H G Wells Omnibus, page 198
He nodded.
“Find out—what it all means, my boy?”
“Yes. So far as I’m concerned.”
“And then——?”
“Come back, I suppose. I haven’t thought.”
“To her?”
He didn’t answer. She went and stood beside him, leaning upon the mantel. “Godwin,” she said, “she’d only be further behind…. You’ve got to take her with you.”
He stood still and silent.
“You’ve got to think things out with her. If you don’t——”
“I can’t.”
“Then you ought to go away with her——” She stopped.
“For good?” he asked.
“Yes.”
They were both silent for a space. Then Mrs. Trafford gave her mind to the tea that was cooling in the cups, and added milk and sugar. She spoke again with the table between them.
“I’ve thought so much of these things,” she said with the milk-jug in her hand. “It’s not only you two, but others. And all the movement about us…. Marriage isn’t what it was. It’s become a different thing because women have become human beings. Only——You know, Godwin, all these things are so difficult to express. Woman’s come out of being a slave, and yet she isn’t an equal…. We’ve had a sort of sham emancipation, and we haven’t yet come to the real one.”
She put down the milk-jug on the tray with an air of grave deliberation. “If you go away from her and make the most wonderful discoveries about life and yourself, it’s no good—unless she makes them too. It’s no good at all…. You can’t live without her in the end, any more than she can live without you. You may think you can, but I’ve watched you. You don’t want to go away from her, you want to go away from the world that’s got hold of her, from the dresses and parties and the competition and all this complicated flatness we have to live in…. It wouldn’t worry you a bit, if it hadn’t got hold of her. You don’t want to get out of it for your own sake. You are out of it. You are as much out of it as any one can be. Only she holds you in it, because she isn’t out of it. Your going away will do nothing. She’ll still be in it—and still have her hold on you…. You’ve got to take her away. Or else—if you go away—in the end it will be just like a ship, Godwin, coming back to its moorings.”
She watched his thoughtful face for some moments, then arrested herself just in time in the act of putting a second portion of sugar into each of the cups. She handed her son his tea, and he took it mechanically. “You’re a wise little mother,” he said. “I didn’t see things in that light…. I wonder if you’re right.”
“I know I am,” she said.
“I’ve thought more and more,—it was Marjorie.”
“It’s the world.”
“Women made the world. All the dress and display and competition.”
Mrs. Trafford thought. “Sex made the world. Neither men nor women. But the world has got hold of the women tighter than it has the men. They’re deeper in.” She looked up into his face. “Take her with you,” she said, simply.
“She won’t come,” said Trafford, after considering it.
Mrs. Trafford reflected. “She’ll come—if you make her,” she said.
“She’ll want to bring two housemaids.”
“I don’t think you know Marjorie as well as I do.”
“But she can’t——”
“She can. It’s you—you’ll want to take two housemaids for her. Even you…. Men are not fair to women.”
Trafford put his untasted tea upon the mantelshelf, and confronted his mother with a question point blank. “Does Marjorie care for me?” he asked.
“You’re the sun of her world.”
“But she goes her way.”
“She’s clever, she’s full of life, full of activities, eager to make and arrange and order; but there’s nothing she is, nothing she makes, that doesn’t centre on you.”
“But if she cared, she’d understand!”
“My dear, do you understand?”
He stood musing. “I had everything clear,” he said. “I saw my way to Labrador….”
Her little clock pinged the hour. “Good God!” he said, “I’m to be at dinner somewhere at seven. We’re going to a first night. With the Bernards, I think. Then I suppose we’ll have a supper. Always life is being slashed to tatters by these things. Always. One thinks in snatches of fifty minutes. It’s dementia….”
§ 7
They dined at the Loretto Restaurant with the Bernards and Richard Hampden and Mrs. Godwin Capes, the dark-eyed, quiet-mannered wife of the dramatist, a woman of impulsive speech and long silences, who had subsided from an early romance (Capes had been divorced for her while she was still a mere girl) into a markedly correct and exclusive mother of daughters. Through the dinner Marjorie was watching Trafford and noting the deep preoccupation of his manner. He talked a little to Mrs. Bernard until it was time for Hampden to entertain her, then finding Mrs. Capes was interested in Bernard, he lapsed into thought. Presently Marjorie discovered his eyes scrutinizing herself.
She hoped the play would catch his mind, but the play seemed devised to intensify his sense of the tawdry unreality of contemporary life. Bernard filled the intervals with a conventional enthusiasm. Capes didn’t appear.
“He doesn’t seem to care to see his things,” his wife explained.
“It’s so brilliant,” said Bernard.
“He has to do it,” said Mrs. Capes slowly, her sombre eyes estimating the crowded stalls below. “It isn’t what he cares to do.”
The play was in fact an admirable piece of English stagecraft, and it dealt exclusively with that unreal other world of beings the English theatre has for its own purposes developed. Just as Greece through the ages evolved and polished and perfected the idealized life of its Homeric poems, so the British mind has evolved their Stage Land to embody its more honourable dreams, full of heroic virtues, incredible honour, genial worldliness, childish villainies, profound but amiable waiters and domestics, pathetic shepherds and preposterous crimes. Capes, needing an income, had mastered the habits and customs of this imagined world as one learns a language; success endorsed his mastery; he knew exactly how deeply to underline an irony and just when it is fit and proper for a good man to call upon “God!” or cry out “Damn!” In this play he had invented a situation in which a charming and sympathetic lady had killed a gross and drunken husband in self-defence, almost but not quite accidentally, and had then appealed to the prodigious hero for assistance in the resulting complications. At a great cost of mental suffering to himself he had told his First and Only Lie to shield her. Then years after he had returned to England—the first act happened, of course in India—to find her on the eve of marrying, without any of the preliminary confidences common among human beings, an old school friend of his. (In plays all Gentlemen have been at school together, and one has been the other’s fag.) The audience had to be interested in the problem of what the prodigious hero was to do in this prodigious situation. Should he maintain a colossal silence, continue his shielding, and let his friend marry the murderess saved by his perjury, or——?… The dreadful quandary! Indeed, the absolute—inconvenience!
Marjorie watched Trafford in the corner of the box, as he listened rather contemptuously to the statement of the evening’s Problem and then lapsed again into a brooding quiet. She wished she understood his moods better. She felt there was more in this than a mere resentment at her persistence about the new house….
Why didn’t he go on with things?…
This darkling mood of his had only become manifest to her during the last three or four years of their life. Previously, of course, he had been irritable at times.
Were they less happy now than they had been in the little house in Chelsea? It had really been a horrible little house. And yet there had been a brightness then—a nearness….
She found her mind wandering away upon a sort of stock-taking expedition. How much of real happiness had she and Trafford had together? They ought by every standard to be so happy….
She declined the Bernard’s invitation to a chafing-dish supper, and began to talk so soon as she and Trafford had settled into the car.
“Rag,” she said, “something’s the matter?”
“Well—yes.”
“The house?”
“Yes—the house.”
Marjorie considered through a little interval.
“Old man, why are you so prejudiced against a bigger house?”
“Oh, because the one we have bores me, and the next one will bore me more.”
“But try it.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Well,” she said and lapsed into silence.
“And then,” he asked, “what are we going to do?”
“Going to do—when?”
“After the new house——”
“I’m going to open out,” she said.
He made no answer.
“I want to open out. I want you to take your place in the world, the place you deserve.”
“A four-footman place?”
“Oh! the house is only a means.”
He thought upon that. “A means,” he asked, “to what? Look here, Marjorie, what do you think you are up to with me and yourself? What do you see me doing—in the years ahead?”
She gave him a silent and thoughtful profile for a second or so.
“At first I suppose you are going on with your researches.”
“Well?”
“Then——I must tell you what I think of you, Rag. Politics——”
“Good Lord!”
“You’ve a sort of power. You could make things noble.”
“And then? Office?”
“Why not? Look at the little men they are.”
“And then perhaps a still bigger house?”
“You’re not fair to me.”
He pulled up the bearskin over his knees.
“Marjorie!” he said. “You see——We aren’t going to do any of those things at all…. No!…”
“I can’t go on with my researches,” he explained. “That’s what you don’t understand. I’m not able to get back to work. I shall never do any good research again. That’s the real trouble, Marjorie, and it makes all the difference. As for politics——I can’t touch politics. I despise politics. I think this empire and the monarchy and Lords and Commons and patriotism and social reform and all the rest of it, silly, silly beyond words; temporary, accidental, foolish, a mere stop-gap—like a gipsey’s roundabout in a place where one will presently build a house…. You don’t help make the house by riding on the roundabout…. There’s no clear knowledge—no clear purpose…. Only research matters—and expression perhaps—I suppose expression is a sort of research—until we get that—that sufficient knowledge. And you see, I can’t take up my work again. I’ve lost something….”
She waited.
“I’ve got into this stupid struggle for winning money,” he went on, “and I feel like a woman must feel who’s made a success of prostitution. I’ve been prostituted. I feel like some one fallen and diseased…. Business and prostitution; they’re the same thing. All business is a sort of prostitution, all prostitution is a sort of business. Why should one sell one’s brains any more than one sells one’s body?… It’s so easy to succeed if one has good brains and cares to do it, and doesn’t let one’s attention or imagination wander—and it’s so degrading. Hopelessly degrading…. I’m sick of this life, Marjorie. I don’t want to buy things. I’m sick of buying. I’m at an end. I’m clean at an end. It’s exactly as though suddenly in walking through a great house one came on a passage that ended abruptly in a door, which opened—on nothing! Nothing!”
“This is a mood,” she whispered to his pause.
“It isn’t a mood, it’s a fact…. I’ve got nothing ahead, and I don’t know how to get back. My life’s no good to me any more. I’ve spent myself.”
She looked at him with dismayed eyes. “But,” she said, “this is a mood.”
“No,” he said, “no mood, but conviction. I know….”
He started. The car had stopped at their house, and Malcolm was opening the door of the car. They descended silently, and went upstairs in silence.
He came into her room presently and sat down by her fireside. She had gone to her dressing-table and unfastened a necklace; now with this winking and glittering in her hand she came and stood beside him.
“Rag,” she said, “I don’t know what to say. This isn’t so much of a surprise…. I felt that somehow life was disappointing you, that I was disappointing you. I’ve felt it endless times, but more so lately. I haven’t perhaps dared to let myself know just how much…. But isn’t it what life is? Doesn’t every wife disappoint her husband? We’re none of us inexhaustible. After all, we’ve had a good time; isn’t it a little ungrateful to forget?…”
“Look here, Rag,” she said. “I don’t know what to do. If I did know, I would do it…. What are we to do?”
“Think,” he suggested.
“We’ve got to live as well as think.”
“It’s the immense troublesome futility of—everything,” he said.
“Well—let us cease to be futile. Let us do. You say there is no grip for you in research, that you despise politics…. There’s no end of trouble and suffering. Cannot we do social work, social reform, change the lives of others less fortunate than ourselves….”
“Who are we that we should tamper with the lives of others?”
“But one must do something.”
He thought that over.
“No,” he said “that’s the universal blunder nowadays. One must do the right thing. And we don’t know the right thing, Marjorie. That’s the very heart of the trouble…. Does this life satisfy you? If it did would you always be so restless?…”
“But,” she said, “think of the good things in life?”
“It’s just the good, the exquisite things in life, that make me rebel against this life we are leading. It’s because I’ve seen the streaks of gold that I know the rest for dirt. When I go cheating and scheming to my office, and come back to find you squandering yourself upon a horde of chattering, overdressed women, when I think that that is our substance and everyday and what we are, then it is I remember most the deep and beautiful things…. It is impossible, dear, it is intolerable that life was made beautiful for us—just for these vulgarities.”
“Isn’t there——” She hesitated. “Love—still?”
“But——Has it been love? Love is a thing that grows. But we took it—as people take flowers out of a garden, cut them off, put them in water…. How much of our daily life has been love? How much of it mere consequences of the love we’ve left behind us?… We’ve just cohabited and ‘made love’—you and I—and thought of a thousand other things….”
He looked up at her. “Oh, I love a thousand things about you,” he said. “But do I love you, Marjorie? Have I got you? Haven’t I lost you—haven’t we both lost something, the very heart of it all? Do you think that we were just cheated by instinct, that there wasn’t something in it we felt and thought was there? And where is it now? Where is that brightness and wonder, Marjorie, and the pride and the immense unlimited hope?”
She was still for a moment, then knelt very swiftly before him and held out her arms.
“Oh Rag!” she said, with a face of tender beauty. He took her finger tips in his, dropped them and stood up above her.
“My dear,” he cried, “my dear! why do you always want to turn love into—touches?… Stand up again. Stand up there, my dear; don’t think I’ve ceased to love you, but stand up there and let me talk to you as one man to another. If we let this occasion slide to embraces….”
He stopped short.
She crouched before the fire at his feet. “Go on,” she said, “go on.”
“I feel now that all our lives now, Marjorie——We have come to a crisis. I feel that now——now is the time. Either we shall save ourselves now or we shall never save ourselves. It is as if something had gathered and accumulated and could wait no longer. If we do not seize this opportunity——Then our lives will go on as they have gone on, will become more and more a matter of small excitements and elaborate comforts and distraction….”
He stopped this halting speech and then broke out again.
“Oh! why should the life of every day conquer us? Why should generation after generation of men have these fine beginnings, these splendid dreams of youth, attempt so much, achieve so much and then, then become—this! Look at this room, this litter of little satisfactions! Look at your pretty books there, a hundred minds you have pecked at, bright things of the spirit that attracted you as jewels attract a jackdaw. Look at the glass and silver, and that silk from China! And we are in the full tide of our years, Marjorie. Now is the very crown and best of our lives. And this is what we do, we sample, we accumulate. For this we loved, for this we hoped. Do you remember when we were young—that life seemed so splendid—it was intolerable we should ever die?… The splendid dream! The intimations of greatness!… The miserable failure!”
He raised clenched fists. “I won’t stand it, Marjorie. I won’t endure it. Somehow, in some way, I will get out of this life—and you with me. I have been brooding upon this and brooding, but now I know….”
“But how?” asked Marjorie, with her bare arms about her knees, staring into the fire. “How?”
“We must get out of its constant interruptions, its incessant vivid, petty appeals….”
“We might go away—to Switzerland.”
“We went to Switzerland. Didn’t we agree—it was our second honeymoon. It isn’t a honeymoon we need. No, we’ll have to go further than that.”
A sudden light broke upon Marjorie’s mind. She realized he had a plan. She lifted a fire-lit face to him and looked at him with steady eyes and asked——
“Where?”
“Ever so much further.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do. You’ve planned something.”
“I don’t know, Marjorie. At least—I haven’t made up my mind. Where it is very lonely. Cold and remote. Away from all this——” His mind stopped short, and he ended with a cry: “Oh! God! how I want to get out of all this!”
