atoms, while there is a drunken mother or a man dying of cholera in this world. I will not hear of a God who is just a means for getting away. Whatever foulness and beastliness there is, you must square God with that. Or there is no universal God, but only a coldness, a vast cruel difference....

130“I would not make my peace with such a God if I could....

“I tell you of these black and sinister realities, and what do you reply? That it is all right, because after death we shall get away from them. Why! if presently I go down under the surgeon’s knife, down out of this hot and weary world, and then find myself being put together by a spirit doctor in this beyond of yours, waking up to a new world of amiable conversations and artificial flowers, having my hair restored and the gaps among my teeth filled up, I shall feel like someone who has deserted his kind, who has sneaked from a sickroom into a party.... Well—my infection will go with me. I shall talk of nothing but the tragedy out of which I have come—which still remains—which continues—tragedy.

“And yet I believe in Immortality!”

Dr. Barrack, who had hitherto been following Mr. Huss with evident approval, started, sounded a note of surprise and protest, and fixed accusing eyes upon him. For the moment he did not interrupt.

“But it is not I that am immortal, but the God within me. All this personal immortality of which you talk is a mockery of our personalities. What is there personal in us that can 131live? What makes us our very selves? It is all a matter of little mean things, small differences, slight defects. Where does personal love grip?—on just these petty things.... Oh! dearly and bitterly did I love my son, and what is it that my heart most craves for now? His virtues? No! His ambitions? His achievements?... No! none of these things.... But for a certain queer flush among his freckles, for a kind of high crack in his voice ... a certain absurd hopefulness in his talk ... the sound of his footsteps, a little halt there was in the rhythm of them. These are the things we long for. These are the things that wring the heart.... But all these things are just the mortal things, just the defects that would be touched out upon this higher plane you talk about. You would give him back to me smoothed and polished and regularized. So, I grant, it must be if there is to be this higher plane. But what does it leave of personal distinction? What does it leave of personal love?

“When my son has had his defects smoothed away, then he will be like all sons. When the older men have been ironed out, they will be like the younger men. There is no personality in hope and honour and righteousness and truth.... My son has gone. He has gone 132for evermore. The pain may some day go.... The immortal thing in us is the least personal thing. It is not you nor I who go on living; it is Man that lives on, Man the Universal, and he goes on living, a tragic rebel in this same world and in no other....”

Mr. Huss leant back in his chair.

“There burns an undying fire in the hearts of men. By that fire I live. By that I know the God of my Salvation. His will is Truth; His will is Service. He urges me to conflict, without consolations, without rewards. He takes and does not restore. He uses up and does not atone. He suffers—perhaps to triumph, and we must suffer and find our hope of triumph in Him. He will not let me shut my eyes to sorrow, failure, or perplexity. Though the universe torment and slay me, yet will I trust in Him. And if He also must die—Nevertheless I can do no more; I must serve Him....”

He ceased. For some moments no one spoke, silenced by his intensity.

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This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2020). The Undying Fire. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61547/61547-h/61547-h.htm

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