the Art of 12: QUEER LOT ... THESE 20TH CENTURY DICTATORS: THE HOLY TERROR BY H.G. WELLS

A Novel About a Dictator

First UK edition: Michael Joseph, London, 1939,

First US edition: Simon & Schuster, New York, 1939

"I killed him because I knew that no one else among you had the guts to do it. There was something—a prestige—about him. But he had to be killed...

"After I killed him he became more important. That I have always found rather queer, Krause. I began to ask myself what exactly it was I had killed. Was he exceptional or was he a perfect sample of what we all are? Stink and insight? Rats with unexploited brains? Toads with jewels in their heads?

"That peculiar intelligence that he showed at times! In the early days particularly. It seemed to be something almost entirely independent of his personal self, As though his brain lit up. Everyone who knew him says that. I suppose it's something of the sort you get in real poets—or in cardinal men of science. Like something hidden in the dark suddenly lit by a searchlight. As though a higher mind is imprisoned somewhere behind the human brain. Getting free now and then—partially.

"Presently, now that so much has been cleared up in the world, it may get free more and more frequently. What do you think, Krause? Suppose man is only just beginning to realise what he can do with his brain? Or suppose our brains are only beginning to realise what they can do with us? Or that some sort of brain behind all brains...

"The world state in which we live isn't a magnified militant sovereign state of the old type; it's something essentially different, something new and better. Maybe this Man in Common is something different too—not a man magnified, but men aggregated, a super-man with larger thoughts and aims, something not so much collective as quintessential. The real Leviathan—not the State, as Hobbes had it, but man's entire achievement."

The mind of Krause moved in a narrower orbit than Carstall's. "It was a pity you had to do away with Rud. I see your case. But it was a pity. It seems so—so ungracious. After he had done so much."

"It was a pity the world couldn't do its business without a Rud—from the beginning," said Carstall. "I suppose Rud was necessary, but I cannot see why he was necessary. I suppose these new biological philosophers now can tell a sort of story about individuality being a necessary step for realisation and all that sort of jargon..."

"Individual as Tentative," said Krause, quoting the title of a current popular book.

"The way he used to call himself The Common Man," said Carstall..."What did he mean by that really?

What was he getting at? I've never quite got to the bottom of that. A sort of return from individualism at large, wild individualism, to—one might call it—co-operative identification...Individual as Tentative, I haven't read that book. But that's the idea. Perhaps we are all drifting to that. In his own peculiar self-centred fashion, I suppose he was doing just what you and I are doing in our work, what religion and morality have always been doing. That's the line of thought. He was certainly conscious of being impelled to develop—not himself exactly, but how can I say it?—his particular aspect of that common man who is hidden in all of us, that unknown common man, that undying, unhurrying, incessant man in common, who says this through one man and that through another, and who comprehends and transcends us all?"

Carstall enunciated his phrases slowly and carefully, with his hands behind his head and his eyes among the clouds.

"He talks like a book," thought Krause. "He might be dictating to his stenographer. That last bit might be in capitals...And he poisoned the Master Dictator like a rat!...

"And where," reflected Krause, "would he and I and all this free and lovely life of ours be to-day f it hadn't been for the vehemence and vindictiveness of the Holy Terror?

"Or—to be just—that dose of arsenic? I suppose that too was necessary...As he said, the rest of us hadn't the guts...

"Hard and cold. Think of it! Living with that lovely wife of his and never breathing a word even to her...Ten years of silence for fear she wouldn't understand. Or so as not to make her an accessory after the fact...As though she'd have told on him!...Or not to put a strain on her gentle mind...That too I couldn't have done. It's too much self-control altogether for me..."

Carstall said no more, pursuing his private meditations over his cigar, and Krause went on thinking.

"Lusts of reptiles, stallion pride, dog hunger, anger of apes, obstinacy of urgency and obstinate resistances, cunning and double-crossing—So it is we got here. It is too much for my poor understanding," thought Krause. "It is too much for any understanding. He talks like a book, and quite apart from that poisoning, quite apart from that, he and this free and handsome new world of his make me afraid. Perhaps I should have been a little afraid in any world. He talks like a book and yet I have to admit that what he says is harshly true. Mystical Stoicism is as much as we can make of it...

"As much maybe as any of us individually ever will make of it," thought Krause. "But could there be this greater sort of mind, this co-operative mind? How would it work? Couldn't we somehow know of it? It would be such a mitigation. Isn't it after all a sort of God?...

"Carstall," he said aloud. "That transcendental mind..."

The idea escaped him.

Carstall glanced sideways at him and seemed to understand what he was unable to say. "So far as we go now," he said, "thinking of these things is like shouting to catch the ear of a star. When we are young we think the stars are looking down on us—entirely sympathetic. And when we have lived through our personal lives we come out on the other side—and find this. The stars in their courses going away from us. Inexplicably. Like people leaving a theatre...

"We have been played..."

§ V

A few days afterwards Carstall came upon his youngest son curled up on a grassy slope beneath a bank of purple iris, reading a Memoir of the Master Director.

He was absorbed in the book. "Gosh!" he exclaimed. Carstall stood over his son unnoticed.

"What do you think of him, Bunny?"

The boy sat up with a start. He answered after due consideration.

"Think of him? I think he was a Holy Terror," he said. "Worse than Napo or Musso or any of them. I suppose you knew him quite well, Father? Talked to him and all that?"

"Your grandfather brought him into the world and II was his schoolfellow. We knew a lot about him. Yes. I was called in. I assisted at his last illness. I suppose it tells you that."

"And it was you made up their minds for them that the Dictator had done his task and that we did not need another. Good old Daddy! They say it was his desire. He turned to you at the last."

"It says that? It says he turned to me at the last?..."

"You knew his work was done?"

"Yes..."

"He must have been a Holy Terror to get on with, though, if half of this is true," said Bunny, after a pause for reflection..."All the same..."

"Yes?"

"He got a move on things..."

Carstall considered that for some moments, Then he expressed the other side of his own unsolved perplexity. "Maybe," he said, "the move was there anyhow; maybe it just took him."

But Bunny was five-and-twenty years at least too young for predestination, Mystical Stoicism and that style of thought. His father's doubts flew over his head unheeded. "It was marvellous the way he seemed to get hold of people. I suppose Bodisham had a very powerful mind; the great world organiser, they call him. And Bellacourt the Air Master. And Norvel. Re- educating the whole world!

And those others. But they all worked for him. He was horrid at times; he had people shot and he killed his best friends. But always they stood by him. Didn't they? It says here 'he cleared things out of their way'. It says here 'he seemed to make it possible for them to work unencumbered'. And they seemed in a way to like him, even when he treated them badly. There must have been something about him...And he did, it says, he did clean up the suffocating tangle the world was in'. What a world it was! So mean.

Everybody doing everybody in. Profits, usury, appropriating things, taxes upon taxes, patenting, monopolising, sweating, stealing, frauds, gambling...He cleaned it up. I wish I could have seen him once. I missed him by just two years—two years and a month. At least I wasn't born, I mean...I suppose you did all you could for him?"

"Yes," said Carstall slowly. "Yes. I did all I could for him. According to my lights. I did my best for him—and his work. Quite at the last, you know. When he turned to me."

He took the book, flicked over a few pages, mused over it, and handed it back to his son.

"This book exaggerates here and there—and it simplifies things. It simplifies a lot. What else can a book do? I suppose that makes it easier to read. It brings life within our compass...Broadly anyhow it is the truth. The condensed truth about the World Revolution. It is as real as most other historical stuff..."