Babes in the Darkling Wood

by H.G. Wells

Genres: Classics; Science Fiction; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Stella has the world at her feet - good looks, brains, and a place at Cambridge University. Together with her admirer Gemini, she becomes interested in the work and mind of a psycho-therapist with exciting new ideas. However, when tragedy encroaches on their lives they soon come to realise that intellectualism brings little comfort or solace. Babes in the Darkling Wood is a powerful tale of fluctuating fortunes that presents an interesting dialogue of contemporary developments in psychoanalytical theory.

Release date: April 30, 2017

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

IT IS CHARACTERISTIC OF MOST literary criticism to be carelessly uncritical of the terms it uses and violently partisan and dogmatic in its statements about them. No competent Linnaeus has ever sat down to sort out the orders and classes, genera and varieties, of fiction, and no really sane man ever will. They have no fixed boundaries; all sorts interbreed as shamelessly as dogs, and they pass at last by indefinite gradations into more or less honest fact telling, into “historical reconstruction,” the roman à clef, biography, history and autobiography. So the literary critic, confronted with a miscellany of bookish expression far more various than life itself, has an excellent excuse for the looseness of his vocabulary, if not for his exaltations and condemnations. Unhappily he insists on adopting types for his preference and he follows fashions. My early life as a naive, spontaneous writer was much afflicted by the vehement advocacy by Henry James II, Joseph Conrad, Edward Garnett and Ford Madox Hueffer, of something called The Novel, and by George Moore of something called The Short Story. There were all sorts of things forbidden for The Novel; there must be no explanation of the ideas animating the characters, and the author himself had to be as invisible and unheard—of as Cod; for no conceivable reason. So far as The Short Story went, it gave George Moore the consolation of calling Kipling’s stories, and in fact any short stories that provoked his ready jealousy, “anecdotes.” Novelists were arranged in order of merit that made the intelligent reader doubt his own intelligence, and the idea of “Progress” was urged upon the imaginative writer. Conrad was understood to be in the van of progress; Robert Louis Stevenson had “put the clock back,” and so on. Quite inconspicuous young writers were able to believe that in some mysterious technical way they were leaving Defoe and Sterne far away behind them. There has been no such “progress” in human brains. Against this sort of thing, which for many reasons I found tiresome and unpalatable, I rebelled. I declared that a novel, as distinguished from the irresponsible plausibilities of romance or the invention in imaginative stories of hitherto unthought-of human circumstances, could be any sort of honest treatment of the realities of human behaviour in narrative form. Conduct was the novel’s distinctive theme. It was and is and must be, if we are to have any definition of a novel. All writing should be done as well as it can be done, wit and vigour are as Cod wills, but pretentious artistry is a minor amateurism on the flank of literature.

This present story belongs to a school to which I have always been attracted, and in which I have already written several books. The merit of my particular contributions may be infinitesimal, but that does not alter the fact that they follow in a great tradition, the tradition of discussing fundamental human problems in dialogue form.

The dialogue, written or staged, is one of the oldest forms of literary expression. Very early, men realised the impossibility of abstracting any philosophy of human behaviour from actual observable flesh and blood. As soon can you tear a brain away from its blood and membranes: it dies. Abstract philosophy is the deadest of stuff; one disintegrating hortus siccus follows another; I am astounded at the implacable Scholarly industry of those who still write Textbooks of Philosophy. And your psychological handbook is only kept alive by a stream of anecdote. The Socratic Dialogue on the other hand produces character after character to state living views, to have them ransacked by an interlocutor who is also a character subject to all the infirmities of the flesh. Plato’s dramas of the mind live to this day. They may have inspired—it is a fancy of mine for which there is only very slight justification—that kindred Socratic novel, the Book of Job. For that magnificent creation my admiration is unstinted. I have made a close study of it; I have in fact not only studied it but modernised it, traced it over, character by character and speech, in The Undying Fire. The Book of Job has been compared to a Greek tragedy, to the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, for example, but I see it myself, naturally enough, from the angle of the writer. It was written to be read.

Manifestly the novel of ideas and the play of ideas converge. My friend George Bernard Shaw has lived a long, vivid life putting the discussion of ideas on to the English stage, to the infinite exasperation of generation after generation of dramatic critics, who insist upon puppets with heads of solid wood. Then they can get the drama of pure situation within the compass of overnight judgments. From opposite directions Shaw and I approach what is to us and, I submit, firmly and immodestly, to all really intelligent people, the most interesting thing in the world, the problems of human life and behaviour as we find them incarnate in persons. We have no claim to be pioneers, but by an inner necessity we were revivalists. Hamlet is evidently a dramatic dialogue about suicide in face of intolerable conditions, and Julius Caesar a treatment of political assassination. But by the time Shaw began dramatic criticism ideas had vanished from the English theatre for generations. Mallock and Peacock, however, had kept the dialogue alive through the darkest period of the three-volume novel.

I found myself, and I got to the dialogue novel, through a process of trial and error. The critical atmosphere was all against me. As I felt about rebelliously among the possibilities of fiction, I found certain of my characters were displaying an irresistible tendency to break out into dissertation. Many critical readers, trained to insist on a straight story, objected to these talkers; they said they were my self-projections, author’s exponents. But in many cases these obtrusive individuals were not saying things I thought, but, what is a very different thing, things I wanted to put into shape by having them said. An early type of this sort of book was Ann Veronica. She is a young woman who soliloquises and rhapsodises incessantly, revealing the ideas of the younger intelligentsia round about 1910, which I had found very interesting indeed. Before then no one had realised there was an English intelligentsia. The book is not a dialogue, simply because no one answers Ann Veronica. It interested a number of people who did not realise fully what bad taste they showed in being interested.

I made a much nearer approach to the fully developed novel of ideas in Mr Britling Sees It Through. I was getting more cunning about the business. I made him a writer and I used the letters home of his son to say a number of things that could be said in no other way. In Joan And Peter, I did what I think was a better book than Mr Britling; it is a dialogue about education, and I centred the discussion on the perplexities of the guardian who had to find a school for these young people. All my most recent hooks, Brynhild, Dolores (apart from the scandalous misbehaviour of her dog and a few such uncontrollable incidents), The Holy Terror, are primarily discussions carried on through living characters; it is for the discussion of behaviour they were written, and to cut out the talk would be like cutting a picture out of its frame.

And now I will come to the plan and purpose of this present book, which is the most comprehensive and ambitious dialogue novel I have ever attempted. I will try to explain certain devices I have had to adopt, and certain unavoidable necessities of the treatment. At the present time a profounder change in human thought and human outlook is going on than has ever occurred before. The great literary tradition I follow demands that this be rendered in terms of living human beings. It must be shown in both word and act. This I attempt here. So far as my observation and artistry as a novelist have enabled me to achieve it, there is not a single individual in this book that you might not meet and recognise in the street. If you have had any experience in writing fiction, I think you will find that you can take any of my characters out of this book and invent a meeting between them and the real people you know. But because of the very great burden of fresh philosophical matter that this novel has to carry, I have chosen my chief individuals from among the sort of people who would be closest to that matter. I have made one main figure a psychotherapeutist who as an intrusive outside lecturer carries on a feud with the academic traditions of Cambridge. He writes, he talks, he lectures, aggressively and destructively. Very much under his intellectual influence are my central “Babes,” two keen young people, one a Newnham undergraduate and the other her lover, Gemini, an Oxford man, who writes and criticises in a “highbrow” weekly, talks abundantly and is in harsh conflict with his father, a London Police Magistrate, celebrated for his bitter utterances on the London bench, and constitutionally addicted to uttering judgments. The mother is a highly self-conscious writer of bright letters. The mental break-down of Gemini after some grim experiences in Poland and Finland bring the methods of a leading psychoanalyst and modern psychosynthesis into the story. All these people talk, write and explain, by habit, profession and necessity. I could not devise a more favourable assemblage of personalities for a modem symposium, or I would have done so. The inexpert reader might imagine that nothing remained for the novelist to do but to report their conversations.

But that is by no means the case. Let us consider for example the long conversation between Stella and Gemini after they had received Uncle Hopkinshire’s abusive threats. Everything reported of it was actually said and understood, and to both interlocutors the chastened, edited, polished conversation given in that section would certainly be acceptable as a fair rendering of their intentions. Yet it is really as different from what they actually said to one another as clear, large print is from a note scribbled in faint pencil on crumpled scraps of paper. They talked a language that was sometimes a kind of shorthand to each other. They had been educated upon parallel lines; they had read the same books; they could say much of this that is set before you, with half the words and without ever finishing a sentence; all sorts of things could be assumed between them; they could pick up and finish each other’s phrases; and if I were to write it all down verbatim you would find it, unless you were made to exactly the same pattern and belonged to the same generation, inconsecutive and incomprehensible to the extremest degree. And sometimes, when they entered upon unfamiliar territory, instead of shorthand they used a roundabout very elongated longhand, abounding in loops, digressions and corrections, while they felt their way to their meaning. Moreover, ever and again, it has been necessary, by a turn of the phrase or the neat insertion of a phrase that might be unknown to you, to get over the reality of what they said to you. Again and again, to do them justice, it has been necessary to clarify, condense, expand or underline their words. Nevertheless, what is given here is what they imagined they were saying, and what indeed they meant. And I do not know of any way of writing the novel of ideas that can dispense with such magnified and crystallised conversations and meditations.…

That magnification and clarification applies in a greater or lesser degree to nearly all the talk in every novel of ideas. It is the exact opposite of that “flow of consciousness” technique, with which Virginia Woolf, following in the footsteps of Dorothy Richardson, has experimented more or less successfully. Thereby personalities are supposed to be stippled out by dabs of responses, which after all have to be verbalised. Uncle Robert, when he discourses on a University Education, tells Stella a score of things that as a matter of fact he knew she knew. Later on he and Gemini perform a sort of duet of mutual information. They explain the whole gist and bearing of the new and entirely revolutionary philosophy of behaviourism to one another, cheerfully, uncivilly and without embarrassment. I know of no better way of setting out this new way of thinking. To the best of my ability I contrive a situation that makes their talk as plausible as possible, and I keep rigorously true to their mental characters. In this fashion I may manage to get away with the understanding reader. But against the carping realist who objects that people do not talk like this, there is no reply, except that people know what they mean much better than they say it, and that the most unrighteous thing a reporter can do to a speaker or lecturer is to report him verbatim. So I put this dialogue novel of contemporary ideas before you with characters I claim to be none the less living because through my lens you see them larger and clearer than life.

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 talk?”

“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 mustard,’ one can talk about in a sort of natural unprintable way, but ideas.… We’re abashed. We’ve been trained to be abashed. My old nurse began it. ‘Don’t you talk like a book, Mr Jimmy,’ she said. ‘Don’t you go using long words.’ But suppose the short words won’t do it? You’re so right, Stella. We’ve got to talk of these things. Of course we have. There’s a sort of shyness they put upon us.… Even between lovers.…”

She nodded. “Worse than their damned decency,” she said. She returned the handkerchief rolled into a ball. Then she remarked, apropos of nothing: “This morning I saw a big bird flying across the garden and it cuckooed as it flew. Always before, I thought they sat and did it. Did you know, Gemini, they cuckooed as they flew?”

“And sitting also. I’ve seen ’em perched on branches and doing it.…”

But he did not seem to be thinking about cuckoos. Neither of them was thinking with any particular intensity about cuckoos. And the sun, the old fool, went on shining upon them.

2. BLOCK OF ALABASTER

One side of the deep lane changed its character and became highly respectable as a tall, well-trimmed hedge of yew. Presently that hedge had a lapse, where something had devoured or destroyed it and left only a stretch of oak palings to carry on in its place.

Our young people cast off the cares of the world abruptly and became gaminesque. Simultaneously they had one and the same idea. “Let’s peek at old Kalikov’s lump,” she said. “Just once more. That lovely lump.”

“Marble it is,” he said.

“Alabaster, I tell you. I know.”

“Marble. You never get alabaster in ’normous lumps like that. Alabaster’s semi-precious or something of that sort. Just little bits.”

“Who ever saw marble all bloodshot?”

“Obstinate. Alabaster is marble.”

“Ignorance. It’s gypsum.”

“That G is hard. It’s Greek.”

“Even there you are wrong. It’s English and soft. Naturalised ages ago.”

She put out her tongue at him. That was that.… In the most perfect accord they crept up to the gap in the hedge and looked over. There, amidst thick grass and tall wild hemlock was a big piece of Derbyshire alabaster, twelve feet high at least.

“See that sort of dirty pink vein,” she began.… He laid a hand on her arm. “Sh,” he said very softly. “He’s there.… There!”

They became as still and observant as startled fawns. Kalikov, a great lump of a man, with a frizzy, non-Aryan coiffure and ears that you would have thought any sensitive sculptor would have cut off or improved upon years ago, was sitting on a garden seat in the shade of a mulberry tree, brooding over his huge, clumsy block of material. There was a flavour almost of blood-relationship between him and it. He was still as death and intensely wide awake. When at last he stirred it was as eventful as if the block had stirred. He put out his hand. He moved it slowly in a curving path. Then it came to rest, extended.

He shook his head disapprovingly. He repeated his gesture. This time it passed muster. He drew it back along an invisible lower path, carefully, mystically. It was as if he caressed the invisible. It was as if he was trying to hypnotise the inanimate. Then his hand went back into his pocket and he became still again, scheming, dreaming.

The two young people looked at one another and then dropped back noiselessly into the lane.

“Like that,” she whispered.

“Then one day he will get his chisels and hammers and things and begin to hew it out,” she expanded.

“No clay model?” he queried.

“Not for him.” She was sure. Some paces further he spoke with a note of intense surprise.

“But that’s exactly how we have to do it. Exactly. Exactly what has been trying to get into my mind for weeks.”

She made an interrogative noise.

“That,” he said, with a backward toss of the head. “That behind there. It’s just exactly how I feel about things.”

“Meaning?”

“Something completely hidden. Which is there?

“Yeah?”

“Clumsy block of a world, monstrous, crushing the grass, bloodshot, and yet in it there is a world to be found, a real world, a great world.”

“Which he may find?”

“Which we may find-our sort of people—in