by H. G. Wells
Aphrodite shining and commanding, and sometimes that Venus who
stoops and allures.
This travel abroad seemed to have released a multitude of things in
my mind; the clear air, the beauty of the sunshine, the very blue of
the glaciers made me feel my body and quickened all those
disregarded dreams. I saw the sheathed beauty of women's forms all
about me, in the cheerful waitresses at the inns, in the pedestrians
one encountered in the tracks, in the chance fellow travellers at
the hotel tables. "Confound it!" said I, and talked all the more
zealously of that greater England that was calling us.
I remember that we passed two Germans, an old man and a tall fair
girl, father and daughter, who were walking down from Saas. She
came swinging and shining towards us, easy and strong. I worshipped
her as she approached.
"Gut Tag!" said Willersley, removing his hat.
"Morgen!" said the old man, saluting.
I stared stockishly at the girl, who passed with an indifferent
face.
That sticks in my mind as a picture remains in a room, it has kept
there bright and fresh as a thing seen yesterday, for twenty
years…
I flirted hesitatingly once or twice with comely serving girls, and
was a little ashamed lest Willersley should detect the keen interest
I took in them, and then as we came over the pass from Santa Maria
Maggiore to Cannobio, my secret preoccupation took me by surprise
and flooded me and broke down my pretences.
The women in that valley are very beautiful-women vary from valley
to valley in the Alps and are plain and squat here and divinities
five miles away-and as we came down we passed a group of five or
six of them resting by the wayside. Their burthens were beside
them, and one like Ceres held a reaping hook in her brown hand. She
watched us approaching and smiled faintly, her eyes at mine.
There was some greeting, and two of them laughed together.
We passed.
"Glorious girls they were," said Willersley, and suddenly an immense
sense of boredom enveloped me. I sawmyself striding on down that
winding road, talking of politics and parties and bills of
parliament and all sorts of dessicated things. That road seemed to
me to wind on for ever down to dust and infinite dreariness. I knew
it for a way of death. Reality was behind us.
Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral. "I'm not so
sure," he said in a voice of intense discriminations, "after all,
that agricultural work isn't good for women."
"Damn agricultural work!" I said, and broke out into a vigorous
cursing of all I held dear. "Fettered things we are!" I cried. "I
wonder why I stand it!"
"Stand what?"
"Why don't I go back and make love to those girls and let the world
and you and everything go hang? Deep breasts and rounded limbs-and
we poor emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in
us!…"
"I'm not quite sure, Remington," said Willersley, looking at me with
a deliberately quaint expression over his glasses, "that picturesque
scenery is altogether good for your morals."
That fever was still in my blood when we came to Locarno.
13
Along the hot and dusty lower road between the Orrido of Traffiume
and Cannobio Willersley had developed his first blister. And partly
because of that and partly because there was a bag at the station
that gave us the refreshment of clean linen and partly because of
the lazy lower air into which we had come, we decided upon three or
four days' sojourn in the Empress Hotel.
We dined that night at a table-d'hote, and I found myself next to an
Englishwoman who began a conversation that was resumed presently in
the hotel lounge. She was a woman of perhaps thirty-three or
thirty-four, slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very
abundant fair golden hair, the wife of a petulant-looking heavy-
faced man of perhaps fifty-three, who smoked a cigar and dozed over
his coffee and presently went to bed. "He always goes to bed like
that," she confided startlingly. "He sleeps after all his meals. I
never knew such a man to sleep."
Then she returned to our talk, whatever it was.
We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries and the usual
topographical talk, and she had envied our pedestrian travel. "My
husband doesn't walk," she said. "His heart is weak and he cannot
manage the hills."
There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she
conveyed she liked me, and when presently Willersley drifted off to
write letters our talk sank at once to easy confidential undertones.
I felt enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people
one has never seen before and may never see again. I said I loved
beautiful scenery and all beautiful things, and the pointing note in
my voice made her laugh. She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as
I can remember I said she made them bold. "Blue they are," she
remarked, smiling archly. "I like blue eyes." Then I think we
compared ages, and she said she was the Woman of Thirty, "George
Moore's Woman of Thirty."
I had not read George Moore at the time, but I pretended to
understand.
That, I think, was our limit that evening. She went to bed, smiling
good-night quite prettily down the big staircase, and I and
Willersley went out to smoke in the garden. My head was full of
her, and I found it necessary to talk about her. So I made her a
problem in sociology. "Who the deuce are these people?" I said, and
how do they get a living? They seem to have plenty of money. He
strikes me as being-Willersley, what is a drysalter? I think he's
a retired drysalter."
Willersley theorised while I thought of the woman and that
provocative quality of dash she had displayed. The next day at
lunch she and I met like old friends. A huge mass of private
thinking during the interval had been added to our effect upon one
another. We talked for a time of insignificant things.
"What do you do," she asked rather quickly, "after lunch? Take a
siesta?"
"Sometimes," I said, and hung for a moment eye to eye.
We hadn't a doubt of each other, but my heart was beating like a
steamer propeller when it lifts out of the water.
"Do you get a view from your room?" she asked after a pause.
"It's on the third floor, Number seventeen, near the staircase. My
friend's next door."
She began to talk of books. She was interested in Christian
Science, she said, and spoke of a book. I forget altogether what
that book was called, though I remember to this day with the utmost
exactness the purplish magenta of its cover. She said she would
lend it to me and hesitated.
Wlllersley wanted to go for an expedition across the lake that
afternoon, but I refused. He made some other proposals that I
rejected abruptly. " I shall write in my room," I said.
"Why not write down here?"
"I shall write in my room," I snarled like a thwa
rted animal, and he
looked at me curiously. "Very well," he said; "then I'll make some
notes and think about that order of ours out under the magnolias."
I hovered about the lounge for a time buying postcards and
feverishly restless, watching the movements of the other people.
Finally I went up to my room and sat down by the windows, staring
out. There came a little tap at the unlocked door and in an
instant, like the go of a taut bowstring, I was up and had it open.
"Here is that book," she said, and we hesitated.
"COME IN!" I whispered, trembling from head to foot.
"You're just a boy," she said in a low tone.
I did not feel a bit like a lover, I felt like a burglar with the
safe-door nearly opened. "Come in," I said almost impatiently, for
anyone might be in the passage, and I gripped her wrist and drew her
towards me.
"What do you mean?" she answered with a faint smile on her lips, and
awkward and yielding.
I shut the door behind her, still holding her with one hand, then
turned upon her-she was laughing nervously-and without a word drew
her to me and kissed her. And I remember that as I kissed her she
made a little noise almost like the purring miaow with which a cat
will greet one and her face, close to mine, became solemn and
tender.
She was suddenly a different being from the discontented wife who
had tapped a moment since on my door, a woman transfigured…
That evening I came down to dinner a monster of pride, for behold! I
was a man. I feltmyself the most wonderful and unprecedented of
adventurers. It was hard to believe that any one in the world
before had done as much. My mistress and I met smiling, we carried
things off admirably, and it seemed to me that Willersley was the
dullest old dog in the world. I wanted to give him advice. I
wanted to give him derisive pokes. After dinner and coffee in the
lounge I was too excited and hilarious to go to bed, I made him come
with me down to the cafe under the arches by the pier, and there
drank beer and talked extravagant nonsense about everything under
the sun, in order not to talk about the happenings of the afternoon.
All the time something shouted within me: "Iam a man! Iam a
man!"…
"What shall we do to-morrow?" said he.
"I'm for loafing," I said. "Let's row in the morning and spend to-
morrow afternoon just as we did to-day."
"They say the church behind the town is worth seeing."
"We'll go up about sunset; that's the best time for it. We can
start about five."
We heard music, and went further along the arcade to discover a
place where girls in operatic Swiss peasant costume were singing and
dancing on a creaking, protesting little stage. I eyed their
generous display of pink neck and arm with the seasoned eye of a man
who has lived in the world. Life was perfectly simple and easy, I
felt, if one took it the right way.
Next day Willersley wanted to go on, but I delayed. Altogether I
kept him back four days. Then abruptly my mood changed, and we
decided to start early the following morning. I remember, though a
little indistinctly, the feeling of my last talk with that woman
whose surname, odd as it may seem, either I never learnt or I have
forgotten. (Her christian name was Milly.) She was tired and
rather low-spirited, and disposed to be sentimental, and for the
first time in our intercourse I found myself liking her for the sake
of her own personality. There was something kindly and generous
appearing behind the veil of naive and uncontrolled sensuality she
had worn. There was a curious quality of motherliness in her
attitude to me that something in my nature answered and approved.
She didn't pretend to keep it up that she had yielded to my
initiative. "I've done you no harm," she said a little doubtfully,
an odd note for a man's victim! And, "we've had a good time. You
have liked me, haven't you?"
She interested me in her lonely dissatisfied life; she was childless
and had no hope of children, and her husband was the only son of a
rich meat salesman, very mean, a mighty smoker-"he reeks of it,"
she said, "always"-and interested in nothing but golf, billiards
(which he played very badly), pigeon shooting, convivial Free
Masonry and Stock Exchange punting. Mostly they drifted about the
Riviera. Her mother had contrived her marriage when she was
eighteen. They were the first samples I ever encountered of the
great multitude of functionless property owners which encumbers
modern civilisation-but at the time I didn't think much of that
aspect of them…
I tell all this business as it happened without comment, because I
have no comment to make. It was all strange to me, strange rather
than wonderful, and, it may be, some dream of beauty died for ever
in those furtive meetings; it happened to me, and I could scarcely
have been more irresponsible in the matter or controlled events less
if I had been suddenly pushed over a cliff into water. I swam, of
course-finding myself in it. Things tested me, and I reacted, as I
have told. The bloom of my innocence, if ever there had been such a
thing, was gone. And here is the remarkable thing about it; at the
time and for some days I was over-weeningly proud; I have never been
so proud before or since; I felt I had been promoted to virility; I
was unable to conceal my exultation from Willersley. It was a mood
of shining shameless ungracious self-approval. As he and I went
along in the cool morning sunshine by the rice fields in the throat
of the Val Maggia a silence fell between us.
"You know?" I said abruptly,-"about that woman?"
Willersley did not answer for a moment. He looked at me over the
corner of his spectacles.
"Things went pretty far?" he asked.
"Oh! all the way!" and I had a twinge of fatuous pride in my
unpremeditated achievement.
"She came to your room?"
I nodded.
"I heard her. I heard her whispering… The whispering and
rustling and so on. I was in my room yesterday… Any one
might have heard you."
I went on with my head in the air.
"You might have been caught, and that would have meant endless
trouble. You might have incurred all sorts of consequences. What
did you know about her?… We have wasted four days in that hot
close place. When we found that League of Social Service we were
talking about," he said with a determined eye upon me, "chastity
will be first among the virtues prescribed."
"I shall form a rival league," I said a little damped. "I'm hanged
if I give up a single desire in me until I know why."
He lifted his chin and stared before him through his glasses at
nothing. "There are some things," he said, "that a man who means to
work-to do great public services-MUST turn his back upon. I'm not
discussing the rights or wrongs of this sort of thing. It happens
to be the conditions we work under. It will probably always be so.
If
you want to experiment in that way, if you want even to discuss
it,-out you go from political life. You must know that's so…
You're a strange man, Remington, with a kind of kink in you. You've
a sort of force. You might happen to do immense things…
Only-"
He stopped. He had said all that he had forced himself to say.
"I mean to take myself as Iam," I said. "I'm going to get
experience for humanity out of all my talents-and bury nothing."
Willersley twisted his face to its humorous expression. "I doubt if
sexual proclivities," he said drily, come within the scope of the
parable."
I let that go for a little while. Then I broke out. "Sex!" said I,
"is a fundamental thing in life. We went through all this at
Trinity. I'm going to look at it, experience it, think about it-
and get it square with the rest of life. Career and Politics must
take their chances of that. It's part of the general English
slackness that they won't look this in the face. Gods! what a
muffled time we're coming out of! Sex means breeding, and breeding
is a necessary function in a nation. The Romans broke up upon that.
The Americans fade out amidst their successes. Eugenics-"
"THAT wasn't Eugenics," said Willersley.
"It was a woman," I said after a little interval, feeling oddly that
I had failed altogether to answer him, and yet had a strong dumb
case against him.
BOOK THE SECOND
MARGARET
CHAPTER THE FIRST
MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE
1
I must go back a little way with my story. In the previous book I
have described the kind of education that happens to a man of my
class nowadays, and it has been convenient to leap a phase in my
experience that I must now set out at length. I want to tell in
this second hook how I came to marry, and to do that I must give
something of the atmosphere in which I first met my wife and some
intimations of the forces that went to her making. I met her in
Staffordshire while I was staying with that uncle of whom I have
already spoken, the uncle who sold my father's houses and settled my
mother in Penge. Margaret was twenty then and I was twenty-two.
It was just before the walking tour in Switzerland that opened up so