Читать книгу Joan and Peter - H. G. Wells - Страница 9

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But although Dolly did not pursue her husband with any sustained criticism, he seemed now to feel always that her attitude was critical and needed an answer. The feeling made him something of a thinker and something of a talker. Sometimes the thinker was uppermost, and then he would sit silent and rather in profile (his profile, it has already been stated, was a good one, and much enhanced by a romantic bang of warm golden hair that hung down over one eye), very picturesque in his beautiful blue linen blouse, listening to whatever was said; and sometimes he would turn upon the company and talk with a sort of experimental dogmatism, as is the way with men a little insecure in their convictions, but quite good talk. He would talk of education, and work, and Peter, and of love and beauty, and the finer purposes of life, and things like that.

A lot of talk came the way of Peter’s father.

Along the Limpsfield ridge and away east and west and north, there was a scattered community of congenial intellectuals. It spread along the ridge beyond Dorking, and resumed again at Haslemere and Hindhead, where Grant Allen and Richard Le Gallienne were established. They were mostly people of the same detached and independent class as the Stublands; they were the children of careful people who had created considerable businesses, or the children of the more successful of middle Victorian celebrities, or dons, or writers themselves, or they came from Hampstead, which was in those days a nest of considerable people’s children, inheritors of reputations and writers of memoirs, an hour’s ’bus drive from London and outside the cab radius. A thin flavour of Hampstead spread out, indeed, over all Surrey. Some of these newcomers lived in old adapted cottages; some of them had built little houses after the fashion of the Stublands; some had got into the real old houses that already existed. There was much Sunday walking and “dropping in” and long evenings and suppers. Safety bicycles were coming into use and greatly increasing intercourse. And there was a coming and going of Stubland aunts and uncles and of Sydenhams and Dolly’s “people.” Nearly all were youngish folk; it was a new generation and a new sort of population for the countryside. They were dotted among the farms and the estates and preserves and “places” of the old county family pattern. The “county” wondered a little at them, kept busy with horse and dog and gun, and, except for an occasional stiff call, left them alone. The church lamented their neglected Sabbaths. The doctors were not unfriendly.

One of the frequent visitors, indeed, at The Ingle-Nook—that was the name of Peter’s birthplace—was Doctor Fremisson, the local general practitioner. He was a man, he said, who liked “Ideas.” The aborigines lacked Ideas, it seemed; but Stubland was a continual feast of them. The doctor’s diagnosis of the difference between these new English and the older English of the country rested entirely on the presence or absence of Ideas. But there he was wrong. The established people were people of fixed ideas; the immigrants had abandoned fixed ideas for discussion. So far from their having no ideas, those occasional callers who came dropping in so soon as the Stublands were settled in The Ingle-Nook before Peter was born, struck the Stublands as having ideas like monstrous and insurmountable cliffs. To fling your own ideas at them was like trying to lob stones into Zermatt from Macugnana.

One day when Mrs. Darcy, old Lady Darcy’s daughter-in-law, had driven over, some devil prompted Arthur to shock her. He talked his extremest Fabianism. He would have the government control all railways, land, natural products; nobody should have a wage of less than two pounds a week; the whole country should be administered for the universal benefit; everybody should be educated.

“I’m sure the dear old Queen does all she can,” said Mrs. Darcy.

“I’m a democratic republican,” said Arthur.

He might as well have called himself a Christadelphian for any idea he conveyed.

Presently, seized by a gust of unreasonable irritation, he went out of the room.

“Mr. Stubland talks,” said Mrs. Darcy; “really——” She paused. She hesitated. She spoke with a little disarming titter lest what she said should seem too dreadful. “He says such things. I really believe he’s more than half a Liberal. There! You mustn’t mind what I say, Mrs. Stubland....”

Dolly, by virtue of her vicarage training, understood these people better than Peter’s father. She had read herself out of the great Anglican culture, but she remembered things from the inside. She was still in close touch with numerous relations who were quite completely inside. Before the little green gate had clicked behind their departing backs, Arthur would protest to her and heaven that these visitors were impossible, that such visitors could not be, they were phantoms or bad practical jokes, undergraduates dressed up to pull his leg.

“They know nothing,” he said.

“They know all sorts of things you don’t know,” she corrected.

“What do they know? There isn’t a topic one can start on which they are not just blank.”

“You start the wrong topics. They can tell you all sorts of things about the dear Queen’s grandchildren. They know things about horses. And about regiments and barracks. Tell me, Arthur, how is the charming young Prince of Bulgaria, who is just getting married, related to the late Prince Consort.”

“Damn their Royal Marriages!”

“If you say that, then they have an equal right to say, ‘damn your Wildes and Beardsleys and William Morrises and Swinburnes.’”

“They read nothing.”

“They read Mrs. Henry Wood. They read lots of authors you have never heard of, nice authors. They read so many of them that for the most part they forget their names. The bold ones read Ouida—who isn’t half bad. They read every scrap they can find about the marriage of the Princess Marie to the Crown Prince of Roumania. Mrs. Bagshot-Fawcett talked about it yesterday. It seems he’s really a rarer and better sort of Hohenzollern than the young German Emperor, our sailor grandson that is. She isn’t very clear about it, but she seems to think that the Prince of Hohenzollern ought rightfully to be German Emperor.”

“Oh, what rot!”

“But perhaps she’s right. How do you know? I don’t. She takes an almost voluptuous delight in the two marriage ceremonies. You know, I suppose, dear, that there were two ceremonies, a Protestant one and a Catholic one, because the Roumanian Hohenzollerns are Catholic Hohenzollerns. Of course, the dear princess would become a Catholic——”

“Oh, don’t!” cried Peter’s father; “don’t!”

“I had to listen to three-quarters of an hour of it yesterday. Such a happy and convenient occurrence, the princess’s conversion, but—archly—of course, my dear, I suppose there’s sometimes just a little persuasion in these cases.”

“Dolly, you go too far!”

“But that isn’t, of course, the great interest just at present. The great interest just at present is George and May. You know they’re going to be married.”

Arthur lifted a protesting profile. “My dear! Who is May?” he tenored.

“Affected ignorance! She is the Princess May who was engaged to the late Duke of Clarence, the Princess Mary of Teck. And now he’s dead, she’s going to marry the Duke of York. Surely you understand about that. He is your Future Sovereign. Mrs. Bagshot-Fawcett gets positively lush about him. It was George she always lurved, Mrs. Bagshot-Fawcett says, but she accepted his brother for Reasons of State. So after all it’s rather nice and romantic that the elder brother——”

Arthur roared and tore his hair and walked up and down the low room. “What are these people to me?” he shouted. “What are these people to me?”

“But there is twenty times as much about that sort of thing in the papers as there is about our sort of things.”

There was no disputing it.

“We’re in a foreign country,” cried Arthur, going off at a tangent. “We’re in a foreign country. We English are a subject people.... Talk of Home Rule for Ireland!... Why are there no English Nationalists? One of these days I will hoist the cross of St. George outside this cottage. But I doubt if any one on this countryside will know it for the English flag.”