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

it,” he replies, compactly.

 

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