Title: Men Like Gods (1923)
Author: H.G. Wells
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Title: Men Like Gods
Author: H.G. Wells




To Florence Lamont
in whose home at Englewood this story
was christened

CONTENTS

BOOK THE FIRST - The Irruption of the Earthlings

1. Mr. Barnstaple Takes a Holiday
2. The Wonderful Road
3. The Beautiful People
4. The Shadow of Einstein Falls Across the Story but Passes Lightly by
5. The Governance and History of Utopia
6. Some Earthly Criticisms
7. The Bringing in of Lord Barralonga's Party
8. Early Morning in Utopia

BOOK THE SECOND - Quarantine Crag

1. The Epidemic
2. The Castle on the Crag
3. Mr. Barnstaple as a Traitor to Mankind
4. The End of Quarantine Crag

BOOK THE THIRD - A Neophyte in Utopia

1. The Peaceful Hills Beside the River
2. A Loiterer in a Living World
3. The Service of the Earthling
4. The Return of the Earthling




BOOK THE FIRST

THE IRRUPTION OF THE EARTHLINGS


CHAPTER THE FIRST

MR. BARNSTAPLE TAKES A HOLIDAY


Section 1

Mr. Barnstaple found himself in urgent need of a holiday, and he had
no one to go with and nowhere to go. He was overworked. And he was
tired of home.

He was a man of strong natural affections; he loved his family
extremely so that he knew it by heart, and when he was in these
jaded moods it bored him acutely. His three sons, who were all
growing up, seemed to get leggier and larger every day; they sat
down in the chairs he was just going to sit down in; they played
him off his own pianola; they filled the house with hoarse, vast
laughter at jokes that one couldn't demand to be told; they cut in
on the elderly harmless flirtations that had hitherto been one of
his chief consolations in this vale; they beat him at tennis; they
fought playfully on the landings, and fell downstairs by twos and
threes with an enormous racket. Their hats were everywhere. They
were late for breakfast. They went to bed every night in a storm
of uproar: "Haw, Haw, Haw--bump!" and their mother seemed to like
it. They all cost money, with a cheerful disregard of the fact
that everything had gone up except Mr. Barnstaple's earning power.
And when he said a few plain truths about Mr. Lloyd George at
meal-times, or made the slightest attempt to raise the tone of
the table-talk above the level of the silliest persiflage, their
attention wandered ostentatiously....

At any rate it _seemed_ ostentatiously.

He wanted badly to get away from his family to some place where he
could think of its various members with quiet pride and affection,
and otherwise not be disturbed by them....

And also he wanted to get away for a time from Mr. Peeve. The
very streets were becoming a torment to him, he wanted never to
see a newspaper or a newspaper placard again. He was obsessed by
apprehensions of some sort of financial and economic smash that
would make the Great War seem a mere incidental catastrophe. This
was because he was sub-editor and general factotum of the Liberal,
that well-known organ of the more depressing aspects of advanced
thought, and the unvarying pessimism of Mr. Peeve, his chief, was
infecting him more and more. Formerly it had been possible to put
up a sort of resistance to Mr. Peeve by joking furtively about his
gloom with the other members of the staff, but now there were no
other members of the staff: they had all been retrenched by Mr.
Peeve in a mood of financial despondency. Practically, now, nobody
wrote regularly for the Liberal except Mr. Barnstaple and Mr. Peeve.
So Mr. Peeve had it all his own way with Mr. Barnstaple. He would
sit hunched up in the editorial chair, with his hands deep in his
trouser pockets, taking a gloomy view of everything, sometimes for
two hours together. Mr. Barnstaple's natural tendency was towards
a modest hopefulness and a belief in progress, but Mr. Peeve held
very strongly that a belief in progress was at least six years out
of date, and that the brightest hope that remained to Liberalism
was for a good Day of Judgment soon. And having finished the copy
of what the staff, when there was a staff, used to call his weekly
indigest, Mr. Peeve would depart and leave Mr. Barnstaple to get
the rest of the paper together for the next week.

Even in ordinary times Mr. Peeve would have been hard enough to
live with; but the times were not ordinary, they were full of
disagreeable occurrences that made his melancholy anticipations
all too plausible. The great coal lock-out had been going on for
a month and seemed to foreshadow the commercial ruin of England;
every morning brought intelligence of fresh outrages from Ireland,
unforgivable and unforgettable outrages; a prolonged drought
threatened the harvests of the world; the League of Nations, of
which Mr. Barnstaple had hoped enormous things in the great days
of President Wilson, was a melancholy and self-satisfied futility;
everywhere there was conflict, everywhere unreason; seven-eighths
of the world seemed to be sinking down towards chronic disorder
and social dissolution. Even without Mr. Peeve it would have been
difficult enough to have made headway against the facts.

Mr. Barnstaple was, indeed, ceasing to secrete hope, and for such
types as he, hope is the essential solvent without which there is no
digesting life. His hope had always been in liberalism and generous
liberal effort, but he was beginning to think that liberalism would
never do anything more for ever than sit hunched up with its hands
in its pockets grumbling and peeving at the activities of baser but
more energetic men. Whose scrambling activities would inevitably
wreck the world.

Night and day now, Mr. Barnstaple was worrying about the world at
large. By night even more than by day, for sleep was leaving him.
And he was haunted by a dreadful craving to bring out a number of
the Liberal of his very own--to alter it all after Mr. Peeve had
gone away, to cut out all the dyspeptic stuff, the miserable, empty
girding at this wrong and that, the gloating on cruel and unhappy
things, the exaggeration of the simple, natural, human misdeeds
of Mr. Lloyd George, the appeals to Lord Grey, Lord Robert Cecil,
Lord Lansdowne, the Pope, Queen Anne, or the Emperor Frederick
Barbarossa (it varied from week to week), to arise and give voice
and form to the young aspirations of a world reborn, and, instead,
to fill the number with--Utopia! to say to the amazed readers of
the Liberal: Here are things that have to be done! Here are the
things we are going to do! What a blow it would be for Mr. Peeve
at his Sunday breakfast! For once, too astonished to secrete
abnormally, he might even digest that meal!

But this was the most foolish of dreaming. There were the three
young Barnstaples at home and their need for a decent start in
life to consider. And beautiful as the thing was as a dream, Mr.
Barnstaple had a very unpleasant conviction that he was not really
clever enough to pull such a thing off. He would make a mess of
it somehow....

One might jump from the frying-pan into the fire. The Liberal was
a dreary, discouraging, ungenerous paper, but anyhow it was not a
base and wicked paper.

Still, if there was to be no such disastrous outbreak it was
imperative that Mr. Barnstaple should rest from Mr. Peeve for a
time. Once or twice already he had contradicted him. A row might
occur anywhen. And the first step towards resting from Mr. Peeve
was evidently to see a doctor. So Mr. Barnstaple went to a doctor.

"My nerves are getting out of control," said Mr. Barnstaple. "I feel
horribly neurasthenic."

"You are suffering from neurasthenia," said the doctor. "I dread
my daily work."

"You want a holiday."

"You think I need a change?"

"As complete a change as you can manage."

"Can you recommend any place where I could go?"

"Where do you want to go?"

"Nowhere definite. I thought you could recommend--"

"Let some place attract you--and go there. Do nothing to force
your inclinations at the present time."

Mr. Barnstaple paid the doctor the sum of one guinea, and armed
with these instructions prepared to break the news of his illness
and his necessary absence to Mr. Peeve whenever the occasion
seemed ripe for doing so.


Section 2

For a time this prospective holiday was merely a fresh addition to
Mr. Barnstaple's already excessive burthen of worries. To decide
to get away was to find oneself face to face at once with three
apparently insurmountable problems: How to get away? Whither?
And since Mr. Barnstaple was one of those people who tire very
quickly of their own company: With whom? A sharp gleam of furtive
scheming crept into the candid misery that had recently become Mr.
Barnstaple's habitual expression. But then, no one took much notice
of Mr. Barnstaple's expressions.

One thing was very clear in his mind. Not a word of this holiday
must be breathed at home. If once Mrs. Barnstaple got wind of it,
he knew exactly what would happen. She would, with an air of
competent devotion, take charge of the entire business. "You must
have a _good_ holiday," she would say. She would select some rather
distant and expensive resort in Cornwall or Scotland or Brittany,
she would buy a lot of outfit, she would have afterthoughts to swell
the luggage with inconvenient parcels at the last moment, and she
would bring the boys. Probably she would arrange for one or two
groups of acquaintances to come to the same place to "liven things
up." If they did they were certain to bring the worst sides of their
natures with them and to develop into the most indefatigable of
bores. There would be no conversation. There would be much unreal
laughter, There would be endless games.... _No_!

But how is a man to go away for a holiday without his wife getting
wind of it? Somehow a bag must be packed and smuggled out of the
house....

The most hopeful thing about Mr. Barnstaple's position from Mr.
Barnstaple's point of view was that he owned a small automobile of
his very own. It was natural that this car should play a large part
in his secret plannings. It seemed to offer the easiest means of
getting away; it converted the possible answer to Whither? from a
fixed and definite place into what mathematicians call, I believe,
a locus; and there was something so companionable about the little
beast that it did to a slight but quite perceptible extent answer
the question, With whom? It was a two-seater. It was known in the
family as the Foot Bath, Colman's Mustard, and the Yellow Peril.
As these names suggest, it was a low, open car of a clear yellow
colour. Mr. Barnstaple used it to come up to the office from
Sydenham because it did thirty-three miles to the gallon and was
ever so much cheaper than a season ticket. It stood up in the court
under the office window during the day. At Sydenham it lived in a
shed of which Mr. Barnstaple carried the only key. So far he had
managed to prevent the boys from either driving it or taking it to
pieces. At times Mrs. Barnstaple made him drive her about Sydenham
for her shopping, but she did not really like the little car because
it exposed her to the elements too much and made her dusty and
dishevelled. Both by reason of all that it made possible and by
reason of all that it debarred, the little car was clearly indicated
as the medium for the needed holiday. And Mr. Barnstaple really
liked driving it. He drove very badly, but he drove very carefully;
and though it sometimes stopped and refused to proceed, it did not
do, or at any rate it had not so far done as most other things did
in Mr. Barnstaple's life, which was to go due east when he turned
the steering wheel west. So that it gave him an agreeable sense of
mastery.

In the end Mr. Barnstaple made his decisions with great rapidity.
Opportunity suddenly opened in front of him. Thursday was his day at
the printer's, and he came home on Thursday evening feeling horribly
jaded. The weather kept obstinately hot and dry. It made it none the
less distressing that this drought presaged famine and misery for
half the world. And London was in full season, smart and grinning:
if anything it was a sillier year than 1913, the great tango year,
which, in the light of subsequent events, Mr. Barnstaple had
hitherto regarded as the silliest year in the world's history.
The Star had the usual batch of bad news along the margin of the
sporting and fashionable intelligence that got the displayed space.
Fighting was going on between the Russians and Poles, and also in
Ireland, Asia Minor, the India frontier, and Eastern Siberia. There
had been three new horrible murders. The miners were still out,
and a big engineering strike was threatened. There had been only
standing room in the down train and it had started twenty minutes
late.

He found a note from his wife explaining that her cousins at
Wimbledon had telegraphed that there was an unexpected chance of
seeing the tennis there with Mademoiselle Lenglen and all the rest
of the champions, and that she had gone over with the boys and
would not be back until late. It would do their game no end of good,
she said, to see some really first-class tennis. Also it was the
servants' social that night. Would he mind being left alone in the
house for once? The servants would put him out some cold supper
before they went.

Mr. Barnstaple read this note with resignation. While he ate his
supper he ran his eye over a pamphlet a Chinese friend had sent him
to show how the Japanese were deliberately breaking up what was left
of the civilization and education of China.

It was only as he was sitting and smoking a pipe in his little back
garden after supper that he realized all that being left alone in
the house meant for him.

Then suddenly he became very active. He rang up Mr. Peeve, told him
of the doctor's verdict, explained that the affairs of the Liberal
were just then in a particularly leavable state, and got his
holiday. Then he went to his bedroom and packed up a hasty selection
of things to take with him in an old Gladstone bag that was not
likely to be immediately missed, and put this in the dickey of his
car. After which he spent some time upon a letter which he addressed
to his wife and put away very carefully in his breast pocket.

Then he locked up the car-shed and composed himself in a deck-chair
in the garden with his pipe and a nice thoughtful book on the
Bankruptcy of Europe, so as to look and feel as innocent as possible
before his family came home.

When his wife returned he told her casually that he believed he was
suffering from neurasthenia, and that he had arranged to run up to
London on the morrow and consult a doctor in the matter.

Mrs. Barnstaple wanted to choose him a doctor, but he got out of
that by saying that he had to consider Peeve in the matter and
that Peeve was very strongly set on the man he had already in fact
consulted. And when Mrs. Barnstaple said that she believed they
_all_ wanted a good holiday, he just grunted in a non-committal
manner.

In this way Mr. Barnstaple was able to get right away from his house
with all the necessary luggage for some weeks' holiday, without
arousing any insurmountable opposition. He started next morning
Londonward. The traffic on the way was gay and plentiful, but by no
means troublesome, and the Yellow Peril was running so sweetly that
she might almost have been named the Golden Hope. In Camberwell
he turned into the Camberwell New Road and made his way to the
post-office at the top of Vauxhall Bridge Road. There he drew up.
He was scared but elated by what he was doing. He went into the
post-office and sent his wife a telegram. "Dr. Pagan," he wrote,
"says solitude and rest urgently needed so am going off Lake
District recuperate have got bag and things expecting this letter
follows."

Then he came outside and fumbled in his pocket and produced and
posted the letter he had written so carefully overnight. It was
deliberately scrawled to suggest neurasthenia at an acute phase. Dr.
Pagan, it explained, had ordered an immediate holiday and suggested
that Mr. Barnstaple should "wander north." It would be better to
cut off all letters for a few days, or even a week or so. He would
not trouble to write unless something went wrong. No news would
be good news. Rest assured all would be well. As soon as he had a
certain address for letters he would wire it, but only very urgent
things were to be sent on.

After this he resumed his seat in his car with such a sense of
freedom as he had never felt since his first holidays from his first
school. He made for the Great North Road, but at the traffic jam at
Hyde Park Corner he allowed the policeman to turn him down towards
Knightsbridge, and afterwards at the corner where the Bath Road
forks away from the Oxford Road an obstructive van put him into the
former. But it did not matter very much. Any way led to Elsewhere
and he could work northward later.


Section 3

The day was one of those days of gay sunshine that were
characteristic of the great drought of 1921. It was not in the least
sultry. Indeed there was a freshness about it that blended with Mr.
Barnstaple's mood to convince him that there were quite agreeable
adventures before him. Hope had already returned to him. He knew he
was on the way out of things, though as yet he had not the slightest
suspicion how completely out of things the way was going to take
him. It would be quite a little adventure presently to stop at an
inn and get some lunch, and if he felt lonely as he went on he would
give somebody a lift and talk. It would be quite easy to give people
lifts because so long as his back was generally towards Sydenham.
and the Liberal office, it did not matter at all now in which
direction he went.

A little way out of Slough he was passed by an enormous grey touring
car. It made him start and swerve. It came up alongside him without
a sound, and though according to his only very slightly inaccurate
speedometer, he was doing a good twenty-seven miles an hour, it
had passed him in a moment. Its occupants, he noted, were three
gentlemen and a lady. They were all sitting up and looking backward
as though they were interested in something that was following them.
They went by too quickly for him to note more than that the lady was
radiantly lovely in an immediate and indisputable way, and that the
gentleman nearest to him had a peculiarly elfin yet elderly face.

Before he could recover from the eclat of this passage a car with
the voice of a prehistoric saurian warned him that he was again
being overtaken. This was how Mr. Barnstaple liked being passed. By
negotiation. He slowed down, abandoned any claim to the crown of the
road and made encouraging gestures with his hand. A large, smooth,
swift Limousine availed itself of his permission to use the thirty
odd feet or so of road to the right of him. It was carrying a fair
load of luggage, but except for a young gentleman with an eye-glass
who was sitting beside the driver, he saw nothing of its passengers.
It swept round a corner ahead in the wake of the touring car.

Now even a mechanical foot-bath does not like being passed in
this lordly fashion on a bright morning on the open road. Mr.
Barnstaple's accelerator went down and he came round that corner a
good ten miles per hour faster than his usual cautious practice.
He found the road quite clear ahead of him.

Indeed he found the road much too clear ahead of him. It stretched
straight in front of him for perhaps a third of a mile. On the left
were a low, well-trimmed hedge, scattered trees, level fields, some
small cottages lying back, remote poplars, and a distant view of
Windsor Castle. On the right were level fields, a small inn, and
a background of low, wooded hills. A conspicuous feature in this
tranquil landscape was the board advertisement of a riverside hotel
at Maidenhead. Before him was a sort of heat flicker in the air and
two or three little dust whirls spinning along the road. And there
was not a sign of the grey touring car and not a sign of the
Limousine.

It took Mr. Barnstaple the better part of two seconds to realize the
full astonishment of this fact. Neither to right nor left was there
any possible side road down which either car could have vanished.
And if they had already got round the further bend, then they must
be travelling at the rate of two or three hundred miles per hour!

It was Mr. Barnstaple's excellent custom whenever he was in doubt
to slow down. He slowed down now. He went on at a pace of perhaps
fifteen miles an hour, staring open-mouthed about the empty
landscape for some clue to this mysterious disappearance. Curiously
enough he had no feeling that he himself was in any sort of danger.

Then his car seemed to strike something and skidded. It skidded
round so violently that for a moment or so Mr. Barnstaple lost his
head. He could not remember what ought to be done when a car skids.
He recalled something vaguely about steering in the direction
in which the car is skidding, but he could not make out in the
excitement of the moment in what direction the car was skidding.

Afterwards he remembered that at this point he heard a sound. It
was exactly the same sound, coming as the climax of an accumulating
pressure, sharp like the snapping of a lute string, which one hears
at the end--or beginning--of insensibility under anaesthetics.

He had seemed to twist round towards the hedge on the right, but now
he found the road ahead of him again. He touched his accelerator and
then slowed down and stopped. He stopped in the profoundest
astonishment.

This was an entirely different road from the one he had been upon
half a minute before. The hedges had changed, the trees had altered,
Windsor Castle had vanished, and--a small compensation--the big
Limousine was in sight again. It was standing by the roadside about
two hundred yards away,



CHAPTER THE SECOND

THE WONDERFUL ROAD


Section 1

For a time Mr. Barnstaple's attention was very unequally divided
between the Limousine, whose passengers were now descending, and the
scenery about him. This latter was indeed so strange and beautiful
that it was only as people who must be sharing his admiration and
amazement and who therefore might conceivably help to elucidate
and relieve his growing and quite overwhelming perplexity, that
the little group ahead presently arose to any importance in his
consciousness.

The road itself instead of being the packed together pebbles and
dirt smeared with tar with a surface of grit, dust, and animal
excrement, of a normal English high road, was apparently made of
glass, clear in places as still water and in places milky or
opalescent, shot with streaks of soft colour or glittering richly
with clouds of embedded golden flakes. It was perhaps twelve or
fifteen yards wide. On either side was a band of greensward, of a
finer grass than Mr. Barnstaple had ever seen before--and he was an
expert and observant mower of lawns--and beyond this a wide border
of flowers. Where Mr. Barnstaple sat agape in his car and perhaps
for thirty yards in either direction this border was a mass of some
unfamiliar blossom of forget-me-not blue. Then the colour was broken
by an increasing number of tall, pure white spikes that finally
ousted the blue altogether from the bed. On the opposite side of the
way these same spikes were mingled with masses of plants bearing
seed-pods equally strange to Mr. Barnstaple, which varied through a
series of blues and mauves and purples to an intense crimson. Beyond
this gloriously coloured foam of flowers spread flat meadows on
which creamy cattle were grazing. Three close at hand, a little
startled perhaps by Mr. Barnstaple's sudden apparition, chewed the
cud and regarded him with benevolently speculative eyes. They had
long horns and dewlaps like the cattle of South Europe and India.
From these benign creatures Mr. Barnstaple's eyes went to a long
line of flame-shaped trees, to a colonnade of white and gold, and
to a background of snow-clad mountains. A few tall, white clouds
were sailing across a sky of dazzling blue. The air impressed Mr.
Barnstaple as being astonishingly clear and sweet.

Except for the cows and the little group of people standing by the
Limousine Mr. Barnstaple could see no other living creature. The
motorists were standing still and staring about them. A sound of
querulous voices came to him.

A sharp crepitation at his back turned Mr. Barnstaple's attention
round. By the side of the road in the direction from which
conceivably he had come were the ruins of what appeared to be a
very recently demolished stone house. Beside it were two large
apple trees freshly twisted and riven, as if by some explosion,
and out of the centre of it came a column of smoke and this sound
of things catching fire. And the contorted lines of these shattered
apple trees helped Mr. Barnstaple to realize that some of the
flowers by the wayside near at hand were also bent down to one side
as if by the passage of a recent violent gust of wind. Yet he had
heard no explosion nor felt any wind.

He stared for a time and then turned as if for an explanation to
the Limousine. Three of these people were now coming along the road
towards him, led by a tall, slender, grey-headed gentleman in a
felt hat and a long motoring dust-coat. He had a small upturned
face with a little nose that scarce sufficed for the springs of his
gilt glasses. Mr. Barnstaple restarted his engine and drove slowly
to meet them.

As soon as he judged himself within hearing distance he stopped and
put his head over the side of the Yellow Peril with a question. At
the same moment the tall, grey-headed gentleman asked practically
the same question: "Can you tell me at all, sir, where we _are_?"


Section 2

"Five minutes ago," said Mr. Barnstaple, "I should have said we were
on the Maidenhead Road. Near Slough."

"Exactly!" said the tall gentleman in earnest, argumentative tones.
"Exactly! And I maintain that there is not the slightest reason for
supposing that we are not still on the Maidenhead Road."

The challenge of the dialectician rang in his voice.

"It doesn't _look_ like the Maidenhead Road," said Mr. Barnstaple.

"Agreed! But are we to judge by appearances or are we to judge by
the direct continuity of our experience? The Maidenhead Road led to
this, was in continuity with this, and therefore I hold that this
is the Maidenhead Road."

"Those mountains?" considered Mr. Barnstaple.

"Windsor Castle ought to be there," said the tall gentleman brightly
as if he gave a point in a gambit.

"_Was_ there five minutes ago," said Mr. Barnstaple.

"Then obviously those mountains are some sort of a camouflage," said
the tall gentleman triumphantly, "and the whole of this business
is, as they say nowadays, a put-up thing."

"It seems to be remarkably well put up," said Mr. Barnstaple.

Came a pause during which Mr. Barnstaple surveyed the tall
gentleman's companions. The tall gentleman he knew perfectly well.
He had seen him a score of times at public meetings and public
dinners. He was Mr. Cecil Burleigh, the great Conservative leader.
He was not only distinguished as a politician; he was eminent
as a private gentleman, a philosopher and a man of universal
intelligence. Behind him stood a short, thick-set, middle-aged
young man, unknown to Mr. Barnstaple, the natural hostility of
whose appearance was greatly enhanced by an eye-glass. The third
member of the little group was also a familiar form, but for a time
Mr. Barnstaple could not place him. He had a clean-shaven, round,
plump face and a well-nourished person and his costume suggested
either a High Church clergyman or a prosperous Roman Catholic
priest.

The young man with the eye-glass now spoke in a kind of impotent
falsetto. "I came down to Taplow Court by road not a month ago
and there was certainly nothing of this sort on the way then."

"I admit there are difficulties," said Mr. Burleigh with gusto.
"I admit there are considerable difficulties. Still, I venture to
think my main proposition holds."

"_You_ don't think this is the Maidenhead Road?" said the gentleman
with the eye-glass flatly to Mr. Barnstaple.

"It seems too perfect for a put-up thing," said Mr. Barnstaple with
a mild obstinacy.

"But, my dear Sir!" protested Mr. Burleigh, "this road is _notorious_
for nursery seedsmen and sometimes they arrange the most astonishing
displays. As an advertisement."

"Then why don't we go straight on to Taplow Court now?" asked the
gentleman with the eye-glass.

"Because," said Mr. Burleigh, with the touch of asperity natural
when one has to insist on a fact already clearly known, and
obstinately overlooked, "Rupert insists that we are in some other
world. And won't go on. That is why. He has always had too much
imagination. He thinks that things that don't exist _can_ exist.
And now he imagines himself in some sort of scientific romance and
out of our world altogether. In another dimension. I sometimes think
it would have been better for all of us if Rupert had taken to
writing romances--instead of living them. If you, as his secretary,
think that you will be able to get him on to Taplow in time for
lunch with the Windsor people--"

Mr. Burleigh indicated by a gesture ideas for which he found words
inadequate.

Mr. Barnstaple had already noted a slow-moving, intent,
sandy-complexioned figure in a grey top hat with a black band that
the caricaturists had made familiar, exploring the flowery tangle
beside the Limousine. This then must be no less well-known person
than Rupert Catskill, the Secretary of State for War.

For once Mr. Barnstaple found himself in entire agreement with
this all too adventurous politician. This _was_ another world. Mr.
Barnstaple got out of his car and addressed himself to Mr. Burleigh.
"I think we may get a lot of light upon just where we are, Sir,
if we explore this building which is burning here close at hand.
I thought just now that I saw a figure lying on the slope close
behind it. If we could catch one of the hoaxers--"

He left his sentence unfinished because he did not believe for a
moment that they were being hoaxed. Mr. Burleigh had fallen very
much in his opinion in the last five minutes.

All four men turned their faces to the smoking ruin.

"It's a very extraordinary thing that there isn't a soul in sight,"
remarked the eye-glass gentleman searching the horizon.

"Well, I see no harm whatever in finding out what is burning," said
Mr. Burleigh and led the way, upholding an intelligent, anticipatory
face, towards the wrecked house between the broken trees.

But before he had gone a dozen paces the attention of the little
group was recalled to the Limousine by a loud scream of terror
from the lady who had remained seated therein.


Section 3

"Really this is too much!" cried Mr. Burleigh with a note of
genuine exasperation. "There must surely be police regulations to
prevent this kind of thing."

"It's out of some travelling menagerie," said the gentleman with
the eye-glass. "What ought we to do?"

"It looks tame," said Mr. Barnstaple, but without any impulse to
put his theory to the test.

"It might easily frighten people very seriously," said Mr. Burleigh.
And lifting up a bland voice he shouted: "Don't be alarmed, Stella!
It's probably quite tame and harmless. Don't _irritate_ it with that
sunshade. It might fly at you. Stel-_la_!"

"It" was a big and beautifully marked leopard which had come very
softly out of the flowers and sat down like a great cat in the
middle of the glass road at the side of the big car. It was blinking
and moving its head from side to side rhythmically, with an
expression of puzzled interest, as the lady, in accordance with the
best traditions of such cases, opened and shut her parasol at it as
rapidly as she could. The chauffeur had taken cover behind the car.
Mr. Rupert Catskill stood staring, knee-deep in flowers, apparently
only made aware of the creature's existence by the same scream that
had attracted the attention of Mr. Burleigh and his companions.

Mr. Catskill was the first to act, and his act showed his mettle.
It was at once discreet and bold. "Stop flopping that sunshade, Lady
Stella," he said. "Let me--I will--catch its eye."

He made a detour round the car so as to come face to face with the
animal. Then for a moment he stood, as it were displaying himself,
a resolute little figure in a grey frock coat and a black-banded
top hat. He held out a cautious hand, not too suddenly for fear of
startling the creature. "Poossy!" he said.

The leopard, relieved by the cessation of Lady Stella's sunshade,
regarded him with interest and curiosity. He drew closer. The
leopard extended its muzzle and sniffed.

"If it will only let me stroke it," said Mr. Catskill, and came
within arm's length.

The beast sniffed the extended hand with an expression of
incredulity. Then with a suddenness that sent Mr. Catskill back
several paces, it sneezed. It sneezed again much more violently,
regarded Mr. Catskill reproachfully for a moment and then leapt
lightly over the flower-bed and made off in the direction of
the white and golden colonnade. The grazing cattle in the field,
Mr. Barnstaple noted, watched its passage without the slightest
sign of dismay.

Mr. Catskill remained in a slightly expanded state in the middle
of the road. "No animal," he remarked, "can stand up to the
steadfast gaze of the human eye. Not one. It is a riddle for your
materialist.... Shall we join Mr. Cecil, Lady Stella? He seems to
have found something to look at down there. The man in the little
yellow car may know where he is. Hm?"

He assisted the lady to get out of the car and the two came on after
Mr. Barnstaple's party, which was now again approaching the burning
house. The chauffeur, evidently not wishing to be left alone with
the Limousine in this world of incredible possibilities, followed
as closely as respect permitted.



CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE


Section 1

The fire in the little house did not seem to be making headway. The
smoke that came from it was much less now than when Mr. Barnstaple
had first observed it. As they came close they found a quantity of
twisted bits of bright metal and fragments of broken glass among the
shattered masonry. The suggestion of exploded scientific apparatus
was very strong. Then almost simultaneously the entire party became
aware of a body lying on the grassy slope behind the ruins. It was
the body of a man in the prime of life, naked except for a couple
of bracelets and a necklace and girdle, and blood was oozing from
his mouth and nostrils. With a kind of awe Mr. Barnstaple knelt
down beside this prostrate figure and felt its still heart. He had
never seen so beautiful a face and body before.

"_Dead_," he whispered.

"Look!" cried the shrill voice of the man with the eye-glass.
"Another!"

He was pointing to something that was hidden from Mr. Barnstaple by
a piece of wall. Mr. Barnstaple had to get up and climb over a heap
of rubble before he could see this second find. It was a slender
girl, clothed as little as the man. She had evidently been flung
with enormous violence against the wall and killed instantaneously.
Her face was quite undistorted although her skull had been crushed
in from behind; her perfect mouth and green-grey eyes were a little
open and her expression was that of one who is still thinking out
some difficult but interesting problem. She did not seem in the
least dead but merely disregardful. One hand still grasped a copper
implement with a handle of glass. The other lay limp and prone.

For some seconds nobody spoke. It was as if they all feared to
interrupt the current of her thoughts.

Then Mr. Barnstaple heard the voice of the priestly gentleman
speaking very softly behind him. "What a _perfect_ form!" he said.

"I admit I was wrong," said Mr. Burleigh with deliberation. "I have
been wrong.... These are no earthly people. Manifestly. And ergo,
we are not on earth. I cannot imagine what has happened nor where
we are. In the face of sufficient evidence I have never hesitated
to retract an opinion. This world we are in is not our world. It
is something--"

He paused. "It is something very wonderful indeed."

"And the Windsor party," said Mr. Catskill without any apparent
regret, "must have its lunch without us."

"But then," said the clerical gentleman, "what world _are_ we in,
and how did we get here?"

"Ah! _there_," said Mr. Burleigh blandly, "you go altogether beyond
my poor powers of guessing. We are here in some world that is
singularly like our world and singularly unlike it. It must be in
some way related to our world or we could not be here. But how it
can be related, is, I confess, a hopeless mystery to me. Maybe we
are in some other dimension of space than those we wot of. But my
poor head whirls at the thought of these dimensions. I am--I am
mazed--mazed."

"Einstein," injected the gentleman with the eye-glass compactly
and with evident self-satisfaction.

"Exactly!" said Mr. Burleigh. "Einstein might make it clear to us.
Or dear old Haldane might undertake to explain it and fog us up with
that adipose Hegelianism of his. But I am neither Haldane nor
Einstein. Here we are in some world which is, for all practical
purposes, including the purposes of our week-end engagements,
Nowhere. Or if you prefer the Greek of it, we are in Utopia. And
as I do not see that there is any manifest way out of it again, I
suppose the thing we have to do as rational creatures is to make
the best of it. And watch our opportunities. It is certainly a very
lovely world. The loveliness is even greater than the wonder. And
there are human beings here--with minds. I judge from all this
material lying about, it is a world in which experimental chemistry
is pursued--pursued indeed to the bitter end--under almost idyllic
conditions. Chemistry--and nakedness. I feel bound to confess that
whether we are to regard these two people who have apparently just
blown themselves up here as Greek gods or as naked savages, seems to
me to be altogether a question of individual taste. I admit a bias
for the Greek god--and goddess."

"Except that it is a little difficult to think of two dead
immortals," squeaked the gentleman of the eye-glass in the tone
of one who scores a point.

Mr. Burleigh was about to reply, and to judge from his ruffled
expression his reply would have been of a disciplinary nature.
But instead he exclaimed sharply and turned round to face two
newcomers. The whole party had become aware of them at the same
moment. Two stark Apollos stood over the ruin and were regarding
our Earthlings with an astonishment at least as great as that
they created.

One spoke, and Mr. Barnstaple was astonished beyond measure to find
understandable words reverberating in his mind.

"Red Gods!" cried the Utopian. "What things are you? And how did
you get into the world?"

(English! It would have been far less astounding if they had spoken
Greek. But that they should speak any known language was a matter
for incredulous amazement.)


Section 2

Mr. Cecil Burleigh was the least disconcerted of the party. "Now,"
he said, "we may hope to learn something definite--face to face with
rational and articulate creatures."

He cleared his throat, grasped the lapels of his long dust-coat with
two long nervous hands and assumed the duties of spokesman. "We are
quite unable, gentlemen, to account for our presence here," he said.
"We are as puzzled as you are. We have discovered ourselves suddenly
in your world instead of our own."

"You come from another world?"

"Exactly. A quite different world. In which we have all our natural
and proper places. We were travelling in that world of ours
in--Ah!--certain vehicles, when suddenly we discovered ourselves
here. Intruders, I admit, but, I can assure you, innocent and
unpremeditated intruders."

"You do not know how it is that Arden and Greenlake have failed in
their experiment and how it is that they are dead?"

"If Arden and Greenlake are the names of these two beautiful young
people here, we know nothing about them except that we found them
lying as you see them when we came from the road hither to find out
or, in fact, to inquire--"

He cleared his throat and left his sentence with a floating end.

The Utopian, if we may for convenience call him that, who had first
spoken, looked now at his companion and seemed to question him
mutely. Then he turned to the Earthlings again. He spoke and again
those clear tones rang, not--so it seemed to Mr. Barnstaple--in his
ears but within his head.

"It will be well if you and your friends do not trample this
wreckage. It will be well if you all return to the road. Come with
me. My brother here will put an end to this burning and do what
needs to be done to our brother and sister. And afterwards this
place will be examined by those who understand the work that was
going on here."

"We must throw ourselves entirely upon your hospitality," said Mr.
Burleigh. "We are entirely at your disposal. This encounter, let
me repeat, was not of our seeking."

"Though we should certainly have sought it if we had known of its
possibility," said Mr. Catskill, addressing the world at large and
glancing at Mr. Barnstaple as if for confirmation. "We find this
world of yours--_most_ attractive."

"At the first encounter," the gentleman with the eye-glass endorsed,
"a _most_ attractive world."

As they returned through the thick-growing flowers to the road,
in the wake of the Utopian and Mr. Burleigh, Mr. Barnstaple found
Lady Stella rustling up beside him. Her words, in this setting
of pure wonder, filled him with amazement at their serene and
invincible ordinariness. "Haven't we met before somewhere--at
lunch or something--Mr.--Mr.--?"

Was all this no more than a show? He stared at her blankly for a
moment before supplying her with:

"Barnstaple."

"Mr. Barnstaple?"

His mind came into line with hers.

"I've never had that pleasure, Lady Stella. Though, of course, I
know you--I know you very well from your photographs in the weekly
illustrated papers."

"Did you hear what it was that Mr. Cecil was saying just now?
About this being Utopia?"

"He said we might _call_ it Utopia."

"So like Mr. Cecil. But is it Utopia?--_really_ Utopia?

"I've always longed so to be in Utopia," the lady went on without
waiting for Mr. Barnstaple's reply to her question. "What splendid
young men these two Utopians appear to be! They must, I am sure,
belong to its aristocracy--in spite of their--informal--costume.
Or even because of it."...

Mr. Barnstaple had a happy thought. "I have also recognized Mr.
Burleigh and Mr. Rupert Catskill, Lady Stella, but I should be so
glad if you would tell me who the young gentleman with the eye-glass
is, and the clerical gentleman. They are close behind us."

Lady Stella imparted her information in a charmingly confidential
undertone. "The eye-glass," she murmured, "is--I am going to spell
it--F.R.E.D.D.Y. M.U.S.H. Taste. Good taste. He is awfully clever at
finding out young poets and all that sort of literary thing. And
he's Rupert's secretary. If there is a literary Academy, they say,
he's certain to be in it. He's dreadfully critical and sarcastic. We
were going to Taplow for a perfectly intellectual week-end, quite
like the old times. So soon as the Windsor people had gone again,
that is.... Mr. Gosse was coming and Max Beerbohm--and everyone
like that. But nowadays something always happens. Always.... The
unexpected--almost excessively.... The clerical collar"--she
glanced back to judge whether she was within earshot of the
gentleman under discussion--"is Father Amerton, who is so dreadfully
outspoken about the sins of society and all _that_ sort of thing.
It's odd, but out of the pulpit he's inclined to be shy and quiet and
a little awkward with the forks and spoons. Paradoxical, isn't it?"

"Of _course_!" cried Mr. Barnstaple. "I remember him now. I knew his
face but I couldn't place it. Thank you so much, Lady Stella."


Section 3

There was something very reassuring to Mr. Barnstaple in the company
of these famous and conspicuous people and particularly in the
company of Lady Stella. She was indeed heartening: she brought so
much of the dear old world with her, and she was so manifestly
prepared to subjugate this new world to its standards at the
earliest possible opportunity. She fended off much of the wonder and
beauty that had threatened to submerge Mr. Barnstaple altogether.
Meeting her and her company was in itself for a man in his position
a minor but considerable adventure that helped to bridge the gulf
of astonishment between the humdrum of his normal experiences and
this all too bracing Utopian air. It solidified, it--if one may use
the word in such a connexion--it _degraded_ the luminous splendour
about him towards complete credibility that it should also be seen
and commented on by her and by Mr. Burleigh, and viewed through the
appraising monocle of Mr. Freddy Mush. It brought it within range
of the things that get into the newspapers. Mr. Barnstaple alone
in Utopia might have been so completely overawed as to have been
mentally overthrown. This easy-mannered brown-skinned divinity who
was now exchanging questions with Mr. Burleigh was made mentally
accessible by that great man's intervention.

Yet it was with something very like a catching of the breath that
Mr. Barnstaple's attention reverted from the Limousine people to
this noble-seeming world into which he and they had fallen. What
sort of beings really were these men and women of a world where
ill-bred weeds, it seemed, had ceased to thrust and fight amidst
the flowers, and where leopards void of feline malice looked out
with friendly eyes upon the passer-by?

It was astounding that the first two inhabitants they had found
in this world of subjugated nature should be lying dead, victims,
it would seem, of some hazardous experiment. It was still more
astonishing that this other pair who called themselves the brothers
of the dead man and woman should betray so little grief or dismay
at the tragedy. There had been no emotional scene at all, Mr.
Barnstaple realized, no consternation or weeping. They were
evidently much more puzzled and interested than either horrified
or distressed.

The Utopian who had remained in the ruin, had carried out the body
of the girl to lay it beside her companion's, and he had now, Mr.
Barnstaple saw, returned to a close scrutiny of the wreckage of the
experiment.

But now more of these people were coming upon the scene. They had
aeroplanes in this world, for two small ones, noiseless and swift in
their flight as swallows, had landed in the fields near by. A man
had come up along the road on a machine like a small two-wheeled
two-seater with its wheels in series, bicycle fashion; lighter and
neater it was than any earthly automobile and mysteriously able to
stand up on its two wheels while standing still. A burst of laughter
from down the road called Mr. Barnstaple's attention to a group
of these Utopians who had apparently found something exquisitely
ridiculous in the engine of the Limousine. Most of these people
were as scantily clothed and as beautifully built as the two dead
experimentalists, but one or two were wearing big hats of straw,
and one who seemed to be an older woman of thirty or more wore a
robe of white bordered by an intense red line. She was speaking now
to Mr. Burleigh.

Although she was a score of yards away, her speech
presented itself in Mr. Barnstaple's mind with great distinctness.

"We do not even know as yet what connexion your coming into our world
may have with the explosion that has just happened here or whether,
indeed, it has any connexion. We want to inquire into both these
things. It will be reasonable, we think, to take you and all the
possessions you have brought with you to a convenient place for a
conference not very far from here. We are arranging for machines to
take you thither. There perhaps you will eat. I do not know when you
are accustomed to eat?"

"Refreshment," said Mr. Burleigh, rather catching at the idea. "Some
refreshment would certainly be acceptable before very long. In fact,
had we not fallen so sharply out of our own world into yours, by
this time we should have been lunching--lunching in the best of
company."

"Wonder and lunch," thought Mr. Barnstaple. Man is a creature who
must eat by necessity whether he wonder or no. Mr. Barnstaple
perceived indeed that he was already hungry and that the air he
was breathing was a keen and appetizing air.

The Utopian seemed struck by a novel idea. "Do you eat several times
a day? What sort of things do you eat?"

"Oh! Surely! They're _not_ vegetarians!" cried Mr. Mush sharply in
a protesting parenthesis, dropping his eye-glass from its socket.

They were all hungry. It showed upon their faces.

"We are all accustomed to eat several times a day," said Mr.
Burleigh. "Perhaps it would be well if I were to give you a brief
resume of our dietary. There may be differences. We begin, as
a rule, with a simple cup of tea and the thinnest slice of
bread-and-butter brought to the bedside. Then comes breakfast."...
He proceeded to a masterly summary of his gastronomic day,
giving clearly and attractively the particulars of an English
breakfast, eggs to be boiled four and a half minutes, neither more
nor less, lunch with any light wine, tea rather a social rally
than a serious meal, dinner, in some detail, the occasional resort
to supper. It was one of those clear statements which would have
rejoiced the House of Commons, light, even gay, and yet with
a trace of earnestness. The Utopian woman regarded him with
deepening interest as he proceeded. "Do you all eat in this
fashion?" she asked.

Mr. Burleigh ran his eye over his party. "I cannot answer for
Mr.--Mr.--?"

"Barnstaple.... Yes, I eat in much the same fashion."

For some reason the Utopian woman smiled at him. She had very
pretty brown eyes, and though he liked her to smile he wished that
she had not smiled in the way she did.

"And you sleep?" she asked.

"From six to ten hours, according to circumstances," said
Mr. Burleigh.

"And you make love?"

The question perplexed and to a certain extent shocked our
Earthlings. What exactly did she mean? For some moments no one
framed a reply. Mr. Barnstaple's mind was filled with a hurrying
rush of strange possibilities.

Then Mr. Burleigh, with his fine intelligence and the quick
evasiveness of a modern leader of men, stepped into the breach.
"Not habitually, I can assure you," he said. "Not habitually."

The woman with the red-bordered robe seemed to think this over for
a swift moment. Then she smiled faintly.

"We must take you somewhere where we can talk of all these things,"
she said. "Manifestly you come from some strange other world. Our
men of knowledge must get together with you and exchange ideas."


Section 4

At half-past ten that morning Mr. Barnstaple had been motoring
along the main road through Slough, and now at half-past one he
was soaring through wonderland with his own world half forgotten.
"Marvellous," he repeated. "Marvellous. I knew that I should have
a good holiday. But _this_, _this_--!"

He was extraordinarily happy with the bright unclouded happiness
of a perfect dream. Never before had he enjoyed the delights of an
explorer in new lands, never before had he hoped to experience these
delights. Only a few weeks before he had written an article for the
Liberal lamenting the "End of the Age of Exploration," an article so
thoroughly and aimlessly depressing that it had pleased Mr. Peeve
extremely. He recalled that exploit now with but the faintest twinge
of remorse.

The Earthling party had been distributed among four small
aeroplanes, and as Mr. Barnstaple and his companion, Father Amerton,
rose in the air, he looked back to see the automobiles and luggage
being lifted with astonishing ease into two lightly built lorries.
Each lorry put out a pair of glittering arms and lifted up its
automobile as a nurse might lift up a baby.

By contemporary earthly standards of safety Mr. Barnstaple's aviator
flew very low. There were times when he passed between trees rather
than over them, and this, even if at first it was a little alarming,
permitted a fairly close inspection of the landscape. For the
earlier part of the journey it was garden pasture with grazing
creamy cattle and patches of brilliantly coloured vegetation of a
nature unknown to Mr. Barnstaple. Amidst this cultivation narrow
tracks, which may have been foot or cycle tracks, threaded their
way. Here and there ran a road bordered with flowers and shaded
by fruit trees.

There were few houses and no towns or villages at all. The houses
varied very greatly in size, from little isolated buildings which
Mr. Barnstaple thought might be elegant summer-houses or little
temples, to clusters of roofs and turrets which reminded him
of country chateaux or suggested extensive farming or dairying
establishments. Here and there people were working in the fields
or going to and fro on foot or on machines, but the effect of the
whole was of an extremely underpopulated land.

It became evident that they were going to cross the range of snowy
mountains that had so suddenly blotted the distant view of Windsor
Castle from the landscape.

As they approached these mountains, broad stretches of golden
corn-land replaced the green of the pastures and then the
cultivation became more diversified. He noted unmistakable vineyards
on sunny slopes, and the number of workers visible and the
habitations multiplied. The little squadron of aeroplanes flew up
a broad valley towards a pass so that Mr. Barnstaple was able to
scrutinize the mountain scenery. Came chestnut woods and at last
pines. There were Cyclopean turbines athwart the mountain torrents
and long, low, many-windowed buildings that might serve some
industrial purpose. A skilfully graded road with exceedingly bold,
light and beautiful viaducts mounted towards the pass. There were
more people, he thought, in the highland country than in the levels
below, though still far fewer than he would have seen upon any
comparable countryside on earth.

Ten minutes of craggy desolation with the snow-fields of a great
glacier on one side intervened before he descended into the upland
valley on the Conference Place where presently he alighted. This
was a sort of lap in the mountain, terraced by masonry so boldly
designed that it seemed a part of the geological substance of the
mountain itself. It faced towards a wide artificial lake retained by
a stupendous dam from the lower reaches of the valley. At intervals
along this dam there were great stone pillars dimly suggestive of
seated figures. He glimpsed a wide plain beyond, which reminded him
of the valley of the Po, and then as he descended the straight line
of the dam came up to hide this further vision.

Upon these terraces, and particularly upon the lower ones, were
groups and clusters of flowerlike buildings, and he distinguished
paths and steps and pools of water as if the whole place were a
garden.

The aeroplanes made an easy landing on a turfy expanse. Close at
hand was a graceful chalet that ran out from the shores of the lake
over the water, and afforded mooring to a flotilla of gaily coloured
boats....

It was Father Amerton who had drawn Mr. Barnstaple's attention to
the absence of villages. He now remarked that there was no church
in sight and that nowhere had they seen any spires or belfries.
But Mr. Barnstaple thought that some of the smaller buildings might
be temples or shrines. "Religion may take different forms here,"
he said.

"And how few babies or little children are visible!" Father Amerton
remarked. "Nowhere have I seen a mother with her child."

"On the other, side of the mountains there was a place like the
playing field of a big school. There were children there and one or
two older people dressed in white."

"I saw that. But I was thinking of babes. Compare this with what
one would see in Italy.

"The most beautiful and desirable young women," added the reverend
gentleman; "_most_ desirable--and not a sign of maternity!"

Their aviator, a sun-tanned blond with very blue eyes, helped them
out of his machine, and they stood watching the descent of the other
members of their party. Mr. Barnstaple was astonished to note how
rapidly he was becoming familiarized with the colour and harmony of
this new world; the strangest things in the whole spectacle now were
the figures and clothing of his associates. Mr. Rupert Catskill
in his celebrated grey top hat, Mr. Mush with his preposterous
eye-glass, the peculiar long slenderness of Mr. Burleigh, and the
square leather-clad lines of Mr. Burleigh's chauffeur, struck him as
being far more incredible than the graceful Utopian forms about him.

The aviator's interest and amusement enhanced Mr. Barnstaple's
perception of his companions' oddity. And then came a wave of
profound doubt.

"I suppose this is _really_ real," he said to Father Amerton.

"Really real! What else can it be?"

"I suppose we are not dreaming all this."

"Are your dreams and my dreams likely to coincide?"

"Yes; but there are quite impossible things--absolutely impossible
things."

"As, for instance?"

"Well, how is it that these people are speaking to us in
English--modern English?"

"I never thought of that. It is rather incredible. They don't talk
in English to one another."

Mr. Barnstaple stared in round-eyed amazement at Father Amerton,
struck for the first time by a still more incredible fact. "They
don't talk in _anything_ to one another," he said. "And we haven't
noticed it until this moment!"



CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE SHADOW OF EINSTEIN FALLS ACROSS THE STORY BUT PASSES LIGHTLY BY


Section 1

Except for that one perplexing fact that all these Utopians had
apparently a complete command of idiomatic English, Mr. Barnstaple
found his vision of this new world developing with a congruity that
no dream in his experience had ever possessed. It was so coherent,
so orderly, that less and less was it like a strange world at all
and more and more like an arrival in some foreign but very highly
civilized country.

Under the direction of the brown-eyed woman in the scarlet-edged
robe, the Earthlings were established in their quarters near the
Conference Place in the most hospitable and comfortable fashion
conceivable. Five or six youths and girls made it their business to
initiate the strangers in the little details of Utopian domesticity.
The separate buildings in which they were lodged had each an
agreeable little dressing-room, and the bed, which had sheets of
the finest linen and a very light puffy coverlet, stood in an open
loggia--too open Lady Stella thought, but then as she said, "One
feels so safe here." The luggage appeared and the valises were
identified as if they were in some hospitable earthly mansion.

But Lady Stella had to turn two rather too friendly youths out of
her apartment before she could open her dressing-bag and administer
refreshment to her complexion.

A few minutes later some excitement was caused by an outbreak of
wild laughter and the sounds of an amiable but hysterical struggle
that came from Lady Stella's retreat. The girl who had remained with
her had displayed a quite feminine interest in her equipment and had
come upon a particularly charming and diaphanous sleeping suit. For
some obscure reason this secret daintiness amused the young Utopian
extremely, and it was with some difficulty that Lady Stella
restrained her from putting the garment on and dancing out in it
for a public display. "Then _you_ put it on," the girl insisted.

"But you don't understand," cried Lady Stella. "It's almost--_sacred_!
It's for nobody to see--_ever_."

"But _why_?" the Utopian asked, puzzled beyond measure.

Lady Stella found an answer impossible.

The light meal that followed was by terrestrial standards an
entirely satisfactory one. The anxiety of Mr. Freddy Mush was
completely allayed: there were cold chicken and ham and a very
pleasant meat pate. There were also rather coarse-grained but most
palatable bread, pure butter, an exquisite salad, fruit, cheese
of the Gruyere type, and a light white wine which won from Mr.
Burleigh the tribute that "Moselle never did anything better."

"You find our food very like your own?" asked the woman in the
red-trimmed robe.

"Eckquithit quality," said Mr. Mush with his mouth rather full.

"Food has changed very little in the last three thousand years.
People had found out all the best things to eat long before the Last
Age of Confusion."

"It's too real to be real," Mr. Barnstaple repeated to himself.
"Too real to be real."

He looked at his companions, elated, interested and eating with
appreciation.

If it wasn't for the absurdity of these Utopians speaking English
with a clearness that tapped like a hammer inside his head Mr.
Barnstaple would have had no doubt whatever of its reality.

No servants waited at the clothless stone table; the woman in the
white and scarlet robe and the two aviators shared the meal and the
guests attended to each other's requirements. Mr. Burleigh's
chauffeur was for modestly shrinking to another table until the
great statesman reassured him with: "Sit down there, Penk. Next to
Mr. Mush." Other Utopians with friendly but keenly observant eyes
upon the Earthlings came into the great pillared veranda in which
the meal had been set, and smiled and stood about or sat down. There
were no introductions and few social formalities.

"All this is most reassuring," said Mr. Burleigh. "Most reassuring.
I'm bound to say these beat the Chatsworth peaches. Is that cream,
my dear Rupert, in the little brown jar in front of you?... I
guessed as much. If you are sure you can spare it, Rupert....
Thank you."


Section 2

Several of the Utopians made themselves known by name to the
Earthlings. All their voices sounded singularly alike to Mr.
Barnstaple and the words were as clear as print. The brown-eyed
woman's name was Lychnis. A man with a beard who might perhaps, Mr.
Barnstaple thought, have been as old as forty, was either Urthred
or Adam or Edom, the name for all its sharpness of enunciation had
been very difficult to catch. It was as if large print _hesitated_.
Urthred conveyed that he was an ethnologist and historian and that
he desired to learn all that he possibly could about the ways of our
world. He impressed Mr. Barnstaple as having the easy carriage of
some earthly financier or great newspaper proprietor rather than the
diffidence natural in our own every-day world to a merely learned
man. Another of their hosts, Serpentine, was also, Mr. Barnstaple
learnt with surprise, for his bearing too was almost masterful, a
scientific man. He called himself something that Mr. Barnstaple
could not catch. First it sounded like "atomic mechanician," and
then oddly enough it sounded like "molecular chemist." And then
Mr. Barnstaple heard Mr. Burleigh say to Mr. Mush, "He said
'physio-chemist,' didn't he?"

"_I_ thought he just called himself a materialist," said Mr. Mush.

"I thought he said he weighed things," said Lady Stella.

"Their intonation is peculiar," said Mr. Burleigh. "Sometimes they
are almost too loud for comfort and then there is a kind of gap in
the sounds."...

When the meal was at an end the whole party removed to another
little building that was evidently planned for classes and
discussions. It had a semicircular apse round which ran a series of
white tablets which evidently functioned at times as a lecturer's
blackboard, since there were black and coloured pencils and cloths
for erasure lying on a marble ledge at a convenient height below
the tablets. The lecturer could walk from point to point of this
semicircle as he talked. Lychnis, Urthred, Serpentine and the
Earthlings seated themselves on a semicircular bench below this
lecturer's track, and there was accommodation for about eighty or a
hundred people upon the seats before them. All these were occupied,
and beyond stood a number of graceful groups against a background
of rhododendron-like bushes, between which Mr. Barnstaple caught
glimpses of grassy vistas leading down to the shining waters of
the lake.

They were going to talk over this extraordinary irruption into
their world. Could anything be more reasonable than to talk it
over? Could anything be more fantastically impossible?

"Odd that there are no swallows," said Mr. Mush suddenly in Mr.
Barnstaple's ear. "I wonder why there are no swallows."

Mr. Barnstaple's attention went to the empty sky. "No gnats nor
flies perhaps," he suggested. It was odd that he had not missed
the swallows before.

"Sssh!" said Lady Stella. "He's beginning."


Section 3

This incredible conference began. It was opened by the man named
Serpentine, and he stood before his audience and seemed to make
a speech. His lips moved, his hands assisted his statements; his
expression followed his utterance. And yet Mr. Barnstaple had the
most subtle and indefensible doubt whether indeed Serpentine was
speaking. There was something odd about the whole thing. Sometimes
the thing said sounded with a peculiar resonance in his head;
sometimes it was indistinct and elusive like an object seen through
troubled waters; sometimes though Serpentine still moved his fine
hands and looked towards his hearers, there were gaps of absolute
silence--as if for brief intervals Mr. Barnstaple had gone deaf....
Yet it was a discourse; it held together and it held Mr.
Barnstaple's attention.

Serpentine had the manner of one who is taking great pains to be as
simple as possible with a rather intricate question. He spoke, as it
were, in propositions with a pause between each. "It had long been
known," he began, "that the possible number of dimensions, like
the possible number of anything else that could be enumerated, was
unlimited!"

Yes, Mr. Barnstaple had got that, but it proved too much for Mr.
Freddy Mush.

"Oh, Lord!" he said. "Dimensions!" and dropped his eye-glass and
became despondently inattentive.

"For most practical purposes," Serpentine continued, "the
particular universe, the particular system of events, in which we
found ourselves and of which we formed part, could be regarded as
occurring in a space of three rectilinear dimensions and as
undergoing translation, which translation was in fact duration,
through a fourth dimension, _time_. Such a system of events was
necessarily a gravitational system."

"Er!" said Mr. Burleigh sharply. "Excuse me! I don't see that."

So he, at any rate, was following it too.

"Any universe that endures must necessarily gravitate," Serpentine
repeated, as if he were asserting some self-evident fact.

"For the life of me I can't see that," said Mr. Burleigh after a
moment's reflection.

Serpentine considered him for a moment. "It _is_ so," he said,
and went on with his discourse. Our minds, he continued, had been
evolved in the form of this practical conception of things, they
accepted it as true, and it was only by great efforts of sustained
analysis that we were able to realize that this universe in which
we lived not only extended but was, as it were, slightly bent
and contorted, into a number of other long unsuspected spatial
dimensions. It extended beyond its three chief spatial dimensions
into these others just as a thin sheet of paper, which is
practically two dimensional, extended not only by virtue of its
thickness but also of its crinkles and curvature into a third
dimension.

"Am I going deaf?" asked Lady Stella in a stage whisper. "I can't
catch a word of all this."

"Nor I," said Father Amerton.

Mr. Burleigh made a pacifying gesture towards these unfortunates
without taking his eyes off Serpentine's face. Mr. Barnstaple
knitted his brows, clasped his knees, knotted his fingers, held
on desperately.

He _must_ be hearing--of course he was hearing!

Serpentine proceeded to explain that just as it would be possible
for any number of practically two-dimensional universes to lie side
by side, like sheets of paper, in a three-dimensional space, so in
the many-dimensional space about which the ill-equipped human mind
is still slowly and painfully acquiring knowledge, it is possible
for an innumerable quantity of practically three-dimensional
universes to lie, as it were, side by side and to undergo a roughly
parallel movement through time. The speculative work of Lonestone
and Cephalus had long since given the soundest basis for the belief
that there actually were a very great number of such space-and-time
universes, parallel to one another and resembling each other,
nearly but not exactly, much as the leaves of a book might resemble
one another. All of them would have duration, all of them would be
gravitating systems--

(Mr. Burleigh shook his head to show that still he didn't see it.)

--And those lying closest together would most nearly resemble each
other. How closely they now had an opportunity of learning. For the
daring attempts of those two great geniuses, Arden and Greenlake, to
use the--(inaudible)--thrust of the atom to rotate a portion of the
Utopian material universe in that dimension, the F dimension, into
which it had long been known to extend for perhaps the length of a
man's arm, to rotate this fragment of Utopian matter, much as a gate
is swung on its hinges, had manifestly been altogether successful.
The gate had swung back again bringing with it a breath of close
air, a storm of dust and, to the immense amazement of Utopia,
three sets of visitors from an unknown world.

"_Three_?" whispered Mr. Barnstaple doubtfully. "Did he say _three_?"

[Serpentine disregarded him.]

"Our brother and sister have been killed by some unexpected release
of force, but their experiment has opened a way that now need never
be closed again, out of the present spatial limitations of Utopia
into a whole vast folio of hitherto unimagined worlds. Close at
hand to us, even as Lonestone guessed ages ago, nearer to us, as
he put it, than the blood in our hearts--"

("Nearer to us than breathing and closer than hands and feet,"
Father Amerton misquoted, waking up suddenly. "But what is he
talking about? I don't catch it.")

"--we discover another planet, much the same size as ours to judge
by the scale of its inhabitants, circulating, we may certainly
assume, round a sun like that in our skies, a planet bearing life
and being slowly subjugated, even as our own is being subjugated,
by intelligent life which has evidently evolved under almost exactly
parallel conditions to those of our own evolution. This sister
universe to ours is, so far as we may judge by appearances, a little
retarded in time in relation to our own. Our visitors wear something
very like the clothing and display physical characteristics
resembling those of our ancestors during the Last Age of Confusion....

"We are not yet justified in supposing that their history has been
strictly parallel to ours. No two particles of matter are alike;
no two vibrations. In all the dimensions of being, in all the
universes of God, there has never been and there can never be an
exact repetition. That we have come to realize is the one impossible
thing. Nevertheless, this world you call Earth is manifestly very
near and like to this universe of ours....

"We are eager to learn from you Earthlings, to check our history,
which is still very imperfectly known, by your experiences, to show
you what we know, to make out what may be possible and desirable in
intercourse and help between the people of your planet and ours. We,
here, are the merest beginners in knowledge; we have learnt as yet
scarcely anything more than the immensity of the things that we have
yet to learn and do. In a million kindred things our two worlds may
perhaps teach each other and help each other....

"Possibly there are streaks of heredity in your planet that have
failed to develop or that have died out in ours. Possibly there are
elements or minerals in one world that are rare or wanting in the
other.... The structure of your atoms (?)...our worlds may
intermarry (?)...to their common invigoration...."

He passed into the inaudible just when Mr. Barnstaple was most
moved and most eager to follow what he was saying. Yet a deaf man
would have judged he was still speaking.

Mr. Barnstaple met the eye of Mr. Rupert Catskill, as distressed
and puzzled as his own. Father Amerton's face was buried in his
hands. Lady Stella and Mr. Mush were whispering softly together;
they had long since given up any pretence of listening.

"Such," said Serpentine, abruptly becoming audible again, "is our
first rough interpretation of your apparition in our world and of
the possibilities of our interaction. I have put our ideas before
you as plainly as I can. I would suggest that now one of you tell
us simply and plainly what _you_ conceive to be the truth about
your world in relation to ours."



CHAPTER THE FIFTH

THE GOVERNANCE AND HISTORY OF UTOPIA


Section 1

Came a pause. The Earthlings looked at one another and their gaze
seemed to converge upon Mr. Cecil Burleigh. That statesman feigned
to be unaware of the general expectation. "Rupert," he said.
"Won't _you_?"

"I reserve my comments," said Mr. Catskill. "Father Amerton, you
are accustomed to treat of other worlds."

"Not in your presence, Mr. Cecil. No."

"But what am I to tell them?"

"What you think of it," said Mr. Barnstaple.

"Exactly," said Mr. Catskill. "Tell them what you think of it."

No one else appeared to be worthy of consideration. Mr. Burleigh
rose slowly and walked thoughtfully to the centre of the semicircle.
He grasped his coat lapels and remained for some moments with
face downcast as if considering what he was about to say. "Mr.
Serpentine," he began at last, raising a candid countenance and
regarding the blue sky above the distant lake through his glasses.
"Ladies and Gentlemen--"

He was going to make a speech!--as though he was at a Primrose
League garden party--or Geneva. It was preposterous and yet, what
else was there to be done?

"I must confess, Sir, that although I am by no means a novice at
public speaking, I find myself on this occasion somewhat at a loss.
Your admirable discourse, Sir, simple, direct, lucid, compact, and
rising at times to passages of unaffected eloquence, has set me a
pattern that I would fain follow--and before which, in all modesty,
I quail. You ask me to tell you as plainly and clearly as possible
the outline facts as we conceive them about this kindred world out
of which with so little premeditation we have come to you. So far as
my poor powers of understanding or discussing such recondite matters
go, I do not think I can better or indeed supplement in any way your
marvellous exposition of the mathematical aspects of the case. What
you have told us embodies the latest, finest thoughts of terrestrial
science and goes, indeed, far beyond our current ideas. On certain
matters, in, for example, the relationship of time and gravitation,
I feel bound to admit that I do not go with you, but that is rather
a failure to understand your position than any positive dissent.
Upon the broader aspects of the case there need be no difficulties
between us. We accept your main proposition unreservedly; namely,
that we conceive ourselves to be living in a parallel universe
to yours, on a planet the very brother of your own, indeed quite
amazingly like yours, having regard to all the possible contrasts
we might have found here. We are attracted by and strongly disposed
to accept your view that our system is, in all probability, a
little less seasoned and mellowed by the touch of time than yours,
short perhaps by some hundreds or some thousands of years of your
experiences. Assuming this, it is inevitable, Sir, that a certain
humility should mingle in our attitude towards you. As your juniors
it becomes us not to instruct but to learn. It is for us to ask:
What have you done? To what have you reached? rather than to display
to you with an artless arrogance all that still remains for us to
learn and do...."

"No!" said Mr. Barnstaple to himself but half audibly. "This is a
dream.... If it were anyone else...."

He rubbed his knuckles into his eyes and opened them again, and
there he was still, sitting next to Mr. Mush in the midst of these
Olympian divinities. And Mr. Burleigh, that polished sceptic, who
never believed, who was never astonished, was leaning forward on
his toes and speaking, speaking, with the assurance of a man who
has made ten thousand speeches. He could not have been more sure
of himself and his audience in the Guildhall in London. And they
were understanding him! Which was absurd!

There was nothing to do but to fall in with this stupendous
absurdity--and sit and listen. Sometimes Mr. Barnstaple's mind
wandered altogether from what Mr. Burleigh was saying. Then it
returned and hung desperately to his discourse. In his halting,
parliamentary way, his hands trifling with his glasses or clinging
to the lapels of his coat, Mr. Burleigh was giving Utopia a brief
account of the world of men, seeking to be elementary and lucid
and reasonable, telling them of states and empires, of wars and
the Great War, of economic organization and disorganization, of
revolutions and Bolshevism, of the terrible Russian famine that
was beginning, of the difficulties of finding honest statesmen
and officials, and of the unhelpfulness of newspapers, of all the
dark and troubled spectacle of human life. Serpentine had used the
term "the Last Age of Confusion," and Mr. Burleigh had seized upon
the phrase and was making much of it....

It was a great oratorical impromptu. It must have gone on for an
hour, and the Utopians listened with keen, attentive faces, now and
then nodding their acceptance and recognition of this statement or
that. "Very like," would come tapping into Mr. Barnstaple's brain.
"With us also--in the Age of Confusion."

At last Mr. Burleigh, with the steady deliberation of an old
parliamentary hand, drew to his end. Compliments.

He bowed. He had done. Mr. Mush startled everyone by a vigorous
hand-clapping in which no one else joined.

The tension in Mr. Barnstaple's mind had become intolerable.
He leapt to his feet.


Section 2

He stood making those weak propitiatory gestures that come so
naturally to the inexperienced speaker. "Ladies and Gentlemen," he
said. "Utopians, Mr. Burleigh! I crave your pardon for a moment.
There is a little matter. Urgent."

For a brief interval he was speechless.

Then he found attention and encouragement in the eye of Urthred.

"Something I don't understand. Something incredible--I mean,
incompatible. The little rift. Turns everything into a fantastic
phantasmagoria."

The intelligence in Urthred's eye was very encouraging. Mr.
Barnstaple abandoned any attempt to address the company as a whole,
and spoke directly to Urthred.

"You live in Utopia, hundreds of thousands of years in advance of
us. How is it that you are able to talk contemporary English--to use
exactly the same language that we do? I ask you, how is that? It is
incredible. It jars. It makes a dream of you. And yet you are not a
dream? It makes me feel--almost--insane."

Urthred smiled pleasantly. "We _don't_ speak English," he said.

Mr. Barnstaple felt the ground slipping from under his feet. "But
I _hear_ you speaking English," he said.

"Nevertheless we do not speak it," said Urthred.

He smiled still more broadly. "We don't--for ordinary
purposes--speak anything."

Mr. Barnstaple, with his brain resigning its functions, maintained
his pose of deferential attention.

"Ages ago," Urthred continued, "we certainly used to speak
languages. We made sounds and we heard sounds. People used to think,
and then chose and arranged words and uttered them. The hearer
heard, noted, and retranslated the sounds into ideas. Then, in some
manner which we still do not understand perfectly, people began to
_get_ the idea before it was clothed in words and uttered in sounds.
They began to hear in their minds, as soon as the speaker had
arranged his ideas and before he put them into word symbols even in
his own mind. They knew what he was going to say before he said it.
This direct transmission presently became common; it was found out
that with a little effort most people could get over to each other
in this fashion to some extent, and the new mode of communication
was developed systematically.

"That is what we do now habitually in this world. We think directly
_to_ each other. We determine to convey the thought and it is
conveyed at once--provided the distance is not too great. We use
sounds in this world now only for poetry and pleasure and in moments
of emotion or to shout at a distance, or with animals, not for
the transmission of ideas from human mind to kindred human mind
any more. When I think to you, the thought, so far as it finds
corresponding ideas and suitable words in your mind, is reflected
in your mind. My thought clothes itself in words in your mind,
which words you seem to hear--and naturally enough in your own
language and your own habitual phrases. Very probably the members
of your party are hearing what I am saying to you, each with his
own individual difference of vocabulary and phrasing."

Mr. Barnstaple had been punctuating this discourse with sharp,
intelligent nods, coming now and then to the verge of interruption.
Now he broke out with: "And that is why occasionally--as for
instance when Mr. Serpentine made his wonderful explanation just
now--when you soar into ideas of which we haven't even a shadow
in our minds, we just hear nothing at all."

"Are there such gaps?" asked Urthred.

"Many, I fear--for all of us," said Mr. Burleigh.

"It's like being deaf in spots," said Lady Stella. "Large spots."

Father Amerton nodded agreement.

"And that is why we cannot be clear whether you are called Urthred
or Adam, and why I have found myself confusing Arden and Greentrees
and Forest in my mind."

"I hope that now you are mentally more at your case?" said Urthred.

"Oh, quite," said Mr. Barnstaple. "Quite. And all things considered,
it is really very convenient for us that there should be this method
of transmission. For otherwise I do not see how we could have
avoided weeks of linguistic bother, first principles of our
respective grammars, logic, significs, and so forth, boring stuff
for the most part, before we could have got to anything like our
present understanding."

"A very good point indeed," said Mr. Burleigh, turning round to Mr.
Barnstaple in a very friendly way. "A very good point indeed. I
should never have noted it if you had not called my attention to it.
It is quite extraordinary; I had not noted anything of this--this
difference. I was occupied, I am bound to confess, by my own
thoughts. I supposed they were speaking English. Took it for
granted."


Section 3

It seemed to Mr. Barnstaple that this wonderful experience was now
so complete that there remained nothing more to wonder at except
its absolute credibility. He sat in this beautiful little building
looking out upon dreamland flowers and the sunlit lake amidst this
strange mingling of week-end English costumes and this more than
Olympian nudity that had already ceased to startle him, he listened
and occasionally participated in the long informal conversation
that now ensued. It was a discussion that brought to light the most
amazing and fundamental differences of moral and social outlook. Yet
everything had now assumed a reality that made it altogether natural
to suppose that he would presently go home to write about it in the
Liberal and tell his wife, as much as might seem advisable at the
time, about the manners and costumes of this hitherto undiscovered
world. He had not even a sense of intervening distances. Sydenham
might have been just round the corner.

Presently two pretty young girls made tea at an equipage among
the rhododendra and brought it round to people. Tea! It was what
we should call China tea, very delicate, and served in little
cups without handles, Chinese fashion, but it was real and very
refreshing tea.

The earlier curiosities of the Earthlings turned upon methods of
government. This was perhaps natural in the presence of two such
statesmen as Mr. Burleigh and Mr. Catskill.

"What form of government do you have?" asked Mr. Burleigh. "Is it a
monarchy or an autocracy or a pure democracy? Do you separate the
executive and the legislative? And is there one central government
for all your planet, or are there several governing centres?"

It was conveyed to Mr. Burleigh and his companions with some
difficulty that there was no central government in Utopia at all.

"But surely," said Mr. Burleigh, "there is someone or something,
some council or bureau or what not, somewhere, with which the final
decision rests in cases of collective action for the common welfare,
Some ultimate seat and organ of sovereignty, it seems to me, there
_must_ be."...

No, the Utopians declared, there was no such concentration of
authority in their world. In the past there had been, but it had
long since diffused back into the general body of the community.
Decisions in regard to any particular matter were made by the
people who knew most about that matter.

"But suppose it is a decision that has to be generally observed?
A rule affecting the public health, for example? Who would enforce
it?"

"It would not need to be enforced. Why should it?"

"But suppose someone refused to obey your regulation?"

"We should inquire why he or she did not conform. There might be
some exceptional reason."

"But failing that?"

"We should make an inquiry into his mental and moral health."

"The mind doctor takes the place of the policeman," said Mr.
Burleigh.

"I should prefer the policeman," said Mr. Rupert Catskill.

"You _would_, Rupert," said Mr. Burleigh as who should say:
"_Got_ you that time."

"Then do you mean to say," he continued, addressing the Utopians
with an expression of great intelligence, "that your affairs are
all managed by special bodies or organizations--one scarcely knows
what to call them--without any co-ordination of their activities?"

"The activities of our world," said Urthred, "are all co-ordinated
to secure the general freedom. We have a number of intelligences
directed to the general psychology of the race and to the
interaction of one collective function upon another."

"Well, isn't that group of intelligences a governing class?" said
Mr. Burleigh.

"Not in the sense that they exercise any arbitrary will," said
Urthred. "They deal with general relations, that is all. But they
rank no higher, they have no more precedence on that account than
a philosopher has over a scientific specialist."

"This is a republic indeed!" said Mr. Burleigh. "But how it works
and how it came about I cannot imagine. Your state is probably a
highly socialistic one?"

"You live still in a world in which nearly everything except the
air, the high roads, the high seas and the wilderness is privately
owned?"

"We do," said Mr. Catskill. "Owned--and competed for."

"We have been through that stage. We found at last that private
property in all but very personal things was an intolerable nuisance
to mankind. We got rid of it. An artist or a scientific man has
complete control of all the material he needs, we all own our tools
and appliances and have rooms and places of our own, but there is
no property for trade or speculation. All this militant property,
this property of manoeuvre, has been quite got rid of. But how we
got rid of it is a long story. It was not done in a few years.
The exaggeration of private property was an entirely natural and
necessary stage in the development of human nature. It led at last
to monstrous results, but it was only through these monstrous and
catastrophic results that men learnt the need and nature of the
limitations of private property."

Mr. Burleigh had assumed an attitude which was obviously habitual
to him. He sat very low in his chair with his long legs crossed
in front of him and the thumb and fingers of one hand placed with
meticulous exactness against those of the other.

"I must confess," he said, "that I am most interested in the
peculiar form of Anarchism which seems to prevail here. Unless I
misunderstand you completely every man attends to his own business
as the servant of the state. I take it you have--you must correct me
if I am wrong--a great number of people concerned in the production
and distribution and preparation of food; they inquire, I assume,
into the needs of the world, they satisfy them and they are a law
unto themselves in their way of doing it. They conduct researches,
they make experiments. Nobody compels, obliges, restrains or
prevents them. ("People talk to them about it," said Urthred with
a faint smile.) And again others produce and manufacture and study
metals for all mankind and are also a law unto themselves. Others
again see to the habitability of your world, plan and arrange these
delightful habitations, say who shall use them and how they shall be
used. Others pursue pure science. Others experiment with sensory and
imaginative possibilities and are artists. Others again teach."

"They are very important," said Lychnis.

"And they all do it in harmony--and due proportion. Without either a
central legislature or executive. I will admit that all this seems
admirable--but impossible. Nothing of the sort has ever been even
suggested yet in the world from which we come."

"Something of the sort was suggested long ago by the Guild
Socialists," said Mr. Barnstaple.

"Dear me!" said Mr. Burleigh. "I know very little about the Guild
Socialists. Who were they? Tell me."

Mr. Barnstaple tacitly declined that task. "The idea is quite
familiar to our younger people," he said. "Laski calls it the
pluralistic state, as distinguished from the monistic state in
which sovereignty is concentrated. Even the Chinese have it. A
Pekin professor, Mr. S. C. Chang, has written a pamphlet on what he
calls 'Professionalism.' I read it only a few weeks ago. He sent it
to the office of the Liberal. He points out how undesirable it is
and how unnecessary for China to pass through a phase of democratic
politics on the western model. He wants China to go right straight
on to a collateral independence of functional classes, mandarins,
industrials, agricultural workers and so forth, much as we seem
to find it here. Though that of course involves an educational
revolution. Decidedly the germ of what you call Anarchism here is
also in the air we come from."

"Dear me!" said Mr. Burleigh, looking more intelligent and
appreciative than ever. "And is that so? I had _no_ idea--!"


Section 4

The conversation continued desultory in form and yet the exchange
of ideas was rapid and effective. Quite soon, as it seemed to Mr.
Barnstaple, an outline of the history of Utopia from the Last Age
of Confusion onward shaped itself in his mind.

The more he learnt of that Last Age of Confusion the more it seemed
to resemble the present time on earth. In those days the Utopians
had worn abundant clothing and lived in towns quite after the
earthly fashion. A fortunate conspiracy of accidents rather than
any set design had opened for them some centuries of opportunity
and expansion. Climatic phases and political chances had smiled
upon the race after a long period of recurrent shortage, pestilence
and destructive warfare. For the first time the Utopians had been
able to explore the whole planet on which they lived, and these
explorations had brought great virgin areas under the axe, the spade
and the plough. There had been an enormous increase in real wealth
and in leisure and liberty. Many thousands of people were lifted
out of the normal squalor of human life to positions in which they
could, if they chose, think and act with unprecedented freedom. A
few, a sufficient few, did. A vigorous development of scientific
inquiry began and, trailing after it a multitude of ingenious
inventions, produced a great enlargement of practical human power.

There had been previous outbreaks of the scientific intelligence
in Utopia, but none before had ever occurred in such favourable
circumstances or lasted long enough to come to abundant practical
fruition. Now in a couple of brief centuries the Utopians, who had
hitherto crawled about their planet like sluggish ants or travelled
parasitically on larger and swifter animals, found themselves able
to fly rapidly or speak instantaneously to any other point on the
planet. They found themselves, too, in possession of mechanical
power on a scale beyond all previous experience, and not simply
of mechanical power; physiological and then psychological science
followed in the wake of physics and chemistry, and extraordinary
possibilities of control over his own body and over his social life
dawned upon the Utopian. But these things came, when at last they
did come, so rapidly and confusingly that it was only a small
minority of people who realized the possibilities, as distinguished
from the concrete achievements, of this tremendous expansion
of knowledge. The rest took the novel inventions as they came,
haphazard, with as little adjustment as possible of their thoughts
and ways of living to the new necessities these novelties implied.

The first response of the general population of Utopia to the
prospect of power, leisure and freedom thus opened out to it was
proliferation. It behaved just as senselessly and mechanically as
any other animal or vegetable species would have done. It bred until
it had completely swamped the ampler opportunity that had opened
before it. It spent the great gifts of science as rapidly as it got
them in a mere insensate multiplication of the common life. At one
time in the Last Age of Confusion the population of Utopia had
mounted to over two thousand million....

"But what is it now?" asked Mr. Burleigh.

About two hundred and fifty million, the Utopians told him. That
had been the maximum population that could live a fully developed
life upon the surface of Utopia. But now with increasing resources
the population was being increased.

A gasp of horror came from Father Amerton. He had been dreading this
realization for some time. It struck at his moral foundations. "And
you dare to _regulate_ increase! You control it! Your women consent
to bear children as they are needed--or refrain!"

"Of course," said Urthred. "Why not?"

"I feared as much," said Father Amerton, and leaning forward he
covered his face with his hands, murmuring, "I felt this in the
atmosphere! The human stud farm! Refusing to create souls! The
_wickedness_ of it! Oh, my God!"

Mr. Burleigh regarded the emotion of the reverend gentleman through
his glasses with a slightly shocked expression. He detested
catchwords. But Father Amerton stood for very valuable conservative
elements in the community. Mr. Burleigh turned to the Utopian again.
"That is extremely interesting," he said. "Even at present our earth
contrives to carry a population of at least five times that amount."

"But twenty millions or so will starve this winter, you told us a
little while ago--in a place called Russia. And only a very small
proportion of the rest are leading what even you would call full
and spacious lives?"

"Nevertheless the contrast is very striking," said Mr. Burleigh.

"It is terrible!" said Father Amerton.

The overcrowding of the planet in the Last Age of Confusion was,
these Utopians insisted, the fundamental evil out of which all
the others that afflicted the race arose. An overwhelming flood
of newcomers poured into the world and swamped every effort the
intelligent minority could make to educate a sufficient proportion
of them to meet the demands of the new and still rapidly changing
conditions of life. And the intelligent minority was not itself in
any position to control the racial destiny. These great masses of
population that had been blundered into existence, swayed by damaged
and decaying traditions and amenable to the crudest suggestions,
were the natural prey and support of every adventurer with a
mind blatant enough and a conception of success coarse enough to
appeal to them. The economic system, clumsily and convulsively
reconstructed to meet the new conditions of mechanical production
and distribution, became more and more a cruel and impudent
exploitation of the multitudinous congestion of the common man by
the predatory and acquisitive few. That all too common common man
was hustled through misery and subjection from his cradle to his
grave; he was cajoled and lied to, he was bought, sold and dominated
by an impudent minority, bolder and no doubt more energetic, but
in all other respects no more intelligent than himself. It was
difficult, Urthred said, for a Utopian nowadays to convey the
monstrous stupidity, wastefulness and vulgarity to which these
rich and powerful men of the Last Age of Confusion attained.

("We will not trouble you," said Mr. Burleigh. "Unhappily--we know....
We know. Only too well do we know.")

Upon this festering, excessive mass of population disasters
descended at last like wasps upon a heap of rotting fruit. It was
its natural, inevitable destiny. A war that affected nearly the
whole planet dislocated its flimsy financial system and most of its
economic machinery beyond any possibility of repair. Civil wars
and clumsily conceived attempts at social revolution continued the
disorganization. A series of years of bad weather accentuated the
general shortage. The exploiting adventurers, too stupid to realize
what had happened, continued to cheat and hoodwink the commonalty
and burke any rally of honest men, as wasps will continue to eat
even after their bodies have been cut away. The effort to make
passed out of Utopian life, triumphantly superseded by the effort
to get. Production dwindled down towards the vanishing point.
Accumulated wealth vanished. An overwhelming system of debt, a swarm
of creditors, morally incapable of helpful renunciation, crushed
out all fresh initiative.

The long diastole in Utopian affairs that had begun with the great
discoveries, passed into a phase of rapid systole. What plenty and
pleasure was still possible in the world was filched all the more
greedily by the adventurers of finance and speculative business.
Organized science had long since been commercialized, and was
"applied" now chiefly to a hunt for profitable patents and the
forestalling of necessary supplies. The neglected lamp of pure
science waned, flickered and seemed likely to go out again
altogether, leaving Utopia in the beginning of a new series of
Dark Ages like those before the age of discovery began....

"It is really _very_ like a gloomy diagnosis of our own outlook,"
said Mr. Burleigh. "Extraordinarily like. How Dean Inge would have
enjoyed all this!"

"To an infidel of his stamp, no doubt, it would seem most
enjoyable," said Father Amerton a little incoherently.

These comments annoyed Mr. Barnstaple, who was urgent to hear more.

"And then," he said to Urthred, "what happened?"


Section 5

What happened, Mr. Barnstaple gathered, was a deliberate change
in Utopian thought. A growing number of people were coming to
understand that amidst the powerful and easily released forces that
science and organization had brought within reach of man, the old
conception of social life in the state, as a limited and legalized
struggle of men and women to get the better of one another, was
becoming too dangerous to endure, just as the increased dreadfulness
of modern weapons was making the separate sovereignty of nations too
dangerous to endure. There had to be new ideas and new conventions
of human association if history was not to end in disaster and
collapse.

All societies were based on the limitation by laws and taboos and
treaties of the primordial fierce combativeness of the ancestral
man-ape; that ancient spirit of self-assertion had now to undergo
new restrictions commensurate with the new powers and dangers of
the race. The idea of competition to possess, as the ruling idea of
intercourse, was, like some ill-controlled furnace, threatening to
consume the machine it had formerly driven. The idea of creative
service had to replace it. To that idea the human mind and will had
to be turned if social life was to be saved. Propositions that had
seemed, in former ages, to be inspired and exalted idealism began
now to be recognized not simply as sober psychological truth but as
practical and urgently necessary truth. In explaining this Urthred
expressed himself in a manner that recalled to Mr. Barnstaple's mind
certain very familiar phrases; he seemed to be saying that whosoever
would save his life should lose it, and that whosoever would give
his life should thereby gain the whole world.

Father Amerton's thoughts, it seemed, were also responding in the
same manner. For he suddenly interrupted with: "But what you are
saying is a quotation!"

Urthred admitted that he had a quotation in mind, a passage from the
teachings of a man of great poetic power who had lived long ago in
the days of spoken words.

He would have proceeded, but Father Amerton was too excited to let
him do so. "But who was this teacher?" he asked. "Where did he live?
How was he born? How did he die?"

A picture was flashed upon Mr. Barnstaple's consciousness of a
solitary-looking pale-faced figure, beaten and bleeding, surrounded
by armoured guards, in the midst of a thrusting, jostling, sun-bit
crowd which filled a narrow, high-walled street. Behind, some huge
ugly implement was borne along, dipping and swaying with the swaying
of the multitude....

"Did he die upon the Cross in _this_ world also?" cried Father
Amerton. "Did he die upon the Cross?"

This prophet in Utopia they learnt had died very painfully, but not
upon the Cross. He had been tortured in some way, but neither the
Utopians nor these particular Earthlings had sufficient knowledge of
the technicalities of torture to get any idea over about that, and
then apparently he had been fastened upon a slowly turning wheel and
exposed until he died. It was the abominable punishment of a cruel
and conquering race, and it had been inflicted upon him because his
doctrine of universal service had alarmed the rich and dominant who
did not serve. Mr. Barnstaple had a momentary vision of a twisted
figure upon that wheel of torture in the blazing sun. And,
marvellous triumph over death! out of a world that could do such
a deed had come this great peace and universal beauty about him!

But Father Amerton was pressing his questions. "But did you not
realize who he was? Did not this world suspect?"

A great many people thought that this man was a God. But he had been
accustomed to call himself merely a son of God or a son of Man.

Father Amerton stuck to his point. "But you worship him now?"

"We follow his teaching because it was wonderful and true," said
Urthred.

"But worship?"

"No."

"But does nobody worship? There _were_ those who worshipped him?"

There were those who worshipped him. There were those who quailed
before the stern magnificence of his teaching and yet who had a
tormenting sense that he was right in some profound way. So they
played a trick upon their own uneasy consciences by treating him as
a magical god instead of as a light to their souls. They interwove
with his execution ancient traditions of sacrificial kings. Instead
of receiving him frankly and clearly and making him a part of their
understandings and wills they pretended to eat him mystically and
make him a part of their bodies. They turned his wheel into a
miraculous symbol, and they confused it with the equator and the sun
and the ecliptic and indeed with anything else that was round. In
cases of ill-luck, ill-health or bad weather it was believed to be
very helpful for the believer to describe a circle in the air with
the forefinger.

And since this teacher's memory was very dear to the ignorant
multitude because of his gentleness and charity, it was seized upon
by cunning and aggressive types who constituted themselves champions
and exponents of the wheel, who grew rich and powerful in its name,
led people into great wars for its sake and used it as a cover and
justification for envy, hatred, tyranny and dark desires. Until at
last men said that had that ancient prophet come again to Utopia,
his own triumphant wheel would have crushed and destroyed him
afresh....

Father Amerton seemed inattentive to this communication. He was
seeing it from another angle. "But surely," he said, "there is a
remnant of believers still! Despised perhaps--but a remnant?"

There was no remnant. The whole world followed that Teacher of
Teachers, but no one worshipped him. On some old treasured buildings
the wheel was still to be seen carved, often with the most fantastic
decorative elaborations. And in museums and collections there were
multitudes of pictures, images, charms and the like.

"I don't understand this," said Father Amerton. "It is too terrible.
I am at a loss. I do not understand."


Section 6

A fair and rather slender man with a delicately beautiful face
whose name, Mr. Barnstaple was to learn later, was Lion, presently
took over from Urthred the burthen of explaining and answering the
questions of the Earthlings.

He was one of the educational co-ordinators in Utopia. He made it
clear that the change over in Utopian affairs had been no sudden
revolution. No new system of laws and customs, no new method of
economic co-operation based on the idea of universal service to
the common good, had sprung abruptly into being complete and
finished. Throughout a long period, before and during the Last
Age of Confusion, the foundations of the new state were laid by a
growing multitude of inquirers and workers, having no set plan or
preconceived method, but brought into unconscious co-operation by
a common impulse to service and a common lucidity and veracity of
mind. It was only towards the climax of the Last Age of Confusion in
Utopia that psychological science began to develop with any vigour,
comparable to the vigour of the development of geographical and
physical science during the preceding centuries. And the social
and economic disorder which was checking experimental science and
crippling the organized work of the universities was stimulating
inquiry into the processes of human association and making it
desperate and fearless.

The impression given Mr. Barnstaple was not of one of those violent
changes which our world has learnt to call revolutions, but of an
increase of light, a dawn of new ideas, in which the things of the
old order went on for a time with diminishing vigour until people
began as a matter of common sense to do the new things in the place
of the old.

The beginnings of the new order were in discussions, books and
psychological laboratories; the soil in which it grew was found
in schools and colleges. The old order gave small rewards to the
schoolmaster, but its dominant types were too busy with the struggle
for wealth and power to take much heed of teaching: it was left to
any man or woman who would give thought and labour without much hope
of tangible rewards, to shape the world anew in the minds of the
young. And they did so shape it. In a world ruled ostensibly by
adventurer politicians, in a world where men came to power through
floundering business enterprises and financial cunning, it was
presently being taught and understood that extensive private
property was socially a nuisance, and that the state could not do
its work properly nor education produce its proper results, side by
side with a class of irresponsible rich people. For, by their very
nature, they assailed, they corrupted, they undermined every state
undertaking; their flaunting existences distorted and disguised all
the values of life. They had to go, for the good of the race.

"Didn't they fight?" asked Mr. Catskill pugnaciously.

They had fought irregularly but fiercely. The fight to delay
or arrest the coming of the universal scientific state, the
educational state, in Utopia, had gone on as a conscious struggle
for nearly five centuries. The fight against it was the fight of
greedy, passionate, prejudiced and self-seeking men against the
crystallization into concrete realities of this new idea of
association for service. It was fought wherever ideas were spread;
it was fought with dismissals and threats and boycotts and storms
of violence, with lies and false accusations, with prosecutions
and imprisonments, with lynching-rope, tar and feathers, paraffin,
bludgeon and rifle, bomb and gun.

But the service of the new idea that had been launched into the
world never failed; it seized upon the men and women it needed with
compelling power. Before the scientific state was established in
Utopia more than a million martyrs had been killed for it, and
those who had suffered lesser wrongs were beyond all reckoning.
Point after point was won in education, in social laws, in economic
method. No date could be fixed for the change. A time came when
Utopia perceived that it was day and that a new order of things
had replaced the old....

"So it must be," said Mr. Barnstaple, as though Utopia were not
already present about him. "So it must be."

A question was being answered. Every Utopian child is taught to the
full measure of its possibilities and directed to the work that is
indicated by its desires and capacity. It is born well. It is born
of perfectly healthy parents; its mother has chosen to bear it after
due thought and preparation. It grows up under perfectly healthy
conditions; its natural impulses to play and learn are gratified by
the subtlest educational methods; hands, eyes and limbs are given
every opportunity of training and growth; it learns to draw, write,
express itself, use a great variety of symbols to assist and extend
its thought. Kindness and civility become ingrained habits, for
all about it are kind and civil. And in particular the growth of
its imagination is watched and encouraged. It learns the wonderful
history of its world and its race, how man has struggled and still
struggles out of his earlier animal narrowness and egotism towards
an empire over being that is still but faintly apprehended through
dense veils of ignorance. All its desires are made fine; it learns
from poetry, from example and the love of those about it to lose
its solicitude for itself in love; its sexual passions are turned
against its selfishness, its curiosity flowers into scientific
passion, its combativeness is set to fight disorder, its inherent
pride and ambition are directed towards an honourable share in
the common achievement. It goes to the work that attracts it and
chooses what it will do.

If the individual is indolent there is no great loss, there is
plenty for all in Utopia, but then it will find no lovers, nor will
it ever bear children, because no one in Utopia loves those who have
neither energy nor distinction. There is much pride of the mate in
Utopian love. And there is no idle rich "society" in Utopia, nor
games and shows for the mere looker-on. There is nothing for the
mere looker-on. It is a pleasant world indeed for holidays, but not
for those who would continuously do nothing.

For centuries now Utopian science has been able to discriminate
among births, and nearly every Utopian alive would have ranked as an
energetic creative spirit in former days. There are few dull and no
really defective people in Utopia; the idle strains, the people of
lethargic dispositions or weak imaginations, have mostly died out;
the melancholic type has taken its dismissal and gone; spiteful and
malignant characters are disappearing. The vast majority of Utopians
are active, sanguine, inventive, receptive and good-tempered.

"And you have not even a parliament?" asked Mr. Burleigh, still
incredulous.

Utopia has no parliament, no politics, no private wealth, no
business competition, no police nor prisons, no lunatics, no
defectives nor cripples, and it has none of these things because it
has schools and teachers who are all that schools and teachers can
be. Politics, trade and competition are the methods of adjustment
of a crude society. Such methods of adjustment have been laid
aside in Utopia for more than a thousand years. There is no rule
nor government needed by adult Utopians because all the rule and
government they need they have had in childhood and youth.

Said Lion: "Our education is our government."



CHAPTER THE SIXTH

SOME EARTHLY CRITICISMS


Section 1

At times during that memorable afternoon and evening it seemed to
Mr. Barnstaple that he was involved in nothing more remarkable than
an extraordinary dialogue about government and history, a dialogue
that had in some inexplicable way become spectacular; it was as if
all this was happening only in his mind; and then the absolute
reality of his adventure would return to him with overwhelming power
and his intellectual interest fade to inattention in the astounding
strangeness of his position. In these latter phases he would find
his gaze wandering from face to face of the Utopians who surrounded
him, resting for a time on some exquisite detail of the architecture
of the building and then coming back to these divinely graceful
forms.

Then incredulously he would revert to his fellow Earthlings.

Not one of these Utopian faces but was as candid, earnest and
beautiful as the angelic faces of an Italian painting. One woman
was strangely like Michael Angelo's Delphic Sibyl. They sat in easy
attitudes, men and women together, for the most part concentrated on
the discussion, but every now and then Mr. Barnstaple would meet the
direct scrutiny of a pair of friendly eyes or find some Utopian face
intent upon the costume of Lady Stella or the eye-glass of Mr. Mush.

Mr. Barnstaple's first impression of the Utopians had been that they
were all young people; now he perceived that many of these faces had
a quality of vigorous maturity. None showed any of the distinctive
marks of age as this world notes them, but both Urthred and Lion
had lines of experience about eyes and lips and brow.

The effect of these people upon Mr. Barnstaple mingled stupefaction
with familiarity in the strangest way. He had a feeling that he had
always known that such a race could exist and that this knowledge
had supplied the implicit standard of a thousand judgments upon
human affairs, and at the same time he was astonished to the pitch
of incredulity to find himself in the same world with them. They
were at once normal and wonderful in comparison with himself and
his companions who were, on their part, at the same time queer and
perfectly matter-of-fact.

And together with a strong desire to become friendly and intimate
with these fine and gracious persons, to give himself to them and
to associate them with himself by service and reciprocal acts,
there was an awe and fear of them that made him shrink from contact
with them and quiver at their touch. He desired their personal
recognition of himself as a fellow and companion so greatly that
his sense of his own ungraciousness and unworthiness overwhelmed
him. He wanted to bow down before them. Beneath all the light and
loveliness of things about him lurked the intolerable premonition
of his ultimate rejection from this new world.

So great was the impression made by the Utopians upon Mr.
Barnstaple, so entirely did he yield himself up to his joyful
acceptance of their grace and physical splendour, that for a time he
had no attention left over to note how different from his own were
the reactions of several of his Earthling companions. The aloofness
of the Utopians from the queerness, grotesqueness and cruelty of
normal earthly life made him ready for the most uncritical approval
of their institutions and ways of life.

It was the behaviour of Father Amerton which first awakened him
to the fact that it was possible to disapprove of these wonderful
people very highly and to display a very considerable hostility to
them. At first Father Amerton had kept a round-faced, round-eyed
wonder above his round collar; he had shown a disposition to give
the lead to anyone who chose to take it, and he had said not a word
until the naked beauty of dead Greenlake had surprised him into an
expression of unclerical appreciation. But during the journey to the
lakeside and the meal and the opening arrangements of the conference
there was a reaction, and this first naive and deferential
astonishment gave place to an attitude of resistance and hostility.
It was as if this new world which had begun by being a spectacle had
taken on the quality of a proposition which he felt he had either to
accept or confute. Perhaps it was that the habit of mind of a public
censor was too strong for him and that he could not feel normal
again until he began to condemn. Perhaps he was really shocked and
distressed by the virtual nudity of these lovely bodies about him.
But he began presently to make queer grunts and coughs, to mutter
to himself, and to betray an increasing incapacity to keep still.

He broke out first into an interruption when the question of
population was raised. For a little while his intelligence prevailed
over this emotional stir when the prophet of the wheel was
discussed, but then his gathering preoccupations resumed their sway.

"I must speak out," Mr. Barnstaple heard him mutter. "I must speak
out."

"Now suddenly he began to ask questions. There are some things
I want to have clear," he said. "I want to know what moral state
this so-called Utopia is in. Excuse me!"

He got up. He stood with wavering hands, unable for a moment to
begin. Then he went to the end of the row of seats and placed
himself so that his hands could rest on the back of a seat. He
passed his fingers through his hair and he seemed to be inhaling
deeply. An unwonted animation came into his face, which reddened
and began to shine. A horrible suspicion crossed the mind of Mr.
Barnstaple that so it was he must stand when he began those weekly
sermons of his, those fearless denunciations of almost everything,
in the church of St. Barnabas in the West. The suspicion deepened
to a still more horrible certainty.

"Friends, Brothers of this new world--I have certain things to
say to you that I cannot delay saying. I want to ask you some
soul-searching questions. I want to deal plainly with you about some
plain and simple but very fundamental matters. I want to put things
to you frankly and as man to man, not being mealy-mouthed about
urgent if delicate things. Let me come without parley to what I have
to say. I want to ask you if, in this so-called state of Utopia, you
still have and respect and honour the most sacred thing in social
life. Do you still respect the marriage bond?"

He paused, and in the pause the Utopian reply came through to
Mr. Barnstaple: "In Utopia there are no bonds."

But Father Amerton was not asking questions with any desire for
answers; he was asking questions pulpit-fashion.

"I want to know," he was booming out, "if that holy union revealed
to our first parents in the Garden of Eden holds good here, if that
sanctified life-long association of one man and one woman, in good
fortune and ill fortune, excluding every other sort of intimacy,
is the rule of your lives. I want to know--"

"But he _doesn't_ want to know," came a Utopian intervention.

"--if that shielded and guarded dual purity--"

Mr. Burleigh raised a long white hand. "Father Amerton," he
protested, "_please_."

The hand of Mr. Burleigh was a potent hand that might still wave
towards preferment. Few things under heaven could stop Father
Amerton when he was once launched upon one of his soul storms, but
the hand of Mr. Burleigh was among such things.

"--has followed another still more precious gift and been cast aside
here and utterly rejected of men? What is it, Mr. Burleigh?"

"I wish you would not press this matter further just at present,
Father Amerton. Until we have learnt a little more. Institutions
are, manifestly, very different here. Even the institution of
marriage may be different."

The preacher's face lowered. "Mr. Burleigh," he said, "I _must_. If
my suspicions are right, I want to strip this world forthwith of its
hectic pretence to a sort of health and virtue."

"Not much stripping required," said Mr. Burleigh's chauffeur, in a
very audible aside.

A certain testiness became evident in Mr. Burleigh's voice.

"Then ask questions," he said. "Ask questions. Don't orate, please.
They don't want us to orate."

"I've asked my question," said Father Amerton sulkily with a
rhetorical glare at Urthred, and remained standing.

The answer came clear and explicit. In Utopia there was no
compulsion for men and women to go about in indissoluble pairs. For
most Utopians that would be inconvenient. Very often men and women,
whose work brought them closely together, were lovers and kept very
much together, as Arden and Greenlake had done. But they were not
obliged to do that.

There had not always been this freedom. In the old crowded days of
conflict, and especially among the agricultural workers and employed
people of Utopia, men and women who had been lovers were bound
together under severe penalties for life. They lived together in a
small home which the woman kept in order for the man, she was his
servant and bore him as many children as possible, while he got food
for them. The children were desired because they were soon helpful
on the land or as wage-earners. But the necessities that had
subjugated women to that sort of pairing had passed away.

People paired indeed with their chosen mates, but they did so by an
inner necessity and not by any outward compulsion.

Father Amerton had listened with ill-concealed impatience. Now he
jumped with: "Then I was right, and you have abolished the family?"
His finger pointed at Urthred made it almost a personal accusation.

No. Utopia had not abolished the family. It had enlarged and
glorified the family until it embraced the whole world. Long ago
that prophet of the wheel, whom Father Amerton seemed to respect,
had preached that very enlargement of the ancient narrowness of
home. They had told him while he preached that his mother and his
brethren stood without and claimed his attention. But he would not
go to them. He had turned to the crowd that listened to his words:
"Behold my mother and my brethren!"

Father Amerton slapped the seat-back in front of him loudly and
startlingly. "A quibble," he cried, "a quibble! Satan too can
quote the scriptures."

It was clear to Mr. Barnstaple that Father Amerton was not in
complete control of himself. He was frightened by what he was doing
and yet impelled to do it. He was too excited to think clearly or
control his voice properly, so that he shouted and boomed in the
wildest way. He was "letting himself go" and trusting to the
habits of the pulpit of St. Barnabas to bring him through.

"I perceive now how you stand. Only too well do I perceive how you
stand. From the outset I guessed how things were with you. I
waited--I waited to be perfectly sure, before I bore my testimony.
But it speaks for itself--the shamelessness of your costume, the
licentious freedom of your manners! Young men and women, smiling,
joining hands, near to caressing, when averted eyes, averted eyes,
are the least tribute you could pay to modesty! And this vile
talk--of lovers loving--without bonds or blessings, without rules or
restraint. What does it mean? Whither does it lead? Do not imagine
because I am a priest, a man pure and virginal in spite of great
temptations, do not imagine that I do not understand! Have I no
vision of the secret places of the heart? Do not the wounded
sinners, the broken potsherds, creep to me with their pitiful
confessions? And I will tell you plainly whither you go and how you
stand? This so-called freedom of yours is nothing but licence. Your
so-called Utopia, I see plainly, is nothing but a hell of unbridled
indulgence! Unbridled indulgence!"

Mr. Burleigh held up a protesting hand, but Father Amerton's
eloquence soared over the obstruction.

He beat upon the back of the seat before him. "I will bear my
witness," he shouted. "I will bear my witness. I will make no bones
about it. I refuse to mince matters I tell you. You are all
living--in promiscuity! That is the word for it. In animal
promiscuity! In _bestial_ promiscuity!"

Mr. Burleigh had sprung to his feet. He was holding up his two hands
and motioning the London Boanerges to sit down. "No, no!" he cried.
"You must _stop_, Mr. Amerton. Really, you must stop. You are being
insulting. You do not understand. Sit _down_, please. I insist."

"Sit down and hold your peace," said a very clear voice. "Or you
will be taken away."

Something made Father Amerton aware of a still figure at his elbow.
He met the eyes of a lithe young man who was scrutinizing his build
as a portrait painter might scrutinize a new sitter. There was no
threat in his bearing, he stood quite still, and yet his appearance
threw an extraordinary quality of evanescence about Father Amerton.
The great preacher's voice died in his throat.

Mr. Burleigh's bland voice was lifted to avert a conflict. "Mr.
Serpentine, Sir, I appeal to you and apologize. He is not fully
responsible. We others regret the interruption--the incident. I pray
you, please do not take him away, whatever taking away may mean. I
will answer personally for his good behaviour.... _Do_ sit down,
Mr. Amerton, _please_; _now_; or I shall wash my hands of the whole
business."

Father Amerton hesitated.

"My time will come," he said and looked the young man in the eyes
for a moment and then went back to his seat.

Urthred spoke quietly and clearly. "You Earthlings are difficult
guests to entertain. This is not all.... Manifestly this man's mind
is very unclean. His sexual imagination is evidently inflamed and
diseased. He is angry and anxious to insult and wound. And his
noises are terrific. To-morrow he must be examined and dealt with."

"How?" said Father Amerton, his round face suddenly grey. "How do
you mean--_dealt_ with?"

"_Please_ do not talk," said Mr. Burleigh. "_Please_ do not talk any
more. You have done