By the time his first son was of an age to think and question, Theodore understood more than the growth and workings of a child-mind—much that had hitherto seemed dark and fantastic in the origins of a world that had ended with the Ruin of Man. It was the workings of a child-mind that made oddly clear to him the significance of primitive religious doctrine and beliefs handed down through the ages—the once meaningless doctrine of the Fall of Man and the belief in a vanished Golden Age. These the boy, unprompted, evolved from his own knowledge and the talk of his elders, accepting them spontaneously and naturally.
In Theodore’s childhood the Golden Age had been a myth and pleasant fancy of the ancients, and the Fall of Man as distant as the Book of Genesis and unreal as the tale of Puss-in-Boots; to his children, one and all, the legends of his infancy were close and undoubted realities. The Golden Age was a wondrous condition of yesterday; the Fall—the Ruin—its catastrophic overthrow, an experience their father had survived. The fields and hillsides where they worked, played and wandered were still littered with strange relics of the Golden Age—the vanished, fruitful, incomprehensible world whence their parents had been cast into the outer darkness of everyday hardship as a penalty for the sin of mankind. The sin unforgivable of grasping at the knowledge which had made them like unto gods; a mad ambition which not only they but their children’s children must atone for in the sweat of their brow. … More than once Theodore suspected in the secret recesses of his youngsters’ minds a natural and wondering contempt for the men of the last generation; the fools and blind who had overreached themselves and forfeited the splendour of the Golden Age by their blundering greed and unwisdom. So history was writing itself in their minds; making of a race that had acquiesced in science and drifted to destruction a legendary people whose sin was deliberate—a people whose encroachments had angered a self-important Deity and brought down his wrath upon their heads. It was a history inseparable from religious belief; its opening chapters identical in all essentials with the legendary history of an epoch that had ceased to exist.
Once his eight-year boy, planted sturdily before him, demanded a plain explanation of the folly of his father’s contemporaries.
“Why,” he asked frowning, “did the people want to find out God’s secrets?”
Theodore thought of Ada and the countless millions like her, leaned his chin on his hand and smiled grimly.
“Some of us didn’t,” he answered. “Some of us—many of us—had no interest in the secrets of God. We made use of them when others found them out, but we, ourselves, were quite content to be ignorant. Ignorant in all things.”
“I know,” the child assented, puzzled by his father’s smile. “The good ones didn’t want to—the good ones like you and Mummy. But the others—all the wicked ones—why did they? It was stupid of them.”
“They wanted to find out,” said Theodore, “and there have always been people like that. From the beginning, the very beginning of things—ever since there were men on the earth. The desire to know burned them like a fire. There is an old story of a woman who brought great trouble into the world because she wanted to know. She was given a box and told never to open it; but she disobeyed because she was filled with a great curiosity to know what had been put inside it. Her longing tormented her night and day and she could think of nothing else; till at last she opened the box and horrible creatures flew out.”
The boy, interested, demanded more of Pandora and the horrible creatures. “Is it a true story?” he asked when his father had given such further details as he managed to remember and invent.
“Yes,” Theodore told him, “I believe it is a true story. It was so long ago that we cannot tell exactly how it happened: I may not have told it you quite rightly, but on the whole it is a true story. … And the wicked people—our wicked people who brought ruin on the world—were much like Pandora and her box. It was the same thing over again; they wanted to know so strongly that they forgot everything else; they had only the longing to find out and it seemed as if nothing else mattered.”
“Weren’t they afraid?” the boy asked doubtfully, still puzzled by his father’s odd smile. “Afraid of what would happen to them?”
“No,” Theodore answered. “Until it was too late and they saw what they had done, I don’t think many were afraid. Here and there, before the end, some began to be frightened, but most of them didn’t see where they were going.”
“But they must have known,” his son insisted, frowning. “God told them He would punish them if they tried to learn His secrets.”
“Yes,” Theodore assented—with the orthodox truth, more deceptive than a lie, that meant one thing to him and another to the world barbarian. “Yes, God told them so; but though He said it very plainly not many of them understood. …” They were talking, he knew, across more than the gulf between the mind of a child and a man; between them lay the centuries, the barrier of many generations. To his son, now and always, dead and gone chemists and mathematicians must appear in the likeness of present evildoers—raiders of the territory and robbers of the property of God; to his son, now and always, inventors and spectacled professors
