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

“Last night!” she said. “I could not live through another such night.”

He looked at her. Her face was pale for want of sleep, and drawn and haggard. He came to a sudden resolution. “We must go back,” he said.

She looked at the dead dogs, and shivered. “We cannot stay here,” she said.

“We must go back,” he repeated, glancing over his shoulder to see if the enemy kept their distance. “We have been happy for a time⁠ ⁠… But the world is too civilised. Ours is the age of cities. More of this will kill us.”

“But what are we to do? How can we live there?”

Denton hesitated. His heel kicked against the wall on which he sat. “It’s a thing I haven’t mentioned before,” he said, and coughed; “but⁠—”

“Yes?”

“You could raise money on your expectations,” he said.

“Could I?” she said eagerly.

“Of course you could. What a child you are!”

She stood up, and her face was bright. “Why did you not tell me before?” she asked. “And all this time we have been here!”

He looked at her for a moment, and smiled. Then the smile vanished. “I thought it ought to come from you,” he said. “I didn’t like to ask for your money. And besides⁠—at first I thought this would be rather fine.”

There was a pause.

“It has been fine,” he said; and glanced once more over his shoulder. “Until all this began.”

“Yes,” she said, “those first days. The first three days.”

They looked for a space into one another’s faces, and then Denton slid down from the wall and took her hand.

“To each generation,” he said, “the life of its time. I see it all plainly now. In the city⁠—that is the life to which we were born. To live in any other fashion⁠ ⁠… Coming here was a dream, and this⁠—is the awakening.”

“It was a pleasant dream,” she said⁠—“in the beginning.”

For a long space neither spoke.

“If we would reach the city before the shepherds come here, we must start,” said Denton. “We must get our food out of the house and eat as we go.”

Denton glanced about him again, and, giving the dead dogs a wide berth, they walked across the garden space and into the house together. They found the wallet with their food, and descended the bloodstained stairs again. In the hall Elizabeth stopped. “One minute,” she said. “There is something here.”

She led the way into the room in which that one little blue flower was blooming. She stooped to it, she touched it with her hand.

“I want it,” she said; and then, “I cannot take it⁠ ⁠…”

Impulsively she stooped and kissed its petals.

Then silently, side by side, they went across the empty garden-space into the old high road, and set their faces resolutely towards the distant city⁠—towards the complex mechanical city of those latter days, the city that had swallowed up mankind.

Prominent if not paramount among world-changing inventions in the history of man is that series of contrivances in locomotion that began with the railway and ended for a century or more with the motor and the patent road. That these contrivances, together with the device of limited liability joint stock companies and the supersession of agricultural labourers by skilled men with ingenious machinery, would necessarily concentrate mankind in cities of unparallelled magnitude and work an entire revolution in human life, became, after the event, a thing so obvious that it is a matter of astonishment it was not more clearly anticipated. Yet that any steps should be taken to anticipate the miseries such a revolution might entail does not appear even to have been suggested; and the idea that the moral prohibitions and sanctions, the privileges and concessions, the conception of property and responsibility, of comfort and beauty, that had rendered the mainly agricultural states of the past prosperous and happy, would fail in the rising torrent of novel opportunities and novel stimulations, never seems to have entered the nineteenth-century mind. That a citizen, kindly and fair in his ordinary life, could as a shareholder become almost murderously greedy; that commercial methods that were reasonable and honourable on the old-fashioned countryside, should on an enlarged scale be deadly and overwhelming; that ancient charity was modern pauperisation, and ancient employment modern sweating; that, in fact, a revision and enlargement of the duties and rights of man had become urgently necessary, were things it could not entertain, nourished as it was on an archaic system of education and profoundly retrospective and legal in all its habits of thought. It was known that the accumulation of men in cities involved unprecedented dangers of pestilence; there was an energetic development of sanitation; but that the diseases of gambling and usury, of luxury and tyranny should become endemic, and produce horrible consequences was beyond the scope of nineteenth-century thought. And so, as if it were some inorganic process, practically unhindered by the creative will of man, the growth of the swarming unhappy cities that mark the twenty-first century accomplished itself.

The new society was divided into three main classes. At the summit slumbered the property owner, enormously rich by accident rather than design, potent save for the will and aim, the last avatar of Hamlet in the world. Below was the enormous multitude of workers employed by the gigantic companies that monopolised control; and between these two the dwindling middle class, officials of innumerable sorts, foremen, managers, the medical, legal, artistic, and scholastic classes, and the minor rich, a middle class whose members led a life of insecure luxury and precarious speculation amidst the movements of the great managers.

Already the love story and the marrying of two persons of this middle class have been told: how they overcame the obstacles between them, and how they tried the simple old-fashioned way of living on the countryside and came back speedily enough into the city of London. Denton had no means, so Elizabeth borrowed money on the securities that her father Mwres held