The New Paul and Virginia Part 2

But he is as much alive as ever in his posthumous activities. He has made you wretched after him; and that is his future life. Become an exact thinker, and you will see that this is so. Old woman,' added the Professor solemnly, 'old woman, listen to me--_You and your son are in h.e.l.l._'

At this the old woman flew into a terrible rage.

'In h.e.l.l, sir!' she exclaimed; 'me in h.e.l.l!--a poor lone woman like me!

How dare you!' And she sank back in a chair and fainted.

'Alas!' said the Professor, 'thus is misery again introduced into the world. A fourth part of Humanity is now miserable.'

The curate answered promptly that if no restoratives were given her, she would probably die in a few minutes. 'And to let her die,' he said, 'is clearly our solemn duty. It will be for the greatest happiness of the greatest number.'

'No,' said the Professor; 'for our sense of pity would then be wounded, and the happiness of all of us would be marred by that.'

'Excuse me,' said the curate; 'but exact thought shows me that pity for others is but the imagining of their misfortune falling on ourselves.

Now, we can none of us imagine ourselves exactly in the old woman's case; therefore it is quite impossible that we can pity her.'

'But,' said the Professor, 'such an act would violate our ideas of justice.'

'You are wrong again,' said the curate, 'for exact thought shows me that the love of justice is nothing but the fear of suffering injustice. If we were to kill strong men, we might naturally fear that strong men would kill us. But whatever we do to fainting old women, we cannot expect that fainting old women will do anything to us in return.'

'Your reasoning cannot be sound,' said the Professor, 'for it would lead to the most horrible conclusions. I will solve the difficulty better. I will make the old woman happy, and therefore fit to live. Old woman,' he exclaimed, 'let me beg you to consider this. You are yourself by your own unhappiness expiating your son's sins. Do but think of that, and you will become unspeakably happy.'

Meanwhile, however, the old woman had died. When the Professor discovered this he was somewhat shocked; but at length with a sudden change of countenance, 'We neither of us did it,' he exclaimed; 'her death is no act of ours. It is part of the eternal not-ourselves that makes for righteousness--righteousness, which is, as we all know, but another name for happiness. Let us adore the event with reverence.'

'Yes,' said the curate, 'we are well rid of her. She was an immoral old woman, for happiness is the test of morality, and she was very unhappy.'

'On the contrary,' said the Professor, 'she was a moral old woman; for she has made us happy by dying so very opportunely. Let us speak well of the dead. Her death has been a holy and a blessed one. She has conformed to the laws of matter. Thus is unhappiness destined to fade out of the world. Quick! let us tie a bag of shot to all the sorrow and evil of Humanity, which, after all, is only a fourth part of it, and let us sink her in the bay close at hand, that she may catch lobsters for us.'

CHAPTER IX.

At last,' said the Professor, as they began dinner that evening, 'the fulness of time has come. All the evils of Humanity are removed, and progress has come to an end because it can go no further. We have nothing now to do but to be unspeakably and significantly happy.'

The champagne flowed freely. Our friends ate and drank of the best, their spirits rose, and Virginia admitted that this was really 'jolly.'

The sense of the word pleased the Professor, but its sound seemed below the gravity of the occasion; so he begged her to say 'sublime' instead.

'We can make it mean,' he said, 'just the same, but we prefer it for the sake of its a.s.sociations.'

It soon, however, occurred to him that eating and drinking were hardly delights sufficient to justify the highest state of human emotion, and he began to fear he had been feeling sublime prematurely; but in another moment he recollected he was an altruist, and that the secret of their happiness was not that any one of them was happy, but that they each knew the others were.

'Yes, my dear curate,' said the Professor, 'what I am enjoying is the champagne that you drink, and what you are enjoying is the champagne that I drink. This is altruism; this is benevolence; this is the sublime outcome of enlightened modern thought. The pleasures of the table, in themselves, are low and beastly ones; but if we each of us are only glad because the others are enjoying them, they become holy and glorious beyond description.'

'They do,' cried the curate rapturously, 'indeed they do. I will drink another bottle for your sake. It is sublime!' he said, as he tossed off three gla.s.ses. 'It is significant!' he said as he finished three more.

'Tell me, my dear, do I look significant?' he added, as he turned to Virginia, and suddenly tried, to crown the general bliss by kissing her.

Virginia started back, looking fire and fury at him. The Professor was completely astounded by an occurrence so unnatural, and exclaimed in a voice of thunder, 'Morality, sir--remember morality! How dare you upset that which Professor Huxley tells us must be for ever strong enough to hold its own?'

But the last gla.s.s of champagne had put the curate beyond the reach of exact thought. He tumbled under the table, and the Professor carried him off to bed.

CHAPTER X.

The Professor, like most serious thinkers, knew but little of that trifle commonly called 'the world.' He had never kissed any one except his wife; even that he did as seldom as possible; and the curate lying dead drunk was the first glimpse he had of what, _par excellence_, is described as 'life.' But though the scene just recounted was thus a terrible shock to him, in one way it gave him an unlooked-for comfort.

He had felt that even yet things were not quite as sublime as they should be. He now saw the reason. 'Of course,' he said, 'existence cannot be perfect so long as one third of Humanity makes a beast of itself. A little more progress must be still necessary.'

He hastened to explain this next morning to Virginia, and begged her not to be alarmed at the curate's scandalous conduct. 'Immorality,' he said, 'is but a want of success in attaining our own happiness. It is evidently most immoral for the curate to be kissing you; and therefore kissing you would not really conduce to his happiness. I will convince him of this solemn truth in a very few moments. Then the essential dignity of human nature will become at once apparent, and we shall all of us at last begin to be unspeakably happy.'

The curate, however, altogether declined to be convinced. He maintained stoutly that to kiss Virginia would be the greatest pleasure that Humanity could offer him. 'And if it is immoral as well as pleasant,' he added, 'I should like it all the better.'

At this the Professor gave a terrible groan; he dropped almost fainting into a chair; he hid his face in his hands; and murmured half-articulately, 'Then I can't tell what to do!' In another instant, however, he recovered himself; and fixing a dreadful look on the curate, 'That last statement of yours,' he said, 'cannot be true; for if it were, it would upset all my theories. It is a fact that can be proved and verified, that if you kissed Virginia it would make you miserable.'

'Pardon me,' said the curate, rapidly moving towards her, 'your notion is a remnant of superst.i.tion; I will explode it by a practical experiment.'

The Professor caught hold of the curate's coat-tails, and forcibly pulled him back into his seat.

'If you dare attempt it,' he said, 'I will kick you soundly, and, shocking, immoral man! you will feel miserable enough then.'

The curate was a terrible coward, and very weak as well. 'You are a great hulking fellow,' he said, eyeing the Professor; 'and I am of a singularly delicate build. I must, therefore, conform to the laws of matter, and give in.' He said this in a very sulky voice; and, going out of the room, slammed the door after him.

A radiant expression suffused the face of the Professor. 'See,' he said to Virginia, 'the curate's conversion is already half accomplished. In a few hours more he will be rational, he will be moral, he will be solemnly and significantly happy.'

The Professor talked like this to Virginia the whole morning; but in spite of all his arguments, she declined to be comforted. 'It is all very well,' she said, 'whilst you are in the way. But as soon as your back is turned, I know he will be at me again.'

'Will you never,' said Paul, by this time a little irritated, 'will you never listen to exact thought? The curate is now reflecting; and a little reflection must inevitably convince him that he does not really care to kiss you, and that it would give him very little real pleasure to do so.'

'Stuff!' exclaimed Virginia, with a sudden vigour at which the Professor was thunderstruck. 'I can tell you,' she went on, 'that better men than he have borne kicks for my sake; and to kiss me is the only thing that that little man cares about.--What _shall_ I do?' she exclaimed, bursting into tears. 'Here is one of you insulting me by trying to kiss me; and the other insulting me by saying that I am not worth being kissed!'

'Ah, me!' groaned the poor Professor in an agony, 'here is one third of Humanity plunged in sorrow; and another third has not yet freed itself from vice. When, when, I wonder, will the sublimity begin?'

CHAPTER XI.

At dinner, however, things wore a more promising aspect. The curate had been so terrified by the Professor's threats, that he hardly dared to so much as look at Virginia; and to make up for it, he drank and drank champagne, till the strings of his tongue were loosed, and he was laughing and chattering at a rate that was quite extraordinary.

Virginia, seeing herself thus neglected by the curate, began to fear that, as Paul said, he really did not so much care to kiss her after all. She, therefore, put on all her most enticing ways; she talked, flirted, and smiled her best, and made her most effective eyes, that the curate might see what a prize was for ever beyond his reach.

This state of affairs seemed full of glorious promise. Virginia's tears were dried, she had never looked so radiant and exquisite before. The curate had foregone every attempt to kiss Virginia, and yet apparently he was happiness itself; and Paul took him aside, as soon as the meal was over, to congratulate him on the holy state to which exact thought had conducted him. 'You see,' Paul said, 'what a natural growth the loftiest morality is. Virginia doesn't want to be kissed by you. I should be shocked at your doing so shocking a thing as kissing her. If you kissed her, you would make both of us miserable; and, as a necessary consequence, you would be in an agony likewise; in addition to which, I should inevitably kick you.'

'But,' said the curate, 'suppose I kissed Virginia on the sly,--I merely put this as an hypothesis, remember,--and that in a little while she liked it, what then? She and I would both be happy, and you ought to be happy too, because we were.'

'Idiot!' said the Professor. 'Virginia is another man's wife. n.o.body really likes kissing another man's wife; nor do wives ever like kissing any one except their husbands. What they really like is what Professor Huxley calls "the undefined but bright ideal of the highest good,"

which, as he says, exact thought shows us is the true end of existence.

But, pooh! what is the use of all this talking? You know which way your higher nature calls you; and, of course, unless men believe in G.o.d, they cannot help obeying their higher nature.'