by H. G. Wells
receive or impart and nothing to do-but stood snatching his left
cheek until I rescued him and her, and left him free to congratulate
the new Lady Snape on her husband's K. C. B.
I took Margaret down. We achieved no feats of mutual expression,
except that it was abundantly clear we were both very pleased and
interested to meet again, and that we had both kept memories of each
other. We made that Misterton tea-party and the subsequent
marriages of my cousins and the world of Burslem generally, matter
for quite an agreeable conversation until at last Altiora, following
her invariable custom, called me by name imperatively out of our
duologue. "Mr. Remington," she said, "we want your opinion-" in
her entirely characteristic effort to get all the threads of
conversation into her own hands for the climax that always wound up
her dinners. How the other women used to hate those concluding
raids of hers! I forget most of the other people at that dinner,
nor can I recall what the crowning rally was about. It didn't in
any way join on to my impression of Margaret.
In the drawing-room of the matting floor I rejoined her, with
Altiora's manifest connivance, and in the interval I had been
thinking of our former meeting.
"Do you find London," I asked, "give you more opportunity for doing
things and learning things than Burslem?"
She showed at once she appreciated my allusion to her former
confidences. "I was very discontented then," she said and paused.
"I've really only been in London for a few months. It's so
different. In Burslem, life seems all business and getting-without
any reason. One went on and it didn't seem to mean anything. At
least anything that mattered… London seems to be so full of
meanings-all mixed up together."
She knitted her brows over her words and smiled appealingly at the
end as if for consideration for her inadequate expression,
appealingly and almost humorously.
I looked understandingly at her. "We have all," I agreed, "to come
to London."
"One sees so much distress," she added, as if she felt she had
completely omitted something, and needed a codicil.
"What are you doing in London?"
"I'mthinking of studying. Some social question. I thought perhaps
I might go and study social conditions as Mrs. Bailey did, go
perhaps as a work-girl or see the reality of living in, but Mrs.
Bailey thought perhaps it wasn't quite my work."
"Are you studying?"
"I'm going to a good many lectures, and perhaps I shall take up a
regular course at the Westminster School of Politics and Sociology.
But Mrs. Bailey doesn't seem to believe very much in that either."
Her faintly whimsical smile returned. "I seem rather indefinite,"
she apologised, "but one does not want to get entangled in things
one can't do. One-one has so many advantages, one's life seems to
be such a trust and such a responsibility-"
She stopped.
"A man gets driven into work," I said.
"It must be splendid to be Mrs. Bailey," she replied with a glance
of envious admiration across the room.
"SHE has no doubts, anyhow," I remarked.
"She HAD," said Margaret with the pride of one who has received
great confidences.
6
"You've met before?" said Altiora, a day or so later.
I explained when.
"You find her interesting?"
I saw in a flash that Altiora meant to marry me to Margaret.
Her intention became much clearer as the year developed. Altiora
was systematic even in matters that evade system. I was to marry
Margaret, and freed from the need of making an income I was to come
into politics-as an exponent of Baileyism. She put it down with
the other excellent and advantageous things that should occupy her
summer holiday. It was her pride and glory to put things down and
plan them out in detail beforehand, and I'm not quite sure that she
did not even mark off the day upon which the engagement was to be
declared. If she did, I disappointed her. We didn't come to an
engagement, in spite of the broadest hints and the glaring
obviousness of everything, that summer.
Every summer the Baileys went out of London to some house they hired
or borrowed, leaving their secretaries toiling behind, and they went
on working hard in the mornings and evenings and taking exercise in
the open air in the afternoon. They cycled assiduously and went for
long walks at a trot, and raided and studied (and incidentally
explained themselves to) any social "types" that lived in the
neighbourhood. One invaded type, resentful under research,
described them with a dreadful aptness as Donna Quixote and Sancho
Panza-and himself as a harmless windmill, hurting no one and
signifying nothing. She did rather tilt at things. This particular
summer they were at a pleasant farmhouse in level country near
Pangbourne, belonging to the Hon. Wilfrid Winchester, and they asked
me to come down to rooms in the neighbourhood-Altiora took them for
a month for me in August-and board with them upon extremely
reasonable terms; and when I got there I found Margaret sitting in a
hammock at Altiora's feet. Lots of people, I gathered, were coming
and going in the neighbourhood, the Ponts were in a villa on the
river, and the Rickhams' houseboat was to moor for some days; but
these irruptions did not impede a great deal of duologue between
Margaret and myself.
Altiora was efficient rather than artistic in her match-making. She
sent us off for long walks together-Margaret was a fairly good
walker-she exhumed some defective croquet things and incited us to
croquet, not understanding that detestable game is the worst
stimulant for lovers in the world. And Margaret and I were always
getting left about, and finding ourselves for odd half-hours in the
kitchen-garden with nothing to do except talk, or we were told with
a wave of the hand to run away and amuse each other.
Altiora even tried a picnic in canoes, knowing from fiction rather
than imagination or experience the conclusive nature of such
excursions. But there she fumbled at the last moment, and elected
at the river's brink to share a canoe with me. Bailey showed so
much zeal and so little skill-his hat fell off and he became
miraculously nothing but paddle-clutching hands and a vast wrinkled
brow-that at last he had to be paddled ignominiously by Margaret,
while Altiora, after a phase of rigid discretion, as nearly as
possible drowned herself-and me no doubt into the bargain-with a
sudden lateral gesture of the arm to emphasise the high note with
which she dismissed the efficiency of the Charity Organisation
Society. We shipped about an inch of water and sat in it for the
rest of the time, an inconvenience she disregarded heroically. We
had difficulties in landing Oscar from his frail craft upon the ait
of our feasting,-he didn't balance sideways and was much alarmed,
and afterwards, as Margaret had a pain in her back, I took him
in my
canoe, let him hide his shame with an ineffectual but not positively
harmful paddle, and towed the other by means of the joined painters.
Still it was the fault of the inadequate information supplied in the
books and not of Altiora that that was not the date of my betrothal.
I find it not a little difficult to state what kept me back from
proposing marriage to Margaret that summer, and what urged me
forward at last to marry her. It is so much easier to remember
one's resolutions than to remember the moods and suggestions that
produced them.
Marrying and getting married was, I think, a pretty simple affair to
Altiora; it was something that happened to the adolescent and
unmarried when you threw them together under the circumstances of
health, warmth and leisure. It happened with the kindly and
approving smiles of the more experienced elders who had organised
these proximities. The young people married, settled down, children
ensued, and father and mother turned their minds, now decently and
properly disillusioned, to other things. That to Altiora was the
normal sexual life, and she believed it to be the quality of the
great bulk of the life about her.
One of the great barriers to human understanding is the wide
temperamental difference one finds in the values of things relating
to sex. It is the issue upon which people most need training in
charity and imaginative sympathy. Here are no universal standards
at all, and indeed for no single man nor woman does there seem to be
any fixed standard, so much do the accidents of circumstances and
one's physical phases affect one's interpretations. There is
nothing in the whole range of sexual fact that may not seem
supremely beautiful or humanly jolly or magnificently wicked or
disgusting or trivial or utterly insignificant, according to the eye
that sees or the mood that colours. Here is something that may fill
the skies and every waking hour or be almost completely banished
from a life. It may be everything on Monday and less than nothing
on Saturday. And we make our laws and rules as though in these
matters all men and women were commensurable one with another, with
an equal steadfast passion and an equal constant duty…
I don't know what dreams Altiora may have had in her schoolroom
days, I always suspected her of suppressed and forgotten phases, but
certainly her general effect now was of an entirely passionless
worldliness in these matters. Indeed so far as I could get at her,
she regarded sexual passion as being hardly more legitimate in a
civilised person than-let us say-homicidal mania. She must have
forgotten-and Bailey too. I suspect she forgot before she married
him. I don't suppose either of them had the slightest intimation of
the dimensions sexual love can take in the thoughts of the great
majority of people with whom they come in contact. They loved in
their way-an intellectual way it was and a fond way-but it had no
relation to beauty and physical sensation-except that there seemed
a decree of exile against these things. They got their glow in high
moments of altruistic ambition-and in moments of vivid worldly
success. They sat at opposite ends of their dinner table with so
and so "captured," and so and so, flushed with a mutual approval.
They saw people in love forgetful and distraught about them, and
just put it down to forgetfulness and distraction. At any rate
Altiora manifestly viewed my situation and Margaret's with an
abnormal and entirely misleading simplicity. There was the girl,
rich, with an acceptable claim to be beautiful, shiningly virtuous,
quite capable of political interests, and there was I, talented,
ambitious and full of political and social passion, in need of just
the money, devotion and regularisation Margaret could provide. We
were both unmarried-white sheets of uninscribed paper. Was there
ever a simpler situation? What more could we possibly want?
She was even a little offended at the inconclusiveness that did not
settle things at Pangbourne. I seemed to her, I suspect, to reflect
upon her judgment and good intentions.
7
I didn't see things with Altiora's simplicity.
I admired Margaret very much, I was fully aware of all that she and
I might give each other; indeed so far as Altiora went we were quite
in agreement. But what seemed solid ground to Altiora and the
ultimate footing of her emasculated world, was to me just the
superficial covering of a gulf-oh! abysses of vague and dim, and
yet stupendously significant things.
I couldn't dismiss the interests and the passion of sex as Altiora
did. Work, I agreed, was important; career and success; but deep
unanalysable instincts told me this preoccupation was a thing quite
as important; dangerous, interfering, destructive indeed, but none
the less a dominating interest in life. I have told how flittingly
and uninvited it came like a moth from the outer twilight into my
life, how it grew in me with my manhood, how it found its way to
speech and grew daring, and led me at last to experience. After
that adventure at Locarno sex and the interests and desires of sex
never left me for long at peace. I went on with my work and my
career, and all the time it was like-like someone talking ever and
again in a room while one tries to write.
There were times when I could have wished the world a world all of
men, so greatly did this unassimilated series of motives and
curiosities hamper me; and times when I could have wished the world
all of women. I seemed always to be seeking something in women, in
girls, and I was never clear what it was I was seeking. But never-
even at my coarsest-was I moved by physical desirealone. Was I
seeking help and fellowship? Was I seeking some intimacy with
beauty? It was a thing too formless to state, that I seemed always
desiring to attain and never attaining. Waves of gross sensuousness
arose out of this preoccupation, carried me to a crisis of
gratification or disappointment that was clearly not the needed
thing; they passed and left my mind free again for a time to get on
with the permanent pursuits of my life. And then presently this
solicitude would have me again, an irrelevance as it seemed, and yet
a constantly recurring demand.
I don't want particularly to dwell upon things that are disagreeable
for others to read, but I cannot leave them out of my story and get
the right proportions of the forces Iam balancing. I was no
abnormal man, and that world of order we desire to make must be
built of such stuff as I was and am and can beget. You cannot have
a world of Baileys; it would end in one orderly generation.
Humanity is begotten in Desire, lives by Desire.
"Love which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb;
Love which is lust, is the Call from the Gloom."
I echo Henley.
I suppose the life of celibacy which the active, well-fed, well-
exercised and imaginatively stirred young man of the educated
Nature certainly meant him to marry, to thirty or more, when
civilisation permits him to do so, is the most impossible thing in
the world. We deal here with facts that are kept secret and
obscure, but I doubt for my own part if more than one man out of
five in our class satisfies that ideal demand. The rest are even as
I was, and Hatherleigh and Esmeer and all the men I knew. I draw no
lessons and offer no panacea; I have to tell the quality of life,
and this is how it is. This is how it will remain until men and
women have the courage to face the facts of life.
I was no systematic libertine, you must understand; things happened
to me and desire drove me. Any young man would have served for that
Locarno adventure, and after that what had been a mystic and
wonderful thing passed rapidly into a gross, manifestly misdirected
and complicating one. I can count a meagre tale of five illicit
loves in the days of my youth, to include that first experience, and
of them all only two were sustained relationships. Besides these
five "affairs," on one or two occasions I dipped so low as the inky
dismal sensuality of the streets, and made one of those pairs of
correlated figures, the woman in her squalid finery sailing
homeward, the man modestly aloof and behind, that every night in the
London year flit by the score of thousands across the sight of the
observant…
How ugly it is to recall; ugly and shameful now without
qualification! Yet at the time there was surely something not
altogether ugly in it-something that has vanished, some fine thing
mortally ailing.
One such occasion I recall as if it were a vision deep down in a
pit, as if it had happened in another state of existence to someone
else. And yet it is the sort of thing that has happened, once or
twice at least, to half the men in London who have been in a
position to make it possible. Let me try and give you its peculiar
effect. Man or woman, you ought to know of it.
Figure to yourself a dingy room, somewhere in that network of
streets that lies about Tottenham Court Road, a dingy bedroom lit by
a solitary candle and carpeted with scraps and patches, with
curtains of cretonne closing the window, and a tawdry ornament of