第20章

Yet the roots of growth have been left behind, and when you pass the place a few years hence you can no longer tell where the black scars used to be.Here in this tiny creature are the roots of growth of the animal world, and by its inherent development, and evolution, it will surely in time remove every trace of this incomparable crisis in which we are now involved.""Dooced interestin'!" said Lord John, lounging across and looking through the microscope."Funny little chap to hang number one among the family portraits.Got a fine big shirt-stud on him!""The dark object is his nucleus," said Challenger with the air of a nurse teaching letters to a baby.

"Well, we needn't feel lonely," said Lord John laughing.

"There's somebody livin' besides us on the earth.""You seem to take it for granted, Challenger," said Summerlee, "that the object for which this world was created was that it should produce and sustain human life.""Well, sir, and what object do you suggest?" asked Challenger, bristling at the least hint of contradiction.

"Sometimes I think that it is only the monstrous conceit of mankind which makes him think that all this stage was erected for him to strut upon.""We cannot be dogmatic about it, but at least without what you have ventured to call monstrous conceit we can surely say that we are the highest thing in nature.""The highest of which we have cognizance.""That, sir, goes without saying."

"Think of all the millions and possibly billions of years that the earth swung empty through space--or, if not empty, at least without a sign or thought of the human race.Think of it, washed by the rain and scorched by the sun and swept by the wind for those unnumbered ages.Man only came into being yesterday so far as geological times goes.Why, then, should it be taken for granted that all this stupendous preparation was for his benefit?""For whose then--or for what?"

Summerlee shrugged his shoulders.

"How can we tell? For some reason altogether beyond our conception--and man may have been a mere accident, a by-product evolved in the process.It is as if the scum upon the surface of the ocean imagined that the ocean was created in order to produce and sustain it or a mouse in a cathedral thought that the building was its own proper ordained residence."I have jotted down the very words of their argument, but now it degenerates into a mere noisy wrangle with much polysyllabic scientific jargon upon each side.It is no doubt a privilege to hear two such brains discuss the highest questions; but as they are in perpetual disagreement, plain folk like Lord John and Iget little that is positive from the exhibition.They neutralize each other and we are left as they found us.Now the hubbub has ceased, and Summerlee is coiled up in his chair, while Challenger, still fingering the screws of his microscope, is keeping up a continual low, deep, inarticulate growl like the sea after a storm.Lord John comes over to me, and we look out together into the night.

There is a pale new moon--the last moon that human eyes will ever rest upon--and the stars are most brilliant.Even in the clear plateau air of South America I have never seen them brighter.Possibly this etheric change has some effect upon light.The funeral pyre of Brighton is still blazing, and there is a very distant patch of scarlet in the western sky, which may mean trouble at Arundel or Chichester, possibly even at Portsmouth.I sit and muse and make an occasional note.There is a sweet melancholy in the air.Youth and beauty and chivalry and love--is this to be the end of it all? The starlit earth looks a dreamland of gentle peace.Who would imagine it as the terrible Golgotha strewn with the bodies of the human race?

Suddenly, I find myself laughing.

"Halloa, young fellah!" says Lord John, staring at me in surprise."We could do with a joke in these hard times.What was it, then?""I was thinking of all the great unsolved questions," I answer, "the questions that we spent so much labor and thought over.

Think of Anglo-German competition, for example--or the Persian Gulf that my old chief was so keen about.Whoever would have guessed, when we fumed and fretted so, how they were to be eventually solved?"We fall into silence again.I fancy that each of us is thinking of friends that have gone before.Mrs.Challenger is sobbing quietly, and her husband is whispering to her.My mind turns to all the most unlikely people, and I see each of them lying white and rigid as poor Austin does in the yard.There is McArdle, for example, I know exactly where he is, with his face upon his writing desk and his hand on his own telephone, just as I heard him fall.Beaumont, the editor, too--I suppose he is lying upon the blue-and-red Turkey carpet which adorned his sanctum.And the fellows in the reporters' room--Macdona and Murray and Bond.