Babes in the Darkling Wood by H. G. Wells (Illustrated)

H. G. Wells, Delphi Classics

• Verlag: Delphi Classics (Parts Edition)
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786566065
• Thema: Literature
• Thema: Classics

This eBook features the unabridged text of 'Babes in the Darkling Wood' from the bestselling edition of 'The Complete Works of H. G. Wells'.

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eBook features:
* The complete unabridged text of 'Babes in the Darkling Wood'
* Beautifully illustrated with images related to Wells's works
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CHAPTER I. UNREVEALED WORLD

1. AND NOW WHAT?

A GIRL still just short of twenty walked very gravely, lightly and happily beside her lover, a youngster of twenty-four, along an overgrown, sunken, sun-flecked lane in Suffolk. The lane ran sometimes between fields and sometimes along the boundaries of pleasant residences, and it led from the village green at the centre of all things to the cottage they occupied. It was early in June. Lilac was dropping but the may was at its last and best; and countless constellations of stitchwort, clusters and nebulae, celebrated a brief ascendency over the promiscuous profusion of the hedge-banks.

“Stellaria!” said he, “it’s just chickweed, which proves that Stella is a chick — a downy little chick.”

“We won’t always talk nonsense,” said Stella.

“When one is drunk with happiness, what else can one ta1k?”

“Well,” she considered....

They bumped themselves against each other, summer-drunk, love-drunk, smiled into each other’s eyes, and he ran an impudent, appreciative hand over her bare shoulder. She shrank a little from that before she remembered not to shrink. His hand dropped to his side and they walked on, a little apart and with grave, preoccupied faces.

“Things that aren’t nonsense are so hard to express,” he said presently, and lapsed into another silence.

She was slight and lithe and sunburnt, with sun-bleached hair and intelligent, dark — blue eyes. She had finely modelled brows, with a faintly humorous crinkle in the broad forehead, and enough mouth for a variety of expressions; a wide mouth it was that could flash into a vivid smile or shut with considerable deliberation, which could kiss, as he knew, very delightfully but was by no means specialised for that purpose. She was wearing an exiguous pale green vest which emphasised rather than hid the points of her pretty body, a pair of grey flannel trousers, in which she evidently carried a lot of small possessions as well as her dirty little hands, and brown canvas shoes. Her third finger in her left hand pocket bore a wedding ring that would not have deceived a rabbit. A bright patterned green and gold silk handkerchief round her slim but sufficient waist completed her costume.

Her companion was perhaps four or five inches taller, and darker in complexion. He was something of a pug about the face, with disarming brown eyes, a lot of forehead and a resolute mouth. His rather crisp brown hair seemed to grow anyhow and had apparently been cut en brosse by an impatient and easily discouraged barber. This young man also wore grey slacks and canvas shoes, with a white cotton shirt that had once no doubt possessed as many buttons as any shirt, but which was now buttoned only at the right wrist. He was carrying a spike of bananas still attached to their parent stem in his left (off) hand. It was only as he walked that it became apparent that he was extremely lame.

The least worldly of people meeting this young couple would have known at once, if only by the challenging pride in their faces, that they were living in sin together, that they had been doing so for five or six days at the outside, and that they had never done anything of the sort before. But old Mrs Greedle, who did for them in Mary Clarkson’s borrowed week-end cottage, never betrayed a shadow of doubt about that very loosely fitting wedding ring. She consulted Stella upon all sorts of matronly questions and prompted her with the right answer whenever there was the least sign of hesitation....

But of Mrs Greedle more later....

“It is just because we are so happy,” he said, trying again.

“I know,” she agreed.

“Has anyone any right to be happy in a world like this?”

“We were foolish to get those newspapers and letters.”

“Sooner or later that had to come.”

“They had to come. And anyhow it’s been a lovely time. Such a lovely time. Such a very lovely time. Anyhow.”

“But all those other fellows all over the world....”

“We’ve only stolen a week”

“And no one can ever take it away from us. Whatever happens. There’s something unfair about our luck. Think of the ones who would — and can’t. Down here-or wherever there’s working people or out-of-works or gipsies or such-I look at them and feel a sort of thief. As though I’d stolen it from them. What right have we to our education, to the freedom in our minds, to the time and money, that makes all this possible? And our health! If we haven’t stolen, our blessed progenitors did. We are Receivers of stolen goods.”

“In a way it’s getting less and less unfair. The Evil Thing is going to catch us all sooner or later. Why shouldn’t we snatch this? At the eleventh hour?”

“To think that it’s an advantage to have had a foot crushed between a motor-bike and a tram! Luck to be a cripple! No obligation to join up. One of the exempted. The last of the free. We shall catch it with the other civilians but anyhow we’re not under orders.”

“Not so much of a cripple,” she reflected. “Anyhow I’m a woman now and grown-up and ready to look at what’s coming to us.”

“And what is coming to us?”

“It isn’t fair. Life didn’t come after our grandfathers and grandmothers and trim them up for slaughter. They had a breathing space.”

“Much good they did with it.”

“Romeo and Juliet weren’t called on for national service.”

“They didn’t get away with so very much either.”

“Just accidents and misunderstandings in their case, Gemini; they had bad luck, their people were awful people, worse than ours, and there were those mixed philtres, pure accident, and that was all there was the matter with them. But now everyone, all over the world, is being threatened, compelled, driven. Like a great hand feeling for us, catching more and more of us. It’s only God’s mercy that there isn’t some siren howling after us, or some loud-speaker bellowing A.R.P. instructions, here and now. It got us at the post office; it’s waiting for us at the cottage.... But I’m talking worse than you do, Gemini.”

“And saying what everyone is saying. All the same we two are the world’s pets. We’ve had education, art, literature, travel, while most of those others have been marched off long ago, trained to drudge, to obey, to trust the nice ruling classes — . Ideas kept from them. Books hard to get at. What’s the good of pretending that you and I are not the new ruling-class generation? We are. We’ve shared the loot. And what are we doing by way of thank-you for the education and the art and the literature and the travel we’ve had? Trying not to care a damn. Having as good a time as we can manage until something hits us.... It’s all the damned radio and the rest of it that does it. Why should I be worried because Chinese kids are being raped and disembowelled for fun by the Japs in Shanghai? Why should I be worried because they are being sold to the brothels and given syphilis and driven to death and all that, under the approving noses of our own blessed Pukka Sahibs in Hong Kong? Lousy Pukka Sahibs! Dirty old Blimps!... This, that and the other horror, up and down the world. That concentration camp stuff.... And all hammering down on our poor little brains. All the time now. All hammering down on us. Things like that have always been going on, but they didn’t worry grandfather when he walked in the lanes with grandmamma. They didn’t come after them as they come after us.”

“And they didn’t say You next.”

“Gods! Stella, and are we as bad as that? Maybe we are. Did it have to be bombs over London before any of our lot worried?”

She puckered her brows and weighed the question. She stuck her hands deeper in her trouser pockets as though that helped her thinking. “It wasn’t in the same world then,” she decided.

“Now it is. ‘Ye ken the noo,’ as the Calvinist’s God said.”

“We ken. And what are we going to do about it, Gemini? Playing bright kids won’t save us. If our sort can’t think of something, nobody will think of anything. We have to do something about it. We! You and me! And what can we do?...”

“What can we do?” he echoed. “Oh hell! Stella, what can we do? Being a Communist! What’s being a Communist? What good is it? Trotsky and Stalin don’t matter a damn to me. Conscientious objectors — objectors to being alive, I suppose. This, this muddle, is life. How can we stand out of it?... Anti-Fascist?... What party is there to work with; what leader can one follow? Saying No, No, NO to everything isn’t being alive. Why haven’t we leaders to lead us somewhere? I forgot things for a bit, this last week, but that emetic speech of the Prime Minister’s friend — what was his name? Lindsey-Jump-in-the-Snow Lindsey, they call him — and that story of those Jews in No Man’s Land and that quotation from that book of Timperley’s about those Japanese atrocities.... It’s all come back to me, and the helplessness of it. And the sun, old fool, goes on shining. You poor old fool up there! Why don’t you go out and finish us up?”

“And none of the old religions are any good?”

“It’s the old religions and faiths and patriotisms that have brought us to just exactly where we are. Manifestly.”

“No good going back to them again.”

“No good going back to anything again. But how to get on?”

She confronted him. “Gemini,” she said, “have you no ideas?”

“Oh! the shadows of the ghosts of ideas. And a sound of claptrap in the distance”

“Gemini Jimmini — that is to say Mr James Twain — listen to me. I love you. Always have done; long before you thought of it. I am your true love. Haven’t I proved it? And also, as I warned you, I am a prig.”

“Don’t I know it? Could I love you otherwise? Go on.”

“I warn you I am going to talk like a prig. Almost like warning you I’m going to be sick. I’ve felt it coming on. Gemini, I must say it.”

“Out with it, as they say on the excursion steamboats. Sorry! Oh-out with it, Stella!”

“Well, we two are individuals of outstanding intelligence. Outstanding intelligence. Young, of course, silly in a way because we are young, but really damned intelligent. That’s generally admitted by our friends and relations. Even Aunt Ruby said that. We are bright. In the privacy of this Lovers’ Lane, need we hesitate to say as much to one another? We are. Yes. And I’m for getting on with it. You listen. For all practical purposes, about the conduct of our lives, about the conduct of life, we don’t know a blessed thing. Not a blessed real thing. You as well as me. They haven’t told us anything worth knowing. We are just bright enough to realise that. The religion and morals they fed us are exploded old rubbish. That much we’ve found out. The unbelieving way they taught it us was enough to show that. Blank. Yet we’ve got to devote ourselves to something, Gemini, all the same. We’re made that way. We’ve got to learn what we can and use it somehow. We’ve got to do whatever is in us, to save ourselves and the world. Maybe we’ll do something. Maybe we’ll do nothing at all. But we’ve got to make the effort. In a war hundreds of people have to be killed or messed-up. Even if their side is winning. Some get in the way of their own side and get done in like that. Trying to do their best. All sorts go into the boiling. But they’ve got to join up, they’ve got to try. It doesn’t matter so long as they don’t slack or hide.... We’re slacking, Gemini....”

She was dismayed at herself.

“I can’t go on. It’s the very life of me I’m telling you, and it sounds — rot... preachment.... Salvation indeed!... Salvation Army.... If only I hadn’t begun. I’ve never talked this way.... I must — with you. I’m not just talking? She was weeping.

“Darling,” he said, and kissed and embraced her.

“No need to say any of this again,” she sobbed, clinging to him....

“Can I borrow your snitch-rag, Gemini?” she said presently. “I left mine at home.”

“We’ll have to talk about things,” he reflected. “I will. But it’s awful hard. We get this stuff out of books. We think of it bookishly. We have to at first. When we talk about it, it’s like bringing up partly digested print. We’ve got to talk bookish. What natural words are there? Slang, love-making, smut, games, gossip, ‘pass the mustar...