No. 9. MR. H. G. WELLS

I

I do not quite know how to begin.... Ever since I left England and settled here in this quiet Putumayo valley I have been wondering and wondering.... I want to put everything down quite frankly so that you who come after me shall understand. It is very peaceful here in the forest, and as my mind goes back to that roaring old England, with its strange welter of aspirations and basenesses, that little old England, so far away now, a small green jewel in the great sea, I break into a smile of tender tolerance. Here, as the immemorial procession of day and night, of summer and winter, sweeps over the earth, amid the vast serenities of primeval nature, it all seems so very far away, so small, so queerly inconsequent.... The men who made me, the men who broke me, the women I loved, the sprawling towns, the confused effort, and that ungainly lop-sided structure of our twentieth-century civilization, with its strange welter of sex....

II

And then it was that the Hon. Astarte Cholmondeley came into my life. I remember as clearly as though it were yesterday—and it is now over thirty years ago—the moment of our meeting. It was at one of those enormous futile receptions that political hostesses give at the beginning of the Session, assemblies of two or three thousand men and women, minor politicians, organizers, journalists, all clamorous for champagne and burning for nods of recognition from the great men of the Party. It was a fine night, almost oppressively warm, and I had walked across the Park from Hill Street, carrying my opera-hat in my hand. There was a dull uniform roar from the distant traffic; the tops of the trees faintly swished in the light wind, the lights along the lake shone very quietly, and above were the vast serenities of the sky, powdered with stars. On benches in the shadows lurked pairs of quiet lovers, and the stars looked down upon them as they had upon lovers in Nineveh and Babylon. As I stepped out into the rush of Pall Mall, with its stream of swift motors, I thought, I remember, of my career....

III

The crush was vulgar and intolerable.

I had spent an hour passing dejected remarks to the other young men, also there out of duty and as bored as I was myself. Then suddenly she entered ... a slender slip of a thing, brown-haired and brown-eyed, leaning flower-like on the arm of her elephantine mother, the Dowager....

IV

“Dearest,” she wrote me next day, “did you sleep last night? I did not sleep a wink. All night long I lay dazzled and overwhelmed by this wonderful thing that has come to us. And then this morning, when God’s great dawn slowly lifted over the westward hills, I got up, did my hair (oh my beautiful, beautiful hair, now all yours, my own Man, all yours), and sat down to write this, my first letter, to you. I am sitting at the little window of my room in the Lion Tower. The breath of the roses rises in the fresh morning air; and out beyond the park, where the deer are placidly grazing, the slanting sun glints exquisitely on spacious woodland and rolling down, mile after mile.... Far away, against the blue of the horizon, there is a little pointing church spire, and somehow it reminds me of you.... Oh, my lover, I am going to lay bare to you the inmost shrine of my heart. You must be patient with me, very patient; for do we not belong to each other? We must live openly we two, we who are the apostles of new freedoms, of new realizations, of a second birth for this dear foolish old world of ours.” Thus she wrote, and there was more, much more, too sacredly intimate to be set down here, but breathing in every line the essence of her adorable self....

V

And then it was that Mary Browne came into my life. I had known her years ago when I was at college; I had thought her a meek and rather dull little girl, as insignificant as the rest of her family. But now there was about her a certain quality of graciousness, very difficult to define, but very unescapable when it is present, that gave to her mouse-grey hair and rather weak blue eyes a beauty very rare and very subtle. She had spent, she told me, two years in the East End at some social work or other....

VI

And then I met Cecilia Scroop....

VII

And so the end came. In those last days I worked more feverishly than ever, writing my book, attending committees, speaking on platforms throughout the country. I was the chief speaker during that by-election of Brooks’s at Manchester, which I still believe might have been the germ of a new social order, of coherences and approximations, of differentiations and realizations beyond the imagining of the men of our time, but to be very clearly and very palpably apprehended by that future race for whom we, in a blind and groping way, are living and building.... And then the blow fell....

It was a Friday afternoon. The House had risen early after throwing out some absurd Bill that that ass Biffin had brought in; I think it was something about Bee Disease. I had been one of the tellers for the Noes, and at three o’clock I walked out into Palace Yard and along the chalky stone cloister that leads to the private tunnel through which members enter the Underground Railway station. I had promised to meet Astarte at four at the foot of the Scenic Railway (this was before the time when little Higgins revolutionized the amusement business with his actino-gyroscopes) in the Earl’s Court Exhibition. Since her marriage with Binger communication had been increasingly difficult for us. All her letters were opened, and Binger had eavesdroppers at work in the telephone exchanges. Her chauffeur, happily, played his master false, and she was usually able to keep appointments when she had made them; and for some months we had arranged our meetings by little cryptic notices in the agony column of the Morning Post. We had thought ourselves safe. But she must have dropped a casual word to somebody; some fool had given us away; and when I got to Earl’s Court I found that Astarte was there, but that Mary and Cecilia were there as well....

VIII

I remonstrated with them. I knew it was hopeless, and my heart sank; but I did my best. Greatest agony of all it was to know that these women in whom I had trusted, whom I had looked to as pioneers, as auguries of what was to be and what still will be, were, when the crisis came, still shackled and bound by the little petty jealousies of the old system. With set, white faces they glowered upon me (it was raining a little I remember, and the ground at our feet was muddy and covered with stained and trampled paper) as I spoke, softly and passionately, of muddle and waste, of the sordid and furtive shames and reticences that man has brought with him from the ancestral past, that he must shed before we build for our gods the diviner temples that might be.... Night came over ... and then, as my voice failed, a tall man stepped out from behind a hoarding. It was Montacute, the Prime Minister. “I am very sorry for you,” he said simply, “but I am afraid, Mr. Bilgewater, we shall have to ask you to resign.” He seemed to hesitate a moment; then, as though half ashamed, he held out his hand and looked me in the eyes.... I had known him since I was a boy at school and he a young man, a fastidious and kindly young man who had seemed almost too delicate for the rough work of politics. He had always taken a friendly interest in me even when I was bitterly fighting him.... “Good-bye,” he said. My voice was husky as I returned his farewell.

IX

I went back to my chambers and told my man to pack a single portmanteau. There were just three hours before the boat-train. Before I left I wrote ten letters....