Читать книгу The Holy Terror - H.G. Wells - Страница 12

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While Rud Whitlow pursued his studies at Camford, such as they were, the disintegration of the civilisation into which he had been born went on steadily. Human society had in fact been progressing too fast; it had slipped up on mechanisms and dislocated its class disciplines and traditions. It was in a bad way; it was possibly in need of a major operation. History was passing into a new and very perplexing phase. The scale and pace of life had altered and mental habits had failed to keep pace with the alteration. The social cog-wheels were failing to mesh with one another and they ground and jammed more and more violently. At first he did not apprehend this at all clearly, but the perception of it seeped into his mind.

Mankind put to the test was indeed displaying the most extraordinary inadaptability, politically, economically, educationally. The sole ideas for relieving tension that anyone seemed able to entertain, were the suicidal alternatives of blind social insurrection to shift the stresses to other classes on the one hand, or aggressive war to shift the stresses to other nations on the other. No one seemed to think of relieving the stresses. One resounding crack followed another in the mighty edifice of confidence and traditional usage which was the essential framework of civilised society. Abyss after abyss yawned open wider and wider. Insecurity appeared at the most unexpected points. And amidst it, like an ant in an earthquake, our hero ran about and grew up.

It did not take him long to realise the advancing malaise of his world. Hints of disillusionment, impalpable but cumulative, gathered in his consciousness. Doubt accumulated in his mind and would not be dispelled. The ladder of academic competition and of promotion to assurance and dazzling opportunity, that he had started to climb, which by all precedents should have made him more or less a member of a definite governing class and opened the door to legal distinction or political opportunity—or at very least to the higher civil service and security—acquired a quality of unreality, became less and less credible until at times it seemed more like some inaccessible spiral staircase seen in the central incandescence of a burning house than a permanent method of ascent.

It was hard for him to believe that he of all people had misjudged his world, that even now that he had got to Camford, it was going to be a much more difficult world than he had supposed. He thought about it at nights and he betrayed an intense exasperation when people made banal remarks about it to him. Apparently the whole system of things had conspired to anticipate his ambitions and corner and defeat him.

But indeed the whole system of things was not thinking of Rud at all. It was thinking and thinking very incoherently about itself. More and more of the two thousand million or so who constituted humanity were falling into very much the same line of thought and feeling as that along which he was drifting. It was like the way particles change their orientation in a magnetised bar. It was like bits of crumbling ore falling one after another into a flux. This sense of insecurity was spreading about the entire planet, and though people went on doing the things they usually did, they had none of the assurance, the happy-go-lucky "all-right" feeling, that had hitherto sustained normal men. They went on doing their customary things because they could not think of anything else to do. They tried to believe, and many did succeed in believing, that there would presently be a turn for the better. They did nothing to bring about that turn for the better; they just hoped it would occur. All the same, they were worried. Rud was very seriously worried. He had no disposition to believe in the natural benevolence of the universe.

"They ought not to have let things come to this," he said, but he was never very clear even to himself who or why "They" were nor what "This" was. Some person or persons unknown was to blame. He hated these unknowns in general. But he was unable to focus his hatred into hating some responsible person or persons in particular. If only he could find who it was had neglected to do something, or had done something wrong or messed about with things, they would catch it. He'd get even with them somehow.

There had been a time when Camford was the very heart of conservatism. It was a bilateral conservatism in those days—and one half of it was called the Liberal Party. It dominated the country without effort as a matter of course. It changed and remained the same. It radiated out over an unresentful empire in a state of unindicted exploitation—on which a sun of unimpeachable loyalty never set. Odd specimens of the more coloured subject-races came up to Camford and objected to something or other, but in such funny Babu-English that their complaints dissolved in laughter. In these happy days the tradition of the careless, wealthy, young gentlemen ruled the whole university from the richest Fellow Commoner to the poorest scholar. The only use for subversive ideas was the opportunities they afforded for privileged rags. People with revolutionary minds and "advanced" notions were invited to address meetings and conduct debates, and were then kidnapped, ducked, personated and so forth, all in the most perfect good-humour and with the unostentatious approval of the authorities.

But when Rudie went up, those golden days were already ancient history. He had read about them in books, but behold! they were over. The Great War had strained Camford, and Camford, after a phase of hectic optimism while it was reconstructing what was left of the old undergraduates who had gone to the front, remained strained and began even to realise how strained it was. A subtle change in the quality of the multiplying students and the younger dons, due to the belated but extensive expansion of lower middle-class education and the development of what was called the educational ladder, had gone on and continued. A new, uneasy type was swamping the ancient confidence of those venerable colleges, young men who said: "Yes, but—" to everything, over whose apprehensive minds the perception of decaying privileges and of imperial enervation, shrinkage and decline, hung more and more heavily.

For a year and more Rud stuck to his lectures and books. The teaching of Hooplady House had been urgent for examination successes rather than first-class in itself, and he had much to revise and supplement. Then he began to take notice of events outside the classroom.

Camford, since the mediaeval cosmogony had broken down and the Catholic scheme of salvation had fallen into disuse, had never made the slightest attempt to give any coherent picture of the universe to the new generation that came to it for instruction. Its Church of England orthodoxy broke down with Catholic emancipation and an influx of Dissenters and Jews. Since then nothing in Camford except a few dreaming spires had pointed anywhere. Inertia had carried the old place on for the better part of a century. It resisted novel ideas and scientific aggression as long as possible by the method of slight and innuendo, and when it could resist no longer it yielded in the true Anglican style with ambiguous and nearly inaudible acquiescences. This lulled the minds of a certain proportion of the young people and diverted their energies to games, rage, amateur theatricals, amateurish poetry and amateurish literary criticism, and the less easily tranquillised ones resorted to the bookshops in the town and to a diversity of intrusive movements that promised in the most various ways to satisfy that impatience for plain direction towards a concrete objective which is one of the natural cravings of ripening adolescence. At first these uneasy ones had been a small and derided minority, but in the post-war days they multiplied rapidly.

In his school days he had devoured books whole. Now he was realising that standard history had little to tell about what was happening in the world. He began to attend political gatherings and discussion circles; he took to reading and comparing a number of newspapers; his large brow and lowering expression were to be seen at the back of stuffy and draughty rooms, disliking and scrutinising the speakers and watching every reaction of the audience. He was puzzled, but he hung on, and his mind became more and more involved in this extra-academic stuff. He joined the Union and snorted and growled and indulged in ironical and imperfectly audible comments through three discussions. Each time he wanted to speak and didn't dare. Then at a debate upon the resolution: "That a drastic change in our economic life in the direction of collectivism is long overdue," he wrenched himself up from his seat, drew a deep breath and began his maiden speech.

He spoke for the motion. Words came. He found he could think on his legs. He could forget himself in his subject. Once started, his speech rambled indeed, but rambled interestingly. His sentences flowed easily. They were going over, he realised. He was less and less scared and more and more fluent. He was keeping his head and quite aware of what he was doing. He found he could hold a sentence, even quite a long sentence, bring out its conclusion with an emphasised clearness and a punch at the air that made it seem significant even when it was not. He worked himself up into a generous indignation. He ended in a whirl of patriotic anger.

"This is what they have made of our country! This is our inheritance!" The "old men" caught it, the privileged incapables, the greedy, short-sighted business organisers, the military caste, finance, the party "gangs". All the recognised cockshies. Indeed they caught it. Even "people in high places."

"Wake up England!—that was said thirty years and more ago. And see where we are! We of the new crop! Where are we to go? Go into the cadet corps, go into the flying corps! Yes—yes. Though those others died, they thought, to save us! We're in the soup and we've got to do it over again, my masters. We've got to do 1914 over again. It'll be our turn sure enough. The way they're going. We've got to face up to it. But not under the old fools and rogues, Sir, this time—not with the profiteers at our heels. No, Sir! This time we fight with our eyes open, with our eyes wide open."

And so on, growing loud and harsh, but still keeping pretty clear, more and more sure of himself. Betsy Barnacle would hardly have recognised the voice that had squalled upstairs in Mrs. Whitlow's room eighteen years before, but it was the same voice growing up now, as protesting and as unquenchable. The speech was the success of the evening. It was what so many of his hearers had been feeling. But they had not been able to let themselves go as he did. More and more applause broke into his flow. They liked him. They really liked this thick-set figure with the punching gesture and the big head. His words had the rather attractive bitterness of quinine.

He sat down amidst a buzz of applause.

In one crowded half-hour Rud had become a Camford personality. Men discussed him in their rooms that night, and young dons talked about him.

"That was a pretty good speech," said a voice beside him as the gathering broke up. "A bit angry of course."

He looked up and saw Carstall at his elbow. That gave him a thrill. Carstall was already a research Fellow and his work in physiology was being talked about.

"How did you vote?" he asked.

"I voted with you, of course," said Carstall. "I'm all for a revolution—maybe more of a revolution than yours. I don't know. Mine is the cold deliberate sort and yours is the hot indignant stuff, but we're revolutionaries all right. It takes all sorts to make the world budge."

"We're revolutionaries all right," from Carstall, gave a peculiar confirmation to Rud's self-approval.

We!

Other hands got hold of his sleeves and caught at his elbow and drew him away from Carstall. Or he would have liked to have lingered for a moment over that. Men who had ignored him and even avoided him were asking him to come along to their rooms for a talk. Others were obviously intent upon questioning him.

He was not prepared to answer questions, he realised. He had made a strong impression and he must not complicate it. A natural turn for tactics came into play. "I'd love to," he said, "I'd love to but I've two hours of work to-night before I go to bed..."

"No. No. It's work that won't wait..."

He hoped they got the faint flavour of mystery in that work that wouldn't wait.

"I didn't mean to speak at all to-night. My ideas ran away with me..."

He felt he was doing it all magnificently. He was elated with himself. He disengaged himself, got away to his own rooms and locked himself in.

It required a considerable effort to do this. There was something intoxicating in this sudden transition from contemptuous negligence to interest. It was the first time he had felt visible in Camford. But he knew that he had to get out of it. He had to adjust himself before he betrayed how little he was adjusted. His speech quite as much as its reception had taken him by surprise. He hadn't thought it was in him. Even the ideas he had expressed struck him as new. They had come up out of him.

He sat before his fire for a long time in a state of confused self-congratulation. If he could go on with this sort of thing! Dreams he had kept at arm's length before he now accepted frankly. "Leadership," he whispered. "The quality of leadership. Maybe I have it. Maybe I really have it.

"Man to man I don't count for much, but man to meeting! It's going to be different. I wonder why. And—yes I can do it."

He began that acid whistle between his teeth that had been the common accompaniment of the walking day-dreams of his schoolboy years—at first very softly and then loudly.

"A great speech, Rud, my boy. A magnificent speech!" To that he had expanded Carstall's "pretty good speech."

"Leadership. Leadership. Leadership." The word sang through his brain.

He found himself in a vast dreamland auditorium compelling great waves in that time-honoured "sea of faces".

He thrust out his fist, held it up to the level of his forehead and glared at his arm-chair. It was his natural gesture, arrested and held. The room was filled with phantom applause.