The Darkest Hours - 18 Chilling Dystopias in One Edition. Samuel Butler
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knew it was coming. I warned you before about it.”
“Yes, you did,” father meditated. “But I couldn’t believe it. At any rate, it is only so much more clinching evidence for my book.”
“It is nothing to what will come,” Ernest went on, “if you persist in your policy of having these socialists and radicals of all sorts at your house, myself included.”
“Just what old Wilcox said. And of all unwarranted things! He said it was in poor taste, utterly profitless, anyway, and not in harmony with university traditions and policy. He said much more of the same vague sort, and I couldn’t pin him down to anything specific. I made it pretty awkward for him, and he could only go on repeating himself and telling me how much he honored me, and all the world honored me, as a scientist. It wasn’t an agreeable task for him. I could see he didn’t like it.”
“He was not a free agent,” Ernest said. “The leg-bar48 is not always worn graciously.”
“Yes. I got that much out of him. He said the university needed ever so much more money this year than the state was willing to furnish; and that it must come from wealthy personages who could not but be offended by the swerving of the university from its high ideal of the passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence. When I tried to pin him down to what my home life had to do with swerving the university from its high ideal, he offered me a two years’ vacation, on full pay, in Europe, for recreation and research. Of course I couldn’t accept it under the circumstances.”
“It would have been far better if you had,” Ernest said gravely.
“It was a bribe,” father protested; and Ernest nodded.
“Also, the beggar said that there was talk, tea-table gossip and so forth, about my daughter being seen in public with so notorious a character as you, and that it was not in keeping with university tone and dignity. Not that he personally objected—oh, no; but that there was talk and that I would understand.”
Ernest considered this announcement for a moment, and then said, and his face was very grave, withal there was a sombre wrath in it:
“There is more behind this than a mere university ideal. Somebody has put pressure on President Wilcox.”
“Do you think so?” father asked, and his face showed that he was interested rather than frightened.
“I wish I could convey to you the conception that is dimly forming in my own mind,” Ernest said. “Never in the history of the world was society in so terrific flux as it is right now. The swift changes in our industrial system are causing equally swift changes in our religious, political, and social structures. An unseen and fearful revolution is taking place in the fibre and structure of society. One can only dimly feel these things. But they are in the air, now, to-day. One can feel the loom of them—things vast, vague, and terrible. My mind recoils from contemplation of what they may crystallize into. You heard Wickson talk the other night. Behind what he said were the same nameless, formless things that I feel. He spoke out of a superconscious apprehension of them.”
“You mean . . . ?” father began, then paused.
“I mean that there is a shadow of something colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the land. Call it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you will; it is the nearest I dare approximate it. What its nature may be I refuse to imagine.49 But what I wanted to say was this: You are in a perilous position—a peril that my own fear enhances because I am not able even to measure it. Take my advice and accept the vacation.”
“But it would be cowardly,” was the protest.
“Not at all. You are an old man. You have done your work in the world, and a great work. Leave the present battle to youth and strength. We young fellows have our work yet to do. Avis will stand by my side in what is to come. She will be your representative in the battle-front.”
“But they can’t hurt me,” father objected. “Thank God I am independent. Oh, I assure you, I know the frightful persecution they can wage on a professor who is economically dependent on his university. But I am independent. I have not been a professor for the sake of my salary. I can get along very comfortably on my own income, and the salary is all they can take away from me.”
“But you do not realize,” Ernest answered. “If all that I fear be so, your private income, your principal itself, can be taken from you just as easily as your salary.”
Father was silent for a few minutes. He was thinking deeply, and I could see the lines of decision forming in his face. At last he spoke.
“I shall not take the vacation.” He paused again. “I shall go on with my book.50 You may be wrong, but whether you are wrong or right, I shall stand by my guns.”
“All right,” Ernest said. “You are travelling the same path that Bishop Morehouse is, and toward a similar smash-up. You’ll both be proletarians before you’re done with it.”
The conversation turned upon the Bishop, and we got Ernest to explain what he had been doing with him.
“He is soul-sick from the journey through hell I have given him. I took him through the homes of a few of our factory workers. I showed him the human wrecks cast aside by the industrial machine, and he listened to their life stories. I took him through the slums of San Francisco, and in drunkenness, prostitution, and criminality he learned a deeper cause than innate depravity. He is very sick, and, worse than that, he has got out of hand. He is too ethical. He has been too severely touched. And, as usual, he is unpractical. He is up in the air with all kinds of ethical delusions and plans for mission work among the cultured. He feels it is his bounden duty to resurrect the ancient spirit of the Church and to deliver its message to the masters. He is overwrought. Sooner or later he is going to break out, and then there’s going to be a smash-up. What form it will take I can’t even guess. He is a pure, exalted soul, but he is so unpractical. He’s beyond me. I can’t keep his feet on the earth. And through the air he is rushing on to his Gethsemane. And after this his crucifixion. Such high souls are made for crucifixion.”
“And you?” I asked; and beneath my smile was the seriousness of the anxiety of love.
“Not I,” he laughed back. “I may be executed, or assassinated, but I shall never be crucified. I am planted too solidly and stolidly upon the earth.”
“But why should you bring about the crucifixion of the Bishop?” I asked. “You will not deny that you are the cause of it.”
“Why should I leave one comfortable soul in comfort when there are millions in travail and misery?” he demanded back.
“Then why did you advise father to accept the vacation?”
“Because I am not a pure, exalted soul,” was the answer. “Because I am solid and stolid and selfish. Because I love you and, like Ruth of old, thy people are my people. As for the Bishop, he has no daughter. Besides, no matter how small the good, nevertheless his little inadequate wail will be productive of some good in the revolution, and every little bit counts.”
I could not agree with Ernest. I knew well the noble nature of Bishop Morehouse, and I could not conceive that his voice raised for righteousness would be no more than a little inadequate wail. But I did not yet have the harsh facts of life at my fingers’ ends as Ernest had. He saw clearly the futility of the Bishop’s great soul, as coming events were soon to show as clearly to me.
It was shortly after this day that Ernest told me, as a good story, the offer he had received from the government, namely, an appointment as United States Commissioner of Labor. I was overjoyed. The salary was comparatively large, and would make safe our marriage. And then it surely was congenial work for Ernest, and, furthermore, my jealous pride in him made me hail the proffered appointment as a recognition