Герберт Джордж Уэллс
The New Machiavelli
11
Every day the wine of the mountains was stronger in our blood, and the flush of our youth deeper. We would go in the morning sunlight along some narrow Alpine mule-path shouting large suggestions for national reorganisation, and weighing considerations as lightly as though the world was wax in our hands. “Great England,” we said in effect, over and over again, “and we will be among the makers! England renewed! The country has been warned; it has learnt its lesson. The disasters and anxieties of the war have sunk in. England has become serious… Oh! there are big things before us to do; big enduring things!”
One evening we walked up to the loggia of a little pilgrimage church, I forget its name, that stands out on a conical hill at the head of a winding stair above the town of Locarno. Down below the houses clustered amidst a confusion of heat-bitten greenery. I had been sitting silently on the parapet, looking across to the purple mountain masses where Switzerland passes into Italy, and the drift of our talk seemed suddenly to gather to a head.
I broke into speech, giving form to the thoughts that had been accumulating. My words have long since passed out of my memory, the phrases of familiar expression have altered for me, but the substance remains as clear as ever. I said how we were in our measure emperors and kings, men undriven, free to do as we pleased with life; we classed among the happy ones, our bread and common necessities were given us for nothing, we had abilities, – it wasn’t modesty but cowardice to behave as if we hadn’t – and Fortune watched us to see what we might do with opportunity and the world.
“There are so many things to do, you see,” began Willersley, in his judicial lecturer’s voice.
“So many things we may do,” I interrupted, “with all these years before us… We’re exceptional men. It’s our place, our duty, to do things.”
“Here anyhow,” I said, answering the faint amusement of his face; “I’ve got no modesty. Everything conspires to set me up. Why should I run about like all those grubby little beasts down there, seeking nothing but mean little vanities and indulgencies – and then take credit for modesty? I KNOW I am capable. I KNOW I have imagination. Modesty! I know if I don’t attempt the very biggest things in life I am a damned shirk. The very biggest! Somebody has to attempt them. I feel like a loaded gun that is only a little perplexed because it has to find out just where to aim itself…”
The lake and the frontier villages, a white puff of steam on the distant railway to Luino, the busy boats and steamers trailing triangular wakes of foam, the long vista eastward towards battlemented Bellinzona, the vast mountain distances, now tinged with sunset light, behind this nearer landscape, and the southward waters with remote coast towns shining dimly, waters that merged at last in a luminous golden haze, made a broad panoramic spectacle. It was as if one surveyed the world, – and it was like the games I used to set out upon my nursery floor. I was exalted by it; I felt larger than men. So kings should feel.
That sense of largeness came to me then, and it has come to me since, again and again, a splendid intimation or a splendid vanity. Once, I remember, when I looked at Genoa from the mountain crest behind the town and saw that multitudinous place in all its beauty of width and abundance and clustering human effort, and once as I was steaming past the brown low hills of Staten Island towards the towering vigour and clamorous vitality of New York City, that mood rose to its quintessence. And once it came to me, as I shall tell, on Dover cliffs. And a hundred times when I have thought of England as our country might be, with no wretched poor, no wretched rich, a nation armed and ordered, trained and purposeful amidst its vales and rivers, that emotion of collective ends and collective purposes has returned to me. I felt as great as humanity. For a brief moment I was humanity, looking at the world I had made and had still to make…
12
And mingled with these dreams of power and patriotic service there was another series of a different quality and a different colour, like the antagonistic colour of a shot silk. The white life and the red life, contrasted and interchanged, passing swiftly at a turn from one to another, and refusing ever to mingle peacefully one with the other. I was asking myself openly and distinctly: what are you going to do for the world? What are you going to do with yourself? and with an increasing strength and persistence Nature in spite of my averted attention was asking me in penetrating undertones: what are you going to do about this other fundamental matter, the beauty of girls and women and your desire for them?
I have told of my sisterless youth and the narrow circumstances of my upbringing. It made all women-kind mysterious to me. If it had not been for my Staffordshire cousins I do not think I should have known any girls at all until I was twenty. Of Staffordshire I will tell a little later. But I can remember still how through all those ripening years, the thought of women’s beauty, their magic presence in the world beside me and the unknown, untried reactions of their intercourse, grew upon me and grew, as a strange presence grows in a room when one is occupied by other things. I busied myself and pretended to be wholly occupied, and there the woman stood, full half of life neglected, and it seemed to my averted mind sometimes that she was there clad and dignified and divine, and sometimes Aphrodite shining and commanding, and sometimes that Venus who stoops and allures.
This travel abroad seemed to have released a multitude of things in my mind; the clear air, the beauty of the sunshine, the very blue of the glaciers made me feel my body and quickened all those disregarded dreams. I saw the sheathed beauty of women’s forms all about me, in the cheerful waitresses at the inns, in the pedestrians one encountered in the tracks, in the chance fellow travellers at the hotel tables. “Confound it!” said I, and talked all the more zealously of that greater England that was calling us.
I remember that we passed two Germans, an old man and a tall fair girl, father and daughter, who were walking down from Saas. She came swinging and shining towards us, easy and strong. I worshipped her as she approached.
“Gut Tag!” said Willersley, removing his hat.
“Morgen!” said the old man, saluting.
I stared stockishly at the girl, who passed with an indifferent face.
That sticks in my mind as a picture remains in a room, it has kept there bright and fresh as a thing seen yesterday, for twenty years…
I flirted hesitatingly once or twice with comely serving girls, and was a little ashamed lest Willersley should detect the keen interest I took in them, and then as we came over the pass from Santa Maria Maggiore to Cannobio, my secret preoccupation took me by surprise and flooded me and broke down my pretences.
The women in that valley are very beautiful – women vary from valley to valley in the Alps and are plain and squat here and divinities five miles away – and as we came down we passed a group of five or six of them resting by the wayside. Their burthens were beside them, and one like Ceres held a reaping hook in her brown hand. She watched us approaching and smiled faintly, her eyes at mine.
There was some greeting, and two of them laughed together.
We passed.
“Glorious girls they were,” said Willersley, and suddenly an immense sense of boredom enveloped me. I saw myself striding on down that winding road, talking of politics and parties and bills of parliament and all sorts of dessicated things. That road seemed to me to wind on for ever down to dust and infinite dreariness. I knew it for a way of death. Reality was behind us.
Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral. “I’m not so sure,” he said in a voice of intense discriminations, “after all, that agricultural work isn’t good for women.”
“Damn agricultural work!” I said, and broke out into a vigorous cursing of all I held dear. “Fettered things we are!” I cried. “I wonder why I stand it!”
“Stand what?”
“Why don’t I go back and make love to those girls and let the world and you and everything go hang? Deep breasts and rounded limbs – and we poor emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in us!..”
“I’m not quite sure, Remington,” said Willersley, looking at me with a deliberately quaint expression over his glasses, “that picturesque scenery is altogether good for your morals.”
That fever was still in my blood when we came to Locarno.
13
Along the hot and dusty lower road between the Orrido of Traffiume and Cannobio Willersley had developed his first blister. And partly because of that and partly because there was a bag at the station that gave us the refreshment of clean linen and partly because of the lazy lower air into which we had come, we decided upon three or four days’ sojourn in the Empress Hotel.
We dined that night at a table-d’hote, and I found myself next to an Englishwoman who began a conversation that was resumed presently in the hotel lounge. She was a woman of perhaps thirty-three or thirty-four, slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very abundant fair golden hair, the wife of a petulant-looking heavy-faced man of perhaps fifty-three, who smoked a cigar and dozed over his coffee and presently went to bed. “He always goes to bed like that,” she confided startlingly. “He sleeps after all his meals. I never knew such a man to sleep.”
Then she returned to our talk, whatever it was.
We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries and the usual topographical talk, and she had envied our pedestrian travel. “My husband doesn’t walk,” she said. “His heart is weak and he cannot manage the hills.”
There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she conveyed she liked me, and when presently Willersley drifted off to write letters our talk sank at once to easy confidential undertones. I felt enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people one has never seen before and may never see again. I said I loved beautiful scenery and all beautiful things, and the pointing note in my voice made her laugh. She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as I can remember I said she made them bold. “Blue they are,” she remarked, smiling archly. “I like blue eyes.” Then I think we compared ages, and she said she was the Woman of Thirty, “George Moore’s Woman of Thirty.”
I had not read George Moore at the time, but I pretended to understand.
That, I think, was our limit that evening. She went to bed, smiling good-night quite prettily down the big staircase, and I and Willersley went out to smoke in the garden. My head was full of her, and I found it necessary to talk about her. So I made her a problem in sociology. “Who the deuce are these people?” I said, “and how do they get a living? They seem to have plenty of money. He strikes me as being – Willersley, what is a drysalter? I think he’s a retired drysalter.”
Willersley theorised while I thought of the woman and that provocative quality of dash she had displayed. The next day at lunch she and I met like old friends. A huge mass of private thinking during the interval had been added to our effect upon one another. We talked for a time of insignificant things.
“What do you do,” she asked rather quickly, “after lunch? Take a siesta?”
“Sometimes,” I said, and hung for a moment eye to eye.
We hadn’t a doubt of each other, but my heart was beating like a steamer propeller when it lifts out of the water.
“Do you get a view from your room?” she asked after a pause.
“It’s on the third floor, Number seventeen, near the staircase. My friend’s next door.”
She began to talk of books. She was interested in Christian Science, she said, and spoke of a book. I forget altogether what that book was called, though I remember to this day with the utmost exactness the purplish magenta of its cover. She said she would lend it to me and hesitated.
Willersley wanted to go for an expedition across the lake that afternoon, but I refused. He made some other proposals that I rejected abruptly. “I shall write in my room,” I said.
“Why not write down here?”
“I shall write in my room,” I snarled like a thwarted animal, and he looked at me curiously. “Very well,” he said; “then I’ll make some notes and think about that order of ours out under the magnolias.”
I hovered about the lounge for a time buying postcards and feverishly restless, watching the movements of the other people. Finally I went up to my room and sat down by the windows, staring out. There came a little tap at the unlocked door and in an instant, like the go of a taut bowstring, I was up and had it open.
“Here is that book,” she said, and we hesitated.
“COME IN!” I whispered, trembling from head to foot.
“You’re just a boy,” she said in a low tone.
I did not feel a bit like a lover, I felt like a burglar with the safe-door nearly opened. “Come in,” I said almost impatiently, for anyone might be in the passage, and I gripped her wrist and drew her towards me.
“What do you mean?” she answered with a faint smile on her lips, and awkward and yielding.
I shut the door behind her, still holding her with one hand, then turned upon her – she was laughing nervously – and without a word drew her to me and kissed her. And I remember that as I kissed her she made a little noise almost like the purring miaow with which a cat will greet one and her face, close to mine, became solemn and tender.
She was suddenly a different being from the discontented wife who had tapped a moment since on my door, a woman transfigured…
That evening I came down to dinner a monster of pride, for behold! I was a man. I felt myself the most wonderful and unprecedented of adventurers. It was hard to believe that any one in the world before had done as much. My mistress and I met smiling, we carried things off admirably, and it seemed to me that Willersley was the dullest old dog in the world. I wanted to give him advice. I wanted to give him derisive pokes. After dinner and coffee in the lounge I was too excited and hilarious to go to bed, I made him come with me down to the cafe under the arches by the pier, and there drank beer and talked extravagant nonsense about everything under the sun, in order not to talk about the happenings of the afternoon. All the time something shouted within me: “I am a man! I am a man!”…
“What shall we do to-morrow?” said he.
“I’m for loafing,” I said. “Let’s row in the morning and spend to-morrow afternoon just as we did to-day.”
“They say the church behind the town is worth seeing.”
“We’ll go up about sunset; that’s the best time for it. We can start about five.”
We heard music, and went further along the arcade to discover a place where girls in operatic Swiss peasant costume were singing and dancing on a creaking, protesting little stage. I eyed their generous display of pink neck and arm with the seasoned eye of a man who has lived in the world. Life was perfectly simple and easy, I felt, if one took it the right way.
Next day Willersley wanted to go on, but I delayed. Altogether I kept him back four days. Then abruptly my mood changed, and we decided to start early the following morning. I remember, though a little indistinctly, the feeling of my last talk with that woman whose surname, odd as it may seem, either I never learnt or I have forgotten. (Her christian name was Milly.) She was tired and rather low-spirited, and disposed to be sentimental, and for the first time in our intercourse I found myself liking her for the sake of her own personality. There was something kindly and generous appearing behind the veil of naive and uncontrolled sensuality she had worn. There was a curious quality of motherliness in her attitude to me that something in my nature answered and approved. She didn’t pretend to keep it up that she had yielded to my initiative. “I’ve done you no harm,” she said a little doubtfully, an odd note for a man’s victim! And, “we’ve had a good time. You have liked me, haven’t you?”
She interested me in her lonely dissatisfied life; she was childless and had no hope of children, and her husband was the only son of a rich meat salesman, very mean, a mighty smoker – “he reeks of it,” she said, “always” – and interested in nothing but golf, billiards (which he played very badly), pigeon shooting, convivial Free Masonry and Stock Exchange punting. Mostly they drifted about the Riviera. Her mother had contrived her marriage when she was eighteen. They were the first samples I ever encountered of the great multitude of functionless property owners which encumbers modern civilisation – but at the time I didn’t think much of that aspect of them…
I tell all this business as it happened without comment, because I have no comment to make. It was all strange to me, strange rather than wonderful, and, it may be, some dream of beauty died for ever in those furtive meetings; it happened to me, and I could scarcely have been more irresponsible in the matter or controlled events less if I had been suddenly pushed over a cliff into water. I swam, of course – finding myself in it. Things tested me, and I reacted, as I have told. The bloom of my innocence, if ever there had been such a thing, was gone. And here is the remarkable thing about it; at the time and for some days I was over-weeningly proud; I have never been so proud before or since; I felt I had been promoted to virility; I was unable to conceal my exultation from Willersley. It was a mood of shining shameless ungracious self-approval. As he and I went along in the cool morning sunshine by the rice fields in the throat of the Val Maggia a silence fell between us.
“You know?” I said abruptly, – “about that woman?”
Willersley did not answer for a moment. He looked at me over the corner of his spectacles.
“Things went pretty far?” he asked.
“Oh! all the way!” and I had a twinge of fatuous pride in my unpremeditated achievement.
“She came to your room?”
I nodded.
“I heard her. I heard her whispering… The whispering and rustling and so on. I was in my room yesterday… Any one might have heard you.”
I went on with my head in the air.
“You might have been caught, and that would have meant endless trouble. You might have incurred all sorts of consequences. What did you know about her?.. We have wasted four days in that hot close place. When we found that League of Social Service we were talking about,” he said with a determined eye upon me, “chastity will be first among the virtues prescribed.”
“I shall form a rival league,” I said a little damped. “I’m hanged if I give up a single desire in me until I know why.”
He lifted his chin and stared before him through his glasses at nothing. “There are some things,” he said, “that a man who means to work – to do great public services – MUST turn his back upon. I’m not discussing the rights or wrongs of this sort of thing. It happens to be the conditions we work under. It will probably always be so. If you want to experiment in that way, if you want even to discuss it, – out you go from political life. You must know that’s so… You’re a strange man, Remington, with a kind of kink in you. You’ve a sort of force. You might happen to do immense things… Only – ”
He stopped. He had said all that he had forced himself to say.
“I mean to take myself as I am,” I said. “I’m going to get experience for humanity out of all my talents – and bury nothing.”
Willersley twisted his face to its humorous expression. “I doubt if sexual proclivities,” he said drily, “come within the scope of the parable.”
I let that go for a little while. Then I broke out. “Sex!” said I, “is a fundamental thing in life. We went through all this at Trinity. I’m going to look at it, experience it, think about it – and get it square with the rest of life. Career and Politics must take their chances of that. It’s part of the general English slackness that they won’t look this in the face. Gods! what a muffled time we’re coming out of! Sex means breeding, and breeding is a necessary function in a nation. The Romans broke up upon that. The Americans fade out amidst their successes. Eugenics – ”
“THAT wasn’t Eugenics,” said Willersley.
“It was a woman,” I said after a little interval, feeling oddly that I had failed altogether to answer him, and yet had a strong dumb case against him.
