THE DREAM
_A NOVEL_
BY
H. G. WELLS
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1924
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1923 and 1924,
BY H. G. WELLS.
Set up and electrotyped.
Published April, 1924.
Printed in the United States of America by
THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE EXCURSION
CHAPTER THE SECOND
THE BEGINNING OF THE DREAM
CHAPTER THE THIRD
MISFORTUNES COME UPON THE SMITH FAMILY
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE WIDOW SMITH MOVES TO LONDON
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
FANNY DISCOVERS HERSELF
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
MARRIAGE IN WAR TIME
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
LOVE AND DEATH
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
THE EPILOGUE
PART I
How Harry Mortimer Smith Was Made
THE DREAM
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE EXCURSION
§ 1
Sarnac had worked almost continuously for the better part of a year
upon some very subtle chemical reactions of the nervous cells of the
sympathetic system. His first enquiries had led to the opening out
of fresh and surprising possibilities, and these again had lured him
on to still broader and more fascinating prospects. He worked
perhaps too closely; he found his hope and curiosity unimpaired, but
there was less delicacy of touch in his manipulation, and he was
thinking less quickly and accurately. He needed a holiday. He had
come to the end of a chapter in his work and wished to brace himself
for a new beginning. Sunray had long hoped to be away with him; she,
too, was at a phase in her work when interruption was possible, and
so the two went off together to wander among the lakes and mountains.
Their companionship was at a very delightful stage. Their close
relationship and their friendship was of old standing, so that they
were quite at their ease with one another, yet they were not too
familiar to have lost the keen edge of their interest in each other's
proceedings. Sunray was very much in love with Sarnac and glad, and
Sarnac was always happy and pleasantly exalted when Sunray was near
him. Sunray was the richer-hearted and cleverer lover. They talked
of everything in the world but Sarnac's work because that had to rest
and grow fresh again. Of her own work Sunray talked abundantly. She
had been making stories and pictures of happiness and sorrow in the
past ages of the world, and she was full of curious speculations
about the ways in which the ancestral mind has thought and felt.
They played with boats upon the great lake for some days, they sailed
and paddled and drew up their canoe among the sweet-scented rushes of
the islands and bathed and swam. They went from one guest-house to
another upon the water and met many interesting and refreshing
people. In one house an old man of ninety-eight was staying: he was
amusing his declining years by making statuettes of the greatest
beauty and humour; it was wonderful to see the clay take shape in his
hands. Moreover, he had a method of cooking the lake fish that was
very appetising, and he made a great dish of them so that everyone
who was dining in the place could have some. And there was a
musician who made Sunray talk about the days gone by, and afterwards
he played music with his own hands on a clavier to express the
ancient feelings of men. He played one piece that was, he explained,
two thousand years old; it was by a man named Chopin, and it was
called the Revolutionary Etude. Sunray could not have believed a
piano capable of such passionate resentment. After that he played
grotesque and angry battle music and crude marching tunes from those
half-forgotten times, and then he invented wrathful and passionate
music of his own.
Sunray sat under a golden lantern and listened to the musician and
watched his nimble hands, but Sarnac was more deeply moved. He had
not heard very much music in his life, and this player seemed to open
shutters upon deep and dark and violent things that had long been
closed to mankind. Sarnac sat, cheek on hand, his elbow on the
parapet of the garden wall, looking across the steely blue of the
lake at the darkling night sky at the lower end. The sky had been
starry, but a monstrous crescent of clouds like a hand that closes
was now gathering all the stars into its fist of darkness. Perhaps
there would be rain to-morrow. The lanterns hung still, except that
ever and again a little shiver of the air set them swaying. Now and
then a great white moth would come fluttering out of the night and
beat about among the lanterns for a time and pass away. Presently it
would return again or another moth like it would come. Sometimes
there would be three or four of these transitory phantoms; they
seemed to be the only insects abroad that night.
A faint ripple below drew his attention to the light of a boat, a
round yellow light like a glowing orange, which came gliding close up
to the terrace wall out of the blue of the night. There was the
sound of a paddle being shipped and a diminishing drip of water, but
the people in the boat sat still and listened until the musician had
done altogether. Then they came up the steps to the terrace and
asked the master of the guest-house for rooms for the night. They
had dined at a place farther up the lake.
Four people came by this boat. Two were brother and sister, dark
handsome people of southern origin, and the others were fair women,
one blue-eyed and one with hazel eyes, who were clearly very much
attached to the brother and sister. They came and talked about the
music and then of a climbing expedition they had promised themselves
in the great mountains above the lakes. The brother and sister were
named Radiant and Starlight, and their work in life, they explained,
was to educate animals; it was a business for which they had an
almost instinctive skill. The two fair girls, Willow and Firefly,
were electricians. During the last few days Sunray had been looking
ever and again at the glittering snowfields and desiring them; there
was always a magic call for her in snowy mountains. She joined very
eagerly in the mountain talk, and it was presently suggested that she
and Sarnac should accompany these new acquaintances up to the peaks
they had in mind. But before they went on to the mountains, she and
Sarnac wanted to visit some ancient remains that had recently been
excavated in a valley that came down to the lake from the east. The
four new-comers were interested in what she told them about these
ruins, and altered their own plans to go with her and Sarnac to see
them. Then afterwards all six would go into the mountains.
§ 2
These ruins were rather more than two thousand years old.
There were the remains of a small old town, a railway station of some
importance, and a railway tunnel which came right through the
mountains. The tunnel had collapsed, but the excavators had worked
along it and found several wrecked trains in it which had evidently
been packed with soldiers and refugees. The remains of these people,
much disturbed by rats and other vermin, lay about in the trains and
upon the railway tracks. The tunnel had apparently been blocked by
explosives and these trainloads of people entombed. Afterwards the
town itself and all its inhabitants had been destroyed by poison-gas,
but what sort of poison-gas it was the investigators had still to
decide. It had had an unusual pickling effect, so that many of the
bodies were not so much skeletons as mummies; and there were books,
papers, papier mâché objects or the like in a fair state of
preservation in many of the houses. Even cheap cotton goods were
preserved, though they had lost all their colour. For some time
after the great catastrophe this part of the world must have remained
practically uninhabited. A landslide had presently blocked the lower
valley and banked back the valley waters so as to submerge the town
and cover it with a fine silt and seal up the tunnel very completely.
Now the barrier had been cut through and the valley drained again,
and all these evidences of one of the characteristic disasters of the
last war period in man's history had been brought back to the light
once more.
The six holiday-makers found the visit to this place a very vivid
experience, almost too vivid for their contentment. On Sarnac's
tired mind it made a particularly deep impression. The material
collected from the town had been arranged in a long museum gallery of
steel and glass. There were many almost complete bodies; one invalid
old woman, embalmed by the gas, had been replaced in the bed from
which the waters had floated her, and there was a shrivelled little
baby put back again in its cradle. The sheets and quilts were
bleached and browned, but it was quite easy to see what they had once
been like. The people had been taken by surprise, it seemed, while
the midday meal was in preparation; the tables must have been set in
many of the houses; and now, after a score of centuries beneath mud
and weeds and fishes, the antiquaries had disinterred and reassembled
these old machine-made cloths and plated implements upon the tables.
There were great stores of such pitiful discoloured litter from the
vanished life of the past.
The holiday-makers did not go far into the tunnel; the suggestion of
things there were too horrible for their mood, and Sarnac stumbled
over a rail and cut his hand upon the jagged edge of a broken
railway-carriage window. The wound pained him later, and did not
heal so quickly as it should have done. It was as if some poison had
got into it. It kept him awake in the night.
For the rest of the day the talk was all of the terrible days of the
last wars in the world and the dreadfulness of life in that age. It
seemed to Firefly and Starlight that existence must have been almost
unendurable, a tissue of hate, terror, want and discomfort, from the
cradle to the grave. But Radiant argued that people then were
perhaps no less happy and no happier than himself; that for everyone
in every age there was a normal state, and that any exaltation of
hope or sensation above that was happiness and any depression below
it misery. It did not matter where the normal came. "They went to
great intensities in both directions," he said. There was more
darkness in their lives and more pain, but not more unhappiness.
Sunray was inclined to agree with him.
But Willow objected to Radiant's psychology. She said that there
could be permanently depressed states in an unhealthy body or in a
life lived under restraint. There could be generally miserable
creatures just as there could be generally happy creatures.
"Of course," interjected Sarnac, "given a standard outside
themselves."
"But why did they make such wars?" cried Firefly. "Why did they do
such horrible things to one another? They were people like
ourselves."
"No better," said Radiant, "and no worse. So far as their natural
quality went. It is not a hundred generations ago."
"Their skulls were as big and well shaped."
"Those poor creatures in the tunnel!" said Sarnac. "Those poor
wretches caught in the tunnel! But everyone in that age must have
felt caught in a tunnel."
After a time a storm overtook them and interrupted their
conversation. They were going up over a low pass to a guest-house at
the head of the lake, and it was near the crest of the pass that the
storm burst. The lightning was tremendous and a pine-tree was struck
not a hundred yards away. They cheered the sight. They were all
exhilarated by the elemental clatter and uproar; the rain was like a
whip on their bare, strong bodies and the wind came in gusts that
held them staggering and laughing, breathlessly unable to move
forward. They had doubts and difficulties with the path; for a time
they lost touch with the blazes upon the trees and rocks. Followed a
steady torrent of rain, through which they splashed and stumbled down
the foaming rocky pathway to their resting-place. They arrived wet
as from a swim and glowing; but Sarnac, who had come behind the
others with Sunray, was tired and cold. The master of this
guest-house drew his shutters and made a great fire for them with
pine-knots and pine-cones while he prepared a hot meal.
After a while they began to talk of the excavated town again and of
the shrivelled bodies lying away there under the electric light of
the still glass-walled museum, indifferent for evermore to the
sunshine and thunderstorms of life without.
"Did they ever laugh as we do?" asked Willow. "For sheer happiness
of living?"
Sarnac said very little. He sat close up to the fire, pitching
pine-cones into it and watching them flare and crackle. Presently he
got up, confessed himself tired, and went away to his bed.
§ 3
It rained hard all through the night and until nearly midday, and
then the weather cleared. In the afternoon the little party pushed
on up the valley towards the mountains they designed to climb, but
they went at a leisurely pace, giving a day and a half to what was
properly only one day's easy walking. The rain had refreshed
everything in the upper valley and called out a great multitude of
flowers.
The next day was golden and serene.
In the early afternoon they came to a plateau and meadows of
asphodel, and there they sat down to eat the provisions they had
brought with them. They were only two hours' climb from the
mountain-house in which they were to pass the night, and there was no
need to press on. Sarnac was lazy; he confessed to a desire for
sleep; in the night he had been feverish and disturbed by dreams of
men entombed in tunnels and killed by poison-gas. The others were
amused that anyone should want to sleep in the daylight, but Sunray
said she would watch over him. She found a place for him on the
sward, and Sarnac laid down beside her and went to sleep with his
cheek against her side as suddenly and trustfully as a child goes to
sleep. She sat up--as a child's nurse might do--enjoining silence on
the others by gestures.
"After this he will be well again," laughed Radiant, and he and
Firefly stole off in one direction, while Willow and Starlight went
off in another to climb a rocky headland near at hand, from which
they thought they might get a very wide and perhaps a very beautiful
view of the lakes below.
For some time Sarnac lay quite still in his sleep and then he began
to twitch and stir. Sunray bent down attentively with her warm face
close to his. He was quiet again for a time and then he moved and
muttered, but she could not distinguish any words. Then he rolled
away from her and threw his arms about and said, "I can't stand it.
I can't endure it. Nothing can alter it now. You're unclean and
spoilt." She took him gently and drew him into a comfortable
attitude again, just as a nurse might do. "Dear," he whispered, and
in his sleep reached out for her hand....
When the others came back he had just awakened.
He was sitting up with a sleepy expression and Sunray was kneeling
beside him with her hand on his shoulder. "Wake up!" she said.
He looked at her as if he did not know her and then with puzzled eyes
at Radiant. "Then there is another life!" he said at last.
"Sarnac!" cried Sunray, shaking him. "Don't you know me?"
He passed a hand over his face. "Yes," he said slowly. "Your name
is Sunray. I seem to remember. Sunray.... Not Hetty-- No. Though
you are very like Hetty. Queer! And mine--mine is Sarnac.
"Of course! I am Sarnac." He laughed at Willow. "But I thought I
was Harry Mortimer Smith," he said. "I did indeed. A moment ago I
was Henry Mortimer Smith.... Henry Mortimer Smith."
He looked about him. "Mountains," he said, "sunshine, white
narcissus. Of course, we walked up here this very morning. Sunray
splashed me at a waterfall.... I remember it perfectly.... And yet
I was in bed--shot. I was in bed.... A dream? ... Then I have had a
dream, a whole lifetime, two thousand years ago!"
"What do you mean?" said Sunray.
"A lifetime--childhood, boyhood, manhood. And death. He killed me.
Poor rat!--he killed me!"
"A dream?"
"A dream--but a very vivid dream. The reallest of dreams. If it was
a dream.... I can answer all your questions now, Sunray. I have
lived through a whole life in that old world. I know....
"It is as though that life was still the real one and this only a
dream.... I was in a bed. Five minutes ago I was in bed. I was
dying.... The doctor said, 'He is going.' And I heard the rustle of
my wife coming across the room...."
"Your wife!" cried Sunray.
"Yes--my wife--Milly."
Sunray looked at Willow with raised eyebrows and a helpless
expression.
Sarnac stared at her, dreamily puzzled. "Milly," he repeated very
faintly. "She was by the window."
For some moments no one spoke.
Radiant stood with his arm on Firefly's shoulder.
"Tell us about it, Sarnac. Was it hard to die?"
"I seemed to sink down and down into quiet--and then I woke up here."
"Tell us now, while it is still so real to you."
"Have we not planned to reach the mountain-house before nightfall?"
said Willow, glancing at the sun.
"There is a little guest-house here, within five minutes' walk of
us," said Firefly.
Radiant sat down beside Sarnac. "Tell us your dream now. If it
fades out presently or if it is uninteresting, we can go on; but if
it is entertaining, we can hear it out and sleep down here to-night.
It is a very pleasant place here, and there is a loveliness about
those mauve-coloured crags across the gorge, a faint mistiness in
their folds, that I could go on looking at for a week without
impatience. Tell us your dream, Sarnac."
He shook his friend. "Wake up, Sarnac!"
Sarnac rubbed his eyes. "It is so queer a story. And there will be
so much to explain."
He took thought for a while.
"It will be a long story."
"Naturally, if it is a whole life."
"First let me get some cream and fruit from the guest-house for us
all," said Firefly, "and then let Sarnac tell us his dream. Five
minutes, Sarnac, and I will be back here."
"I will come with you," said Radiant, hurrying after her.
This that follows is the story Sarnac told.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
THE BEGINNING OF THE DREAM
§ 1
"This dream of mine began," he said, "as all our lives begin, in
fragments, in a number of disconnected impressions. I remember
myself lying on a sofa, a sofa covered with a curious sort of hard,
shiny material with a red and black pattern on it, and I was
screaming, but I do not know why I screamed. I discovered my father
standing in the doorway of the room looking at me. He looked very
dreadful; he was partially undressed in trousers and a flannel shirt
and his fair hair was an unbrushed shock; he was shaving and his chin
was covered with lather. He was angry because I was screaming. I
suppose I stopped screaming, but I am not sure. And I remember
kneeling upon the same hard red and black sofa beside my mother and
looking out of the window--the sofa used to stand with its back to
the window-sill--at the rain falling on the roadway outside. The
window-sill smelt faintly of paint; soft bad paint that had blistered
in the sun. It was a violent storm of rain and the road was an
ill-made road of a yellowish sandy clay. It was covered with muddy
water and the storming rainfall made a multitude of flashing bubbles,
that drove along before the wind and burst and gave place to others.
"'Look at 'em, dearie,' said my mother. 'Like sojers.'
"I think I was still very young when that happened,
but I was not so young that I had not often
seen soldiers with their helmets and bayonets marching by."
"That," said Radiant, "was some time before the Great War, then, and
the Social Collapse."
"Some time before," said Sarnac. He considered. "Twenty-one years
before. This house in which I was born was less than two miles from
the great military camp of the British at Lowcliff in England, and
Lowcliff railway station was only a few hundred yards away. 'Sojers'
were the most conspicuous objects in my world outside my home. They
were more brightly coloured than other people. My mother used to
wheel me out for air every day in a thing called a perambulator, and
whenever there were soldiers to be seen she used to say, 'Oh! PRITTY
sojers!'
"'Sojers' must have been one of my earliest words. I used to point
my little wool-encased finger--for they wrapped up children
tremendously in those days and I wore even gloves--and I would say:
'Sosher.'
"Let me try and describe to you what sort of home this was of mine
and what manner of people my father and mother were. Such homes and
houses and places have long since vanished from the world, not many
relics of them have been kept, and though you have probably learnt
most of the facts concerning them, I doubt if you can fully realise
the feel and the reality of the things I found about me. The name of
the place was Cherry Gardens; it was about two miles from the sea at
Sandbourne, one way lay the town of Cliffstone from which steamboats
crossed the sea to France, and the other way lay Lowcliff and its
rows and rows of ugly red brick barracks and its great
drilling-plain, and behind us inland was a sort of plateau covered
with raw new roads of loose pebbles--you cannot imagine such
roads!--and vegetable gardens and houses new-built or building, and
then a line of hills, not very high but steep and green and bare, the
Downs. The Downs made a graceful sky-line that bounded my world to
the north as the sapphire line of the sea bounded it to the south,
and they were almost the only purely beautiful things in that world.
All the rest was touched and made painful by human confusion. When I
was a very little boy I used to wonder what lay behind those Downs,
but I never went up them to see until I was seven or eight years old."
"This was before the days of aeroplanes?" asked Radiant.
"They came into the world when I was eleven or twelve. I saw the
first that ever crossed the Channel between the mainland of Europe
and England. That was considered a very wonderful thing indeed.
("It was a wonderful thing," said Sunray.) I went with a lot of
other boys, and we edged through a crowd that stood and stared at the
quaint old machine; it was like a big canvas grasshopper with
outspread wings; in a field--somewhere beyond Cliffstone. It was
being guarded, and the people were kept away from it by stakes and a
string.
"I find it hard to describe to you what sort of places Cherry Gardens
and Cliffstone were like--even though we have just visited the ruins
of Domodossola. Domodossola was a sprawling, aimless town enough,
but these sprawled far more and looked with a far emptier aimlessness
into the face of God. You see in the thirty or forty years before my
birth there had been a period of comparative prosperity and
productivity in human affairs. It was not of course in those days
the result of any statesmanship or forethought; it just happened,--as
now and then in the course of a rain-torrent there comes a pool of
level water between the rapids. But the money and credit system was
working fairly well; there was much trade and intercourse, no
extensive pestilences, exceptionally helpful seasons, and few very
widespread wars. As a result of this conspiracy of favourable
conditions there was a perceptible rise in the standards of life of
the common people, but for the most part it was discounted by a huge
increase of population. As our school books say, 'In those days Man
was his own Locust.' Later in my life I was to hear furtive whispers
of a forbidden topic called Birth Control, but in the days of my
childhood the whole population of the world, with very few
exceptions, was in a state of complete and carefully protected
ignorance about the elementary facts of human life and happiness.
The surroundings of my childhood were dominated by an unforeseen and
uncontrollable proliferation. Cheap proliferation was my scenery, my
drama, my atmosphere."
"But they had teachers and priests and doctors and rulers to tell
them better," said Willow.
"Not to tell them better," said Sarnac. "These guides and pilots of
life were wonderful people. They abounded, and guided no one. So
far from teaching men and women to control births or avoid diseases
or work generously together, they rather prevented such teaching.
This place called Cherry Gardens had mostly come into existence in
the fifty years before my birth. It had grown from a minute hamlet
into what we used to call an 'urban district.' In that old world in
which there was neither freedom nor direction, the land was divided
up into patches of all sorts and sizes and owned by people who did
what they liked with it, subject to a few vexatious and unhelpful
restrictions. And in Cherry Gardens, a sort of men called
speculative builders bought pieces of land, often quite unsuitable
land, and built houses for the swarming increase of population that
had otherwise nowhere to go. There was no plan about this building.
One speculative builder built here and another there, and each built
as cheaply as possible and sold or let what he had built for as much
as possible. Some of the houses they built in rows and some stood
detached each with a little patch of private garden--garden they
called it, though it was either a muddle or a waste--fenced in to
keep people out."
"Why did they keep people out?"
"They liked to keep people out. It was a satisfaction for them.
They were not secret gardens. People might look over the fence if
they chose. And each house had its own kitchen where food was
cooked--there was no public eating-place in Cherry Gardens--and each,
its separate store of household gear. In most houses there was a man
who went out to work and earn a living--they didn't so much live in
those days as earn a living--and came home to eat and sleep, and
there was a woman, his wife, who did all the services, food and
cleaning and everything, and also she bore children, a lot of
unpremeditated children--because she didn't know any better. She was
too busy to look after them well, and many of them died. Most days
she cooked a dinner. She cooked it.... It was cooking!"
Sarnac paused--his brows knit. "Cooking! Well, well. That's over,
anyhow," he said.
Radiant laughed cheerfully.
"Almost everyone suffered from indigestion. The newspapers were full
of advertisements of cures," said Sarnac, still darkly retrospective.
"I've never thought of that aspect of life in the old world," said
Sunray.
"It was--fundamental," said Sarnac. "It was a world, in every way,
out of health.
"Every morning, except on the Sunday, after the man had gone off to
his day's toil and the children had been got up and dressed and those
who were old enough sent off to school, the woman of the house tidied
up a bit and then came the question of getting in food. For this
private cooking of hers. Every day except Sunday a number of men
with little pony carts or with barrows they pushed in front of them,
bearing meat and fish and vegetables and fruit, all of it exposed to
the weather and any dirt that might be blowing about, came bawling
along the roads of Cherry Gardens, shouting the sort of food they
were selling. My memory goes back to that red and black sofa by the
front window and I am a child once again. There was a particularly
splendid fish hawker. What a voice he had! I used to try to
reproduce his splendid noises in my piping childish cries:
'Mackroo-E-y'are Macroo! Fine Macroo! Thee a Sheen. _Macroo_!'
"The housewives would come out from their domestic mysteries to buy
or haggle and, as the saying went, 'pass the time of day' with their
neighbours. But everything they wanted was not to be got from the
hawkers, and that was where my father came in. He kept a little
shop. He was what was called a greengrocer; he sold fruits and
vegetables, such poor fruits and vegetables as men had then learnt to
grow--and also he sold coals and paraffin (which people burnt in
their lamps) and chocolate and ginger-beer and other things that were
necessary to the barbaric housekeeping of the time. He also sold
cut-flowers and flowers in pots, and seeds and sticks and string and
weed-killer for the little gardens. His shop stood in a row with a
lot of other shops; the row was like a row of the ordinary houses
with the lower rooms taken out and replaced by the shop, and he 'made
his living' and ours by buying his goods as cheaply as he could and
getting as much as he could for them. It was a very poor living
because there were several other able-bodied men in Cherry Gardens
who were also greengrocers, and if he took too much profit then his
customers would go away and buy from these competitors and he would
get no profit at all.
"I and my brother and sisters--for my mother had been unable to avoid
having six babies and four of us were alive--lived by and in and
round about this shop. In the summer we were chiefly out of doors or
in the room above the shop; but in the cold weather it cost too much
trouble and money to have a fire in that room--all Cherry Gardens was
heated by open coal fires--and we went down into a dark underground
kitchen where my mother, poor dear! cooked according to her lights."
"You were troglodytes!" said Willow.
"Practically. We always ate in that downstairs room. In the summer
we were sunburnt and ruddy, but in the winter, because of
this--inhumation, we became white and rather thin. I had an elder
brother who was monstrous in my childish memory; he was twelve years
older than I; and I had two sisters, Fanny and Prudence. My elder
brother Ernest went out to work, and then he went away to London and
I saw very little of him until I too went to London. I was the
youngest of the lot; and when I was nine years old, my father, taking
courage, turned my mother's perambulator into a little push-cart for
delivering sacks of coals and suchlike goods.
"Fanny, my elder sister, was a very pretty girl, with a white face
from which her brown hair went back in graceful, natural waves and
curls, and she had very dark blue eyes. Prudence was also white but
of a duller whiteness, and her eyes were grey. She would tease me
and interfere with me, but Fanny was either negligent or gracefully
kind to me and I adored her. I do not, strangely enough, remember my
mother's appearance at all distinctly, though she was, of course, the
dominant fact of my childish life. She was too familiar, I suppose,
for the sort of attention that leaves a picture on the mind.
"I learnt to speak from my family and chiefly from my mother. None
of us spoke well; our common idioms were poor and bad, we
mispronounced many words, and long words we avoided as something
dangerous and pretentious. I had very few toys: a tin railway-engine
I remember, some metal soldiers, and an insufficient supply of wooden
building-bricks. There was no special place for me to play, and if I
laid out my toys on the living-room table, a meal was sure to descend
and sweep them away. I remember a great longing to play with the
things in the shop, and especially with the bundles of firewood and
some fire-kindlers that were most seductively shaped like wheels, but
my father discouraged such ambitions. He did not like to have me
about the shop until I was old enough to help, and the indoor part of
most of my days was spent in the room above it or in the underground
room below it. After the shop was closed it became a very cold,
cavernous, dark place to a little boy's imagination; there were
dreadful shadows in which terrible things might lurk, and even
holding fast to my mother's hand on my way to bed, I was filled with
fear to traverse it. It had always a faint, unpleasant smell, a
smell of decaying vegetation varying with the particular fruit or
vegetable that was most affected, and a constant element of paraffin.
But on Sundays when it was closed all day the shop was different, no
longer darkly threatening but very, very still. I would be taken
through it on my way to church or Sunday school. (Yes--I will tell
you about church and Sunday school in a minute.) When I saw my
mother lying dead--she died when I was close upon sixteen--I was
instantly reminded of the Sunday shop....
"Such, my dear Sunray, was the home in which I found myself. I
seemed to have been there since my beginning. It was the deepest
dream I have ever had. I had forgotten even you."
§ 2
"And how was this casually begotten infant prepared for the business
of life?" asked Radiant. "Was he sent away to a Garden?"
"There were no Children's Gardens such as we know them, in that
world," said Sarnac. "There was a place of assembly called an
elementary school. Thither I was taken, twice daily, by my sister
Prudence, after I was six years old.
"And here again I find it hard to convey to you what the reality was
like. Our histories tell you of the beginning of general education
in that distant time and of the bitter jealousy felt by the old
priesthoods and privileged people for the new sort of teachers, but
they give you no real picture of the ill-equipped and understaffed
schoolhouses and of the gallant work of the underpaid and ill-trained
men and women who did the first rough popular teaching. There was in
particular a gaunt dark man with a cough who took the older boys, and
a little freckled woman of thirty or so who fought with the lower
children, and, I see now, they were holy saints. His name I forget,
but the little woman was called Miss Merrick. They had to handle
enormous classes, and they did most of their teaching by voice and
gesture and chalk upon a blackboard. Their equipment was miserable.
The only materials of which there was enough to go round were a stock
of dirty reading-books, Bibles, hymn-books, and a lot of slabs of
slate in frames on which we wrote with slate pencils to economise
paper. Drawing materials we had practically none; most of us never
learnt to draw. Yes. Lots of sane adults in that old world never
learnt to draw even a box. There was nothing to count with in that
school and no geometrical models. There were hardly any pictures
except a shiny one of Queen Victoria and a sheet of animals, and
there were very yellow wall-maps of Europe and Asia twenty years out
of date. We learnt the elements of mathematics by recitation. We
used to stand in rows, chanting a wonderful chant called our Tables:--
"'_Twi_-swun two.
_Twi_-stewer four.
_Twi_-shee'r six.
_Twi_-sfour' rate.'
"We used to sing--in unison--religious hymns for the most part. The
school had a second-hand piano to guide our howlings. There had been
a great fuss in Cliffstone and Cherry Gardens when this piano was
bought. They called it a luxury, and pampering the working classes."
"Pampering the working classes!" Firefly repeated. "I suppose it's
all right. But I'm rather at sea."
"I can't explain everything," said Sarnac. "The fact remains that
England grudged its own children the shabbiest education, and so for
the matter of fact did every other country. They saw things
differently in those days. They were still in the competitive cave.
America, which was a much richer country than England, as wealth went
then, had if possible meaner and shabbier schools for her common
people.... My dear! it was so. I'm telling you a story, not
explaining the universe.... And naturally, in spite of the strenuous
efforts of such valiant souls as Miss Merrick, we children learnt
little and we learnt it very badly. Most of my memories of school
are memories of boredom. We sat on wooden forms at long, worn,
wooden desks, rows and rows of us--I can see again all the little
heads in front of me--and far away was Miss Merrick with a pointer
trying to interest us in the Rivers of England:--
"Ty. Wear. Teasumber."
"Is that what they used to call swearing?" asked Willow.
"No. Only Jogriphy. And History was:--
"Wi-yum the Conqueror. Tessisstysiss.
Wi-yum Ruefiss. Ten eighty-seven."
"What did it mean?"
"To us children? Very much what it means to you--gibberish. The
hours, those interminable hours of childhood in school! How they
dragged! Did I say I lived a life in my dream? In school I lived
eternities. Naturally we sought such amusement as was possible. One
thing was to give your next-door neighbour a pinch or a punch and
say, 'Pass it on.' And we played furtive games with marbles. It is
rather amusing to recall that I learnt to count, to add and subtract
and so forth, by playing marbles in despite of discipline."
"But was that the best your Miss Merrick and your saint with the
cough could do?" asked Radiant.
"Oh! they couldn't help themselves. They were in a machine, and
there were periodic Inspectors and examinations to see that they kept
in it."
"But," said Sunray, "that Incantation about 'Wi-yum the Conqueror'
and the rest of it. It meant something? At the back of it, lost to
sight perhaps, there was some rational or semi-rational idea?"
"Perhaps," reflected Sarnac. "But I never detected it."
"They called it history," said Firefly helpfully.
"They did," Sarnac admitted. "Yes, I think they were trying to
interest the children of the land in the doings of the Kings and
Queens of England, probably as dull a string of monarchs as the world
has ever seen. If they rose to interest at times it was through a
certain violence; there was one delightful Henry VIII with such a
craving for love and such a tender conscience about the sanctity of
marriage that he always murdered one wife before he took another.
And there was one Alfred who burnt some cakes--I never knew why. In
some way it embarrassed the Danes, his enemies."
"But was that all the history they taught you?" cried Sunray.
"Queen Elizabeth of England wore a ruff and James the First of
England and Scotland kissed his men favourites."
"But history!"
Sarnac laughed. "It is odd. I see that--now that I am awake again.
But indeed that was all they taught us."
"Did they tell you nothing of the beginnings of life and the ends of
life, of its endless delights and possibilities?"
Sarnac shook his head.
"Not at school," said Starlight, who evidently knew her books; "they
did that at church. Sarnac forgets the churches. It was, you must
remember, an age of intense religious activity. There were places of
worship everywhere. One whole day in every seven was given up to the
Destinies of Man and the study of God's Purpose. The worker ceased
from his toil. From end to end of the land the air was full of the
sound of church bells and of congregations singing. Wasn't there a
certain beauty in that, Sarnac?"
Sarnac reflected and smiled. "It wasn't quite like that," he said.
"Our histories, in that matter, need a little revision."
"But one sees the churches and chapels in the old photographs and
cinema pictures. And we still have many of their cathedrals. And
some of those are quite beautiful."
"And they have all had to be shored up and underpinned and tied
together with steel," said Sunray, "because they were either so
carelessly or so faithlessly built. And anyhow, these were not built
in Sarnac's time."
"Mortimer Smith's time," Sarnac corrected.
"They were built hundreds of years earlier than that."
§ 3
"You must not judge the religion of an age by its temples and
churches," said Sarnac. "An unhealthy body may have many things in
it that it cannot clear away, and the weaker it is the less it can
prevent abnormal and unserviceable growths.... Which sometimes may
be in themselves quite bright and beautiful growths.
"But let me describe to you the religious life of my home and
upbringing. There was a sort of State Church in England, but it had
lost most of its official standing in regard to the community as a
whole; it had two buildings in Cherry Gardens--one an old one dating
from the hamlet days with a square tower and rather small as churches
went, and the other new and spacious with a spire. In addition there
were the chapels of two other Christian communities, the
Congregationalists and the Primitive Methodists, and also one
belonging to the old Roman Catholic communion. Each professed to
present the only true form of Christianity and each maintained a
minister, except the larger Church of England place, which had two,
the vicar and the curate. You might suppose that, like the museums
of history and the Temples of Vision we set before our young people,
these places would display in the most moving and beautiful forms
possible the history of our race and the great adventure of life in
which we are all engaged, they would remind us of our brotherhood and
lift us out of selfish thoughts.... But let me tell you how I saw
it:--
"I don't remember my first religious instruction. Very early I must
have learnt to say a rhymed prayer to--
"'Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look on me, a little child.'
And also another prayer about 'Trespassing' which I thought referred
to going into fields or woods where there was no public footpath, and
which began with the entirely incomprehensible words, 'Our Father
Charting Heaven, Haloed B thy Name.' Also one asked for one's 'daily
bread' and that God's Kingdom should come. I learnt these two
prayers from my mother at an incredibly early age, and said them
every night and sometimes in the morning. She held these words in
far too great reverence to explain them, and when I wanted to ask for
my 'daily bread and butter,' she scolded me bitterly. I also wanted
to ask what would happen to good Queen Victoria when God's Kingdom
came, but I never mustered courage to ask my mother that. I had a
curious idea that there could be a marriage but that nobody had
thought of that solution. This must have been very early in my life,
because Victoria the Good died when I was five, during the course of
a long, far-away, and now almost-forgotten struggle called the Boer
War.
"These infantile perplexities deepened and then gave way to a kind of
self-protective apathy when I was old enough to go to church and
Sunday school.
"Sunday morning was by far the most strenuous part of all the week
for my mother. We had all had a sort of bath overnight in the
underground kitchen, except my father and mother, who I don't think
ever washed all over--I don't know for certain--and on Sunday morning
we rose rather later than usual and put on our 'clean things' and our
best clothes. (Everybody in those days wore a frightful lot of
clothes. You see, they were all so unhealthy they could not stand
the least exposure to wet or cold.) Breakfast was a hurried and
undistinguished meal on the way to greater things. Then we had to
sit about, keeping out of harm's way, avoiding all crumpling or dirt,
and pretending to be interested in one of the ten or twelve books our
home possessed, until church time. Mother prepared the Sunday meal,
almost always a joint of meat in a baking-dish which my elder sister
took in to the baker's next door but one to be cooked while we
worshipped. Father rose later than anyone and appeared strangely
transformed in a collar, dickey and cuffs and a black coat and his
hair smoothed down and parted. Usually some unforeseen delay arose;
one of my sisters had a hole in her stocking, or my boots wouldn't
button and nobody could find the buttonhook, or a prayer-book was
mislaid. This engendered an atmosphere of flurry. There were
anxious moments when the church bell ceased to ring and began a
monotonous 'tolling-in.'
"'Oh! we shall be late _again_!' said my mother. 'We shall be late
_again_.'
"'I'll go on with Prue,' my father would say.
"'Me too!' said Fanny.
"'Not till you've found that button'ook, Miss Huzzy,' my mother would
cry. 'For well I know you've 'ad it.'
"Fanny would shrug her shoulders.
"'Why 'e carn't 'ave lace-up shoes to 'is feet like any other kid, I
carn't understand,' my father would remark unhelpfully.
"My mother, ashen white with flurry, would wince and say, 'Lace-up
shoes at 'is age! Let alone that 'e'd break the laces.'
"'What's that on the chiffoneer?' Fanny would ask abruptly.
"'Ah! Naturally you know.'
"'Naturally I use my eyes.'
"'Tcha! Got your answer ready! Oh, you _wicked_ girl!'
"Fanny would shrug her shoulders again and stare out of the window.
There was more trouble afoot than a mislaid buttonhook between her
and my mother. Overnight 'Miss Huzzy' had been abroad long after
twilight, a terrible thing from a mother's point of view, as I will
make plain to you later.
"My mother, breathing hard, would button my boots in a punitive
manner and then off we would go, Prue hanging on to father ahead,
Fanny a little apart and scornful, and I trying to wriggle my little
white-cotton-gloved hand out of my mother's earnest grip.
"We had what was called a 'sitting' at church, a long seat with some
hassocks and a kind of little praying-ledge at the back of the seat
in front. We filed into our sitting and knelt and rose up, and were
ready for the function known as morning service."
§ 4
"And this service again was a strange thing. We read about these
churches and their services in our histories and we simplify and
idealise the picture; we take everything in the account, as we used
to say in that old world, at its face value. We think that the
people understood and believed completely the curious creeds of those
old-world religions; that they worshipped with a simple ardour; that
they had in their hearts a secret system of comforts and illusions
which some of us even now try to recover. But life is always more
complicated than any account or representation of it can be. The
human mind in those days was always complicating and overlaying its
ideas, forgetting primary in secondary considerations, substituting
repetition and habit for purposive acts, and forgetting and losing
its initial intentions. Life has grown simpler for men as the ages
have passed because it has grown clearer. We were more complicated
in our lives then because we were more confused. And so we sat in
our pews on Sunday, in a state of conforming inattention, not really
thinking out what we were doing, feeling rather than knowing
significances and with our thoughts wandering like water from a leaky
vessel. We watched the people about us furtively and minutely and we
were acutely aware that they watched us. We stood up, we half knelt,
we sat, as the ritual of the service required us to do. I can still
recall quite vividly the long complex rustle of the congregation as
it sat down or rose up in straggling unison.
"This morning service was a mixture of prayers and recitations by the
priests--vicar and curate we called them--and responses by the
congregation, chants, rhymed hymns, the reading of passages from the
Hebrew-Christian Bible, and at last a discourse. Except for this
discourse all the service followed a prescribed course set out in a
prayer-book. We hopped from one page of the prayer-book to another,
and 'finding your place' was a terrible mental exercise for a small
boy with a sedulous mother on one side and Prue on the other.
"The service began lugubriously and generally it was lugubrious. We
were all miserable sinners, there was no health in us; we expressed
our mild surprise that our Deity did not resort to violent measures
against us. There was a long part called the Litany in which the
priest repeated with considerable gusto every possible human
misfortune, war, pestilence, famine, and so on, and the congregation
interjected at intervals, 'Good Lord deliver us!' although you might
have thought that these were things within the purview of our
international and health and food administrators rather than matters
for the Supreme Being. Then the officiating priest went on to a
series of prayers for the Queen, the rulers of the State, heretics,
unfortunate people, travellers, and the harvest, all of which I
concluded were being dangerously neglected by Divine Providence, and
the congregation reinforced the priest's efforts by salvos of 'We
beseech Thee to hear us, Good Lord.' The hymns were of very variable
quality, but the greater part were effusive praises of our Maker,
with frequent false rhymes and bad quantities. We thanked Heaven for
our 'blessings,' and that without a thought of irony. Yet you would
imagine that a Deity of Infinite Power might easily have excused our
gratitude for the precarious little coal and greengrocery business in
Cherry Gardens and all my mother's toil and anxieties and my father's
worries.