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

>“I’m certain it was her. Certain. She was far away across those

gardens near here—and before I had recovered from my amazement she

had gone! But it was Mary.”

 

He takes my arm. “You know I did not understand this,” he says. “I

did not really understand that when you said Utopia, you meant I was

to meet her—in happiness.”

 

“I didn’t.”

 

“It works out at that.”

 

“You haven’t met her yet.”

 

“I shall. It makes everything different. To tell you the truth I’ve

rather hated this Utopia of yours at times. You mustn’t mind my

saying it, but there’s something of the Gradgrind–-”

 

Probably I should swear at that.

 

“What?” he says.

 

“Nothing.”

 

“But you spoke?”

 

“I was purring. I’m a Gradgrind—it’s quite right—anything you can

say about Herbert Spencer, vivisectors, materialistic Science or

Atheists, applies without correction to me. Begbie away! But now you

think better of a modern Utopia? Was the lady looking well?”

 

“It was her real self. Yes. Not the broken woman I met—in the real

world.”

 

“And as though she was pining for you.”

 

He looks puzzled.

 

“Look there!” I say.

 

He looks.

 

We are standing high above the ground in the loggia into which our

apartments open, and I point across the soft haze of the public

gardens to a tall white mass of University buildings that rises with

a free and fearless gesture, to lift saluting pinnacles against the

clear evening sky. “Don’t you think that rather more beautiful

than—say—our National Gallery?”

 

He looks at it critically. “There’s a lot of metal in it,” he

objects. “What?”

 

I purred. “But, anyhow, whatever you can’t see in that, you can, I

suppose, see that it is different from anything in your world—it

lacks the kindly humanity of a red-brick Queen Anne villa residence,

with its gables and bulges, and bow windows, and its stained

glass fanlight, and so forth. It lacks the self-complacent

unreasonableness of Board of Works classicism. There’s something in

its proportions—as though someone with brains had taken a lot of

care to get it quite right, someone who not only knew what metal can

do, but what a University ought to be, somebody who had found the

Gothic spirit enchanted, petrified, in a cathedral, and had set it

free.”

 

“But what has this,” he asks, “to do with her?”

 

“Very much,” I say. “This is not the same world. If she is here, she

will be younger in spirit and wiser. She will be in many ways more

refined–-”

 

“No one–-” he begins, with a note of indignation.

 

“No, no! She couldn’t be. I was wrong there. But she will be

different. Grant that at any rate. When you go forward to speak to

her, she may not remember—very many things you may remember.

Things that happened at Frognal—dear romantic walks through the

Sunday summer evenings, practically you two alone, you in your

adolescent silk hat and your nice gentlemanly gloves…. Perhaps

that did not happen here! And she may have other memories—of

things—that down there haven’t happened. You noted her costume. She

wasn’t by any chance one of the samurai?”

 

He answers, with a note of satisfaction, “No! She wore a womanly

dress of greyish green.”

 

“Probably under the Lesser Rule.”

 

“I don’t know what you mean by the Lesser Rule. She wasn’t one of

the samurai.”

 

“And, after all, you know—I keep on reminding you, and you keep on

losing touch with the fact, that this world contains your

double.”

 

He pales, and his countenance is disturbed. Thank Heaven, I’ve

touched him at last!

 

“This world contains your double. But, conceivably, everything may

be different here. The whole romantic story may have run a different

course. It was as it was in our world, by the accidents of custom

and proximity. Adolescence is a defenceless plastic period. You are

a man to form great affections,—noble, great affections. You might

have met anyone almost at that season and formed the same

attachment.”

 

For a time he is perplexed and troubled by this suggestion.

 

“No,” he says, a little doubtfully. “No. It was herself.” … Then,

emphatically, “No!”

 

Section 4

 

For a time we say no more, and I fall musing about my strange

encounter with my Utopian double. I think of the confessions I have

just made to him, the strange admissions both to him and myself. I

have stirred up the stagnations of my own emotional life, the pride

that has slumbered, the hopes and disappointments that have not

troubled me for years. There are things that happened to me in my

adolescence that no discipline of reason will ever bring to a just

proportion for me, the first humiliations I was made to suffer, the

waste of all the fine irrecoverable loyalties and passions of my

youth. The dull base caste of my little personal tragi-comedy—I

have ostensibly forgiven, I have for the most part forgotten—and

yet when I recall them I hate each actor still. Whenever it comes

into my mind—I do my best to prevent it—there it is, and these

detestable people blot out the stars for me.

 

I have told all that story to my double, and he has listened with

understanding eyes. But for a little while those squalid memories

will not sink back into the deeps.

 

We lean, side by side, over our balcony, lost in such egotistical

absorptions, quite heedless of the great palace of noble dreams to

which our first enterprise has brought us.

 

Section 5

 

I can understand the botanist this afternoon; for once we are in the

same key. My own mental temper has gone for the day, and I know what

it means to be untempered. Here is a world and a glorious world, and

it is for me to take hold of it, to have to do with it, here and

now, and behold! I can only think that I am burnt and scarred, and

there rankles that wretched piece of business, the mean

unimaginative triumph of my antagonist–-

 

I wonder how many men have any real freedom of mind, are, in truth,

unhampered by such associations, to whom all that is great and noble

in life does not, at times at least, if not always, seem secondary

to obscure rivalries and considerations, to the petty hates that are

like germs in the blood, to the lust for self-assertion, to dwarfish

pride, to affections they gave in pledge even before they were

men.

 

The botanist beside me dreams, I know, of vindications for that

woman.

 

All this world before us, and its order and liberty, are no more

than a painted scene before which he is to meet Her at last, freed

from “that scoundrel.”

 

He expects “that scoundrel” really to be present and, as it were,

writhing under their feet….

 

I wonder if that man was a scoundrel. He has gone wrong on earth,

no doubt, has failed and degenerated, but what was it sent him

wrong? Was his failure inherent, or did some net of cross purposes

tangle about his feet? Suppose he is not a failure in Utopia!…

 

I wonder that this has never entered the botanist’s head.

 

He, with his vaguer mind, can overlook—spite of my ruthless

reminders—all that would mar his vague anticipations. That, too, if

I suggested it, he would overcome and disregard. He has the most

amazing power of resistance to uncongenial ideas; amazing that is,

to me. He hates the idea of meeting his double, and consequently so

soon as I cease to speak of that, with scarcely an effort of his

will, it fades again from his mind.

 

Down below in the gardens two children pursue one another, and one,

near caught, screams aloud and rouses me from my reverie.

 

I follow their little butterfly antics until they vanish beyond a

thicket of flowering rhododendra, and then my eyes go back to the

great facade of the University buildings.

 

But I am in no mood to criticise architecture.

 

Why should a modern Utopia insist upon slipping out of the hands of

its creator and becoming the background of a personal drama—of such

a silly little drama?

 

The botanist will not see Utopia in any other way. He tests it

entirely by its reaction upon the individual persons and things he

knows; he dislikes it because he suspects it of wanting to lethal

chamber his aunt’s “dear old doggie,” and now he is reconciled to it

because a certain “Mary” looks much younger and better here than she

did on earth. And here am I, near fallen into the same way of

dealing!

 

We agreed to purge this State and all the people in it of

traditions, associations, bias, laws, and artificial entanglements,

and begin anew; but we have no power to liberate ourselves. Our

past, even its accidents, its accidents above all, and ourselves,

are one.