Tomorrow Is Forever (18 page)

“And we can't. Can we?” Dick exclaimed with unconscious appeal.

“No, we can't,” Kessler answered without hesitation. “Leave me out of it. You're the one she's interested in. There's just one thing you might do, if you can do it.”

“What?” Dick asked eagerly.

“Let her and your father understand that you know what you're doing. Don't let them believe that you're going off grinning, as you express it, just to put an end to a lot of toothy villains because mass hatred happens to be the emotion of the moment. It's not merely that they have a right to think better of you than that. But if you expect them, and the rest of the decent people in the world, to get anything from this war except more destruction and suffering, if you want it to be something more than just another war, you've got to have an idea of what you want it to bring about. Even if you know what you want you may not get it, but if you don't know, this certainly won't be anything but just another war.”

“Well, what do we want to get?” Dick demanded. He laughed uncomfortably. “I guess you think I'm pretty silly to ask that, don't you? I guess you think I ought to know.”

He stopped to listen. His attention was itself a demand. Dick had spent his life in a world where everything was in its right place, so he knew of chaos only by hearsay. The turbulence of his century had reached him by newspaper and radio, and from remarks made by refugees he had met occasionally, but it had been such a long way off that it had never had as much reality as the week's football game. His habitual tolerance of mind had developed, not in response to opposition, but partly in reflection of his parents' attitude and partly because he lived in a corner of the earth where there was enough for everybody and hence no reasonable objection to anybody's having a share. Now that he felt himself confronted with the necessity of plunging into the confusion beyond his safe island, he felt bewildered. Having begun to understand that his arrogance had been that of an amateur who thinks a problem easy because he has never tried to solve it, he felt his confidence turning to humility. This war, involving a country that had assured him it was never going to have another war, was an enigma he wanted explained.

Letting his cane drop between his knees, Kessler rested his elbow on the table and regarded Dick thoughtfully for a moment before he spoke.

“No, Dick, I don't think you're silly not to know. We who are older than you ought to be wiser, but sometimes we feel we don't know any more than you do. I'll try to tell you how it looks to me. That's all I can tell you.”

“Go ahead,” said Dick. He added with an embarrassed grin, “I guess I've been talking a lot. But now I'm listening.”

Kessler turned his cane under his hand and looked at it, then raised his eyes again.

“Dick, the sweep of history doesn't take much account of individuals. That's hard for us to realize, because we are individuals and we can't think except in terms of ourselves. But suppose you could stand aside and look at the current of six thousand years.”

“Holy smoke,” said Dick.

“It is difficult. Just at the moment you aren't seeing anything but today. You're seeing the persecutions in Germany, and the Japs using their prisoners for bayonet practice, and you are revolted, you want to kill them thoroughly and fast.”

“You're damn right I do.”

“But suppose you were watching all of recorded history at once. If you were, you would notice that there was a time when nobody was revolted by such conduct. It was taken for granted in the ordinary course of things.”

“Wait a minute. Is that right?”

“Certainly. You've studied ancient history, only like most schoolboys you memorized the dates and forgot them, and didn't think much about its actually having happened to human beings no different from you. But you know, for instance, that the Babylonian kings flayed their enemies alive. Flay—that means peel the skin off, in strips. They did it for no reason but the pleasure of doing it. Nobody was shocked. In fact, they were proud of it—the reason we know about it is that they left drawings on their monuments boasting of it. And you know it was the accepted practice to sell the people of conquered countries into slavery. Nobody questioned its being right or wrong.”

Dick nodded. “Sure, now that you say that, I do remember.”

“And when the ancients weren't busy with a war, they were no better. You know how the pyramids were built, by millions of slaves who were quite literally worked to death, in order to feed the vanity of some preposterous nincompoop who happened to have been born in a palace. Nobody questioned that either. It never occurred to them that the slaves who built the pyramids were human beings just like the kings and queens whose bodies were going to be in them.”

“I guess it didn't,” Dick acknowledged. “But Mr. Kessler, what's that got to do with us?”

“A great deal, Dick. Have you ever thought about how very recently it did occur to anybody that human beings were human beings, no matter where you found them? It's hard to make a man like you understand what a strange new idea that is. We're all likely to assume that what we take for granted, everybody else takes for granted too. You see, you know a laborer living in a cabin is not necessarily inferior to an aristocrat living in a mansion, because you grew up with the story of Lincoln.” Kessler leaned forward speaking slowly. “It's hard for you to understand that as recently as a hundred years ago men were still writing in the English language that So-and-so came to a bad end because he bought a book and concerned himself ‘with subjects too complex for the mind of a peasant.' Or that such a statement provoked no comment, because it was generally accepted as true.”

“That peasants didn't have minds?” Dick asked with a puzzled frown.

“They generally took it for granted,” Kessler answered, “that the minds of peasants were fundamentally different from those of aristocrats—that the difference between ignorant laborers and cultured ladies and gentlemen was not the result of education, but an inherent difference in the way they were made. One of the favorite subjects of old stories is the duke's child who was lost in infancy and adopted by a shepherd, but who grew up finer than his supposed brothers and sisters because he had noble blood in his veins.”

Dick began to chuckle. “Gee, Mr. Kessler, I don't know why you limit that tripe to olden times. Some people believe it this very minute.”

“Do you believe it, Dick?”

“Of course not,” Dick said scornfully. “Lincoln isn't the only poor boy who made good in this country. But you know—or maybe you don't know, being a foreigner—that there are still a lot of legends going around about Lincoln's father having been some Virginia planter, because such a great man must have had ‘good blood' in him.”

Without saying whether or not he had ever heard this explanation of Lincoln's excellence, Kessler reminded him, his mouth quivering with amusement, “Even Shakespeare hasn't escaped the suggestion that if the courtier Bacon didn't write the plays, some other courtier must have wandered into Stratford nine months before Shakespeare was born. We have a great talent for finding reasons to believe what we want to believe, Dick. The rich and powerful want to believe in their right to be rich and powerful, so they justify it by saying they are inherently superior to the poor and lowly. So when somebody born poor and lowly proves himself to be as good as they are, they explain it by some accidental infusion of blood or influence from their own ranks. Then everybody's happy except the rest of the poor and lowly, who can't talk back anyway. What do you think about it, Dick?”

Dick considered. “Well, some people are stupider than others, that's a fact. Aren't they?” he exclaimed, and waited for confirmation.

“Certainly. But go on. I want to know what you think.”

“But they aren't stupid because they're poor, I'm sure of that. Take our class at school. We've got some first-class dopes from some mighty good families, and a couple of the brightest fellows—” he hesitated an instant—“are Negroes. Mr. Kessler, what do you think about Negroes?”

“What do you think?” asked Kessler.

“I think they're all right!” Dick retorted, almost defiantly. “Aren't they?”

“‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?'” Kessler quoted smiling.

“That's what I think!” Dick said in relief. “But you'd better not say that around some people.”

“Why not, Dick? If you don't say it, and act on it, what are you fighting for?”

“Wait a minute,” exclaimed Dick. “I don't get it. Maybe I'm slow. Let's go back. We were talking about Babylon, and people being skinned alive and sold into slavery and nobody minding, and the pyramids and everybody's thinking it was all right for a thousand slaves to be worked to death to please one king, and people just lately thinking aristocrats and peasants were born different like human beings and apes. And then about white people thinking they're superior to Negroes. And now we're back to the war. We've gone pretty deep, haven't we? Do you mean we're no better than the Babylonians?”

“No, Dick, I mean we're a great deal better than the Babylonians. The very fact that you and I are sitting here talking like this proves we have come a long way.” He smiled at his listener. “For example—you're a very fortunate young man, you know.”

“Am I?” Dick asked with artless astonishment.

“Why yes. You've had all the advantages your civilization can give you. Which means that in the United States you occupy a position like that of a prince in Babylon.”

“Holy cats,” said Dick.

“And no prince in Babylon ever sat down as a matter of course to say that the people born in the cabins of Babylon were quite as good as he was, and as entitled as himself to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Certainly if any of the princes did, he left us no record of it. All they ever thought worth writing about was how they made slaves of anybody they could lay hands on, and made them build monuments and temples to prove the superiority of their overlords. No, Dick, we've gone a long way. But we've taken every step of it through blood and torture and hell, and we're in this war because we haven't gone as far as we'll have to go before we get peace.”

“Go on. I'm listening. I don't think I ever listened so hard in my life.”

“If you look at the sweep of history,” Kessler went on, “you'll notice that there are certain currents that appear as almost invisible little ripples, and they grow, and move forward, and finally push away everything in their path. Some of these are minor alterations in social customs, others are tremendous new philosophies that overturn nations and change the lives of millions. Every one of them has the same course. It starts as a ludicrous notion that gets no attention but occasional jokes, it grows until it's called an attack on law and order and revealed religion, and at last, sometimes after a revolution or a war, it becomes the normal way of thinking and everybody says, ‘I told you so, I knew it all the time.'”

“Like what, for instance?” asked Dick, still puzzled.

“Let's take some small examples—they're easier to see. What about the revolution in bathing suits?”

Dick started to laugh. “You do think of the damnedest things,” he commented.

“You're not old enough,” continued Kessler, laughing too, “to remember when men's swimming suits had shirts with sleeves to them, or when women went into the water wearing corsets and petticoats, but you must have seen pictures. Anybody who suggested anything different was a fool. Everybody knew a man would get sick if he exposed his body unprotected to the summer sun. And as for women, everybody knew their muscles were too weak for them to stand up without whalebones to support them.”

“Honestly?” Dick exclaimed. He laughed incredulously, and Kessler laughed too, thinking of Dick's lean sunburnt body and the strong young figures of Cherry and her friends.

“Honestly,” Kessler assured him. “So naturally, only a lunatic would think of any change. At last when a few lunatics did begin to adopt scantier suits, the suits were called indecent, contrary to Scripture, an insult to womanhood and a threat to the home. The scantier the suits got the more the uproar increased.”

Dick found this very funny. “Of all things,” he commented.

Kessler continued, “However, if you've noticed, uproar against a new idea, and laws to prevent anybody's accepting it, nearly always can be regarded as a signal that the new idea is just about to be taken for granted.”

“You mean that? Why?”

“Why, as long as nobody thinks of trying to do some particular thing, why go to a lot of trouble to prohibit their doing it? There's no law to prevent the citizens of Beverly Hills from climbing up to hang their laundry on the telephone wires.”

Dick nodded slowly. “Say, wait a minute. You know, I believe your idea is true. Wait a minute, let me think.” He scowled, his mind fumbling among the scraps of his knowledge. “The anti-evolution laws were like that, weren't they? I mean, they didn't start making laws to prohibit the teaching of evolution until everybody was about to take it for granted.”

Kessler nodded. “They were like that. So were the old church dignitaries, threatening to put Galileo on the rack unless he'd stop saying the earth moved around the sun. It didn't occur to them to insist that the earth was the center of the universe until just before everybody was about to stop believing that it was.”

“I've often wondered,” said Dick, “why the old dopes didn't get some telescopes and go out and see what moved around what before they did anything about it.”

“Why Dick,” said Kessler, laughing again, “you don't notice Hitler asking for scientific tests to show that Nordic blonds are superior to Jews, or the Japanese trying to prove their descent from the sun-goddess, or the white-supremacy school of Americans favoring intelligence tests for themselves in competition with Negroes. Hell hath no fury like a fanatic asked to find a reason for what he's doing. He simply wants to do it, and generally he wants to do it because he observes, often unconsciously, that something new is coming into existence and he doesn't like it, and he's going out with fire and sword to hold it back.”