H G Wells Omnibus, page 174
He went on while Marjorie was still considering the proper response to this.
“You see, I’m her only son and she brought me up, and we know each other—oh! very well. She helps with my work. She understands nearly all of it. She makes suggestions. And to this day I don’t know if she’s the most original or the most parasitic of creatures. And that’s the way with all women and girls, it seems to me. You’re as critical as light, and as undiscriminating…. I say, do I strike you as talking nonsense?”
“Not a bit,” said Marjorie. “But you do go rather fast.”
“I know,” he admitted. “But somehow you excite me. I’ve been with Solomonson a week, and he’s dull at all times. It was that made me take out that monoplane of his. But it did him no good.”
He paused.
“They told me after the exam.,” said Marjorie, “you knew more about crystallography—than anyone.”
“Does that strike you as a dull subject?”
“No,” said Marjorie, in a tone that invited justifications.
“It isn’t. I think—naturally, that the world one goes into when one studies molecular physics is quite the most beautiful of Wonderlands…. I can assure you I work sometimes like a man who is exploring a magic palace…. Do you know anything of molecular physics?”
“You examined me,” said Marjorie.
“The sense one has of exquisite and wonderful rhythms—just beyond sound and sight! And there’s a taunting suggestion of its being all there, displayed and confessed, if only one were quick enough to see it. Why, for instance, when you change the composition of a felspar almost imperceptibly, do the angles change? What’s the correspondence between the altered angle and the substituted atom? Why does this bit of clear stuff swing the ray of light so much out of its path, and that swing it more? Then what happens when crystals gutter down, and go into solution. The endless launching of innumerable little craft. Think what a clear solution must be if only one had ultra-microscopic eyes and could see into it, see the extraordinary patternings, the swimming circling constellations. And then the path of a ray of polarized light beating through it! It takes me like music. Do you know anything of the effects of polarized light, the sight of a slice of olivine-gabbro for instance between crossed Nicols?”
“I’ve seen some rock sections,” said Marjorie. “I forget the names of the rocks.”
“The colours?”
“Oh yes, the colours.”
“Is there anything else so rich and beautiful in all the world? And every different mineral and every variety of that mineral has a different palette of colours, a different scheme of harmonies—and is telling you something.”
“If only you understood.”
“Exactly. All the ordinary stuff of life—you know—the carts and motor cars and dusty roads and—cinder sifting, seems so blank to me—with that persuasion of swing and subtlety beneath it all. As if the whole world was fire and crystal and aquiver—with some sort of cotton wrappers thrown over it….”
“Dust sheets,” said Marjorie. “I know.”
“Or like a diamond painted over!”
“With that sort of grey paint, very full of body—that lasts.”
“Yes.” He smiled at her. “I can’t help apologetics. Most people think a professor of science is just——”
“A professor of science.”
“Yes. Something all pedantries and phrases. I want to clear my character. As though it is foolish to follow a vortex ring into a vacuum, and wise to whack at a dirty golf ball on a suburban railway bank. Oh, their golf! Under high heaven!… You don’t play golf, do you, by any chance?”
“Only the woman’s part,” said Marjorie.
“And they despise us,” he said. “Solomonson can hardly hide how he despises us. Nothing is more wonderful than the way these people go on despising us who do research, who have this fever of curiosity, who won’t be content with—what did you call those wrappers?”
“Dust sheets.”
“Yes, dust sheets. What a life! Swaddling bands, dust sheets and a shroud! You know, research and discovery aren’t nearly so difficult as people think—if only you have the courage to say a thing or try a thing now and then that it isn’t usual to say or try. And after all——” he went off at a tangent, “these confounded ordinary people aren’t justified in their contempt. We keep on throwing them things over our shoulders, electric bells, telephones, Marconigrams. Look at the beautiful electric trains that come towering down the London streets at nightfall, ships of light in full sail! Twenty years ago they were as impossible as immortality. We conquer the seas for these—golfers, puts arms in their hands that will certainly blow them all to bits if ever the idiots go to war with them, come sailing out of the air on them——”
He caught Marjorie’s eye and stopped.
“Falling out of the air on them,” corrected Marjorie very softly.
“That was only an accident,” said Mr. Trafford….
So they began a conversation in the lane where the trees met overhead that went on and went on like a devious path in a shady wood, and touched upon all manner of things….
§ 7
In the end quite a number of people were aggrieved by this dialogue, in the lane that led nowhither….
Sir Rupert Solomonson was the first to complain. Trafford had been away “three mortal hours.” No one had come near him, not a soul, and there hadn’t been even a passing car to cheer his ear.
Sir Rupert admitted he had to be quiet. “But not so damned quiet.”
“I’d have been glad,” said Sir Rupert, “if a hen had laid an egg and clucked a bit. You might have thought there had been a Resurrection or somethin’, and cleared off everybody. Lord! it was deadly. I’d have sung out myself if it hadn’t been for these infernal ribs….”
Mrs. Pope came upon the affair quite by accident.
“Well, Marjorie,” she said as she poured tea for the family, “did you get your laces?”
“Never got there, Mummy,” said Marjorie, and paused fatally.
“Didn’t get there!” said Mrs. Pope. “That’s worse than Theodore! Wouldn’t the donkey go, poor dear?”
There was nothing to colour about, and yet Marjorie felt the warm flow in neck and cheek and brow. She threw extraordinary quantities of candour into her manner. “I had a romantic adventure,” she said rather quietly. “I was going to tell you.”
(Sensation.)
“You see it was like this,” said Marjorie. “I ran against Mr. Trafford….”
She drank tea, and pulled herself together for a lively description of the wheel-locking and the subsequent conversation, a bright ridiculous account which made the affair happen by implication on the high road and not in a byeway, and was adorned with every facetious ornament that seemed likely to get a laugh from the children. But she talked rather fast, and she felt she forced the fun a little. However, it amused the children all right, and Theodore created a diversion by choking with his tea. From first to last Marjorie was extremely careful to avoid the affectionate scrutiny of her mother’s eye. And had this lasted the whole afternoon? asked Mrs. Pope. “Oh, they’d talked for half-an-hour,” said Marjorie, or more, and had driven back very slowly together. “He did all the talking. You saw what he was yesterday. And the donkeys seemed too happy together to tear them away.”
“But what was it all about?” asked Daffy curious.
“He asked after you, Daffy, most affectionately,” said Marjorie, and added, “several times.” (Though Trafford had as a matter of fact displayed a quite remarkable disregard of all her family.)
“And,” she went on, getting a plausible idea at last, “he explained all about aeroplanes. And all that sort of thing. Has Daddy gone to Wamping for some more cricket?…”
(But none of this was lost on Mrs. Pope.)
§ 8
Mr. Magnet’s return next day was heralded by nearly two-thirds of a column in the Times.
The Lecture on the Characteristics of Humour had evidently been quite a serious affair, and a very imposing list of humorists and of prominent people associated with their industry had accepted the hospitality of the Literati.
Marjorie ran her eyes over the Chairman’s flattering introduction, then with a queer faint flavour of hostility she reached her destined husband’s utterance. She seemed to hear the flat full tones of his voice as she read, and automatically the desiccated sentences of the reporter filled out again into those rich quietly deliberate unfoldings of sound that were already too familiar to her ear.
Mr. Magnet had begun with modest disavowals. “There was a story, he said,”—so the report began—“whose hallowed antiquity ought to protect it from further exploitation, but he was tempted to repeat it because it offered certain analogies to the present situation. There were three characters in the story, a bluebottle and two Scotsmen. (Laughter.) The bluebottle buzzed on the pane, otherwise a profound silence reigned. This was broken by one of the Scotsmen trying to locate the bluebottle with zoölogical exactitude. Said this Scotsman: ‘Sandy, I am thinking if yon fly is a birdie or a beastie.’ The other replied: ‘Man, don’t spoil good whiskey with religious conversation.’ (Laughter.) He was tempted, Mr. Magnet resumed, to ask himself and them why it was that they should spoil the aftereffects of a most excellent and admirably served dinner by an academic discussion on British humour. At first he was pained by the thought that they proposed to temper their hospitality with a demand for a speech. A closer inspection showed that he was to introduce a debate and that others were to speak, and that was a new element in their hospitality. Further, he was permitted to choose the subject so that he could bring their speeches within the range of his comprehension. (Laughter.) His was an easy task. He could make it easier; the best thing to do would be to say nothing at all. (Laughter.)”
For a space the reporter seemed to have omitted largely—perhaps he was changing places with his relief—and the next sentence showed Mr. Magnet engaged as it were in revising a hortus siccus of jokes. “There was the humour of facts and situations,” he was saying, “or that humour of expression for which there was no human responsibility, as in the case of Irish humour; he spoke of the humour of the soil which found its noblest utterance in the bull. Humour depended largely on contrast. There was a humour of form and expression which had many local varieties. American humour had been characterized by exaggeration, the suppression of some link in the chain of argument or narrative, and a wealth of simile and metaphor which had been justly defined as the poetry of a pioneer race.”…
Marjorie’s attention slipped its anchor, and caught lower down upon: “In England there was a near kinship between laughter and tears; their mental relations were as close as their physical. Abroad this did not appear to be the case. It was different in France. But perhaps on the whole it would be better to leave the humour of France and what some people still unhappily chose to regard as matters open to controversy—he referred to choice of subject—out of their discussion altogether. (‘Hear, hear,’ and cheers.)”…
Attention wandered again. Then she remarked:—it reminded her in some mysterious way of a dropped hairpin—“It was noticeable that the pun to a great extent had become démodé….”
At this point the flight of Marjorie’s eyes down the column was arrested by her father’s hand gently but firmly taking possession of the Times. She yielded it without reluctance, turned to the breakfast table, and never resumed her study of the social relaxations of humorists….
Indeed she forgot it. Her mind was in a state of extreme perplexity. She didn’t know what to make of herself or anything or anybody. Her mind was full of Trafford and all that he had said and done and all that he might have said and done, and it was entirely characteristic that she could not think of Magnet in any way at all except as a bar-like shadow that lay across all her memories and all the bright possibilities of this engaging person.
She thought particularly of the mobile animation of his face, the keen flash of enthusiasm in his thoughts and expressions….
It was perhaps more characteristic of her time than of her that she did not think she was dealing so much with a moral problem as an embarrassment, and that she hadn’t as yet felt the first stirrings of self-reproach for the series of disingenuous proceedings that had rendered the yesterday’s encounter possible. But she was restless, wildly restless as a bird whose nest is taken. She could abide nowhere. She fretted through the morning, avoided Daffy in a marked manner, and inflicted a stinging and only partially merited rebuke upon Theodore for slouching, humping and—of all trite grievances!—not washing behind his ears. As if any chap washed behind his ears! She thought tennis with the pseudo-twins might assuage her, but she broke off after losing two sets; and then she went into the garden to get fresh flowers, and picked a large bunch and left them on the piano until her mother reminded her of them. She tried a little Shaw. She struggled with an insane wish to walk through the wood behind the village and have an accidental meeting with someone who couldn’t possibly appear but whom it would be quite adorable to meet. Anyhow she conquered that.
She had a curious and rather morbid indisposition to go after lunch to the station and meet Mr. Magnet as her mother wished her to do, in order to bring him straight to the vicarage to early tea, but here again reason prevailed and she went.
Mr. Magnet arrived by the 2.27, and to Marjorie’s eye his alighting presence had an effect of being not so much covered with laurels as distended by them. His face seemed whiter and larger than ever. He waved a great handful of newspapers.
“Hullo, Magsy!” he said. “They’ve given me a thumping Press. I’m nearer swelled head than I’ve ever been, so mind how you touch me!”
“We’ll take it down at croquet,” said Marjorie.
“They’ve cleared that thing away?”
“And made up the lawn like a billiard table,” she said.
“That makes for skill,” he said waggishly. “I shall save my head after all.”
For a moment he seemed to loom towards kissing her, but she averted this danger by a business-like concern for his bag. He entrusted this to a porter, and reverted to the triumph of overnight so soon as they were clear of the station. He was overflowing with kindliness towards his fellow humorists, who had appeared in force and very generously at the banquet, and had said the most charming things—some of which were in one report and some in another, and some the reporters had missed altogether—some of the kindliest.
“It’s a pleasant feeling to think that a lot of good fellows think you are a good fellow,” said Mr. Magnet.
He became solicitous for her. How had she got on while he was away? She asked him how one was likely to get on at Buryhamstreet; monoplanes didn’t fall every day, and as she said that it occurred to her she was behaving meanly. But he was going on to his next topic before she could qualify.
“I’ve got something in my pocket,” he remarked, and playfully: “Guess.”
She did, but she wouldn’t. She had a curious sinking of the heart.
“I want you to see it before anyone else,” he said. “Then if you don’t like it, it can go back. It’s a sapphire.”
He was feeling nervously in his pockets and then the little box was in her hand.
She hesitated to open it. It made everything so dreadfully concrete. And this time the sense of meanness was altogether acuter. He’d bought this in London; he’d brought it down, hoping for her approval. Yes, it was—horrid. But what was she to do?
“It’s—awfully pretty,” she said with the glittering symbol in her hand, and indeed he had gone to one of those artistic women who are reviving and improving upon the rich old Roman designs. “It’s so beautifully made.”
“I’m so glad you like it. You really do like it?”
“I don’t deserve it.”
“Oh! But you do like it?”
“Enormously.”
“Ah! I spent an hour in choosing it.”
She could see him. She felt as though she had picked his pocket.
“Only I don’t deserve it, Mr. Magnet. Indeed I don’t. I feel I am taking it on false pretences.”
“Nonsense, Magsy. Nonsense! Slip it on your finger, girl.”
“But I don’t,” she insisted.
He took the box from her, pocketed it and seized her hand. She drew it away from him.
“No!” she said. “I feel like a cheat. You know, I don’t—I’m sure I don’t love——”
“I’ll love enough for two,” he said, and got her hand again. “No!” he said at her gesture, “you’ll wear it. Why shouldn’t you?”
And so Marjorie came back along the vicarage avenue with his ring upon her hand. And Mr. Pope was evidently very glad to see him….
The family was still seated at tea upon rugs and wraps, and still discussing humorists at play, when Professor Trafford appeared, leaning on a large stick and limping, but resolute, by the church gate. “Pish!” said Mr. Pope. Marjorie tried not to reveal a certain dismay, there was dumb, rich approval in Daphne’s eyes, and the pleasure of Theodore and the pseudo-twins was only too scandalously evident. “Hoo-Ray!” said Theodore, with ill-concealed relief.
Mrs. Pope was the incarnate invocation of tact as Trafford drew near.
“I hope,” he said, with obvious insincerity, “I don’t invade you. But Solomonson is frightfully concerned and anxious about your lawn, and whether his men cleared it up properly and put things right.” His eye went about the party and rested on Marjorie. “How are you?” he said, in a friendly voice.
“Well, we seem to have got our croquet lawn back,” said Mr. Pope. “And our nerves are recovering. How is Sir Rupert?”
“A little fractious,” said Trafford, with the ghost of a smile.
“You’ll take some tea?” said Mrs. Pope in the pause that followed.
“Thank you,” said Trafford and sat down instantly.
“I saw your jolly address in the Standard,” he said to Magnet. “I haven’t read anything so amusing for some time.”
