H G Wells Omnibus, page 330
‘You better not speak to your cousins, George,’ said my aunt, ‘till you’re in a better state of mind.’
I became an outcast forthwith. At supper that night a gloomy silence was broken by my cousin saying, ‘’E ’ ‘it me for telling you, and I turned the other cheek, muvver.’
‘’E’s got the evil one be’ind ’im now, a ridin’ on ‘is back,’ said my aunt, to the grave discomfort of the eldest girl, who sat beside me.
After supper my uncle, in a few ill-chosen words, prayed me to repent before I slept.
‘Suppose you was took in your sleep, George,’ he said; ‘where’d you be then? You jest think of that, me boy.’ By this time I was thoroughly miserable and frightened, and this suggestion unnerved me dreadfully, but I kept up an impenitent front. ‘To wake in ’ell,’ said Uncle Nicodemus, in gentle tones. ‘You don’t want to wake in ‘ell, George, burnin’ and screamin’ for ever, do you? You wouldn’t like that?’
He tried very hard to get me to ‘jest ‘ave a look at the bake’ ouse fire’ before I retired. ‘It might move you,’ he said.
I was awake longest that night. My cousins slept the sleep of faith on either side of me. I decided I would whisper my prayers, and stopped midway because I was ashamed, and perhaps also because I had an idea one didn’t square God like that.
‘No,’ I said, with a sudden confidence, ‘damn me if you’re coward enough…. But you’re not…. No! You couldn’t be!’
I woke my cousins up with emphatic digs, and told them as much, triumphantly, and went very peacefully to sleep with my act of faith accomplished.
I slept not only through that night, but for all my nights since then. So far as any fear of Divine injustice goes, I sleep soundly, and shall, I know, to the end of things. That declaration was an epoch in my spiritual life.
§2
But I didn’t expect to have the whole meeting on Sunday turned on to me.
It was. It all comes back to me, that convergence of attention, even the faint leathery smell of its atmosphere returns, and the coarse feel of my aunt’s black dress beside me in contact with my hand. I see again the old Welsh milkman ‘wrestling’ with me – they all wrestled with me, by prayer or exhortation. And I was holding out stoutly, though convinced now by the contagion of their universal conviction that by doing so I was certainly and hopelessly damned. I felt that they were right, that God was probably like them, and that on the whole it didn’t matter. And to simplify the business thoroughly, I had declared I didn’t believe anything at all. They confuted me by texts from Scripture, which I now perceive was an illegitimate method of reply. When I got home, still impenitent and eternally lost and secretly very lonely and miserable and alarmed, Uncle Nicodemus docked my Sunday pudding.
One person only spoke to me like a human being on that day of wrath, and that was the younger Frapp. He came up to me in the afternoon while I was confined upstairs with a Bible and my own thoughts.
‘’Ello,’ he said, and fretted about.
‘D’you mean to say there isn’t – no one,’ he said, funking the word.
‘No one?’
‘No one watching yer – always.’
‘Why should there be?’ I asked.
‘You can’t ‘elp thoughts,’ said my cousin, ‘any-‘ow…. mean –’ He stopped hovering. ‘I s‘pose I oughtn’t to be talking to you.’
He hesitated and flitted away with a guilty back glance over his shoulder….
The following week made life quite intolerable for me; these people forced me at last into an Atheism that terrified me. When I learnt that next Sunday the wrestling was to be resumed, my courage failed me altogether.
I happened upon a map of Kent in a stationer’s window on Saturday, and that set me thinking of one form of release. I studied it intently for half an hour perhaps, on Saturday night, got a route list of villages well fixed in my memory, and got up and started for Bladesover about five on Sunday morning while my two bed-mates were still fast asleep.
§3
I remember something, but not so much of it as I should like to recall, of my long tramp to Bladesover House. The distance from Chatham is almost exactly seventeen miles, and it took me until nearly one. It was very interesting and I do not think I was overfatigued, though I got rather pinched by one boot.
The morning must have been very clear, because I remember that near Itchinstow Hall9 I looked back and saw the estuary of the Thames, that river that has since played so large a part in my life. But at the time I did not know it was the Thames, I thought this great expanse of mud flats and water was the sea, which I had never yet seen nearly. And out upon it stood ships, sailing ships and a steamer or so, going up to London or down out into the great seas of the world. I stood for a long time watching these and thinking whether after all I should not have done better to have run away to sea.
The nearer I drew to Bladesover, the more doubtful I grew of the quality of my reception, and the more I regretted that alternative. I suppose it was the dirty clumsiness of the shipping I had seen nearly, that put me out of mind of that. I took a short cut through the Warren across the corner of the main park to intercept the people from the church. I wanted to avoid meeting anyone before I met my mother, and so I went to a place where the path passed between banks, and without exactly hiding, stood up among the bushes. This place, among other advantages, eliminated any chance of seeing Lady Drew, who would drive round by the carriage road.
Standing up to waylay in this fashion, I had a queer feeling of brigandage, as though I was some intrusive sort of bandit among these orderly things. It is the first time I remember having that outlaw feeling distinctly, a feeling that has played a large part in my subsequent life. I felt there existed no place for me – that I had to drive myself in.
Presently, down the hill, the servants appeared, straggling by twos and threes, first some of the garden people and the butler’s wife with them, then the two laundry maids, odd inseparable old creatures, then the first footman talking to the butler’s little girl, and at last, walking grave and breathless beside old Ann and Miss Fison, the black figure of my mother.
My boyish mind suggested the adoption of a playful form of appearance. ‘Coo-ee, mother!’ said I, coming out against the sky, ‘Coo-ee!’
My mother looked up, went very white, and put her hand to her bosom….
I suppose there was a fearful fuss about me. And of course I was quite unable to explain my reappearance. But I held out stoutly, ‘I won’t go back to Chatham; I’ll drown myself first.’ The next day my mother carried me off to Wimblehurst, took me fiercely and aggressively to an uncle I had never heard of before, near though the place was to us. She gave me no word as to what was to happen, and I was too subdued by her manifest wrath and humiliation at my last misdemeanour to demand information. I don’t for one moment think Lady Drew was ‘nice’ about me. The finality of my banishment was endorsed and underlined and stamped home. I wished very much now that I had run away to sea, in spite of the coaly dust and squalor Rochester had revealed to me. Perhaps overseas one came to different lands.
§4
I do not remember much of my journey to Wimblehurst with my mother except the image of her as sitting bolt upright, as rather disdaining the third-class carriage in which we travelled, and how she looked away from me out of the window when she spoke of my uncle. ‘I have not seen your uncle,’ she said, ‘since he was a boy…’ She added grudgingly, ‘Then he was supposed to be clever.’
She took little interest in such qualities as cleverness.
‘He married about three years ago, and set up for himself in Wimblehurst…. So I suppose she had some money.’
She mused on scenes she had long dismissed from her mind. ‘Teddy,’ she said at last in the tone of one who has been feeling in the dark and finds. ‘He was called Teddy… about your age…. Now he must be twenty-six or seven.’
I thought of my uncle as Teddy directly I saw him; there was something in his personal appearance that in the light of that memory phrased itself at once as Teddiness – a certain Teddi-dity. To describe it in any other terms is more difficult. It is nimbleness without grace, and alertness without intelligence. He whisked out of his shop upon the pavement, a short figure in grey and wearing grey carpet slippers; one had a sense of a young fattish face behind gilt glasses, wiry hair that stuck up and forward over the forehead, an irregular nose that had its aquiline moments, and that the body betrayed an equatorial laxity, an incipient ‘bow window’ as the image goes. He jerked out of the shop, came to a stand on the pavement outside, regarded something in the window with infinite appreciation, stroked his chin, and, as abruptly, shot sideways into the door again, charging through it as it were behind an extended hand.
‘That must be him,’ said my mother, catching at her breath.
We came past the window whose contents I was presently to know by heart, a very ordinary chemist’s window except that there was a frictional electrical machine, an air-pump and two or three tripods and retorts replacing the customary blue, yellow and red bottles above. There was a plaster of Paris horse to indicate veterinary medicines among these breakables, and below were scent packets and diffusers and sponges and soda-water syphons and suchlike things. Only in the middle there was a rubricated10 card, very neatly painted by hand, with these words –
* * *
Buy Ponderevo’s Cough Linctus Now.
NOW!
WHY?
Twopence Cheaper than in Winter.
You Store Apples! why not the Medicine
You are Bound to Need?
* * *
in which appeal I was to recognize presently my uncle’s distinctive note.
My uncle’s face appeared above a card of infants’ comforters in the glass pane of the door. I perceived his eyes were brown, and that his glasses creased his nose. It was manifest he did not know us from Adam. A stare of scrutiny allowed an expression of commercial deference to appear in front of it, and my uncle flung open the door.
‘You don’t know me?’ panted my mother.
My uncle would not own he did not, but his curiosity was manifest. My mother sat down on one of the little chairs before the soap and patent-medicine-piled counter, and her lips opened and closed.
‘A glass of water, madam,’ said my uncle, waved his hand in a sort of curve, and shot away.
My mother drank the water and spoke. ‘That boy,’ she said, ‘takes after his father. He grows more like him every day… and so I have brought him to you.’
‘His father, madam?’
‘George.’
For a moment the chemist was still at a loss. He stood behind the counter with the glass my mother had returned to him in his hand. Then comprehension grew.
‘By Gosh!’ he said. ‘Lord!’ he cried. His glasses fell off. He disappeared, replacing them, behind a pile of boxed-up bottles of blood mixture. ‘Eleven thousand virgins!’11 I heard him cry. The glass was banged down. ‘O-ri-ental Gums!’12
He shot away out of the shop through some masked door. One heard his voice. ‘Susan! Susan!’
Then he reappeared with an extended hand. ‘Well, how are you?’ he said. ‘I was never so surprised in my life. Fancy!… You!’
He shook my mother’s impassive hand and then mine very warmly, holding his glasses on with his left forefinger.
‘Come right in!’ he cried – ‘come right in! Better late than never!’ and led the way into the parlour behind the shop.
After Bladesover that apartment struck me as stuffy and petty, but it was very comfortable in comparison with the Frapp living-room. It had a faint, disintegrating smell of meals about it, and my most immediate impression was of the remarkable fact that something was hung about or wrapped round or draped over everything. There was bright-patterned muslin round the gas-bracket in the middle of the room, round the mirror over the mantel, stuff with ball-fringe along the mantel and casing in the fireplace, – I first saw ball-fringe here, – and even the lamp on the little bureau wore a shade like a large muslin hat. The tablecloth had ball-fringe, and so had the window curtains, and the carpet was a bed of roses. There were little cupboards on either side of the fireplace, and in the recesses ill-made shelves packed with books and enriched with pinked American cloth. There was a dictionary lying face downward on the table, and the open bureau was littered with foolscap paper and the evidences of recently abandoned toil. My eye caught, ‘The Ponderevo Patent Flat, a Machine you can Live in,’ written in large firm letters. My uncle opened a little door like a cupboard door in the corner of this room, and revealed the narrowest twist of staircase I had ever set eyes upon. ‘Susan!’ he bawled again. ‘Wantje. Someone to see you. Surprisin’.’
There came an inaudible reply, and a sudden loud bump over our heads as of some article of domestic utility pettishly flung aside, then the cautious steps of someone descending the twist, and then my aunt appeared in the doorway with her hand upon the jamb.
‘It’s Aunt Ponderevo,’ cried my uncle. ‘George’s wife – and she’s brought over her son!’ His eye roved about the room. He darted to the bureau with a sudden impulse, and turned the sheet about the patent flat face down. Then he waved his glasses at us, ‘You know, Susan, my elder brother George. I told you about ’im lots of times.’
He fretted across to the hearthrug and took up a position there, replaced his glasses and coughed.
My aunt Susan seemed to be taking it in. She was then rather a pretty slender woman of twenty-three or four, I suppose, and I remember being struck by the blueness of her eyes and the clear freshness of her complexion. She had little features, a button nose, a pretty chin, and a long graceful neck that stuck out of her pale blue cotton morning dress. There was a look of half-assumed perplexity on her face, a quizzical wrinkle of the brow that suggested a faintly amused attempt to follow my uncle’s mental operations, a vain attempt and a certain hopelessness that had in succession become habitual. She seemed to be saying, ‘Oh Lord! What’s he giving me this time?’ And as I came to know her better I detected, as a complication of her effort of apprehension, a subsidiary riddle to ‘What’s he giving me?’ and that was – to borrow a phrase from my schoolboy language – ‘Is it keeps?’ She looked at my mother and me, and back to her husband again.
‘You know,’ he said. ‘George!’
‘Well, ’ she said to my mother, descending the last three steps of the staircase and holding out her hand, ‘you’re welcome. Though it’s a surprise…. I can’t ask you to have anything, I’m afraid, for there isn’t anything in the house.’ She smiled, and looked at her husband banteringly. ‘Unless he makes up something with his old chemicals, which he’s quite equal to doing.’
My mother shook hands stiffly, and told me to kiss my aunt…
‘Well, let’s all sit down,’ said my uncle, suddenly whistling through his clenched teeth, and briskly rubbing his hands together. He put up a chair for my mother, raised the blind of the window, lowered it again, and returned to his hearthrug. ‘I’m sure,’ he said, as one who decides, ‘I’m very glad to see you.’
§5
As they talked I gave my attention pretty exclusively to my uncle.
I noted him in great detail. I remember now his partially unbuttoned waistcoat, as though something had occurred to distract him as he did it up; and a little cut upon his chin. I liked a certain humour in his eyes. I watched too, with the fascination these things have for an observant boy, the play of his lips – they were slightly oblique, and there was something ‘slipshod’, if one may strain a word so far, about his mouth so that he lisped and sibilated ever and again – and the coming and going of a curious expression, triumphant in quality it was, upon his face as he talked. He fingered his glasses, which did not seem to fit his nose, fretted with things in his waistcoat-pockets or put his hands behind him, looked over our heads, and ever and again rose to his toes and dropped back on his heels. He had a way of drawing air in at times through his teeth that gave a whispering zest to his speech. It’s a sound I can only represent as a soft Zzzz.
He did most of the talking. My mother repeated what she had already said in the shop, ‘I have brought George over to you,’ and then desisted for a time from the real business in hand. ‘You find this a comfortable house?’ she asked; and this being affirmed: ‘It looks – very convenient…. Not too big to be a trouble – no. You like Wimblehurst, I suppose?’
My uncle retorted with some inquiries about the great people of Bladesover, and my mother answered in the character of a personal friend of Lady Drew’s. The talk hung for a time, and then my uncle embarked upon a dissertation upon Wimblehurst.
‘This place,’ he began, ‘isn’t of course quite the place I ought to be in.’
My mother nodded as though she had expected that.
‘It gives me no Scope,’ he went on. ‘It’s dead-and-alive. Nothing happens.’
‘He’s always wanting something to happen,’ said my aunt Susan. ‘Some day he’ll get a shower of things and they’ll be too much for him.’
‘Not they,’ said my uncle, buoyantly.
‘Do you find business – slack?’ asked my mother.
‘Oh! one rubs along. But there’s no Development – no Growth. They just come along here and buy pills when they want ‘em – and a horseball13 or such. They’ve got to be ill before there’s a prescription. That sort they are. You can’t get ‘em to launch out, you can’t get ‘em to take up anything new. F’rinstance, I’ve been trying lately – induce them to buy their medicines in advance, and in larger quantities. But they won’t look at it! Then I tried to float a little notion of mine, sort of an insurance scheme for colds; you pay so much a week, and when you’ve got a cold you get a bottle of Cough Linctus so long as you can produce a substantial sniff. See? But Lord! they’ve no capacity for ideas, they don’t catch on; no Jump about the place, no Life! Live! – they trickle, and what one has to do here is to trickle too – Zzzz.’
