Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/139

THE ARTLESSNESS OF MR. H. G. WELLS 113 curer) asserts that he is a contributor to Punch. We are sure he was only a contribution. He is like nothing so much in the world as one of those drawings by Mr. George Morrow. And it is to this gnome that Mr. Wells blandly assures us that, things being what they are, Marjorie would inevitably become engaged, gently approved by parents and pawns ! This is worse than eugenics. Horrible spectacle of a distin- guished novelist forcibly mating two incompatibles in order to procure proofs of his theory of racial disease. It is monstrous, unhuman. We prefer the simple, old-fashioned methods of The Island of Dr. Moreau. And already it is page 118. And then the real Mr. Wells wakens up. Across this cold clicking and snubbing there suddenly thrills the rich sound we used always to hear in his books — the giant buzz and thrum of a swift aeroplane — It arrested Mr. Magnet in mid-jest. The monster came sliding up the sky over the trees beside the church, a great stiff shape, big buff sails stayed with glittering wire, and with two odd little wheels beneath its body. It drove up the sky, rising with a sort of upward heaving, until the croquet players could see the driver and a passenger perched behind him quite clearly. It became immense and overshadowing, and everybody stood rigid as it swept across the sun above the vicarage chimneys. . . . The huge thing banked, but not enough, and came about and slipped away until its wing was slashing into the tree-tops. It came on its edge, hesitated whether to turn over as a whole, then crumpled, and in a volley of smashing and crashing came to rest. . . . Deus ex machina ! Marjorie is saved, or at any rate de-Magnetized. Of the two new pieces spilt out of the sky, in this splendid, untypical, and therefore thoroughly truthful manner, one is Richard Trafford, a six-and-twenty scientist (with a Christian name at last) and a real live man. He has a brain like a lamp and a body of steel, and a heart bubbling with poetry and joy. He saves Marjorie from the threatened Mvn of Letters. ^