A Modern Utopia - H. G. Wells (best color ebook reader txt) 📗

will spread out over the land in finer reticulations, growing

close and dense in the urban regions and thinning as the population

thins. And running beside these lighter railways, and spreading

beyond their range, will be the smooth minor high roads such as this

one we now approach, upon which independent vehicles, motor cars,

cycles, and what not, will go. I doubt if we shall see any horses

upon this fine, smooth, clean road; I doubt if there will be many

horses on the high roads of Utopia, and, indeed, if they will use

draught horses at all upon that planet. Why should they? Where the

world gives turf or sand, or along special tracts, the horse will

perhaps be ridden for exercise and pleasure, but that will be all

the use for him; and as for the other beasts of burthen, on the

remoter mountain tracks the mule will no doubt still be a

picturesque survival, in the desert men will still find a use for

the camel, and the elephant may linger to play a part in the pageant

of the East. But the burthen of the minor traffic, if not the whole

of it, will certainly be mechanical. This is what we shall see even

while the road is still remote, swift and shapely motor-cars going

past, cyclists, and in these agreeable mountain regions there will

also be pedestrians upon their way. Cycle tracks will abound in

Utopia, sometimes following beside the great high roads, but oftener

taking their own more agreeable line amidst woods and crops and

pastures; and there will be a rich variety of footpaths and minor

ways. There will be many footpaths in Utopia. There will be pleasant

ways over the scented needles of the mountain pinewoods,

primrose-strewn tracks amidst the budding thickets of the lower

country, paths running beside rushing streams, paths across the wide

spaces of the corn land, and, above all, paths through the flowery

garden spaces amidst which the houses in the towns will stand. And

everywhere about the world, on road and path, by sea and land, the

happy holiday Utopians will go.

 

The population of Utopia will be a migratory population beyond any

earthly precedent, not simply a travelling population, but

migratory. The old Utopias were all localised, as localised as a

parish councillor; but it is manifest that nowadays even quite

ordinary people live over areas that would have made a kingdom in

those former days, would have filled the Athenian of the Laws with

incredulous astonishment. Except for the habits of the very rich

during the Roman Empire, there was never the slightest precedent for

this modern detachment from place. It is nothing to us that we go

eighty or ninety miles from home to place of business, or take an

hour’s spin of fifty miles to our week-end golf; every summer it has

become a fixed custom to travel wide and far. Only the clumsiness of

communications limit us now, and every facilitation of locomotion

widens not only our potential, but our habitual range. Not only

this, but we change our habitations with a growing frequency and

facility; to Sir Thomas More we should seem a breed of nomads. That

old fixity was of necessity and not of choice, it was a mere phase

in the development of civilisation, a trick of rooting man learnt

for a time from his new-found friends, the corn and the vine and

the hearth; the untamed spirit of the young has turned for ever to

wandering and the sea. The soul of man has never yet in any land

been willingly adscript to the glebe. Even Mr. Belloc, who preaches

the happiness of a peasant proprietary, is so much wiser than his

thoughts that he sails about the seas in a little yacht or goes

afoot from Belgium to Rome. We are winning our freedom again once

more, a freedom renewed and enlarged, and there is now neither

necessity nor advantage in a permanent life servitude to this place

or that. Men may settle down in our Modern Utopia for love and the

family at last, but first and most abundantly they will see the

world.

 

And with this loosening of the fetters of locality from the feet of

men, necessarily there will be all sorts of fresh distributions of

the factors of life. On our own poor haphazard earth, wherever men

work, wherever there are things to be grown, minerals to be won,

power to be used, there, regardless of all the joys and decencies of

life, the households needs must cluster. But in Utopia there will be

wide stretches of cheerless or unhealthy or toilsome or dangerous

land with never a household; there will be regions of mining and

smelting, black with the smoke of furnaces and gashed and desolated

by mines, with a sort of weird inhospitable grandeur of industrial

desolation, and the men will come thither and work for a spell and

return to civilisation again, washing and changing their attire in

the swift gliding train. And by way of compensation there will be

beautiful regions of the earth specially set apart and favoured for

children; in them the presence of children will remit taxation,

while in other less wholesome places the presence of children will

be taxed; the lower passes and fore hills of these very Alps, for

example, will be populous with homes, serving the vast arable levels

of Upper Italy.

 

So we shall see, as we come down by our little lake in the lap of

Lucendro, and even before we reach the road, the first scattered

chalets and households in which these migrant people live, the upper

summer homes. With the coming of summer, as the snows on the high

Alps recede, a tide of households and schools, teachers and doctors,

and all such attendant services will flow up the mountain masses,

and ebb again when the September snows return. It is essential to

the modern ideal of life that the period of education and growth

should be prolonged to as late a period as possible and puberty

correspondingly retarded, and by wise regulation the statesmen of

Utopia will constantly adjust and readjust regulations and taxation

to diminish the proportion of children reared in hot and stimulating

conditions. These high mountains will, in the bright sweet summer,

be populous with youth. Even up towards this high place where the

snow is scarce gone until July, these households will extend, and

below, the whole long valley of Urseren will be a scattered summer

town.

 

One figures one of the more urban highways, one of those along which

the light railways of the second order run, such as that in the

valley of Urseren, into which we should presently come. I figure it

as one would see it at night, a band a hundred yards perhaps in

width, the footpath on either side shaded with high trees and lit

softly with orange glowlights; while down the centre the tramway of

the road will go, with sometimes a nocturnal tram-car gliding, lit

and gay but almost noiselessly, past. Lantern-lit cyclists will flit

along the track like fireflies, and ever and again some humming

motor-car will hurry by, to or from the Rhoneland or the Rhineland

or Switzerland or Italy. Away on either side the lights of the

little country homes up the mountain slopes will glow.

 

I figure it at night, because so it is we should see it first.

 

We should come out from our mountain valley into the minor road that

runs down the lonely rock wilderness of the San Gotthard Pass, we

should descend that nine miles of winding route, and so arrive

towards twilight among the clustering homes and upland unenclosed

gardens of Realp and Hospenthal and Andermatt. Between Realp and

Andermatt, and down the Schoellenen gorge, the greater road would

run. By the time we reached it, we should be in the way of

understanding our adventure a little better. We should know already,

when we saw those two familiar clusters of chalets and hotels

replaced by a great dispersed multitude of houses—we should see

their window lights, but little else—that we were the victims of

some strange transition in space or time, and we should come down by

dimly-seen buildings into the part that would answer to Hospenthal,

wondering and perhaps a little afraid. We should come out into this

great main roadway—this roadway like an urban avenue—and look up

it and down, hesitating whether to go along the valley Furka-ward,

or down by Andermatt through the gorge that leads to Goschenen….

 

People would pass us in the twilight, and then more people; we

should see they walked well and wore a graceful, unfamiliar dress,

but more we should not distinguish.

 

“Good-night!” they would say to us in clear, fine voices. Their dim

faces would turn with a passing scrutiny towards us.

 

We should answer out of our perplexity: “Good-night!”—for by the

conventions established in the beginning of this book, we are given

the freedom of their tongue.

 

Section 4

 

Were this a story, I should tell at length how much we were helped

by the good fortune of picking up a Utopian coin of gold, how at

last we adventured into the Utopian inn and found it all

marvellously easy. You see us the shyest and most watchful of

guests; but of the food they put before us and the furnishings of

the house, and all our entertainment, it will be better to speak

later. We are in a migratory world, we know, one greatly accustomed

to foreigners; our mountain clothes are not strange enough to

attract acute attention, though ill-made and shabby, no doubt, by

Utopian standards; we are dealt with as we might best wish to be

dealt with, that is to say as rather untidy, inconspicuous men. We

look about us and watch for hints and examples, and, indeed, get

through with the thing. And after our queer, yet not unpleasant,

dinner, in which we remark no meat figures, we go out of the house

for a breath of air and for quiet counsel one with another, and

there it is we discover those strange constellations overhead. It

comes to us then, clear and full, that our imagination has realised

itself; we dismiss quite finally a Rip-Van-Winkle fancy we have

entertained, all the unfamiliarities of our descent from the

mountain pass gather together into one fullness of conviction, and

we know, we know, we are in Utopia.

 

We wander under the trees by the main road, watching the dim

passers-by as though they were the phantoms of a dream. We say

little to one another. We turn aside into a little pathway and come

to a bridge over the turbulent Reuss, hurrying down towards the

Devil’s Bridge in the gorge below. Far away over the Furka ridge a

pallid glow preludes the rising of the moon.

 

Two lovers pass us whispering, and we follow them with our eyes.

This Utopia has certainly preserved the fundamental freedom, to

love. And then a sweet-voiced bell from somewhere high up towards

Oberalp chimes two-and-twenty times.

 

I break the silence. “That might mean ten o’clock,” I say.

 

My companion leans upon the bridge and looks down into the dim river

below. I become aware of the keen edge of the moon like a needle of

incandescent silver creeping over the crest, and suddenly the river

is alive with flashes.

 

He speaks, and astonishes me with the hidden course his thoughts

have taken.

 

“We two were boy and girl lovers like that,” he says, and jerks a

head at the receding Utopians. “I loved her first, and I do not

think I have ever thought of loving anyone but her.”

 

It is a curiously human thing, and, upon my honour, not one I had

designed, that when at last I