THE FOURTH GUARDIAN

Joan and Peter by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE FOURTH GUARDIAN

THE FOURTH GUARDIAN

§ 1

It was just a quarter of a year after the death of Dolly and Arthur before Oswald Sydenham heard of the event and of Arthur’s will and of the disputes of his three fellow guardians in England. For when the stonemason boatman staggered and fell and the boat turned over beneath the Arco Naturale, Oswald was already marching with a long string of porters and armed men beyond the reach of letters and telegrams into the wilderness.

He was in pursuit of a detachment of the Sudanese mutineers who, with a following of wives, children and captives, were making their way round through the wet forest country north of Lake Kioga towards the Nile province. With Sydenham was an able young subaltern, Muir, the only other white man of the party. In that net of rivers, marsh and forest they were destined to spend some feverish months. They pushed too far eastward and went too fast, and they found themselves presently not the pursuers but the pursued, cut off from their supports to the south. They built a stockade near Lake Salisbury, and were loosely besieged. For a time both sides in the conflict were regarded with an impartial unfriendliness by the naked blacks who then cultivated that primitive region, and it was only the looting and violence of the Sudanese that finally turned the scale in favour of Sydenham’s little force. Sydenham was able to attack in his turn with the help of a local levy; he took the Sudanese camp, killed twenty or thirty of the mutineers, captured most of their women and gear, and made five prisoners with very little loss to his own party. He led the attack, a tall, lean, dreadful figure with half a face that stared fiercely and half a red, tight-skinned, blind mask. Two Sudanese upon whom his one-sided visage came suddenly, yelled with dismay, dropped their rifles and started a stampede. Black men they knew and white men, but this was a horrible red and white man. A remnant of the enemy got away to the north and eluded his pursuit until it became dangerous to push on further. They were getting towards the district in which was the rebel chief Kabarega, and a union of his forces with the Sudanese fugitives would have been more than Sydenham and Muir could have tackled.

The government force turned southward again. Oswald had been suffering from fatigue and a recurrence of blackwater fever, a short, sharp spell that passed off as suddenly as it came; but it left him weak and nervously shaken; for some painful days before he gave in he ruled his force with an iron discipline that was at once irrational and terrifying, and afterwards he was carried in a litter, and Muir took over the details of command. It was only when Oswald was within two days’ journey of Luba Fort upon Lake Victoria Nyanza that his letters reached him.

§ 2

During all this time until he heard of Dolly’s death, Oswald’s heart was bitter against her and womankind. He had left England in a fever of thwarted loneliness. He did his best to “go to Hell” even as he had vowed in the first ecstasy of rage, humiliation and loss. He found himself incapable of a self-destructive depravity. He tried drinking heavily and he could never be sure that he was completely drunk; some toughness in his fibre defeated this overrated consolation. He attempted other forms of dissipation, and he could not even achieve remorse, nothing but exasperation with that fiddling pettiness of sexual misbehaviour which we call Vice. He desired a gigantic sense of desolation and black damnation, and he got only shame for a sort of childish nastiness. “If this is Sin!” cried Oswald at last, “then God help the Devil!”

“There’s nothing like Work,” said Oswald, “nothing like Work for forgetfulness. And getting hurt. And being shot at. I’ve done with this sort of thing for good and all....”

“What a fool I was to come here!...”

And he went on his way to Uganda.

The toil of his expedition kept his mind from any clear thinking about Dolly. But if he thought little he felt much. His mind stuck and raged at one intolerable thought, and could not get beyond it. Dolly had come towards him and then had broken faith with the promise in her eyes, and fled back to Arthur’s arms. And now she was with Arthur. Arthur was with her, Arthur had got her. And it was intolerably stupid of her. And yet she wasn’t stupid. There she was in that affected little white cottage with its idiotic big roof, waiting about while that fool punched copper or tenored about æsthetics. (Oswald’s objection to copper repoussé had long since passed the limits of sanity.) Always Dolly was at Arthur’s command now. Until the end of things. And she might be here beside her mate, with the flash in her eyes, with her invincible spirit, sharing danger, fever and achievement; empire building, mankind saving....

Now and then indeed his mind generalized his bitter personal disappointment with a fine air of getting beyond it. The Blantyre woman and that older woman of his first experiences who had screamed at the sight of his disfigured face, were then brought into the case to establish a universal misogyny. Women were just things of sex, child-bearers, dressed up to look like human beings. They promised companionship as the bait on the hook promises food. They were the cheap lures of that reproductive maniac, herself feminine, old Mother Nature; sham souls blind to their own worthless quality through an inordinate vanity and self-importance. Ruthless they were in their distribution of disappointment. Sterile themselves, life nested in them. They were the crowning torment in the Martyrdom of Man.

Thus Oswald in the moments when thought overtook him. And when it came to any dispute about women among the men, and particularly to the disposal of the women after the defeat of the mutineers near Lake Salisbury, it suited his humour to treat them as chattels and to note how ready they were to be treated as chattels, how easy in the transfer of their affections and services from their defeated masters to their new owners. This, he said, was the natural way with women. In Europe life was artificial; women were out of hand; we were making an inferior into a superior as the Egyptian made a god of the cat. Like cat worship it was a phase in development that would pass in its turn.

The camp at which his letters met him was in the Busoga country, and all day long the expedition had been tramping between high banks of big-leaved plants, blue flowering salvias, dracenas and the like, and under huge flowering trees. Captain Wilkinson from Luba Fort had sent runners and porters to meet them, and at the halting-place, an open space near the banana fields of a village, they found tea already set for them. Oswald was ill and tired, and Muir took over the bothers of supervision while Oswald sat in a deck chair, drank tea, and opened his letters. The first that came to hand was from Sycamore, the Stubland solicitor. Its news astonished him.

Dear Sir, wrote Mr. Sycamore.

I regret to have to inform you of the death of my two clients, your friends Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Stubland. They were drowned by a boat accident at Capri on the third of this month, and they probably died within a few minutes of each other. They had been in Italy upon a walking tour together. There were no witnesses of the accident—the boatman was drowned with them—and the presumption in such cases is that the husband survived the wife. This is important because by the will of Mrs. Stubland you are nominated as the sole guardian both of the son and the adopted daughter, while by the will of Mr. Stubland you are one of four such guardians. In all other respects the wills are in identical terms....

At this point Oswald ceased to read.

He was realizing that these words meant that Dolly was dead.

§ 3

Oswald felt very little grief at the first instant of this realization. We grieve acutely for what we have lost, whether it be a reality or a dream, but Dolly had become for Oswald neither a possession nor a hope. In his mind she was established as an intense quarrel. Whatever he had to learn about her further had necessarily to begin in terms of that. The first blow of this news made him furious. He could not think of any act or happening of Dolly’s except in terms of it being aimed at him. And he was irrationally angry with her for dying in such a way. That she had gone back to Arthur and resumed his embraces was, he felt, bad enough; but that she should start out to travel with Arthur alone, to walk by Arthur’s side exactly as Oswald had desired her to walk by his side—he had dreamt of her radiant companionship, it had seemed within his grasp—and at last to get drowned with Arthur, that was the thing to strike him first. He did not read the rest of the letter attentively. He threw it down on the folding table before him and hit it with his fist, and gave his soul up to a storm of rage and jealousy.

“To let that fool drown her!” he cried. “She’d do anything for him....

“And I might go to Hell!...

“Oh, damn all women!...”

It was not a pretty way of taking this blow. But such are the instinctive emotions of the thwarted male. His first reception of the news of Dolly’s death was to curse her and all her sex....

And then suddenly he had a gleam of imagination and saw Dolly white and wet and pitiful. Without any intermediate stage his mind leapt straight from storming anger to that....

For a time he stared at that vision—reproached and stunned....

Something that had darkened his thoughts was dispelled. His mind was illuminated by understanding. He saw Dolly again very clearly as she had talked to him in the garden. It was as if he had never seen her before. For the first time he realized her indecision. He understood now why it was she had snatched herself back from him and taken what she knew would be an irrevocable step, and he knew now that it was his own jealous pride that had made that step irrevocable. The Dolly who had told him of that decision next morning was a Dolly already half penitent and altogether dismayed. And if indeed he had loved her better than his pride, even then he might have held on still and won her. He remembered how she had winced when she made her hinting confession to him. No proud, cold-hearted woman had she been when she had whispered, “Oswald, now you must certainly go.”

It was as plain as daylight, and never before had he seen it plain.

He had left her, weak thing that she was, because she was weak, for this fellow to waste and drown. And it was over now and irrevocable.

“Men and women, poor fools together,” he said. “Poor fools. Poor fools,” and then at the thought of Dolly, broken and shrinking, ashamed of the thing she had done, at the thought of the insults he had slashed at her, knowing how much she was ashamed and thinking nevertheless only of his own indignity, and at the thought of how all this was now stilled forever in death, an overwhelming sense of the pitifulness of human pride and hatred, passion and desire came upon him. How we hated! how we hurt one another! and how fate mocked all our spites and hopes! God sold us a bargain in life. Dolly was sold. Arthur the golden-crested victor was sold. He himself was sold. The story had ended in this pitiless smacking of every one of the three poor tiresome bits of self-assertion who had acted in it. It was a joke, really, just a joke. He began to laugh as a dog barks, and then burst into bitter weeping....

He wept noisily for a time. He blubbered with his elbows on the table.

His Swahili attendant watched him with an undiminished respect, for Africa weeps and laughs freely and knows well that great chiefs also may weep.

Presently his tears gave out; he became very still and controlled, feeling as if in all his life he would never weep again.

He took up Mr. Sycamore’s letter and went on reading it.

“In all other respects the wills are in identical terms,” the letter ran. “In both I am appointed sole executor, a confidence I appreciate as a tribute to my lifelong friendship with Mr. Stubland and his parents. The other guardians are Miss Phyllis and Miss Phœbe Stubland and your aunt-in-law, Lady Charlotte Sydenham.”

“Good heavens!” cried Oswald wearily, as one hears a hopelessly weak jest. “But why?”

“I do not know if you will remember me, but I have had the pleasure of meeting you on one or two occasions, notably after your admirable paper read to the Royal Geographical Society. This fact and the opinion our chance meetings have enabled me to form of you, emboldens me to add something here that I should not I think have stated to a perfect stranger, and that is my impression that Mr. Stubland was particularly anxious that you should become a guardian under his will. I knew Mr. Stubland from quite a little boy; his character was a curious one, there was a streak of distrust and secretiveness in it, due I think to a Keltic strain that came in from his mother’s side. He altered his will a couple of days before he started for Italy, and from his manner and from the fact that Mrs. Stubland’s will was not also altered, I conclude that he did so without consulting her. He did so because for some reason he had taken it into his head that you would not act, and he did so for no other reason that I can fathom. Otherwise he would have left the former will alone. Under the circumstances I feel bound to tell you this because it may materially affect your decision to undertake this responsibility. I think it will be greatly to the advantage of the children if you do. I may add that I know the two Miss Stublands as well as I knew their brother, and that I have a certain knowledge of Lady Charlotte, having been consulted on one occasion by a client in relation to her. The Misses Stubland were taking care of The Ingle-Nook and children—there is a trustworthy nurse—in the absence of the parents up to the time of the parents’ decease, and it will be easy to prolong this convenient arrangement for the present. The children are still of tender age and for the next few years they could scarcely be better off. I trust that in the children’s interest you will see your way to accept this duty to your friend. My hope is enhanced by the thought hat so I may be able later to meet again a man for whose courage and abilities and achievements I have a very great admiration indeed.

I am, dear Sir,Very truly yours,George Sycamore.”

“Yes,” said Oswald, “but I can’t, you know.”

He turned over Sycamore’s letter again, and it seemed no longer a jest and an insult that Arthur had made him Peter’s guardian. Sycamore’s phrases did somehow convey the hesitating Arthur, penitent of the advantages that had restored him Dolly and still fatuously confident of Oswald’s good faith.

“But I can’t do it, my man,” said Oswald. “It’s too much for human nature. Your own people must see to your own breed.”

He sat quite still for a long time thinking of another child that now could never be born.

“Why didn’t I stick to her?” he whispered. “Why didn’t I hold out for her?”

He took up Sycamore’s letter again.

“But why the devil did he shove in old Charlotte?” he exclaimed. “The man was no better than an idiot. And underhand at that.”

His eye went to a pile of still unopened letters. “Ah! here we are!” he said, selecting one in a bulky stone-grey envelope.

He opened it and extracted a number of sheets of stone-grey paper covered with a vast, loose handwriting, for which previous experience had given Oswald a strong distaste.

My dear Nephew, her letter began.

I suppose you have already heard the unhappy end of that Stubland marriage. I have always said that it was bound to end in a tragedy....

“Oh Lord!” said Oswald, and pitched the letter aside and fell into deep thought....

He became aware of Muir standing and staring down at him. One of the boys must have gone off to Muir and told him of Oswald’s emotion.

“Hullo,” said Muir. “All right?”

“I’ve been crying,” said Oswald drily. “I’ve had bad news. This fever leaves one rotten.”

“Old Wilkinson has sent us up a bottle of champagne,” said Muir. “He’s thought of everything. The cook’s got curry powder again and there’s a basket of fish. We shall dine tonight. It’s what you want.”

“Perhaps it is,” said Oswald.

§ 4

After dinner, the best dinner they had had for many weeks, a dinner beautifully suggestive to a sick man of getting back once more to a world in which there is enough and comfort, Oswald’s tongue was loosened and he told his story. He was not usually a communicative man but this was a brimming occasion; Muir he knew for a model of discretion, Muir had been his colleague, his nurse and his intimate friend to the exclusion of all others, for three eventful months, and Muir had already made his confidences. So Oswald told about Dolly and how his scar and his scruples had come between them, and what he thought and felt about Arthur, and so to much experimental wisdom about love and the bitterness of life. He mentioned the children, and presently Muir, who had the firm conscientiousness of the Scotch, brought him back to Peter.

“He was a decent little chap,” said Oswald. “He was tremendously like Dolly.”

“And not like that other man?” said Muir sympathetically.

“No. Not a bit.”

“I’m thinking you ought to stand by him for all you’re worth.”

Oswald thought.

“I will,” he said....

The next morning life did not seem nearly so rounded and kindly as it had been after his emotional storm of the evening before; he was angry and jealous about Dolly and Arthur again, and again disposed to regard his guardianship as an imposition, but he felt he had given his word overnight 111and that he was bound now to stand by Joan and Peter as well as he could. Moreover neither Lady Charlotte nor the sisters Stubland were really, he thought, people to whom children should be entrusted. His party reached Luba’s the next evening, and he at once arranged to send a cable to Mr. Sycamore accepting his responsibility and adding: “Prefer children should go on as much as possible mother’s ideas until my return.”

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