H G Wells Omnibus, page 337
She stood out among the other girls very distinctly because they dressed more than she did, struck emphatic notes of colour, startled one by novelties in hats and bows and things. I’ve always hated the rustle, the disconcerting colour boundaries, the smart unnatural angles of women’s clothes. Her plain black dress gave her a starkness….
I do remember, though, how one afternoon I discovered the peculiar appeal of her form for me. I had been restless with my work and had finally slipped out of the Laboratory and come over to the Art Museum to lounge among the pictures. I came upon her in an odd corner of the Sheepshanks gallery intently copying something from a picture that hung high. I had just been in the gallery of casts from the antique, my mind was all alive with my newly awakened sense of line, and there she stood with face upturned, her body drooping forward from the hips just a little – memorably graceful – feminine.
After that I know I sought to see her, felt a distinctive emotion at her presence, began to imagine things about her. I no longer thought of generalized womanhood or of this casual person or that. I thought of her.
An accident brought us together. I found myself one Monday morning in an omnibus staggering westward from Victoria – I was returning from a Sunday I’d spent at Wimblehurst in response to a unique freak of hospitality on the part of Mr Mantell. She was the sole other inside passenger. And when the time came to pay her fare, she became an extremely scared, disconcerted and fumbling young woman; she had left her purse at home.
Luckily I had some money.
She looked at me with startled, troubled brown eyes; she permitted my proffered payment to the conductor with a certain ungraciousness that seemed a part of her shyness, and then as she rose to go, she thanked me with an obvious affectation of ease.
‘Thank you so much,’ she said in a pleasant soft voice; and then less gracefully, ‘Awfully kind of you, you know.’
I fancy I made polite noises. But just then I wasn’t disposed to be critical. I was full of the sense of her presence, her arm was stretched out over me as she moved past me, the gracious slenderness of her body was near me. The words we used didn’t seem very greatly to matter. I had vague ideas of getting out with her – and I didn’t.
That encounter, I have no doubt, exercised me enormously. I lay awake at night rehearsing it, and wondering about the next phase of our relationship. That took the form of the return of my twopence. I was in the Science Library, digging something out of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, when she appeared beside me and placed on the open page an evidently premeditated thin envelope, bulgingly confessing the coins within.
‘It was so very kind of you,’ she said, ‘the other day. I don’t know what I should have done, Mr—’
I supplied my name. ‘I knew,’ I said, ‘you were a student here.’
‘Not exactly a student. I —’
‘Well, anyhow, I knew you were here frequently. And I’m a student myself at the Consolidated Technical Schools.’
I plunged into autobiography and questionings, and so entangled her in a conversation that got a quality of intimacy through the fact that, out of deference to our fellow readers, we were obliged to speak in undertones. And I have no doubt that in substance it was singularly banal. Indeed I have an impression that all our early conversations were incredibly banal. We met several times in a manner half-accidental, half-furtive and wholly awkward. Mentally I didn’t take hold of her. I never did take hold of her mentally. Her talk, I now know all too clearly, was shallow, pretentious, evasive. Only – even to this day – I don’t remember it as in any way vulgar. She was, I could see quite clearly, anxious to overstate or conceal her real social status, a little desirous to be taken for a student in the art school and a little ashamed that she wasn’t. She came to the museum to ‘copy things’, and this, I gathered, had something to do with some way of partially earning her living that I wasn’t to enquire into. I told her things about myself, vain things that I felt might appeal to her, but that I learnt long afterwards made her think me ‘conceited’. We talked of books but there she was very much on her guard and secretive, and rather more freely of pictures. She ‘liked’ pictures. I think from the outset I appreciated and did not for a moment resent that hers was a commonplace mind, that she was the unconscious custodian of something that had gripped my most intimate instinct, that she embodied the hope of a possibility, was the careless proprietor of a physical quality that had turned my head like strong wine. I felt I had to stick to our acquaintance, flat as it was. Presently we should get through these irrelevant exterior things, and come to the reality of love beneath.
I saw her in dreams released, as it were, from herself, beautiful, worshipful, glowing. And sometimes when we were together, we would come on silences through sheer lack of matter, and then my eyes would feast on her and the silence seemed like the drawing back of a curtain – her superficial self. Odd, I confess. Odd, particularly, the enormous hold of certain things about her upon me, a certain slight rounded duskiness of skin, a certain perfection of modelling in her lips, her brow, a certain fine flow about the shoulders. She wasn’t indeed beautiful to many people – these things are beyond explaining. She had manifest defects of form and feature, and they didn’t matter at all. Her complexion was bad, but I don’t think it would have mattered if it had been positively unwholesome. I had extraordinarily limited, extraordinarily painful, desires. I longed intolerably to kiss her lips.
§5
The affair was immensely serious and commanding to me. I don’t remember that in these earlier phases I had any thought of turning back at all. It was clear to me that she regarded me with an eye entirely more critical than I had for her, that she didn’t like my scholarly untidiness, my want of even the most commonplace style. ‘Why do you wear collars like that?’ she said, and sent me in pursuit of gentlemanly neckwear. I remember when she invited me a little abruptly one day to come to tea at her home on the following Sunday and meet her father and mother and aunt, that I immediately doubted whether my hitherto unsuspected best clothes would create the impression she desired me to make on her belongings. I put off the encounter until the Sunday after, to get myself in order. I had a morning coat made and I bought a silk hat, and had my reward in the first glance of admiration she ever gave me. I wonder how many of my sex are as preposterous. I was, you see, abandoning all my beliefs – all my conventions unasked. I was forgetting myself – immensely. And there was a conscious shame in it all. Never a word did I breathe to Ewart – to any living soul – of what was going on.
Her father and mother and aunt struck me as the dismalest of people, and her home in Walham Green was chiefly notable for its black and amber tapestry carpets and curtains and tablecloths, and the age and irrelevance of its books, mostly books with faded gilt on the covers. The windows were fortified against the intrusive eye by cheap lace curtains and an ‘art pot’ upon an unstable octagonal table. Several framed Art School drawings of Marion’s, bearing official South Kensington marks of approval, adorned the room, and there was a black and gilt piano with a hymn-book on the top of it. There were draped mirrors over all the mantels, and above the sideboard in the dining-room in which we sat at tea was a portrait of her father, villainously truthful after the manner of such works. I couldn’t see a trace of the beauty I found in her in either parent, yet she somehow contrived to be like them both.
These people pretended in a way that reminded me of the Three Great Women in my mother’s room, but they had not nearly so much social knowledge and did not do it nearly so well. Also, I remarked, they did it with an eye on Marion. They had wanted to thank me, they said, for the kindness to their daughter in the matter of the bus fare, and so accounted for anything unusual in their invitation. They posed as simple gentlefolk, a little hostile to the rush and gadding-about of London, preferring a secluded and unpretentious quiet.
When Marion got out the white tablecloth from the sideboard-drawer for tea, a card bearing the word ‘APARTMENTS‘ fell to the floor. I picked it up and gave it to her before I realized from her quickened colour that I should not have seen it; that probably it had been removed from the window in honour of my coming.
Her father spoke once in a large remote way of the claims of business engagements, and it was only long afterwards I realized that he was a supernumerary clerk17 in the Walham Green Gas Works and otherwise a useful man at home. He was a large, loose, fattish man with unintelligent brown eyes magnified by spectacles; he wore an ill-fitting frock-coat and a paper collar, and he showed me, as his great treasure and interest, a large Bible which he had grangerized18 with photographs of pictures. Also he cultivated the little garden-yard behind the house, and he had a small greenhouse with tomatoes. ‘I wish I ‘ad ‘eat,’ he said. ‘One can do such a lot with ‘eat. But I suppose you can’t ‘ave everything you want in this world.’
Both he and Marion’s mother treated her with a deference that struck me as the most natural thing in the world. Her own manner changed, became more authoritative and watchful, her shyness disappeared. She had taken a line of her own I gathered, draped the mirror, got the secondhand piano, and broken her parents in. Her mother must once have been a pretty woman; she had regular features and Marion’s hair without its lustre, but she was thin and careworn. The aunt, Miss Ramboat, was a large, abnormally shy person very like her brother, and I don’t recall anything she said on this occasion.
To begin with there was a good deal of tension – Marion was frightfully nervous and everyone was under the necessity of behaving in a mysteriously unreal fashion until I plunged, became talkative and made a certain ease and interest. I told them of the schools, of my lodgings, of Wimblehurst and my apprenticeship days. ‘There’s a lot of this Science about nowadays,’ Mr Ramboat reflected; ‘but I sometimes wonder a bit what good it is?’
I was young enough to be led into what he called ‘a bit of a discussion’, which Marion truncated before our voices became unduly raised. ‘I dare say,’ she said, ‘there’s much to be said on both sides.’
I remember Marion’s mother asked me what church I attended, and that I replied evasively. After tea there was music and we sang hymns. I doubted if I had a voice when this was proposed, but that was held to be a trivial objection, and I found sitting close beside the sweep of hair from Marion’s brow had many compensations. I discovered her mother sitting in the horsehair armchair and regarding us sentimentally. I went for a walk with Marion towards Putney Bridge, and then there was more singing and a supper of cold bacon and pie, after which Mr Ramboat and I smoked. During that walk, I remember, she told me the import of her sketchings and copying in the museum. A cousin of a friend of hers whom she spoke of as Smithie, had developed an original business in a sort of tea-gown garment which she called a Persian Robe, a plain wrap with a gaily embroidered yoke, and Marion went there and worked in the busy times. In the times that weren’t busy she designed novelties in yokes by an assiduous use of eyes and notebook in the museum, and went home and traced out the captured forms on the foundation material. ‘I don’t get much,’ said Marion, ‘but it’s interesting, and in the busy times we work all day. Of course the workgirls are dreadfully common, but we don’t say much to them. And Smithie talks enough for ten.’
I quite understood the workgirls were dreadfully common.
I don’t remember that Walham Green ménage and the quality of these people, nor the light they threw on Marion, detracted in the slightest degree at that time from the intent resolve that held me to make her mine. I didn’t like them. But I took them as part of the affair. Indeed, on the whole, I think they threw her up by an effect of contrast; she was so obviously controlling them, so consciously superior to them.
More and more of my time did I give to this passion that possessed me. I began to think chiefly of ways of pleasing Marion, of acts of devotion, of treats, of sumptuous presents for her, of appeals she would understand. If at times she was manifestly unintelligent, if her ignorance became indisputable, I told myself her simple instincts were worth all the education and intelligence in the world. And to this day I think I wasn’t altogether wrong about her. There was, I still recognize, something fine about her, something simple and high, that flickered in and out of her ignorance and commonness and limitations like the tongue from the mouth of a snake….
One night I was privileged to meet her and bring her home from an entertainment at the Birkbeck Institute.19 We came back on the underground railway and we travelled first-class – that being the highest class available. We were alone in the carriage, and for the first time I ventured to put my arm about her.
‘You mustn’t,’ she said feebly.
‘I love you,’ I whispered suddenly with my heart beating wildly, drew her to me, drew all her beauty to me and kissed her cool and unresisting lips.
‘Love me?’ she said, struggling away from me, ‘Don’t!’ and then, as the train ran into a station, ‘You must tell no one…. I don’t know… . You shouldn’t have done that….’
Then two other people got in with us and terminated my wooing for a time.
When we found ourselves alone together, walking towards Battersea, she had decided to be offended. I parted from her unforgiven and terribly distressed.
When we met again, she told me I must never do ‘that’ again.
I had dreamt that to kiss her lips was ultimate satisfaction. But it was indeed only the beginning of desires. I told her my one ambition was to marry her.
‘But,’ she said, ‘you’re not in a position – What’s the good of talking like that?’
I stared at her. ‘I mean to,’ I said.
‘You can’t,’ she answered. ‘It will be years—’
‘But I love you,’ I insisted.
I stood not a yard from the sweet lips I had kissed; I stood within arm’s length of the inanimate beauty I desired to quicken, and I saw opening between us a gulf of years, toil, waiting, disappointments and an immense uncertainty.
‘I love you,’ I said. ‘Don’t you love me?’
She looked me in the face with grave irresponsive eyes.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I like you, of course…. One has to be sensible….’
I can remember now my sense of frustration by her unresilient reply. I should have perceived then that for her my ardour had no quickening fire. But how was I to know? I had let myself come to want her, my imagination endowed her with infinite possibilities. I wanted her and wanted her, stupidly and instinctively….
‘But,’ I said; ‘Love—!’
‘One has to be sensible,’ she replied. ‘I like going about with you. Can’t we keep as we are?’
§6
Well, you begin to understand my breakdown now. I have been copious enough with these apologia. My work got more and more spiritless, my behaviour degenerated, my punctuality declined; I was more and more outclassed in the steady grind by my fellow students. Such supplies of moral energy as I still had at command shaped now in the direction of serving Marion rather than science.
I fell away dreadfully, more and more I shirked and skulked; the humped men from the north, the pale men with thin, clenched minds, the intent, hard-breathing students I found against me, fell at last from keen rivalry to moral contempt. Even a girl got above me upon one of the lists. Then indeed I made it a point of honour to show by my public disregard of every rule that I really did not even pretend to try….
So one day I found myself sitting in a mood of considerable astonishment in Kensington Gardens, reflecting on a recent heated interview with the school Registrar in which I had displayed more spirit than sense. I was astonished chiefly at my stupendous falling away from all the militant ideals of unflinching study I had brought up from Wimblehurst. I had displayed myself, as the Registrar put it, ‘an unmitigated rotter’. My failure to get marks in the written examination had only been equalled by the insufficiency of my practical work.
‘I ask you,’ the Registrar had said, ‘what will become of you when your scholarship runs out?’
It certainly was an interesting question. What was going to become of me?
It was clear there would be nothing for me in the schools as I had once dared to hope; there seemed, indeed, scarcely anything in the world except an ill-paid assistantship in some provincial organized Science School or grammar school. I knew that for that sort of work, without a degree or any qualification, one earned hardly a bare living and had little leisure to struggle up to anything better. If only I had even as little as fifty pounds I might hold out in London and take my B.Sc. degree, and quadruple my chances! My bitterness against my uncle returned at the thought. After all, he had some of my money still, or ought to have. Why shouldn’t I act within my rights, threaten to ‘take proceedings’? I meditated for a space on the idea, and then returned to the Science Library and wrote him a very considerable and occasionally pungent letter.
That letter to my uncle was the nadir of my failure. Its remarkable consequences which ended my student days altogether, I will tell in the next chapter.
I say ‘my failure’. Yet there are times when I can even doubt whether that period was a failure at all, when I become defensively critical of those exacting courses I did not follow, the encyclopaedic process of scientific exhaustion from which I was distracted. My mind was not inactive, even if it fed on forbidden food. I did not learn what my professors and demonstrators had resolved I should learn, but I learnt many things. My mind learnt to swing wide and to swing by itself.
