of that rising cliff of houses.
At the next meeting the next one must be taken aside and prepared, told that the time was nigh; the next one, so far committed that again there could be no turning back.
CHAPTER TWO
The chandelier in the coffee room of the Pantheon Club still showed the scars of last November’s outrage. Lacking one heavy cluster of drops and pendants, it hung slightly askew. Repairs could have been carried out at the same time as those to the window overlooking Pall Mall, but by tacit consent of all the members this relic of an historic moment had been left as it was, perhaps to remind them that in such revolutionary times they should never lapse into complacency. By the end of this century and well on into the twentieth there would be an accumulation of legends around that unsymmetrical chandelier: colourful fantasies of a night when a peer of the realm had been persuaded to swing from it and thereby bring down a portion in his fall; of a bishop who let a wine goblet fly from his hand in an impassioned appeal to heaven; even of a little-reported earth tremor. In fact, the crystal cluster had been demolished by a brick hurled through the window by one of the socialist marchers heading for Trafalgar Square on that bloody November Sunday of 1887.
The Right Honourable Joseph Hinde, Privy Councillor and Secretary of State for Municipal Development in Lord Salisbury’s Government, stood staring out of the window as if to raise the alarm should further attacks have to be repelled. A crossing sweeper, brushing steaming dung out of the path of a uniformed colonel on his way to a neighbouring club, caught a stab of the implacable stare and bobbed away round the corner, out of sight.
Viewed from inside the coffee room, Hinde’s stance had a different aspect. He had the air of one turning away in distaste from the two companions at his elbow rather than that of an alert sentry guarding the street. His always austere features were cramped with disapproval. Fellow Members of Parliament might have said there was nothing unusual in this: it was held by many, on both sides of the House, that the length and narrowness of his skull accounted for the narrowness of his opinions and the thinness of his voice. Here in his club, as so often in the House, he could not tear himself away from debate; but suffered by remaining.
‘A repeat performance. Invited to amplify the whole subject to the British Association in the autumn. Invited? Ha. Well-nigh commanded. What d’you think of that, Joseph?’
Sir Andrew Thornhill was mightily pleased with himself. His lecture to the Royal Society two evenings ago had been a success: that is to say, it had already stirred up a great deal of argument, which was always one of Thonhill’s aims. Hinde’s patent disapproval served only to provoke a mischievous pleasure in his restless blue eyes. He was heavier than either of his companions, with broad shoulders swelling beneath the spread of his cheviot coat, and a broad head weighted with a casque of silver hair, his side whiskers seeming to clamp it to his cheeks; but his eagerness and his constant wild gestures made him appear light and feathery, about to fly off across whatever room or platform he was dominating at the time.
‘The British Association,’ he repeated. ‘Hey, Joseph? A pretty contrast, hey, Caspian? There’ll be my estimable brother-in-law’—it was as if over the distance between them he were archly nudging an elbow into Hinde’s ribs—‘tramping the north giving speeches on traditional morality, whilst I demonstrate that all the old ideas are being constantly transformed into the new.’
‘Constantly distorted.’ Hinde did not look round, but could not suppress a dour response.
‘You weren’t even at my lecture, Joseph.’
‘We sat late at the House.’
‘If you’d heard what I actually said, you would realize there’s no question of distortion.’
‘What I’ve heard,’ said Hinde, ‘was that you’ve been preaching the possibility of the artificial creation of life.’
‘You see? False reports. Overstatement. I was talking about the prolongation of life. Quite a different thing. And why artificial? If it can be achieved within the natural order of things, then that makes it natural and not artificial, hmm?’
Hinde would not be drawn again. He moved an inch nearer the window.
Thornhill tried a wide conspiratorial grin at the third member of the group. ‘Don’t have to tell you, Caspian, a scientific man yourself, Etheric energy conversion: we all accept now that that’s what keeps us going. Energy can’t be lost. Can’t be created—there, Joseph, how’s that for an admission?—but it can’t be lost. And it can be refashioned. Always being refashioned. Nothing is destroyed, merely changed into another form.’ His right hand sketched soaring concepts in the air. ‘If matter and energy are indestructible, never suffering anything worse than conversion into another equally vital form, then human life is not a transitory thing.’
Dr. Alexander Caspian said carefully: ‘Obviously, the race as a race can continue to regenerate itself. The physical matter of our universe will change but cannot dwindle. One accepts that. But the prolongation of individual life...no, I’m afraid I have many reservations.’
‘Damn it,’ Thornhill burst out, ‘how can we ever make substantial progress if the best brains in the country are cut off in their prime?’
‘We make progress by drawing from what one might call a collective knowledge, amassed over the centuries. Each gifted individual is in fact gifted by his awareness of those sources and his ability to interpret them. The collective progress of the race and its philosophy—’
‘Damn collective progress! I want to see things for myself, and to go on contributing to them. Why should a man who has spent so long developing his skills have to give way, often at the height of his powers, to an infant who has to start the whole learning process all over again? If energy itself continues, why should not an existing formation of that energy continue? I’m convinced that the discovery of some regenerative process is waiting, just round the corner, so that those who don’t want to be transmuted into other matter may continue in their present shape, with their present faculties. And I want to live to see it. To see how our new knowledge is expanded and perfected.’
Caspian said: ‘Such desires are not new. And the knowledge is not new. This all-pervading ether to which you physicists ascribe the behaviour of all natural forces is similar to the Aksashic Record of Hindu mysticism. Paracelsus, too, wrote of just that astral power to which you have given a modern name.’
There was an odd hush. Caspian had half expected a burst of materialistic argument. Instead, Thornhill glanced covertly at him as if wondering what unspoken secrets they shared.
‘Perhaps,’ said Thornhill with unusual deference, ‘the old alchemists knew more than we like to admit.’
‘So that’s it!’ Hinde swung round. ‘Gibberish, just as I thought. Pagan superstition. A return to the Dark Ages.’
‘I meant merely that if we take those old concepts symbolically rather than literally, they often turn out to be remarkably close to what we’re now discovering by purely scientific experimentation.’
‘Such theories are bound to arouse opposition from some of your colleagues,’ said Caspian.
‘I expect it.’ Thornhill was gleeful again. ‘I could tell you here and now the names of enemies who’ll write scathing denunciations in Nature. And a lot of other places.’ He glanced past Caspian and raised a hand in greeting. ‘Speak of the devil. Or one of them. Old Walton—a bit restive the other evening. I really must go and find out what he made of it.’
He
