Добавил:
ivanov666
Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.
Вуз:
Предмет:
Файл:Boon
.pdf
BOON
Trump should have been far larger and much more wonderful
and subtle than Boon made it. That instant vision of God would
not have been dismissed altogether. People might have gone on,
as Boon tells us they went on, but they would have been haunted nevertheless by a new sense of deep, tremendous things….
Cynicism is humour in ill-health. It would have been far
more diffi cult to tell the story of how a multitude of commonplace people were changed by a half-dubious perception that
God was indeed close at hand to them, a perception that they
would sometimes struggle with and deny, sometimes realize
overwhelmingly; it would have been a beautiful, pitiful, wonderful story, and it may be if Boon had lived he would have written
it. He could have written it. But he was too ill for that much of
writing, and the tired pencil turned to the easier course….
I can’t believe after all I know of him, and particularly after the intimate talk I have repeated, that he would have remained in this mood. He would, I am certain, have altered
the Story of the Last Trump. He must have done so.
And so, too, about this war, this dreadful outbreak of brutish
violence which has darkened all our lives, I do not think he would
have remained despairful. As his health mended, as the braveries of spring drew near, he would have risen again to the assurance he gave me that the Mind is immortal and invincible.
Of course there is no denying the evil, the black evils of
this war; many of us are impoverished and ruined, many of us
are wounded, almost all of us have lost friends and suffered
indirectly in a hundred ways. And all that is going on yet.
The black stream of consequence will fl ow for centuries. But
all this multitudinous individual unhappiness is still compat-
181
HERBERT GEORGE WELLS
ible with a great progressive movement in the general mind.
Being wounded and impoverished, being hurt and seeing
things destroyed, is as much living and learning as anything
else in the world. The tremendous present disaster of Europe
may not be, after all, a disaster for mankind. Horrible possibilities have to be realized, and they can be realized only by
experience; complacencies, fatuities have to be destroyed; we
have to learn and relearn what Boon once called “the bitter
need for honesty.” We must see these things from the standpoint of the Race Life, whose days are hundreds of years….
Nevertheless, such belief cannot alter for me the fact that
Boon is dead and our little circle is scattered. I feel that no
personal comfort nor any further happiness of the mind remains in store for me. My duties as his literary executor still
give me access to the dear old house and the garden of our
security, and, in spite of a considerable coolness between myself and Mrs. Boon – who would willingly have all this material destroyed and his reputation rest upon his better-known
works – I make my duty my excuse to go there nearly every
day and think. I am really in doubt about many matters. I cannot determine, for example, whether it may not be possible to
make another volume from the fragments still remaining
over after this one. There are great quantities of sketches, several long pieces of Vers Libre, the story of “Jane in Heaven,”
the draft of a novel. And so I go there and take out the papers
and fall into fi ts of thinking. I turn the untidy pages and think
about Boon and of all the stream of nonsense and fancy that
was so much more serious to him and to me than the serious
business of life. I go there, I know, very much as a cat hangs
182
BOON
about its home after its people have departed – that is to say,
a little incredulously and with the gleam of a reasonless hope….
There must, I suppose, come a limit to these visitations, and
I shall have to go about my own business. I can see in Mrs.
Boon’s eye that she will presently demand conclusive decisions. In a world that has grown suddenly chilly and lonely
I know I must go on with my work under diffi cult and novel
conditions (and now well into the routines of middle age) as
if there were no such things as loss and disappointment. I am,
I learned long ago, an uncreative, unimportant man. And yet,
I suppose, I do something; I count; it is better that I should
help than not in the great task of literature, the great task of
becoming the thought and the expressed intention of the race,
the task of taming violence, organizing the aimless, destroying
error, the task of waylaying the Wild Asses of the Devil and
sending them back to Hell. It does not matter how individually feeble we writers and disseminators are; we have to hunt
the Wild Asses. As the feeblest puppy has to bark at cats and
burglars. And we have to do it because we know, in spite of
the darkness, the wickedness, the haste and hate, we know in
our hearts, though no momentary trumpeting has shown it to
us, that judgement is all about us and God stands close at hand.
Yes, we go on.
But I wish that George Boon were still in the world with
me, and I wish that he could have written a different ending to
the Story of the Last Trump.
Литературно-художественное издание
Herbert George Wells
Boon
Выпускающий редактор: И. Краснова
Редактор: П. Воронин
Корректор: И. Шаболова
Компьютерная верстка: Т. Серёгина
Художественное оформление: М. Соколова
В оформлении обложки использованы материалы
по лицензии агентства © shutterstock.com
Проект осуществлён с помощью технологий
print on demand
16+
Знак информационной продукции согласно
Федеральному закону от 29.12.2010 г. № 436-ФЗ.
Подписано в печать 10.01.2018
Формат 60х90/16
Усл. печ. л. 11,50
Отпечатано: АО «Т8 Издательские Технологии»
109548, г. Москва, Волгоградский проспект, дом 42, корпус 5
www.t8print.ru; info@t8print.ru
Тел.: +7 (499) 322-38-30
Соседние файлы в предмете [НЕСОРТИРОВАННОЕ]