H G Wells Omnibus, page 175
“Rom dear,” said Mrs. Pope, “will you take the pot in and get some fresh tea?”
Mr. Trafford addressed himself to the flattery of Magnet with considerable skill. He had detected a lurking hostility in the eyes of the two gentlemen that counselled him to propitiate them if he meant to maintain his footing in the vicarage, and now he talked to them almost exclusively and ignored the ladies modestly but politely in the way that seems natural and proper in a British middle-class house of the better sort. But as he talked chiefly of the improvement of motor machinery that had recently been shown at the Engineering Exhibition, he did not make that headway with Marjorie’s father that he had perhaps anticipated. Mr. Pope fumed quietly for a time, and then suddenly spoke out.
“I’m no lover of machines,” he said abruptly, slashing across Mr. Trafford’s description. “All our troubles began with villainous saltpetre. I’m an old-fashioned man with a nose—and a neck, and I don’t want the one offended or the other broken. No, don’t ask me to be interested in your valves and cylinders. What do you say, Magnet? It starts machinery in my head to hear about them….”
On such occasions as this when Mr. Pope spoke out, his horror of an anti-climax or any sort of contradiction was apt to bring the utterance to a culmination not always to be distinguished from a flight. And now he rose to his feet as he delivered himself.
“Who’s for a game of tennis?” he said, “in this last uncontaminated patch of air? I and Marjorie will give you a match, Daffy—if Magnet isn’t too tired to join you.”
Daffy looked at Marjorie for an instant.
“We’ll want you, Theodore, to look after the balls in the potatoes,” said Mr. Pope lest that ingenuous mind should be corrupted behind his back….
Mrs. Pope found herself left to entertain a slightly disgruntled Trafford. Rom and Syd hovered on the off chance of notice, at the corner of the croquet lawn nearest the tea things. Mrs. Pope had already determined to make certain little matters clearer than they appeared to be to this agreeable but superfluous person, and she was greatly assisted by his opening upon the subject of her daughters. “Jolly tennis looks,” he said.
“Don’t they?” said Mrs. Pope. “I think it is such a graceful game for a girl.”
Mr. Trafford glanced at Mrs. Pope’s face, but her expression was impenetrable.
“They both like it and play it so well,” she said. “Their father is so skillful and interested in games. Marjorie tells me you were her examiner a year or so ago.”
“Yes. She struck my memory—her work stood out.”
“Of course she is clever,” said Mrs. Pope. “Or we shouldn’t have sent her to Oxbridge. There she’s doing quite well—quite well. Everyone says so. I don’t know, of course, if Mr. Magnet will let her finish there.”
“Mr. Magnet?”
“She’s just engaged to him. Of course she’s frightfully excited about it, and naturally he wants her to come away and marry. There’s very little excuse for a long engagement. No.”
Her voice died in a musical little note, and she seemed to be scrutinizing the tennis with an absorbed interest. “They’ve got new balls,” she said, as if to herself.
Trafford had rolled over, and she fancied she detected a change in his voice when it came. “Isn’t it rather a waste not to finish a university career?” he said.
“Oh, it wouldn’t be wasted. Of course a girl like that will be hand and glove with her husband. She’ll be able to help him with the scientific side of his jokes and all that. I sometimes wish it had been Daffy who had gone to college though. I sometimes think we’ve sacrificed Daffy a little. She’s not the bright quickness of Marjorie, but there’s something quietly solid about her mind—something stable. Perhaps I didn’t want her to go away from me…. Mr. Magnet is doing wonders at the net. He’s just begun to play—to please Marjorie. Don’t you think he’s a dreadfully amusing man, Mr. Trafford? He says such quiet things.”
§ 9
The effect of this éclaircissement upon Mr. Trafford was not what it should have been. Properly he ought to have realized at once that Marjorie was for ever beyond his aspirations, and if he found it too difficult to regard her with equanimity, then he ought to have shunned her presence. But instead, after his first shock of incredulous astonishment, his spirit rose in a rebellion against arranged facts that was as un-English as it was ungentlemanly. He went back to Solomonson with a mood of thoughtful depression giving place to a growing passion of indignation. He presented it to himself in a generalized and altruistic form. “What the deuce is the good of all this talk of Eugenics,” he asked himself aloud, “if they are going to hand over that shining girl to that beastly little area sneak?”
He called Mr. Magnet a “beastly little area sneak!”
Nothing could show more clearly just how much he had contrived to fall in love with Marjorie during his brief sojourn in Buryhamstreet and the acuteness of his disappointment, and nothing could be more eloquent of his forcible and undisciplined temperament. And out of ten thousand possible abusive epithets with which his mind was no doubt stored, this one, I think, had come into his head because of the alert watchfulness with which Mr. Magnet followed a conversation, as he waited his chance for some neat but brilliant flash of comment….
Trafford, like Marjorie, was another of those undisciplined young people our age has produced in such significant quantity. He was just six-and-twenty, but the facts that he was big of build, had as an only child associated much with grown-up people, and was already a conspicuous success in the world of micro-chemical research, had given him the self-reliance and assurance of a much older man. He had still to come his croppers and learn most of the important lessons in life, and, so far, he wasn’t aware of it. He was naturally clean-minded, very busy and interested in his work, and on remarkably friendly and confidential terms with his mother who kept house for him, and though he had had several small love disturbances, this was the first occasion that anything of the kind had ploughed deep into his feelings and desires.
Trafford’s father had died early in life. He had been a brilliant pathologist, one of that splendid group of scientific investigators in the middle Victorian period which shines ever more brightly as our criticism dims their associated splendours, and he had died before he was thirty through a momentary slip of the scalpel. His wife—she had been his wife for five years—found his child and his memory and the quality of the life he had made about her too satisfying for the risks of a second marriage, and she had brought up her son with a passionate belief in the high mission of research and the supreme duty of seeking out and expressing truth finely. And here he was, calling Mr. Magnet a “beastly little area sneak.”
The situation perplexed him. Marjorie perplexed him. It was, had he known it, the beginning for him of a lifetime of problems and perplexities. He was absolutely certain she didn’t love Magnet. Why, then, had she agreed to marry him? Such pressures and temptations as he could see about her seemed light to him in comparison with such an undertaking.
Were they greater than he supposed?
His method of coming to the issue of that problem was entirely original. He presented himself next afternoon with the air of an invited guest, drove Mr. Pope who was suffering from liver, to expostulatory sulking in the study, and expressed a passionate craving for golf-croquet, in spite of Mrs. Pope’s extreme solicitude for his still bandaged ankle. He was partnered with Daffy, and for a long time he sought speech with Marjorie in vain. At last he was isolated in a corner of the lawn, and with the thinnest pretence of inadvertence, in spite of Daffy’s despairing cry of “She plays next!” he laid up within two yards of her. He walked across to her as she addressed herself to her ball, and speaking in an incredulous tone and with the air of a comment on the game, he said: “I say, are you engaged to that chap Magnet?”
Marjorie was amazed, but remarkably not offended. Something in his tone set her trembling. She forgot to play, and stood with her mallet hanging in her hand.
“Punish him!” came the voice of Magnet from afar.
“Yes,” she said faintly.
His remark came low and clear. It had a note of angry protest. “Why?”
Marjorie, by the way of answer, hit her ball so that it jumped and missed his, ricochetted across the lawn and out of the ground on the further side.
“I’m sorry if I’ve annoyed you,” said Trafford, as Marjorie went after her ball, and Daffy thanked heaven aloud for the respite.
They came together no more for a time, and Trafford, observant with every sense, found no clue to the riddle of her grave, intent bearing. She played very badly, and with unusual care and deliberation. He felt he had made a mess of things altogether, and suddenly found his leg was too painful to go on. “Partner,” he asked, “will you play out my ball for me? I can’t go on. I shall have to go.”
Marjorie surveyed him, while Daffy and Magnet expressed solicitude. He turned to go, mallet in hand, and found Marjorie following him.
“Is that the heavier mallet?” she asked, and stood before him looking into his eyes and weighing a mallet in either hand.
“Mr. Trafford, you’re one of the worst examiners I’ve ever met,” she said.
He looked puzzled.
“I don’t know why,” said Marjorie, “I wonder as much as you. But I am”; and seeing the light dawning in his eyes, she turned about, and went back to the debacle of her game.
§ 10
After that Mr. Trafford had one clear desire in his being which ruled all his other desires. He wanted a long, frank, unembarrassed and uninterrupted conversation with Marjorie. He had a very strong impression that Marjorie wanted exactly the same thing. For a week he besieged the situation in vain. After the fourth day Solomonson was only kept in Buryhamstreet by sheer will-power, exerted with a brutality that threatened to end that friendship abruptly. He went home on the sixth day in his largest car, but Trafford stayed on beyond the limits of decency to perform some incomprehensible service that he spoke of as “clearing up.”
“I want,” he said, “to clear up.”
“But what is there to clear up, my dear boy?”
“Solomonson, you’re a pampered plutocrat,” said Trafford, as though everything was explained.
“I don’t see any sense in it at all,” said Solomonson, and regarded his friend aslant with thick, black eyebrows raised.
“I’m going to stay,” said Trafford.
And Solomonson said one of those unhappy and entirely disregarded things that ought never to be said.
“There’s some girl in this,” said Solomonson.
“Your bedroom’s always waiting for you at Riplings,” he said, when at last he was going off….
Trafford’s conviction that Marjorie also wanted, with an almost equal eagerness, the same opportunity for speech and explanations that he desired, sustained him in a series of unjustifiable intrusions upon the seclusion of the Popes. But although the manner of Mr. and Mrs. Pope did change considerably for the better after his next visit, it was extraordinary how impossible it seemed for him and Marjorie to achieve their common end of an encounter.
Always something intervened.
In the first place, Mrs. Pope’s disposition to optimism had got the better of her earlier discretions, and a casual glance at Daphne’s face when their visitor reappeared started quite a new thread of interpretations in her mind. She had taken the opportunity of hinting at this when Mr. Pope asked over his shirt-stud that night, “What the devil that—that chauffeur chap meant by always calling in the afternoon.”
“Now that Will Magnet monopolizes Marjorie,” she said, after a little pause and a rustle or so, “I don’t see why Daffy shouldn’t have a little company of her own age.”
Mr. Pope turned round and stared at her. “I didn’t think of that,” he said. “But, anyhow, I don’t like the fellow.”
“He seems to be rather clever,” said Mrs. Pope, “though he certainly talks too much. And after all it was Sir Rupert’s aeroplane. He was only driving it to oblige.”
“He’ll think twice before he drives another,” said Mr. Pope, wrenching off his collar….
Once Mrs. Pope had turned her imagination in this more and more agreeable direction, she was rather disposed, I am afraid, to let it bolt with her. And it was a deflection that certainly fell in very harmoniously with certain secret speculations of Daphne’s. Trafford, too, being quite unused to any sort of social furtiveness, did perhaps, in order to divert attention from his preoccupation with Marjorie, attend more markedly to Daphne than he would otherwise have done. And so presently he found Daphne almost continuously on his hands. So far as she was concerned, he might have told her the entire history of his life, and every secret he had in the world, without let or hindrance. Mrs. Pope, too, showed a growing appreciation of his company, became sympathetic and confidential in a way that invited confidence, and threw a lot of light on her family history and Daffy’s character. She had found Daffy a wonderful study, she said. Mr. Pope, too, seemed partly reconciled to him. The idea that, after all, both motor cars and monoplane were Sir Rupert’s, and not Trafford’s, had produced a reaction in the latter gentleman’s favour. Moreover, it had occurred to him that Trafford’s accident had perhaps disposed him towards a more thoughtful view of mechanical traction, and that this tendency would be greatly helped by a little genial chaff. So that he ceased to go indoors when Trafford was there, and hung about, meditating and delivering sly digs at this new victim of his ripe, old-fashioned humour.
Nor did it help Trafford in his quest for Marjorie and a free, outspoken delivery that the pseudo-twins considered him a person of very considerable charm, and that Theodore, though indisposed to “suck up” to him publicly—I write here in Theodorese—did so desire intimate and solitary communion with him, more particularly in view of the chances of an adventitious aeroplane ride that seemed to hang about him—as to stalk him persistently—hovering on the verge of groups, playing a waiting game with a tennis ball and an old racquet, strolling artlessly towards the gate of the avenue when the time seemed ripening for his appearance or departure.
On the other hand, Marjorie was greatly entangled by Magnet.
Magnet was naturally an attentive lover; he was full of small encumbering services, and it made him none the less assiduous to perceive that Marjorie seemed to find no sort of pleasure in all the little things he did. He seemed to think that if picking the very best rose he could find for her did not cause a very perceptible brightening in her, then it was all the more necessary quietly to force her racquet from her hand and carry it for her, or help her ineffectually to cross a foot-wide ditch, or offer to read her in a rich, abundant, well modulated voice, some choice passage from “The Forest Lovers” of Mr. Maurice Hewlett. And behind these devotions there was a streak of jealousy. He knew as if by instinct that it was not wise to leave these two handsome young people together; he had a queer little disagreeable sensation whenever they spoke to one another or looked at one another. Whenever Trafford and Marjorie found themselves in a group, there was Magnet in the midst of them. He knew the value of his Marjorie, and did not mean to lose her….
Being jointly baffled in this way was oddly stimulating to Marjorie’s and Trafford’s mutual predisposition. If you really want to throw people together, the thing to do—thank God for Ireland!—is to keep them apart. By the fourth day of this emotional incubation, Marjorie was thinking of Trafford to the exclusion of all her reading; and Trafford was lying awake at nights—oh, for half an hour and more—thinking of bold, decisive ways of getting at Marjorie, and bold, decisive things to say to her when he did.
(But why she should be engaged to Magnet continued, nevertheless, to puzzle him extremely. It was a puzzle to which no complete solution was ever to be forthcoming….)
§ 11
At last that opportunity came. Marjorie had come with her mother into the village, and while Mrs. Pope made some purchases at the general shop she walked on to speak to Mrs. Blythe the washerwoman. Trafford suddenly emerged from the Red Lion with a soda syphon under each arm. She came forward smiling.
“I say,” he said forthwith, “I want to talk with you—badly.”
“And I,” she said unhesitatingly, “with you.”
“How can we?”
“There’s always people about. It’s absurd.”
“We’ll have to meet.”
“Yes.”
“I have to go away to-morrow. I ought to have gone two days ago. Where can we meet?”
She had it all prepared.
“Listen,” she said. “There is a path runs from our shrubbery through a little wood to a stile on the main road.” He nodded. “Either I will be there at three or about half-past five or—there’s one more chance. While father and Mr. Magnet are smoking at nine…. I might get away.”
“Couldn’t I write?”
“No. Impossible.”
“I’ve no end of things to say….”
Mrs. Pope appeared outside her shop, and Trafford gesticulated a greeting with the syphons. “All right,” he said to Marjorie. “I’m shopping,” he cried as Mrs. Pope approached.
§ 12
All through the day Marjorie desired to go to Trafford and could not do so. It was some minutes past nine when at last with a swift rustle of skirts that sounded louder than all the world to her, she crossed the dimly lit hall between dining-room and drawing-room and came into the dreamland of moonlight upon the lawn. She had told her mother she was going upstairs; at any moment she might be missed, but she would have fled now to Trafford if an army pursued her. Her heart seemed beating in her throat, and every fibre of her being was aquiver. She flitted past the dining-room window like a ghost, she did not dare to glance aside at the smokers within, and round the lawn to the shrubbery, and so under a blackness of trees to the gate where he stood waiting. And there he was, dim and mysterious and wonderful, holding the gate open for her, and she was breathless, and speechless, and near sobbing. She stood before him for a moment, her face moonlit and laced with the shadows of little twigs, and then his arms came out to her.
