The Crack of Doom
fulness of its time the race shall die. Man will go down into the pit,
and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness which, in
this obscure corner, has for a brief space broken the silence of the
Universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. Life and
death and love, stronger than death, will be as though they never had
been. Nor will anything that _is_ be better or be worse for all that
the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through
countless generations to effect.
[1] From this sentence to the end of the paragraph Brande draws
freely, for the purpose of his own argument, on Mr. Balfour's
"Naturalism and Ethics."--_Ed._
"The roaring loom of Time weaves on. The globe cools out. Life
mercifully ceases from upon its surface. The atmosphere and water
disappear. It rests. It is dead.
"But for its vicarious service in influencing more youthful planets
within its reach, that dead world might as well be loosed at once from
its gravitation cable and be turned adrift into space. Its time has not
yet come. It will not come until the great central sun of the system to
which it belongs has passed laboriously through all his stages of
stellar life and died out also. Then when that dead sun, according to
the impact theory, blunders across the path of another sun, dead and
blind like himself, its time will come. The result of that impact will
be a new star nebula, with all its weary history before it; a history of
suffering, in which a million years will not be long enough to write a
single page.
"Here we have a scientific parallel to the hell of superstition which
may account for the instinctive origin of the smoking flax and the fire
which shall never be quenched. We know that the atoms of which the
human body is built up are atoms of matter. It follows that every atom
in every living body will be present in some form at that final impact
in which the solar system will be ended in a blazing whirlwind which
will melt the earth with its fervent heat. There is not a molecule or
cell in any creature alive this day which will not in its ultimate
constituents endure the long agony, lasting countless aeons of centuries,
wherein the solid mass of this great globe will be represented by a rush
of incandescent gas, stupendous in itself, but trivial in comparison
with the hurricane of flame in which it will be swallowed up and lost.
"And when from that hell a new star emerges, and new planets in their
season are born of him, and he and they repeat, as they must repeat, the
ceaseless, changeless, remorseless story of the universe, every atom in
this earth will take its place, and fill again functions identical with
those which it, or its fellow, fills now. Life will reappear, develop,
determine, to be renewed again as before. And so on for ever.
"Nature has known no rest. From the beginning--which never was--she has
been building up only to tear down again. She has been fabricating
pretty toys and trinkets, that cost her many a thousand years to forge,
only to break them in pieces for her sport. With infinite painstaking
she has manufactured man only to torture him with mean miseries in the
embryonic stages of his race, and in his higher development to madden
him with intellectual puzzles. Thus it will be unto the end--which never
shall be. For there is neither beginning nor end to her unvarying
cycles. Whether the secular optimist be successful or unsuccessful in
realising his paltry span of terrestrial paradise, whether the paeans he
sings about it are prophetic dithyrambs or misleading myths, no
Christian man need fear for his own immortality. That is well assured.
In some form he will surely be raised from the dead. In some shape he
will live again. But, _Cui bono_?"
CHAPTER X.
FORCE--A REMEDY.
"Get me out of this, I am stifled--ill," Miss Metford said, in a low
voice to me.
As we were hurrying from the room, Brande and his sister, who had joined
him, met us. The fire had died out of his eyes. His voice had returned
to its ordinary key. His demeanour was imperturbable, sphinx-like. I
murmured some words about the eloquence of the lecture, but interrupted
myself when I observed his complete indifference to my remarks, and
said,
"Neither praise nor blame seems to affect you, Brande."
"Certainly not," he answered calmly. "You forget that there is nothing
deserving of either praise or blame."
I knew I could not argue with him, so we passed on. Outside, I offered
to find a cab for Miss Metford, and to my surprise she allowed me to do
so. Her self-assertive manner was visibly modified. She made no pretence
of resenting this slight attention, as was usual with her in similar
cases. Indeed, she asked me to accompany her as far as our ways lay
together. But I felt that my society at the time could hardly prove
enlivening. I excused myself by saying candidly that I wished to be
alone.
My own company soon became unendurable. In despair I turned into a music
hall. The contrast between my mental excitement and the inanities of the
stage was too acute, so this resource speedily failed me. Then I betook
myself to the streets again. Here I remembered a letter Brande had put
into my hand as I left the hall. It was short, and the tone was even
more peremptory than his usual arrogance. It directed me to meet the
members of the Society at Charing Cross station at two o'clock on the
following day. No information was given, save that we were all going on
a long journey; that I must set my affairs in such order that my absence
would not cause any trouble, and the letter ended, "Our experiments are
now complete. Our plans are matured. Do not fail to attend."
"Fail to attend!" I muttered. "If I am not the most abject coward on the
earth I will attend--with every available policeman in London." The
pent-up wrath and impotence of many days found voice at last. "Yes,
Brande," I shouted aloud, "I will attend, and you shall be sorry for
having invited me."
"But I will not be sorry," said Natalie Brande, touching my arm.
"You here!" I exclaimed, in great surprise, for it was fully an hour
since I left the hall, and my movements had been at haphazard since
then.
"Yes, I have followed you for your own sake. Are you really going to
draw back now?"
"I must."
"Then I must go on alone."
"You will not go on alone. You will remain, and your friends shall go on
without you--go to prison without you, I mean."
"Poor boy," she said softly, to herself. "I wonder if I would have
thought as I think now if I had known him sooner? I suppose I should
have been as other women, and their fools' paradise would have been
mine--for a little while."
The absolute hopelessness in her voice pierced my heart. I pleaded
passionately with her to give up her brother and all the maniacs who
followed him. For the time I forgot utterly that the girl, by her own
confession, was already with them in sympathy as well as in deed.
She said to me: "I cannot hold back now. And you? You know you are
powerless to interfere. If you will not come with me, I must go alone.
But you may remain. I have prevailed on Herbert and Grey to permit
that."
"Never," I answered. "Where you go, I go."
"It is not really necessary. In the end it will make no difference. And
remember, you still think me guilty."
"Even so, I am going with you--guilty."
Now this seemed to me a very ordinary speech, for who would have held
back, thinking her innocent? But Natalie stopped suddenly, and, looking
me in the face, said, almost with a sob:
"Arthur, I sometimes wish I had known you sooner. I might have been
different." She was silent for a moment. Then she said piteously to me:
"You will not fail me to-morrow?"
"No, I will not fail you to-morrow," I answered.
She pressed my hand gratefully, and left me without any explanation as
to her movements in the meantime.
I hurried to my hotel to set my affairs in order before joining Brande's
expedition. The time was short for this. Fortunately there was not much
to do. By midnight I had my arrangements nearly complete. At the time,
the greater part of my money was lying at call in a London bank. This I
determined to draw in gold the next day. I also had at my banker's some
scrip, and I knew I could raise money on that. My personal effects and
the mementos of my travels, which lay about my rooms in great confusion,
must remain where they were. As to the few friends who still remained to
me, I did not write to them. I could not well describe a project of
which I knew nothing, save that it was being carried out by dangerous
lunatics, or, at least, by men who were dangerous, whether their madness
was real or assumed. Nor could I think of any reasonable excuse for
leaving England after so long an absence without a personal visit to
them. It was best, then, to disappear without a word. Having finished my
dispositions, I changed my coat for a dressing-gown and sat down by the
window, which I threw open, for the summer night was warm. I sat long,
and did not leave my chair until the morning sun was shining on my face.
When I got to Charing Cross next day, a group of fifty or sixty people
were standing apart from the general crowd and conversing with
animation. Almost the whole strength of the Society was assembled to see
a few of us off, I thought. In fact, they were all going. About a dozen
women were in the party, and they were dressed in the most extravagant
rational costumes. Edith Metford was amongst them. I drew her aside, and
apologised for not having called to wish her farewell; but she stopped
me.
"Oh, it's all right; I am going too. Don't look so frightened."
This was more than I could tolerate. She was far too good a girl to be
allowed to walk blindfold into the pit I had digged for myself with full
knowledge. I said imperatively:
"Miss Metford, you shall not go. I warned you more than once--and warned
you, I firmly believe, at the risk of my life--against these people. You
have disregarded the advice which it may yet cost me dear to have given
you."
"To tell you the truth," she said candidly, "I would not go an inch if
it were not for yourself. I can't trust you with them. You'd get into
mischief. I don't mean with Natalie Brande, but the others; I don't like
them. So I am coming to look after you."
"Then I shall speak to Brande."
"That would be useless. I joined the Society this morning."
This she said seriously, and without anything of the spirit of bravado
which was one of her faults. That ended our dispute. We exchanged a
meaning look as our party took their seats. There was now, at any rate,
one human being in the Society to whom I could speak my mind.
We travelled by special train. Our ultimate destination was a fishing
village on the southern coast, near Brande's residence. Here we found a
steam yacht of about a thousand tons lying in the harbour with steam up.
The vessel was a beautiful model. Her lines promised great speed, but
the comfort of her passengers had been no less considered by her builder
when he gave her so much beam and so high a freeboard. The ship's
furniture was the finest I had ever seen, and I had crossed every great
ocean in the world. The library, especially, was more suggestive of a
room in the British Museum than the batch of books usually carried at
sea. But I have no mind to enter on a detailed description of a
beautiful pleasure ship while my story waits. I only mention the general
condition of the vessel in evidence of the fact which now struck me for
the first time--Brande must have unlimited money. His mode of life in
London and in the country, notwithstanding his pleasant house, was in
the simplest style. From the moment we entered his special train at