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Updated: June 19, 2025
So the intimate, personal narrative of Smallways' adventures is occasionally dropped for a few pages; Mr Wells shuts off his magic-lantern and fills the interval with an analysis of larger issues.
Where have you been?" "What's up?" asked Bert. "This end of the airship is up. Most other things are down." "Was there a battle?" "There was." "Who won?" "I haven't seen the papers, Smallways. We left before the finish. We got disabled and unmanageable, and our colleagues consorts I mean were too busy most of them to trouble about us, and the wind blew us Heaven knows where the wind IS blowing us.
The Grubb business was in difficulties, and Grubb in a moment of financial eloquence had given a half-share in it to Bert, whose relations with his employer had been for some time unsalaried and pallish and informal. Bert was trying to impress Tom with the idea that the reconstructed Grubb & Smallways offered unprecedented and unparalleled opportunities to the judicious small investor.
Bert Smallways was only one of countless millions in Europe and America and Asia who, instead of being born rooted in the soil, were born struggling in a torrent they never clearly understood. All the faiths of their fathers had been taken by surprise, and startled into the strangest forms and reactions.
There Kurt stopped and seated himself on a rock. "That's as much as I wanted to see," he explained. "It isn't very like, but it's like enough." "Like what?" "Another waterfall I knew." He asked a question abruptly. "Got a girl, Smallways?" "Funny thing," said Bert, "those flowers, I suppose. I was jes' thinking of 'er." "So was I." "WHAT! Edna?" "No. I was thinking of MY Edna.
"So far as I can judge, Smallways," he said, "the Prince will probably want to throw you overboard next time he thinks of you. He certainly will if he sees you.... After all, you know, you came als Ballast.... And we shall have to lighten ship extensively pretty soon. Unless I'm mistaken, the Prince will wake up presently and start doing things with tremendous vigour.... I've taken a fancy to you.
And so our Bert Smallways became a participant in one of the most cold-blooded slaughters in the world's history, in which men who were neither excited nor, except for the remotest chance of a bullet, in any danger, poured death and destruction upon homes and crowds below.
"Orf to Brighton!" said old Smallways, regarding his youngest son from the sitting-room window over the green-grocer's shop with something between pride and reprobation. "When I was 'is age, I'd never been to London, never bin south of Crawley never bin anywhere on my own where I couldn't walk. And nobody didn't go. Not unless they was gentry.
Old Smallways went to his grave under an intricate network of wires and cables, for Bun Hill became not only a sort of minor centre of power distribution the Home Counties Power Distribution Company set up transformers and a generating station close beside the old gas-works but, also a junction on the suburban mono-rail system.
Then he would explain complicated questions of polity to imaginary hearers, in low, wily tones. The other sick men kept still, listening to him. Bert's distracted attention would be recalled by Kurt. "Smallways, take that end. So!" Slowly, tediously, the great mast was rigged and hoisted foot by foot into place.
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