A Christmas Garland | Page 8

that was a set of diamond and sapphire sleeve-links--large ones.
He stood looking at them, blinking a little.
He supposed he must put them on. But something in him, some intractably tough bit of his old self, rose up protesting--frantically.
If he couldn't Use these people, at least they weren't going to Use him!
"No, damn it!" he said under his breath, and, thrusting the case into his pocket, slipped away unobserved.
§4.
He flung himself into a chair in his bedroom and puffed a blast of air from his lungs.... Yes, it had been a narrow escape. He knew that if he had put those beastly blue and white things on he would have been a lost soul....
"You've got to pull yourself together, d'you hear?" he said to himself. "You've got to do a lot of clear, steady, merciless thinking--now, to-night. You've got to persuade yourself somehow that, Foundlings or no Foundlings, this regeneration of mankind business may still be set going--and by you."
He paced up and down the room, fuming. How recapture the generous certitudes that had one by one been slipping away from him? He found himself staring vacantly at the row of books on the little shelf by his bed. One of them seemed suddenly to detach itself--he could almost have sworn afterwards that he didn't reach out for it, but that it hopped down into his hand....
"Sitting Up For The Dawn"! It was one of that sociological series by which H.G. W*lls had first touched his soul to finer issues when he was at the 'Varsity.
He opened it with tremulous fingers. Could it re-exert its old sway over him now?
The page he had opened it at was headed "General Cessation Day," and he began to read....
"The re-casting of the calendar on a decimal basis seems a simple enough matter at first sight. But even here there are details that will have to be thrashed out....
"Mr. Edgar Dibbs, in his able pamphlet 'Ten to the Rescue,'[1] advocates a twenty-hour day, and has drawn up an ingenious scheme for accelerating the motion of this planet by four in every twenty-four hours, so that the alternations of light and darkness shall be re-adjusted to the new reckoning. I think such re-adjustment would be indispensable (though I know there is a formidable body of opinion against me). But I am far from being convinced of the feasibility of Mr. Dibbs' scheme. I believe the twenty-four hour day has come to stay--anomalous though it certainly will seem in the ten-day week, the fifty-day month, and the thousand-day year. I should like to have incorporated Mr. Dibbs' scheme in my vision of the Dawn. But, as I have said, the scope of this vision is purely practical....
[Footnote 1: Published by the Young Self-Helpers' Press, Ipswich.]
"Mr. Albert Baker, in a paper[2] read before the South Brixton Hebdomadals, pleads that the first seven days of the decimal week should retain their old names, the other three to be called provisionally Huxleyday, Marxday, and Tolstoiday. But, for reasons which I have set forth elsewhere,[3] I believe that the nomenclature which I had originally suggested[4]--Aday, Bday, and so on to Jday--would be really the simplest way out of the difficulty. Any fanciful way of naming the days would be bad, as too sharply differentiating one day from another. What we must strive for in the Dawn is that every day shall be as nearly as possible like every other day. We must help the human units--these little pink slobbering creatures of the Future whose cradle we are rocking--to progress not in harsh jerks, but with a beautiful unconscious rhythm....
[Footnote 2: "Are We Going Too Fast?"]
[Footnote 3: "A Midwife For The Millennium." H.G. W*lls.]
[Footnote 4: "How To Be Happy Though Yet Unborn." H.G. W*lls.]
"There must be nothing corresponding to our Sunday. Sunday is a canker that must be cut ruthlessly out of the social organism. At present the whole community gets 'slack' on Saturday because of the paralysis that is about to fall on it. And then 'Black Monday'!--that day when the human brain tries to readjust itself--tries to realise that the shutters are down, and the streets are swept, and the stove-pipe hats are back in their band-boxes....
"Yet of course there must be holidays. We can no more do without holidays than without sleep. For every man there must be certain stated intervals of repose--of recreation in the original sense of the word. My views on the worthlessness of classical education are perhaps pretty well known to you, but I don't underrate the great service that my friend Professor Ezra K. Higgins has rendered by his discovery[5] that the word recreation originally signified a re-creating--i.e.,[6] a time for the nerve-tissues to renew themselves in. The problem before us is how to secure for the human units in the Dawn--these giants of