Certain Personal Matters by H.G. Wells

Author:H.G. Wells
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ManyBooks.net

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INCIDENTAL THOUGHTS ON A BALD HEAD

I was asked to go, quite suddenly, and found myself there before I had time to think of what it might be. I understood her to say it was a meeting of some "Sunday society," some society that tried to turn the Sabbath from a day of woe to a day of rejoicing. "St. George's Hall, Langham Place," a cab, and there we were. I thought they would be picturesque Pagans. But the entertainment was the oddest it has ever been my lot to see, a kind of mystery. The place was dark, except for a big circle of light on a screen, and a dismal man with a long stick was talking about the effects of alcohol on your muscles. He talked and talked, and people went to sleep all about us. Euphemia's face looked so very pretty in the dim light that I tried to talk to her and hold her hand, but she only said "Ssh!" And then they began showing pictures on the screen--the most shocking things!--stomachs, and all that kind of thing. They went on like that for an hour, and then there was a lot of thumping with umbrellas, and they turned the lights up and we went home. Curious way of spending Sunday afternoon, is it not?

But you may imagine I had a dismal time all that hour. I understood the people about me were Sceptics, the kind of people who don't believe things--a singular class, and, I am told, a growing one. These excellent people, it seems, have conscientious objections to going to chapel or church, but at the same time the devotional habit of countless generations of pious forerunners is strong in them. Consequently they have invented things like these lectures to go to, with a professor instead of a priest, and a lantern slide of a stomach by way of altar-piece; and alcohol they make their Devil, and their god is Hygiene--a curious and instructive case of mental inertia. I understand, too, there are several other temples of this Cult in London--South Place Chapel and Essex Hall, for instance, where they worship the Spirit of the Innermost. But the thing that struck me so oddly was the number of bald heads glimmering faintly in the reflected light from the lantern circle. And that set me thinking upon a difficulty I have never been able to surmount.

You see these people, and lots of other people, too, believe in a thing they call Natural Selection. They think, as part of that belief, that men are descended from hairy simian ancestors; assert that even a hundred thousand years ago the ancestor was hairy--hairy, heavy, and almost as much a brute as if he lived in Mr. Arthur Morrison's Whitechapel. For my own part I think it a pretty theory, and would certainly accept it were it not for one objection. The thing I cannot understand is how our ancestor lost that hair. I see no reason why he should not have kept his hair on.

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