H G Wells Omnibus, page 162
The Primates appeared as forest creatures related to groups of the Insectivora. They commenced arboreal. They acquired quickness of eye and muscular adjustment among the branches. They were sociable and flourished wider. Then, as the usual increase in size, weight and strength occurred, they descended perforce to ground level, big enough now to outface, fight and outwit the larger carnivores of the forest world. Their semi-erect attitude enabled them to rear up and beat at their antagonists with sticks and stones, an unheard-of enhancement of tooth and claw. But presently their sociability diminished because they now needed wide areas of food supply. The little fellows faded out before the big fellows, according to the time-honoured pattern of life. The great apes developed the institution of the private family to a high level. Along this line they traveled to the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orang-utan of to-day.
But outside forest regions during a phase of forest recession, the developing primates were exposed to other exactions. Grass plains and arid steppes spread out. The supply of vegetable food shrank. Small game and meat generally became an increasingly important part of the dietary. As ever there was the alternative: “Adapt or perish”. From a world-wide massacre of resistant primates a new series of forms had the good fortune to escape. They were more erect than the forest apes; they ran and hunted and they were sufficiently intelligent to co-operate in their hunting.
These cursive ground apes were the Hominidæ, a hungry and ferocious animal series. Since they are open air animals with sufficient wits to avoid frequent drowning, the fossil traces of their appearance are few and far between. But they suffice. If they did not leave many bones, they littered the world with implements. The erect attitude had liberated hand and eye for a more accurate co-operation. These brutes communicated by uncouth sounds. They seized upon stakes and stones for their purposes. They hammered great stones into a sharper shape, and when the sparks flew into the dry leaves amidst which they squatted and the red flower of fire appeared, it appeared in a manner so mild and familiar to them that they were not dismayed. No other living creature hitherto had seen fire except in a catastrophic stampede of terrified animals. It pursued relentlessly. Bears, even cave bears, bolted headlong from fire and smoke. The Hominidæ on the contrary made a friend and a servant of fire. Attacked by cold or carnivorous enemies, they countered by creeping into caverns and suchlike sheltered places and keeping the home fires burning.
So in the wintry phases of the successive glacial periods, these great quasi-human lout-beasts prevailed. With uncouth cries and gestures they hunted and killed. They were, in their adult form, much bigger and heavier than men. The clumsy hands that battered out the Chellean implements were bigger than any human hand. Skilled knappers can forge the relatively delicate implements of the later palaeolithic men with the utmost success, but the sham Chellean implement is as difficult as a subhuman eolith. The Chellean implement is the core of a great flint; the later human implement is a flake struck off from a core.
The creature called Homo sapiens emerges from among the earlier Hominidæ very evidently, as another of those relapses of the life-cycle towards an infantile and biologically more flexible form, which have played so important a role in the chequered history of living things. He is not the equivalent of the clumsy adult Heidelberg or Neanderthal man. He is, in his opening phase, the experimental, playful, teachable, precocious child, still amenable to social subordination when already sexually adult. The ever changing conditions of life had less and less tolerance for a final gross overbearing adult phase, and it was cut out of the cycle. That primordial gross adult Homo disappears, and gives place to a more juvenile type, that much the record shows very plainly, but the phases and manner of the transition remain still open to speculation. All varieties of Homo sapiens interbreed, and there may have been a continuous interbreeding among the earlier species of the genus. Intervals of isolation may have produced Neanderthaloid, negroid, fair, dark, tall and short local variations still able to interbreed—in the same way that the dogs have produced endless races that can and will mongrelize when barriers break down. Families and tribes may have warred against each other and the victors have obliterated their distinctiveness by mating with captive women. Comparative anthropology slowly disentangles this story of the way in which the now unnecessary primordial adult Homo, for all effective purposes, faded out, leaving as his successor the childlike Homo sapiens, who is, at his best, curious, teachable and experimental from the cradle to the grave.
These words “at his best” are the gist of this section. It is possible that there are wide variations in the mental adaptability of contemporary mankind. It is possible that the mass of contemporary mankind may not be as readily accessible to fresh ideas as the younger, more childish minds of earlier generations, and it is also possible that hard imaginative thinking has not increased so as to keep pace with the expansion and complication of human societies and organizations. That is the darkest shadow upon the hopes of mankind.
But my own temperament makes it unavoidable for me to doubt, as I have said, that there will not be that small minority which will succeed in seeing life out to its inevitable end.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
RUDY RUCKER grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. Memorable volumes in his youthful readings were SEVEN SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS OF H.G. WELLS and Colin Wilson’s THE OUTSIDER, the two books setting him on his path to be a long-winded beatnik SF writer. Rucker has published twenty-nine books, primarily science-fiction and popular science. An early cyberpunk, he also writes SF in a realistic style that he characterizes as transreal. His most recent nonfiction book was about the meaning of computation: THE LIFEBOX, THE SEASHELL, AND THE SOUL. His latest novel is MATHEMATICIANS IN LOVE, which gratifyingly includes the ouster of a corrupt and evil U. S. President. His latest story collection is MAD PROFESSOR. Having finally retired from his day-job as math and computer science professor, Rucker spends an inordinate amount of time writing and photographing for his blog www.rudyrucker.com/blog.
COLIN WILSON has written over 100 books. At 24, he was hailed as a major existentialist thinker when his first success, THE OUTSIDER (1956) was published. But in his many books, Mr. Wilson has consistently revealed his contention that insight is achieved during moments of well-being, attained through effort and focus and that pessimism is what robs people of their vital energies. He lives on the Cornish coast in England.
1 These can be found in the British Edition of THE LAST BOOKS OF H.G. WELLS published by the H.G. Wells Society.
MR. WELLS HAS ALSO WRITTEN
The following Novels:
TONO BUNGAY
LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
KIPPS ANN VERONICA
THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY
and THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
Numerous short stories now published in a single volume under the title.
THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
The following fantastic Romances:
THE TIME MACHINE
THE WONDERFUL VISIT
THE INVISIBLE MAN
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
THE SEA LADY
IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
THE SLEEPER AWAKES
THE FOOD OF THE GODS
THE WAR IN THE AIR
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
and THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU
And a series of books upon social and political questions of which
A MODERN UTOPIA
FIRST AND LAST THINGS (RELIGION)
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
and ANTICIPATIONS
are the chief.
MARRIAGE
BY
H. G. WELLS
“And the Poor Dears haven’t the shadow of a doubt they will live
happily ever afterwards.”—From a Private Letter.
NEW YORK
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
1912
* * *
COPYRIGHT, 1912
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
* * *
FRATERNALLY
TO
ARNOLD BENNETT
* * *
BOOK THE FIRST
MARJORIE MARRIES
* * *
MARRIAGE
CHAPTER THE FIRST
A Day with the Popes
§ 1
An extremely pretty girl occupied a second-class compartment in one of those trains which percolate through the rural tranquillities of middle England from Ganford in Oxfordshire to Rumbold Junction in Kent. She was going to join her family at Buryhamstreet after a visit to some Gloucestershire friends. Her father, Mr. Pope, once a leader in the coach-building world and now by retirement a gentleman, had taken the Buryhamstreet vicarage furnished for two months (beginning on the fifteenth of July) at his maximum summer rental of seven guineas a week. His daughter was on her way to this retreat.
At first she had been an animated traveller, erect and keenly regardful of every detail upon the platforms of the stations at which her conveyance lingered, but the tedium of the journey and the warmth of the sunny afternoon had relaxed her pose by imperceptible degrees, and she sat now comfortably in the corner, with her neat toes upon the seat before her, ready to drop them primly at the first sign of a fellow-traveller. Her expression lapsed more and more towards an almost somnolent reverie. She wished she had not taken a second-class ticket, because then she might have afforded a cup of tea at Reading, and so fortified herself against this insinuating indolence.
She was travelling second class, instead of third as she ought to have done, through one of those lapses so inevitable to young people in her position. The two Carmel boys and a cousin, two greyhounds and a chow had come to see her off; they had made a brilliant and prosperous group on the platform and extorted the manifest admiration of two youthful porters, and it had been altogether too much for Marjorie Pope to admit it was the family custom—except when her father’s nerves had to be considered—to go third class. So she had made a hasty calculation—she knew her balance to a penny because of the recent tipping—and found it would just run to it. Fourpence remained,—and there would be a porter at Buryhamstreet!
Her mother had said: “You will have Ample.” Well, opinions of amplitude vary. With numerous details fresh in her mind, Marjorie decided it would be wiser to avoid financial discussion during her first few days at Buryhamstreet.
There was much in Marjorie’s equipment in the key of travelling second class at the sacrifice of afternoon tea. There was, for example, a certain quiet goodness of style about her clothes, though the skirt betrayed age, and an entire absence of style about her luggage, which was all in the compartment with her, and which consisted of a distended hold-all, a very good tennis racquet in a stretcher, a portmanteau of cheap white basketwork held together by straps, and a very new, expensive-looking and meretricious dressing-bag of imitation morocco, which had been one of her chief financial errors at Oxbridge. The collection was eloquent indeed of incompatible standards….
Marjorie had a chin that was small in size if resolute in form, and a mouth that was not noticeably soft and weak because it was conspicuously soft and pretty. Her nose was delicately aquiline and very subtly and finely modelled, and she looked out upon the world with steady, grey-blue eyes beneath broad, level brows that contradicted in a large measure the hint of weakness below. She had an abundance of copper-red hair, which flowed back very prettily from her broad, low forehead and over her delicate ears, and she had that warm-tinted clear skin that goes so well with reddish hair. She had a very dainty neck, and the long slender lines of her body were full of the promise of a riper beauty. She had the good open shoulders of a tennis-player and a swimmer. Some day she was to be a tall, ruddy, beautiful woman. She wore simple clothes of silvery grey and soft green, and about her waist was a belt of grey leather in which there now wilted two creamy-petalled roses.
That was the visible Marjorie. Somewhere out of time and space was an invisible Marjorie who looked out on the world with those steady eyes, and smiled or drooped with the soft red lips, and dreamt, and wondered, and desired.
§ 2
What a queer thing the invisible human being would appear if, by some discovery as yet inconceivable, some spiritual X-ray photography, we could flash it into sight! Long ago I read a book called “Soul Shapes” that was full of ingenious ideas, but I doubt very much if the thing so revealed would have any shape, any abiding solid outline at all. It is something more fluctuating and discursive than that—at any rate, for every one young enough not to have set and hardened. Things come into it and become it, things drift out of it and cease to be it, things turn upside down in it and change and colour and dissolve, and grow and eddy about and blend into each other. One might figure it, I suppose, as a preposterous jumble animated by a will; a floundering disconnectedness through which an old hump of impulse rises and thrusts unaccountably; a river beast of purpose wallowing in a back eddy of mud and weeds and floating objects and creatures drowned. Now the sunshine of gladness makes it all vivid, now it is sombre and grimly insistent under the sky of some darkling mood, now an emotional gale sweeps across it and it is one confused agitation….
And surely these invisible selves of men were never so jumbled, so crowded, complicated, and stirred about as they are at the present time. Once I am told they had a sort of order, were sphered in religious beliefs, crystal clear, were arranged in a cosmogony that fitted them as hand fits glove, were separated by definite standards of right and wrong which presented life as planned in all its essential aspects from the cradle to the grave. Things are so no longer. That sphere is broken for most of us; even if it is tied about and mended again, it is burst like a seed case; things have fallen out and things have fallen in….
Can I convey in any measure how it was with Marjorie?
What was her religion?
In college forms and returns, and suchlike documents, she would describe herself as “Church of England.” She had been baptized according to the usages of that body, but she had hitherto evaded confirmation into it, and although it is a large, wealthy, and powerful organization with many minds to serve it, it had never succeeded in getting into her quick and apprehensive intelligence any lucid and persuasive conception of what it considered God and the universe were up to with her. It had failed to catch her attention and state itself to her. A number of humorous and other writers and the general trend of talk around her, and perhaps her own shrewd little observation of superficial things, had, on the other hand, created a fairly definite belief in her that it wasn’t as a matter of fact up to very much at all, that what it said wasn’t said with that absolute honesty which is a logical necessity in every religious authority, and that its hierarchy had all sorts of political and social considerations confusing its treatment of her immortal soul….
Marjorie followed her father in abstaining from church. He too professed himself “Church of England,” but he was, if we are to set aside merely superficial classifications, an irascible atheist with a respect for usage and Good Taste, and an abject fear of the disapproval of other gentlemen of his class. For the rest he secretly disliked clergymen on account of the peculiarity of their collars, and a certain influence they had with women. When Marjorie at the age of fourteen had displayed a hankering after ecclesiastical ceremony and emotional religion, he had declared: “We don’t want any of that nonsense,” and sent her into the country to a farm where there were young calves and a bottle-fed lamb and kittens. At times her mother went to church and displayed considerable orthodoxy and punctilio, at times the good lady didn’t, and at times she thought in a broad-minded way that there was a Lot in Christian Science, and subjected herself to the ministrations of an American named Silas Root. But his ministrations were too expensive for continuous use, and so the old faith did not lose its hold upon the family altogether.
* * *
At school Marjorie had been taught what I may best describe as Muffled Christianity—a temperate and discreet system designed primarily not to irritate parents, in which the painful symbol of the crucifixion and the riddle of what Salvation was to save her from, and, indeed, the coarser aspects of religion generally, were entirely subordinate to images of amiable perambulations, and a rich mist of finer feelings. She had been shielded, not only from arguments against her religion, but from arguments for it—the two things go together—and I do not think it was particularly her fault if she was now growing up like the great majority of respectable English people, with her religious faculty as it were, artificially faded, and an acquired disposition to regard any speculation of why she was, and whence and whither, as rather foolish, not very important, and in the very worst possible taste.
And so, the crystal globe being broken which once held souls together, you may expect to find her a little dispersed and inconsistent in her motives, and with none of that assurance a simpler age possessed of the exact specification of goodness or badness, the exact delimitation of right and wrong. Indeed, she did not live in a world of right and wrong, or anything so stern; “horrid” and “jolly” had replaced these archaic orientations. In a world where a mercantile gentility has conquered passion and God is neither blasphemed nor adored, there necessarily arises this generation of young people, a little perplexed, indeed, and with a sense of something missing, but feeling their way inevitably at last to the great releasing question, “Then why shouldn’t we have a good time?”
