A Modern Utopia, H. G. Wells [i like reading books .txt] 📗

about it waves a quantity of disorderly blond hair.

He is dressed in leather doublet and knee breeches, and he wears

over these a streaming woollen cloak of faded crimson that give him

a fine dramatic outline as he comes down towards us over the rocks.

His feet, which are large and handsome, but bright pink with the

keen morning air, are bare, except for sandals of leather. (It was

the only time that we saw anyone in Utopia with bare feet.) He

salutes us with a scroll-like waving of his stick, and falls in with

our slower paces.

 

“Climbers, I presume?” he says, “and you scorn these trams of

theirs? I like you. So do I! Why a man should consent to be dealt

with as a bale of goods holding an indistinctive ticket—when God

gave him legs and a face—passes my understanding.”

 

As he speaks, his staff indicates the great mechanical road that

runs across the gorge and high overhead through a gallery in the

rock, follows it along until it turns the corner, picks it up as a

viaduct far below, traces it until it plunges into an arcade through

a jutting crag, and there dismisses it with a spiral whirl. “No!”

he says.

 

He seems sent by Providence, for just now we had been discussing how

we should broach our remarkable situation to these Utopians before

our money is spent.

 

Our eyes meet, and I gather from the botanist that I am to open our

case.

 

I do my best.

 

“You came from the other side of space!” says the man in the crimson

cloak, interrupting me. “Precisely! I like that—it’s exactly my

note! So do I! And you find this world strange! Exactly my case! We

are brothers! We shall be in sympathy. I am amazed, I have been

amazed as long as I can remember, and I shall die, most certainly,

in a state of incredulous amazement, at this remarkable world.

Eh? … You found yourselves suddenly upon a mountain top! Fortunate

men!” He chuckled. “For my part I found myself in the still stranger

position of infant to two parents of the most intractable

dispositions!”

 

“The fact remains,” I protest.

 

“A position, I can assure you, demanding Tact of an altogether

superhuman quality!”

 

We desist for a space from the attempt to explain our remarkable

selves, and for the rest of the time this picturesque and

exceptional Utopian takes the talk entirely under his control….

 

Section 2

 

An agreeable person, though a little distracting, he was, and he

talked, we recall, of many things. He impressed us, we found

afterwards, as a poseur beyond question, a conscious Ishmaelite in

the world of wit, and in some subtly inexplicable way as a most

consummate ass. He talked first of the excellent and commodious

trams that came from over the passes, and ran down the long valley

towards middle Switzerland, and of all the growth of pleasant homes

and chalets amidst the heights that made the opening gorge so

different from its earthly parallel, with a fine disrespect. “But

they are beautiful,” I protested. “They are graciously proportioned,

they are placed in well-chosen positions; they give no offence to

the eye.”

 

“What do we know of the beauty they replace? They are a mere rash.

Why should we men play the part of bacteria upon the face of our

Mother?”

 

“All life is that!”

 

“No! not natural life, not the plants and the gentle creatures that

live their wild shy lives in forest and jungle. That is a part of

her. That is the natural bloom of her complexion. But these houses

and tramways and things, all made from ore and stuff torn from her

veins–-! You can’t better my image of the rash. It’s a morbid

breaking out! I’d give it all for one—what is it?—free and natural

chamois.”

 

“You live at times in a house?” I asked.

 

He ignored my question. For him, untroubled Nature was the best, he

said, and, with a glance at his feet, the most beautiful. He

professed himself a Nazarite, and shook back his Teutonic poet’s

shock of hair. So he came to himself, and for the rest of our walk

he kept to himself as the thread of his discourse, and went over

himself from top to toe, and strung thereon all topics under the sun

by way of illustrating his splendours. But especially his foil was

the relative folly, the unnaturalness and want of logic in his

fellow men. He held strong views about the extreme simplicity of

everything, only that men, in their muddle-headedness, had

confounded it all. “Hence, for example, these trams! They are always

running up and down as though they were looking for the lost

simplicity of nature. ‘We dropped it here!’” He earned a living, we

gathered, “some considerable way above the minimum wage,” which

threw a chance light on the labour problem—by perforating records

for automatic musical machines—no doubt of the Pianotist and

Pianola kind—and he spent all the leisure he could gain in going to

and fro in the earth lecturing on “The Need of a Return to Nature,”

and on “Simple Foods and Simple Ways.” He did it for the love of it.

It was very clear to us he had an inordinate impulse to lecture, and

esteemed us fair game. He had been lecturing on these topics in

Italy, and he was now going back through the mountains to lecture in

Saxony, lecturing on the way, to perforate a lot more records,

lecturing the while, and so start out lecturing again. He was

undisguisedly glad to have us to lecture to by the way.

 

He called our attention to his costume at an early stage. It was the

embodiment of his ideal of Nature-clothing, and it had been made

especially for him at very great cost. “Simply because naturalness

has fled the earth, and has to be sought now, and washed out from

your crushed complexities like gold.”

 

“I should have thought,” said I, “that any clothing whatever was

something of a slight upon the natural man.”

 

“Not at all,” said he, “not at all! You forget his natural

vanity!”

 

He was particularly severe on our artificial hoofs, as he called our

boots, and our hats or hair destructors. “Man is the real King of

Beasts and should wear a mane. The lion only wears it by consent and

in captivity.” He tossed his head.

 

Subsequently while we lunched and he waited for the specific natural

dishes he ordered—they taxed the culinary resources of the inn to

the utmost—he broached a comprehensive generalisation. “The animal

kingdom and the vegetable kingdom are easily distinguished, and for

the life of me I see no reason for confusing them. It is, I hold, a

sin against Nature. I keep them distinct in my mind and I keep them

distinct in my person. No animal substance inside, no vegetable

without;—what could be simpler or more logical? Nothing upon me but

leather and allwool garments, within, cereals, fruit, nuts, herbs,

and the like. Classification—order—man’s function. He is here to

observe and accentuate Nature’s simplicity. These people”—he swept

an arm that tried not too personally to include us—“are filled and

covered with confusion.”

 

He ate great quantities of grapes and finished with a cigarette. He

demanded and drank a great horn of unfermented grape juice, and it

seemed to suit him well.

 

We three sat about the board—it was in an agreeable little arbour

on a hill hard by the place where Wassen stands on earth, and it

looked down the valley to the Uri Rothstock, and ever and again we

sought to turn his undeniable gift of exposition to the elucidation

of our own difficulties.

 

But we seemed to get little, his style was so elusive. Afterwards,

indeed, we found much information and many persuasions had soaked

into us, but at the time it seemed to us he told us nothing. He

indicated things by dots and dashes, instead of by good hard

assertive lines. He would not pause to see how little we knew.

Sometimes his wit rose so high that he would lose sight of it

himself, and then he would pause, purse his lips as if he whistled,

and then till the bird came back to the lure, fill his void mouth

with grapes. He talked of the relations of the sexes, and love—a

passion he held in great contempt as being in its essence complex

and disingenuous—and afterwards we found we had learnt much of what

the marriage laws of Utopia allow and forbid.

 

“A simple natural freedom,” he said, waving a grape in an

illustrative manner, and so we gathered the Modern Utopia did not at

any rate go to that. He spoke, too, of the regulation of unions, of

people who were not allowed to have children, of complicated rules

and interventions. “Man,” he said, “had ceased to be a natural

product!”

 

We tried to check him with questions at this most illuminating

point, but he drove on like a torrent, and carried his topic out of

sight. The world, he held, was overmanaged, and that was the root of

all evil. He talked of the overmanagement of the world, and among

other things of the laws that would not let a poor simple idiot, a

“natural,” go at large. And so we had our first glimpse of what

Utopia did with the feeble and insane. “We make all these

distinctions between man and man, we exalt this and favour that, and

degrade and seclude that; we make birth artificial, life artificial,

death artificial.”

 

“You say We,” said I, with the first glimmering of a new idea,

“but you don’t participate?”

 

“Not I! I’m not one of your samurai, your voluntary noblemen who

have taken the world in hand. I might be, of course, but I’m

not.”

 

“Samurai!” I repeated, “voluntary noblemen!” and for the moment

could not frame a question.

 

He whirled on to an attack on science, that stirred the botanist to

controversy. He denounced with great bitterness all specialists

whatever, and particularly doctors and engineers.

 

“Voluntary noblemen!” he said, “voluntary Gods I fancy they think

themselves,” and I was left behind for a space in the perplexed

examination of this parenthesis, while he and the botanist—who is

sedulous to keep his digestion up to date with all the newest

devices—argued about the good of medicine men.

 

“The natural human constitution,” said the blond-haired man, “is

perfectly simple, with one simple condition—you must leave it to

Nature. But if you mix up things so distinctly and essentially

separated as the animal and vegetable kingdoms for example, and ram

that in for it to digest, what can you expect?

 

“Ill health! There isn’t such a thing—in the course of Nature. But

you shelter from Nature in houses, you protect yourselves by clothes

that are useful instead of being ornamental, you wash—with such

abstersive chemicals as soap for example—and above all you consult

doctors.” He approved himself with a chuckle. “Have you ever found

anyone seriously ill without doctors and medicine about? Never! You

say a lot of people would die without shelter and medical

attendance! No doubt—but a natural death. A natural death is better

than an artificial life, surely? That’s—to be frank with you—the

very citadel of my position.”

 

That led him, and rather promptly, before the botanist could rally

to reply, to a great tirade against the laws that forbade “sleeping

out.” He denounced them with great vigour, and alleged that for his

own part he broke that law whenever he could, found some corner of

moss, shaded from an excess of dew, and there sat up to sleep. He

slept, he said, always in