The Country of the Blind, and Other StoriesWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Science
The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Science fiction, English
I stuck it with elaborate care into my pocket, and with a whirling brain
walked home through the Regent Street loiterers and the dark back streets
beyond Portland Road. I remember the sensations of that walk very vividly,
strange as they were. I was still so far myself that I could notice my
strange mental state, and wonder whether this stuff I had had was opium--a
drug beyond my experience. It is hard now to describe the peculiarity of
my mental strangeness--mental doubling vaguely expresses it. As I was
walking up Regent Street I found in my mind a queer persuasion that it
was Waterloo Station, and had an odd impulse to get into the Polytechnic
as a man might get into a train. I put a knuckle in my eye, and it was
Regent Street. How can I express it? You see a skilful actor looking
quietly at you, he pulls a grimace, and lo!--another person. Is it too
extravagant if I tell you that it seemed to me as if Regent Street had,
for the moment, done that? Then, being persuaded it was Regent Street
again, I was oddly muddled about some fantastic reminiscences that cropped
up. "Thirty years ago," thought I, "it was here that I quarrelled with my
brother." Then I burst out laughing, to the astonishment and encouragement
of a group of night prowlers. Thirty years ago I did not exist, and never
in my life had I boasted a brother. The stuff was surely liquid folly, for
the poignant regret for that lost brother still clung to me. Along
Portland Road the madness took another turn. I began to recall vanished
shops, and to compare the street with what it used to be. Confused,
troubled thinking is comprehensible enough after the drink I had taken,
but what puzzled me were these curiously vivid phantasm memories that had
crept into my mind, and not only the memories that had crept in, but also
the memories that had slipped out. I stopped opposite Stevens', the
natural history dealer's, and cudgelled my brains to think what he had to
do with me. A 'bus went by, and sounded exactly like the rumbling of a
train. I seemed to be dipping into some dark, remote pit for the
recollection. "Of course," said I, at last, "he has promised me three
frogs to-morrow. Odd I should have forgotten."
Do they still show children dissolving views? In those I remember one view
would begin like a faint ghost, and grow and oust another. In just that
way it seemed to me that a ghostly set of new sensations was struggling
with those of my ordinary self.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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