H. Wells - The World Set Free

detection of radio-activity to its first subjugation to human

purpose measured little more than a quarter of a century. For

twenty years after that, indeed, minor difficulties prevented any

striking practical application of his success, but the essential

thing was done, this new boundary in the march of human progress

was crossed, in that year. He set up atomic disintegration in a

minute particle of bismuth; it exploded with great violence into

a heavy gas of extreme radio-activity, which disintegrated in its

turn in the course of seven days, and it was only after another

year's work that he was able to show practically that the last

result of this rapid release of energy was gold. But the thing

was done-at the cost of a blistered chest and an injured finger,

and from the moment when the invisible speck of bismuth flashed

into riving and rending energy, Holsten knewthat he had opened a

way for mankind, however narrow and dark it might still be, to

worlds of limitless power. He recorded as much in the strange

diary biography he left the world, a diary that was up to that

particular moment a mass of speculations and calculations, and

which suddenly became for a space an amazingly minute and human

record of sensations and emotionsthat all humanity might

understand.

He gives, in broken phrases and often single words, it is true,

but none the less vividly for that, a record of the twenty-four

hours following the demonstration of the correctness of his

intricate tracery of computations and guesses. 'I thoughtI

should not sleep,' he writes-the words he omitted are supplied

in brackets-(on account of) 'pain in (the) hand and chest and

(the) wonder of what I had done… Slept like a child.'

He feltstrange and disconcerted the next morning; he had nothing

to do, he was living alonein apartments in Bloomsbury, and he

decided to go up to Hampstead Heath, which he had knownwhen he

was a little boy as a breezy playground. He went up by the

underground tube that was then the recognised means of travel

from one part of London to another, and walked up Heath Street

from the tube station to the open heath. He found it a gully of

planks and scaffoldings between the hoardings of house-wreckers.

The spiritof the times had seized upon that narrow, steep, and

winding thoroughfare, and was in the act of making it commodious

and interesting, according to the remarkable ideals of

Neo-Georgian aestheticism. Such is the illogical quality of

humanity that Holsten, fresh from work that was like a petard

under the seat of current civilisation, sawthese changes with

regret. He had come up Heath Street perhaps a thousand times, had

knownthe windows of all the little shops, spent hours in the

vanished cinematograph theatre, and marvelled at the high-flung

early Georgian houses upon the westward bank of that old gully of

a thoroughfare; he feltstrange with all these familiar things

gone. He escaped at last with a feelingof relief from this

choked alley of trenches and holes and cranes, and emerged upon

the old familiar scene about the White Stone Pond. That, at

least, was very much as it used to be.

There were still the fine old red-brick houses to left and right

of him; the reservoir had been improved by a portico of marble,

the white-fronted inn with the clustering flowers above its

portico still stood out at the angle of the ways, and the blue

view to Harrow Hill and Harrow spire, a view of hills and trees

and shining waters and wind-driven cloud shadows, was like the

opening of a great window to the ascending Londoner. All that

was very reassuring. There was the same strolling crowd, the same

perpetual miracle of motors dodging through it harmlessly,

escaping headlong into the country from the Sabbatical stuffiness

behind and below them. There was a band still, a women's suffrage

meeting-for the suffrage women had won their way back to the

tolerance, a trifle derisive, of the populace again-socialist

orators, politicians, a band, and the same wild uproar of dogs,

frantic with the gladness of their one blessed weekly release

from the back yard and the chain. And away along the road to the

Spaniards strolled a vast multitude, saying, as ever, that the

view of London was exceptionally clear that day.

Young Holsten's face was white. He walked with that uneasy

affectation of ease that marks an overstrained nervous system and

an under-exercised body. He hesitated at the White Stone Pond

whether to go to the left of it or the right, and again at the

fork of the roads. He kept shifting his stick in his hand, and

every now and then he would get in the way of people on the

footpath or be jostled by them because of the uncertainty of his

movements. He felt, he confesses, 'inadequate to ordinary

existence.' He seemed to himselfto be something inhuman and

mischievous. All the people about him looked fairly prosperous,

fairly happy, fairly well adapted to the lives they had to

lead-a week of work and a Sunday of best clothes and mild

promenading-and he had launched something that would disorganise

the entire fabric that held their contentments and ambitions and

satisfactions together. 'Felt like an imbecile who has presented

a box full of loaded revolvers to a Creche,' he notes.

He met a man named Lawson, an old school-fellow, of whom history

now knowsonly that he was red-faced and had a terrier. He and

Holsten walked together and Holsten was sufficiently pale and

jumpy for Lawson to tell him he overworked and needed a holiday.

They sat down at a little table outside the County Council house

of Golders Hill Park and sent one of the waiters to the Bull and

Bush for a couple of bottles of beer, no doubtat Lawson's

suggestion. The beer warmed Holsten's rather dehumanised system.

He began to tell Lawson as clearly as he could to what his great

discovery amounted. Lawson feigned attention, but indeed he had

neither the knowledgenor the imagination to understand. 'In the

end, before many years are out, this must eventually change war,

transit, lighting, building, and every sort of manufacture, even

agriculture, every material human concern--'

Then Holsten stopped short. Lawson had leapt to his feet. 'Damn

that dog!' cried Lawson. 'Look at it now. Hi! Here!

Phewoo-phewoo phewoo! Come HERE, Bobs! Come HERE!'

The young scientific man, with his bandaged hand, sat at the

green table, too tired to convey the wonder of the thing he had

sought so long, his friend whistled and bawled for his dog, and

the Sunday people drifted about them through the spring sunshine.

For a moment or so Holsten stared at Lawson in astonishment, for

he had been too intent upon what he had been saying to realise

how little Lawson had attended.

Then he remarked, 'WELL!' and smiled faintly, and-finished the

tankard of beer before him.

Lawson sat down again. 'One must look after one's dog,' he said,

with a note of apology. 'What was it you were telling me?'

Section 2

In the evening Holsten went out again. He walked to Saint Paul's

Cathedral, and stood for a time near the door listening to the

evening service. The candles upon the altar reminded him in some

odd way of the fireflies at Fiesole. Then he walked back through

the evening lights to Westminster. He was oppressed, he was

indeed scared, by his sense of the immense consequences of his