The sounds and then the scene return, those obscure, undignified people, a fat woman with asthma, an old Welsh milkseller with a tumor on his bald head, who was the intellectual leader of the sect, a huge-voiced haberdasher with a big black beard, a white-faced, extraordinarily pregnant woman, his wife; a spectacled rate-collector with a bent back . . . I hear the talk about souls, the strange battered old phrases that were coined ages ago in the seaports of the sun-dry Levant, of balm of Gilead and manna in the desert, of gourds that give shade and water in a thirsty land; I recall again the way in which at the conclusion of the service the talk remained pious in form, but became medical in substance, and how the women got together for obstetric whisperings.
Having passed from the stratified Bladesover Hall world to evangelical hymn-singing society, George Ponderevo then enters the tradesman's world of his uncle, a small English Babbitt, who wishes he were in America, "where things hum," and with him he enters the field of unscrupulous business, which is the main theme of the book.
Now, I am, of course, aware that the short and easy way to describe Mr. Wells's main intention, and at the same stroke to destroy him, is to say that in reaction from this mid-Victorian background he developed "the Messiah complex." But what does that really mean? Elijah III developed a Messiah complex. How does the "complex" of H. G. Wells differ from that of Elijah III? Perhaps we need not go into that. Perhaps we need only characterize briefly any one of Mr. Wells's heroes—for they are all of the same spiritual family. Suppose we stick to George Ponderevo and take his description of the spirit that
