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One brilliantly sunny morning two years later found old Doctor Carstall in his dressing–gown, sitting in a capacious wicker chair in his garden, lost in thought. His devastated breakfast tray was on a rustic table beside him, and various letters, circulars and a couple of morning papers occupied a second wicker chair within arm's length. A waste–paper basket had been put conveniently for his envelopes and wrappers.

On his tray lay a letter and an original paper, a reprint from a scientific publication, by his son. The paper was entitled Certain Relations between Nervous Strain and General Metabolism, and the letter explained: "This is a sort of premature birth brought on by the Crisis. Some of the most interesting threads lie loose. I meant this research to be an epoch–maker, but what will you? All my work is interrupted—for Heaven knows how long. I've been grabbed by the National Nutrition Emergency Committee, damn it. How the devil research is to get along under this sort of thing I can't imagine. The Committee is fundamentally futile. But there's no escaping it."

Two headlines of the crumpled newspapers were visible. One proclaimed a "Further Slump in Industrials," and this had suddenly brought home to the doctor that his tenure of this pleasant red–brick house and this garden in which he had expected to spend his declining years, was now extremely insecure. If he hadn't sold his practice so soon it would have been better for him. And if he hadn't bought United States Steels. No good fretting about that now. Anyhow, Dick had had his start, and not even the N.N.E.C. could rob him of that now.

The second newspaper, at which the doctor had scarcely glanced as yet, was being emphatic about "The Fight for the Purple House."

"Damn the world," said the doctor, and began filling the pipe that for reasons of economy had replaced his former customary cigar. "Nothing is safe any longer. Nothing is steady. I could have bet my life on those Steels."

He smoked slowly, and presently his breakfast tray was carried indoors.

There seemed no end to this slump. No end at all. He found himself going over the steady development of the world peril that had thrown its shadow across the security of his morning sunshine. How had it begun? He recalled the follies of the victors in the Fatuous Twenties, the gathering resentment and bitterness of the losers in the war, and the wave of pacificism that preceded the armament race of the Frightened Thirties. How obdurate France had been, how ambiguous England! How futile the League! He recalled the Great Peace Ballot of 1936 which had passed like the sigh of a sleeper reluctant to awaken.

Then had come, not formal war, all declared and set, but a gradual decline into warlike violence and destruction all over the world; Abyssinia, Spain, China and Japan, Macedonia, Syria, the social disorder in the Cotton States, the Ukraine business, Brazil, the Argentine, Ireland, and now these ever–spreading troubles in India. Everywhere there appeared the same phenomenon of unemployed and discontented masses of young people milling about in revolutionary movements; everywhere demagogues rose to exploit them, everywhere the gangsters fought more openly, everywhere were shrinking markets, mounting taxation and monetary inflation, conscription for military service, conscription for munition–making. The formulae of the gangsters varied from extreme leftism to extreme rightism, but the material facts were everywhere the same. Governments everywhere were afraid to declare war definitely or to restore an effective peace, because so long as the military necessity ruled there was at least an excuse for unqualified repression. It made one's mind fret and ache to open the morning paper.

Civilisation as he knew it, was going to pieces.

He thought of the world before the Great War and it seemed a Golden Age. In those happy days a man lived his own life, and politics were no more than a noise off–stage. Government was as remote and benign as the sky. You went about nearly all Europe then without a visa and you talked with absolute freedom wherever you went. Your personal liberties were rational and immense, you could do anything short of violence to frustrate the government, and when you earned money it meant you had that much money—less a slight diminution of pay for the roads and the policeman. You could invest and assure your future and provide freedom for your children after you. And all over the world a pound was a pound. Of course the poor were poor then, but were they any better off now, except that they felt their poverty more acutely? The subject races were subject and equally unawakened. Life had some dignity then in a decent Englishman's home. Art was subservient and not subversive, its mission was to please and evoke a feeling of complacent approval, and literature, as free as it is to–day, had infinitely better manners. Philanthropy, real charity indeed, prevailed remarkably.

It had been a good secure time for a quite considerable number of gently–living people, and all about him, all his world, had assumed that that really very good life was getting better and better, carrying a higher polish and spreading out steadily to an ever–increasing proportion of the population. Presently the whole world would be gentle. And no one dreamt that this expanding civilisation was being undermined and outgrown, was living on its moral capital and wasting its abundant material resources. That pleasant world of his in which he had been born and which had seemed so permanent and settled, had been indeed hardly more than a passing gleam of sunshine upon the overcast, stormy, incalculable stream of life. It had seemed to be the normal course of life.

How rare indeed are such patches of sunlight in history! Now and again, in China, in Greece, in Egypt, in Japan, in the early Roman Empire maybe, in a few cities in the Middle Ages and rather widely through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there had been phases of well–bred, humane, cultivated living, free talk and liberal behaviour. Gentlemen and their womenfolk had walked the world without weapons and lived in pleasant comfortable houses. Gardens had multiplied and men of his type had sat in them, secure in their dignity. Surely wherever you find a cared–for garden you have a symbol of goodwill and well–being in life.

Probably, thought the doctor, few of my sort of people who have lived this life have realised, what I am beginning to realise, that ours is not the normal life of man. Over vast regions always, and for long ages even in the favoured lands, our sort of life has been impossible. True that in a few half–illuminated regions there has been a sort of penumbra to our civilisation, little gleams of comfort, refinement and loveliness, cringing in courts or carried on precariously behind high walls and locked doors. But the rest had been blackness, the blackness of natural violence, the black struggle of the brute to survive and triumph. A general blackness leaves no books or pictures or traces behind it; only the bright phases are remembered. The old proverb is wrong. Unhappy is the breed that has no history. In all those vast unlit intervals, the life of man, just as much as the life of any other animal, has been red in tooth and claw, suffering greatly and signifying nothing.

Am I growing old? questioned the doctor, or am I beginning to see reality plain?

Never before had it dawned upon him, how flimsy was civilisation, how limited and incidental and flimsy it had always been.

"A few precarious patches of civilised life," whispered the doctor, "a few decades here, a few there, and before and behind and around and beyond that an animal—that craves, that cowers and is beaten. Homo vapulans. And back to that we go.

"Burr!" he said and knocked out his pipe.

He sat polishing the bowl of his pipe in the palm of his hand. His eye fell on Dick's letter and paper.

He recalled that talk they had had at the beginning of the Long Vacation. Two—three?—no, two years ago. Before that bad bout of neuritis had set his mind towards thoughts of senescence. Fine chap Dick was, but a little strange. So like and so intensely different from himself. They had had a long talk…

The doctor had hoped the boy wouldn't be disturbed in that psycho–visceral work of his, but the rising tide had got him. The tide of disaster was coming in faster than they had thought…

They had discussed this breakdown towards war and disorder. Dick had been very strong on—what was it?—the idea of "scavenging ". All this present disorder in the world, he had said, was the breakdown and clearing away of outworn creeds, dynasties, classes, nationalism, bad industrial organisation, bad monetary and financial methods. Possibly—Oh! Probably—it was so. But what had Dick to put in the place of all this debris when the scavengers had taken it away? There was no doubt we were going to have the ruffians and scavengers, no doubt at all now, all over the world they were busy, hyaenas on the battlefield, wolves following the retreat, but who were these other fellows, where were these other fellows Dick had talked about, who were going to take hold of things and set up the great modern scientific world–state of our dreams and hopes? That was where Dick had become mystical.

What was it he had said? Something about a lot of tacit fellows, with a common clear–headedness. Secret natural aristocrats—something like that. Yes, he had the words now, a World Civil Service, based—that was it—a World Civil Service based on a World Public Opinion.

"But my dear Dick," said the doctor, addressing his absent son aloud, "how the devil do you propose to get a World Civil Service based on a World Public Opinion when all the good school–masters and mistresses have been beaten to death, when all the universities have been turned inside out and filled with bullies and subservient professors scared out of their wits? When all free publishing is over. I ought to have said it that night, only we got on to something else…"

He nodded his head.

The fact of it is, he reflected, Dick makes up that story in self–defence. It's just self–protection from the reality of the case. It's the reckless optimism of youth. He wants to get on with his work—and very pretty work it is, too—and not be invaded and wasted by politics. He is shirking the issue because it is too complex and disagreeable to face. That is how it is; that is how it has always been with these scientific men. Dick has invented these phantom natural aristocrats of his, this imaginary new breed of mankind, who would all know each other and exactly what has to be done when the time comes; he has invented them, just to save himself from the distraction of political things. And so until the ultimate smash–up overtakes him, please don't bother him.

"It's not good enough, Dick,"

Something occurred to the doctor. He decided to smoke another pipe on it. He had a faint memory that he too had been rather bitten at that time by that idea of a better sort of men appearing on earth.

A nice easy way out of our troubles. Here comes the Super Man, the Super Man; the Super Man! He'll see to it. In the nick of time.

Things weren't going to happen like that…

For the stresses of the new world we wanted a new education. Such a lot of people were saying that and still doing nothing about it. If we had only realised that thirty years, twenty years, ago. Then Dick's World Civil Service, which was to be indispensable for successful dictators whether they liked it or not, and his World Public Opinion which would be unavoidable if you are to have the education for an adequate Civil Service, might be something more than dreams. But now?

Wasn't all that too late now? Too late? The world was becoming a warfare in fragments. There might not even be great dictators any more, no wide–reaching Caesars like the early Caesars, but only a succession of little bloody men who would come and go, little Francos and Francolets, getting baser and less civilised step by step. And if that was so, there would be no intellectual revival now, much less a great educational reconstruction, and no effective World Public Opinion anywhere. That World Civil Service was a dream…

"Pessimism of old age?" asked the doctor.

"But isn't it so?"

Enough of this thinking! Who had enough knowledge for prophecy? No one. We had to take the blows as they came. Maybe it wasn't going to be as bad as it looked. Not so bad as all that. Maybe he was missing some hopeful possibility…

"And now for the morning's disasters!" he sighed.

He picked up a newspaper and read: "The Fight for the Purple House. Political Monkey—Lord Horatio or Rud Whitlow."

"Whitlow?" he repeated. "Now where have I heard that name before? Bud Whitlow?"

A small recalcitrant white–faced boy appeared scowling before him. Of course he had gone up to Camford! On some scholarship. There had been talk of speeches he had made…

"That infernal little beast!"