UnWellsian Wells

THE CROQUET PLAYER--H. G. Wells-- Viking ($1.25).

Herbert George Wells has been seeing things for years, and telling about them at such length and with such irrepressible enthusiasm that now, at 70, he is well known as Civilization's Journalist No. 1. Back in the protozoic slime of the Victorian Era he first saw his vision of Civilization Triumphant, and in his fashion has been faithful to it ever since. Numerous, in^nious have been his variations on this theme. Last week his 78th book added one more minor version. Used to fat books from Author Wells, readers were surprised at the slimness of The Croquet Player (104 pages), no less surprised by its ambiguous, unWellsian message.

George Frobisher is a he-sprinter who lives a carefully protected life with his spinster aunt. Both of them have plenty of money, spend their lives playing first-rate croquet and bridge, keeping aloof from any sort of unpleasantness. At a French health resort George meets a Dr. Finchatton, an intense fellow who has come there for treatment of his badly jangled nerves. Finchatton spins George a ghostly yarn: he had had a country practice in England in a place called Cainsmarsh, just the kind of quiet district he wanted. Before he had been there very long, the place began to get on his nerves. He noticed that everyone seemed to be afraid: no one would go out after dark, everyone distrusted and feared his neighbor, took drugs on the sly to keep going. Soon Finchatton began to lose his nerve. When he found a dog beaten to death by the side of the road, when his friend the vicar made a murderous attack on his own wife because he thought she was trying to poison him, Finchatton made up his mind to go away before his sanity cracked.

George is impressed in spite of himself by Finchatton's story, is further impressed by the gloomy thunders of Finchatton's doctor, who explains to him that Finchatton's story is all a yarn, but symbolically true: "The realities that are overwhelming him are so monstrous and frightful that he has to transform them into this fairy tale. . . ." The doctor alarms George even further by shouting that Finchatton is right: Cainsmarsh is everywhere, and the spirit of the animal cave man is still poisoning the air with fear. "What I tell you is the monstrous reality. The brute has been marking time and dreaming of a progress it has failed to make. Any archeologist will tell you as much; modern man has no better skull, no better brain. Just a cave man, more or less trained." Shaken, but not to his roots, George goes off with temporarily furrowed brow to play croquet with his aunt.

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