Читать книгу Babes in the Darkling Woods - H.G. Wells - Страница 9

Table of Contents

The unquenchable Balch, true to form, did not appear until the meal was ready. They went through the front room with its big open fireplace and its incongruous array of rugs, miscellaneous chairs, stools, ornaments, allusive and entirely irrational objects and artistic impedimenta—there were two inactive grandfather clocks, two brass panoplies for cart-horses, a powder horn, but only one copper warming-pan—towards the kitchen scullery at the back. They went calling, "Hullo Mrs Greedle, what have you got to cat?" and "Mrs Greedle, is there anything to eat?"

"Bubble and squeak, you said you liked, Mrs Twain," said Mrs Greedle. "The cabbage is all chopped. You left some bits of bacon; I can't think 'ow. With a bit of 'am and a hegg or so and a nunion for taste; not ten minutes it won't take, to 'ave it nice and spluttering, and there's them sardines to begin upon for an orderove and that nice fruit cake Miss Clarkson sent you down, and a nice tomato cocktail and the siphons 'ave come."

"Nice siphons," whispered Gemini.

"With coffee to follow," said the temporary Mrs Twain, hitherto known to us as Stella.

"Yes, Ma'am, nice black coffee in them little cups. As usual. Nice and 'ot."

"On with the frying!" cried Gemini. "We'll eat it here. Ten minutes! I'm damned if I don't wash my l1ands."

"Me too," said Stella. "See what a good example does!"

"How's the whiskey?" said Gemini.

"'S in the tantalus in the front room," said Mrs Greedle. "I didn't think to look 'ow much. I do 'ope...."

Gemini had a moment of apprehension, but he found the tantalus, which ages ago had lost its key and ceased to tantalise, still resourceful, even if Balch dropped in. "I ordered two bottles from the grocer," said Gemini, "in case," but Mrs Greedle seemed too preoccupied with the appetising mess in her frying pan to hear. They were busy with the sardines when Balch became audible as a copious throaty voice in the front room.

"Hoy Hoy!" it said. "What a reek of onions, and food at large! You children seem always to be eating."

"Bubble and squeak, Balch. You're just in time. Come and join us."

A large buff face with an enormous loose mouth, large grey eyes with a slight cast, and quantities of iron-grey hair, not only on the scalp but bursting generously from brows and ears, appeared in the doorway. The loose mouth was drawn down at the corners with a misleading effect of hauteur, and there was not so much a chin as a series of chin tentatives which finally gave it up and became a neck. The face radiated a sort of anxious benevolence, as though it was relieved to find things no worse than they were. It was closely followed by a body clad loosely in what was still technically a white linen suit, from_the breast pocket of which bristled a number of fountain pens, several copying-ink pencils, a spectacle-case, and a large red carpenters pencil, proclaiming an alert, various and fecund literary worker. He looked like a ham actor; he looked like an unsuccessful playwright; he looked exactly what he was—a free-lance journalist in his early fifties; the sort of man who is always getting on tremendously and volubly and never by any chance getting anywhere.

"If ever I hit this cottage between meals," he said, "I shall put it in my diary as a notable event."

"Join us," said Gemini, putting out the rest of the sardines for him upon a Woolworth plate. (All the plates in the house, except the wall decorations, were Woolworth plates and all the glasses Woolworth glasses.)

"I ought not," said Balch, and then relenting, "just to save your greedy little faces, I will."

He did.

Mrs Greedle surveyed the consumption of her bubble and squeak with bland benevolence and felt that whatever criticisms might be passed upon her fancy dishes, her soofles, crimes, mooses, kickshaws, glasses, gallant tins, soup-raims, rag-whos, consomers, and debauches—tomato soup that latter is, with a bit of cream on the top—her arlar thises and her arlar thats-nevertheless at good old village cooking, at your bubble and squeak of your nice onion stew or your hot-pot or what not, she knew her business to a T. And in her heart she hoped that in the end the young gentleman would marry the young lady, for a nicer young lady she had never set eyes on in all her born days, speaking clearly like a lady and look you nicely in the eyes, and never getting drunk and not keeping it down like a lady should, and the mess and all of it, like so many young ladies of the best families seemed to make almost a point of doing nowadays....

The nice hot coffee was served on an Indian brass tray on a lacquered Moorish table in the front room, and the voice of the unquenchable Balch, released from degustation, began to play about the world of fact and fancy in a free and fearless fashion.

He was in the habit of calling his host and hostess "The ultimate generation, the last and so far the best." They were, he said, his "Wunderkinds." He combined an undisguised admiration for their youth, boldness, directness, and intelligence with an air of immense helpfulness and patronage and tutorial responsibility. And also there was a note of sadness because this world would surely be too much for them. "You two ought to write while you are fresh and young and new. And still alive. Use your baby language-for I know you have one, mum though you keep about it—and any little Joycery that comes into your heads. Write! Tell me about it, show it to me. Anything you do. I know things. I know people. If you have any ideas. I might save you endless experimenting...."

Now over the coffee Gemini unfolded his idea, and Balch interrupted, commented, and expanded, and Stella sat on the settle with her chin between her fists and her elbows on the old polished cask, resolved to let no nonsense get past her.

"We're the heirs of a bankrupt world," said Gemini. "The religions, the patriotisms, have all killed one another. This war, this war that is going to drink us all up, will be a war about nothing, because the sense has gone out of everything. Worse than the War to End War. Whichever way it goes, things after it will be worse than ever. One thing's as rotten as another, and there's nothing we can join on to. Nothing. See? Nothing. Nothing by way of a going concern. And that's where the great idea comes in...."

"Come to the great idea," said Balch, waving aside the preamble.

"The thing we have to serve isn't a divinity or a church or a country or an empire or a class or a party. None of them is worth while now. None. It's something greater."

Balch opened his mouth to speak.

"Listen, Balch! It's a possibility we have to serve."

He went on, holding up a hand like a traffic policeman to restrain Balch, while he told of their glimpse of Kalikov brooding in his garden. "There's this great block, the world, and there's the human imagination gradually realising what it can do with it.... Now you have your say, Balch."

At first he was not appreciative. "This is Utopianism, my dear chap," he protested, "just Utopianism."

"No. Utopia is nowhere, but the Unrevealed World is here and now. Smothered up. Embedded. It's not a dream. It's the possibility, close at hand, which is something quite different."

"Your possibility isn't everybody's possibility," said Balch.

"Gemini, grapple with that," said Stella.

"I've thought of that. Already I've thought of that. While I was washing my hands. First, let me ask you a question. First, Balch, do you think that Kalikov could make anything he pleases out of that block he has? Anything?"

"Within certain limits."

"You don't think that?"

"But I do."

"Then why does he sit and brood over it? Tell me that. He can make all sorts of messes of it, I admit, chip it to bits, spoil it and waste it, but there's only one supreme thing waiting for him there. That's what he has to get out of it. That's why he broods. Everything else, everything else, will be failure."

"Something in that," said Balch. "Something in that. I give you old Kalikov. Leave him. But who's going to imagine the hidden world in our world? You?"

"M'm?" said Stella.

"I think there is an answer to that too. The artist in front of our world is the human imagination. No! Don't tell me human imaginations can imagine anything. I've had a brain-wave , about that. They can't. Any more than Kalikov can. They may go astray. I guess Kalikov has his wandering fancies which he ' has to dismiss. But-here's my second great idea—the human imagination is like the human blood corpuscle; it's the same everywhere. Fundamentally. We aren't all at sixes and sevens. We seem to be, but fundamentally we are not. See?"

"I don't see," said Balch. "No. What are you driving at?"

"This. All over the world the mass of human beings want peace. Don't they? But their minds are confused. They are misled, miseducated. They don't see the shape of it as a world organisation. They don't give it a form. All over the world they are staring at this great lump of a world—a1l this war, all this hatred—blood-red streaks and stains-and yet with a loveliness—like Kalikov. See? But gradually, quickly or not, they will begin to realise-what is practically the same idea— the idea of a whole world in one active order...."

"H'm." Balch weighed it profoundly. "Differences of race," he said. "Differences of culture. Differences of tradition. Differences of colour."

"Streaks in the alabaster," said Stella softly. Gemini was fairly launched upon his second great idea, and he did not mean to have it set aside.

"The human brain," he declared, "is more alike everywhere, than anything else in the human make-up. I can assure you it is. A little heavier or a little lighter. You can tell the race, the sex, of a finger or a hair, but you couldn't tell anything about a human brain in pickle except that it was a human brain."

"And is that so?" said Balch.

"Common knowledge," said Gemini stoutly. "Human minds, I tell you, are more alike than human bodies. Make them think; put the same problem before them, and the harder they think the nearer they'll come to the same answer. There's a Common Human Imagination, waiting to be awakened...."

Balch shut his extensive mouth hard, put his head on one side, and regarded the timbered ceiling. "Now that's a large proposition," he considered, rallying his mind, and was glad to defer to Stella, who was preparing to point her remarks with an extended finger.

"This idea of yours, Gemini, sounded so good at first," she said. "But is it after all even a good analogy? There's Kalikov there with his block of alabaster—because you know, Gemini, it is alabaster—and it's fixed. It won't do a thing until Kalikov makes up his mind. It squats there in the grass and waits. He can go away for a holiday and forget about it, and when he comes back there it is just the same. But our block of alabaster isn't fixed."

"M'm," said Twain, as if he was beginning something.

"It isn't the least bit fixed," she said, raising her voice by way of a protest against a possible interruption. "Our lump, our world, hangs over us, keeps heeling over us. It is moving, like a mountain moving down to crush a Swiss village. It won't wait for anything. Kalikov can brood over his lump for a year. But our imaginations—"

"The common human imagination," said Gemini, sticking to his second great idea.

"Of which ours are the only samples now in court. Our imaginations have no time for that sort of thing. Our mass of a world may do anything to us now. The one thing we can be sure of is that it won't leave us alone. We carve it; it's much more likely to carve us. It may blow us to bloody rags; it may smash us underfoot, flat as squashed ants. Kalikov can afford to say, 'I will sleep on it. I will do it to-morrow,' but for our block, which is in front of us and behind us and over us and under us-the word is now."

"Yes," she added, as rapidly as possible because Balch was making the sort of noises that preluded an emption. "And about human imaginations being all alike. If only they were. If only they were. But what sort of proof? They don't even begin to get together.... The imaginations of man's heart are only evil continually...."

But now Balch was rising to his occasion. He began to wave his hand about like a hovering wasp while Stella was speaking. He pounced on her first pause for breath. "Very good," he said, "very good, Madam Stella. True and penetrating. But it doesn't alter the proposition in any essential respect. Let me explain. Let me speak. The essential thing is the challenge of the block. There's the lump you have to carve life out of. Whether it keeps still or whether it keeps sliding after you, is secondary. Secondary. Still—. Sculptor chased by a block of alabaster. Ugh? Idea in that. Short story perhaps. But it doesn't abolish the sculpture idea. Twain, I apologise for calling this notion of yours Utopian. I do indeed. I begin to see your drift. It isn't Utopian. Far from it. It's immensely common-sense. I didn't get your drift at first. I didn't expect it from you. I wonder if you even begin to realise the importance of what you have said. The Universality! It's an Enormous Idea. E-normous. You've hit on something.... Now I begin to think of it.... I wonder I never thought of it myself. It's all very well for you to call it down, young lady, and criticise it, but don't let her discourage you, Twain. Your mind is building better than you know."

"I didn't," began Stella....

"I don't think I implied," began Gemini....

But Balch was now under way and he raised his voice, at once powerful and plaintive, so as to take complete possession of the air.

"There is a great world order here and now, hidden in our circumstances and in men's minds. True! And you can prove it by the universal similarity of brains and cells. Good! Excellent! That's your idea. A biological assertion of human brotherhood. Don't you see that that is what you are saying?"

"Saying it," protested Gemini unavailingly....

"Don't you see that this gives the preliminary concept for a new and hopeful—as far as anything can be hopeful nowadays—a new and hopeful attack on life? At the eleventh hour. It's—it's as fundamental.... It's a new, a creative restatement of religion. It calls together everything that is progressive and constructive in life. Think what it says! Never mind what is, it says. That's the essence of it. To hell with what is. Whatever is, is just material, stuff to be used or stuff to be thrown away. You get together sooner or later with all the other imaginations in the world that have got lit up. And the What Is, vanishes." His arm swept the World that Is away. "It melts into the World of Heart's Desire. What is, meanwhile can do its damnedest. It has no claim on you. The only thing that has a claim on you is this non—existent world hidden in the alabaster. Oh! a great idea. The only thing that has a hold upon you is your own free thought and free imagination about that. You are the Free Man looking for his world, the world that has to be, the world that's been put over you. If they clap you into a uniform and put a rifle in your hand, you owe them no obedience. None. If they put an oath into your mouth it doesn't matter. No oath can hold you that you don't make of your own free accord. Whether you let fly at the man in front of you, or your officer, or the ammunition dump or into the air or try potting the War Boss himself, depends upon just what you think will help most to release the Unrevealed World....

"Phew!" Evidently he would have liked a breathing space, but plainly he felt that Gemini or Stella might cut in if he stopped. So he just let loose a howling, tenoring sound—"Warrow. Ugh. Warrow"—until he could begin his next paragraph.

"Such an idea! Oh, such an idea! The Unrevealed World! You can state it in general terms now. It forms itself in people's minds all over the world. Peace from pole to pole. Don't we all want it? But we're held up by How? How's a mouthful. How's the giant in the path. That's not going to hold us up for ever. What are brains for? The service of the human spirit. All over the world people are working their brains like hell to get a practical answer to How? To conceive it and behold it. Kalikovs all. You young people may think you are the only people on earth who've glimpsed this idea, but I tell you there are thousands of you; there will be millions of you. Not seeing it so clearly perhaps, but feeling it, urged by it. Maybe you exaggerate the possibility of a common human imagination, Twain; maybe you do. But that is merely an exaggeration. The common human imagination is there. Ready to be lit. And it can and it shall be lit. It shall be discovered and lit. What you are proposing is a Great Possibility."

"I said that," Gemini half whispered.

"The Great Possibility in the Human Imagination, the Human Heart; Various, I admit, Madam, and yet the Same throughout the World. He sees sameness; you may see variety. What I see is sameness in variety. That was the discovery of all the great propagandist religions of the world. They saw it even if they lost sight of it again. Think what we mean when we say all men are Brothers. Who said that first? What anonymous Seer? But what a Leap into the light! The awakening idea of one kingdom of heaven on earth; that step by step realises itself and becomes the Great Human Reality. Ugh! Wur. I've been watching it grow upon people in these years we've lived through. For I too-I am a Kalikov. You are Kalikovs, yes; but I've been in this thing longer than you. I've watched this dream-of world unity, world justice. Not here; not there; but everywhere. World cooperation in giant undertakings, becoming real almost day by day. Why! in 1900, it was a dream, thinner than a dream, the shadow of a dream. People were too far away from one another. Now there are schemes of federalisms, schemes of alliances by the score,— that book you lent me the other day, Union Now—just one sample. Everyone making schemes and plans for it, more and more practicable, closer and closer to actuality. Up and down the scale. Internationalism! The Oxford Movement. All touched by the spirit of it. Why! there's even a sort of Cosmopolis in the Rotary Clubs. This has been going on for ages. In a sense, that is, it has been going on for ages. Dumbly. Blindly. Getting clearer—more definite. Never so swiftly. That is what Christ meant by his Kingdom. Buddha was after this! Prophets and teachers. Confucius. All of them! Pisgah! Feeling for a way out from the Thing that is.... Seekers all."

He extended a waving hand and twiddled his fingers to express a great multitude of active seekers.

"Like an immense crowd feeling about in the dark, jostling against each other—but with the dawn breaking. Humanity! Dawn. Darkest hour before the Dawn! Hitler? What's Hitler? The ultimate Cain? The last parricide? Can he prevail? Don't tell me. Japan? A final black-out? The end of all things? No! A thousand times, No! Nerve storms. Fits of evil temper. I tell you the dawn's breaking. Then comes this conception of the Unrevealed World. Nobody is a winner and all win. Don't go on with anything in particular. Carve it out of everything in general. Not here. Not there. But everywhere. The Unrevealed World! Shining darkly through governments, through religions. But plainer now than it was. To think it's got hold l of you! And so clearly that you even make it plainer to me. You brilliant kids! When I hear you saying it clear and definite, Twain, I want to get up and shout and march about...."

Never had this unquenchable Balch been quite so unquenchable. It was just his excessiveness that made him want to shout even more than he was doing. He was already definitely shouting. He was already bumping up and down in his seat. He was like a large boy who has pounced on a small boy's new bicycle. He went on riding it round and round even { when he was out of breath. They could not get in a word of their own nice clear thoughts edgeways.

Stella, silenced, regarded him grimly. She had several fine points to make. Every moment she was feeling more clearly that Gemini had jumped too confidently at that "common human imagination" of his. That had to be cleared up. But how could she collect her thoughts, much less say anything, under all this Balchery?

Gemini fretted under the torrent. Hitherto he had thought Balch a joke, a joke with a vulture's scent for distant nourishment, but this was almost too much. "He takes anything,"

thought Gemini; "it doesn't matter how fine and good it is, he swallows it down and he brings it up, and he turns it into this sort of spew. All the same my idea is a great one. All the same I stick to it and will look at it presently, Balchify though you will."

"Waur! Let us think for a moment of the implication of this great movement which is as old as the hills and as new as sunrise! To which you in your turn have come. In your turn. Such a lot of people have felt it and thought it, and yet it's only now we see clearly what it is that we have felt and thought. Citizens of a state that hasn't arrived; advance agents of a government yet to be. All the roads and railways and mines and factories, all the arsenals, barracks, warships, all the aeroplanes and aerodromes, from end to end of the earth, are the property of our unrevealed government, are ours, but mark you, in the hands of usurpers. Our heritage-not handed over to us. Every actual government in the world, either a usurpation or a trust. Its end is to hand over or get out. All the universities and schools, all the churches and religions, are just the genus of our One Great World Teaching. Squabbling with one another, keeping us in the dark and failing to unite and develop. Slash and hammer and we clear the alabaster, dig out the shape in it. Hand over, you there, get on, or get out. Kings, Presidents, officials, Ministers, every sort of leader, hand over—get ready to hand over—or get out. Get on to the revelation of Cosmopolis or get off the earth! Some slogan that, eh? Gods! If only I could touch someone for money I'd start a newspaper, I'd start a movement, I'd start a campaign to—morrow. Right on this idea. This is what the Anarchists have been feeling their way towards. Shelley, Kropotkin.... If you can call Shelley an Anarchist. He used, I admit, to call the actual governments, Anarchs. Yes. Never mind. Mere matter of phraseology. He meant what I do. What we all do. He would have been with us. Your method must be so far anarchism, that it uses all governments and respects none of them."

"There can be no idea of anarchy in a world of reasonable men," said Gemini's submerged voice.

"We begin to realise at last what is implied in that good old phrase, a Citizen of the World. He is the heir to the future, seeking his divided and mismanaged estate, resolved to unify it now for good and all.... I'm talking, I know. Too much perhaps. I can't help talking, because the more I think of this phrase of yours—great phrase it is—the Unrevealed World, I realise that it releases all that has been accumulating in me for years. I feel as though at last I was being born again. After a sacrament of bubble and squeak. We are all being born again here and now. We are not the people we were yesterday. We slot into the new order. Now....

"Think of the new behaviour our great idea demands. Because we new people are the real kings, the rightful owners, and our bearing must be masterly. Masterly," he repeated, as though the timbered ceiling had contradicted him. "Just in so far as we hold to our relentless aim, just so far are we living rightly. Complaisant to all that is decent and creative in the world, but inflexible to whatever is treason to one universal citizenship. Then we must resist; then we must withstand, not seeking martyrdom but lacing it calmly, daring to say 'I disbelieve in your encumbering, separating faiths, I disavow your irrational loyalties....' So!"

He paused with hand extended, breathing deeply, his great face aflame with leadership and defiance.

Then he started like a man stung.

It was a minute mechanical sound that startled him. It was the click of the latch of the garden gate. He turned, extended his neck, and stared through the half-open door. An expression of consternation spread swiftly over his countenance.

"Gee-whizz, here's the plurry parson coming up the path!" he said, clawing at the air, and vanished by way of the kitchen as they turned their heads.

It was almost incredible that so much sound and substance could be so completely and instantaneously annihilated. It was like the bursting of some vast, sonorous bladder.

Stella and Gemini found themselves staring across the littered room at one another in empty silence, a silence which nevertheless seemed to reverberate with inaudible echoes of Balch's phrases.

"I can't tell lies," said Stella, suddenly and simply. "I can't tell any more lies."

"What?" cried Gemini.

"I won't. It's sucking up to the Old World. See?"

"But it's still the old world," said Gemini, aghast. "Go easy, Stella!"

The clergyman called attention to his arrival by a neat rat-tat of his knuckles on the front door.

"Come in," said Gemini, standing up politely.

"No lies, mind you," said Stella, sitting tight and clenching her little fists. That wedding ring pinched her. "Damn you!" she whispered to it, but there was no time to fumble it off.

The clergyman, stooping slightly under the six foot door, came in, quite unaware that the world he lived in had just been warned to get itself born again or go.