by H. G. Wells
and responsible guardian of her children.
It is no use pretending that this is not novel and revolutionary; it
is. The Endowment of Motherhood implies a new method of social
organization, a rearrangement of the social unit, untried in human
expericnce-as untried as electric traction was or flying in 1800.
Of course, it may work out to modify men's ideas of marriage
profoundly. To me that is a secondary consideration. I do not
believe that particular assertion myself, because Iam convinced
that a practical monogamy is a psychological necessity to the mass
of civilised people. But even if I did believe it I should still
keep to my present line, because it is the only line that will
prevent a highly organised civilisation from ending in biological
decay. The public Endowment of Motherhood is the only possible way
which will ensure the permanently developing civilised state at
which all constructive minds are aiming. A point is reached in the
life-history of a civilisation when either this reconstruction must
be effected or the quality and MORALE of the population prove
insufficient for the needs of the developing organisation. It is
not so much moral decadence that will destroy us as moral
inadaptability. The old code fails under the new needs. The only
alternative to this profound reconstruction is a decay in human
quality and social collapse. Either this unprecedented
rearrangement must be achieved by our civilisation, or it must
presently come upon a phase of disorder and crumble and perish, as
Rome perished, as France declines, as the strain of the Pilgrim
Fathers dwindles out of America. Whatever hope there may be in the
attempt therefore, there is no alternative to the attempt.
6
I wanted political success now dearly enough, but not at the price
of constructive realities. These questions were no doubt
monstrously dangerous in the political world; there wasn't a
politician alive who didn't look scared at the mention of "The
Family," but if raising these issues were essential to the social
reconstructions on which my life was set, that did not matter. It
only implied that I should take them up with deliberate caution.
There was no release because of risk or difficulty.
The question of whether I should commit myself to some open project
in this direction was going on in my mind concurrently with my
speculations about a change of party, like bass and treble in a
complex piece of music. The two drew to a conclusion together. I
would not only go over to Imperialism, but I would attempt to
biologise Imperialism.
I thought at first that I was undertaking a monstrous uphill task.
But as I came to look into the possibilities of the matter, a strong
persuasion grew up in my mind that this panic fear of legislative
proposals affecting the family basis was excessive, that things were
much riper for development in this direction than old-experienced
people out of touch with the younger generation imagined, that to
phrase the thing in a parliamentary fashion, "something might be
done in the constituencies" with the Endowment of Motherhood
forthwith, provided only that it was made perfectly clear that
anything a sane person could possibly intend by "morality" was left
untouched by these proposals.
I went to work very carefully. I got Roper of the DAILY TELEPHONE
and Burkett of the DIAL to try over a silly-season discussion of
State Help for Mothers, and I put a series of articles on eugenics,
upon the fall in the birth-rate, and similar topics in the BLUE
WEEKLY, leading up to a tentative and generalised advocacy of the
public endowment of the nation's children. I was more and more
struck by the acceptance won by a sober and restrained presentation
of this suggestion.
And then, in the fourth year of the BLUE WEEKLY'S career, came the
Handitch election, and I was forced by the clamour of my antagonist,
and very willingly forced, to put my convictions to the test. I
returned triumphantly to Westminster with the Public Endowment of
Motherhood as part of my open profession and with the full approval
of the party press. Applauding benches of Imperialists cheered me
on my way to the table between the whips.
That second time I took the oath I was not one of a crowd of new
members, but salient, an event, a symbol of profound changes and new
purposes in the national life.
Here it is my political book comes to an end, and in a sense my book
ends altogether. For the rest is but to tell how I was swept out of
this great world of political possibilities. I close this Third
Book as I opened it, with an admission of difficulties and
complexities, but now with a pile of manuscript before me I have to
confess them unsurmounted and still entangled.
Yet my aim was a final simplicity. I have sought to show my growing
realisation that the essential quality of all political and social
effort is the development of a great race mind behind the interplay
of individual lives. That is the collective human reality, the
basis of morality, the purpose of devotion. To that our lives must
be given, from that will come the perpetual fresh release and
further ennoblement of individual lives…
I have wanted to make that idea of a collective mind play in this
book the part United Italy plays in Machiavelli's PRINCE. I have
called it the hinterland of reality, shown it accumulating a
dominating truth and rightness which must force men's now sporadic
motives more and more into a disciplined and understandingrelation
to a plan. And I have tried to indicate how I sought to serve this
great clarification of our confusions…
Now I come back to personality and the story of my self-betrayal,
and how it is I have had to leave all that far-reaching scheme of
mine, a mere project and beginning for other men to take or leave as
it pleases them.
BOOK THE FOURTH
ISABEL
CHAPTER THE FIRST
LOVE AND SUCCESS
1
I come to the most evasive and difficult part of my story, which is
to tell how Isabel and I have made a common wreck of our joint
lives.
It is not the telling of one simple disastrous accident. There was
a vein in our natures that led to this collapse, gradually and at
this point and that it crept to the surface. One may indeed see our
destruction-for indeed politically we could not be more extinct if
we had been shot dead-in the form of a catastrophe as disconnected
and conclusive as a meteoric stone falling out of heaven upon two
friends and crushing them both. But I do not think that is true to
our situation or ourselves. We were not taken by surprise. The
thing was in us and not from without, it was akin to our way of
thinking and our habitual attitudes; it had, for all its impulsive
effect, a certain necessity. We might have escaped no doubt, as two
men at a hundred yards may shoot at each other with pistols for a
consi
derable time and escape. But it isn't particularly reasonable
to talk of the contrariety of fate if they both get hit.
Isabel and I were dangerous to each other for several years of
friendship, and not quite unwittingly so.
In writing this, moreover, there is a very great difficulty in
steering my way between two equally undesirable tones in the
telling. In the first place I do not want to seem to confess my
sins with a penitence Iam very doubtful if I feel. Now that I have
got Isabel we can no doubt count the cost of it and feel
unquenchable regrets, but Iam not sure whether, if we could be put
back now into such circumstances as we were in a year ago, or two
years ago, whether with my eyes fully open I should not do over
again very much as I did. And on the other hand I do not want to
justify the things we have done. We are two bad people-if there is
to be any classification of good and bad at all, we have acted
badly, and quite apart from any other considerations we've largely
wasted our own very great possibilities. But it is part of a queer
humour that underlies all this, that I find myself slipping again
and again into a sentimental treatment of our case that is as
unpremeditated as it is insincere. When Iam a little tired after a
morning's writing I find the faint suggestion getting into every
other sentence that our blunders and misdeeds embodied, after the
fashion of the prophet Hosea, profound moral truths. Indeed, I feel
so little confidence in my ability to keep this altogether out of my
book that I warn the reader here that in spite of anything he may
read elsewhere in the story, intimating however shyly an esoteric
and exalted virtue in our proceedings, the plain truth of this
business is that Isabel and I wanted each other with a want entirely
formless, inconsiderate, and overwhelming. And though I could tell
you countless delightful and beautiful things about Isabel, were
this a book in her praise, I cannot either analyse that want or
account for its extreme intensity.
I will confess that deep in my mind there is a belief in a sort of
wild rightness about any love that is fraught with beauty, but that
eludes me and vanishes again, and is not, I feel, to be put with the
real veracities and righteousnesses and virtues in the paddocks and
menageries of human reason…
We have already a child, and Margaret was childless, and I find
myself prone to insist upon that, as if it was a justification.
But, indeed, when we became lovers there was small thought of
Eugenics between us. Ours was a mutual and not a philoprogenitive
passion. Old Nature behind us may have had such purposes with us,
but it is not for us to annex her intentions by a moralising
afterthought. There isn't, in fact, any decent justification for us
whatever-at that the story must stand.
But if there is no justification there is at least a very effective
excuse in the mental confusedness of our time. The evasion of that
passionately thorough exposition of belief and of the grounds of
morality, which is the outcome of the mercenary religious
compromises of the late Vatican period, the stupid suppression of
anything but the most timid discussion of sexual morality in our
literature and drama, the pervading cultivated and protected muddle-
headedness, leaves mentally vigorous people with relatively enormous
possibilities of destruction and little effectivehelp. They find
themselves confronted by the habits and prejudices of manifestly
commonplace people, and by that extraordinary patched-up
Christianity, the cult of a "Bromsteadised" deity, diffused,
scattered, and aimless, which hides from examination and any
possibility of faith behind the plea of goodtaste. A god about
whom there is delicacy is far worse than no god at all. We are
FORCED to be laws unto ourselves and to live experimentally. It is
inevitable that a considerable fraction of just that bolder, more
initiatory section of the intellectual community, the section that
can least be spared from the collective life in a period of trial
and change, will drift into such emotional crises and such disaster
as overtook us. Most perhaps will escape, but many will go down,
many more than the world can spare. It is the unwritten law of all
our public life, and the same holds true of America, that an honest
open scandal ends a career. England in the last quarter of a
century has wasted half a dozen statesmen on this score; she would,
I believe, reject Nelson now if he sought to serve her. Is it
wonderful that to us fretting here in exile this should seem the
cruellest as well as the most foolish elimination of a necessary
social element? It destroys no vice; for vice hides by nature. It
not only rewards dullness as if it were positive virtue, but sets an
enormous premium upon hypocrisy. That is my case, and that is why I
am telling this side of my story with so much explicitness.
2
Ever since the Kinghamstead election I had maintained what seemed a
desultory friendship with Isabel. At first it was rather Isabel
kept it up than I. Whenever Margaret and I went down to that villa,
with its three or four acres of garden and shrubbery about it, which
fulfilled our election promise to live at Kinghamstead, Isabel would
turn up in a state of frank cheerfulness, rejoicing at us, and talk
all she was reading and thinking to me, and stay for all the rest of
the day. In her shameless liking for me she was as natural as a
savage. She would exercise me vigorously at tennis, while Margaret
lay and rested her back in the afternoon, or guide me for some long
ramble that dodged the suburban and congested patches of the
constituency with amazing skill. She took possession of me in that
unabashed, straight-minded way a girl will sometimes adopt with a
man, chose my path or criticised my game with a motherly solicitude
for my welfare that was absurd and delightful. And we talked. We
discussed and criticised the stories of novels, scraps of history,
pictures, social questions, socialism, the policy of the Government.
She was young and most unevenly informed, but she was amazingly
sharp and quick and good. Never before in my life had I known a
girl of her age, or a woman of her quality. I had never dreamt
there was such talk in the world. Kinghamstead became a lightless
place when she went to Oxford. Heaven knows how much that may not
have precipitated my abandonment of the seat!
She went to Ridout College, Oxford, and that certainly weighed with
me when presently after my breach with the Liberals various little
undergraduate societies began to ask for lectures and discussions.
I favoured Oxford. I declared openly I did so because of her. At
that time I think we neither of us suspected the possibility of
passion that lay like a coiled snake in the path before us. It
seemed to us that we had the quaintest, most delightful friendship
in the world; she was my pupil, and I was her guide, philosopher,
an
d friend. People smiled indulgently-even Margaret smiled
indulgently-at our attraction for one another.
Such friendships are not uncommon nowadays-among easy-going,
liberal-minded people. For the most part, there's no sort of harm,
as people say, in them. The two persons concerned are never
supposed to think of the passionate love that hovers so close to the
friendship, or if they do, then they banish the thought. I think we
kept the thought as permanently in exile as any one could do. If it
did in odd moments come into our heads we pretended elaborately it
wasn't there.
Only we were both very easily jealous of each other's attention, and
tremendously insistent upon each other's preference.
I remember once during the Oxford days an intimation that should
have set me thinking, and I suppose discreetly disentangling myself.
It was one Sunday afternoon, and it must have been about May, for
the trees and shrubs of Ridout College were gay with blossom, and
fresh with the new sharp greens of spring. I had walked talking
with Isabel and a couple of other girls through the wide gardens of
the place, seen and criticised the new brick pond, nodded to the
daughter of this friend and that in the hammocks under the trees,
and picked a way among the scattered tea-parties on the lawn to our
own circle on the grass under a Siberian crab near the great bay
window. There I sat and ate great quantities of cake, and discussed
the tactics of the Suffragettes. I had made some comments upon the
spirit of the movement in an address to the men in Pembroke, and it
had got abroad, and a group of girls and women dons were now having
it out with me.
I forget the drift of the conversation, or what it was made Isabel
interrupt me. She did interrupt me. She bad been lying prone on
the ground at my right hand, chin on fists, listening thoughtfully,
and I was sitting beside old Lady Evershead on a garden seat. I
turned to Isabel's voice, and saw her face uplifted, and her dear
cheeks and nose and forehead all splashed and barred with sunlight
and the shadows of the twigs of the trees behind me. And something-
