The story developed with a flavour of
strangely twisted sentimentality. Suddenly he did not like it. He liked
it less as it proceeded.
He had a revulsion of feeling. These were no pictures, no idealisations,
but photographed realities. He wanted no more of the twenty-second
century Venusberg. He forgot the part played by the model in nineteenth
century art, and gave way to an archaic indignation. He rose, angry and
half ashamed at himself for witnessing this thing even in solitude. He
pulled forward the apparatus, and with some violence sought for a means
of stopping its action. Something snapped. A violet spark stung and
convulsed his arm and the thing was still. When he attempted next day to
replace these Tannhauser cylinders by another pair, he found the
apparatus broken....
He struck out a path oblique to the room and paced to and fro, struggling
with intolerable vast impressions. The things he had derived from the
cylinders and the things he had seen, conflicted, confused him. It seemed
to him the most amazing thing of all that in his thirty years of life he
had never tried to shape a picture of these coming times. "We were making
the future," he said, "and hardly any of us troubled to think what future
we were making. And here it is!"
"What have they got to, what has been done? How do I come into the midst
of it all?" The vastness of street and house he was prepared for, the
multitudes of people.
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