by H. G. Wells
an infinite tenderness, stabbed me. It was a keen physical
feeling, like nothing I had ever felt before. It had a quality of
tears in it. For the first time in my narrow and concentrated life
another human being had really thrust into my being and gripped my
very heart.
Our eyes met perplexed for an extraordinary moment. Then I turned
back and addressed myself a little stiffly to the substance of her
intervention. For some time I couldn't look at her again.
From that time forth I knew I loved Isabel beyond measure.
Yet it is curious that it never occurred to me for a year or so that
this was likely to be a matter of passion between us. I have told
how definitely I put my imagination into harness in those matters at
my marriage, and I was living now in a world of big interests, where
there is neither much time nor inclination for deliberate love-
making. I suppose there is a large class of men who never meet a
girl or a woman without thinking of sex, who meet a friend's
daughter and decide: "Mustn't get friendly with her-wouldn't DO,"
and set invisible bars between themselves and all the wives in the
world. Perhaps that is the way to live. Perhaps there is no other
method than this effectual annihilation of half-and the most
sympathetic and attractive half-of the human beings in the world,
so far as any frank intercourse is concerned. Iam quite convinced
anyhow that such a qualified intimacy as ours, such a drifting into
the sense of possession, such untrammeled conversation with an
invisible, implacable limit set just where the intimacy glows, it is
no kind of tolerable compromise. If men and women are to go so far
together, they must be free to go as far as they may want to go,
without the vindictive destruction that has come upon us. On the
basis of the accepted codes the jealous people are right, and the
liberal-minded ones are playing with fire. If people are not to
love, then they must be kept apart. If they are not to be kept
apart, then we must prepare for an unprecedented toleration of
lovers.
Isabel was as unforeseeing as I to begin with, but sex marches into
the life of an intelligent girl with demands and challenges far more
urgent than the mere call of curiosity and satiabledesire that
comes to a young man. No woman yet has dared to tell the story of
that unfolding. She attracted men, and she encouraged them, and
watched them, and tested them, and dismissed them, and concealed the
substance of her thoughts about them in the way that seems
instinctive in a natural-minded girl. There was even an engagement-
amidst the protests and disapproval of the college authorities. I
never saw the man, though she gave me a long history of the affair,
to which I listened with a forced and insincere sympathy. She
struck me oddly as taking the relationship for a thing in itself,
and regardless of its consequences. After a time she became silent
about him, and then threw him over; and by that time, I think, for
all that she was so much my junior, she knew more about herself and
me than I was to know for several years to come.
We didn't see each other for some months after my resignation, but
we kept up a frequent correspondence. She said twice over that she
wanted to talk to me, that letters didn't convey what one wanted to
say, and I went up to Oxford pretty definitely to see her-though I
combined it with one or two other engagements-somewhere in
February. Insensibly she had become important enough for me to make
journeys for her.
But we didn't see very much of one another on that occasion. There
was something in the air between us that made a faint embarrassment;
the mere fact, perhaps, that she had asked me to come up.
A year before she would have dashed off with me quite unscrupulously
to talk alone, carried me off to her room for an hour with a minute
of chaperonage to satisfy the rules. Now there was always some one
or other near us that it seemed impossible to exorcise.
We went for a walk on the Sunday afternoon with old Fortescue, K.
C., who'd come up to see his two daughters, both great friends of
Isabel's, and some mute inglorious don whose name I forget, but who
was in a state of marked admiration for her. The six of us played a
game of conversational entanglements throughout, and mostly I was
impressing the Fortescue girls with the want of mental concentration
possible in a rising politician. We went down Carfex, I remember,
to Folly Bridge, and inspected the Barges, and then back by way of
Merton to the Botanic Gardens and Magdalen Bridge. And in the
Botanic Gardens she got almost her only chance with me.
"Last months at Oxford," she said.
"And then?" I asked.
"I'm coming to London," she said.
"To write?"
She was silent for a moment. Then she said abruptly, with that
quick flush of hers and a sudden boldness in her eyes: "I'm going to
work with you. Why shouldn't I?"
3
Here, again, I suppose I had a fair warning of the drift of things.
I seem to remembermyself in the train to Paddington, sitting with a
handful of papers-galley proofs for the BLUE WEEKLY, I suppose-on
my lap, and thinking about her and that last sentence of hers, and
all that it might mean to me.
It is very hard to recall even the main outline of anything so
elusive as a meditation. I know that the idea of working with her
gripped me, fascinated me. That my value in her life seemed growing
filled me with pride and a kind of gratitude. I was already in no
doubt that her value in my life was tremendous. It made it none the
less, that in those days I was obsessed by the idea that she was
transitory, and bound to go out of my life again. It is no good
trying to set too fine a face upon this complex business, there is
gold and clay and sunlight and savagery in every love story, and a
multitude of elvish elements peeped out beneath the fine rich
curtain of affection that masked our future. I've never properly
weighed how immensely my vanity was gratified by her clear
preference for me. Nor can I for a moment determine how much
deliberate intention I hide from myself in this affair.
Certainly I think some part of me must have been saying in the
train: "Leave go of her. Get away from her. End this now." I
can't have been so stupid as not to have had that in my mind…
If she had been only a beautiful girl in love with me, I think I
could have managed the situation. Once or twice since my marriage
and before Isabel became of any significance in my life, there had
been incidents with other people, flashes of temptation-no telling
is possible of the thing resisted. I think that mere beauty and
passion would not have taken me. But between myself and Isabel
things were incurably complicated by the intellectual sympathy we
had, the jolly march of our minds together. That has always
mattered enormously. I should have wanted her company nearly as
badly if she had be
en some crippled old lady; we would have hunted
shoulder to shoulder, as two men. Only two men would never have had
the patience and readiness for one another we two had. I had never
for years met any one with whom I could be so carelessly sure of
understanding or to whom I could listen so easily and fully. She
gave me, with an extraordinary completeness, that rare, precious
effect of always saying something fresh, and yet saying it so that
it filled into and folded about all the little recesses and corners
of my mind with an infinite, soft familiarity. It is impossible to
explain that. It is like trying to explain why her voice, her voice
heard speaking to any one-heard speaking in another room-pleased
my ears.
She was the only Oxford woman who took a first that year. She spent
the summer in Scotland and Yorkshire, writing to me continually of
all she now meant to do, and stirring my imagination. She came to
London for the autumn session. For a time she stayed with old Lady
Colbeck, but she fell out with her hostess when it became clear she
wanted to write, not novels, but journalism, and then she set every
one talking by taking a flat near Victoria and installing as her
sole protector an elderly German governess she had engaged through a
scholastic agency. She began writing, not in that copious flood the
undisciplined young woman of gifts is apt to produce, but in exactly
the manner of an able young man, experimenting with forms,
developing the phrasing of opinions, taking a definite line. She
was, of course, tremendously discussed. She was disapproved of, but
she was invited out to dinner. She got rather a reputation for the
management of elderly distinguished men. It was an odd experience
to follow Margaret's soft rustle of silk into some big drawing-room
and discover my snub-nosed girl in the blue sack transformed into a
shining creature in the soft splendour of pearls and ivory-white and
lace, and with a silver band about her dusky hair.
For a time we did not meet very frequently, though always she
professed an unblushing preference for my company, and talked my
views and sought me out. Then her usefulness upon the BLUE WEEKLY
began to link us closelier. She would come up to the office, and
sit by the window, and talk over the proofs of the next week's
articles, going through my intentions with a keen investigatory
scalpel. Her talk always puts me in mind of a steel blade. Her
writing became rapidly very good; she had a wit and a turn of the
phrase that was all her own. We seemed to have forgotten the little
shadow of embarrassment that had fallen over our last meeting at
Oxford. Everything seemed natural and easy between us in those
days; a little unconventional, but that made it all the brighter.
We developed something like a custom of walks, about once a week or
so, and letters and notes became frequent. I won't pretend things
were not keenly personal between us, but they had an air of being
innocently mental. She used to call me "Master" in our talks, a
monstrous and engaging flattery, and I was inordinately proud to
have her as my pupil. Who wouldn't have been? And we went on at
that distance for a long time-until within a year of the Handitch
election.
After Lady Colbeck threw her up as altogether too "intellectual" for
comfortable control, Isabel was taken up by the Balfes in a less
formal and compromising manner, and week-ended with them and their
cousin Leonora Sparling, and spent large portions of her summer with
them in Herefordshire. There was a lover or so in that time, men
who came a little timidly at this brilliant young person with the
frank manner and the Amazonian mind, and, she declared, received her
kindly refusals with manifest relief. And Arnold Shoesmith struck
up a sort of friendship that oddly imitated mine. She took a liking
to him because he was clumsy and shy and inexpressive; she embarked
upon the dangerous interest of helping him to find his soul. I had
some twinges of jealousy about that. I didn't see the necessity of
him. He invaded her time, and I thought that might interfere with
her work. If their friendship stole some hours from Isabel's
writing, it did not for a long while interfere with our walks or our
talks, or the close intimacy we had together.
4
Then suddenly Isabel and I found ourselves passionately in love.
The change came so entirely without warning or intention that I find
it impossible now to tell the order of its phases. What disturbed
pebble started the avalanche I cannot trace. Perhaps it was simply
that the barriers between us and this masked aspect of life had been
wearing down unperceived.
And there came a change in Isabel. It was like some change in the
cycle of nature, like the onset of spring-a sharp brightness, an
uneasiness. She became restless with her work; little encounters
with men began to happen, encounters not quite in the quality of the
earlier proposals; and then came an odd incident of which she told
me, but somehow, I felt, didn't tell me completely. She told me all
she was able to tell me. She had been at a dance at the Ropers',
and a man, rather well known in London, had kissed her. The thing
amazed her beyond measure. It was the sort of thing immediately
possible between any man and any woman, that one never expects to
happen until it happens. It had the surprising effect of a judge
generally known to be bald suddenly whipping off his wig in court.
No absolutely unexpected revelation could have quite the same
quality of shock. She went through the whole thing to me with a
remarkable detachment, told me how she had felt-and the odd things
it seemed to open to her.
"I WANT to be kissed, and all that sort of thing," she avowed. "I
suppose every woman does."
She added after a pause: "And I don't want any one to do it."
This struck me as queerly expressive of the woman's attitude to
these things. "Some one presently will-solve that," I said.
"Some one will perhaps."
I was silent.
"Some one will," she said, almost viciously. "And then we'll have
to stop these walks and talks of ours, dear Master… I'll be
sorry to give them up."
"It's part of the requirements of the situation," I said, "that he
should be-oh, very interesting! He'll start, no doubt, all sorts
of new topics, and open no end of attractive vistas… You
can't, you know, always go about in a state of pupillage."
"I don't think I can," said Isabel. "But it's only just recently
I've begun to doubt about it."
I remember these things being said, but just how much we saw and
understood, and just how far we were really keeping opaque to each
other then, I cannot remember. But it must have been quite soon
after this that we spent nearly a whole day together at Kew Gardens,
with the curtains up and the barriers down, and the thing that had
happened plain before our eyes. I don't remember we ever made any
declaration
. We just assumed the new footing…
It was a day early in that year-I think in January, because there
was thin, crisp snow on the grass, and we noted that only two other
people had been to the Pagoda that day. I've a curious impression
of greenish colour, hot, moist air and huge palm fronds about very
much of our talk, as though we were nearly all the time in the
Tropical House. But I also remember very vividly looking at certain
orange and red spray-like flowers from Patagonia, which could not
have been there. It is a curious thing that I do not remember we
made any profession of passionate love for one another; we talked as
though the fact of our intense love for each other had always been
patent between us. There was so long and frank an intimacy between
us that we talked far more like brother and sister or husband and
wife than two people engaged in the war of the sexes. We wanted to
know what we were going to do, and whatever we did we meant to do in
the most perfect concert. We both felt an extraordinary accession
of friendship and tenderness then, and, what again is curious, very
little passion. But there was also, in spite of the perplexities we
faced, an immense satisfaction about that day. It was as if we had
taken off something that had hindered our view of each other, like
people who unvizard to talk more easily at a masked ball.
I've had since to view our relations from the standpoint of the
ordinary observer. I find that vision in the most preposterous
contrast with all that really went on between us. I suppose there I
should figure as a wicked seducer, while an unprotected girl
succumbed to my fascinations. As a matter of fact, it didn't occur
to us that there was any personal inequality between us. I knew her
for my equal mentally; in so many things she was beyond comparison
cleverer than I; her courage outwent mine. The quick leap of her
mind evoked a flash of joy in mine like the response of an induction
wire; her way of thinking was like watching sunlight reflected from
little waves upon the side of a boat, it was so bright, so mobile,
so variously and easily true to its law. In the back of our minds
we both had a very definite belief that making love is full of