H. Wells - The World Set Free

knownas a cytologist. And several of the younger men who were

working in the place and a patientnamed Kahn, a poet, and

Edwards, a designer of plays and shows, spent some time with him.

The talk wandered from point to point and came back upon itself,

and became now earnest and now trivial as the chance suggestions

determined. But soon afterwards Gardener wrote down notes of

things he remembered, and it is possible to put together again

the outlook of Karenin upon the world and how he thoughtand felt

about many of the principal things in life.

'Our age,' he said, 'has been so far an age of scene-shifting. We

have been preparing a stage, clearing away the setting of a drama

that was played out and growingtiresome… If I could but sit

out the first few scenes of the new spectacle…

'How encumbered the world had become! It was ailing as I am

ailing with a growthof unmeaning things. It was entangled,

feverish, confused. It was in sore need of release, and I suppose

that nothing less than the violence of those bombs could have

released it and made it a healthy world again. I suppose they

were necessary. Just as everything turns to evil in a fevered

body so everything seemed turning to evil in those last years of

the old time. Everywhere there were obsolete organisations

seizing upon all the new fine things that science was giving to

the world, nationalities, all sorts of political bodies, the

churches and sects, proprietorship, seizing upon those treat

powers and limitless possibilities and turning them to evil uses.

And they would not suffer open speech, they would not permit of

education, they would let no one be educated to the needs of the

new time… You who are younger cannot imagine the mixture of

desperate hope and protesting despairin which we who could

believe in the possibilities of science lived in those years

before atomic energy came…

'It was not only that the mass of people would not attend, would

not understand, but that those who did understandlacked the

power of realbelief. They said the things, they sawthe things,

and the things meant nothing to them…

'I have been reading some old papers lately. It is wonderful how

our fathers bore themselvestowards science. They hatedit. They

fearedit. They permitted a few scientific men to existand

work-a pitiful handful… "Don't find out anything about us,"

they said to them; "don't inflict vision upon us, spare our

little ways of life from the fearfulshaft of understanding. But

do tricks for us, little limitedtricks. Give us cheap lighting.

And cure us of certain disagreeable things, cure us of cancer,

cure us of consumption, cure our colds and relieve us after

repletion…" We have changed all that, Gardener. Science is no

longer our servant. We knowit for something greater than our

little individual selves. It is the awakening mindof the race,

and in a little while--In a little while--I wish indeed I

could watch for that little while, now that the curtain has

risen…

'While I lie here they are clearing up what is left of the bombs

in London,' he said. 'Then they are going to repair the ruins

and make it all as like as possible to its former condition

before the bombs fell. Perhaps they will dig out the old house in

St John's Wood to which my father went after his expulsion from

Russia… That London of my memoriesseems to me like a place in

another world. For you younger people it must seem like a place

that could never have existed.'

'Is there much left standing?' asked Edith Haydon.

'Square miles that are scarcely shaken in the south and

north-west, they say; and most of the bridges and large areas of

dock. Westminster, which held most of the government offices,

suffered badly from the small bomb that destroyed the Parliament,

there are very few traces of the old thoroughfare of Whitehall or

the Government region thereabout, but there are plentiful

drawings to scale of its buildings, and the great hole in the

east of London scarcely matters. That was a poor district and

very like the north and the south… It will be possible to

reconstruct most of it… It is wanted. Already it becomes

difficult to recall the old time-even for us who sawit.'

'It seems very distant to me,' said the girl.

'It was an unwholesome world,' reflected Karenin. 'I seem to

remembereverybody about my childhood as if they were ill. They

were ill. They were sick with confusion. Everybody was anxious

about money and everybody was doing uncongenial things. They ate

a queer mixture of foods, either too much or too little, and at

odd hours. One seeshow ill they were by their advertisements.

All this new region of London they are opening up now is

plastered with advertisements of pills. Everybody must have been

taking pills. In one of the hotel rooms in the Strand they have

found the luggage of a lady covered up by falling rubble and

unburnt, and she was equipped with nine different sorts of pill

and tabloid. The pill-carrying age followed the weapon-carrying

age. They are equally strange to us. People's skins must have

been in a vile state. Very few people were properly washed; they

carried the filth of months on their clothes. All the clothes

they wore were old clothes; our way of pulping our clothes again

after a week or so of wear would have seemed fantastic to them.

Their clothing hardly bears thinkingabout. And the congestion

of them! Everybody was jostling against everybody in those awful

towns. In an uproar. People were run over and crushed by the

hundred; every year in London the cars and omnibuses alonekilled

or disabled twenty thousand people, in Paris it was worse; people

used to fall dead for want of air in the crowded ways. The

irritation of London, internal and external, must have been

maddening. It was a maddened world. It is like thinkingof a

sick child. One has the same effectof feverish urgencies and

acute irrational disappointments.

'All history,' he said, 'is a record of a childhood…

'And yet not exactly a childhood. There is something clean and

keen about even a sick child-and something touching. But so much

of the old times makes one angry. So much they did seems grossly

stupid, obstinately, outrageously stupid, which is the very

opposite to beingfresh and young.

'I was reading only the other day about Bismarck, that hero of

nineteenth-century politics, that sequel to Napoleon, that god of

blood and iron. And he was just a beery, obstinate, dull man.

Indeed, that is what he was, the commonest, coarsest man, who

ever became great. I looked at his portraits, a heavy, almost

froggish face, with projecting eyes and a thick moustache to hide

a poor mouth. He aimed at nothing but Germany, Germany

emphasised, indurated, enlarged; Germany and his class in

Germany; beyond that he had no ideas, he was inaccessible to

ideas; his mindnever rose for a recorded instant above a

bumpkin's elaborate cunning. And he was the most influentialman

in the world, in the whole world, no man ever left so deep a mark

on it, because everywhere there were gross men to resonate to the

heavy notes he emitted. He trampled on ten thousand lovely

things, and a kind of malice in these louts made it pleasantto

them to seehim trample. No-he was no child; the dull, national

aggressiveness he stood for, no childishness. Childhood is