Page:The Education of Henry Adams (1907).djvu/375

 redressed the balance of the ecliptic. As one approached the end,—the spot where, seventy years before, a futile Carlylean Teufelsdröck had stopped to ask futile questions of the silent infinite,—the infinite seemed to have become loquacious, not to say familiar, chattering gossip in one's ear. An installation of electric lighting and telephones led tourists close up to the polar ice-cap, beyond the level of the magnetic pole; and there the newer Teufelsdrock sat dumb with surprise, and glared at the permanent electric lights of Hammerfest.

He had good reason,—better than the Teufelsdröck of 1830 in his liveliest Scotch imagination, ever dreamed, or mortal man had ever told. At best, a week in these dim northern seas, without means of speech, within the arctic circle, at the equinox, lent itself to gravity if not to gloom; but only a week before, breakfasting in the restaurant at Stockholm, his eye had caught, across the neighboring table, a head line in a Swedish newspaper, announcing an attempt on the life of President McKinley, and from Stockholm to Drontjem, and so up the coast to Hammerfest, day after day the news came, telling of the President's condition, and the doings and sayings of Hay and Roosevelt, until at last a little journal was cried on reaching some dim haven, announcing the President's death a few hours before. To Adams the death of McKinley and the advent of Roosevelt were not wholly void of personal emotion, but this was little in comparison with his depth of wonder at hearing hourly reports from his most intimate friends, sent to him far within the realm of night, not to please him, but to correct the faults of the solar system. The electro-dynamo-social universe worked better than the sun.

No such strange chance had ever happened to a historian before, and it upset for the moment his whole philosophy of conservative anarchy. The acceleration was marvellous, and wholly in the lines of unity. To recover his grasp of chaos, he must look back across the gulf to Russia, and the gap seemed to have suddenly become an abyss. Russia was infinitely distant. Yet the nightmare of the glacial ice-cap still pressed down on him from the hills, in full vision, and no one could look out on the dusky and oily sea that lapped these spectral islands without consciousness that only a day's steaming to the northward would bring him to the ice-barrier, ready at any moment to advance, which obliged