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Chapter the Fifth: Fanny Discovers Herself. Parts 7 and 8 · The Dream: A Novel

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Section fifteen of The Dream A Novel. This says the LibriVox recording. All
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LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer,
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please visit LibriVox dot org. The dream A Novel by H. G.
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Wells, Chapter the fifth Fanny discovers herself parts seven and eight. Part seven,
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But said Sarnak, my second visit to Fanny, like my first,
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was full of unexpected experiences and unrehearsed effects. The carpet on the pleasant staircase
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seemed to deaden down my moral tramplings. And when the door opened and I
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saw my dear Fanny again friendly and glad, I forgot altogether the stern interrogations
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with which that second interview was to have opened. She pulled my hair and
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kissed me, took my hat and coat, said I had grown to tremendously,
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measured herself against me, pushed me into her bright little sitting room,
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where she had prepared such a tea as I'd never seen before. Little ham
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sandwiches, sandwiches of a delightful stuff called Gentleman's relish, strawberry jam, two
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sorts of cake, and little biscuits to fill in any odd corners. You
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are a dear to come and see me, Harry. But I had a
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sort of feeling that whatever happened, you would come along. We two always
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sort of hung together, I said always. She agreed. I think mother
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and Ernie might have written me a line. Perhaps they will later. Ever
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seen an electric kettle, Harry, this is one, And you put that
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plug in there? I know, I said, and did as I was
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told. There's resistances embedded in the coating. I've been doing some electricity in
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chemistry council classes, six or seven subjects altogether, and there's a shop window
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in Tothel Street full of such things. I expect you know all about them,
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she said, I expect you've learnt all sorts of sciences. And so
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we came to the great topic of what I was learning and what I was
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going to do. It was delightful to talk to someone who really understood the
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thirst for knowledge that possessed me. I talked of myself and my dreams and
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ambitions, and meanwhile, being a growing youth, my arms swept like a
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swarm of locustsover Fanny's wonderful tea. Fanny watched me with a smile on her
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face and steered me with questions towards the things she most wanted to know.
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And when we had talked enough for a time, she showed me how to
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play her pianola, and I got a role of Schumann that mister Place had
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long ago made familiar to me, and had the exquisite delight of playing it
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over for myself. These pianolas were quite easy things to manage, I found
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in a little while I was already playing with conscious expression. Fanny praised me
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for my quickness, cleared her teeth things away while I played, and then
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came and sat beside me and listened and talked, and we found we had
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learned quite a lot about music since our party. We both thought great things
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of Bach, whom I found I was calling quite incorrectly Batch, and Mozart,
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who also had to be pronounced a little differently. And then Fanny began
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to question me about the work I wanted to do in the world. You
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mustn't stay with that old chemist much longer, she declared, How would I
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like to do some sort of work that had to do with books, book
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selling, or helping in a library, or printing and publishing books and magazines.
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You've never thought of writing things, asked Fanny, people do I made
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some verses once or twice, I confessed, and wrote a letter to the
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Daily News about temperance, but they didn't put it in. Have you ever
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wanted to write what books? Like Arnold Bennett? Rather? But you didn't
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quite know how to set about it. It's difficult to begin, I said,
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as though that was the only barrier you ought to leave that old chemist's
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shop, She repeated. If I were to ask people I know and found
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out some better sort of job for you, Harry, would you take it?
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Rather? Said I? Why not? Altogether? Interrupted firefly? Oh,
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we used to say rather, said Sarnak. It was artistic understatement,
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But you realize how dreadfully I lapsed from all my preconceived notions about Fanny and
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myself. We talked the whole evening away. We had a delightful cold picnic
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supper in a pretty little dining room with a dresser, and Fanny showed me
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how to make a wonderful salad with onions very finely chopped, and white wine
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and sugar in the dressing. And afterwards came some more of that marvel the
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pianola, and then very reluctantly I took my leave, and when I found
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myself in the streets again, I had once more my former sense of having
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dropped abruptly from one world into another, colder, bleaker, harder, and
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with entirely different moral values. Again I felt the same reluctance to go straight
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home and have my evening dimmed and destroyed by a score of pitiless questions.
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And when at last I did go home, I told a lie, Fanny's
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got a pretty place, and she's as happy as can be. I said,
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I'm not quite sure, but from what she said, I believe that
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man's going to marry her. Before very long, my cheeks and ears grew
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hot under my mother's hostile stare. Did she tell you that? Practically?
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I lied, I kind of got it out of her. But he's married
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already, said my mother. I believe there is something. I said something,
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said my mother, scornfully. She's stolen another woman's man. He belongs
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to er forever, no matter what there is against her, whomsoever God hath
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joined, let no man put asunder. That's what I was taught in what
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I believe. E may be older, E may have led her astray.
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But while she and e harbor together the sin is hers as much as is
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Indeed, you see him, he wasn't there, adn't the face that's so
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much to their credit? And are you going there again? I've kind of
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promised it's against my wishes. Ery, every time you go near Fanny Rry
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you disobey me. Mark that let's be plain about that once and for all.
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I've felt mulish. She's my sister, I said, and I'm your
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mother, though nowadays mothers are no more than dirt under their children's feet.
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Marry Er, Indeed, why should he likely eel Mary the next one?
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Come, Prue, take that bit of coal off the fire and wheel go
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up to bed. Part eight. And now said Sarnak, I must tell
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you of the queer business organization Thunderstone House, and the great firm of Crane
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and Newbery, for whom, at Fanny's instance, I abandoned mister Humburg and
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his gold labeled bottles of nothingness. Green and Newberry were publishers of newspapers,
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magazines, and books, and Thunderstone House was a sort of fountain of printed
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paper, spouting an unending wash of reading matter. In the two The Lives
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of the English people. I'm talking of the world two thousand years ago,
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said Sarnak. No doubt you have all been good children and have read your
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histories duly. But at this distance in time things appear very much foreshortened,
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and changes that occupied lifetimes and went on amidst dense clouds of doubt, misunderstanding
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and opposition seemed to be the easiest and most natural transitions. We were all
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taught that the scientific method came into human affairs, first of all in the
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world of material things, and later on in the matter of psychology and human
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relationship, so that the large scale handling of steel in railways, automobiles,
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telegraphs, flying machines, and all the broad material foundations of the New Age
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were in existence two or three generations before social, political, and educational ideas
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and methods were modified in correspondence with the new necessities these things had created.
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There was a great unanticipated increase in the trade and population of the world,
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in much confusion and conflict, violent social stresses, and very revolutions in great
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wars, before even the need of a scientific adjustment of human relationships was recognized.
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It is easy enough to learn of such things in general terms but hard
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to explain just what these processes of blind readjustment meant in anxiety, suffering,
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in distress to the countless millions who found themselves born into the swirl of this
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phase of change. As I look back to that time in which I lived
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my other life, I am reminded of a crowd of people in one of
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my old Pimlico fogs. No one had any vision of things as a whole.
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Everybody was feeling his way slowly and clumsily from one just perceptible thing to
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another, and nearly everybody was uneasy and disposed to be angry. It is
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clear beyond question to us now that the days of illiterate drudges were already passed
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in the distant nineteenth century, for power machinery had superseded them. The new
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world, so much more complicated and danger so much richer and ampler, was
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a world insisting upon an educated population, educated intellectually and morally. But in
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those days these things were not at all clear, and it was grudgingly and
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insufficiently that access to knowledge and enlightenment was given by the learned and prosperous classes
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to the rapidly accumulating masses of the population. They insisted that it should be
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done by special channels and in a new and different class of schools. I've
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told you of what passed for my education, reading and writing, rudimentary computations,
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jog free, and so forth. That sort of process truncated by employment.
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At thirteen or fourteen, when curiosity and interests were just beginning to awaken,
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was as far as education had gone for the bulk of the common men
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and women. In the opening years of the twentieth century, it had produced
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a vast multitude of people just able to read, credulous and uncritical, and
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pitifully curious to learn about life and things, pitifully wanting to see and know.
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As a whole, the community did nothing to satisfy the vague aspirations of
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those half awakened swarms. It was left to private enterprise to find what profits
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it could in their dim desires. A number of great publishing businesses arose to
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trade upon the new reading public that this elementary education, as we called it,
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had accumulated. In all ages. People have wanted stories about life.
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The young have always wanted to be told about the stage on which they are
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beginning to play their part. Arts to be shown the chances and possibilities of
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existence vividly and dramatically, so that they may imagine and anticipate their own reactions.
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And even those who are no longer youthful have always been eager to supplement
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their experiences and widen their judgment by tales and histories and discussions. There has
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been literature since there has been writing, since indeed there was enough language for
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storytelling and reciting. And always literature has told people what their minds were prepared
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to receive, searching for what it should tell, rather in the mind and
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expectation of the hear or reader who was the person who paid, than in
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the unendowed wilderness of reality, so that the greater part of literature of every
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age has been a vulgar and ephemeral thing, interesting only to the historian and
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psychologists of later times because of the light it threw upon the desires and imaginative
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limitations of its generation. But the popular literature of the age in which Harry
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Mortimer Smith was living was more abundant, more cynically insincere, lazy, cheap
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and empty than anything that the world had ever seen before. You would accuse
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me of burlesque if I were to tell you the stories of the various people
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who built up immense fortunes by catering for the vague needs of the new reading
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crowds that filled the hypertrophied cities of the Atlantic world. There was a certain
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news of whom legend related that, one day, after reading allowed some item
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of interest to his family, he remarked, I call that a regular titbit.
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From that feet of nomenclature, he went on to the idea of a
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weekly periodical full of scraps of interest, cuttings from books and newspapers and the
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like. Angry multitude, eager and curious, was ready to feed greedily on
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such orders. So titbits came into existence, whittled from a thousand sources by
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an industrious and not too expensive staff, and Noons became a man of wealth
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and a baronet. His first experiment upon the new public encouraged him to make
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a number of others. He gave it a monthly magazine full of short stories
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drawn from foreign sources. At first that success was uncertain and done. A
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certain doctor, Conan Doyle rose to fame in it and carried it to success
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with stories about crime and the detection of crime. Every intelligent person in those
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days, everyone indeed intelligent or not, was curious about the murders and such
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like crimes which still abounded. Indeed, there could have been no more fascinating
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and desirable subject for us. Properly treated, such cases illuminated the problems of
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law, training and control in our social welter, as nothing else could have
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done. The poorest people bought at least a weekly paper in order to quicken
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their wits over murder, mysteries and divorces, driven by an almost instinctive need
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to probe motives and judge restraints. But Conan Doyle's stories had little of psychology
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in them. He tangled scheme of clues in order to disentangle it again,
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and his readers forgot the interest of the problem. In the interest of the
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puzzle hard upon the heels of Noon's came a host of other competitors, among
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others, of certain Arthur Pearson and a group of brothers Heart Humsworth, who
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rose to great power and wealth from the beginning of a small weekly paper called
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Answers, inspired originally by the notion that people like to read other people's letters.
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You will find in the histories. How two of these harms Worths,
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men of great thrust and energy, became lords of England and prominent figures in
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politics. But I have to take of them now simply to tell you of
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the multitude of papers and magazines they created to win the eron boys gifle,
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the heart of the factory girl, the respect to the aristocracy, and the
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confidence of the neu vau rige. It was a roaring factory of hasty printing.
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Our own firm at Thunderstone House was of an older standing than these noons
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Pearson Harmsworth concerns. As early as the eighteenth century, the hunger for knowledge
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had been apparent, and a certain footman turned publisher named Dodsley had produced a
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book of wisdom called The young Man's Companion. Our founder, Crane, had
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done the same sort of thing in early Victorian times. He had won his
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way to considerable success with a home teacher monthly Parts, and with Train's Circle
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of the Sciences, and a weekly magazine, and so forth. His chief
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rivals had been two firms Callcastles and Routledges, And for years, though he
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worked upon a smaller capitial, he kept well abreast of them. For a
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time, the on rush of the newer popular publishers had thrust Grain in his
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contemporaries into the background, and then reconstructed and reinvigorated by a certain Sir Peter
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Newberry. The old business had won its way back to prosperity, publishing a
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shoal of novelette magazines and cheap domestic newspapers for women, young girls and children.
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Reviving the home teacher on modern lines with a memory training system and a
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guide to success by Sir Peter Newberry, thrown in and even launching out into
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scientific handbooks of a not too onerous sort. It is difficult for you to
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realize, said Sarnak, what a frightful lot of printed stuff there was in
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that old world. It was joked with printed rubbish, just as it was
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joked with human rubbish, and a rubbish of furniture and clothing, and every
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sort of rubbish. There was too much of the inferior grades of everything,
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and good things incredibly rare. You cannot imagine how delightful it is for me
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to sit here again, naked and simple, talking plainly and nakedly in a
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clear and beautiful room. The sense of escape, of being cleansed of unnecessary
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adhesions of any sort is exquisite. We read a book now and then,
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and talk and make love naturally and honestly, and do our work in thought
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and research with well aired, well fed brains. That we lived with all
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our senses and abilities, taking a firm and easy grip upon life. But
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stress was in the air of the twentieth century. Those who had enough courage
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fought hard for knowledge and existence, and to them we sold our not very
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lucid or helpful home teacher and our entirely base guide to success. But great
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multitudes relaxed their hold upon life in a way that is known now only to
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our morbid psychologists. They averted their attention from reality and gave themselves up to
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reverie. They went about the world distraught in a day dream, a day
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dream that they were not really themselves but beings far nobler and more romantic,
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or that presently things would change about them into a dramatic scene centering about themselves.
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These novel at magazines and popular novels that supplied the chief part of the
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income of Crane and Newberry. Where really helps to reverie? Mental drugs?
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Sunray, Have you ever read any twentieth century novelettes one or two, said
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Sunray, it's as you say. I suppose I have a dozen or so.
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Some day you shall see my little collection. Very likely ours half of
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them Crane and Newberries. I mean, it would be amusing to see them
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again. The great bulk of this reverie material was written for Crane and Newberry
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by girls and women, and by a type of slack imaginative men. These
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authors, as we called them, lived scattered about London or in houses on
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the countryside, and they sent their writings by post to Thunderstone House, where
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we edited them in various ways and put the stuff into our magazines and books.
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Thunderstone House was a great rambling warren of a place, opening out of
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Tottenham Court, wrote with a yard into which huge lorries brought rolls of paper,
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and from which vans departed with our finished products. It was all equivered
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with the roar and flooding of the printing machinery. I remember very vividly to
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this day how I went there. First, down a narrow roadway out of
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the main thoroughfare, passed a dingy public house and the stage door of a
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theater. What were you going to do pack up books or ron Aaron's,
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asked Radiant. I was to do what I could. Very soon I was
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on the general editorial staff, editing popular knowledge. Yes, but why did
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they want an illiterate youngster like yourself at Thunderstone House? Asked Radiant. I
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can understand that this work of instructing and answering the first greup questions of the
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new reading classes was necessarily a wholesale, improvised affair. But surely there were
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enough learned men at the ancient universities to do all the editing and instructing that
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was needed. Sarnax Stricis said. The amazing thing is that there weren't.
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He said, they produced men enough of a sort, but they weren't the
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right sort. His auditors looked puzzled. The rank and file of the men
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they sent out, labeled MA and so forth from Oxford and Cambridge were exactly
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like those guilt letter jars in mister Hamburg's shop that had nothing in them but
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stale water. The pseudo educated men of the older order couldn't teach, couldn't
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write, couldn't explain. He was pompous and patronizing, a prosy, timid
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and indistinct in statement, with no sense of the common need or the common
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quality. The promoted office boy, these new magazine and newspaper people discovered,
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was brighter and better at the job, comparatively modest and industrious, eager to
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note things and in part things. The editors of our period articles, the
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managers of our part publications, and so forth, were nearly all of the
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office boy class. Hardly any of them in the academic sense educated. The
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many of them had a sort of educational enthusiasm, and all of them a
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boldness that the men of the old learning blacked. Sarnak reflected. In Britain
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at the time I'm speaking about, and in America also, there were practically
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two educational worlds and two traditions of intellectual culture side by side. There was
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all this vast fermenting hullabaloo of the new publishing, the new press, the
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cinema, theaters, and so forth, a crude mental uproar rising out of
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the new elementary schools of the nineteenth century. And there was the old aristocratic
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education of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which had picked up its tradition from
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the Augustine age of Rome. On the one hand were these office boy fellas
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with the intellectual courage and vigor oh of Aristotle and Plato, whatever the quality
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of their intellectual equipment might be. And on the other, academic man affectedly
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Grecian liked the bought and so learned men of the days of Roman slavery.
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He had the gentility of the household slave. He had the same abject respect
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for patron, prince and patrician. He had the same mecculous care in minor
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matters, and the same fear of uncharted reality. He criticized like a slave,
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sneering and hinting. He quarreled like a slave, despised all he dared,
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despise with the eagerness of a slave. He was incapable of serving the
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multitude, the new reading crowd, the working masses, the democracy, as
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we used to call it, how to get its knowledge and its wisdom Without
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him Green, our founder, had had in his day some inkling of the
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educational function such businesses as his were bound to serve in the world. But
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Sir Peter Newberry had been a hard tradesman, intent only on recovering the prosperity
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that the newer popular publishers had filtered. Away from our firm. He was
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a hard driving man. He drove hard, he paid in niggardly fashioned,
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and he succeeded. He had been dead now for some years, and the
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chief shareholder and director of the firm was his son, Richard. He was
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nicknamed the Sun, I think because someone had quoted Shakespeare about the winter of
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our discontent being made summer by this son of York. He was, by
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contrast, a very genial and warming person. He was acutely alive to the
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moral responsibilities that lay behind the practical irresponsibility of a popular publisher. If anything,
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he drove harder than his father, but he paid generously. He tried
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to keep a little ahead of the new public instead of a little behind.
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The times moved in his favor, and he succeeded even more than his father
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had done. I'd been employed by Crane and Newberry for many weeks before I
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saw him. But in the first office I entered in Thunderstone House, I
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saw the evidences of his personality, and certain notices upon the wall. They
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were printed in clear black letters on cards and hung up. It was his
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device for giving the house a tone of its own. I remember we lead
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the others imitate, and if you are in any doubt about it's being too
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good, put it in. A third was if a man doesn't know what
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you know, that's no reason for writing as if he was an all round
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fool. Rest assured there is something he knows better than you do. End
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of Section fifteen.