My fist instinct was to refuse. I hated the idea of going into the district and of seeing anybody even remotely connected with the Harrisons. But the idea of meeting Hoskyns was fascinating. I have that kind of vaguely inquiring mind that likes to be told what is going on, even though I could not be troubled to make a single experiment myself, and should not have the vaguest idea what experiment to make. A pap-fed, negative, twentieth-century mind open on all sides and wind-swept by every passing gust. Elizabeth thought that a chat with a bunch of scientific men would do me good. We need not, she said, mention the Harrisons. In the end, I accepted, and I rather think Elizabeth must have conveyed some sort of warning to Perry, for the Harrisons were not mentioned.
Perry’s shabby little sitting-room seemed crowded with men and smoke when I arrived. Professor Hoskyns, long, thin, bald, and much more human-looking than his press photographs, was installed in a broken-springed leather armchair and called Perry ‘Jim’. There was also a swarthy little man in spectacles whom they both called ‘Stingo’, and who turned out to be Professor Matthews, the biologist, the man who has done so much work on heredity. A large, stout, red-faced person with a boisterous manner was introduced as Waters. He was younger than the rest, but they all treated him with deference, and it presently appeared that he was the coming man in chemistry. Desultory conversation made it clear that Matthews, Hoskyns and Perry had been contemporaries at Oxford, and that Waters had been brought by Matthews, with whom he was on terms of the heartiest friendship and disagreement. A thin youth, with an eager manner and an irrepressible forelock, completed the party. He sported a clerical collar and informed me that he was the new curate, and that it was ‘a wonderful opportunity’ to start his ministry under a man like Mr Perry.
The dinner was satisfying. A vast beef-steak pudding, an apple-pie of corresponding size, and tankards of beers, quaffed from Perry’s old rowing-cups, put us all into a mellow humour. Perry’s asceticism did not, I am thankful to say, take the form of tough hash and lemonade, in spite of the presence on his walls of a series of melancholy Arundel prints, portraying brown and skinny anchorites, apparently nourished on cabbage-water. It rather tended to the idea of: ‘Beef, noise, the Church, vulgarity and beer,’ and I judged that in their younger days, my fellow-guests had kept the progs busy. However, the somewhat wearisome flood of undergraduate reminiscence was stemmed after a time with suitable apologies, and Matthews said, a little provocatively:
‘So here we all are. I never thought you’d stick to it, Perry. Which has made your job hardest — the War or people like us?’
‘The War,’ said Perry, immediately. ‘It has taken the heart out of people.’
‘Yes. It showed things up a bit,’ said Matthews. ‘Made it hard to believe in anything.’
‘No,’ replied the priest. ‘Made it easy to believe and difficult not to believe — in anything. Just anything. They believe in everything in a languid sort of way — in you, in me, in Waters, in Hoskyns, in mascots, in spiritualism, in education, in the daily papers — why not? It’s easier, and the various things cancel out and so make it unnecessary to take any definite steps in any direction.’
‘Damn the daily papers,’ said Hoskyns. ‘And damn education. All these get-clever-quick articles and sixpenny textbooks. Before one has time to verify an experiment, they’re all at you, shrieking to have it formulated into a theory. And if you do formulate it, they misunderstand it, or misapply it. If anybody says there are vitamins in tomatoes, they rush out with a tomato-theory. If somebody says that gamma-rays are found to have an action on cancer-cells in mice, they proclaim gamma-rays as a cure-all for everything from old age to a cold in the head. And if anybody goes quietly away into a corner to experiment with high-voltage electric currents, they start a lot of ill-informed rubbish about splitting the atom.’
‘Yes,’ said Matthews, ‘I thought I saw some odd remarks attributed to you the other day about that.’
‘Wasting my time,’ said Hoskyns. ‘I told them exactly what they put into my mouth. You’re right, Jim, they’d believe anything. The elixir of life — that’s what they really want to get hold of. It would look well in a headline. If you can’t give ’em a simple formula to cure all human ills and explain creation, they say you don’t know your business.’
‘Ah!’ said Perry, with a twinkle of the eye, ‘but if the Church gives them a set of formulae for the same purpose, they say they don’t want formulae or dogmas, but just a loving wistfulness.’
‘You’re not up-to-date enough,’ said Waters. ‘They like their formulae to be red-hot, up-to-the-minute discoveries.’
‘Why, so they are,’ said Perry. ‘Look at Stingo here. He tells them that if two unfit people marry, their unfitness will be visited on their children unto the third and fourth generation, after which they will probably die out through mere degeneration. We’ve been telling them that for three or four thousand years, and Matthews has only just caught up to us. As a matter of fact, you people are on our side. If you tell them the things, they may perhaps come to believe in them.’
‘And possibly act on them, you think?’ said Matthews. ‘But we have to do all the work for them, just as you have to do the godly living.’
‘That’s not altogether true,’ said Perry.
‘Near enough. But we do get on a bit faster, because we can give reasons for things. Show me a germ, and I’ll tell you how to get rid of plague or cholera. Call it Heaven’s judgement for sin, and all you can do is to sit down under it.’
‘But surely,’ struck in the curate, ‘we are expressly warned in Scripture against calling things judgements for sin. How about those eight on whom the Tower of Siloam fell?’
‘If it was anybody’s sin,’ said Perry, ‘it was probably the carelessness of the people who built the tower.’
‘And that’s usually a sin that finds somebody out,’ added Waters. ‘Unfortunately, the sinner isn’t always the victim.’
‘Why should it be?’ said Matthews. ‘Nature does not work by a scheme or poetical justice.’
‘Nor does God,’ said Perry. ‘We suffer for one another, as, indeed, we must, being all members one of another. Can you separate the child from the father, the man from the brute, or even the man from the vegetable cell, Stingo?’
‘No,’ said Matthews. ‘It is you that have tried to keep up that story about Man in the image of God and lord of nature and so on. But trace the chain back and you will find every linkhold — you yourself, compounded from your father and mother by the mechanical chemistry of the chromosomes. Back to your ancestors, back to prehistoric Neanderthal Man and his cousin, Aurignacian. Neanderthal was a mistake, he wouldn’t work properly and died out, but the line goes on back, dropping the misfits, leaving the stabilised forms on the way — back to Arboreal Man, to the common ancestor Tarsius, to the first Mammal, to the ancestral bird-form, back to the Reptiles, the Trilobites, back to the queer, shapeless jellies of life that divide and subdivide eternally in the waters. The things that found some kind of balance with their environment persisted, the things that didn’t, died out; and here and there some freak found its freakishness of advantage and started a new kind of life with a new equilibrium. At what point, Perry, will you place your image of God?’
‘Well,’ said Perry, ‘I should not attempt to deny that Adam was formed of the dust of the earth. And your ape-and-tiger ancestry at least provides me with a scientific authority for original sin. What a mercy the Church stuck to that dogma, in spite of Rousseau and the noble savage. If she hadn’t, you scientists would have forced it back on her, and how silly we should all have looked then.’