Читать книгу Joan and Peter - H. G. Wells - Страница 20

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The changes in the Stubland nursery, though they were the most apparent, were certainly not the greatest in the little home that looked over the Weald. Arthur had been unfaithful to Dolly—on principle it would seem. That did not reach Oswald’s perceptions all at once, though even on his first visit he felt a difference between them.

The later ’nineties were the “Sex Problem” period in Great Britain. Not that sex has been anything else than a perplexity in all ages, but it was just about this time that that unanswerable “Why not?”—that bacterium of social decay, spreading out from the dark corners of unventilated religious dogmas into a moribund system of morals, reached, in the case of the children of the serious middle-classes of Great Britain, this important field of conduct. The manner of the question and the answer remained still serious. Those were the days of “The Woman Who Did” and the “Keynote Series,” of adultery without fun and fornication for conscience’ sake. Arthur, with ample leisure, a high-grade bicycle, the consciousness of the artistic temperament and a gnawing secret realization, which had never left him since those early days in Florence, that Dolly did not really consider him as an important person in the world’s affairs, was all too receptive of the new suggestions. After some discursive liberal conversations with various people he found the complication he sought in the youngest of three plain but passionate sisters, who lived a decorative life in a pretty little modern cottage on the edge of a wood beyond Limpsfield. The new gale of emancipation sent a fire through her veins. Her soul within her was like a flame. She wrote poetry with a peculiar wistful charm, and her decorative methods were so similar to Arthur’s that it seemed natural to conclude they might be the precursors of an entirely new school. They put a new interest and life into each other’s work. It became a sort of collaboration....

The affair was not all priggishness on Arthur’s part. The woman was honestly in love; and for most men love makes love; there is a pride and fascination for them in a new love adventure, in the hesitation, the dash, the soft capture, the triumph and kindness, that can manage with very poor excuses. And such a beautiful absence of mutual criticism always, such a kindly accepting blindness in passionate eyes!

At first Dolly did not realize how Arthur was rounding off his life. She was busy now with her niece, her disreputable elder brother’s love child, as well as Peter; she did not miss Arthur very much during his increasing absences. Then Arthur, who wished to savour all the aspects of the new situation, revealed it to her one August evening in general terms by a discourse upon polygamy.

Dolly’s quick mind seized the situation long before Arthur could state it.

She did not guess who her successful rival was. She did not know it was the younger Miss Blend, that familiar dark squat figure, quick and almost crowded in speech, and with a peculiar avidity about her manner and bearing. She assumed it must be some person of transcendant and humiliating merit; that much her romantic standards demanded. She was also a little disgusted, as though Arthur had discovered himself to be physically unclean. Her immediate impulse was to arrest a specific confession.

“You forget instinct, Arthur dear,” she said, colouring brightly. “What you say is perfectly reasonable, wonderfully so. Only—it would make me feel sick—I mean sick—if, for example, I thought you——”

She turned away and looked at the view.

“Are you so sure that is instinct? Or convention?” he asked, after a pause of half comprehension.

“Instinct—for certain.... Lovers are one. Whither you go, I go—in the spirit. You can’t go alone with another woman while I—while I—— In those things.... Oh, it’s inconceivable!”

“That’s a primitive point of view.”

“Love—lust for the matter of that.... They are primitive things,” said Dolly, undisguisedly wretched.

“There’s reason in the control of them.”

“Polygamy!” she cried scornfully.

Arthur was immensely disconcerted.

He lit a cigarette, and his movements were slow and clumsy.

“Ideas may differ,” he said lamely....

He did not make his personal confession after all.

In the middle of the night Arthur was lying awake thinking with unusual violence, and for the first time for a long while seeing a question from a standpoint other than his own. Also he fancied he had heard a sound of great significance at bedtime. That uncertain memory worried him more and more. He got up now with excessive precautions against noise and crept with extreme slowness and care to the little door between his room and Dolly’s. It was locked.

Then she had understood!

A solemn, an almost awe-stricken Arthur paddled back to his own bed through a pool of moonlight on the floor. A pair of pallid, blue-veined feet and bright pyjama legs and a perplexed, vague continuation upward was all the moon could see.