suffering from the effects of world changes. And as we come up
to the time of the Last Wars, this newer conception of the
everyday life as a reaction to an accelerated development is
continually more manifest. Barnet's book, which has served us so
well, is frankly a picture of the world coming about like a ship
that sails into the wind. Our later novelists give a vast gallery
of individual conflicts in which old habits and customs, limited
ideas, ungenerous temperaments, and innate obsessions are pitted
against this great opening out of life that has happened to us.
They tell us of the feelings of old people who have been wrenched
away from familiar surroundings, and how they have had to make
peace with uncomfortable comforts and conveniences that are still
strange to them. They give us the discord between the opening
egotisms of youths and the ill-defined limitations of a changing
social life. They tell of the universal struggle of jealousy to
capture and cripple our souls, of romantic failures and tragical
misconceptions of the trend of the world, of the spirit of
adventure, and the urgency of curiosity, and how these serve the
universal drift. And all their stories lead in the end either to
happiness missed or happiness won, to disaster or salvation. The
clearer their vision and the subtler their art, the more
certainly do these novels tell of the possibility of salvation
for all the world. For any road in life leads to religion for
those upon it who will follow it far enough…
It would have seemed a strange thing to the men of the former
time that it should be an open question as it is to-day whether
the world is wholly Christian or not Christian at all. But
assuredly we have the spirit, and as surely have we left many
temporary forms behind. Christianity was the first expression of
world religion, the first complete repudiation of tribalism and
war and disputation. That it fell presently into the ways of more
ancient rituals cannot alter that. The common sense of mankind
has toiled through two thousand years of chastening experience to
find at last how sound a meaning attaches to the familiar phrases
of the Christian faith. The scientific thinker as he widens out
to the moral problems of the collective life, comes inevitably
upon the words of Christ, and as inevitably does the Christian,
as his thoughtgrows clearer, arrive at the world republic. As
for the claims of the sects, as for the use of a name and
successions, we live in a time that has shaken itself free from
such claims and consistencies.
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN
Section 1
The second operation upon Marcus Karenin was performed at the new
station for surgical work at Paran, high in the Himalayas above
the Sutlej Gorge, where it comes down out of Thibet.
It is a place of such wildness and beauty as no other scenery in
the world affords. The granite terrace which runs round the four
sides of the low block of laboratories looks out in every
direction upon mountains. Far below in the hidden depths of a
shadowy blue cleft, the river pours down in its tumultuous
passage to the swarming plains of India. No sound of its roaring
haste comes up to those serenities. Beyond that blue gulf, in
which whole forests of giant deodars seem no more than small
patches of moss, rise vast precipices of many-coloured rock,
fretted above, lined by snowfalls, and jagged into pinnacles.
These are the northward wall of a towering wilderness of ice and
snow which clambers southward higher and wilder and vaster to the
culminating summits of our globe, to Dhaulagiri and Everest.
Here are cliffs of which no other land can show the like, and
deep chasms in which Mt. Blanc might be plunged and hidden. Here
are icefields as big as inland seas on which the tumbled boulders
lie so thickly that strange little flowers can bloom among them
under the untempered sunshine. To the northward, and blocking
out any vision of the uplands of Thibet, rises that citadel of
porcelain, that gothic pile, the Lio Porgyul, walls, towers, and
peaks, a clear twelve thousand feet of veined and splintered rock
above the river. And beyond it and eastward and westward rise
peaks behind peaks, against the dark blue Himalayan sky. Far
away below to the south the clouds of the Indian rains pile up
abruptly and are stayed by an invisible hand.
Hither it was that with a dreamlike swiftness Karenin flew high
over the irrigations of Rajputana and the towers and cupolas of
the ultimate Delhi; and the little group of buildings, albeit the
southward wall dropped nearly five hundred feet, seemed to him as
he soared down to it like a toy lost among these mountain
wildernesses. No road came up to this place; it was reached only
by flight.
His pilot descended to the great courtyard, and Karenin assisted
by his secretary clambered down through the wing fabric and made
his way to the officials who came out to receive him.
In this place, beyond infections and noise and any distractions,
surgery had made for itself a house of research and a healing
fastness. The building itself would have seemed very wonderful to
eyes accustomed to the flimsy architecture of an age when power
was precious. It was made of granite, already a little roughened
on the outside by frost, but polished within and of a tremendous
solidity. And in a honeycomb of subtly lit apartments, were the
spotless research benches, the operating tables, the instruments
of brass, and fine glass and platinum and gold. Men and women
came from all parts of the world for study or experimental
research. They wore a common uniform of white and ate at long
tables together, but the patients lived in an upper part of the
buildings, and were cared for by nurses and skilled
attendants…
The first man to greet Karenin was Ciana, the scientific director
of the institution. Beside him was Rachel Borken, the chief