Читать книгу Joan and Peter - H. G. Wells - Страница 6

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Peter’s mother came from quite a different strand in the complicated web of British life. Her “people”—she was brought up to call them that—were county people, but old-fashioned and prolific, and her father had been the sixth son of a third son and very lucky to get a living. He was the Vicar of Long Downport and an early widower; his two sons had gone to Oxford with scholarships, and Dolly had stayed at home, a leggy, dark-eyed girl with a sceptical manner, much given to reading history. One of her brothers passed from Oxford into the higher division of the Civil Service and went to India; the other took to scornful, reactionary journalism, dramatic criticism, musical comedy lyrics, parody, and drink—which indeed is almost a necessity if a man is to stick to reactionary journalism; this story will presently inherit Joan from him; she had a galaxy of cousins who were parsons, missionaries, schoolmasters, and soldiers; one was an explorer; not one was in business. Her father was a bookish inattentive man who had just missed a fellowship because of a general discursiveness; if he could have afforded it he would have been very liberal indeed in his theology; and, like grains of pepper amidst milder nourishment, there were all sorts of sceptical books about the house: Renan’s Life of Christ, Strauss’s Life of Christ, Gibbon, various eighteenth century memoirs, Huxley’s Essays, much Victor Hugo, and a “collected” Shelley, books that his daughter read with a resolute frown, sitting for the most part with one leg tucked up under her in the chair, her chin on her fists, and her elbows on either side of the volume undergoing assimilation.

Her reading was historical, and her tendency romantic. Her private day-dream through some years of girlhood was that she was Cæsar’s wife. She was present at all his battles, and sometimes, when he had had another of his never altogether fatal wounds, she led the army. Also, which was a happy thought, she stabbed Brutus first, and so her Cæsar, contrariwise to history, reigned happily with her for many, many years. She would go to sleep of a night dreaming of Mr. and Mrs. Imperator driving in triumph through the gates of Rome after some little warlike jaunt. Sometimes she drove. And also they came to Britain to drive out the Picts and Scots, and were quartered with her father in Long Downport, conquering Picts, Scots, Danes, and the most terrific anachronisms with an equal stoutness and courage. The private title she bestowed upon herself (and never told to any human being) was “The Imperatrix.”

As she grew up she became desirous of more freedom and education. After much argument with her father she came up to an aunt in London, and went to study science in the Huxley days as a free student at the Royal College of Science. She saw her future husband at an art students’ soirée, he looked tall and bright and masterful; he had a fine profile, and his blond hair poured nobly off his forehead; she did not dream that Peter’s impatience for incarnation put ideas into her head, she forgot her duty to Cæsar and imagined a devotion to art and beauty. They made a pretty couple, and she married amidst universal approval—after a slight dispute whether it was to be a religious or a civil marriage. She was married in her father’s church.

In the excitement of meeting, appreciating and marrying Stubbo, she forgot that she had had a great pity and tenderness and admiration for her shy and impulsive cousin, Oswald Sydenham, with the glass eye and cruelly scarred face, who had won the V.C. before he was twenty at the bombardment of Alexandria, and who had since done the most remarkable things in Nyasaland. It had been quite typical heroism that had won him the V.C. He had thrown a shell overboard, and it had burst in the air as he threw it and pulped one side of his face. But when she married, she had temporarily forgotten Cousin Oswald. She was just carried away by Arthur Stubland’s profile, and the wave in his hair, and—life.

Arthur was Stubbo’s Christian name because he had been born under the spell of “The Idylls of the King.”

Afterwards when Oswald came home again, she thought the good side of his face, the side of his face that hadn’t been so seriously damaged by the Egyptian shell, looked at her rather queerly. But the wounded side remained a Sphinx-like mask.

“Congratulations!” said Oswald, fumbling with the word. “Congratulations! I hope you’ll be happy, Dolly.”...

She was far gone in rationalism before she met Arthur, and he completed her emancipation. Their ideas ran closely together. They projected some years of travel before they settled down. He wanted to see mediaeval Italy “thoroughly,” and she longed for Imperial Rome. They took just a couple of rooms in South Kensington and spent all the rest of their income in long stretches of holiday. They honeymooned in pleasant inns in South Germany; they did some climbing in the Tyrol and the Dolomites—she had a good head—they had a summer holiday on the Adriatic coast, and she learnt to swim and dive well, and they did one long knapsack tramp round and along the Swiss Italian frontier and then another through the Apennines to Florence.

It was a perfectly lovely time. Everything was bright and happy, and they got on wonderfully together, except that——There was a shadow for her. She found it difficult to say exactly what the shadow was, and it is still more difficult for the historian to define it. She dismissed the idea that it had anything to do with Cousin Oswald’s one reproachful eye. She sometimes had a faint suspicion that it was her jilted Cæsar asking for at least a Rubicon to cross, but it is doubtful if she ever had any suspicion of Peter, waiting outside the doors of life. Yet the feeling of something forgotten, of something left out, grew throughout those sunny days. It was in some sweet meadows high up on the great hill above Fiesole, that she tried to tell Arthur of this vexatious feeling of deficiency.

Manifestly she puzzled him, which was not to be wondered at since the feeling puzzled her. But it also had a queer effect of irritating him.

“Arthur, if you always say I don’t love you,” she said, “when I tell you anything, then how can I tell you anything at all?”

“Aren’t we having the loveliest times?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said without complete conviction. “It isn’t that.”

“You admit you love me. You admit you’re having the loveliest time!”

She sat up with her elbows on her knees and her knuckles pressing her round, firm chin.

“It’s just all one holiday,” she said.

“I did some work last month.”

He had planned three impossible houses and made a most amusing cardboard model of one of them. She disregarded this plea.

“When we came up here people were working in the fields. Even that pretty little girl among the bushes was looking after sheep.”

“By Jove! I wish I could paint her—and those Holman Hunt-faced sheep of hers. It’s tantalizing to be able to see—and yet not to have the—the expressive gift....”

“Things are going on now, Arthur. Down there in the valley along that white road, people are going and coming.... There is a busy little train now.... Things are happening. Things are going to happen. And the work that goes on! The hard work! Today—there are thousands and thousands of men in mines. Out of this sunshine....”

There was an interval. Arthur rolled over on his face to look at the minute railway and road and river bed far below at the bottom of a deep lake of pellucid blue air.

“I don’t agree with you,” he said at last.

“Too much is happening,” he said. “Noisy, vulgar fuss. Commercialism, competition, factory production. Does it make people happy? Look at that horrid little railway disturbing all this beautiful simple Tuscan life....”

Another long pause.

She made a further step. “But if something beautiful is being destroyed,” she tried, “we ought not to be here.”

That also took a little time to soak in.

Then he stirred impatiently.

“Don’t we,” he asked, “protest? By the mere act of living our own lives? Don’t I, in my small way, try to do my share in the Restoration of Craftsmanship? Aren’t people of our sort doing something—something a little too unpretending to be obvious—to develop the conception of a fairer and better, a less hurried, less greedy life?”

He raised an appealing face to her.

She sat with knitted brows. She did not assent, but it was difficult to argue her disaccord.

He took advantage of her pause.

“Confess,” he said, “you would like to have me a business manager—of some big concern. Or a politician. You want me to be in the scrimmage. No!—lording it over the scrimmage. The real things aren’t done like that, Dolly. The real things aren’t done like that!”

She put her next thought out in its stark simplicity.

“Are we doing any real thing in the world at all?”

He did not answer for some seconds.

Then he astonished her by losing his temper. It was exactly as if her question had probed down to some secret soreness deep within him. “Oh, damn!” he shouted. “And on this lovely morning! It’s too bad of you, Dolly!” It was as if he had bit upon a tender tooth. Perhaps a fragment of the stopping had come out of his Nonconformist conscience.

He knelt up and stared at her. “You don’t love this, anyhow—whether you love me or not.”

He tried to alter his tone from a note of sheer quarrelsomeness to badinage. “You Blue Conscience, you! You Gnawing Question! Are we doing anything real at all, you say. Is no one, then, to stand up and meet the sunlight for its own sake, when God sends it to us? No! You can’t unsay it now.” (Though she was not unsaying it. She was only trying for some more acceptable way of saying it over again.) “My day is spoilt! You’ve stuck a fever into me!”

He looked about him. He wanted some vivid gesture. “Oh, come on!” he cried.

He sprang up. He gesticulated over her. He banished the view with a sweep of rejection. “Let us go back to the inn. Let us take our traps back to stuffy old Florence. Let us see three churches and two picture-galleries before sunset! And take our tickets for home. We aren’t rushing and we ought to rush. Life is rush. This holiday has lasted too long, Dolly.”

“‘Life is real! Life is earnest!’

Simple joys are not its goal.”

“Own, my Dolly! If only this afternoon we could find some solid serious lecture down there! Or an election. You’d love an election.... And anyhow, it’s nearly lunch time.”

She knelt, took his hand, and stood up.

“You mock,” she said. “But you know that what I want to say—isn’t that....”