The World Set Free

by H. G. Wells

  over the mountains, and breakfasted lightly, and then young

  Gardener, his secretary, came to consult him upon the spending of

  his day. Would he care to see people? Or was this gnawing pain

  within him too much to permit him to do that?

  'I'd like to talk,' said Karenin. 'There must be all sorts of

  lively-minded people here. Let them come and gossip with me. It

  will distract me-and I can't tell you how interesting it makes

  everything that is going on to have seen the dawn of one's own

  last day.'

  'Your last day!'

  'Fowler will kill me.'

  'But he thinks not.'

  'Fowler will kill me. If he does not he will not leave very much

  of me. So that this is my last day anyhow, the days afterwards if

  they come at all to me, will be refuse. I know…'

  Gardener was about to speak when Karenin went on again.

  'I hope he kills me, Gardener. Don't be-old-fashioned. The

  thing Iam most afraid of is that last rag of life. I may just go

  on-a scarred salvage of suffering stuff. And then-all the

  things I have hidden and kept down or discounted or set right

  afterwards will get the better of me. I shall be peevish. I may

  lose my grip upon my own egotism. It's never been a very firm

  grip. No, no, Gardener, don't say that! You know better, you've

  had glimpses of it. Suppose I came through on the other side of

  this affair, belittled, vain, and spiteful, using the prestige I

  have got among men by my good work in the past just to serve some

  small invalid purpose…'

  He was silent for a time, watching the mists among the distant

  precipices change to clouds of light, and drift and dissolve

  before the searching rays of the sunrise.

  'Yes,' he said at last, 'I am afraid of these anaesthetics and

  these fag ends of life. It's life we are all afraid of.

  Death!-nobody minds just death. Fowler is clever-but some day

  surgery will know its duty better and not be so anxious just to

  save something… provided only that it quivers. I've tried to

  hold my end up properly and do my work. After Fowler has done

  with me Iam certain I shall be unfit for work-and what else is

  there for me?… I know I shall not be fit for work…

  'I do not see why life should be judged by its last trailing

  thread of vitality… I know it for the splendid thing it is-I

  who have been a diseased creature from the beginning. I know it

  well enough not to confuse it with its husks. Remember that,

  Gardener, if presently my heart fails me and I despair, and if I

  go through a little phase of pain and ingratitude and dark

  forgetfulness before the end… Don't believe what I may say at

  the last… If the fabric is good enough the selvage doesn't

  matter. It can't matter. So long as you are alive you are just

  the moment, perhaps, but when you are dead then you are all your

  life from the first moment to the last…'

  Section 4

  Presently, in accordance with his wish, people came to talk to

  him, and he could forget himself again. Rachel Borken sat for a

  long time with him and talked chiefly of women in the world, and

  with her was a girl named Edith Haydon who was already very well

  known as a cytologist. And several of the younger men who were

  working in the place and a patient named Kahn, a poet, and

  Edwards, a designer of plays and shows, spent some time with him.

  The talk wandered from point to point and came back upon itself,

  and became now earnest and now trivial as the chance suggestions

  determined. But soon afterwards Gardener wrote down notes of

  things he remembered, and it is possible to put together again

  the outlook of Karenin upon the world and how he thought and felt

  about many of the principal things in life.

  'Our age,' he said, 'has been so far an age of scene-shifting. We

  have been preparing a stage, clearing away the setting of a drama

  that was played out and growing tiresome… If I could but sit

  out the first few scenes of the new spectacle…

  'How encumbered the world had become! It was ailing as Iam

  ailing with a growth of unmeaning things. It was entangled,

  feverish, confused. It was in sore need of release, and I suppose

  that nothing less than the violence of those bombs could have

  released it and made it a healthy world again. I suppose they

  were necessary. Just as everything turns to evil in a fevered

  body so everything seemed turning to evil in those last years of

  the old time. Everywhere there were obsolete organisations

  seizing upon all the new fine things that science was giving to

  the world, nationalities, all sorts of political bodies, the

  churches and sects, proprietorship, seizing upon those treat

  powers and limitless possibilities and turning them to evil uses.

  And they would not suffer open speech, they would not permit of

  education, they would let no one be educated to the needs of the

  new time… You who are younger cannot imagine the mixture of

  desperate hope and protesting despair in which we who could

  believe in the possibilities of science lived in those years

  before atomic energy came…

  'It was not only that the mass of people would not attend, would

  not understand, but that those who did understand lacked the

  power of real belief. They said the things, they saw the things,

  and the things meant nothing to them…

  'I have been reading some old papers lately. It is wonderful how

  our fathers bore themselves towards science. They hated it. They

  feared it. They permitted a few scientific men to exist and

  work-a pitiful handful… "Don't find out anything about us,"

  they said to them; "don't inflict vision upon us, spare our

  little ways of life from the fearful shaft of understanding. But

  do tricks for us, little limited tricks. Give us cheap lighting.

  And cure us of certain disagreeable things, cure us of cancer,

  cure us of consumption, cure our colds and relieve us after

  repletion…" We have changed all that, Gardener. Science is no

  longer our servant. We know it for something greater than our

  little individual selves. It is the awakeningmind of the race,

  and in a little while--In a little while--I wish indeed I

  could watch for that little while, now that the curtain has

  risen…

  'While I lie here they are clearing up what is left of the bombs

  in London,' he said. 'Then they are going to repair the ruins

  and make it all as like as possible to its former condition

  before the bombs fell. Perhaps they will dig out the old house in

  St John's Wood to which my father went after his expulsion from

  Russia… That London of my memories seems to me like a place in

  another world. For you younger people it must seem like a place

  that could never have existed.'

  'Is there much left standing?' asked Edith Haydon.

  'Square miles that are scarcely shaken in the south and

  north-west, they say; and most of the bridges and large areas of

  dock. Westminster, which held most of the government offices,

  suffered badly from the sm
all bomb that destroyed the Parliament,

  there are very few traces of the old thoroughfare of Whitehall or

  the Government region thereabout, but there are plentiful

  drawings to scale of its buildings, and the great hole in the

  east of London scarcely matters. That was a poor district and

  very like the north and the south… It will be possible to

  reconstruct most of it… It is wanted. Already it becomes

  difficult to recall the old time-even for us who saw it.'

  'It seems very distant to me,' said the girl.

  'It was an unwholesome world,' reflected Karenin. 'I seem to

  remember everybody about my childhood as if they were ill. They

  were ill. They were sick with confusion. Everybody was anxious

  about money and everybody was doing uncongenial things. They ate

  a queer mixture of foods, either too much or too little, and at

  odd hours. One sees how ill they were by their advertisements.

  All this new region of London they are opening up now is

  plastered with advertisements of pills. Everybody must have been

  taking pills. In one of the hotel rooms in the Strand they have

  found the luggage of a lady covered up by falling rubble and

  unburnt, and she was equipped with nine different sorts of pill

  and tabloid. The pill-carrying age followed the weapon-carrying

  age. They are equally strange to us. People's skins must have

  been in a vile state. Very few people were properly washed; they

  carried the filth of months on their clothes. All the clothes

  they wore were old clothes; our way of pulping our clothes again

  after a week or so of wear would have seemed fantastic to them.

  Their clothing hardly bears thinking about. And the congestion

  of them! Everybody was jostling against everybody in those awful

  towns. In an uproar. People were run over and crushed by the

  hundred; every year in London the cars and omnibuses alone killed

  or disabled twenty thousand people, in Paris it was worse; people

  used to fall dead for want of air in the crowded ways. The

  irritation of London, internal and external, must have been

  maddening. It was a maddened world. It is like thinking of a

  sick child. One has the same effect of feverish urgencies and

  acute irrational disappointments.

  'All history,' he said, 'is a record of a childhood…

  'And yet not exactly a childhood. There is something clean and

  keen about even a sick child-and something touching. But so much

  of the old times makes one angry. So much they did seems grossly

  stupid, obstinately, outrageously stupid, which is the very

  opposite to being fresh and young.

  'I was reading only the other day about Bismarck, that hero of

  nineteenth-century politics, that sequel to Napoleon, that god of

  blood and iron. And he was just a beery, obstinate, dull man.

  Indeed, that is what he was, the commonest, coarsest man, who

  ever became great. I looked at his portraits, a heavy, almost

  froggish face, with projecting eyes and a thick moustache to hide

  a poor mouth. He aimed at nothing but Germany, Germany

  emphasised, indurated, enlarged; Germany and his class in

  Germany; beyond that he had no ideas, he was inaccessible to

  ideas; his mind never rose for a recorded instant above a

  bumpkin's elaborate cunning. And he was the most influential man

  in the world, in the whole world, no man ever left so deep a mark

  on it, because everywhere there were gross men to resonate to the

  heavy notes he emitted. He trampled on ten thousand lovely

  things, and a kind of malice in these louts made it pleasant to

  them to see him trample. No-he was no child; the dull, national

  aggressiveness he stood for, no childishness. Childhood is

  promise. He was survival.

  'All Europe offered its children to him, it sacrificed education,

  art, happiness and all its hopes of future welfare to follow the

  clatter of his sabre. The monstrous worship of that old fool's

  "blood and iron" passed all round the earth. Until the atomic

  bombs burnt our way to freedom again…'

  'One thinks of him now as one thinks of the megatherium,' said

  one of the young men.

  'From first to last mankind made three million big guns and a

  hundred thousand complicated great ships for no other purpose but

  war.'

  'Were there no sane men in those days,' asked the young man, 'to

  stand against that idolatry?'

  'In a state of despair,' said Edith Haydon.

  'He is so far off-and there are men alive still who were alive

  when Bismarck died!'… said the young man…

  Section 5

  'And yet it may be Iam unjust to Bismarck,' said Karenin,

  following his own thoughts. 'You see, men belong to their own

  age; we stand upon a common stock of thought and we fancy we

  stand upon the ground. I met a pleasant man the other day, a

  Maori, whose great-grandfather was a cannibal. It chanced he had

  a daguerreotype of the old sinner, and the two were marvellously

  alike. One felt that a little juggling with time and either

  might have been the other. People are cruel and stupid in a

  stupid age who might be gentle and splendid in a gracious one.

  The world also has its moods. Think of the mental food of

  Bismarck's childhood; the humiliations of Napoleon's victories,

  the crowded, crowning victory of the Battle of the Nations…

  Everybody in those days, wise or foolish, believed that the

  division of the world under a multitude of governments was

  inevitable, and that it was going on for thousands of years more.

  It WAS inevitable until it was impossible. Any one who had denied

  that inevitability publicly would have been counted-oh! a SILLY

  fellow. Old Bismarck was only just a little-forcible, on the

  lines of the accepted ideas. That is all. He thought that since

  there had to be national governments he would make one that was

  strong at home and invincible abroad. Because he had fed with a

  kind of rough appetite upon what we can see now were very stupid

  ideas, that does not make him a stupid man. We've had advantages;

  we've had unity and collectivism blasted into our brains. Where

  should we be now but for the grace of science? I should have been

  an embittered, spiteful, downtrodden member of the Russian

  Intelligenza, a conspirator, a prisoner, or an assassin. You, my

  dear, would have been breaking dingy windows as a suffragette.'

  'NEVER,' said Edith stoutly…

  For a time the talk broke into humorous personalities, and the

  young people gibed at each other across the smiling old

  administrator, and then presently one of the young scientific men

  gave things a new turn. He spoke like one who was full to the

  brim.

  'You know, sir, I've a fancy-it is hard to prove such

  things-that civilisation was very near disaster when the atomic

  bombs came banging into it, that if there had been no Holsten and

  no induced radio-activity, the world would have-smashed-much as

  it did. Only instead of its being a smash that opened a way to

  better things, it might have been a smash without a recovery. It

 
is part of my business to understand economics, and from that

  point of view the century before Holsten was just a hundred

  years' crescendo of waste. Only the extreme individualism of that

  period, only its utter want of any collective understanding or

  purpose can explain that waste. Mankind used up

  material-insanely. They had got through three-quarters of all

  the coal in the planet, they had used up most of the oil, they

  had swept away their forests, and they were running short of tin

  and copper. Their wheat areas were getting weary and populous,

  and many of the big towns had so lowered the water level of their

  available hills that they suffered a drought every summer. The

  whole system was rushing towards bankruptcy. And they were

  spending every year vaster and vaster amounts of power and energy

  upon military preparations, and continually expanding the debt of

  industry to capital. The system was already staggering when

  Holsten began his researches. So far as the world in general went

  there was no sense of danger and no desire for inquiry. They had

  no belief that science could save them, nor any idea that there

  was a need to be saved. They could not, they would not, see the

  gulf beneath their feet. It was pure good luck for mankind at

  large that any research at all was in progress. And as I say,

  sir, if that line of escape hadn't opened, before now there might

  have been a crash, revolution, panic, social disintegration,

  famine, and-it is conceivable-complete disorder… The

  rails might have rusted on the disused railways by now, the

  telephone poles have rotted and fallen, the big liners dropped

  into sheet-iron in the ports; the burnt, deserted cities become

  the ruinous hiding-places of gangs of robbers. We might have been

  brigands in a shattered and attenuated world. Ah, you may smile,

  but that had happened before in human history. The world is still

  studded with the ruins of broken-down civilisations. Barbaric

  bands made their fastness upon the Acropolis, and the tomb of

  Hadrian became a fortress that warred across the ruins of Rome

  against the Colosseum… Had all that possibility of reaction

  ended so certainly in 1940? Is it all so very far away even

  now?'

  'It seems far enough away now,' said Edith Haydon.

  'But forty years ago?'

  'No,' said Karenin with his eyes upon the mountains, 'I think you

  underrate the available intelligence in those early decades of