H G Wells Omnibus, page 442
“Tell lies,” said Jessie. “Certainly not. Most certainly not. But I understand that is how your absence is understood at present, and there is no reason—”
Jessie’s grip tightened on her handkerchief. “I won’t go back,” she said, “to have it as I did before. I want a room of my own, what books I need to read, to be free to go out by myself alone, Teaching—”
“Anything,” said Mrs. Milton ,“anything in reason.”
“But will you keep your promise?” said Jessie.
“Surely you won’t dictate to your mother!” said Widgery.
“My stepmother! I don’t want to dictate. I want definite promises now.”
“This is most unreasonable,” said the clergyman. “Very well,” said Jessie, swallowing a sob but with unusual resolution. “Then I won’t go back. My life is being frittered away—”
“LET her have her way,” said Widgery.
“A room then. All your Men. I’m not to come down and talk away half my days—”
“My dear child, if only to save you,” said Mrs. Milton. “If you don’t keep your promise—”
“Then I take it the matter is practically concluded,” said the clergyman. “And that you very properly submit to return to your proper home. And now, if I may offer a suggestion, it is that we take tea. Freed of its tannin, nothing, I think, is more refreshing and stimulating.”
“There’s a train from Lyndhurst at thirteen minutes to six,” said Widgery, unfolding a time table. “That gives us about half an hour or three-quarters here—if a conveyance is obtainable, that is.”
“A gelatine lozenge dropped into the tea cup precipitates the tannin in the form of tannate of gelatine,” said the clergyman to Miss Mergle, in a confidential bray.
Jessie stood up, and saw through the window a depressed head and shoulders over the top of the back of a garden seat. She moved towards the door. “While you have tea, mother,” she said, “I must tell Mr. Hoopdriver of our arrangements.”
“Don’t you think I—” began the clergyman.
“No,” said Jessie, very rudely; “I don’t.”
“But, Jessie, haven’t you already—”
“You are already breaking the capitulation,” said Jessie.
“Will you want the whole half hour?” said Widgery, at the bell.
“Every minute,” said Jessie, in the doorway. “He’s behaved very nobly to me.”
“There’s tea,” said Widgery.
“I’ve had tea.”
“He may not have behaved badly,” said the clergyman. “But he’s certainly an astonishingly weak person to let a wrong-headed young girl—”
Jessie closed the door into the garden.
Meanwhile Mr. Hoopdriver made a sad figure in the sunlight outside. It was over, this wonderful excursion of his, so far as she was concerned, and with the swift blow that separated them, he realised all that those days had done for him. He tried to grasp the bearings of their position. Of course, they would take her away to those social altitudes of hers. She would become an inaccessible young lady again. Would they let him say good-bye to her?
How extraordinary it had all been! He recalled the moment when he had first seen her riding, with the sunlight behind her, along the riverside road; he recalled that wonderful night at Bognor, remembering it as if everything had been done of his own initiative. “Brave, brave!” she had called him. And afterwards, when she came down to him in the morning, kindly, quiet. But ought he to have persuaded her then to return to her home? He remembered some intention of the sort. Now these people snatched her away from him as though he was scarcely fit to live in the same world with her. No more he was! He felt he had presumed upon her worldly ignorance in travelling with her day after day. She was so dainty, so delightful, so serene. He began to recapitulate her expressions, the light of her eyes, the turn of her face …
He wasn’t good enough to walk in the same road with her. Nobody was. Suppose they let him say good-bye to her; what could he say? That? But they were sure not to let her talk to him alone; her mother would be there as—what was it? Chaperone. He’d never once had a chance of saying what he felt; indeed, it was only now he was beginning to realise what he felt. Love I he wouldn’t presume. It was worship. If only he could have one more chance. He must have one more chance, somewhere, somehow. Then he would pour out his soul to her eloquently. He felt eloquently, and words would come. He was dust under her feet …
His meditation was interrupted by the click of a door handle, and Jessie appeared in the sunlight under the verandah. “Come away from here,” she said to Hoopdriver, as he rose to meet her. “I’m going home with them. We have to say good-bye.”
Mr. Hoopdriver winced, opened and shut his mouth, and rose without a word.
Chapter 40
At the Rufus Stone (Continued)
At first Jessie Milton and Mr. Hoopdriver walked away from the hotel in silence. He heard a catching in her breath and glanced at her and saw her lips pressed tight and a tear on her cheek. Her face was hot and bright. She was looking straight before her. He could think of nothing to say, and thrust his hands in his pockets and looked away from her intentionally. After a while she began to talk. They dealt disjointedly with scenery first, and then with the means of self-education. She took his address at Antrobus’s and promised to send him some books. But even with that it was spiritless, aching talk, Hoopdriver felt, for the fighting mood was over. She seemed, to him, preoccupied with the memories of her late battle, and that appearance hurt him.
“It’s the end,” he whispered to himself. “It’s the end.”
They went into a hollow and up a gentle wooded slope, and came at last to a high and open space overlooking a wide expanse of country. There, by a common impulse, they stopped. She looked at her watch—a little ostentatiously. They stared at the billows of forest rolling away beneath them, crest beyond crest, of leafy trees, fading at last into blue.
“The end” ran through his mind, to the exclusion of all speakable thoughts.
“And so,” she said, presently, breaking the silence, “it comes to good-bye.”
For half a minute he did not answer. Then he gathered his resolution. “There is one thing I MUST say.”
“Well?” she said, surprised and abruptly forgetting the recent argument. “I ask no return. But—”
Then he stopped. “I won’t say it. It’s no good. It would be rot from me—now. I wasn’t going to say anything. Good-bye.”
She looked at him with a startled expression in her eyes. “No,” she said. “But don’t forget you are going to work. Remember, brother Chris, you are my friend. You will work. You are not a very strong man, you know, now—you will forgive me—nor do you know all you should. But what will you be in six years’ time?”
He stared hard in front of him still, and the lines about his weak mouth seemed to strengthen. He knew she understood what he could not say.
“I’ll work,” he said, concisely. They stood side by side for a moment. Then he said, with a motion of his head, “I won’t come back to THEM. Do you mind? Going back alone?”
She took ten seconds to think. “No.” she said, and held out her hand, biting her nether lip. “GOOD-BYE,” she whispered.
He turned, with a white face, looked into her eyes, took her hand limply, and then with a sudden impulse, lifted it to his lips. She would have snatched it away, but his grip tightened to her movement. She felt the touch of his lips, and then he had dropped her fingers and turned from her and was striding down the slope. A dozen paces away his foot turned in the lip of a rabbit hole, and he stumbled forward and almost fell. He recovered his balance and went on, not looking back. He never once looked back. She stared at his receding figure until it was small and far below her, and then, the tears running over her eyelids now, turned slowly, and walked with her hands gripped hard together behind her, towards Stoney Cross again.
“I did not know,” she whispered to herself. “I did not understand. Even now—No, I do not understand.”
Chapter 41
The Envoy
So the story ends, dear Reader. Mr. Hoopdriver, sprawling down there among the bracken, must sprawl without our prying, I think, or listening to what chances to his breathing. And of what came of it all, of the six years and afterwards, this is no place to tell. In truth, there is no telling it, for the years have still to run. But if you see how a mere counter-jumper, a cad on castors, and a fool to boot, may come to feel the little insufficiencies of life, and if he has to any extent won your sympathies, my end is attained. (If it is not attained, may Heaven forgive us both!) Nor will we follow this adventurous young lady of ours back to her home at Surbiton, to her new struggle against Widgery and Mrs. Milton combined. For, as she will presently hear, that devoted man has got his reward. For her, also, your sympathies are invited.
The rest of this great holiday, too—five days there are left of it—is beyond the limits of our design. You see fitfully a slender figure in a dusty brown suit and heather mixture stockings, and brown shoes not intended to be cycled in, flitting Londonward through Hampshire and Berkshire and Surrey, going economically—for excellent reasons. Day by day he goes on, riding fitfully and for the most part through bye-roads, but getting a few miles to the north-eastward every day. He is a narrow-chested person, with a nose hot and tanned at the bridge with unwonted exposure, and brown, red-knuckled fists. A musing expression sits upon the face of this rider, you observe. Sometimes he whistles noiselessly to himself, sometimes he speaks aloud, “a juiced good try, anyhow!” you hear; and sometimes, and that too often for my liking, he looks irritable and hopeless. “I know,” he says, “I know. It’s over and done. It isn’t IN me. You ain’t man enough, Hoopdriver. Look at yer silly hands! … Oh, my God!” and a gust of passion comes upon him and he rides furiously for a space.
Sometimes again his face softens. “Anyhow, if I’m not to see her- -she’s going to lend me books,” he thinks, and gets such comfort as he can. Then again; “Books! What’s books?” Once or twice triumphant memories of the earlier incidents nerve his face for a while. “I put the ky-bosh on HIS little game,” he remarks. “I DID that,” and one might even call him happy in these phases. And, by-the-bye, the machine, you notice, has been enamel-painted grey and carries a sonorous gong.
This figure passes through Basingstoke and Bagshot, Staines, Hampton, and Richmond. At last, in Putney High Street, glowing with the warmth of an August sunset and with all the ‘prentice boys busy shutting up shop, and the work girls going home, and the shop folks peeping abroad, and the white ‘buses full of late clerks and city folk rumbling home to their dinners, we part from him. He is back. To-morrow, the early rising, the dusting, and drudgery, begin again—but with a difference, with wonderful memories and still more wonderful desires and ambitions replacing those discrepant dreams.
He turns out of the High Street at the corner, dismounts with a sigh, and pushes his machine through the gates of the Antrobus stable yard, as the apprentice with the high collar holds them open. There are words of greeting. “South Coast,” you hear; and “splendid weather—splendid.” He sighs. “Yes—swapped him off for a couple of sovs. It’s a juiced good machine.”
The gate closes upon him with a slam, and he vanishes from our ken.
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Food for the mind
The World Set Free
H. G. Wells
Published: 1914
Categorie(s): Fiction, Science Fiction
Source: http://www.gutenberg.org
About Wells:
Herbert George Wells, better known as H. G. Wells, was an English writer best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau. He was a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and produced works in many different genres, including contemporary novels, history, and social commentary. He was also an outspoken socialist. His later works become increasingly political and didactic, and only his early science fiction novels are widely read today. Wells, along with Hugo Gernsback and Jules Verne, is sometimes referred to as “The Father of Science Fiction”. Source: Wikipedia
Also available on Feedbooks Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)
The Time Machine (1895)
A Modern Utopia (1905)
The Invisible Man (1897)
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)
Tales of Space and Time (1900)
The Sleeper Awakes (1910)
The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904)
The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost (1902)
The First Men in the Moon (1901)
Copyright: This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+50 or in the USA (published before 1923).
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Preface
THE WORLD SET FREE was written in 1913 and published early in 1914, and it is the latest of a series of three fantasias of possibility, stories which all turn on the possible developments in the future of some contemporary force or group of forces. The World Set Free was written under the immediate shadow of the Great War. Every intelligent person in the world felt that disaster was impending and knew no way of averting it, but few of us realised in the earlier half of 1914 how near the crash was to us. The reader will be amused to find that here it is put off until the year 1956. He may naturally want to know the reason for what will seem now a quite extraordinary delay. As a prophet, the author must confess he has always been inclined to be rather a slow prophet. The war aeroplane in the world of reality, for example, beat the forecast in Anticipations by about twenty years or so. I suppose a desire not to shock the sceptical reader’s sense of use and wont and perhaps a less creditable disposition to hedge, have something to do with this dating forward of one’s main events, but in the particular case of The World Set Free there was, I think, another motive in holding the Great War back, and that was to allow the chemist to get well forward with his discovery of the release of atomic energy. 1956—or for that matter 2056—may be none too late for that crowning revolution in human potentialities. And apart from this procrastination of over forty years, the guess at the opening phase of the war was fairly lucky; the forecast of an alliance of the Central Empires, the opening campaign through the Netherlands, and the despatch of the British Expeditionary Force were all justified before the book had been published six months. And the opening section of Chapter the Second remains now, after the reality has happened, a fairly adequate diagnosis of the essentials of the matter. One happy hit (in Chapter the Second, Section 2), on which the writer may congratulate himself, is the forecast that under modern conditions it would be quite impossible for any great general to emerge to supremacy and concentrate the enthusiasm of the armies of either side. There could be no Alexanders or Napoleons. And we soon heard the scientific corps muttering, ‘These old fools,’ exactly as it is here foretold.
These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story far outnumber the hits. It is the main thesis which is still of interest now; the thesis that because of the development of scientific knowledge, separate sovereign states and separate sovereign empires are no longer possible in the world, that to attempt to keep on with the old system is to heap disaster upon disaster for mankind and perhaps to destroy our race altogether. The remaining interest of this book now is the sustained validity of this thesis and the discussion of the possible ending of war on the earth. I have supposed a sort of epidemic of sanity to break out among the rulers of states and the leaders of mankind. I have represented the native common sense of the French mind and of the English mind—for manifestly King Egbert is meant to be ‘God’s Englishman’—leading mankind towards a bold and resolute effort of salvage and reconstruction. Instead of which, as the school book footnotes say, compare to-day’s newspaper. Instead of a frank and honourable gathering of leading men, Englishman meeting German and Frenchman Russian, brothers in their offences and in their disaster, upon the hills of Brissago, beheld in Geneva at the other end of Switzerland a poor little League of (Allied) Nations (excluding the United States, Russia, and most of the ‘subject peoples’ of the world), meeting obscurely amidst a world-wide disregard to make impotent gestures at the leading problems of the debacle. Either the disaster has not been vast enough yet or it has not been swift enough to inflict the necessary moral shock and achieve the necessary moral revulsion. Just as the world of 1913 was used to an increasing prosperity and thought that increase would go on for ever, so now it would seem the world is growing accustomed to a steady glide towards social disintegration, and thinks that that too can go on continually and never come to a final bump. So soon do use and wont establish themselves, and the most flaming and thunderous of lessons pale into disregard.
