A Modern Utopia - H. G. Wells (best color ebook reader txt) 📗
- Author: H. G. Wells
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I shrug my shoulders, and he adds, “At least with him.”
I let myself down into a seat beside him.
For a time I sit restfully enjoying his companionable silence, and
thinking fragmentarily of those samurai and their Rules. I entertain
something of the satisfaction of a man who has finished building a
bridge; I feel that I have joined together things that I had never
joined before. My Utopia seems real to me, very real, I can believe
in it, until the metal chair-back gives to my shoulder blades, and
Utopian sparrows twitter and hop before my feet. I have a pleasant
moment of unhesitating self-satisfaction; I feel a shameless
exultation to be there. For a moment I forget the consideration the
botanist demands; the mere pleasure of completeness, of holding and
controlling all the threads possesses me.
“You will persist in believing,” I say, with an aggressive
expository note, “that if you meet this lady she will be a person
with the memories and sentiments of her double on earth. You think
she will understand and pity, and perhaps love you. Nothing of the
sort is the case.” I repeat with confident rudeness, “Nothing of the
sort is the case. Things are different altogether here; you can
hardly tell even now how different are–-”
I discover he is not listening to me.
“What is the matter?” I ask abruptly.
He makes no answer, but his expression startles me.
“What is the matter?” and then I follow his eyes.
A woman and a man are coming through the great archway—and
instantly I guess what has happened. She it is arrests my attention
first—long ago I knew she was a sweetly beautiful woman. She is
fair, with frank blue eyes, that look with a sort of tender
receptivity into her companion’s face. For a moment or so they
remain, greyish figures in the cool shadow, against the sunlit
greenery of the gardens beyond.
“It is Mary,” the botanist whispers with white lips, but he stares
at the form of the man. His face whitens, it becomes so transfigured
with emotion that for a moment it does not look weak. Then I see
that his thin hand is clenched.
I realise how little I understand his emotions.
A sudden fear of what he will do takes hold of me. He sits white and
tense as the two come into the clearer light of the courtyard. The
man, I see, is one of the samurai, a dark, strong-faced man, a man I
have never seen before, and she is wearing the robe that shows her a
follower of the Lesser Rule.
Some glimmering of the botanist’s feelings strikes through to my
slow sympathies. Of course—a strange man! I put out a restraining
hand towards his arm. “I told you,” I say, “that very probably, most
probably, she would have met some other. I tried to prepare
you.”
“Nonsense,” he whispers, without looking at me. “It isn’t that.
It’s—that scoundrel–-”
He has an impulse to rise. “That scoundrel,” he repeats.
“He isn’t a scoundrel,” I say. “How do you know? Keep still! Why are
you standing up?”
He and I stand up quickly, I as soon as he. But now the full meaning
of the group has reached me. I grip his arm. “Be sensible,” I say,
speaking very quickly, and with my back to the approaching couple.
“He’s not a scoundrel here. This world is different from that. It’s
caught his pride somehow and made a man of him. Whatever troubled
them there–-”
He turns a face of white wrath on me, of accusation, and for the
moment of unexpected force. “This is your doing,” he says. “You
have done this to mock me. He—of all men!” For a moment speech
fails him, then; “You—you have done this to mock me.”
I try to explain very quickly. My tone is almost propitiatory.
“I never thought of it until now. But he’s–- How did I know he was
the sort of man a disciplined world has a use for?”
He makes no answer, but he looks at me with eyes that are positively
baleful, and in the instant I read his mute but mulish resolve that
Utopia must end.
“Don’t let that old quarrel poison all this,” I say almost
entreatingly. “It happened all differently here—everything is
different here. Your double will be back to-morrow. Wait for him.
Perhaps then you will understand–-”
He shakes his head, and then bursts out with, “What do I want with a
double? Double! What do I care if things have been different here?
This–-”
He thrusts me weakly back with his long, white hand. “My God!” he
says almost forcibly, “what nonsense all this is! All these dreams!
All Utopias! There she is–-! Oh, but I have dreamt of her! And
now–-”
A sob catches him. I am really frightened by this time. I still try
to keep between him and these Utopians, and to hide his gestures
from them.
“It’s different here,” I persist. “It’s different here. The emotion
you feel has no place in it. It’s a scar from the earth—the sore
scar of your past–-”
“And what are we all but scars? What is life but a scarring? It’s
you—you who don’t understand! Of course we are covered with
scars, we live to be scarred, we are scars! We are the scars of the
past! These dreams, these childish dreams–-!”
He does not need to finish his sentence, he waves an unteachable
destructive arm.
My Utopia rocks about me.
For a moment the vision of that great courtyard hangs real. There
the Utopians live real about me, going to and fro, and the great
archway blazes with sunlight from the green gardens by the
riverside. The man who is one of the samurai, and his lady, whom the
botanist loved on earth, pass out of sight behind the marble
flower-set Triton that spouts coolness in the middle of the place.
For a moment I see two working men in green tunics sitting on a
marble seat in the shadow of the colonnade, and a sweet little
silver-haired old lady, clad all in violet, and carrying a book,
comes towards us, and lifts a curious eye at the botanist’s
gestures. And then–-
“Scars of the past! Scars of the past! These fanciful, useless
dreams!”
Section 2
There is no jerk, no sound, no hint of material shock. We are in
London, and clothed in the fashion of the town. The sullen roar of
London fills our ears….
I see that I am standing beside an iron seat of poor design in that
grey and gawky waste of asphalte—Trafalgar Square, and the
botanist, with perplexity in his face, stares from me to a poor,
shrivelled, dirt-lined old woman—my God! what a neglected thing she
is!—who proffers a box of matches….
He buys almost mechanically, and turns back to me.
“I was saying,” he says, “the past rules us absolutely. These
dreams–-”
His sentence does not complete itself. He looks nervous and
irritated.
“You have a trick at times,” he says instead, “of making your
suggestions so vivid–-”
He takes a plunge. “If you don’t mind,” he says in a sort of
quavering ultimatum, “we won’t discuss that aspect of the
question—the lady, I mean—further.”
He pauses, and there still hangs a faint perplexity between us.
“But–-” I begin.
For a moment we stand there, and my dream of Utopia runs off me like
water from an oiled slab. Of course—we lunched at our club. We came
back from Switzerland by no dream train but by the ordinary Bale
express. We have been talking of that Lucerne woman he harps upon,
and I have made some novel comment on his story. I have touched
certain possibilities.
“You can’t conceivably understand,” he says.
“The fact remains,” he goes on, taking up the thread of his argument
again with an air of having defined our field, “we are the scars of
the past. That’s a thing one can discuss—without personalities.”
“No,” I say rather stupidly, “no.”
“You are always talking as though you could kick the past to pieces;
as though one could get right out from oneself and begin afresh. It
is your weakness—if you don’t mind my being frank—it makes you
seem harsh and dogmatic. Life has gone easily for you; you have
never been badly tried. You have been lucky—you do not understand
the other way about. You are—hard.”
I answer nothing.
He pants for breath. I perceive that in our discussion of his case I
must have gone too far, and that he has rebelled. Clearly I must
have said something wounding about that ineffectual love story of
his.
“You don’t allow for my position,” he says, and it occurs to me to
say, “I’m obliged to look at the thing from my own point of
view….”
One or other of us makes a move. What a lot of filthy, torn paper is
scattered about the world! We walk slowly side by side towards the
dirt-littered basin of the fountain, and stand regarding two grimy
tramps who sit and argue on a further seat. One holds a horrible old
boot in his hand, and gesticulates with it, while his other hand
caresses his rag-wrapped foot. “Wot does Cham’lain si?” his words
drift to us. “W’y, ‘e says, wot’s the good of ‘nvesting your kepital
where these ‘ere Americans may dump it flat any time they
like….”
(Were there not two men in green sitting on a marble seat?)
Section 3
We walk on, our talk suspended, past a ruthlessly clumsy hoarding,
towards where men and women and children are struggling about a
string of omnibuses. A newsvendor at the corner spreads a newspaper
placard upon the wood pavement, pins the corners down with stones,
and we glimpse something about:—
MASSACRE IN ODESSA.
DISCOVERY OF HUMAN REMAINS AT CHERTSEY.
SHOCKING LYNCHING OUTRAGE IN NEW YORK STATE.
GERMAN INTRIGUES GET A SET-BACK.
THE BIRTHDAY HONOURS.—FULL LIST.
Dear old familiar world!
An angry parent in conversation with a sympathetic friend jostles
against us. “I’ll knock his blooming young ‘ed orf if ‘e cheeks me
again. It’s these ‘ere brasted Board Schools–-”
An omnibus passes, bearing on a board beneath an incorrectly drawn
Union Jack an exhortation to the true patriot to “Buy Bumper’s
British-Boiled Jam.” …
I am stunned beyond the possibility of discussion for a space. In
this very place it must have been that the high terrace ran with the
gardens below it, along which I came from my double to our hotel. I
am going back, but now through reality, along the path I passed so
happily in my dream. And the people I saw then are the people I am
looking at now—with a difference.
The botanist walks beside me, white and nervously jerky in his
movements, his ultimatum delivered.
We start to cross the road. An open carriage drives by, and we see a
jaded, red-haired woman, smeared with paint, dressed in furs, and
petulantly discontented. Her face is familiar to me, her face, with
a difference.
Why do I think of her as dressed in green?
Of course!—she it was I saw leading her children by the hand!
Comes a crash to our left, and a running of people to see a
cab-horse down on the slippery, slanting pavement outside St.
Martin’s Church.
We go on up the street.
A heavy-eyed young Jewess, a draggled prostitute—no crimson flower
for her hair, poor girl!—regards
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