H. G. Wells

“ The light of a rising full moon mingled with the afterglow; pebbles shone out like gems and stars. He carried himself bravely but he was all atremble. He knew that this time the enterprises would not come from him. And the Spooning of Chris Hossett was no more like the Spooning of Meeta than a furnace glow is like the light of the moon.
“I love you,” said Chris as though that justified anything, and as they stumbled homeward at an hour that Mr. Preemby called “feefully late,” she said: “You’re going to marry me aren’t you? You’ve got to marry me now. And then we can really make love. ”

“ Long before the Christian era the blood of Sargon was diffused throughout all mankind. His traditions still more so. We all inherit. Not merely from him—from all the great kings, from all the noble conquerors. From all the brave and beautiful women. All the statesmen and inventors and creators. If not directly from them, from their fathers and mothers. All that rich wine from the past is in my veins. And I thought I was just Albert Edward Preemby! And at Woodford Wells I went for a silly little walk nearly every afternoon with sixpence in my pocket to spend and nothing in the world to do! ”

“ Sargon was new, Paul Lambone was new, Devizes new; before the war there could not have been any such people. They had grown out of their own past selves; they were as different from pre-war people as nineteenth-century people had been different from eighteenth-century people. Newest of all was this Christina Alberta who had effaced her blue-eyed predecessor. She was so direct and free in her thoughts and talk that she made Bobby feel that his own mind wore a bonnet and flounces. ”

“ He sighed. “Nothing seems certain any more.”
“Can we sit down and talk together?” said Bobby. “There is much to be said between us.”
Sargon glanced round. There were two chairs in a corner, and in that corner they might be a little beyond the eavesdropper’s range. “I cannot understand this madness,” said Sargon as they sat down. “I cannot understand this Riddle that has been set me. Why does the Power, why does God, permit men to be mad? When they are mad they are beyond good and evil. What are they? Men still? What becomes of justice, what becomes of righteousness—when men go mad?” ”

“ It took him with a kindly seriousness and made him feel that rescuing people from lunatic asylums was the sort of work the sun could shine upon and nature welcome.
It had needed a great effort to get down from London. He had felt then like a midget setting out to attack an embattled universe. Amidst the Croydon traffic he had been half-minded to go back, but he had felt that he could not face Tessy until he had been at least definitely defeated. It was delightful to note an increased assurance within himself as he drew nearer to his enterprise. ”

“ Had he been cheated at Tunbridge Wells when the call first came to him to arise and awake? Were those memories of Sumeria no more than dreams? Was he indeed just Albert Edward Preemby—gone crazy? In a crazy, pointless universe of commonplace inanities? If so he was indeed the most foolish of living men. He had left his comfort and securities, sound though insignificant; he had run away from his dear Christina Alberta—to obey a Power that was nothing more than his own imagination and to follow a phantom end. For days he had been shutting Christina Alberta out of his thoughts ”

“ Christina Alberta looked unusually small and overshadowed by her two odd men friends. It was a grey day outside, and the general effect of the gathering was thin and scattered and damp and chilly. The organ was playing as Bobby came in, and he thought he had never heard a less musical organ. The service as it went on sounded more and more trite and theological and insincere. What an old second-hand damp mackintosh the Church of England is, thought Bobby, for a striving soul to wear? But then what can any religion in the world really be in the face of normal death? ”

“ In dreams absurd things happen, dreams when you think them over afterwards are all at sixes and sevens, but this is all sane and orderly. One might think, Christina Alberta, that I had never dreamt dreams and that all these memories of that previous existence which crowd upon me now were a deception of my imagination! But I can go right back as if it was yesterday, and I am surer by far that I am Sargon than that I am Albert Edward Preemby your father. ”

“ Teddy was rotten, so plainly rotten that only a fool wrapped up in her own sensations would have touched him. She lay awake for most of the night after her Daddy had vanished, biting her hands and damning Teddy. Lambone the great friend was lazy, incompetent, and futile. Harold and Fay seemed already a little tired of her misfortune and vaguely disposed to blame her for bringing her Daddy to London. She had no one else to whom she could turn. No one remained to her—except Christina Alberta herself, feeling a little soiled now and more than a little afraid. ”

“ A great beam of light, like the beam of a searchlight, only very much broader, appeared slanting to the north. Then above a whaleback of distant downland came a knife-edge of dazzling light, an effulgence, like a curved knife, like a cap, like a dome, a quivering blazing fire-birth. And then torn clear of the hill and round and red the November sun had risen.
§ 5
It was full daylight and the mist had dissolved away. The roofs of the asylum buildings were now visible over the crest, divested of all magic, bleak and commonplace. From some point in that direction a dog was barking. ”

“ So it seemed to Bobby, who didn’t for a moment suspect how much these people were avoiding and suppressing. Christina Alberta’s thoughts and speech seemed to him to be moving about without a stitch on, like the people in some horrible Utopia by Wells. He compared the vast impalpable network of “understanding” he and Tessy had woven between each other.
“New people,” he whispered, and looked Paul Lambone’s new house in the face. To him they were stupendously new, an immense discovery. The war had overstrained him, he realized, and left him too tired for a time to see new things. ”

“ One can be a laundryman like I was when I was just Preemby, and think of nothing but the profits and needs and vanities and fears of a little laundryman—and how dull it was!—or one can be a king, the descendant of ten thousand kings, the joint heir to the inheritance of all human affairs, the lord of the generations still unborn—who happens to be living in exile as a laundryman. ”

“ What are you going to make of yourself, Christina Alberta?”
There came a time when the court had to address Christina Alberta in this fashion: “Your nose, Christina Alberta, is large beyond comparison. It will probably go on growing all your life—as noses often do. Yet you are setting yourself out to charm and fascinate Teddy Winterton. You go to places where you think you will meet him. You fuss and preen yourself like any female idiot. You dream all sorts of things about him, disgraceful things. You are soppy on this young man in spite of the fact that you know he is—no sort of good. ”

“ Bobby was naturally, inherently, afraid; his instinct was for security, protection, kindliness and help. He clung to his “Aunt Suzannah” job for safety. He didn’t believe Christina Alberta knew one tenth of the dangers she ran of insult, defeat, humiliation, neglect, repulse, fatigue and lonely distress. His imagination presented a tormenting picture of her away there in dark, confused, immense and blundering London, as an excessively fragile figure, light on its feet, shock-head erect, arms akimbo, unaware of monstrous ambushed dangers. ”

“ And suddenly, to her extreme annoyance, Christina Alberta found a flush of indignation mantling her cheek, and a combative tingle passing down the backbone of her straight little body. “Why the devil,” Miss Preemby asked herself, “why the devil shouldn’t a girl cut her hair to save trouble and bother, and wear clothes in which she can walk about?” Anyhow, a mop of well-washed hair was ten times better than those feeble, aimless interweavings of pigtails and fringes and scraps and ends. ”

“ There was more of Sargon now in Bobby’s brain alone, than in that coffin. But Sargon, where was he? Where were those dreams and desires?
Bobby became aware of the voice of the officiating clergyman driving high, like a flying bird, over the welter of his thoughts: “But some men will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened unless it die. ”

“ Paul, a large dark lump on the dim pale sofa, went on speaking. “Immortality,” he said, “is a mystery. One can only speak of it in dark metaphors. How can we believe that each of our individual commonplace lives is to have an endless commonplace sequel? That is incredible nonsense. Yet we go on living after death nevertheless. When we die we are changed. All wise teachers have insisted upon that. As Roothing said, we are not boxed up and buried and forgotten. Our real death is an escape, and we escape and become—what did you say?—dispersed. Immortal life is endless consequence. ”

“ The bright vision of a discourse to a gathering of disciples at a table had so restored the gloriousness of Sargon that by the time he reached the entrance of the Rubicon Restaurant, which bulges invitingly at a corner, he had called two further disciples. One of these acquisitions was a matchbox-holding beggar of venerable appearance, and the other a highly intelligent-looking man of perhaps fifty, lean and thinly bearded, carrying a book on the Doukhobors and wearing mittens and a tall black felt hat—a hat of an unusual shape rather like the steam-dome of a railway engine. ”

“ Every individual of a social species needed love; to fail in that need was to escape out of social life to lonely futility. “Mutual comfort,” Bobby quoted. In his past Bobby had dreamt of the love of children. Even now he remembered as a fact that he had dreamt particularly of a little girl of his own that he could protect and explore. But now the thought and interest of Christina Alberta had blotted that out. It was extraordinary to him to perceive how possessed he was by her. He could endure no prospect of life just now unless it was to include Christina Alberta as its principal fact. ”

“ There was a pause.
“But we have the vote now?” said Christina Alberta almost flippantly. “Why is a woman’s life sacrifice?”
“Think of the children we bear,” said Miss Lambone in a constrained voice.
“Well!” said Christina Alberta, and suppressed some scandalous remark.
“The most astonishing thing about us,” she broke out again, after a pause; “the most astonishing thing in the feminine make-up is that hardly any of us do seem to want children. A lot of us anyhow don’t. Now that I am beginning to learn something about biology, I realize how marvellous that is. ”

“ He felt she had something to say and waited.
“I never know, Bobby—this year less than ever—whether spring is the happiest time in the year or the most miserably restless. Everybody and everything is falling in love.”
[375] “I didn’t wait for spring,” said Bobby.
“But what of the frogs that can’t find water?” said Christina Alberta.
“There’s water where there are frogs,” said Bobby.
“Everybody is marrying and giving in marriage,” she said. “I thought—I thought—Dr. Devizes at least was an inconsolable widower. But the spring tides have caught even him. They catch everybody.” ”

“ They stared down the Mall to the distant Admiralty Arch, and for a moment neither of them said a word. It was a warm and serene October afternoon; the cupolas of Whitehall and Westminster’s two towers and a brown pile of mansions were just visible over the trees on the right, transfigured to beauty by the afternoon glow; the two tall columns of the Duke of York and Nelson rose over the trees and buildings to the left; it was in the pause before the dinner and theatre traffic begins, and only a few taxi-cabs and a car or so emphasized the breadth of the processional roadway. ”

“ Every one backed against the walls to clear a dancing floor. At the beginning it wasn’t so bad. But presently this Mr. Teddy was pitching Christina Alberta about, throwing her over his shoulder, taking hold of her, bending her backward, holding her almost upside down, both legs in the air and her hands dragging on the ground. And she was red and excited and seemed to like these violent familiarities. There was a kind of undesirable suitability between them for such purposes. She and Teddy looked into each other’s eyes with a sort of intimacy and yet with a sort of fierce defiance. ”

“ The whole scheme of things in Sargon’s mind began to shudder and dissolve. If the Power had not done this, then it must be the Anti-Power had done it. There must be an Anti-Power as strong almost as the Power then, able to snatch men out of life into confusion, indignity, and death for ever. ”

“ She seemed to assume that Christina Alberta was no better than she should be, whereas she was much better. It estranged Bobby and Tessy very much, and it was a great sorrow to Bobby.
Because Christina Alberta was good—and interesting—beyond dispute. She was growing with tremendous rapidity mentally and in her knowledge of the world. Every time he met her she seemed more of a person, with richer, fuller, more commanding ideas. She seemed to be living every moment of her time. ”

“ Miss Lambone stirred and rustled.
The darkness that was Devizes spoke to Christina Alberta, and Miss Lambone became still.
“We don’t take and we don’t dare,” he said, “we don’t defy laws and customs because there are other things in our lives, in us and not outside us, that are more important to us. That is why. It pleases Paul to dress up his view of these things in old mystical phrasing, but what he says is really an unscientific way of putting psychological fact. You think you are simple, but you are really complex. You are the individual but you are the race also. ”

“ And anyway children do not take a woman out of her egotism; they only extend and intensify it. I have known intelligent girls marry and have children, and when the baby appeared their minds evaporated. They became creatures of instinct, messing about with napkins. I could scream at the thought of it. No, I am an egoist pure and simple. I am Christina Alberta, and her only. I am not Sargon. I refuse altogether to mix with that promiscuous anybody-nobody.”
“After all that may only be a phase in your development,” said Devizes. ”