Our Sacred Lunatic

Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island. By H. G. Wells. (Benn. 7s. 6d.)

HERE is Mr. Wells at his best, working to a theme so accom- modating that he can display the savagery of Swift, the

caricatures of his lighter mood and the pastels of a subtle

fancy without jostling or confusion. His idle is that of a madman, viewing us all with very lively eyes. " Such

demented figures," Mr. Blettsworthy writes, are " a rocking influence among the complicated balances of savage and barbaric communities. They enable little wedges of innova- tion to be driven into the tight mosaic of custom and precedent."

We have learned to approach a new Wells with suspicious reverence, for it is always uncertain what the master will do next. There was the bulky ore of Clissold from which the patient reader may mine some very fine gold indeed. There was the crude and careless stuff of Meanwhile. There have been the later essays, uneven, controversial, brilliant, com- paring ill with the craftsmanship in Tales of Space and Time, for instance. And here we have a blessed return to the old manner of Polly and Kipps, with fantasy and philosophy in their right place, making patterns in the weave of a delightful story. To the graces of genius are here added the insights of maturity. Mr. Blettsworthy is in a place by him- self among the Wells' heroes, subtler perhaps, but not less vivacious than Mr. Lewisham and far more original than that urgent creature, for Blettsworthy is really insane, not merely in love.

He is a queer little boy, this Arnold Blettsworthy, proud of his ancient line, although his mother was of mixed Portu,- guese and Syrian origin, with a dash of Madeira, where he was born. He was brought up first by an aunt at Cheltenham and then by a kind clergyman uncle, whose death is told in a few very delicate touches. Blettsworthy goes to Oxford and later falls in love with a tobacconist's daughter, whose enchanting fairness he saw shining " through the interstices of the packets of tobacco and cigarettes, like the sun through leaves." After graduation, he starts a bookshop at Oxford with a false friend, who not only absconds with his money but betrays him with the blonde Olive. Returning unex- pectedly from London, he overhears her sighing : " Well, if you ain't the champion kisser I " He rushes in and flings Chianti flasks about in a very proper rage.

His faith shattered in man and womankind, his poor head goes wrong and a nervous breakdown follows. However, he has been left comfortably off and Mr. Femdyke, the family solicitor, arranges for a long sea voyage. " You have known the Upper Thames long enough—a rivulet for boys to splash in. Go down now to the Lower Thames, which is the estuary for the whole world. Start there again. You have lost your youth and that is gone for ever. What of it, Mr. Bletts- worthy ? Go out and find the man."

So Blettsworthy with his disillusions and his Oxford outlook finds himself on a tramp steamer, bound for Pernambuco and Rio. " The Kentish watering-places, mere stains of illumination upon the selvage of the night, drifted by and passed away. . . . Swaying and tumbling water, a greyish blue sky and nothing but ourselves." Three-quarters of the planet Earth are like this. We are not in the " open " here, but prisoners : water and windy air are the enormous walls of our incarceration : " there is no real freedom but in the roads and paths of a land of kindly people."

The Captain, with his sandy lashes and bitter mouth, is his bugbear. Terror leads his tongue astray. " Have you ever gone in for archery, Captain Y " he asked. The Captain paused in his eating for a moment and then made a sound that was partly a short, sharp bite and partly the word " What ? " The same evening, trying to make some contribution to the conversation, which was concerned with the disposal of the cargo, he asked, " What are these bulkheads you speak of ? " The mate made no reply, but during the course of the voyage he dropped the second Syllable of " Mister " by imperceptible degrees, until at last he was known to all the ship's officers as Miss Blettsworthy.

The engines of the ' Golden Lion ' break down. There is

a terrific storm. Any of us who thought that Mr. Wells had lost a little the sharpness of earthly vision by focussing

so much on Utopia, must think again after reading of the cry in the darkness that presaged the first murder done by the Captain, how the storm came which silenced the ' Golden Lion's' crazy engines, of the mutiny of the crew, of the derelict ship, of the shark that shadowed him and of his meditation on the " unchristian stars as he was going mad. The shark tells him that " ' the swallowing will distract you from the drowning and the drowning from the swallowing, and as I shall probably snap too, your attention may be so confused in the rush of these various excitements that

you will hardly grasp for a moment that you are even beginning to suffer.'—I told him I would rather hear nothing

of these technical points." Then looking up he wonders why the churches have never made the Southern Cross their own. " There serene and unassailed ruled the ancient gods. But how wonderful there had never been a Christian conquest of the stars ! " . . . The funnel becomes the Captain, who has stayed on board in that disguise, to make sure the ship goes down. He attacks it with a hatchet. Savages of a dark buff colour come on board and overpower him.

He was taken to Rampole Island and thrown into a palisade, among a brutish people. An elder of the tribe, Chit, wearing a cylindrical crown, rescued him from being eaten, by pro- claiming him insane and therefore immune from The Reproof. The Reproof was one of the many elegant synonyms current on the island, whose language was full of circumlocutions and whose customs were extremely complex and formal : it consisted of a blow on the head administered by a powerful savage equipped with a hardwood club weighing two hundred- weight and set with shark's teeth. The result was then " reconciled "—i.e., the viscera was placed on the altar of the Great Goddess and the edible portions distributed to the people as the Gift of the Friend. It would have been the height of indelicacy to mention human flesh. The slightest infringement of innumerable taboos, however, led to the Reproof and to the altar of the Goddess, so that the higher ranks of the social pyramid were provided with a permanent edible class. Marriage was difficult :-

" The candidate husband had to satisfy some rigorous tests had to draw a satisfactory straw from a bunch in the hands of the soothsayer and had to comply with the requisite conditions for building a hut. Because of these impediments and because of the polygamy of the elders, a considerable proportion of the tribe remained perforce formally celibate, subjected to the impulses of a gross dietary and unclean habits and to the incessant vigilance of friends and neighbours alert for any slip that might lead to the high altar of the Great Goddess and the cooking pots."

There were a multitude of traps for the unobservant, un• lucky, or recalcitrant. But Blettsworthy, who broke all the

rules he could, was safe, for Chit, the soothsayer, had proclaimed him to be a Sacred Lunatic, whose words none but he might

interpret. Clad in a skull head-dress and an unsavoury skin, he was free to wander as he pleased observing many strange things. There was the taboo against climbing out of the dark valley, for instance, to the sunlit uplands. And there was the worship of the Sloths. The little tree sloths, pets of the real directors of the tribe, were brought out at festivals to climb about on a red-dyed perch. These harmless

animals were supposed to whisper wisdom to the directors and the common people were devoted to them. The big sloths, or Megatheria were malevolent, old, cunning, poisonous monsters who lived on the uplands, destroying buds and growing points of trees, and not breeding themselves, but wasting and stinking other things out of existence. These clumsy monsters came to him as a stupendous biological shock, for he had not thought that the brisk and bracing doctrine of evolution can sometimes be but " a graceless drift to a dead end." He saw it now, however, " as one sees things when one crouches close to a smoky fire amidst moonlit scrub and thinks to the tune of running water and the snoring of a savage. . . . With one of those leaps thought takes at

times across vast gulfs of irrelevance, it occurred to me that states, organizations, institutions breed as little, have no

more natural death nor any greater willingness to die than these Megatheria." There was love, of course, on Rampole Island. But the islanders were fierce, greedy, mistrustful. " They feared and resented the physical attraction that drew them together." The pick of the girls went to sages, ceremonial assistants, steersmen of canoes, net and but makers, moral guardians and other leaders. The higher a girl could find her protector, the safer she felt from the Reproof :-

" She would be torn between a natural desire for some friendly and gallant, if oily, youth, and the practical advantage of some tatooed ancient's prestige. - The thought of the Reproof would always restrain her from any freedom with the youth, but a rankling dissatisfaction would fill her with a thirsty desire to see her elderly conqueror uncomfortable and ill. The love story of the Island, therefore, was never the free and pleasant thing it can be under civilized conditions. It was saturated with insincerities, poisoned by reluctant submissions and tempered satisfactions."

One day he saw a girl knee-deep in the weeds of a lonely tarn. Suppose she was no pestiferous savage, but some

refugee from his old world ? The hunger at his heart played with such an improbability. Suddenly she flung herself in the water. The ancient traditions of the Blettsworthys stormed up in our hero. He cast his skull head-dress aside and his smelly mantle and plunged in. He fought for her life and his in the brackish water. Wena, as she was called, became his wife. She crouched beside him, giving him food out of a basin.

Under his head was a pillow. Their eyes met.

He is not on Rampole Island at all, but in New York. The struggle to save a woman from drowning in the Hudson has restored his reason. Rowena is her name. Chit the sooth- sayer is Dr. Minchett, who explains how he was rescued from the ' Golden Lion ' by a scientific expedition hunting for traces of Megatheria. He has been mad for years ; Rowena has restored his reason—he is in the real sane world, which is just embarking on the Great War. .Mr. Ferndykc, the solicitor, returns and is recognized as one of the elders of the tribe. He urges on his client the duty of " doing his bit," which Mr.

Blettsworthy does, unwillingly enough, but creditably. The War and its aftermath, with some pages on Sacco and Vanzetti (who threaten our hero's reason again) are telescoped into an unnecessary and inartistic conclusion. The book should have ended on the first evening of Blettsworthy's sanity at the flat on Brooklyn Heights, with America in the grip of the War fever and sunset aflame in the windows of the mightiest living cities.

But of Rampole Island we could never have too much.

Will not Mr. Wells tell us some more about Arnold Bletts- worthy ? This new Gulliver is too good to die in our genera- tion. One feels he has seen more than he tells : certainly there should be another volume of his adventures. F. Y-B.