As I walk back along the river terrace to the hotel where the botanist¹ awaits me, and observe the Utopians I encounter, I have no thought that my tenure² of Utopia becomes every moment more precarious³. There float in my mind vague anticipations⁴ of more talks with my double and still more, of a steady elaboration of detail, of interesting journeys of exploration. I forget that a Utopia is a thing of the imagination that becomes more fragile with every added circumstance, that, like a soap-bubble, it is most brilliantly and variously coloured at the very instant of its dissolution. This Utopia is nearly done. All the broad lines of its social organisation⁵ are completed now, the discussion of all its general difficulties and problems. Utopian individuals pass me by, fine buildings tower on either hand; it does not occur to me that I may look too closely. To find the people assuming the concrete and individual, is not, as I fondly imagine, the last triumph of realisation, but the swimming moment of opacity⁶ before the film gives way. To come to individual emotional cases, is to return to the earth.

I find the botanist sitting at a table in the hotel courtyard.

“Well?” I say, standing⁷ before him.

“I’ve been in the gardens on the river terrace,” he answers, “hoping I might see her again.”

“Nothing better to do?”

“Nothing in the world.”

“You’ll have your double back from India to-morrow. Then you’ll have conversation.”

“I don’t want it,” he replies, compactly.

I shrug⁹ my shoulders, and he adds, “At least with him.”

I let myself down into a seat beside him.

For a time I sit restfully enjoying his companionable silence, and thinking fragmentarily of those samurai and their Rules. I entertain something of the satisfaction of a man who has finished building a bridge; I feel that I have joined together things that I had never joined before. My Utopia seems real to me, very real, I can believe in it, until the metal chair-back gives to my shoulder blades, and Utopian sparrows twitter and

分享到：