H. Wells - The World Set Free

among his artificial furs and pillows for two hours. Then he

awokeand some tea was brought to him, and he attended to a small

difficulty in connection with the Moravian schools in the

Labrador country and in Greenland that Gardener knewwould

interest him. He remained alonefor a little while after that,

and then the two women came to him again. Afterwards Edwards and

Kahn joined the group, and the talk fell upon love and the place

of women in the renascent world. The cloudbanks of India lay

under a quivering haze, and the blaze of the sun fell full upon

the eastward precipices. Ever and again as they talked, some vast

splinter of rock would crack and come away from these, or a wild

rush of snow and ice and stone, pour down in thunder, hang like a

wet thread into the gulfs below, and cease…

Section 7

For a time Karenin said very little, and Kahn, the popular poet,

talked of passionate love. He said that passionate, personal

love had been the abiding desireof humanity since ever humanity

had begun, and now only was it becoming a possible experience. It

had been a dreamthat generation after generation had pursued,

that always men had lost on the verge of attainment. To most of

those who had sought it obstinately it had brought tragedy. Now,

lifted above sordid distresses, men and women might hope for

realised and triumphant love. This age was the Dawn of Love…

Karenin remained downcast and thoughtfulwhile Kahn said these

things. Against that continued silence Kahn's voice presently

seemed to beat and fail. He had begun by addressing Karenin, but

presently he was including Edith Haydon and Rachel Borken in his

appeal. Rachel listened silently; Edith watched Karenin and very

deliberately avoided Kahn's eyes.

'I know,' said Karenin at last, 'that many people are saying this

sort of thing. I knowthat there is a vast release of

love-making in the world. This great wave of decoration and

elaboration that has gone about the world, this Efflorescence,

has of course laid hold of that. I knowthat when you say that

the world is set free, you interpret that to mean that the world

is set free for love-making. Down there,-under the clouds, the

lovers foregather. I knowyour songs, Kahn, your half-mystical

songs, in which you represent this old hard world dissolving into

a luminous haze of love-sexual love… I don't thinkyou are

right or truein that. You are a young, imaginative man, and you

seelife-ardently-with the eyes of youth. But the power that

has brought man into these high places under this blue-veiled

blackness of the sky and which beckons us on towards the immense

and awful future of our race, is riper and deeper and greater

than any such emotions…

'All through my life-it has been a necessary part of my work-I

have had to thinkof this release of sexual love and the riddles

that perfect freedom and almost limitless power will put to the

soulof our race. I can seenow, all over the world, a beautiful

ecstasyof waste; "Let us sing and rejoice and be lovely and

wonderful."… The orgy is only beginning, Kahn… It was

inevitable-but it is not the end of mankind…

'Think what we are. It is but a yesterday in the endlessness of

time that life was a dreamingthing, dreamingso deeply that it

forgot itself as it dreamt, its lives, its individual instincts,

its moments, were born and wondered and played and desiredand

hungered and grewweary and died. Incalculable successions of

vision, visions of sunlit jungle, river wilderness, wild forest,

eager desire, beating hearts, soaring wings and creeping terror

flamed hotly and then were as though they had never been. Life

was an uneasiness across which lights played and vanished. And

then we came, man came, and opened eyes that were a question and

hands that were a demand and began a mindand memorythat dies

not when men die, but lives and increases for ever, an over-mind,

a dominating will, a question and an aspiration that reaches to

the stars… Hunger and fearand this that you make so much of,

this sex, are but the elementals of life out of which we have

arisen. All these elementals, I grant you, have to be provided

for, dealt with, satisfied, but all these things have to be left

behind.'

'But Love,' said Kahn.

'I speak of sexual love and the love of intimate persons. And

that is what you mean, Kahn.'

Karenin shook his head. 'You cannot stay at the roots and climb

the tree,' he said…

'No,' he said after a pause, 'this sexual excitement, this love

story, is just a part of growingup and we growout of it. So far

literature and art and sentiment and all our emotional formshave

been almost altogether adolescent, plays and stories, delights

and hopes, they have all turned on that marvellous discovery of

the love interest, but life lengthens out now and the mindof

adult humanity detachesitself. Poets who used to die at thirty

live now to eighty-five. You, too, Kahn! There are endless years

yet for you-and all full of learning… We carry an excessive

burden of sex and sexual tradition still, and we have to free

ourselvesfrom it. We do free ourselvesfrom it. We have learnt

in a thousand different ways to hold back death, and this sex,

which in the old barbaric days was just sufficient to balance our

dying, is now like a hammer that has lost its anvil, it plunges

through human life. You poets, you young people want to turn it

to delight. Turn it to delight. That may be one way out. In a

little while, if you have any brains worth thinkingabout, you

will be satisfied, and then you will come up here to the greater

things. The old religions and their new offsets want still, I

see, to suppress all these things. Let them suppress. If they

can suppress. In their own people. Either road will bring you

here at last to the eternal search for knowledgeand the great

adventure of power.'

'But incidentally,' said Rachel Borken; 'incidentally you have

half of humanity, you have womankind, very much specialised

for-for this love and reproduction that is so much less needed

than it was.'

'Both sexes are specialised for love and reproduction,' said

Karenin.

'But the women carry the heavier burden.'

'Not in their imaginations,' said Edwards.

'And surely,' said Kahn, 'when you speak of love as a

phase-isn't it a necessary phase? Quite apart from reproduction

the love of the sexes is necessary. Isn't it love, sexual love,

which has released the imagination? Without that stir, without

that impulse to go out from ourselves, to be reckless of

ourselvesand wonderful, would our lives be anything more than

the contentment of the stalled ox?'

'The key that opens the door,' said Karenin, 'is not the goalof

the journey.'

'But women!' cried Rachel. 'Here we are! What is our future-as

women? Is it only that we have unlocked the doors of the

imagination for you men? Let us speak of this question now. It

is a thing constantly in my thoughts, Karenin. What do you think

of us? You who must have thoughtso much of these perplexities.'

Karenin seemed to weigh his words. He spoke very deliberately.

'I do not care a rap about your future-as women. I do not care

a rap about the future of men-as males. I want to destroy these

peculiar futures. I care for your future as intelligences, as

parts of and contribution to the universal mindof the race.