Short Fiction by H. G. Wells (ebook smartphone .txt) 📕

“If only I can forget⁠—”

“That’s easy enough with you. You wish it. I’ve done much harder things. Quite recently. I hardly expected to do it: the thing was done against the will of the hypnotised person. A love affair too⁠—like yours. A girl. So rest assured.”

The young man came and sat beside the hypnotist. His manner was a forced calm. He looked into the hypnotist’s eyes. “I will tell you. Of course you will want to know what it is. There was a girl. Her name was Elizabeth Mwres. Well⁠—”

He stopped. He had seen the instant surprise on the hypnotist’s face. In that instant he knew. He stood up. He seemed to dominate the seated figure by his side. He gripped the shoulder of green and gold. For a time he could not find words.

“Give her me back!” he said at last. “Give her me back!”

“What do you mean?” gasped the hypnotist.

“Give her me back.”

“Give whom?”

“Elizabeth Mwres⁠—the girl⁠—”

The hypnotist tried to free himself; he rose to his feet. Denton’s grip tightened.

“Let go!” cried the hypnotist, thrusting an arm against Denton’s chest.

In a moment the two men were locked in a clumsy wrestle. Neither had the slightest training⁠—for athleticism, except for exhibition and to afford opportunity for betting, had faded out of the Earth⁠—but Denton was not only the younger but the stronger of the two. They swayed across the room, and then the hypnotist had gone down under his antagonist. They fell together⁠ ⁠…

Denton leaped to his feet, dismayed at his own fury; but the hypnotist lay still, and suddenly from a little white mark where his forehead had struck a stool shot a hurrying band of red. For a space Denton stood over him irresolute, trembling.

A fear of the consequences entered his gently nurtured mind. He turned towards the door. “No,” he said aloud, and came back to the middle of the room. Overcoming the instinctive repugnance of one who had seen no act of violence in all his life before, he knelt down beside his antagonist and felt his heart. Then he peered at the wound. He rose quietly and looked about him. He began to see more of the situation.

When presently the hypnotist recovered his senses, his head ached severely, his back was against Denton’s knees and Denton was sponging his face.

The hypnotist did not speak. But presently he indicated by a gesture that in his opinion he had been sponged enough. “Let me get up,” he said.

“Not yet,” said Denton.

“You have assaulted me, you scoundrel!”

“We are alone,” said Denton, “and the door is secure.”

There was an interval of thought.

“Unless I sponge,” said Denton, “your forehead will develop a tremendous bruise.”

“You can go on sponging,” said the hypnotist sulkily.

There was another pause.

“We might be in the Stone Age,” said the hypnotist. “Violence! Struggle!”

“In the Stone Age no man dared to come between man and woman,” said Denton.

The hypnotist thought again.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“While you were insensible I found the girl’s address on your tablets. I did not know it before. I telephoned. She will be here soon. Then⁠—”

“She will bring her chaperone.”

“That is all right.”

“But what⁠—? I don’t see. What do you mean to do?”

“I looked about for a weapon also. It is an astonishing thing how few weapons there are nowadays. If you consider that in the Stone Age men owned scarcely anything but weapons. I hit at last upon this lamp. I have wrenched off the wires and things, and I hold it so.” He extended it over the hypnotist’s shoulders. “With that I can quite easily smash your skull. I will⁠—unless you do as I tell you.”

“Violence is no remedy,” said the hypnotist, quoting from the Modern Man’s Book of Moral Maxims.

“It’s an undesirable disease,” said Denton.

“Well?”

“You will tell that chaperone you are going to order the girl to marry that knobby little brute with the red hair and ferrety eyes. I believe that’s how things stand?”

“Yes⁠—that’s how things stand.”

“And, pretending to do that, you will restore her memory of me.”

“It’s unprofessional.”

“Look here! If I cannot have that girl I would rather die than not. I don’t propose to respect your little fancies. If anything goes wrong you shall not live five minutes. This is a rude makeshift of a weapon, and it may quite conceivably be painful to kill you. But I will. It is unusual, I know, nowadays to do things like this⁠—mainly because there is so little in life that is worth being violent about.”

“The chaperone will see you directly she comes⁠—”

“I shall stand in that recess. Behind you.”

The hypnotist thought. “You are a determined young man,” he said, “and only half civilised. I have tried to do my duty to my client, but in this affair you seem likely to get your own way⁠ ⁠…”

“You mean to deal straightly.”

“I’m not going to risk having my brains scattered in a petty affair like this.”

“And afterwards?”

“There is nothing a hypnotist or doctor hates so much as a scandal. I at least am no savage. I am annoyed⁠ ⁠… But in a day or so I shall bear no malice⁠ ⁠…”

“Thank you. And now that we understand each other, there is no necessity to keep you sitting any longer on the floor.”

The world, they say, changed more between the year 1800 and the year 1900 than it had done in the previous five hundred years. That century, the nineteenth century, was the dawn of a new epoch in the history of mankind⁠—the epoch of the great cities, the end of the old order of country life.

In the beginning of the nineteenth century the majority of mankind still lived upon the countryside, as their way of life had been for countless generations. All over the world they dwelt in little towns and villages then, and engaged either directly in agriculture, or in occupations that were of service to the agriculturist. They travelled rarely, and dwelt close to their work, because swift means of