Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island by H. G. Wells (Illustrated)

H. G. Wells, Delphi Classics

• Publisher: Delphi Classics (Parts Edition)
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781786565952
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

This eBook features the unabridged text of 'Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island' from the bestselling edition of 'The Complete Works of H. G. Wells'.

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CHAPTER THE FOURTH

Of the Strange Transfiguration that happened to Rampole Island. — How Mr. Blettsworthy came back to Civilisation. — How he played his part manfully and was wounded and nearly died a hero in the World War for Civilisation. — Of Rowena his wife and his Children. — How he found an occupation; — and of a Great Talk he had with an Old Friend. — Leading to those Reflections upon Life in General promised on the Title Page.

§ 1. ROWENA

I GAVE it up for a time and finished my soup.

She put her hand on mine and said again: “ But your fever has gone! “ Mutely I sought to get up and mutely she assisted me. I sat on the edge of the bed. I was perplexed because the place was certainly the cave in which now for weeks she had been feeding me, tending me and guarding me. And also it was a room.

“What is the matter with my shoulder?” I asked.

“That was hurt when you were knocked down by the taxi-auto.”

“Taxi-auto? An arrow.”

“No. A taxi-auto. I dragged you out of the gutter.” I ran my fingers through my hair. I considered another difficulty.

“You are wearing civilised clothes,” I said.

“Why not? We can’t always be making love.”

“ But you are the woman I love, all the same?”

“Don’t you doubt it.”

I explored my poor muddled memory. “I saved you from drowning?”

“In the Hudson.”

“The Hudson? You were no end of trouble to get out of the water... But you were worth it.”

“My poor puzzled dear!” and she kissed my hand as she had done a hundred times before, with the same mixture of devotion and indulgence.

I stared about me. “The way that ceiling takes the light from the window. It used to be a great limestone slab. And those cliffs outside, those tall, grey cliffs, they are great buildings!”

I sniffed the air. “Somewhere,” I said, and my eyes searched the room. Upon the window-sill were three flowerpots containing, I knew, lemon verbena.

I stood up and she supported me, for I seemed to be groggy on the legs. We went across the room to the window, and I looked upon a scene that was at once strange and familiar. Over the busy water with its traffic, the mighty masses of lower New York towered squarely up to the sky, softened and etherealised by the warm light of late afternoon. Her arm about me, protected me and sustained me as I looked out. “Have I been delirious?” I asked. “Have I been in a dream?”

Her arm about me tightened and she made no reply.

“This is New York. Of course — this is New York.”

“There’s the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“This is not Rampole Island?”

Mutely she shook her head.

“This is my own civilised world.”

“Oh, my dear lover!” she whispered.

“And Rampole Island and all its cruelty, barbarity and hopeless stupidity was a dream, a fantastic dream?”

But she was weeping. Perhaps she was weeping with happiness because my delusions were lifting from my mind.

§ 2. DR. MINCHETT EXPLAINS

A THIN veil of doubt seemed to be falling across the first brightness of my world restored. I turned from the window, sensible that I was still very weak. She helped me to sit down in a little arm-chair, which had, I felt, a castor out of order. “So all that dreary frightfulness,” I said, “the war, the cruelties, Ardam, it was all no more than a dream.”

She did not answer. Her face was turned from me towards the door. Came a rap, for which she seemed to have been waiting. “Come in,” she cried, and a man appeared with a brown and broad face, that might have been the face of Chit the soothsayer, washed and brushed and adapted to the standards of Brooklyn Heights. He stood in the doorway considering us. It was Chit and not Chit. I knew he would speak with Chit’s familiar flat voice.

She addressed him joyfully. “He’s ever so much better. We’re no longer in a cave. See! He’s been looking out of the window! He knows New York.”

The new-comer, squat and broad-shouldered, advanced and scrutinised me with Chit’s eyes. “You find yourself in Brooklyn.”

“I find myself a little uncertainly.”

“And you know who I am?”

“I’ve called you Chit.”

“Short for Minchett. Dr. Aloysius G. Minchett, at your service.” He walked past me to the window and stood looking out. He spoke over his shoulder at me as though he did not want to disconcert me by speaking to me too directly. “How often have I told you that this is the real world! And how often have you answered it was Rampole Island! Until I lost all hope for you. And then this young lady does all that I and all the other alienists of New York have failed to do. She brings you back to your senses by pitching herself into the Hudson River up above the Palisades, just as you were wandering along the bank alone. And here you are — both of you — if I may say so — clothed and in your right minds.”

He had turned and smiled at Rowena as he said the last words, and now he faced me.

“Well?” he said to assist me. He perched himself on the edge of the table with the air of a man who has time to spare.

“You must forgive my mental confusion,” I said at last, weighing my words. “I do not know how I came here. I want to know how I came to be here, looking at Manhattan Island, when I thought I was far away from all the world on a quite different island off South America. My mind, I know, plays strange tricks. What trick is it playing now?”

“It’s ceasing to play tricks,” said Dr. Minchett.

“Have I been — abnormal?”

“The abnormal,” said Minchett in the exact manner of the Island Soothsayer, “is only the normal disproportioned.”

“The abnormality amounted to — insanity?”

“Not — how shall I put it? — structural. There was, there is, no lesion. But your mind is exceptional. Very sensitive and rather divided within itself. And I happen to be in that line of research. You have afforded me peculiar opportunities of study.”

I looked from him to Rowena. Her expression encouraged me to go on. I turned to him again with a question.

“Was I your Sacred Lunatic?”

“You were more or less in my care.”

“But where was I in your care?”

“Here — in the State of New York. After you were brought here. Yonkers chiefly. The Quinn mental clinic.”

“But about Rampole Island?”

“There is a place called Rampole Island. You must have caught up the name when you were rescued.”

“And I have been there?”

“Possibly you went ashore for an hour or so. In the boat that took you off the Golden Lion.”

“You are certain this is not Rampole Island?”

“No, no,” said Rowena, “this is the real world. Hard reality.”

I turned to her and considered her. How fragile she was and how pretty! “ Which you were doing your best to leave,” I said, trying to piece things together. “You were trying to drown yourself. Why were you trying to drown yourself?”

She came to me and sat on the arm of my chair and drew my head close to her breast. “You saved me,” she whispered. “You jumped into the water and saved me. You jumped into my life and saved me altogether.”

For a moment I seemed to get hold of things, and then I realised I had hold of nothing. A score of riddles baffled me.

I turned to Dr. Minchett again and apologised for my mental haziness. I asked him to explain the situation more clearly and then, feeling suddenly giddy, I went back to the bed and sat down on it. “I’m a case, I suppose. Tell me the history of my case. Tell me why I have leapt suddenly from Rampole Island to New York.”

He considered the heads of his subject.

“It’s good to be able to talk to you plainly at last,” he remarked. “I’m all for letting you know.”

But he did not begin forthwith. He swung off the table and paced to and fro, the width of the room. “Well?” I said at last.

“He’s got to say it properly,” Rowena excused him. “Do you remember you were on a derelict steamship, the Golden Lion? Do you remember that?”

“Right up to the end. The captain had left me to drown.”

“Left you to drown?”

“He slammed me in a cabin when the boats put off”

“H’m. Never knew that before. He slammed you in the cabin. You must tell me of that. Anyhow, you were found on that ship by a boatload of men from the steam yacht Smithson, collecting various scientific data in the South Atlantic and Tierra del Fuego. That’s where my story begins. Two of our sailors found you asleep behind the funnel and when you woke up you screamed and went for them with a hatchet. You were — to make no bones about it — stark, staring mad.”

“But—” said I, and then: “Go on.”

“You were, regarded as a specimen, rather large and unwieldy for the Smithson.”

“Wait a moment,” said I. “How long ago was this?”

He did a little sum in his head. “Nearly five years.”

“My God!” I said, and Rowena gave me a sympathetic squeeze.

Dr. Minchett held to his course. “You were, to put it mildly, a very inconvenient specimen indeed. The Director of our expedition handed you over to me, me being a mental doctor by profession, and I did what I could to adapt you to our circumstances. You must understand I was there in the capacity of ethnologist. I’d had worries of my own, and I was making the voyage for a holiday. I knew the director...”

He reflected and seemed to be selecting his statements from a great wealth of material.

“You were some handful,” he said...

“They took you into a creek in Rampole Island, and that’s all you ever saw of the place. You were raving that you had lost your world and that we were all bloody savages and painted cannibals. They brought you aboard the Smithson and I was detailed to tone you down, or keep you locked in a cabin. I was interested in you professionally from the outset. My idea was that you weren’t, in any physical sense, mad; nothing wrong, I mean, with your cells and tissues. You’d been treated badly in some way, and were still badly frightened. Also you had got mentally disconnected. I suppose if I’d let them do what they wanted to do and lock you up in a cabin to batter the door, it would have about finished you. You had a real horror of being put in a cabin. Do you remember about that?”

I searched my memory. “No.”

I hesitated, and said less surely, “No-o.”

Some dim memory of trying to get out of a cabin returned to me. But that had been on the Golden Lion.

“You had to be humoured,” he recalled. “And you weren’t popular. You just hated all mankind for a lot of dirty savages and — Well, you were tactless about it. They would have dropped you out of that ship almost anywhere if it hadn’t been for me, but I said you weren’t merely a vexatious human being; you were my one scientific specimen, and that made you respectable. So they brought you all the way home. I wanted to get you back for intensive study at the Frederick Quinn Institute at Yonkers. Europeans are hardly beginning to suspect yet how good our observational and experimental work on mental states is over here. We get such a variety of types. I’ve had difficulties with the Immigration Authorities and difficulties with your old guardian in London, but I’ve kept them both more or less squared, and I’ve had you under observation at Yonkers or in New York ever since. Your guardian is a good sort. He sent people to look you up, and when he saw what we were doing he did me the honour of giving me a free hand — and paying up. We put it through. You’ve had some legacies and you’re fairly well off. I’ve got all the accounts in order. It took me two whole years to establish you were not really dangerous either to yourself or to others, and get you released under my guarantee, in a flat of your own.”

“This one?”

“You’ve moved in here, since you picked up with her.”

“It’s my flat,” whispered Rowena. “You took it for me and gave up your own.”

I reflected. “That is all very well as far as it goes. But why do I remember none of these things?”

“Some of them you remember in a different fashion. But you’re what I insist is a type case of Interpretative Reverie.”

He waited for me to say “Go on,” and after a momentary pause I realised and did what was expected of me.

He came to a stop in front of me and stood, hands in pockets, and became — to use his own phraseology — a type case of university teacher. “You see,” he began, clawed at nothing with his left hand, and began again. “It’s like this.”

But I will not attempt to reproduce the tattered fabric of his exposition. Let who must, suffer from the university teacher. This is a printed book. His theory, or his explanation, whichever you like to call it, was based on the idea that our apprehension of outer reality is never exact and uncritical. We filter and...

Table of contents

• Title page
• H. G. WELLS
• COPYRIGHT
• H. G. Wells: Parts Edition
• Parts Edition Contents
• Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island
• CONTENTS
• CHAPTER THE FIRST
• CHAPTER THE SECOND
• CHAPTER THE THIRD
• CHAPTER THE FOURTH
• The Delphi Classics Catalogue