by H. G. Wells
things for you, and watching you when you're not thinking of me.
All those safe, careless, intimate things. And something else-"
She stopped. "Dear, I don't want to bother you. I just want you to
know I love you…"
She caught my head in her hands and kissed it, then stood up
abruptly.
I looked up at her, a little perplexed.
"Dear heart," said I, "isn't this enough? You're my councillor, my
colleague, my right hand, the secret soul of my life-"
"And I want to darn your socks," she said, smiling back at me.
"You're insatiable."
She smiled "No," she said. "I'm not insatiable, Master. But I'm a
woman in love. And I'm finding out what I want, and what is
necessary to me-and what I can't have. That's all."
"We get a lot."
"We want a lot. You and I are greedy people for the things we like,
Master. It's very evident we've got nearly all we can ever have of
one another-and I'm not satisfied."
"What more is there?
"For you-very little. I wonder. For me-every thing. Yes-
everything. You didn't mean it, Master; you didn't know any more
than I did when I began, but love between a man and a woman is
sometimes very one-sided. Fearfully one-sided! That's all…"
"Don't YOU ever want children?" she said abruptly.
"I suppose I do."
"You don't!"
"I haven't thought of them."
"A man doesn't, perhaps. But I have… I want them-like
hunger. YOUR children, and home with you. Really, continually you!
That's the trouble… I can't have 'em, Master, and I can't
have you."
She was crying, and through her tears she laughed.
"I'm going to make a scene," she said, "and get this over. I'm so
discontented and miserable; I've got to tell you. It would come
between us if I didn't. I'm in love with you, with everything-with
all my brains. I'll pull through all right. I'll be good, Master,
never you fear. But to-day I'm crying out with all my being. This
election-You're going up; you're going on. In these papers-you're
a great big fact. It's suddenly come home to me. At the back of my
mind I've always had the idea I was going to have you somehow
presently for myself-I mean to have you to go long tramps with, to
keep house for, to get meals for, to watch for of an evening. It's
a sort of habitual background to my thought of you. And it's
nonsense-utter nonsense!" She stopped. She was crying and
choking. "And the child, you know-the child!"
I was troubled beyond measure, but Handitch and its intimations were
clear and strong.
"We can't have that," I said.
"No," she said, "we can't have that."
"We've got our own things to do."
"YOUR things," she said.
"Aren't they yours too?"
"Because of you," she said.
"Aren't they your very own things?"
"Women don't have that sort of very own thing. Indeed, it's true!
And think! You've been down there preaching the goodness of
children, telling them the only good thing in a state is happy,
hopeful children, working to free mothers and children-"
"And we give our own children to do it?" I said.
"Yes," she said. "And sometimes I think it's too much to give-too
much altogether… Children get into a woman's brain-when she
mustn't have them, especially when she must never hope for them.
Think of the child we might have now!-the little creature with
soft, tender skin, and little hands and little feet! At times it
haunts me. It comes and says, Why wasn't I given life? I can hear
it in the night… The world is full of such little ghosts,
dear lover-little things that asked for life and were refused.
They clamour to me. It's like a little fist beating at my heart.
Love children, beautiful children. Little cold hands that tear at
my heart! Oh, my heart and my lord!" She was holding my arm with
both her hands and weeping against it, and now she drew herself to
my shoulder and wept and sobbed in my embrace. "I shall never sit
with your child on my knee and you beside me-never, and Iam a woman
and your lover!…"
2
But the profound impossibility of our relation was now becoming more
and more apparent to us. We found ourselves seeking justification,
clinging passionately to a situation that was coldly, pitilessly,
impossible and fated. We wanted quite intensely to live together
and have a child, but also we wanted very many other things that
were incompatible with these desires. It was extraordinarily
difficult to weigh our political and intellectual ambitions against
those intimate wishes. The weights kept altering according as one
found oneself grasping this valued thing or that. It wasn't as if
we could throw everything aside for our love, and have that as we
wanted it. Love such as we bore one another isn't altogether, or
even chiefly, a thing in itself-it is for the most part a value set
upon things. Our love was interwoven with all our other interests;
to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to us like
killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of each
other engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other best
as activities. We had no delusions about material facts; we didn't
want each other alive or dead, we wanted each other fully alive. We
wanted to do big things together, and for us to take each other
openly and desperately would leave us nothing in the world to do.
We wanted children indeed passionately, but children with every
helpful chance in the world, and children born in scandal would be
handicapped at every turn. We wanted to share a home, and not a
solitude.
And when we were at this stage of realisation, began the intimations
that we were found out, and that scandal was afoot against us…
I heard of it first from Esmeer, who deliberately mentioned it, with
that steady grey eye of his watching me, as an instance of the
preposterous falsehoods people will circulate. It came to Isabel
almost simultaneously through a married college friend, who made it
her business to demand either confirmation or denial. It filled us
both with consternation. In the surprise of the moment Isabel
admitted her secret, and her friend went off "reserving her freedom
of action."
Discovery broke out in every direction. Friends with grave faces
and an atmosphere of infinite tact invaded us both. Other friends
ceased to invade either of us. It was manifest we had become-we
knew not how-a private scandal, a subject for duologues, an
amazement, a perplexity, a vivid interest. In a few brief weeks it
seemed London passed from absolute unsuspiciousness to a chattering
exaggeration of its knowledge of our relations.
It was just the most inappropriate time for that disclosure. The
long smouldering antagonism to my endowment of motherhood ideas had
flared up into an active campaign in the EXPURGATOR, and it would be
altogether disastrous to us if I should be convicted of any personal
/>
irregularity. It was just because of the manifest and challenging
respectability of my position that I had been able to carry the
thing as far as I had done. Now suddenly my fortunes had sprung a
leak, and scandal was pouring in… It chanced, too, that a
wave of moral intolerance was sweeping through London, one of those
waves in which the bitterness of the consciously just finds an ally
in the panic of the undiscovered. A certain Father Blodgett had
been preaching against social corruption with extraordinary force,
and had roused the Church of England people to a kind of competition
in denunciation. The old methods of the Anti-Socialist campaign had
been renewed, and had offered far too wide a scope and too tempting
an opportunity for private animosity, to be restricted to the
private affairs of the Socialists. I had intimations of an
extensive circulation of "private and confidential" letters…
I think there can be nothing else in life quite like the unnerving
realisation that rumour and scandal are afoot about one. Abruptly
one's confidence in the solidity of the universe disappears. One
walks silenced through a world that one feels to be full of
inaudible accusations. One cannot challenge the assault, get it out
into the open, separate truth and falsehood. It slinks from you,
turns aside its face. Old acquaintances suddenly evaded me, made
extraordinary excuses; men who had presumed on the verge of my world
and pestered me with an intrusive enterprise, now took the bold step
of flat repudiation. I became doubtful about the return of a nod,
retracted all those tentacles of easy civility that I had hitherto
spread to the world. I still grow warm with amazed indignation when
I recall that Edward Crampton, meeting me full on the steps of the
Climax Club, cut me dead. "By God!" I cried, and came near catching
him by the throat and wringing out of him what of all good deeds and
bad, could hearten him, a younger man than I and empty beyond
comparison, to dare to play the judge to me. And then I had an open
slight from Mrs. Millingham, whom I had counted on as one counts
upon the sunrise. I had not expected things of that sort; they were
disconcerting beyond measure; it was as if the world were giving way
beneath my feet, as though something failed in the essential
confidence of life, as though a hand of wet ice had touched my
heart. Similar things were happening to Isabel. Yet we went on
working, visiting, meeting, trying to ignore this gathering of
implacable forces against us.
For a time I was perplexed beyond measure to account for this
campaign. Then I got a clue. The centre of diffusion was the
Bailey household. The Baileys had never forgiven me my abandonment
of the young Liberal group they had done so much to inspire and
organise; their dinner-table had long been a scene of hostile
depreciation of the BLUE WEEKLY and all its allies; week after week
Altiora proclaimed that I was "doing nothing," and found other
causes for our bye-election triumphs; I counted Chambers Street a
dangerous place for me. Yet, nevertheless, I was astonished to find
them using a private scandal against me. They did. I think
Handitch had filled up the measure of their bitterness, for I had
not only abandoned them, but I was succeeding beyond even their
power of misrepresentation. Always I had been a wasp in their
spider's web, difficult to claim as a tool, uncritical,
antagonistic. I admired their work and devotion enormously, but I
had never concealed my contempt for a certain childish vanity they
displayed, and for the frequent puerility of their political
intrigues. I suppose contempt galls more than injuries, and anyhow
they had me now. They had me. Bailey, I found, was warning fathers
of girls against me as a "reckless libertine," and Altiora, flushed,
roguish, and dishevelled, was sitting on her fender curb after
dinner, and pledging little parties of five or six women at a time
with infinite gusto not to let the matter go further. Our cell was
open to the world, and a bleak, distressful daylight streaming in.
I had a gleam of a more intimate motive in Altiora from the reports
that came to me. Isabel had been doing a series of five or six
articles in the POLITICAL REVIEW in support of our campaign, the
POLITICAL REVIEW which had hitherto been loyally Baileyite. Quite
her best writing up to the present, at any rate, is in those papers,
and no doubt Altiora had had not only to read her in those invaded
columns, but listen to her praises in the mouths of the tactless
influential. Altiora, like so many people who rely on gesture and
vocal insistence in conversation, writes a poor and slovenly prose
and handles an argument badly; Isabel has her University training
behind her and wrote from the first with the stark power of a clear-
headed man. "Now we know," said Altiora, with just a gleam of
malice showing through her brightness, "now we know who helps with
the writing!"
She revealed astonishing knowledge.
For a time I couldn't for the life of me discover her sources. I
had, indeed, a desperate intention of challenging her, and then I
bethought me of a youngster named Curmain, who had been my
supplemental typist and secretary for a time, and whom I had sent on
to her before the days of our breach. "Of course!" said I,
"Curmain!" He was a tall, drooping, sidelong youth with sandy hair,
a little forward head, and a long thin neck. He stole stamps, and,
I suspected, rifled my private letter drawer, and I found him one
day on a turn of the stairs looking guilty and ruffled with a pretty
Irish housemaid of Margaret's manifestly in a state of hot
indignation. I saw nothing, but I felt everything in the air
between them. I hate this pestering of servants, but at the same
time I didn't want Curmain wiped out of existence, so I had packed
him off without unnecessary discussion to Altiora. He was quick and
cheap anyhow, and I thought her general austerity ought to redeem
him if anything could; the Chambers Street housemaid wasn't for any
man's kissing and showed it, and the stamps and private letters were
looked after with an efficiency altogether surpassing mine. And
Altiora, I've no doubt left now whatever, pumped this young
undesirable about me, and scenting a story, had him to dinner alone
one evening to get to the bottom of the matter. She got quite to
the bottom of it,-it must have been a queer duologue. She read
Isabel's careless, intimate letters to me, so to speak, by this
proxy, and she wasn't ashamed to use this information in the service
of the bitterness that had sprung up in her since our political
breach. It was essentially a personal bitterness; it helped no
public purpose of theirs to get rid of me. My downfall in any
public sense was sheer waste,-the loss of a man. She knew she was
behaving badly, and so, when it came to remonstrance, she behaved
worse. She'd got names and dates and places; the efficiency of her
; information was irresistible. And she set to work at it
marvellously. Never before, in all her pursuit of efficient ideals,
had Altiora achieved such levels of efficiency. I wrote a protest
that was perhaps ill-advised and angry, I went to her and tried to
stop her. She wouldn't listen, she wouldn't think, she denied and
lied, she behaved like a naughty child of six years old which has
made up its mind to be hurtful. It wasn't only, I think, that she
couldn't bear our political and social influence; she also-I
realised at that interview couldn't bear our loving. It seemed to
her the sickliest thing,-a thing quite unendurable. While such
things were, the virtue had gone out of her world.
I've the vividest memory of that call of mine. She'd just come in
and taken off her hat, and she was grey and dishevelled and tired,
and in a business-like dress of black and crimson that didn't suit
her and was muddy about the skirts; she'd a cold in her head and
sniffed penetratingly, she avoided my eye as she talked and
interrupted everything I had to say; she kept stabbing fiercely at
the cushions of her sofa with a long hat-pin and pretending she was
overwhelmed with grief at the DEBACLE she was deliberately
organising.
"Then part," she cried, "part. If you don't want a smashing up,-
part! You two have got to be parted. You've got never to see each
other ever, never to speak." There was a zest in her voice. "We're
not circulating stories," she denied. "No! And Curmain never told
us anything-Curmain is an EXCELLENT young man; oh! a quite
excellent young man. You misjudged him altogether."…
I was equally unsuccessful with Bailey. I caught the little wretch
in the League Club, and he wriggled and lied. He wouldn't say where
he had got his facts, he wouldn't admit he had told any one. When I
gave him the names of two men who had come to me astonished and
incredulous, he attempted absurdly to make me think they had told
HIM. He did his horrible little best to suggest that honest old
Quackett, who had just left England for the Cape, was the real
scandalmonger. That struck me as mean, even for Bailey. I've still
the odd vivid impression of his fluting voice, excusing the
inexcusable, his big, shifty face evading me, his perspiration-
beaded forehead, the shrugging shoulders, and the would-be