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The World Set Free-Part30_H. G. WELLS (1866-1946)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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spending every year vaster and vaster amounts of power and energy

upon military preparations, and continually expanding the debt of



industry to capital. The system was already staggering when

Holsten began his researches. So far as the world in general went



there was no sense of danger and no desire for inquiry. They had

no belief that science could save them, nor any idea that there



was a need to be saved. They could not, they would not, see the

gulf beneath their feet. It was pure good luck for mankind at



large that any research at all was in progress. And as I say,

sir, if that line of escape hadn't opened, before now there might



have been a crash, revolution, panic, social disintegration,

famine, and--it is conceivable--complete disorder. . . . The



rails might have rusted on the disused railways by now, the

telephone poles have rotted and fallen, the big liners dropped



into sheet-iron in the ports; the burnt, deserted cities become

the ruinous hiding-places of gangs of robbers. We might have been



brigands in a shattered and attenuated world. Ah, you may smile,

but that had happened before in human history. The world is still



studded with the ruins of broken-down civilisations. Barbaric

bands made their fastness upon the Acropolis, and the tomb of



Hadrian became a fortress that warred across the ruins of Rome

against the Colosseum.... Had all that possibility of reaction



ended so certainly in 1940? Is it all so very far away even

now?'



'It seems far enough away now,' said Edith Haydon.

'But forty years ago?'



'No,' said Karenin with his eyes upon the mountains, 'I think you

underrate the availableintelligence in those early decades of



the twentieth century. Officially, I know, politically, that

intelligence didn't tell--but it was there. And I question your



hypothesis. I doubt if that discovery could have been delayed.

There is a kind of inevitable logic now in the progress of



research. For a hundred years and more thought and science have

been going their own way regardless of the common events of life.



You see--they have got loose. If there had been no Holsten there

would have been some similar man. If atomicenergy had not come



in one year it would have come in another. In decadent Rome the

march of science had scarcely begun.... Nineveh, Babylon, Athens,



Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first rough experiments in

association that made a security, a breathing-space, in which



inquiry was born. Man had to experiment before he found out the

way to begin. But already two hundred years ago he had fairly



begun.... The politics and dignities and wars of the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries were only the last phoenix blaze of the



former civilisation flaring up about the beginnings of the new.

Which we serve.... 'Man lives in the dawn for ever,' said



Karenin. 'Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning. It

begins everlastingly. Each step seems vaster than the last, and



does but gather us together for the nest. This Modern State of

ours, which would have been a Utopian marvel a hundred years ago,



is already the commonplace of life. But as I sit here and dream

of the possibilities in the mind of man that now gather to a head



beneath the shelter of its peace, these great mountains here seem

but little things....'



Section 6

About eleven Karenin had his midday meal, and afterwards he slept



among his artificial furs and pillows for two hours. Then he

awoke and some tea was brought to him, and he attended to a small



difficulty in connection with the Moravian schools in the

Labrador country and in Greenland that Gardener knew would



interest him. He remained alone for a little while after that,

and then the two women came to him again. Afterwards Edwards and



Kahn joined the group, and the talk fell upon love and the place

of women in the renascent world. The cloudbanks of India lay



under a quivering haze, and the blaze of the sun fell full upon

the eastward precipices. Ever and again as they talked, some vast



splinter of rock would crack and come away from these, or a wild

rush of snow and ice and stone, pour down in thunder, hang like a



wet thread into the gulfs below, and cease....

Section 7



For a time Karenin said very little, and Kahn, the popular poet,




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