Selected Stories of H. G. Wells Read Online Free

hunch back, sat on a bent wood stool; two others, one a short, dark youngster and the other a flaxen-haired, reddishcomplexioned young man, stood leaning side by side against the slate sink, while the fourth stood facing them, and maintained the largest share of the conversation.
    This last person was named Hill. He was a sturdily built young fellow, of the same age as Wedderburn; he had a white face, dark grey eyes, hair of an indeterminate colour, and prominent, irregular features. He talked rather louder than was needful, and thrust his hands deeply into his pockets. His collar was frayed and blue with the starch of a careless laundress, his clothes were evidently ready-made, and there was a patch on the side of his boot near the toe. And as he talked or listened to the others, he glanced now and again towards the lecture theatre door. They were discussing the depressing peroration of the lecture they had just heard, the last lecture it was in the introductory course in zoology. “From ovum to ovum is the goal of the higher vertebrata,” the lecturer had said in his melancholy tones, and so had neatly rounded off the sketch of comparative anatomy he had been developing. The spectacled hunchback had repeated it with noisy appreciation, had tossed it towards the fair-haired student with an evident provocation, and had started one of those vague, rambling discussions on generalities so unaccountably dear to the student mind all the world over.
    “That is our goal, perhaps—I admit it, as far as science goes,” said the fair-haired student, rising to the challenge. “But there are things above science.”
    “Science,” said Hill confidently, “is systematic knowledge. Ideas that don’t come into the system—must anyhow—be loose ideas.” He was not quite sure whether that was a clever saying or a fatuity until his hearers took it seriously.
    “The thing I cannot understand,” said the hunchback, at large, “is whether Hill is a materialist or not.”
    “There is one thing above matter,” said Hill promptly, feeling he made a better point this time, aware, too, of someone in the doorway behind him, and raising his voice a trifle for her benefit, “and that is, the delusion that there is something above matter.”
    “So we have your gospel at last,” said the fair student. “It’s all a delusion, is it? All our aspirations to lead something more than dogs’ lives, all our work for anything beyond ourselves. But see how inconsistent you are. Your socialism, for instance. Why do you trouble about the interests of the race? Why do you concern yourself about the beggar in the gutter? Why are you bothering yourself to lend that book”—he indicated William Morris by a movement of the head—“to everyone in the lab?”
    “Girl,” said the hunchback indistinctly, and glanced guiltily over his shoulder.
    The girl in brown, with the brown eyes, had come into the laboratory, and stood on the other side of the table behind him, with her rolled-up apron in one hand, looking over her shoulder, listening to the discussion. She did not notice the hunchback, because she was glancing from Hill to his interlocutor. Hill’s consciousness of her presence betrayed itself to her only in his studious ignoring of the fact; but she understood that, and it pleased her. “I see no reason,” said he, “why a man should live like a brute because he knows of nothing beyond matter, and does not expect to exist a hundred years hence.”
    “Why shouldn’t he?” said the fair-haired student.
    “Why
should
he?” said Hill.
    “What inducement has he?”
    “That’s the way with all you religious people. It’s all a business of inducements. Cannot a man seek after righteousness for righteousness’ sake?”
    There was a pause. The fair man answered, with a kind of vocal padding, “But—you see—inducement—when I said inducement,” to gain time. And then the hunchback came to his rescue and inserted a question. He was a