Читать книгу Babes in the Darkling Woods - H.G. Wells - Страница 16

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"The whole universe aches," said Gemini.

"Oh! It aches right enough," said Stella. "Forget about it now. There is just this time left to us, to talk of everything that matters. And kiss Good-bye."

"After all. This is just one single scribbled letter, and it has shattered us. All our self-satisfaction?

"Has it shattered us? I don't think so, Gemini. We're kids yet. Rather helpless. We've jumped into what suddenly looks like an impossible situation. We are kids, you know. All the same, the things we have thought and said this last week; they hold good, Gemini?"

"Sound enough. But this brutality; this bawling vulgarity...."

"But that is what we have known we were up against all along. We-we stand for life. Haven't we said that over and over again? We stand for the free, abundant, life. We are against compulsion, against uncriticised direction, against war. We've been talking all the time about war and how we had to put an end to it. Our sort of people. We—we were going to carve a new world out of this clumsy landslide of an old world. A whole new world, Gemini! That was to be our ruling idea, our religion."

"All that holds," said Gemini. "That is our religion."

"And people were to live without all the nervous stresses of sexual compulsion. That was a part of it. We said that. A wholesome free life. Well, we mean to do that to the best of our ability. You've forgotten that side of it. For our own sakes, we said. For the sakes of everybody. To make a world without ugly repressions, hates, morbidities.... We've made our protest. Marriage is compulsion, obligation. It turns a happy companionship into a semi-legal obligation? Gemini did not seem so sure of that. She considered his face for a moment.

"How did we put it the other day, Gemini? Organised economic freedom throughout the world, education for everyone as much as they can stand, universally accessible knowledge, freedom of movement about the world, the maximum of private ownership in one's own body and mind.... I'm only quoting you, Gemini. When we said these things we were exalted. We felt fine and large about them. It was like ordering the world about. Now comes the chill, the reminder. We are living in a world where the craving for power and compulsion seems to be the only effective human passion. The only serious people in the world are the brutes and bullies. And the abject. Everyone is barking commands or saluting or doing both. We suddenly realise we are small. Ever so small. But does that matter? Haven't we got to resist all the same? Begin with ourselves. The world is ourselves—multiplied by a thousand million. Why should we cower? Why tell lies?"

"But if telling the truth means separation?"

"After all, we should still be alive, Gemini. We shall still be in the same world."

"That's no great consolation. I like talking to you. In your physical presence everything is different. And I can't write long letters. I can't. I write all day as it is. I want you."

"I'll read all you print, trust me. I'll keep you posted where I am. Nothing they can do to us can keep us from communicating. Love letters? I wonder how it feels to write a love letter. I've never sent you anything but notes.... By 1941 there will be nothing to keep us apart if we still want to live together. Married or not...."

"What if we have a chance of meeting before the time is up?"

"Need you ask, Gemini?"

"That's not so bad. We might manage...."

"We'll see about that. I may be rusticated in Somerset. I don't know. There's Uncle Robert.... But the chances are I shall live the life of a penitent with my mother at Barnes. All sorts of things may happen. They've not beaten us yet. You I will go on living in London...."

"I wonder," said Gemini.

"Eh?"

"I wonder if this business will get round to my father. After all, he's something of the Roman father. Well, don't let's complicate the problem with him now."

It was only too manifest in his candid face that he was complicating the problem with fresh and none too agreeable considerations. She remembered that Gemini still lived mainly on an allowance from his father. His literary earnings and so forth were casual and made up no great income. Yes, and she remembered that there had been threats already to force Gemini into a profession.

"Shall we turn now?" said Stella. "The next bend and we'll be seeing the village green?"

"I don't want to run against Balch. We don't want Balch to know about all this. We don't want any of these last hours Balchified. But I doubt if we'll see him again. He got a bellyful at lunch and the parson frightened him. He must have felt rather a fool, bolting as he did. He'll be in the pub playing darts at the top of his voice and being ever so witty and playful and appreciative and proletarian about it. Darts! All his sort play darts. And in a year or so they'll all be ashamed of dart-cant. So stale it will be. They'll have some new play toy. Still there's no need to run risks."

"Let's go up through the pinewoods and sit there until twilight and come down to the cottage at the back."

They did that....

Gemini laughed suddenly. "We're so deflated!" he said.

"Deflated?" said Stella, sitting astride a felled tree trunk and considering the word. "Strange things you say at times, Gemini! Deflated! I feel as if I was just beginning to live. I don't know what this week has done for you, Gemini, but it's made me a woman. There's no going back on that. I've discovered myself. I've discovered my body and I am in love with it. I stood before the bathroom mirror yesterday loving every bit of it, loving all its loveliness. And talking to you and being in love with you, has made me a soul. I'm twice the thing I was. Yes, I know, that old dualism is wrong, but how else can I say it? Body and soul I'm lit up, and you've done it very nicely, thank you, Gemini, and here we are! We've decided we're going to carve a new world out of the old; haven't we? You weren't just talking, were you, Gemini, when you, when you impregnated me with that? That Unrevealed World! Think it out and carve it out. That's what we're going to do, if the whole of the rest of the world is against us. It can come down on us, hurt us, weary us, trick us, mock us, frustrate us, defeat us, kill us. Gemini, that's all detail. That's in the chapter of accidents. But it isn't going to make us give up our—our great conception...."

Gemini regarded her with admiration and desire. He was sitting side-saddle, so to speak, on the tree, with his arms folded.

"And you don't think it's possible for two young people to take themselves too seriously?" he said.

"No. Not in their private thoughts. Not when they have to talk as we are talking. Talking like this to anyone else would be preposterous, but to ourselves.... The whole world, you said, is our inheritance so far as we can carve it out. Was that serious or was it not? Did we say that or did we not? What has come over you, Gemini? Either we are the heirs and gods and Kalikovs of this rebellious lump of a world or we've just been Balching about it, and it would become us better to be saying Heil Hitler! or kneeling in a confessional for instruction. Crawling somehow. To hell with all that! We can't take ourselves too seriously. We can't have too much backbone. No."

"Gods, but I love you, Stella."

She stared at him and for the first time in their relationship it seemed to him that she was staring through him at something else. When she spoke again, she spoke tentatively.

"Maybe they'1l break us in, but I mean us to be as serious a proposition to ourselves as Adam and Eve. We are our Adam and Eve. Gemini, this life is all the life we're ever going to have. The world is all before us. Ours. The death of us or the life of us. That may be being a prig. What are the alternatives to being a prig? A self-pitying, shirking slouch, a cocktail boozer, a humourist, a games lout, a charming borrower, a Catholic convert with a taste for ceremony and an inclination to sodomy, a tough guy, an all-round stinker? Look at the vermin who aren't prigs! Look at them, Gemini! Look at Mary Clarkson's midnight crowd! You can put names to all I have been saying. Tick 'em off on your lingers. I've had my eyes open. Mary's other name is Circe. Circe of Bloomsbury. She brings out the worst in them."

"Don't be ungrateful, Stella. She lent us the cottage"

"She lent you the cottage?

"She lent the cottage."

"I don't see that that alters the quality of her friends. They're—what is the word—escapists. Drunkards and whimsies. I'm talking fact. Give me a prig all the time. Absurd? Take myself too seriously? Better be absurd than disgusting. If there were only we two of our sort in the world, I'd still be all for this new-world business. Our world or theirs. But we're not such exceptions as all that. There must be thousands thinking like us—or just not daring to think like us. There may be hundreds of thousands. So much the better. But that doesn't excuse us from behaving as though it all rested on us alone. Saying 'Oh, someone else will do that. Have a drink, old boy! Don't worry!' Oh, Gemini, this damned modesty! this damned sense of humour! this damned common sense! We've just got this one life to live, Gemini, and I mean to live it—up to the hilt-without drugs. I mean to live in the middle of things, not get into a corner and snigger life away. I—. I—!"

She had stopped looking through him and she was looking straight at him, as though she had suddenly recalled his existence.

"I can't do without you, Gemini. Everything I say is an echo of something you have said. You can reason out these things and say them. And then I believe them. But do you believe them?"

"When I have you, Stella. When I've got you."

She repeated, "When you've got me...."

She looked about her. She clenched her fists and held them up on either side of her glowing face. "This being alive," she cried. "It's Hell! It's Heaven! I can't live it enough."

She stood up, one knee on the fallen tree.

"The loveliness of it. This soft afternoon sunshine. This faint smell of resin. Soft moss and turf. It's ours. I swear—. Swear with me, Gemini. I swear to extract this lovely world of might-be out of the hands of the beasts and the bullies and the blockheads...." She lifted up her pretty bare arm. "No other way of living."

He stood up too and echoed her absurdly grave attitude and her absurd words. He swore to extract this lovely world of might-be out of the hands of the beasts and bullies and blockheads. "No other way of living, Stella," he concluded. Never, he thought, had he seen anyone so earnestly alive. She changed. The declaration had been made. She lowered her arm slowly, stood with her hands extended at her sides like a surrender, smiling faintly at him. "Well?" she said. He trembled for a moment and then caught her in his arms. Sunshine, stillness, warmth, the mossy ground between the felled trees and the faint smell of resin. It was all of a piece and yet—was it not also—the thought was like being stung by a gnat and yet it came to him there-fantastically inconsecutive?