by H. G. Wells
CHAPTER THE FIRST
SUCCESSES
Sec. 1
I find it hard to trace the accumulation of moods and feelings that ledTrafford and Marjorie at last to make their extraordinary raid uponLabrador. In a week more things happen in the thoughts of such a man asTrafford, changes, revocations, deflections, than one can chronicle inthe longest of novels. I have already in an earlier passage of thisstory sought to give an image of the confused content of a modern humanmind, but that pool was to represent a girl of twenty, and Trafford nowwas a man of nearly thirty-five, and touching life at a hundred pointsfor one of the undergraduate Marjorie's. Perhaps that made him lessconfused, but it certainly made him fuller. Let me attempt thereforeonly the broad outline of his changes of purpose and activity until Icome to the crucial mood that made these two lives a little worthtelling about, amidst the many thousands of such lives that people areliving to-day....
It took him seven years from his conclusive agreement with Solomonson tobecome a rich and influential man. It took him only seven years, becausealready by the mere accidents of intellectual interest he was inpossession of knowledge of the very greatest economic importance, andbecause Solomonson was full of that practical loyalty and honesty thatdistinguishes his race. I think that in any case Trafford's vigor andsubtlety of mind would have achieved the prosperity he had foundnecessary to himself, but it might have been, under less favorableauspices, a much longer and more tortuous struggle. Success and securitywere never so abundant nor so easily attained by men with capacity and asense of proportion as they are in the varied and flexible world ofto-day. We live in an affluent age with a nearly incredible continuousfresh increment of power pouring in from mechanical invention, andcompared with our own, most other periods have been meagre and anxiousand hard-up times. Our problems are constantly less the problems ofsubmission and consolation and continually more problems ofopportunity....
Trafford found the opening campaign, the operation with the plantationshares and his explosion of Behrens' pretensions extremely uncongenial.It left upon his mind a confused series of memories of interviews andtalks in offices for the most part dingy and slovenly, of bales ofpress-cuttings and blue-pencilled financial publications, of unpleasingencounters with a number of bright-eyed, flushed, excitable andextremely cunning men, of having to be reserved and limited in his talkupon all occasions, and of all the worst aspects of Solomonson. All thatpart of the new treatment of life that was to make him rich gave himsensations as though he had ceased to wash himself mentally, until heregretted his old life in his laboratory as a traveller in a crowdednight train among filthy people might regret the bathroom he had leftbehind him....
But the development of his manufacture of rubber was an entirelydifferent business, and for a time profoundly interesting. It took himinto a new astonishing world, the world of large-scale manufacture andindustrial organization. The actual planning of the works was not initself anything essentially new to him. So far as all that went it wasscarcely more than the problem of arranging an experiment upon a hugeand permanent scale, and all that quick ingenuity, that freshness anddirectness of mind that had made his purely scientific work so admirablehad ample and agreeable scope. Even the importance of cost and economyat every point in the process involved no system of considerations thatwas altogether novel to him. The British investigator knows only toowell the necessity for husbanded material and inexpensive substitutes.But strange factors came in, a new region of interest was opened withthe fact that instead of one experimenter working with the alertresponsive assistance of Durgan, a multitude of human beings--even inthe first drafts of his project they numbered already two hundred,before the handling and packing could be considered--had to watch,control, assist or perform every stage in a long elaborate synthesis.For the first time in his life Trafford encountered the reality ofLabour, as it is known to the modern producer.
It will be difficult in the future, when things now subtly or widelyseparated have been brought together by the receding perspectives oftime, for the historian to realize just how completely out of thethoughts of such a young man as Trafford the millions of people who liveand die in organized productive industry had been. That vast world oftoil and weekly anxiety, ill-trained and stupidly directed effort andmental and moral feebleness, had been as much beyond the living circleof his experience as the hosts of Genghis Khan or the social life of theForbidden City. Consider the limitations of his world. In all his lifehitherto he had never been beyond a certain prescribed area of London'simmensities, except by the most casual and uninstructive straying. Heknew Chelsea and Kensington and the north bank and (as a boy) BatterseaPark, and all the strip between Kensington and Charing Cross, with somescraps of the Strand as far as the Law Courts, a shop or so in TottenhamCourt Road and fragments about the British Museum and Holborn andRegent's Park, a range up Edgware Road to Maida Vale, the routes westand south-west through Uxbridge and Putney to the country, and WimbledonCommon and Putney Heath. He had never been on Hampstead Heath norvisited the Botanical Gardens nor gone down the Thames below LondonBridge, nor seen Sydenham nor Epping Forest nor the Victoria Park. Takea map and blot all he knew and see how vast is the area left untouched.All industrial London, all wholesale London, great oceans of humanbeings fall into that excluded area. The homes he knew were comfortablehomes, the poor he knew were the parasitic and dependent poor of theWest, the shops, good retail shops, the factories for the most partengaged in dressmaking.
Of course he had been informed about this vast rest of London. He knewthat as a matter of fact it existed, was populous, portentous, puzzling.He had heard of "slums," read "Tales of Mean Streets," and marvelled ina shallow transitory way at such wide wildernesses of life, apparentlysupported by nothing at all in a state of grey, darkling but prolificdiscomfort. Like the princess who wondered why the people having nobread did not eat cake, he could never clearly understand why thepopulation remained there, did not migrate to more attractivesurroundings. He had discussed the problems of those wildernesses asyoung men do, rather confidently, very ignorantly, had dismissed them,recurred to them, and forgotten them amidst a press of other interests,but now it all suddenly became real to him with the intensity of astartling and intimate contact. He discovered this limitless, unknown,greater London, this London of the majority, as if he had never thoughtof it before. He went out to inspect favourable sites in regions whosevery names were unfamiliar to him, travelled on dirty little intraurbanrailway lines to hitherto unimagined railway stations, found parks,churches, workhouses, institutions, public-houses, canals, factories,gas-works, warehouses, foundries and sidings, amidst a multitudinousdinginess of mean houses, shabby back-yards, and ill-kept streets. Thereseemed to be no limits to this thread-bare side of London, it went onnorthward, eastward, and over the Thames southward, for mile aftermile--endlessly. The factories and so forth clustered in lines and banksupon the means of communication, the homes stretched between, andinfinitude of parallelograms of grimy boxes with public-houses at thecorners and churches and chapels in odd places, towering over which rosethe council schools, big, blunt, truncated-looking masses, the means toan education as blunt and truncated, born of tradition and confusedpurposes, achieving by accident what they achieve at all.
And about this sordid-looking wilderness went a population that seemedat first as sordid. It was in no sense a tragic population. But it sawlittle of the sun, felt the wind but rarely, and so had a white, dullskin that looked degenerate and ominous to a West-end eye. It was notnaked nor barefooted, but it wore cheap clothes that were tawdry whennew, and speedily became faded, discoloured, dusty, and draggled. It wasslovenly and almost wilfully ugly in its speech and gestures. And thefood it ate was rough and coarse if abundant, the eggs it consumed"tasted"--everything "tasted"; its milk, its beer, its bread wasdegraded by base adulterations, its meat was hacked red stuff that hungin the dusty air until it was sold; east of the city Trafford could findno place where by his standards he could get a tolerable meal to
lerablyserved. The entertainment of this eastern London was jingle, itsreligion clap-trap, its reading feeble and sensational rubbish withoutkindliness or breadth. And if this great industrial multitude wasneither tortured nor driven nor cruelly treated--as the slaves andcommon people of other days have been--yet it was universally anxious,perpetually anxious about urgent small necessities and pettydissatisfying things....
That was the general effect of this new region in which he had soughtout and found the fortunate site for his manufacture of rubber, andagainst this background it was that he had now to encounter a crowd ofselected individuals, and weld them into a harmonious and successful"process." They came out from their millions to him, dingy, clumsy, andat first it seemed without any individuality. Insensibly they took oncharacter, rounded off by unaccustomed methods into persons as markedand distinctive as any he had known.
There was Dowd, for instance, the technical assistant, whom he came tocall in his private thoughts Dowd the Disinherited. Dowd had seemed arather awkward, potentially insubordinate young man of unaccountablyextensive and curiously limited attainments. He had begun his career ina crowded home behind and above a baker's shop in Hoxton, he had gone asa boy into the works of a Clerkenwell electric engineer, and there hehad developed that craving for knowledge which is so common in poor menof the energetic type. He had gone to classes, read with a sort offury, feeding his mind on the cheap and adulterated instruction ofgrant-earning crammers and on stale, meretricious and ill-chosen books;his mental food indeed was the exact parallel of the rough, abundant,cheap and nasty groceries and meat that gave the East-ender his spotsand dyspeptic complexion, the cheap text-books were like canned meat anddangerous with intellectual ptomaines, the rascally encyclopaedias likeweak and whitened bread, and Dowd's mental complexion, too, was leadenand spotted. Yet essentially he wasn't, Trafford found, by any means badstuff; where his knowledge had had a chance of touching reality itbecame admirable, and he was full of energy in his work and a sort ofhonest zeal about the things of the mind. The two men grew from an acutemutual criticism into a mutual respect.
At first it seemed to Trafford that when he met Dowd he was only meetingDowd, but a time came when it seemed to him that in meeting Dowd he wasmeeting all that vast new England outside the range of ruling-classdreams, that multitudinous greater England, cheaply treated, rather outof health, angry, energetic and now becoming intelligent and critical,that England which organized industrialism has created. There werenights when he thought for hours about Dowd. Other figures groupedthemselves round him--Markham, the head clerk, the quintessence ofEast-end respectability, who saw to the packing; Miss Peckover, anex-telegraph operator, a woman so entirely reliable and unobservant thatthe most betraying phase of the secret process could be confidentlyentrusted to her hands. Behind them were clerks, workmen, motor-van men,work-girls, a crowd of wage-earners, from amidst which some individualwould assume temporary importance and interest by doing somethingwrong, getting into trouble, becoming insubordinate, and havingcontributed a little vivid story to Trafford's gathering impressions oflife, drop back again into undistinguished subordination.
Dowd became at last entirely representative.
When first Trafford looked Dowd in the eye, he met something of thehostile interest one might encounter in a swordsman ready to begin aduel. There was a watchfulness, an immense reserve. They discussed thework and the terms of their relationship, and all the while Traffordfelt there was something almost threateningly not mentioned.
Presently he learnt from a Silvertown employer what that concealedaspect was. Dowd was "that sort of man who makes trouble," disposed tostrike rather than not upon a grievance, with a taste for open-airmeetings, a member, obstinately adherent in spite of friendlyremonstrance, of the Social Democratic Party. This in spite of his clearduty to a wife and two small white knobby children. For a time he wouldnot talk to Trafford of anything but business--Trafford was somanifestly the enemy, not to be trusted, the adventurous plutocrat, theexploiter--when at last Dowd did open out he did so defiantly, throwingopinions at Trafford as a mob might hurl bricks at windows. At last theyachieved a sort of friendship and understanding, an amiability as itwere, in hostility, but never from first to last would he talk toTrafford as one gentleman to another; between them, and crossed only byflimsy, temporary bridges, was his sense of incurable grievances andfundamental injustice. He seemed incapable of forgetting thedisadvantages of his birth and upbringing, the inferiority and disorderof the house that sheltered him, the poor food that nourished him, thedeadened air he breathed, the limited leisure, the inadequate books.Implicit in his every word and act was the assurance that but for thishandicap he could have filled Trafford's place, while Trafford wouldcertainly have failed in his.
For all these things Dowd made Trafford responsible; he held him to thatinexorably.
"_You_ sweat us," he said, speaking between his teeth; "_you_ limit us,_you_ stifle us, and away there in the West-end, _you_ and the women youkeep waste the plunder."
Trafford attempted palliation. "After all," he said, "it's not me soparticularly----"
"But it is," said Dowd.
"It's the system things go upon."
"You're the responsible part of it. _You_ have freedom, _you_ have powerand endless opportunity--"
Trafford shrugged his shoulders.
"It's because your sort wants too much," said Dowd, "that my sort hasn'tenough."
"Tell me how to organize things better."
"Much you'd care. They'll organize themselves. Everything is drifting toclass separation, the growing discontent, the growing hardship of themasses.... Then you'll see."
"Then what's going to happen?"
"Overthrow. And social democracy."
"How is that going to work?"
Dowd had been cornered by that before. "I don't care if it _doesn't_work," he snarled, "so long as we smash up this. We're getting too sickto care what comes after."
"Dowd," said Trafford abruptly, "_I'm_ not so satisfied with things."
Dowd looked at him askance. "You'll get reconciled to it," he said. "It'sugly here--but it's all right there--at the spending end.... Your sorthas got to grab, your sort has got to spend--until the thing works outand the social revolution makes an end of you."
"And then?"
Dowd became busy with his work.
Trafford stuck his hands in his pockets and stared out of the dingyfactory window.
"I don't object so much to your diagnosis," he said, "as to your remedy.It doesn't strike me as a remedy."
"It's an end," said Dowd, "anyhow. My God! When I think of all the womenand shirkers flaunting and frittering away there in the West, while heremen and women toil and worry and starve...." He stopped short like onewho feels too full for controlled speech.
"Dowd," said Trafford after a fair pause, "What would you do if you wereme?"
"Do?" said Dowd.
"Yes," said Trafford as one who reconsiders it, "what would you do?"
"Now that's a curious question, Mr. Trafford," said Dowd, turning toregard him. "Meaning--if I were in your place?"
"Yes," said Trafford. "What would you do in my place?"
"I should sell out of this place jolly quick," he said.
"_Sell!_" said Trafford softly.
"Yes--sell. And start a socialist daily right off. An absolutelyindependent, unbiassed socialist daily."
"And what would that do?"
"It would stir people up. Every day it would stir people up."
"But you see I can't edit. I haven't the money for half a year of asocialist daily.... And meanwhile people want rubber."
Dowd shook his head. "You mean that you and your wife want to have thespending of six or eight thousand a year," he said.
"I don't make half of that," said Trafford.
"Well--half of that," pressed Dowd. "It's all the same to me."
Trafford reflected. "The point where I don't agree with you," he said,"is in supposing that my scale
of living--over there, is directlyconnected with the scale of living--about here."
"Well, isn't it?"
"'Directly,' I said. No. If we just stopped it--over there--there'd beno improvement here. In fact, for a time it would mean dislocations. Itmight mean permanent, hopeless, catastrophic dislocation. You know thatas well as I do. Suppose the West-end became--Tolstoyan; the East wouldbecome chaos."
"Not much likelihood," sneered Dowd.
"That's another question. That we earn together here and that I spendalone over there, it's unjust and bad, but it isn't a thing that admitsof any simple remedy. Where we differ, Dowd, is about that remedy. Iadmit the disease as fully as you do. I, as much as you, want to see thedawn of a great change in the ways of human living. But I don't thinkthe diagnosis is complete and satisfactory; our problem is an intricatemuddle of disorders, not one simple disorder, and I don't see whattreatment is indicated."
"Socialism," said Dowd, "is indicated."
"You might as well say that health is indicated," said Trafford with anote of impatience in his voice. "Does any one question that if wecould have this socialist state in which every one is devoted and everyone is free, in which there is no waste and no want, and beauty andbrotherhood prevail universally, we wouldn't? But----. You socialistshave no scheme of government, no scheme of economic organization, nointelligible guarantees of personal liberty, no method of progress, noideas about marriage, no plan--except those little pickpocket plans ofthe Fabians that you despise as much as I do--for making this order intothat other order you've never yet taken the trouble to work out even inprinciple. Really you know, Dowd, what is the good of pointing at mywife's dresses and waving the red flag at me, and talking of humanmiseries----"
"It seems to wake you up a bit," said Dowd with characteristicirrelevance.
Sec. 2
The accusing finger of Dowd followed Trafford into his dreams.
Behind it was his grey-toned, intelligent, resentful face, hissmouldering eyes, his slightly frayed collar and vivid, ill-chosen tie.At times Trafford could almost hear his flat insistent voice, hismeasured h-less speech. Dowd was so penetratingly right,--and soignorant of certain essentials, so wrong in his forecasts and ultimates.It was true beyond disputing that Trafford as compared with Dowd hadopportunity, power of a sort, the prospect and possibility of leisure.He admitted the liability that followed on that advantage. It expressedso entirely the spirit of his training that with Trafford the noblemaxim of the older socialists; "from each according to his ability, toeach according to his need," received an intuitive acquiescence. He hadno more doubt than Dowd that Dowd was the victim of a subtle evasiveinjustice, innocently and helplessly underbred, underfed, cramped andcrippled, and that all his own surplus made him in a sense Dowd'sdebtor.
But Dowd's remedies!
Trafford made himself familiar with the socialist and labor newspapers,and he was as much impressed by their honest resentments and theirenthusiastic hopefulness as he was repelled by their haste andignorance, their cocksure confidence in untried reforms and impudentteachers, their indiscriminating progressiveness, their impulsive lapsesinto hatred, misrepresentation and vehement personal abuse. He was in nomood for the humours of human character, and he found the ill-maskedfeuds and jealousies of the leaders, the sham statecraft of G. B.Magdeberg, M.P., the sham Machiavellism of Dorvil, the sham persistentgood-heartedness of Will Pipes, discouraging and irritating. Altogetherit seemed to him the conscious popular movement in politics, both in andout of Parliament, was a mere formless and indeterminate aspiration. Itwas a confused part of the general confusion, symptomatic perhaps, butexercising no controls and no direction.
His attention passed from the consideration of this completelyrevolutionary party to the general field of social reform. With thenaive directness of a scientific man, he got together the publishedliterature of half a dozen flourishing agitations and philanthropies,interviewed prominent and rather embarrassed personages, attendedmeetings, and when he found the speeches too tiresome to follow watchedthe audience about him. He even looked up Aunt Plessington's Movement,and filled her with wild hopes and premature boastings about apromising convert. "Marjorie's brought him round at last!" said AuntPlessington. "I knew I could trust my little Madge!" His impression wasnot the cynic's impression of these wide shallows of activity. Progressand social reform are not, he saw, mere cloaks of hypocrisy; a wealth ofgood intention lies behind them in spite of their manifest futility.There is much dishonesty due to the blundering desire for consistency inpeople of hasty intention, much artless and a little calculatedself-seeking, but far more vanity and amiable feebleness of mind intheir general attainment of failure. The Plessingtons struck him asbeing after all very typical of the publicist at large, quite devoted,very industrious, extremely presumptuous and essentially thin-witted.They would cheat like ill-bred children for example, on some petty pointof reputation, but they could be trusted to expend, ineffectuallyindeed, but with the extremest technical integrity, whatever sums ofmoney their adherents could get together....
He emerged from this inquiry into the proposed remedies and palliativesfor Dowd's wrongs with a better opinion of people's hearts and a worseone of their heads than he had hitherto entertained.
Pursuing this line of thought he passed from the politicians andpractical workers to the economists and sociologists. He spent theentire leisure of the second summer after the establishment of thefactory upon sociological and economic literature. At the end of thatbout of reading he attained a vivid realization of the garrulous badnessthat rules in this field of work, and the prevailing slovenliness andnegligence in regard to it. He chanced one day to look up the article onSocialism in the new Encyclopaedia Britannica, and found in its entirefailure to state the case for or against modern Socialism, to trace itsorigins, or to indicate any rational development in the movement, asymptom of the universal laxity of interest in these matters. Indeed,the writer did not appear to have heard of modern Socialism at all; hediscussed collective and individualist methods very much as a ratherill-read schoolgirl in a hurry for her college debating society mighthave done. Compared with the treatment of engineering or biologicalscience in the same compilation, this article became almost symbolicalof the prevailing habitual incompetence with which all this system ofquestions is still handled. The sciences were done scantily andcarelessly enough, but they admitted at any rate the possibility ofcompleteness; this did not even pretend to thoroughness.
One might think such things had no practical significance. And at theback of it all was Dowd, remarkably more impatient each year, confessingthe failure of parliamentary methods, of trades unionism, hinting moreand more plainly at the advent of a permanent guerilla war againstcapital, at the general strike and sabotage.
"It's coming to that," said Dowd; "it's coming to that."
"_What's the good of it?_" he said, echoing Trafford's words. "It's asort of relief to the feelings. Why shouldn't we?"
Sec. 3
But you must not suppose that at any time these huge grey problems ofour social foundations and the riddle of intellectual confusion onereaches through them, and the yet broader riddles of human purpose thatopen beyond, constitute the whole of Trafford's life during this time.When he came back to Marjorie and his home, a curtain of unreality fellbetween him and all these things. It was as if he stepped through suchboundaries as Alice passed to reach her Wonderland; the other worldbecame a dream again; as if he closed the pages of a vivid book andturned to things about him. Or again it was as if he drew down the blindof a window that gave upon a landscape, grave, darkling, ominous, andfaced the warm realities of a brightly illuminated room....
In a year or so he had the works so smoothly organized and Dowd soreconciled, trained and encouraged that his own daily presence wasunnecessary, and he would go only three and then only two mornings aweek to conduct those secret phases in the preparation of his catalyticthat even Dowd could not be trusted to know. He reverted more and morecompletely to hi
s own proper world.
And the first shock of discovering that greater London which "isn't init" passed away by imperceptible degrees. Things that had been as vividand startling as new wounds became unstimulating and ineffective withrepetition. He got used to the change from Belgravia to East Ham, fromEast Ham to Belgravia. He fell in with the unusual persuasion inBelgravia, that, given a firm and prompt Home Secretary, East Ham couldbe trusted to go on--for quite a long time anyhow. One cannot sit downfor all one's life in the face of insoluble problems. He had a motor-carnow that far outshone Magnet's, and he made the transit from west toeast in the minimum of time and with the minimum of friction. It ceasedto be more disconcerting that he should have workers whom he coulddismiss at a week's notice to want or prostitution than that he shouldhave a servant waiting behind his chair. Things were so. The maincurrent of his life--and the main current of his life flowed throughMarjorie and his home--carried him on. Rubber was his, but there werestill limitless worlds to conquer. He began to take up, working undercircumstances of considerable secrecy at Solomonson's laboratories atRiplings, to which he would now go by motor-car for two or three days ata time, the possibility of a cheap, resilient and very tough substance,rubber glass, that was to be, Solomonson was assured, the road surfaceof the future.
Sec. 4
The confidence of Solomonson had made it impossible for Trafford toalter his style of living almost directly upon the conclusion of theiragreement. He went back to Marjorie to broach a financially emancipatedphase. They took a furnished house at Shackleford, near Godalming inSurrey, and there they lived for nearly a year--using their Chelsea homeonly as a town apartment for Trafford when business held him in London.And there it was, in the pretty Surrey country, with the sweet air ofpine and heather in Marjorie's blood, that their second child was born.It was a sturdy little boy, whose only danger in life seemed to be thesuperfluous energy with which he resented its slightest disrespect ofhis small but important requirements.
When it was time for Marjorie to return to London, spring had come roundagain, and Trafford's conceptions of life were adapting themselves tothe new scale upon which they were now to do things. While he was busycreating his factory in the East End, Marjorie was displaying an equalif a less original constructive energy in Sussex Square, near LancasterGate, for there it was the new home was to be established. She setherself to furnish and arrange it so as to produce the maximum ofsurprise and chagrin in Daphne, and she succeeded admirably. The Magnetsnow occupied a flat in Whitehall Court, the furniture Magnet hadinsisted upon buying himself with all the occult cunning of the humoristin these matters, and not even Daphne could blind herself to thesuperiority both in arrangement and detail of Marjorie's home. That wasvery satisfactory, and so too was the inevitable exaggeration ofTrafford's financial importance. "He can do what he likes in the rubberworld," said Marjorie. "In Mincing Lane, where they deal in rubbershares, they used to call him and Sir Rupert the invaders; now they callthem the Conquering Heroes.... Of course, it's mere child's play toGodwin, but, as he said, 'We want money.' It won't really interfere withhis more important interests...."
I do not know why both those sisters were more vulgarly competitive witheach other than with any one else; I have merely to record the fact thatthey were so.
The effect upon the rest of Marjorie's family was equally gratifying.Mr. Pope came to the house-warming as though he had never had theslightest objection to Trafford's antecedents, and told him casuallyafter dinner that Marjorie had always been his favourite daughter, andthat from the first he had expected great things of her. He told Magnet,who was the third man of the party, that he only hoped Syd and Rom woulddo as well as their elder sisters. Afterwards, in the drawing-room, hewhacked Marjorie suddenly and very startlingly on the shoulder-blade--itwas the first bruise he had given her since Buryhamstreet days. "You'vemade a man of him, Maggots," he said.
The quiet smile of the Christian Scientist was becoming now the fixedexpression of Mrs. Pope's face, and it scarcely relaxed for a moment asshe surveyed her daughter's splendours. She had triumphantly refused toworry over a rather serious speculative disappointment, but her faith inher prophet's spiritual power had been strengthened rather than weakenedby the manifest insufficiency of his financial prestidigitations, andshe was getting through life quite radiantly now, smiling at (but not,of course, giving way to) beggars, smiling at toothaches and headaches,both her own and other people's, smiling away doubts, smiling awayeverything that bows the spirit of those who are still in the bonds ofthe flesh....
Afterwards the children came round, Syd and Rom now with skirts down andhair up, and rather stiff in the fine big rooms, and Theodore in a highcollar and very anxious to get Trafford on his side in his ambition tochuck a proposed bank clerkship and go in for professional aviation....
It was pleasant to be respected by her family again, but the mind ofMarjorie was soon reaching out to the more novel possibilities of herchanged position. She need no longer confine herself to teas andafternoons. She could now, delightful thought! give dinners. Dinners aremere vulgarities for the vulgar, but in the measure of your brains doesa dinner become a work of art. There is the happy blending of a modernand distinguished simplicity with a choice of items essentially good anddelightful and just a little bit not what was expected. There is thestill more interesting and difficult blending and arrangement of thediners. From the first Marjorie resolved on a round table, and theachievement of that rare and wonderful thing, general conversation. Shehad a clear centre, with a circle of silver bowls filled with short cutflowers and low shaded, old silver candlesticks adapted to the electriclight. The first dinner was a nervous experience for her, but happilyTrafford seemed unconscious of the importance of the occasion and talkedvery easily and well; at last she attained her old ambition to see SirRoderick Dover in her house, and there was Remington, the editor of the_Blue Weekly_ and his silent gracious wife; Edward Crampton, thehistorian, full of surprising new facts about Kosciusko; the Solomonsonsand Mrs. Millingham, and Mary Gasthorne the novelist. It was a goodtalking lot. Remington sparred agreeably with the old Toryism of Dover,flank attacks upon them both were delivered by Mrs. Millingham andTrafford, Crampton instanced Hungarian parallels, and was happilyaverted by Mary Gasthorne with travel experiences in the Carpathians;the diamonds of Lady Solomonson and Mrs. Remington flashed and winkedacross the shining table, as their wearers listened with unmistakableintelligence, and when the ladies had gone upstairs Sir RupertSolomonson told all the men exactly what he thought of the policy of the_Blue Weekly_, a balanced, common-sense judgment. Upstairs LadySolomonson betrayed a passion of admiration for Mrs. Remington, and Mrs.Millingham mumbled depreciation of the same lady's intelligence in MaryGasthorne's unwilling ear. "She's _passive_," said Mrs. Millingham. "Shebores him...."
For a time Marjorie found dinner-giving delightful--it is like pickingand arranging posies of human flowers--and fruits--and perhaps a littledried grass, and it was not long before she learnt that she was esteemeda success as a hostess. She gathered her earlier bunches in the Carmeland Solomonson circle, with a stiffening from among the literary andscientific friends of Trafford and his mother, and one or two casual andundervalued blossoms from Aunt Plessington's active promiscuities. Shehad soon a gaily flowering garden of her own to pick from. Its strengthand finest display lay in its increasing proportion of politicalintellectuals, men in and about the House who relaxed their minds fromthe tense detailed alertness needed in political intrigues byconversation that rose at times to the level of the smarter sort ofarticle in the half-crown reviews. The women were more difficult thanthe men, and Marjorie found herself wishing at times that girl novelistsand playwrights were more abundant, or women writers on the averageyounger. These talked generally well, and one or two capable women ofher own type talked and listened with an effect of talking; so manyother women either chattered disturbingly, or else did not listen, withan effect of not talking at all, and so made gaps about the table. Manyof these latter
had to be asked because they belonged to the class ofinevitable wives, _sine-qua-nons_, and through them she learnt the valueof that priceless variety of kindly unselfish men who can create theillusion of attentive conversation in the most uncomfortable andsuspicious natures without producing backwater and eddy in the generalflow of talk.
Indisputably Marjorie's dinners were successful. Of course, theabundance and aesthetic achievements of Mrs. Lee still seemed to herimmeasurably out of reach, but it was already possible to show AuntPlessington how the thing ought really to be done, Aunt Plessington withher narrow, lank, austerely served table, with a sort of quarter-deck ather own end and a subjugated forecastle round Hubert. And accordinglythe Plessingtons were invited and shown, and to a party, too, thatrestrained Aunt Plessington from her usual conversational prominence....
These opening years of Trafford's commercial phase were full of anengaging activity for Marjorie as for him, and for her far morecompletely than for him were the profounder solicitudes of life lostsight of in the bright succession of immediate events.
Marjorie did not let her social development interfere with her duty tosociety in the larger sense. Two years after the vigorous and resentfulGodwin came a second son, and a year and a half later a third. "That'senough," said Marjorie, "now we've got to rear them." The nursery atSussex Square had always been a show part of the house, but it becameher crowning achievement. She had never forgotten the Lee display atVevey, the shining splendours of modern maternity, the books, theapparatus, the space and light and air. The whole second floor wasaltered to accommodate these four triumphant beings, who absorbed theservices of two nurses, a Swiss nursery governess and twohousemaids--not to mention those several hundred obscure individuals whowere yielding a sustaining profit in the East End. At any rate, theywere very handsome and promising children, and little Margharita couldtalk three languages with a childish fluency, and invent and write ashort fable in either French or German--with only as much misspelling asany child of eight may be permitted....
Then there sprang up a competition between Marjorie and the able, prettywife of Halford Wallace, most promising of under-secretaries. They gavedinners against each other, they discovered young artists against eachother, they went to first-nights and dressed against each other.Marjorie was ruddy and tall, Mrs. Halford Wallace dark and animated;Halford Wallace admired Marjorie, Trafford was insensible to Mrs.Halford Wallace. They played for points so vague that it was impossiblefor any one to say which was winning, but none the less they played likeartists, for all they were worth....
Trafford's rapid prosperity and his implicit promise of still wideractivities and successes brought him innumerable acquaintances and manyfriends. He joined two or three distinguished clubs, he derived anuncertain interest from a series of week-end visits to ample,good-mannered households, and for a time he found a distraction inlittle flashes of travel to countries that caught at his imagination,Morocco, Montenegro, Southern Russia.
I do not know whether Marjorie might not have been altogether happyduring this early Sussex Square period, if it had not been for anunconquerable uncertainty about Trafford. But ever and again she becamevaguely apprehensive of some perplexing unreality in her position. Shehad never had any such profundity of discontent as he experienced. Itwas nothing clear, nothing that actually penetrated, distressing her. Itwas at most an uneasiness. For him the whole fabric of life was, as itwere, torn and pieced by a provocative sense of depths unplumbed thatrobbed it of all its satisfactions. For her these glimpses were as yetrare, mere moments of doubt that passed again and left her active andassured.
Sec. 5
It was only after they had been married six or seven years that Traffordbegan to realize how widely his attitudes to Marjorie varied. He emergedslowly from a naive unconsciousness of his fluctuations,--a naiveunconsciousness of inconsistency that for most men and women remainsthroughout life. His ruling idea that she and he were friends, equals,confederates, knowing everything about each other, co-operating ineverything, was very fixed and firm. But indeed that had become theremotest rendering of their relationship. Their lives were lives ofintimate disengagement. They came nearest to fellowship in relation totheir children; there they shared an immense common pride. Beyond thatwas a less confident appreciation of their common house and their jointeffect. And then they liked and loved each other tremendously. Theycould play upon each other and please each other in a hundred differentways, and they did so, quite consciously, observing each other with thecompletest externality. She was still in many ways for him the brightgirl he had admired in the examination, still the mysterious dignifiedtransfiguration of that delightful creature on the tragically tenderverge of motherhood; these memories were of more power with him than thepresent realities of her full-grown strength and capacity. He petted andplayed with the girl still; he was still tender and solicitous for thatearly woman. He admired and co-operated also with the capable, narrowlyambitious, beautiful lady into which Marjorie had developed, but thoseremoter experiences it was that gave the deeper emotions to theirrelationship.
The conflict of aims that had at last brought Trafford from scientificinvestigation into business, had left behind it a little scar ofhostility. He felt his sacrifice. He felt that he had given somethingfor her that she had had no right to exact, that he had gone beyond thefree mutualities of honest love and paid a price for her; he haddeflected the whole course of his life for her and he was entitled torepayments. Unconsciously he had become a slightly jealous husband. Heresented inattentions and absences. He felt she ought to be with him andorient all her proceedings towards him. He did not like other people toshow too marked an appreciation of her. She had a healthy love ofadmiration, and in addition her social ambitions made it almostinevitable that at times she should use her great personal charm tosecure and retain adherents. He was ashamed to betray the resentmentsthus occasioned, and his silence widened the separation more than anyprotest could have done....
For his own part he gave her no cause for a reciprocal jealousy. Otherwomen did not excite his imagination very greatly, and he had none ofthe ready disposition to lapse to other comforters which is so frequenta characteristic of the husband out of touch with his life's companion.He was perhaps an exceptional man in his steadfast loyalty to his wife.He had come to her as new to love as she had been. He had never in hislife taken that one decisive illicit step which changes all the aspectsof sexual life for a man even more than for a woman. Love for him was athing solemn, simple, and unspoilt. He perceived that it was not so formost other men, but that did little to modify his own private attitude.In his curious scrutiny of the people about him, he did not fail to notethe drift of adventures and infidelities that glimmers along beneath theeven surface of our social life. One or two of his intimate friends,Solomonson was one of them, passed through "affairs." Once or twicethose dim proceedings splashed upward to the surface in an open scandal.There came Remington's startling elopement with Isabel Rivers, thewriter, which took two brilliant and inspiring contemporaries suddenlyand distressingly out of Trafford's world. Trafford felt none of thatrage and forced and jealous contempt for the delinquents in thesematters which is common in the ill-regulated, virtuous mind. Indeed, hewas far more sympathetic with than hostile to the offenders. He hadbrains and imagination to appreciate the grim pathos of a process thatbegins as a hopeful quest, full of the suggestion of noblepossibilities, full of the craving for missed intensities of fellowshipand realization, that loiters involuntarily towards beauties anddelights, and ends at last too often after gratification of an appetite,in artificially hideous exposures, and the pelting misrepresentations ofthe timidly well-behaved vile. But the general effect of pitifulevasions, of unavoidable meannesses, of draggled heroics and tortuouslyinsincere explanations confirmed him in his aversion from thislabyrinthine trouble of extraneous love....
But if Trafford was a faithful husband, he ceased to be a happy andconfident one. There grew up in him a vast hinterland of thoughts andfeelings,
an accumulation of unspoken and largely of unformulated thingsin which his wife had no share. And it was in that hinterland that hisessential self had its abiding place....
It came as a discovery; it remained for ever after a profoundlydisturbing perplexity that he had talked to Marjorie most carelessly,easily and seriously, during their courtship and their honeymoon. Heremembered their early intercourse now as an immense happy freedom inlove. Then afterwards a curtain had fallen. That almost delirious senseof escaping from oneself, of having at last found some one from whomthere need be no concealment, some one before whom one could standnaked-souled and assured of love as one stands before one's God, fadedso that he scarce observed its passing, but only discovered at lastthat it had gone. He misunderstood and met misunderstanding. He found hecould hurt her by the things he said, and be exquisitely hurt by herfailure to apprehend the spirit of some ill-expressed intention. And itwas so vitally important not to hurt, not to be hurt. At first he onlyperceived that he reserved himself; then there came the intimation ofthe question, was she also perhaps in such another hinterland as his,keeping herself from him?
He had perceived the cessation of that first bright outbreak ofself-revelation, this relapse into the secrecies of individuality, quiteearly in their married life. I have already told of his first efforts tobridge their widening separation by walks and talks in the country, andby the long pilgrimage among the Alps that had ended so unexpectedly atVevey. In the retrospect the years seemed punctuated with phases when"we must talk" dominated their intercourse, and each time the impulse ofthat recognized need passed away by insensible degrees again--withnothing said.
Sec. 6
Marjorie cherished an obstinate hope that Trafford would take uppolitical questions and go into Parliament. It seemed to her that therewas something about him altogether graver and wider than most of theactive politicians she knew. She liked to think of those gravitiesassuming a practical form, of Trafford very rapidly and easily comingforward into a position of cardinal significance. It gave her generalexpenditure a quality of concentration without involving any uncongeniallimitation to suppose it aimed at the preparation of a statesman'scircle whenever Trafford chose to adopt that assumption. Little men ingreat positions came to her house and talked with opaqueself-confidence at her table; she measured them against her husbandwhile she played the admiring female disciple to their half-confidentialtalk. She felt that he could take up these questions and measures thatthey reduced to trite twaddle, open the wide relevancies behind them,and make them magically significant, sweep away the encrustingpettiness, the personalities and arbitrary prejudices. But why didn't hebegin to do it? She threw out hints he seemed blind towards, sheexercised miracles of patience while he ignored her baits. She came nearintrigue in her endeavor to entangle him in political affairs. For atime it seemed to her that she was succeeding--I have already told ofhis phase of inquiry and interest in socio-political work--and then herelapsed into a scornful restlessness, and her hopes weakened again.
But he could not concentrate his mind, he could not think where tobegin. Day followed day, each with its attacks upon his intention, itspetty just claims, its attractive novelties of aspect. The telephonebell rang, the letters flopped into the hall, Malcom the butler seemedalways at hand with some distracting oblong on his salver. Dowd wasdeveloping ideas for a reconstructed organization of the factory,Solomonson growing enthusiastic about rubber-glass, his house seemedfull of women, Marjorie had an engagement for him to keep or thechildren were coming in to say good-night. To his irritated brain thewhole scheme of his life presented itself at last as a tissue ofinterruptions which prevented his looking clearly at reality. More andmore definitely he realized he wanted to get away and think. His formerlife of research became invested with an effect of immense dignity andof a steadfast singleness of purpose....
But Trafford was following his own lights, upon his own lines. He wasreturning to that faith in the supreme importance of thought andknowledge, upon which he had turned his back when he left pure researchbehind him. To that familiar end he came by an unfamiliar route, afterhis long, unsatisfying examination of social reform movements and socialand political theories. Immaturity, haste and presumption vitiated allthat region, and it seemed to him less and less disputable that the onlyescape for mankind from a continuing extravagant futility lay throughthe attainment of a quite unprecedented starkness and thoroughness ofthinking about all these questions. This conception of a neededRenascence obsessed him more and more, and the persuasion, deeply feltif indistinctly apprehended, that somewhere in such an effort there wasa part for him to play....
Life is too great for us or too petty. It gives us no tolerable middleway between baseness and greatness. We must die daily on the levels ofignoble compromise or perish tragically among the precipices. On the onehand is a life--unsatisfying and secure, a plane of dulledgratifications, mean advantages, petty triumphs, adaptations,acquiescences and submissions, and on the other a steep and terribleclimb, set with sharp stones and bramble thickets and the possibilitiesof grotesque dislocations, and the snares of such temptation as comesonly to those whose minds have been quickened by high desire, and thechallenge of insoluble problems and the intimations of issues so complexand great, demanding such a nobility of purpose, such a steadfastness,alertness and openness of mind, that they fill the heart of man withdespair....
There were moods when Trafford would, as people say, pull himselftogether, and struggle with his gnawing discontent. He would compare hislot with that of other men, reproach himself for a monstrous greed andingratitude. He remonstrated with himself as one might remonstrate witha pampered child refusing to be entertained by a whole handsome nurseryfull of toys. Other men did their work in the world methodically anddecently, did their duty by their friends and belongings, weremanifestly patient through dullness, steadfastly cheerful, ready to meetvexations with a humorous smile, and grateful for orderly pleasures. Washe abnormal? Or was he in some unsuspected way unhealthy? Traffordneglected no possible explanations. Did he want this great Renascence ofthe human mind because he was suffering from some subtle form ofindigestion? He invoked, independently of each other, the aid of twodistinguished specialists. They both told him in exactly the same voiceand with exactly the same air of guineas well earned: "What you want,Mr. Trafford, is a change."
Trafford brought his mind to bear upon the instances of contentmentabout him. He developed an opinion that all men and many women werepotentially at least as restless as himself. A huge proportion of theusage and education in modern life struck upon him now as being atraining in contentment. Or rather in keeping quiet and not upsettingthings. The serious and responsible life of an ordinary prosperous manfulfilling the requirements of our social organization fatigues andneither completely satisfies nor completely occupies. Still less doesthe responsible part of the life of a woman of the prosperous classesengage all her energies or hold her imagination. And there has grown upa great informal organization of employments, games, ceremonies, socialroutines, travel, to consume these surplus powers and excessivecravings, which might otherwise change or shatter the whole order ofhuman living. He began to understand the forced preoccupation withcricket and golf, the shooting, visiting, and so forth, to which theyoung people of the economically free classes in the community aretrained. He discovered a theory for hobbies and specialized interests.He began to see why people go to Scotland to get away from London, andcome to London to get away from Scotland, why they crowd to and froalong the Riviera, swarm over Switzerland, shoot, yacht, hunt, andmaintain an immense apparatus of racing and motoring. Because so theyare able to remain reasonably contented with the world as it is. Heperceived, too, that a man who has missed or broken through the trainingto this kind of life, does not again very readily subdue himself to thesecurity of these systematized distractions. His own upbringing had beenantipathetic to any such adaptations; his years of research had givenhim the habit of naked intimacy with truth, filled him with a cravingfor realit
y and the destructive acids of a relentless critical method.
He began to understand something of the psychology of vice, tocomprehend how small a part mere sensuality, how large a part the spiritof adventure and the craving for illegality, may play, in the career ofthose who are called evil livers. Mere animal impulses and curiositiesit had always seemed possible to him to control, but now he wasbeginning to apprehend the power of that passion for escape, at anycost, in any way, from the petty, weakly stimulating, competitivemotives of low-grade and law-abiding prosperity....
For a time Trafford made an earnest effort to adjust himself to theposition in which he found himself, and make a working compromise withhis disturbing forces. He tried to pick up the scientific preoccupationof his earlier years. He made extensive schemes, to Solomonson's greatconcern, whereby he might to a large extent disentangle himself frombusiness. He began to hunt out forgotten note-books and yellowing sheetsof memoranda. He found the resumption of research much more difficultthan he had ever supposed possible. He went so far as to plan alaboratory, and to make some inquiries as to site and the cost ofbuilding, to the great satisfaction not only of Marjorie but of hismother. Old Mrs. Trafford had never expressed her concern at hisabandonment of molecular physics for money-making, but now in herappreciation of his return to pure investigation she betrayed her senseof his departure.
But in his heart he felt that this methodical establishment of virtue bylimitation would not suffice for him. He said no word of this scepticismas it grew in his mind. Marjorie was still under the impression that hewas returning to research, and that she was free to contrive the steadypreparation for that happier day when he should assume his politicalinheritance. And then presently a queer little dispute sprang up betweenthem. Suddenly, for the first time since he took to business, Traffordfound himself limiting her again. She was disposed, partly through thenatural growth of her circle and her setting and partly through amovement on the part of Mrs. Halford Wallace, to move from Sussex Squareinto a larger, more picturesquely built house in a more centralposition. She particularly desired a good staircase. He met herintimations of this development with a curious and unusual irritation.The idea of moving bothered him. He felt that exaggerated annoyancewhich is so often a concomitant of overwrought nerves. They had adispute that was almost a quarrel, and though Marjorie dropped thematter for a time, he could feel she was still at work upon it.
