"You think this is real because you can't wake out of it," I say.
"It's all a dream, and there are people--I'm just one of the first
of a multitude--between sleeping and waking--who will presently be
rubbing it out of their eyes."
A pinched and dirty little girl, with sores upon her face, stretches
out a bunch of wilting violets, in a pitifully thin little fist, and
interrupts my speech. "Bunch o' vi'lets--on'y a penny."
"No!" I say curtly, hardening my heart.
A ragged and filthy nursing mother, with her last addition to our
Imperial People on her arm, comes out of a drinkshop, and stands a
little unsteadily, and wipes mouth and nose comprehensively with the
back of a red chapped hand....
Section 4
"Isn't _that_ reality?" says the botanist, almost triumphantly, and
leaves me aghast at his triumph.
"_That_!" I say belatedly. "It's a thing in a nightmare!"
He shakes his head and smiles--exasperatingly.
I perceive quite abruptly that the botanist and I have reached the
limits of our intercourse.
"The world dreams things like that," I say, "because it suffers from
an indigestion of such people as you."
His low-toned self-complacency, like the faded banner of an
obstinate fort, still flies unconquered. And you know, he's not even
a happy man with it all!
For ten seconds or more I am furiously seeking in my mind for a
word, for a term of abuse, for one compendious verbal missile that
shall smash this man for ever. It has to express total inadequacy of
imagination and will, spiritual anaemia, dull respectability, gross
sentimentality, a cultivated pettiness of heart....
That word will not come. But no other word will do. Indeed the word
does not exist. There is nothing with sufficient vituperative
concentration for this moral and intellectual stupidity of educated
people....
"Er----" he begins.
No! I can't endure him.
With a passionate rapidity of movement, I leave his side, dart
between a carriage and a van, duck under the head of a cab-horse,
and board a 'bus going westward somewhere--but anyhow, going in
exactly the reverse direction to the botanist. I clamber up the
steps and thread my swaying way to the seat immediately behind the
driver.
"There!" I say, as I whack myself down on the seat and pant.
When I look round the botanist is out of sight.
Section 5
But I am back in the world for all that, and my Utopia is done.
It is good discipline for the Utopist to visit this world
occasionally.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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