'I do not see why life should be judged by its last trailing

thread of vitality… I know it for the splendid thing it is-I

who have been a diseased creature from the beginning. I know it

well enough not to confuse it with its husks. Remember that,

Gardener, if presently my heart fails me and I despair, and if I

go through a little phase of pain and ingratitude and dark

forgetfulness before the end… Don't believe what I may say at

the last… If the fabric is good enough the selvage doesn't

matter. It can't matter. So long as you are alive you are just

the moment, perhaps, but when you are dead then you are all your

life from the first moment to the last…'

Section 4

Presently, in accordance with his wish, people came to talk to

him, and he could forget himself again. Rachel Borken sat for a

long time with him and talked chiefly of women in the world, and

with her was a girl named Edith Haydon who was already very well

known as a cytologist. And several of the younger men who were

working in the place and a patient named Kahn, a poet, and

Edwards, a designer of plays and shows, spent some time with him.

The talk wandered from point to point and came back upon itself,

and became now earnest and now trivial as the chance suggestions

determined. But soon afterwards Gardener wrote down notes of

things he remembered, and it is possible to put together again

the outlook of Karenin upon the world and how he thought and felt

about many of the principal things in life.

'Our age,' he said, 'has been so far an age of scene-shifting. We

have been preparing a stage, clearing away the setting of a drama

that was played out and growing tiresome… If I could but sit

out the first few scenes of the new spectacle…

'How encumbered the world had become! It was ailing as Iam

ailing with a growth of unmeaning things. It was entangled,

feverish, confused. It was in sore need of release, and I suppose

that nothing less than the violence of those bombs could have

released it and made it a healthy world again. I suppose they

were necessary. Just as everything turns to evil in a fevered

body so everything seemed turning to evil in those last years of

the old time. Everywhere there were obsolete organisations

seizing upon all the new fine things that science was giving to

the world, nationalities, all sorts of political bodies, the

churches and sects, proprietorship, seizing upon those treat

powers and limitless possibilities and turning them to evil uses.

And they would not suffer open speech, they would not permit of

education, they would let no one be educated to the needs of the

new time… You who are younger cannot imagine the mixture of

desperate hope and protesting despair in which we who could

believe in the possibilities of science lived in those years

before atomic energy came…

'It was not only that the mass of people would not attend, would

not understand, but that those who did understand lacked the

power of real belief. They said the things, they saw the things,

and the things meant nothing to them…

'I have been reading some old papers lately. It is wonderful how

our fathers bore themselves towards science. They hated it. They

feared it. They permitted a few scientific men to exist and

work-a pitiful handful… "Don't find out anything about us,"

they said to them; "don't inflict vision upon us, spare our

little ways of life from the fearful shaft of understanding. But

do tricks for us, little limited tricks. Give us cheap lighting.

And cure us of certain disagreeable things, cure us of cancer,

cure us of consumption, cure our colds and relieve us after

repletion…" We have changed all that, Gardener. Science is no

longer our servant. We know it for something greater than our

little individual selves. It is the awakeningmind of the race,

and in a little while--In a little while--I wish indeed I

could watch for that little while, now that the curtain has

risen…

'While I lie here they are clearing up what is left of the bombs

in London,' he said. 'Then they are going to repair the ruins

and make it all as like as possible to its former condition

before the bombs fell. Perhaps they will dig out the old house in

St John's Wood to which my father went after his expulsion from

Russia… That London of my memories seems to me like a place in

another world. For you younger people it must seem like a place

that could never have existed.'

'Is there much left standing?' asked Edith Haydon.