“I've been in the gardens on the river terrace,” he answers, “hoping I might see her again.” - novel sciencefiction
“You'll have your double back from India to-morrow. Then you'll have conversation.”I let myself down into a seat beside him.
Some glimmering of the botanist's feelings strikes through to my slow sympathies. Of course—a strange man! I put out a restraining hand towards his arm. “I told you,” I say, “that very probably, most probably, she would have met some other. I tried to prepare you.”He has an impulse to rise. “That scoundrel,” he repeats.He and I stand up quickly, I as soon as he. But now the full meaning of the group has reached me. I grip his arm.
He shakes his head, and then bursts out with, “What do I want with a double? Double! What do I care if things have been different here? This―” “And what are we all but scars? What is life but a scarring? It's you—you who don't understand! Of course we are covered with scars, we live to be scarred, we are scars! We are the scars of the past! These dreams, these childish dreams―!”My Utopia rocks about me.
“You don't allow for my position,” he says, and it occurs to me to say, “I'm obliged to look at the thing from my own point of view....” Comes a crash to our left, and a running of people to see a cab-horse down on the slippery, slanting pavement outside St. Martin's Church.A heavy-eyed young Jewess, a draggled prostitute—no crimson flower for her hair, poor girl!—regards us with a momentary speculation, and we get a whiff of foul language from two newsboys on the kerb.
We are separated again by half-a-dozen lifted flagstones, a burning brazier, and two engineers concerned with some underground business or other—in the busiest hour of the day's traffic.“It spoils the world of everyday to let your mind run on impossible perfections.”My note becomes quarrelsome. “You may accept this as the world of reality, you may consent to be one scar in an ill-dressed compound wound, but so—not I! This is a dream too—this world.
For ten seconds or more I am furiously seeking in my mind for a word, for a term of abuse, for one compendious verbal missile that shall smash this man for ever. It has to express total inadequacy of imagination and will, spiritual anæmia, dull respectability, gross sentimentality, a cultivated pettiness of heart....
One inspects the Thing in Being with something of the diffident speculation of primitive man, peering from behind a tree at an angry elephant. As my omnibus goes lumbering up Cockspur Street through the clatter rattle of the cabs and carriages, there comes another fancy in my mind.... Could one but realise an apocalyptic image and suppose an angel, such as was given to each of the seven churches of Asia, given for a space to the service of the Greater Rule.
The omnibus sways forward.
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