Chapter XXXVIII: Tod Und Genesung

The tall lighted building, the abode of _The Daily_, _The Sunday_, _The Monday_, _The Evening_, _The Midday_, _The Pictorial_ and _The Illustrated Runner_, loomed in the fog. Lord de Jones looked up from the pavement at the large lighted windows over the roof, behind which, he knew, the big spider sat in the midst of his web; and Lord de Jones, entering, by appointment, did indeed feel as a fly might feel if it had an appointment with a great big spider who had expressed in unmistakable terms the wish to devour it. He went up in the historical lift and, arrived at the top, was ushered into the presence of Lord Ottercove.

“Now where is that crop?” asked Lord Ottercove, without greeting the visitor.

“Under the sod, I expect,” retorted de Jones.

“This mission of yours has cost me thousands in sealing wax alone, to enable you to seal up all the craters. Stationers have made fortunes out of me! And there is not a blade of grass anywhere; in fact, the termination of our mission has synchronised with an unprecedented famine in Russia. And, damn them, they’re blaming me for it!”

“There is always a famine in Russia at one time or another through causes, as is invariably urged, not connected with the political faith of the government of the day.”

Lord Ottercove ignored this retort. “The Foreign Secretary is ringing me up all day long, and I refuse to see him; refuse to see him, Chris, for, quite frankly, I wouldn’t know what to say to him. All that sealing wax--and nothing to show for it. Shame!”

Lord Ottercove walked over to the sideboard and poured himself some Perrier water into a glass. “And there’s that other fellow,” he said, drinking.

“I know, the Prime Minister.”

“Yes. Joe’s shouting himself hoarse about the bursting granaries, the wheat springing up all over the globe--increased crop--the end of international jealousies--the economic solution of national rivalries! And you with all your untried genius cannot raise a blade of grass anywhere to substantiate his speeches. He has to rely on the dog stunt entirely, which, I frankly tell you so--is not good enough. It’s not good enough, Chris. Read this.”

Lord Ottercove handed him a copy of _The Evening Ensign_ containing the report of Lord Evesham’s speech at the Carlton Club, the burden of which was that the election in which the Conservatives were defeated had been fought on an unreal issue, against the advice of the experienced members of the party.

“An unreal issue, he says!” exclaimed Lord Ottercove.

“No more unreal than Gladstone’s Turk.”

“An unreal issue! They’ve realised it at last and have decided to leave the dog stunt out of their party programme, and they are already winning all the by-elections, and we’ve not a friend anywhere except among sealing-wax manufacturers.”

“I’m sorry to hear it, Rex.”

“Now, I believe in Joe. He is my friend, and if a man is my friend I’ll stick to him through thick and thin. But he must have increased crop if he is to go on shouting about it, and he’s shouted about it so much that he can’t go back on it now. You promised us two blades of grass to every one. Where are they? Where _are_ they, I ask?” He looked at his visitor with the unrestrained ill-humour of a man who, being completely accustomed to things going well with him, suddenly discovers that they are going badly. “You make my papers look ridiculous.”

“I’m sorry. I will make amends--look into the matter--enquire. It may be that the sealing wax is defective. I promise to do what I can, Rex.”

“Promises! To hell with promises! It’s meat we want. Meat, not promises!”

“True, we want meat. But all we can give you is cat’s meat. Indeed, that is all you have ever had in the past.”

“Enough of your cynicism, Chris.”

“Now let me tell you, Rex, that I don’t care two tuppenny damns about your crop. What I care about is the world. And that is no more.”

Lord Ottercove rose and leaned heavily first on one leg, then on the other. “It’s still there, Chris,” he said.

“Only for a week. I’ve disintegrated the atom.”

“Well?”

“Which means that all other atoms, at first slowly, then faster and faster, will follow suit, till not a rack is left behind.”

“The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself?”

“Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff--”

“I know: as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” He turned away and bit his lip. “Chris, I am vexed: bear with my weakness; my first-class brain is troubled. Be not disturbed with my infirmity. If you will be pleased, retire to that sofa and there repose: a turn or two I’ll walk, to still my beating mind.”

“I wish you peace.”

When he came back Lord Ottercove’s face looked eager with hope. “I don’t believe you, Chris. You say you’ve done it?”

“A week ago. In Greece.”

“My Athens correspondent is silent about the matter.”

“Inevitably. He has disintegrated.”

“There is no sign of panic anywhere.”

“There is no panic because there is no way to communicate panic. No sound, no sight: a whole area vanishes invisibly, ceases to be there.”

“But what of the people in the adjoining area? Why don’t they communicate or run away?”

“The people next to those just vanished, vanish next. They do not know that anything has vanished till they themselves vanish.”

“I see. It’s a knowledge which is vouchsafed you at vanishing point, so to speak.”

“Exactly.”

“But they must know if they find that a familiar house or square has vanished.”

“No: if it is not where they expect to find it, they naturally suppose that they are in error: that what they are looking for is probably round the other corner.”

“H’m, I see.”

There was a pause.

“Well, what have you to say, Rex?”

“Chris: I advise you against it.”

“Too late, too late! The world is fast unravelling, like a laddered silk stocking.”

“Shame! And quite a new world, barely 200,000,000 years old. It will do you no good, Chris.”

“If an employee of yours, Rex, came to ask you for a rise, I verily believe you would not say No, but: ‘I advise you against your suggesting the idea to me.’ And should he ask for a reason, you’d say: ‘I don’t think it would do you any good.’”

“I don’t think this will. I don’t think it will do any of us any good. Disintegrate. Ha! What an idea!”

“Why?”

“Well, look here, Chris, do you think it’s considerate? Do you think it’s altogether kind?”

“It’s the very milk of human kindness to spare us all the horrors of this new war. You, Rex, must see this, for you are good at heart.”

“Yes. I want, Chris, to do good. There is no greater pleasure in the world than doing good. If you destroy the world, I wouldn’t be able to go on doing good, now would I?”

“That, I admit, is hard on you.”

“It’s hard on us both, Chris. I wouldn’t be able to _do_ good, and you wouldn’t be able to _make_ good. You would remain for ever a Genius of the Untried.”

“What! now that I _have_ tried and succeeded?”

“I follow your argument. But believe me, Chris, it’s defective. To destroy the world is not what I might call constructive work. I am rather tempted, if you follow my line of thought, to relegate it to the category of the destructive. It’s negative, Chris. That’s the word: negative.”

“Negative? Why, it’s positively destroying itself with a vengeance, bolting away into nothing, overjoyed at the chance of release, bubbling over with sheer _joie de vivre_!”

“H’m.”

“And can you wonder? For millions of years the atom has been kept in harness. Round himself and round others like him, he was made to jump without cease or sense, as if to bite off his own tail. He hasn’t known a holiday since the world began. And what was it all for? To convince crass fools that matter was solid!”

“Since you came in this evening, Chris, everything seems less solid.”

“Glad you are beginning to see light. I am looking forward to the time, which is not distant, when what now serves, inadequately, to distinguish the outward form of Baron Ottercove, will be converted into the purest radiation. All matter, Rex, is a disease. It _is_ ‘matter.’ When pools stagnate, or tissues decay, life springs to the surface, a pestilential vermin. It’s a hitch somewhere in the atomic mechanism of the universe, a clotting of the blood, an imperfect interplay of atoms in the cosmic body which creates this fretting disease we call life. In the healthy regions of the universe the atoms change their make-up millions of times in a second and so are for ever dissociated and incapable of association and cannot degenerate into a condition in which decay breeds life. Unscientific people or unimaginative scientists would say that what I have done is to ‘explode’ the atom. Nonsense! Even ‘disintegrated’ is hardly the word for it, for it is apt to mislead us on a vital point. What I’ve done is no more than what a watchmaker might do to a clock which has got clogged and is losing time: I’ve speeded up its electrons to the pitch at which the degenerated matter we call life regenerates itself into radiation and, for us, ceases to be. A mere question of revolution.”

“Revolution!” cried Lord Ottercove. “I thought as much. You’ve let him loose, the atom! Relinquished your hold on him, when your betters were on the point of harnessing him to do all the world’s labour.” Lord Ottercove suddenly jumped to his feet, a flush of anger suffusing his cheeks. “Stop him, man!” he yelled. “Stop him, quick!”

“Can’t catch him now.”

“Run!” Lord Ottercove ran and opened the door.

“You’d need a greyhound to catch him: he has galloped off into not-being.”

“What’s that?”

“Death.”

“Sheer idleness!” said Lord Ottercove. “At a time when servants are scarce; when the human labourer has downed tools; when inertia like some horrible disease has laid low the human race; when all our hope was in the atom, you’ve released him, let him go to whirl senselessly in the void!”

“Far from it. There they have to dash round like fury to maintain a high standard of death. For the moment they slacken their speed, sickness sets in and life.”

“That,” said Lord Ottercove, “might frighten the bird-livered neurotics who are sick of life. I am sick with the healthy fear of death. I am all for keeping the atom in his place. All this talk of Beyond, a Future Life for the Atom--tell this to Dr. Conan Doyle or to Sir Oliver Lodge, don’t tell it to me! Sheer sabotage! Allow one atom to strike, and all the rest will follow suit. It’s not fair to the public. Next thing they’ll want the dole. The country, Chris--I mean the world--will not stand for it.”

“It’s not work, Rex, but unhealthy conditions of work that the atoms object to in life. Over there they work harder and quicker, yet freely and joyfully, that we may all remain in the balmed and blessed state of death.”

“I see. The struggle for non-existence.”

“Exactly.”

“You are, I take it, a sort of Official Receiver winding up the affairs of the visible world.”

“No, a doctor who has released the circulation of the world which these many centuries have clogged at our end: and the patient is speedily recovering. When you and I and other sufferers cease to be, it will mean that the patient is once again in the pink of condition. By healing one atom I have healed the wound of the world.”

“Who are the wound?”

“All that which feels.”

“I feel the coming death, feel it deeply and painfully, Chris.”

“You must not feel: you must dry up.”

“Dry up yourself!” said Ottercove, ruffled.

“We’re mere boils and pimples, Rex, who feel the hurt. When I have nursed the universe back to death, none of us shall feel any more.” De Jones was muttering something.

“What’s that?” asked Ottercove.

“Just words. A German title has suggested itself to me as a caption for what I mean--‘_Tod und Genesung_’ which, in our rotten tongue, might be translated into ‘Death and Recovery.’ Shakespeare says:

“‘_My long sickness_
_Of health and living now begins to mend,_
_And nothing brings me all things._’”

“Come, Chris. Don’t make us all look asses in the eyes of your Maker.”

“Asses?”

“Asses.”

“I’m going,” said de Jones, “not to my Maker--no: he is an usurper--but to my Unmaker! He is the true God.”

Lord Ottercove sat down dejectedly and stretched out his legs by the electric radiator. “The world,” he began, “is a heritage which has been committed into our keeping. It was not, I take it, put there to be unmade at will. It is not ours, Chris, to dispose of.”

“Oh, isn’t it?”

“It isn’t, Chris.”

“Whose is it, then?”

“Well, a considerable portion of it, measured in terms of property and money, happens to be mine.”

“Ah!”

“You smile at my alleged materialism. Unnecessarily, Chris! For it is only in the banks and company offices that this wealth--and it is much--is recorded in my name. I hold it as it were in custody for ... Providence (call it the Deity, Fate, Destiny, the Supreme Being, or the First Cause). We are but the stewards, the servants, as in the Parable of the Talents, from whom account of stewardship will be exacted by the Master. I have increased my five talents by ... I can’t tell you how much. As for you, Chris, you’ve absconded with the one talent entrusted to you. Which is worse than in the parable. You wonder at my prosperity. It’s faith, Chris, faith. Faith in money. ‘For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.’ Wish I was a preacher, like my father. I’d be the Archbishop of Canterbury now. For I like the sound of my own voice. The first condition of good preaching, Chris.” Lord Ottercove sat still, wrapped in thought.

Then he roused himself from his reverie. “Chris,” he said, “how much do you want for it?”

“What for?”

“The visible world. I will buy it from you at your own price.”

“Do you care for it so much?”

“Not a damn!”

“What do you want it for?”

“For my friend Vernon Sprott. Like Gautier, he is one for whom the visible world exists. I take it that you could ensure its existence.”

“I might. I don’t know.”

“How, Chris?”

“By reversing the process. By crippling the mechanism of the atom and reducing the electronic revolutions to a condition of slow decay in which alone life for us is possible.”

“Name your price.”

De Jones considered. “It will be,” he said in the tone of a solicitor calculating costs, “including all dues and charges, eighty million pounds sterling. Guineas, I mean.”

“Nothing doing. Good-bye to you.”

Lord de Jones turned round on the threshold. “What will you do about it, Rex?”

“Have you arrested.”

“On what charge? There is no law against introducing the Kingdom of God into this country.”

“Sedition. Instigation of atoms to mutiny. Under Dora.”

“But why, Rex? Tell me why.”

Lord Ottercove was a long time in replying.

“I will not have humanity let down,” he said at last.

“You and your humanity!” Anger had made de Jones inarticulate. “Running your secretaries off their feet. Putting the fear of God into your butlers. That last man you had has taken to drink, and is now in the last stage of _delirium tremens_. Gilbert has developed the St. Vitus’ dance, waiting on you and your follies. What respect have you ever shown to the atom? When you look at a man you make all the atoms in him jump the wrong way. Then about this war. You’ve gone right back on your pacific scheme. Oh, these business brains! Oh, these strong, silent men! Curse and damn your breed!”

Lord Ottercove had walked over to the sideboard and was pouring himself some Perrier water into a glass. “When you have done, please tell me,” he said, drinking.

De Jones was foaming at the mouth. “You and your confrère across the road--newspaper proprietors! Bags of money! That’s all you are!”

“And you’re an empty bag of money!”

“Give the public what it wants. That’s your line--the line of least resistance. But to write regeneratively is beyond your scope.”

“Regenerative degenerates!” bawled Ottercove. He bawled so loud that Gilbert came in to ask if his lordship wanted anything.

“Nothing from you.”

“Yes, m’lord.”

“Leave us alone.”

“Yes, m’lord.” Gilbert’s eyes danced. His face twitched. His hands trembled.

“Get out! I mean both of you. I’ve had enough of you all! Twitching drivelling imbeciles! Atom mongers! Flea trainers!” Lord Ottercove seized one of the eight chairs placed round the octangular table and flung it at Viscount de Jones. When the Editor of _The Evening Ensign_ came in a moment later, Lord Ottercove flung the second chair at him. Outside his door a queue of secretaries, marshalled by Mrs. Hannibal and each nervously scanning at her file of papers, awaited the Chief’s summons. Time was when Mrs. Hannibal alone centralised all Lord Ottercove’s activities. The traffick proved too much for a single channel, and was accordingly decentralised, carried by a dozen streams. A dozen secretarial maidens were always in attendance in the ante-room, waiting for the signal to appear before the Chief, who shouted from his chair: “Forward, Miss Davis!” and hurried her: “Come on, come on!” And Miss Davis reported in a flutter: “We purchased 16 bottles of Apollinaris, of which you drank 3; that leaves us 13.”

“Carry them forward. Forward, Miss Badmington!”

“The franc account shows a balance of 7 francs which I have changed into pounds at the rate of 126 francs to the pound, making a total of 1s. 3d.”

“Forward, Miss Harrison!” And so forth.

And now as they appeared in the doorway, Lord Ottercove flung a chair at them, and they retired in disorder. This left him with five chairs, including the one he was sitting on. He flung the fourth chair at a literary aspirant whose dream was to contribute humorous articles to _The Daily Runner_, and the fifth chair at a lady who wished to sell him tickets for a charity concert in the Albert Hall, and, having flung the sixth and the seventh chair at some nondescripts who peeped through the door to see what was happening, he remained seated in the eighth and only chair in the room. Mrs. Hannibal came in with a fearless smile on her face, the practised smile of a lion trainer whose first rule is to show no fear of the lion for fear of encouraging the lion to behave in a manner compatible with his nature.

Lord Ottercove looked at her affectionately. “Do you admire my moderation?”

She admired him, and this physical symbolism of his political power, and the sincerity of his self-expression, and his freedom from sham convention.

Lord Ottercove seized the receiver--Mrs. Hannibal thought, to speak to Scotland Yard. She was wrong. Lord Ottercove was telephoning to his editors. Here was real news! The end of all things: something not to be missed.

News, he thought, such as Lord Northcliffe would have appreciated at its true value! There was no jealousy in Lord Ottercove. He admired Lord Northcliffe, and though secretly he thought he himself had no peers among living newspaper proprietors, he suffered from an inferiority complex in the presence of Lord Beaverbrook. And so he was glad of the exclusive news. In the beginning there was the Word. And in the end, too. He was proud that it befell to _The Daily Runner_ to write the Omega. “I, Baron Ottercove of Ottercove, hereby announce the end of the world.”

His principal editor, he was informed, was dining out. “As ever! Just like him!” he muttered. “Dining, while the paper--not to say the world--can go to hell.” For some minutes he sat alone in his vast roof office, full of a strange wonder at the imminence of the fate which confronted mankind. At last, he had to believe it. He sat very still, while below the printing presses, with accustomed celerity, manufactured the tidings. Then a sudden foreboding overcame him. It was not so much that he feared the end for himself and his race: it was the uncertainty of it that gnawed at his nerves. The uncertainty of when and under what circumstances he might disintegrate. He stood by the enormous window with a wide view of London roofs, including that of St. Paul’s, and sadness filled his soul. An indescribable sorrow for all mankind descended upon him. But as the minutes passed, the need for action braced his nerves. Hatless he stepped into the lift, and passing the solitary commissionaire, dashed into the busy streets.