H G Wells Omnibus, page 344
I cannot tell to the full how Marion thwarted me and failed in that life of intimate emotions which is the kernel of love. That life of intimate emotions is made up of little things. A beautiful face differs from an ugly one by a difference of surfaces and proportions that are sometimes almost infinitesimally small. I find myself setting down little things and little things; none of them do more than demonstrate those essential temperamental discords I have already sought to make clear. Some readers will understand – to others I shall seem no more than an unfeeling brute who couldn’t make allowances…. It’s easy to make allowances now; but to be young and ardent and to make allowances, to see one’s married life open before one, the life that seemed in its dawn a glory, a garden of roses, a place of deep sweet mysteries and heart throbs and wonderful silences, and to see it a vista of tolerations and baby-talk! A compromise. The least effectual thing in all one’s life.
Every love romance I read seemed to mock our dull intercourse, every poem, every beautiful picture reflected upon the uneventful succession of grey hours we had together. I think our real difference was one of aesthetic sensibility.
I do still recall as the worst and most disastrous aspect of all that time, her absolute disregard of her own beauty. It’s the pettiest thing to record, I know, but she could wear curl-papers in my presence. It was her idea too, to ‘wear out’ her old clothes and her failures at home when ‘no one was likely to see her’ – ‘no one’ being myself. She allowed me to accumulate a store of ungracious and slovenly memories….
All our conceptions of life differed. I remember how we differed about furniture. We spent three or four days in Tottenham Court Road, and she chose the things she fancied with an inexorable resolution, – sweeping aside my suggestions with ‘Oh, you want such queer things.’ She pursued some limited, clearly seen and experienced ideal – that excluded all other possibilities. Over every mantel was a mirror that was draped, our sideboard was wonderfully good and splendid with bevelled glass, we had lamps on long metal stalks and cosy corners and plants in grog-tubs.12 Smithie approved it all. There wasn’t a place where one could sit and read in the whole house. My books went upon shelves in the dining-room recess. And we had a piano, though Marion’s playing was at an elementary level….
You know, it was the cruellest luck for Marion that I, with my restlessness, my scepticism, my constantly developing ideas, had insisted upon marriage with her. She had no faculty of growth or change; she had taken her mould, she had set in the limited ideas of her peculiar class. She preserved her conception of what was right in drawing-room chairs and in marriage ceremonial and in every relation of life with a simple and luminous honesty and conviction, with an immense unimaginative inflexibility – as a tailor-bird builds its nest or a beaver makes its dam.
Let me hasten over this history of disappointments and separation. I might tell of waxings and wanings of love between us, but the whole was waning. Sometimes she would do things for me, make me a tie or a pair of slippers, and fill me with none the less gratitude because the things were absurd. She ran our home and our one servant with a hard, bright efficiency. She was inordinately proud of house and garden. Always, by her lights, she did her duty by me….
Presently the rapid development of Tono-Bungay began to take me into the provinces, and I would be away sometimes for a week together. This she did not like; it left her ‘dull‘, she said, but after a time she began to go to Smithie’s again and to develop an independence of me. At Smithie’s she was now a woman with a position; she had money to spend. She would take Smithie to theatres and out to lunch and talk interminably of the business, and Smithie became a sort of permanent weekender with us. Also Marion got a spaniel and began to dabble with the minor arts, with poker-work13 and a Kodak and hyacinths in glasses. She called once on a neighbour. Her parents left Walham Green – her father severed his connection with the gasworks – and came to live in a small house I took for them near us, and they were much with us.
Odd the littleness of the things that exasperate when the fountains of life are embittered! My father-in-law was perpetually catching me in moody moments and urging me to take to gardening. He irritated me beyond measure.
‘You think too much,’ he would say. ‘If you was to let in a bit with a spade, you might soon ‘ave that garden of yours a Vision of Flowers. That’s better than thinking, George.’
Or in a tone of exasperation, ‘I carn’t think, George, why you don’t get a bit of glass ‘ere. This sunny corner you c’d do wonders with a bit of glass.’
And in the summer time he never came in without performing a sort of conjuring trick in the hall, and taking cucumbers and tomatoes from unexpected points of his person. ‘All out o’ my little bit,’ he’d say in exemplary tones. He left a trail of vegetable produce in the most unusual places, on mantelboards, sideboards, the tops of pictures. Heavens! how the sudden unexpected tomato could annoy me!…
It did much to widen our estrangement that Marion and my aunt failed to make friends, became, by a sort of instinct, antagonistic.
My aunt, to begin with, called rather frequently, for she was really anxious to know Marion. At first she would arrive like a whirlwind and pervade the house with an atmosphere of hello! She dressed already with that cheerfully extravagant abandon that signalized her accession to fortune, and dressed her best for these visits. She wanted to play the mother to me, I fancy, to tell Marion occult secrets about the way I wore out my boots and how I never could think to put on thicker things in cold weather. But Marion received her with that defensive suspiciousness of the shy person, thinking only of the possible criticism of herself; and my aunt, perceiving this, became nervous and slangy….
‘She says such queer things,’ said Marion once, discussing her. ‘But I suppose it’s witty.’
‘Yes,’ I said; ‘it is witty.’
‘If I said things like she does—’
The queer things my aunt said were nothing to the queer things she didn’t say. I remember her in our drawing-room one day, and how she cocked her eye – it’s the only expression – at the India-rubber plant in a Doulton-ware pot which Marion had placed on the corner of the piano.
She was on the very verge of speech. Then suddenly she caught my expression, and shrank up like a cat that has been discovered looking at the milk.
Then a wicked impulse took her.
‘Didn’t say an old word, George,’ she insisted, looking me full in the eye.
I smiled. ‘You’re a dear,’ I said, ‘not to,’ as Marion came lowering into the room to welcome her. But I felt extraordinarily like a traitor – to the India-rubber plant, I suppose – for all that nothing had been said….
‘Your aunt makes Game of people,’ was Marion’s verdict, and, open-mindedly; ‘I suppose it’s all right… for her.’
Several times we went to the house in Beckenham for lunch, and once or twice to dinner. My aunt did her peculiar best to be friends, but Marion was implacable. She was also, I know, intensely uncomfortable, and she adopted as her social method an exhausting silence, replying compactly and without giving openings to anything that was said to her.
The gaps between my aunt’s visits grew wider and wider…
My married existence became at last like a narrow deep groove in the broad expanse of interests in which I was living. I went about the world; I met a great number of varied personalities; I read endless books in trains as I went to and fro. I developed social relationships at my uncle’s house that Marion did not share. The seeds of new ideas poured in upon me and grew in me. Those early and middle years of one’s third decade are, I suppose, for a man the years of greatest mental growth. They are restless years and full of vague enterprise.
Each time I returned to Ealing, life there seemed more alien, narrow and unattractive – and Marion less beautiful and more limited and difficult – until at last she was robbed of every particle of her magic. She gave me always a cooler welcome, I think, until she seemed entirely apathetic. I never asked myself then what heartaches she might hide or what her discontents might be. I would come home hoping nothing, expecting nothing. This was my faded life and I had chosen it. I became more sensitive to the defects I had once disregarded altogether; I began to associate her sallow complexion with her temperamental insufficiency, and the heavier lines of her mouth and nostril with her moods of discontent. We drifted apart; wider and wider the gap opened. I tired of baby-talk and stereotyped little fondlings; I tired of the latest intelligence from those wonderful workrooms, and showed it all too plainly; we hardly spoke when we were alone together. The mere unreciprocated physical residue of my passion remained – an exasperation between us.
No children came to save us. Marion had acquired at Smithie’s a disgust and dread of maternity. All that was the fruition and quintessence of the ‘horrid’ elements in life, a disgusting thing, a last indignity that overtook unwary women. I doubt indeed a little if children would have saved us; we should have differed so fatally about their upbringing.
Altogether, I remember my life with Marion as a long distress, now hard, now tender. It was in those days that I first became critical of my life and burthened with a sense of error and maladjustment. I would lie awake in the night, asking myself the purpose of things, reviewing my unsatisfying, ungainly home life, my days spent in rascal enterprise and rubbish-selling, contrasting all I was being and doing with my adolescent ambitions, my Wimblehurst dreams. My circumstances had an air of finality, and I asked myself in vain why I had forced myself into them.
§6
The end of our intolerable situation came suddenly and unexpectedly, but in a way that I suppose was almost inevitable. My alienated affections wandered, and I was unfaithful to Marion.
I won’t pretend to extenuate the quality of my conduct. I was a young and fairly vigorous man; all my appetite for love had been roused and whetted and none of it had been satisfied by my love-affair and my marriage. I had pursued an elusive gleam of beauty to the disregard of all else, and it had failed me. It had faded when I had hoped it would grow brighter. I despaired of life and was embittered. And things happened as I am telling. I don’t draw any moral at all in the matter, and as for social remedies, I leave them to the social reformer. I’ve got to a time of life when the only theories that interest me are generalizations about realities.
To go to our inner office in Raggett Street I had to walk through a room in which the typists worked. They were the correspondence typists; our books and invoicing had long since overflowed into the premises we had had the luck to secure on either side of us. I was, I must confess, always in a faintly cloudily emotional way aware of that collection of for the most part round-shouldered femininity, but presently one of the girls detached herself from the others and got a real hold upon my attention. I appreciated her at first as a straight little back, a neater back than any of the others; as a softly rounded neck with a smiling necklace of sham pearls; as chestnut hair very neatly done – and as a sidelong glance. Presently as a quickly turned face that looked for me.
My eye would seek her as I went through on business things – I dictated some letters to her and so discovered she had pretty, soft-looking hands with pink nails. Once or twice, meeting casually, we looked one another for the flash of a second in the eyes.
That was all. But it was enough in the mysterious freemasonry of sex to say essential things. We had a secret between us.
One day I came into Raggett Street at lunchtime and she was alone, sitting at her desk. She glanced up as I entered, and then became very still, with a downcast face and her hands clenched on the table. I walked right by her to the door of the inner office, stopped, came back and stood over her.
We neither of us spoke for quite a perceptible time. I was trembling violently.
‘Is that one of the new typewriters?’ I asked at last for the sake of speaking.
She looked up at me without a word, with her face flushed and her eyes alight, and I bent down and kissed her lips. She leant back to put an arm about me, drew my face to her and kissed me again and again. I lifted her and held her in my arms. She gave a little smothered cry to feel herself so held.
Never before had I known the quality of passionate kisses….
Somebody became audible in the shop outside.
We started back from one another with flushed faces and bright and burning eyes.
‘We can’t talk here,’ I whispered with a confident intimacy. ‘Where do you go at five?’
‘Along the Embankment to Charing Cross,’ she answered as intimately. ‘None of the others go that way…’
‘About half-past five?’
‘Yes, half-past five….’
The door from the shop opened, and she sat down very quickly.
‘I’m glad,’ I said in a commonplace voice, ‘that these new typewriters are all right.’
I went into the inner office and routed out the paysheet in order to find her name – Effie Rink. And I did no work at all that afternoon. I fretted about that dingy little den like a beast in a cage.
When presently I went out, Effie was working with an extraordinary appearance of calm – and there was no look for me at all….
We met and had our talk that evening, a talk in whispers when there was none to overhear; we came to an understanding. It was strangely unlike any dream of romance I had ever entertained.
§7
I came back after a week’s absence to my home again – a changed man. I had lived out my first rush of passion for Effie, had come to a contemplation of my position. I had gauged Effie’s place in the scheme of things, and parted from her for a time. She was back in her place at Raggett Street after a temporary indisposition. I did not feel in any way penitent or ashamed, I know, as I opened the little cast-iron gate that kept Marion’s front garden and Pampas grass from the wandering dog. Indeed, if anything, I felt as if I had vindicated some right that had been in question. I came back to Marion with no sense of wrong-doing at all – with, indeed, a new friendliness towards her. I don’t know how it may be proper to feel on such occasions; that is how I felt.
I found her in our drawing-room, standing beside the tall lamp-stand that half filled the bay as though she had just turned from watching for me at the window. There was something in her pale face that arrested me. She looked as if she had not been sleeping. She did not come forward to greet me.
‘You’ve come home,’ she said.
‘As I wrote to you.’
She stood very still, a dusky figure against the bright window.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked.
‘East Coast,’ I said easily.
She paused for a moment. ‘I know,’ she said.
I stared at her. It was the most amazing moment in my life….
‘By Jove!’ I said at last, ‘I believe you do!’
‘And then you come home to me!’
I walked to the hearthrug and stood quite still there, regarding this new situation.
‘I didn’t dream,’ she began. ‘How could you do such a thing?’
It seemed a long interval before either of us spoke another word.
‘Who knows about it?’ I asked at last.
‘Smithie’s brother. They were at Cromer.’
‘Confound Cromer! Yes!’
‘How could you bring yourself—’
I felt a spasm of petulant annoyance at this unexpected catastrophe.
‘I should like to wring Smithie’s brother’s neck,’ I said…
Marion spoke in dry, broken fragments of sentences. ‘You… I’d always thought that anyhow you couldn’t deceive me…. I suppose all men are horrid – about this.’
‘It doesn’t strike me as horrid. It seems to me the most necessary consequence – and natural thing in the world.’
I became aware of someone moving about in the passage, and went and shut the door of the room. Then I walked back to the hearthrug and turned.
‘It’s rough on you,’ I said. ‘But I didn’t mean you to know. You’ve never cared for me. I’ve had the devil of a time. Why should you mind?’
She sat down in a draped armchair. ‘I have cared for you,’ she said.
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘she cares for you?’
I had no answer.
‘Where is she now?’
‘Oh! does it matter to you?… Look here, Marion! This –this I didn’t anticipate. I didn’t mean this thing to smash down on you like this. But, you know, something had to happen. I’m sorry – sorry to the bottom of my heart that things have come to this between us. But indeed, I’m taken by surprise. I don’t know where I am – I don’t know how we got here. Things took me by surprise. I found myself alone with her one day. I kissed her. I went on. It seemed stupid to go back. And besides -why should I have gone back? Why should I? From first to last, I’ve hardly thought of it as touching you…. Damn!’
She scrutinized my face, and pulled at the ball-fringe of the little table beside her.
‘To think of it,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe… I can ever touch you again.’
We kept a long silence. I was only beginning to realize in the most superficial way the immense catastrophe that had happened between us. Enormous issues had rushed upon us. I felt unprepared and altogether inadequate. I was unreasonably angry. There came a rush of stupid expressions to my mind that my rising sense of the supreme importance of the moment saved me from saying. The gap of silence widened until it threatened to become the vast memorable margin of someone among a thousand trivial possibilities of speech that would fix our relations for ever.
