The H.G. Wells Reader (45 page)

“I know,” wept Medina-saroté. “But he's better than he was. He's getting better. And he's strong, dear father, and kind—stronger and kinder than any other man in the world. And he loves me—and, father, I love him.”

Old Yacob was greatly distressed to find her inconsolable, and besides—what made it more distressing—he liked Nunez for many things. So he went and sat in the windowless council-chamber with the other elders and watched the trend of the talk, and said, at the proper time, “He's better than he was. Very likely, some day, we shall find him as sane as ourselves.”

Then afterwards one of the elders, who thought deeply, had an idea. He was the great doctor among these people, their medicine-man, and he had a very philosophical and inventive mind, and the idea of curing Nunez of his peculiarities appealed to him. One day when Yacob was present he returned to the topic of Nunez.

“I have examined Bogota,” he said, “and the case is clearer to me. I think very probably he might be cured.”

“That is what I have always hoped,” said old Yacob.

“His brain is affected,” said the blind doctor.

The elders murmured assent.

“Now,
what
affects it?”

“Ah!” said old Yacob.

“
This
,” said the doctor, answering his own question. “Those queer things that are called the eyes, and which exist to make an agreeable soft depression in the face, are diseased, in the case of Bogota, in such a way as to affect his brain. They are greatly distended, he has eyelashes, and his eyelids move, and consequently his brain is in a state of constant irritation and destruction.”

“Yes?” said old Yacob. “Yes?”

“And I think I may say with reasonable certainty that, in order to cure him completely, all that we need do is a simple and easy surgical operation—namely, to remove these irritant bodies.”

“And then he will be sane?”

“Then he will be perfectly sane, and a quite admirable citizen.”

“Thank Heaven for science!” said old Yacob, and went forth at once to tell Nunez of his happy hopes.

But Nunez's manner of receiving the good news struck him as being cold and disappointing.

“One might think,” he said, “from the tone you take, that you did not care for my daughter.”

It was Medina-saroté who persuaded Nunez to face the blind surgeons.

“
You
do not want me,” he said, “to lose my gift of sight?”

She shook her head.

“My world is sight.”

Her head drooped lower.

“There are the beautiful things, the beautiful little things—the flowers, the lichens among the rocks, the lightness and softness on a piece of fur, the far sky with its drifting down of clouds, the sunsets and the stars. And there is
you
. For you alone it is good to have sight, to see your sweet, serene face, your kindly lips, your dear, beautiful hands folded together. . . . It is these eyes of mine you won, these eyes that hold me to you, that these idiots seek. Instead, I must touch you, hear you, and never see you again. I must come under that roof of rock and stone and darkness, that horrible roof under which your imagination stoops. . . . No; you would not have me do that?”

A disagreeable doubt had arisen in him. He stopped, and left the thing a question.

“I wish,” she said, “sometimes—” She paused.

“Yes?” said he, a little apprehensively.

“I wish sometimes—you would not talk like that.”

“Like what?”

“I know it's pretty—it's your imagination. I love it, but
now
—”

He felt cold. “
Now
?” he said faintly.

She sat quite still.

“You mean—you think—I should be better, better perhaps—”

He was realizing things very swiftly. He felt anger, indeed, anger at the dull course of fate, but also sympathy for her lack of understanding—a sympathy near akin to pity.

“
Dear
,” he said, and he could see by her whiteness how intensely her spirit pressed against the things she could not say. He put his arms about her, he kissed her ear, and they sat for a time in silence.

“If I were to consent to this?” he said at last, in a voice that was very gentle.

She flung her arms about him, weeping wildly. “Oh, if you would,” she sobbed, “if only you would!”

For a week before the operation that was to raise him from his servitude and inferiority to the level of a blind citizen, Nunez knew nothing of sleep, and all through the warm sunlit hours, while the others slumbered happily, he sat brooding or wandered aimlessly, trying to bring his mind to bear on his dilemma. He had given his answer, he had given his consent, and still he was not sure. And at last work-time was over, the sun rose in splendor over the golden crests, and his last day of vision began for him. He had a few minutes with Medina-saroté before she went apart to sleep.

“To-morrow,” he said, “I shall see no more.”

“Dear heart!” she answered, and pressed his hands with all her strength.

“They will hurt you but little,” she said; “and you are going through this pain—you are going through it, dear lover, for
me
. . . . Dear, if a woman's heart and life can do it, I will repay you. My dearest one, my dearest with the tender voice, I will repay.”

He was drenched in pity for himself and her.

He held her in his arms, and pressed his lips to hers, and looked on her sweet face for the last time. “Good-bye!” he whispered at that dear sight, “good-bye!”

And then in silence he turned away from her.

She could hear his slow retreating footsteps, and something in the rhythm of them threw her into a passion of weeping.

He had fully meant to go to a lonely place where the meadows were beautiful with white narcissus, and there remain until the hour of his sacrifice should come, but as he went he lifted up his eyes and saw the morning, the morning like an angel in golden armor, marching down the steeps. . . .

It seemed to him that before this splendor he, and this blind world in the valley, and his love, and all, were no more than a pit of sin.

He did not turn aside as he had meant to do, but went on, and passed through the wall of the circumference and out upon the rock, and his eyes were always upon the sunlit ice and snow.

He saw their infinite beauty, and his imagination soared over them to the things beyond he was now resign for ever.

He thought of that great free world he was parted from, the world that was his own, and he had a vision of those further slopes, distance beyond distance, with Bogota, a place of multitudinous stirring beauty, a glory by day, a luminous mystery by night. A place of palaces and fountains and statues and white houses, lying beautifully in the middle distance. He thought how for a day or so one might come down through the passes, drawing nearer and nearer to its busy streets and ways. He thought of the river journey, day by day, from great Bogota to the still vast world beyond, through towns and villages, forest and desert places, the rushing river day by day, until its banks receded and the big steamers came splashing by, and one had reached the sea—the limitless sea, with its thousands of islands, and its ships seen dimly far away in their incessant journeyings round and about that greater world. And then, unpent by mountains, one saw the sky—the sky, not such a disc as one saw it here, but an arch of immeasurable blue, a deep of deeps in which the circling stars were floating. . . .

His eyes scrutinized the great curtain of the mountains with a keener inquiry.

For example, if one went so, up that gully and to that chimney there, then one might come out high among those stunted pines that ran round in a sort of shelf and rose still higher and higher as it passed above the gorge. And then? That talus might be managed. Thence perhaps a climb might be found to take him up to the precipice that came below the snow; and if that chimney failed, then another farther to the east might serve his purpose better. And then? Then one would be out upon the amber-lit snow there, and half-way up to the crest of those beautiful desolations.

He glanced back at the village, then turned right round and regarded it steadfastly.

He thought of Medina-saroté, and she had become small and remote.

He turned again towards the mountain wall, down which the day had come to him.

Then very circumspectly he began to climb.

When sunset came he was no longer climbing, but he was far and high. He had been higher, but he was still very high. His clothes were torn, his limbs were bloodstained, he was bruised in many places, but he lay as if he were at his ease, and there was a smile on his face.

From where he rested the valley seemed as if it were in a pit and nearly a mile below. Already it was dim with haze and shadow, though the mountain summits around him were things of light and fire. The mountain summits around him were things of light and fire, and the little details of the rocks near at hand were drenched with subtle beauty—a vein of green mineral piercing the grey, the flash of crystal faces here and there, a minute, minutely beautiful orange lichen close beside his face. There were deep mysterious shadows in the gorge, blue deepening into purple, and
purple into a luminous darkness, and overhead was the illimitable vastness of the sky. But he heeded these things no longer, but lay quite inactive there, smiling as if he were satisfied merely to have escaped from the valley of the Blind in which he had thought to be King.

The glow of the sunset passed, and the night came, and still he lay peacefully contented under the cold stars.

In the Days of the Comet,
notorious in its own time for the suggestions of radical sexual possibilities, is a breakthrough novel. For almost a decade Wells had been drawing versions of the world his own adolescence prepared him for—a stunting, tiresome, ignorant, and outrageously unjust society that offered no escape for its victims. This new novel brazenly combines the genre of social realism with that of the scientific romance. In a finely paced exercise in cross-cutting, Wells brings to simultaneous crisis the love plot, the industrial strike, the international war, and the collision of Earth with the comet. The crowded, melodramatic stage is then suddenly and quietly suspended, and in its place appears a new dawn, sane, without rage, one in which all participants easily and generously confess their previous selfishness and immediately set about putting matters straight. Only in the slow working out of the love dilemma does Wells remind us (off in a corner, so to speak) that he knows that old behaviors do not simply evaporate. In the epilogue a man from our own time, a reader like ourselves, speaks of the skepticism to which the bright, monotone utopian optimism blinds us. The selection contains all of the first section of the novel, a bit of the second describing the awakening after the comet, and the chapters on love from the third. Sections recounting Leadford's work with the Prime Minister after the change and the death of Leadford's mother have be omitted. As the last chapter begins, Leadford has renounced Nettie and is ready to marry Anna, who has accompanied him through the death of his mother

I
saw a grey-haired man, a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk and writing
.

He seemed to be in a room in a tower, very high, so that through the tall window on his left one perceived only distances, a remote horizon of sea, a headland, and that vague haze and glitter in the sunset that many miles away marks a city. All the appointments of this room were orderly and beautiful, and in some subtle quality, in this small difference and that, new to me and strange. They were in no fashion I could name, and the simple costume the man wore suggested neither period nor country. It might, I thought, be the Happy Future, or Utopia; an errant mote of memory, Henry James's phrase and story of “The Great Good Place,” twinkled across my mind, and passed and left no light
.

The man I saw wrote with a thing like a fountain pen, a modern touch that prohibited any historical reference, and as he finished each sheet, writing in an easy flowing hand, he added it to a growing pile upon a graceful little table under the window. His last done sheets lay loose, partly covering others that were clipped together into fascicles
.

Clearly he was unaware of my presence, and I stood waiting until his pen should come to a pause. Old as he certainly was he wrote with a steady hand. . . 
.

I discovered that a concave speculum hung slantingly high over his head; a movement in this caught my attention sharply, and I looked up to see, distorted and made fantastic but bright and beautifully coloured, the magnified, reflected, evasive rendering of a palace, of a terrace, of the vista of a great roadway with many people, people exaggerated, impossible-looking because of the curvature of the mirror, going to and fro. I turned my head quickly that I might see more clearly through the window behind me, but it was too high for me to survey this nearer scene directly, and after a momentary pause I came back to that distorting mirror again
.

But now the writer was leaning back in his chair. He put down his pen and sighed the half resentful sigh—“ah! you work, you! how you gratify and tire me!”—of a man who has been writing to his satisfaction
.

“What is this place,” I asked, “and who are you?”

He looked around with the quick movement of surprise
.

“What is this place?” I repeated, “and where am I?”

He regarded me steadfastly for a moment under his wrinkled brows, and then his expression softened to a smile. He pointed to a chair beside the table. “I am writing,” he said
.