For example, we must assume there is a man such as I might have
been, better informed, better disciplined, better employed, thinner
and more active--and I wonder what he is doing!--and you, Sir or
Madam, are in duplicate also, and all the men and women that you
know and I. I doubt if we shall meet our doubles, or if it would be
pleasant for us to do so; but as we come down from these lonely
mountains to the roads and houses and living places of the Utopian
world-state, we shall certainly find, here and there, faces that
will remind us singularly of those who have lived under our
eyes.
There are some you never wish to meet again, you say, and some, I
gather, you do. "And One----!"
It is strange, but this figure of the botanist will not keep in
place. It sprang up between us, dear reader, as a passing
illustrative invention. I do not know what put him into my head, and
for the moment, it fell in with my humour for a space to foist the
man's personality upon you as yours and call you scientific--that
most abusive word. But here he is, indisputably, with me in Utopia,
and lapsing from our high speculative theme into halting but
intimate confidences. He declares he has not come to Utopia to meet
again with his sorrows.
What sorrows?
I protest, even warmly, that neither he nor his sorrows were in my
intention.
He is a man, I should think, of thirty-nine, a man whose life has
been neither tragedy nor a joyous adventure, a man with one of
those faces that have gained interest rather than force or nobility
from their commerce with life. He is something refined, with
some knowledge, perhaps, of the minor pains and all the civil
self-controls; he has read more than he has suffered, and suffered
rather than done. He regards me with his blue-grey eye, from which
all interest in this Utopia has faded.
"It is a trouble," he says, "that has come into my life only for a
month or so--at least acutely again. I thought it was all over.
There was someone----"
It is an amazing story to hear upon a mountain crest in Utopia, this
Hampstead affair, this story of a Frognal heart. "Frognal," he says,
is the place where they met, and it summons to my memory the word
on a board at the corner of a flint-dressed new road, an estate
development road, with a vista of villas up a hill. He had known
her before he got his professorship, and neither her "people" nor
his--he speaks that detestable middle-class dialect in which aunts
and things with money and the right of intervention are called
"people"!--approved of the affair. "She was, I think, rather easily
swayed," he says. "But that's not fair to her, perhaps. She thought
too much of others. If they seemed distressed, or if they seemed to
think a course right----" ...
Have I come to Utopia to hear this sort of thing?
Section 7
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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