STUBLANDS IN COUNCIL

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

STUBLANDS IN COUNCIL

§ 1

But although Dolly did not pursue her husband with any sustained criticism, he seemed now to feel always that her attitude was critical and needed an answer. The feeling made him something of a thinker and something of a talker. Sometimes the thinker was uppermost, and then he would sit silent and rather in profile (his profile, it has already been stated, was a good one, and much enhanced by a romantic bang of warm golden hair that hung down over one eye), very picturesque in his beautiful blue linen blouse, listening to whatever was said; and sometimes he would turn upon the company and talk with a sort of experimental dogmatism, as is the way with men a little insecure in their convictions, but quite good talk. He would talk of education, and work, and Peter, and of love and beauty, and the finer purposes of life, and things like that.

A lot of talk came the way of Peter’s father.

Along the Limpsfield ridge and away east and west and north, there was a scattered community of congenial intellectuals. It spread along the ridge beyond Dorking, and resumed again at Haslemere and Hindhead, where Grant Allen and Richard Le Gallienne were established. They were mostly people of the same detached and independent class as the Stublands; they were the children of careful people who had created considerable businesses, or the children of the more successful of middle Victorian celebrities, or dons, or writers themselves, or they came from Hampstead, which was in those days a nest of considerable people’s children, inheritors of reputations and writers of memoirs, an hour’s ’bus drive from London and outside the cab radius. A thin flavour of Hampstead spread out, indeed, over all Surrey. Some of these newcomers lived in old adapted cottages; some of them had built little houses after the fashion of the Stublands; some had got into the real old houses that already existed. There was much Sunday walking and “dropping in” and long evenings and suppers. Safety bicycles were coming into use and greatly increasing intercourse. And there was a coming and going of Stubland aunts and uncles and of Sydenhams and Dolly’s “people.” Nearly all were youngish folk; it was a new generation and a new sort of population for the countryside. They were dotted among the farms and the estates and preserves and “places” of the old county family pattern. The “county” wondered a little at them, kept busy with horse and dog and gun, and, except for an occasional stiff call, left them alone. The church lamented their neglected Sabbaths. The doctors were not unfriendly.

One of the frequent visitors, indeed, at The Ingle-Nook—that was the name of Peter’s birthplace—was Doctor Fremisson, the local general practitioner. He was a man, he said, who liked “Ideas.” The aborigines lacked Ideas, it seemed; but Stubland was a continual feast of them. The doctor’s diagnosis of the difference between these new English and the older English of the country rested entirely on the presence or absence of Ideas. But there he was wrong. The established people were people of fixed ideas; the immigrants had abandoned fixed ideas for discussion. So far from their having no ideas, those occasional callers who came dropping in so soon as the Stublands were settled in The Ingle-Nook before Peter was born, struck the Stublands as having ideas like monstrous and insurmountable cliffs. To fling your own ideas at them was like trying to lob stones into Zermatt from Macugnana.

One day when Mrs. Darcy, old Lady Darcy’s daughter-in-law, had driven over, some devil prompted Arthur to shock her. He talked his extremest Fabianism. He would have the government control all railways, land, natural products; nobody should have a wage of less than two pounds a week; the whole country should be administered for the universal benefit; everybody should be educated.

“I’m sure the dear old Queen does all she can,” said Mrs. Darcy.

“I’m a democratic republican,” said Arthur.

He might as well have called himself a Christadelphian for any idea he conveyed.

Presently, seized by a gust of unreasonable irritation, he went out of the room.

“Mr. Stubland talks,” said Mrs. Darcy; “really——” She paused. She hesitated. She spoke with a little disarming titter lest what she said should seem too dreadful. “He says such things. I really believe he’s more than half a Liberal. There! You mustn’t mind what I say, Mrs. Stubland....”

Dolly, by virtue of her vicarage training, understood these people better than Peter’s father. She had read herself out of the great Anglican culture, but she remembered things from the inside. She was still in close touch with numerous relations who were quite completely inside. Before the little green gate had clicked behind their departing backs, Arthur would protest to her and heaven that these visitors were impossible, that such visitors could not be, they were phantoms or bad practical jokes, undergraduates dressed up to pull his leg.

“They know nothing,” he said.

“They know all sorts of things you don’t know,” she corrected.

“What do they know? There isn’t a topic one can start on which they are not just blank.”

“You start the wrong topics. They can tell you all sorts of things about the dear Queen’s grandchildren. They know things about horses. And about regiments and barracks. Tell me, Arthur, how is the charming young Prince of Bulgaria, who is just getting married, related to the late Prince Consort.”

“Damn their Royal Marriages!”

“If you say that, then they have an equal right to say, ‘damn your Wildes and Beardsleys and William Morrises and Swinburnes.’”

“They read nothing.”

“They read Mrs. Henry Wood. They read lots of authors you have never heard of, nice authors. They read so many of them that for the most part they forget their names. The bold ones read Ouida—who isn’t half bad. They read every scrap they can find about the marriage of the Princess Marie to the Crown Prince of Roumania. Mrs. Bagshot-Fawcett talked about it yesterday. It seems he’s really a rarer and better sort of Hohenzollern than the young German Emperor, our sailor grandson that is. She isn’t very clear about it, but she seems to think that the Prince of Hohenzollern ought rightfully to be German Emperor.”

“Oh, what rot!”

“But perhaps she’s right. How do you know? I don’t. She takes an almost voluptuous delight in the two marriage ceremonies. You know, I suppose, dear, that there were two ceremonies, a Protestant one and a Catholic one, because the Roumanian Hohenzollerns are Catholic Hohenzollerns. Of course, the dear princess would become a Catholic——”

“Oh, don’t!” cried Peter’s father; “don’t!”

“I had to listen to three-quarters of an hour of it yesterday. Such a happy and convenient occurrence, the princess’s conversion, but—archly—of course, my dear, I suppose there’s sometimes just a little persuasion in these cases.”

“Dolly, you go too far!”

“But that isn’t, of course, the great interest just at present. The great interest just at present is George and May. You know they’re going to be married.”

Arthur lifted a protesting profile. “My dear! Who is May?” he tenored.

“Affected ignorance! She is the Princess May who was engaged to the late Duke of Clarence, the Princess Mary of Teck. And now he’s dead, she’s going to marry the Duke of York. Surely you understand about that. He is your Future Sovereign. Mrs. Bagshot-Fawcett gets positively lush about him. It was George she always lurved, Mrs. Bagshot-Fawcett says, but she accepted his brother for Reasons of State. So after all it’s rather nice and romantic that the elder brother——”

Arthur roared and tore his hair and walked up and down the low room. “What are these people to me?” he shouted. “What are these people to me?”

“But there is twenty times as much about that sort of thing in the papers as there is about our sort of things.”

There was no disputing it.

“We’re in a foreign country,” cried Arthur, going off at a tangent. “We’re in a foreign country. We English are a subject people.... Talk of Home Rule for Ireland!... Why are there no English Nationalists? One of these days I will hoist the cross of St. George outside this cottage. But I doubt if any one on this countryside will know it for the English flag.”

§ 2

Whatever is seems right, and it is only now, after five and twenty years of change, that we do begin to see as a remarkable thing the detached life that great masses of the English were leading beneath the canopy of the Hanoverian monarchy. For in those days the court thought in German; Teutonized Anglicans, sentimental, materialistic and resolutely “loyal,” dominated society; Gladstone was notoriously disliked by them for his anti-German policy and his Irish and Russian sympathies, and the old Queen’s selection of bishops guided feeling in the way it ought to go. But there was a leakage none the less. More and more people were drifting out of relationship to church and state, exactly as Peter’s parents had drifted out. The Court dominated, but it did not dominate intelligently; it controlled the church to no effect, its influence upon universities and schools and art and literature was merely deadening; it responded to flattery but it failed to direct; it was the court of an alien-spirited old lady, making much of the pathos of her widowhood and trading still on the gallantry and generosity that had welcomed her as a “girl queen.” The real England separated itself more and more from that superficial England of the genteel that looked to Osborne and Balmoral. To the real England, dissentient England, court taste was a joke, court art was a scandal; of English literature and science notoriously the court knew nothing. In the huge pacific industrial individualism of Great Britain it did not seem a serious matter that the army and navy and the Indian administration were orientated to the court. Peter’s parents and the large class of detached people to which they belonged, were out of politics, out of the system, scornful, or facetious and aloof. Just as they were out of religion. These things did not concern them.

The great form of the empire contained these indifferents, the great roof of church and state hung over them. Royal visits, diplomatic exchanges and the like passed to and fro, alien, uninteresting proceedings; Heligoland was given to the young Emperor William the Second by Lord Salisbury, the old Queen’s favourite prime minister, English politicians jostled the French in Africa as roughly as possible to “larn them to be” republicans, and resisted the Home Rule aspirations and the ill-concealed republicanism of the “Keltic fringe”; one’s Anglican neighbours of the “ruling class” went off to rule India and the empire with manners that would have maddened Job; they stood for Parliament and played the game of politics upon factitious issues. Sir Charles Dilke, the last of the English Republicans, and Charles Stewart Parnell, the uncrowned King of Ireland, had both been extinguished by opportune divorce cases. (Liberal opinion, it was felt, must choose between the private and the public life. You could not have it both ways.) It did not seem to be a state of affairs to make a fuss about. The general life went on comfortably enough. We built our pretty rough-cast houses, taught Shirley poppies to spring artlessly between the paving-stones in our garden paths, begot the happy children who were to grow up under that roof of a dynastic system that was never going to fall in. (Because it never had fallen in.)

Never before had nurseries been so pretty as they were in that glowing pause at the end of the nineteenth century.

Peter’s nursery was a perfect room in which to hatch the soul of a little boy. Its walls were done in a warm cream-coloured paint, and upon them Peter’s father had put the most lovely pattern of trotting and jumping horses and dancing cats and dogs and leaping lambs, a carnival of beasts. He had copied these figures from books, enlarging them as he did so; he had cut them out in paper, stuck them on the wall, and then flicked bright blue paint at them until they were all outlined in a penumbra of stippled blue. Then he unpinned the paper and took it on to another part of the wall and so made his pattern. There was a big brass fireguard in Peter’s nursery that hooked on to the jambs of the fireplace, and all the tables had smoothly rounded corners against the days when Peter would run about. The floor was of cork carpet on which Peter would put his toys, and there was a crimson hearthrug on which Peter was destined to crawl. And a number of stuffed dogs and elephants, whose bead eyes had been carefully removed by Dolly and replaced with eyes of black cloth that Peter would be less likely to worry off and swallow, awaited his maturing clutch. (But there were no Teddy Bears yet; Teddy Bears had still to come into the world. America had still to discover the charm of its Teddy.) There were scales in Peter’s nursery to weigh Peter every week, and tables to show how much he ought to weigh and when one should begin to feel anxious. There was nothing casual about the early years of Peter.

Peter began well, a remarkably fine child, Dr. Fremisson said, of nine pounds. Although he was born in warm summer weather we never went back upon that. He favoured his mother perhaps more than an impartial child should, but that was at any rate a source of satisfaction to Cousin Oswald (of the artificial eye).

Cousin Oswald was doing his best to behave nicely and persuade himself that all this show had been got up by Dolly and was Dolly’s show—and that Arthur just happened to be about.

“Look at him,” said Cousin Oswald as Peter regarded the world with unwinking intelligence from behind an appreciated bottle; “the Luck of him. He’s the Heir of the Ages. Look at this room and this house and every one about him.”

Dolly remarked foolishly that Peter was a “nittle darum. ’E dizzerves-i-tall. Nevything.”

“The very sunshine on the wall looks as though it had been got for him specially,” said Cousin Oswald.

“It was got for him specially,” said Dolly, with a light of amusement in her eyes that reminded him of former times.

This visit was a great occasion. It was the first time Cousin Oswald had seen either Arthur or Peter. Almost directly after he had learnt about Dolly’s engagement and jerked out his congratulations, he had cut short his holiday in England and gone back to Central Africa. Now he was in England again, looked baked and hard, and his hair, which had always been stubby, more stubby than ever. The scarred half of him had lost its harsh redness and become brown. He was staying with his aunt, Dolly’s second cousin by marriage, Lady Charlotte Sydenham, not ten miles away towards Tonbridge, and he took to bicycling over to The Ingle-Nook every other day or so and gossiping.

“These bicycles,” he said, “are most useful things. Wonderful things. As soon as they get cheap—bound to get cheap—they will play a wonderful part in Central Africa.”

“But there are no roads in Central Africa!” said Arthur.

“Better. Foot tracks padded by bare feet for generations. You could ride for hundreds of miles without dismounting....”

“Compared with our little black babies,” said Cousin Oswald, “Peter seems immobile. He’s like a baby on a lotus flower meditating existence. Those others are like young black indiarubber kittens—all acrawl. But then they’ve got to look sharp and run for themselves as soon as possible, and he hasn’t.... Things happen there.”

“I wonder,” said Arthur in his lifting tenor, “how far all this opening up of Africa to civilization and gin and Bibles is justifiable.”

The one living eye glared at him. “It isn’t exactly like that,” said Oswald stiffly, and offered no occasion for further controversy at the moment.

The conversation hung for a little while. Dolly wanted to say to her cousin: “He isn’t thinking of you. It’s just his way of generalizing about things....”

“Anyhow this young man has a tremendous future,” said Oswald, going back to the original topic. “Think of what lies before him. Never has the world been so safe and settled—most of it that is—as it is now. I suppose really the world’s hardly begun to touch education. In this house everything seems educational—pictures, toys, everything. When one sees how small niggers can be moulded and changed even in a missionary school, it makes one think. I wish I knew more about education. I lie awake at nights thinking of the man I might be, if I knew all I don’t know, and of all I could do if I did. And it’s the same with others. Every one who seems worth anything seems regretting his education wasn’t better. Hitherto of course there’s always been wars, interruptions, religious rows; the world’s been confused and poor, a thorough muddle; there’s never been a real planned education for people. Just scraps and hints. But we’re changing all that. Here’s a big safe world at last. No wars in Europe since ’71 and no likelihood in our time of any more big wars. Things settle down. And he comes in for it all.”

“I hope all this settling down won’t make the world too monotonous,” said Arthur.

“You artists and writers have got to see to that. No, I don’t see it getting monotonous. There’s always differences of climate and colour. Temperament. All sorts of differences.”

“And Nature,” said Arthur profoundly. “Old Mother Nature.”

“Have you christened Peter yet?” Oswald asked abruptly.

“He’s not going to be christened,” said Dolly. “Not until he asks to be. We’ve just registered him. He’s a registered baby.”

“So he won’t have two godfathers and a godmother to be damned for him.”

“We’ve weighed the risk,” said Arthur.

“He might have a godfather just—pour rire,” said Oswald.

“That’s different,” Dolly encouraged promptly. “We must get him one.”

“I’d like to be Peter’s godfather,” said Oswald.

“I will deny him no advantage,” said Arthur. “The ceremony—— The ceremony shall be a simple one. Godfather, Peter; Peter, godfather. Peter, my son, salute your godfather.”

Oswald seemed trying to remember a formula. “I promise and vow three things in his name; first a beautiful mug; secondly that he shall be duly instructed in chemistry, biology, mathematics, the French and German tongues and all that sort of thing; and thirdly, that—what is thirdly? That he shall renounce the devil and all his works. But there isn’t a devil nowadays.”

Peter having consumed his bottle to the dregs and dreamt over it for a space, now thrust it from him and turning towards Oswald, regurgitated—but within the limits of nursery good manners. Then he smiled a toothless, slightly derisive smile.

“Intelligent ’e is!” crooned Dolly. “Unstand evlyfling ’e does....”

§ 3

This conversation about Peter’s future, once it had been started, rambled on for the next three weeks, and then Oswald very abruptly saw fit to be called away to Africa again....

Various interlocutors dropped in while that talk was in progress. Arthur felt his way to his real opinions through a series of experimental dogmas.

Arthur’s disposition was towards an extreme Rousseauism. It is the tendency of the interrogative class in all settled communities. He thought that a boy or girl ought to run wild until twelve and not be bothered by lessons, ought to eat little else but fruit and nuts, go bareheaded and barefooted. Why not? Oswald’s disposition would have been to oppose Arthur anyhow, but against these views all his circle of ideas fought by necessity. If Arthur was Ruskinite and Morrisite, Oswald was as completely Huxleyite. If Arthur thought the world perishing for need of Art and Nature, Oswald stood as strongly for the saving power of Science. In this matter of bare feet——

“There’s thorns, pins, snakes, tetanus,” reflected Oswald.

“The foot hardens.”

“Only the sole,” said Oswald. “And not enough.”

“Shielded from all the corruptions of town and society,” said Arthur presently.

“There’s no such corruptor as that old Mother Nature of yours. You daren’t leave that bottle of milk to her for half an hour but what she turns it sour or poisons it with one of her beastly germs.”

“I never approved of the bottle,” said Arthur, bringing a flash of hot resentment into Dolly’s eyes....

Oswald regretted his illustration.

“Old Mother Nature is a half-wit,” he said. “She’s distraught. You overrate the jade. She’s thinking of everything at once. All her affairs got into a hopeless mess from the very start. Most of her world is desert with water running to waste. A tropical forest is three-quarters death and decay, and what is alive is either murdering or being murdered. It’s only when you come to artificial things, such as a ploughed field, for example, that you get space and health and every blade doing its best.”

“I don’t call a ploughed field an artificial thing,” said Arthur.

“But it is,” said Oswald.

Dr. Fremisson was dragged into this dispute. “A ploughed field,” he maintained, “is part of the natural life of man.”

“Like boots and reading.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Dr. Fremisson warily. He had the usual general practitioner’s belief that any education whatever is a terrible strain on the young, and he was quite on the side of Rousseau and Arthur in that matter. Moreover, as a result of his professional endeavours he had been forced to a belief that Nature’s remedies are the best.

“I’d like to know just what does belong to the natural life of man and what is artificial,” said Oswald. “If a ploughed field belongs then a plough belongs. And if a plough belongs a foundry belongs—and a coal mine. And you wouldn’t plough in bare feet—not in those Weald Clays down there? You want good stout boots for those. And you’d let your ploughman read at least a calendar? Boots and books come in, you see.”

“You’re a perfect lawyer, Mr. Sydenham,” said the doctor, and pretended the discussion had become fanciful....

“But you’ll not leave him to go unlettered until he is half grown up!” said Oswald to Dolly in real distress. “It’s so easy to teach ’em to read early and so hard later. I remember my little brother....”

“I am the mother and I muth,” said Dolly. “When Peter displays the slightest interest in the alphabet, the alphabet it shall be.”

Oswald felt reassured. He had a curious confidence that Dolly could be trusted to protect his godchild.

§ 4

One day Aunt Phyllis and Aunt Phœbe came down.

Both sisters participated in the Stubland break back to colour, but while Aunt Phyllis was a wit and her hats a spree Aunt Phœbe was fantastically serious and her hats went beyond a joke. They got their stuffs apparently from the shop of William Morris and Co., they had their dresses built upon Pre-Raphaelite lines, they did their hair plainly and simply but very carelessly, and their hats were noble brimmers or extravagant toques. Their profiles were as fine almost as Arthur’s, a type of profile not so suitable for young women as for golden youth. They were bright-eyed and a little convulsive in their movements. Beneath these extravagances and a certain conversational wildness they lived nervously austere lives. They were greatly delighted with Peter, but they did not know what to do with him. Phyllis held him rather better than Phœbe, but Phœbe with her chatelaine amused him rather more than Phyllis.

“How happy a tinker’s baby must be,” said Aunt Phœbe, rattling her trinkets: “Or a tin-smith’s.”

“I begin to see some use in a Hindoo woman’s bangles,” said Aunt Phyllis, “or in that clatter machine of yours, Phœbe. Every young mother should rattle. Make a note of it, Phœbe dear, for your book....”

“Whatever you do with him, Dolly,” said Aunt Phœbe, “teach him anyhow to respect women and treat them as his equals. From the Very First.”

“Meaning votes,” said Aunt Phyllis. “Didums want give um’s mummy a Vote den.”

“Never let him touch butcher’s meat in any shape or form,” said Aunt Phœbe. “Once a human child tastes blood the mischief is done.”

“Avoid patriotic songs and symbols,” prompted Aunt Phyllis, who had heard these ideas already in the train coming down.

“And never buy him toy soldiers, drums, guns, trumpets. These things soak deeper into the mind than people suppose. They make wickedness domestic.... Surround him with beautiful things. Accustom him——”

She winced that Arthur should hear her, but she spoke as one having a duty to perform.

“Accustom him to the nude, Dolly, from his early years. Associate it with innocent amusements. Retrieve the fall. Never let him wear a hat upon his head nor boots upon his feet. As soon tie him up into a papoose. As soon tight-lace. A child’s first years should be one long dream of loveliness and spontaneous activity.”

But at this point Peter betrayed signs that he found his aunts overstimulating. He released his grip upon the thimble-case of the chatelaine. His face puckered, ridges and waves and puckers of pink fatness ran distractedly over it, and he threw his head back and opened a large square toothless mouth.

“Mary,” cried Dolly, and a comfortable presence that had been hovering mistrustfully outside the door ever since the aunts appeared, entered with alacrity and bore Peter protectingly away.

“He must be almost entirely lungs,” said Aunt Phœbe, when her voice could be heard through the receding bawl. “Other internal organs no doubt develop later.”

“Come out to the stone table under the roses,” said Dolly. “We argue there about Peter’s upbringing almost every afternoon.”

“Argue, I grant you,” said Aunt Phœbe, following her hostess and dangling her chatelaine from one hand as if to illustrate her remarks, “but argue rightly.”

When Oswald came over in the afternoon he was disposed to regard the two aunts as serious reinforcements to Arthur’s educational heresies. Phyllis and Phœbe were a little inclined to be shy with him as a strange man, and he and Arthur did most of the talking, but they made their positions plain by occasional interpolations. Arthur, supported by their presence, was all for letting Peter grow up a wild untrammelled child of nature. Oswald became genuinely distressed.

“But education,” he protested, “is as natural to a human being as nests to birds.”

“Then why force it?” said Phyllis with dexterity.

“Even a cat boxes its kittens’ ears!”

“A domesticated cat,” said Phœbe. “A civilized cat.”

“But I’ve seen a wild lioness——”

“Are we to learn how to manage our young from lions and hyenas!” cried Phœbe.

They were too good for Oswald. He saw Peter already ruined, a fat, foolish, undisciplined cub.

Dolly with sympathetic amusement watched his distress, which his living half face betrayed in the oddest contrast to his left hand calm.

Arthur had been thinking gracefully while his sisters tackled their adversary. Now he decided to sum up the discussion. His authoritative manner on these occasions was always slightly irritating to Oswald. Like so many who read only occasionally and take thought as a special exercise, Arthur had a fixed persuasion that nobody else ever read or thought at all. So that he did not so much discuss as adjudicate.

“Of course,” he said, “we have to be reasonable in these things. For men a certain artificiality is undoubtedly natural. That is, so to speak, the human paradox. But artificiality is the last resort. Instinct is our basis. For the larger part the boy has just to grow. But We watch his growth. Education is really watching—keeping the course. The human error is to do too much, to distrust instinct too much, to over-teach, over-legislate, over-manage, over-decorate——”

“No, you don’t, my gentleman,” came the voice of Mary from the shadow under the old pear tree.

“Now I wonder——” said Arthur, craning his neck to look over the rose bushes.

“Diddums then,” said Mary. “Woun’t they lettim put’tt in ’s mouf? Oooh!”

“Trust her instinct,” said Dolly, and Arthur was restrained.

Oswald took advantage of the interruption to take the word from Arthur.

“We joke and sharpen our wits in this sort of talk,” he said, “but education, you know, isn’t a joke. It might be the greatest power in the world. If I didn’t think I was a sort of schoolmaster in Africa.... That’s the only decent excuse a white man has for going there.... I’m getting to be a fanatic about education. Give me the schools of the world and I would make a Millennium in half a century.... You don’t mean to let Peter drift. You say it, but you can’t mean it. Drift is waste. We don’t make half of what we could make of our children. We don’t make a quarter—not a tenth. They could know ever so much more, think ever so much better. We’re all at sixes and sevens.”

He realized he wasn’t good at expressing his ideas. He had intended something very clear and compelling, a sort of ultimatum about Peter.

“I believe in Sir Francis Galton,” Aunt Phœbe remarked in his pause; saying with stern resolution things that she felt had to be said. They made her a little breathless, and she fixed her eye on the view until they were said. “Eugenics. It is a new idea. A revival. Plato had it. Men ought to be bred like horses. No marriage or any nonsense of that kind. Just a simple scientific blending of points. Then Everything would be different.”

“Almost too different,” Arthur reflected....

“When I consider Peter and think of all one could do for him——” said Oswald, still floundering for some clenching way of putting it....

§ 5

One evening Dolly caught her cousin looking at her husband with an expression that stuck in her memory. It was Oswald’s habit to sit if he could in such a position that he could rest the obliterated cheek of his face upon a shadowing hand, his fingers on his forehead. Then one saw what a pleasant-faced man he would have been if only he had left that Egyptian shell alone. So he was sitting on this occasion, his elbow on the arm of the settle. His brow was knit, his one eye keen and steady. He was listening to his host discoursing upon the many superiorities of the artisan in the middle ages to his successor of today. And he seemed to be weighing and estimating Arthur with some little difficulty.

Then, as if it was a part of the calculation he was making, he turned to look at Dolly. Their eyes met; for a moment he could not mask himself.

Then he turned to Arthur again with his expression restored to polite interest.

It was the most trivial of incidents, but it stayed, a mental burr.

§ 6

A little accident which happened a few weeks after Oswald’s departure put the idea of making a will into Arthur’s head. Dolly had wanted to ride a bicycle, but he had some theory that she would not need to ride alone or that it would over-exert her to ride alone, and so he had got a tandem bicycle instead, on which they could ride together. Those were the days when all England echoed to the strains of

“Disy, Disy, tell me your answer true;I’m arf crizyAll fer the love of you-oo ...Yew’d look sweetUpon the seatOf-a-bicycle-mide-fer-two.”

A wandering thrush of a cockney whistled it on their first expedition. Dolly went out a little resentfully with Arthur’s broad back obscuring most of her landscape, and her third ride ended in a destructive spill down Ipinghanger Hill. The bicycle brake was still in a primitive stage in those days; one steadied one’s progress down a hill by the art, since lost to mankind again, of “back-pedalling,” and Dolly’s feet were carried over and thrown off the pedals and the machine got away. Arthur’s nerve was a good one. He fought the gathering pace and steered with skill down to the very last bend of that downland descent. The last corner got them. They took the bank and hedge sideways and the crumpled tandem remained on one side of the bank and Arthur and Dolly found themselves torn and sprained but essentially unbroken in a hollow of wet moss and marsh-mallows beyond the hedge.

The sense of adventure helped them through an afternoon of toilsome return....

“But we might both have been killed that time,” said Arthur with a certain gusto.

“If we had,” said Arthur presently, expanding that idea, “what would have become of Peter?”...

They had both made simple wills copied out of Whitaker’s Almanack, leaving everything to each other; it had not occurred to them before that two young parents who cross glaciers together, go cycling together, travel in the same trains, cross the seas in the same boats, might very easily get into the same smash. In that case the law, it appeared, presumed that the wife, being the weaker vessel, would expire first, and so Uncle Rigby, who had relapsed more and more stuffily into evangelical narrowness since his marriage, would extend a dark protection over Peter’s life. “Lucy wouldn’t even feed him properly,” said Dolly. “She’s so close and childlessly inhuman. I can’t bear to think of it.”

On the other hand, if by any chance Dolly should show a flicker of life after the extinction of Arthur, Peter and all his possessions would fall under the hand of Dolly’s shady brother, the failure of the family, a being of incalculable misdemeanours, a gross, white-faced literary man, an artist in parody (itself a vice), who smelt of tobacco always, and already at thirty-eight, it was but too evident, preferred port and old brandy to his self-respect.

“We ought to remake our wills and each appoint the same guardian,” said Arthur.

It was not very easy to find the perfect guardian.

Then as Arthur sat at lunch one day the sunshine made a glory of the little silver tankard that adorned the Welsh dresser at the end of the room.

“Dolly,” he said, “old Oswald would like this job.”

She’d known that by instinct from the first, but she had never expected Arthur to discover it.

“He’s got a sort of fancy for Peter,” he said.

“I think we could trust him,” said Dolly temperately.

“Poor old Oswald,” said Arthur; “he’s a tragic figure. That mask of his cuts him off from so much. He idolizes you and Peter, Dolly. You don’t suspect it, but he does. He’s our man.”

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This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2020). Joan and Peter. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61426/61426-h/61426-h.htm

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