2
The death of Bodisham marked a definite change of phase in the history of the World Revolution. Up to the date of that event it had seemed to be one whole process, complex in detail but homogeneous in form. Now it began to be plain that the World Revolution, like all its less universal precursors, like every Revolution, was woven of two essentially distinct strands. There was, for one strand, the innate insubordination of the human animal which lies in wait for all decaying, hesitating or needlessly oppressive systems of social control, an insubordination compounded of fear, resentment and vindictiveness, and embodied in its final dramatic phase by Rud and Thirp. And contrasting and interwoven with that was the creative urge for order and achievement in the human mind, an impulse more deliberate and sustained, finding its expression in a progressive organisation of science, a progressive extension of the scientific method to human affairs and the systematic establishment of a new education, a new order and a new regime of law. The two strands co–operated at first in their attack upon their common objective, the old order of things. It was not at first evident that while one aimed to destroy, the other sought to replace. It was not necessary at first that it should become evident. Together these two allied contraries produced the World Revolution, which had not so much been evoked by the Group as found its centre of expression therein.
Long after the formal defeat of the decadent old order was manifest, long after the obsolete boundaries, the antiquated Foreign Offices, the armies and navies, monetary manipulation, and the unconscionable appropriations of private ownership in collective businesses had been swept away, Rud's intense fear of reaction and revenge enabled Bodisham to maintain his argument that the only sane barrier against counter–revolution was the establishment of a satisfactorily working new order in the place of the old. To Rud the new institutions were essentially fortifications against the old. He did not see them as collective organisations imposing fresh codes of behaviour and necessitating an education of their own. So, paradoxically enough, Rud, this power–snatching, essential rebel, this instinctive lawless grabber, this antisocial egotist, sustained the forces of constructive control on earth through their early years of growth, while Bodisham implemented and co–ordinated them and protected them from any serious release of the destructive instinct in Rud. Concurrently and, as it came to seem in the retrospect, naturally and necessarily, there grew up an untrammelled and arbitrary Caesarism in which political power became increasingly concentrated, while beside it and interwoven with it, there arose a world system of production, distribution, transport, education and biological control, the living body of that planetary civilisation which the new material conditions demanded. To many it seemed like the complete confirmation of Hobbes' Leviathan, the ultimate realisation of autocratic efficiency on a scale altogether more gigantic than Hobbes could have foreseen. To others it seemed a necessary phase that had to come to an end through the casting–off of autocracy, as an eagle breaks out of its egg. The idea that absolutism might be the necessary way to the world republic had been floating in men's minds long before the last War to end War and the rise of the Group to power. Young Dick Carstall had foreshadowed it long ago when he talked with his father about his own outlook on life.
The full quality of Bodisham's genius only became apparent after his death. Released from his subtle interventions, the two revolutionary strands began to part company forthwith. Then, as young Carstall had foreseen, it began to dawn upon intelligent observers throughout the world that the spirit of insubordination and irresponsibility which leads through ascending phases of lawlessness and violence to lawless personal rule is, by its very nature, doomed to an ultimate grapple with a growing system of law, order and economic justice and sanity. For years Bodisham had been staving off that conflict. His untimely death left Rud, a little heavier, less active and quick–witted, soaked now in preposterous flattery and very much under the sway of Thirp, as the sole actual controller and intermediary of a still very loosely knitted network of world ministries. That young Heir of the Ages, the New World State, suddenly found itself under the guardianship of quite a different uncle. It was confronted with the problem of the liberator become tyrant.
Norvel, who was probably, after Bodisham, the most powerful and energetic intelligence in the Group, contemplated the new situation with undisguised dismay. He was already in conflict with Quinlan and Thirp upon the question of the extensive use of his educational and publicity services for the propaganda of Rud–worship. Bodisham's interposition had damped down the tension; but now he would have to deal with these self–appointed slaves and masters of Caesar directly, and come sooner or later into open conflict with the Master himself. He hated and dreaded the issue to which he was being drawn, the issue of the balanced and deliberate man face to face with lop–sided energy. He reproached himself for his acquiescence in the development of this cant of the Master Director, beside which the cants of personal devotion to Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and God–save–the–King–whoever–he–is of his boyhood seemed tolerable affectations. The ennobled portraits of Rud now decorated every community centre from pole to pole, the children of a new generation were being trained to a servile salute of the supreme figure, they were being assured of his love and wisdom, there were endless songs, hymns rather, sung in his honour. Usually the schools began work in the morning with something very like an opening prayer to Rud and the Revolution. The children took to it with a disgusting readiness; the mediocre teachers liked it sincerely, mainly because they found it so easy to impart. Everywhere Caesar, the Czar, the Shah, the Mikado, the dear King and Queen, the Leader, our Stalin, the Duce, Providence and God Almighty had been or were being ousted from the facile childish imagination of mankind, as the reassuring symbol that justified submission to the restraints and routines of life, in favour of this half–deified new–corner, this aggressive, querulous individuality with indefinite powers of interference. Who did not now seem to Norvel so harmlessly and satisfying mortal as once he had done. The rapidity of this mental infection under modern conditions astounded even Norvel, who was in as good a position as anyone to have anticipated it. He had known how quickly now new things could be spread about the world, but he had not realised how rapidly old things could be dropped and forgotten.
Rud might live for another quarter century. By that time Norvel's slowly growing educational machine might be shattered again, and a universal, clumsy worship of Caesar, a habit of acquiescence in the dogmatic state, be clamped upon mankind. That imprisonment of the human mind might continue indefinitely, and when at last it found a release, what sort of etiolated and distorted thing might it not have become?
"They'd better go back to God," Norvel said to his wife. "Far better go back to God for a bit—Providence the Unready—whom anyhow one can trust to keep his fingers out of things…
"Though I suppose we should soon get some Thirps in canonicals, inventing a 'Will' for him and starting out to defend him against the doubters…
"Some counter–balance there must be. There can be no right, there can be no truth, there can be no healthy life—without some dissent, without some opposition. A society without criticism is like a hand without a thumb…
"Sooner or later this must come to a fight," he told her…"It may be—uncomfortable for us."
"I'd hate to be comfortable," she said, "if it means your standing anything we didn't think absolutely right. You go on and I'll come with you."
"And if, in my disingenuous way, I falter―?" "You'd better not," she said.
"Ugly things can happen in a prison—things worse than mere clean shooting. A man's behaviour can be lied about. His wife may be lied to."
"Giving in," she said, "is the worst sort of death. I'll stand by you to the end. Maybe I'll stand by you if you do give in, but then I shall feel like mad Queen Johanna who carried her dead husband about with her in a coffin of lead…Trust me, my dear. I'm sure of you. Don't I know you through and through? Whatever they say, whatever you do, I shall believe in you."