CHAPTER XIV:  MY FATHER MAKES THE ACQUAINTANCE OF MR BALMY, AND WALKS WITH HIM NEXT DAY TO SUNCH’STON

Up to this point, though he had seen enough to shew him the main drift of the great changes that had taken place in Erewhonian opinions, my father had not been able to glean much about the history of the transformation.  He could see that it had all grown out of the supposed miracle of his balloon ascent, and he could understand that the ignorant masses had been so astounded by an event so contrary to all their experience, that their faith in experience was utterly routed and demoralised.  It a man and a woman might rise from the earth and disappear into the sky, what else might not happen?  If they had been wrong in thinking such a thing impossible, in how much else might they not be mistaken also?  The ground was shaken under their very feet.

It was not as though the thing had been done in a corner.  Hundreds of people had seen the ascent; and even if only a small number had been present, the disappearance of the balloon, of my mother, and of my father himself, would have confirmed their story.  My father, then, could understand that a single incontrovertible miracle of the first magnitude should uproot the hedges of caution in the minds of the common people, but he could not understand how such men as Hanky and Panky, who evidently did not believe that there had been any miracle at all, had been led to throw themselves so energetically into a movement so subversive of all their traditions, when, as it seemed to him, if they had held out they might have pricked the balloon bubble easily enough, and maintained everything in statu quo.

How, again, had they converted the King—­if they had converted him?  The Queen had had full knowledge of all the preparations for the ascent.  The King had had everything explained to him.  The workmen and workwomen who had made the balloon and the gas could testify that none but natural means had been made use of—­means which, if again employed any number of times, would effect a like result.  How could it be that when the means of resistance were so ample and so easy, the movement should nevertheless have been irresistible?  For had it not been irresistible, was it to be believed that astute men like Hanky and Panky would have let themselves be drawn into it?

What then had been its inner history?  My father had so fully determined to make his way back on the following evening, that he saw no chance of getting to know the facts—­unless, indeed, he should be able to learn something from Hanky’s sermon; he was therefore not sorry to find an elderly gentleman of grave but kindly aspect seated opposite to him when he sat down to supper.