H. Wells: You Can't Be Too Careful

She clang so desperately to life; because where would her Only One be without her? And it is to be noted that very little of this remedial struggle of hers extended to him. But that was because she was able to observe her own terrible symptoms, while, after one single experience with some tonic drops, nothing would induce Edward Albert to admit he had any symptoms at all. His demonstration of his extreme vitality on a later occasion included an attempt to stand on his head which was only partially successful and led to the breaking of a plate.

“You cannot be too careful”—she coughed from her chair—she was developing her pleurisy that day. “Doing that might lead to a rush of blood to the head and apoplexy. Promise me, whatever happens, you will never attempt that again.”

She had a spasm of pain. “He’s not much use, darling, but do you know I feel so queer that I think I ought to see Dr Gabbidash. If you’ll go round for him. He might at least give me a morphia injection.”

The good doctor did, and in the course of a week assisted her departure from this vale of trial and error in a soundly professional manner. For she really had pleurisy. She had brought herself down to a vulnerability that gave any old germs a fair chance with her. Their blitzkrieg was swift and successful.

During her final phase of medicated malaise Mrs Tewler made several wills, couched for the most part in a richly pious phraseology. The valid instrument left a number of trifling souvenirs to various friends, including a marked Bible and a silver-framed photograph for her dear friend Mrs Humbelay, and named Mr Myame as sole executor, trustee and guardian for her son until the dear child was twenty-one, exhorting the young man to trust and obey his guardian as a Father and more than a Father, a Guide and a Wise Dear Friend.

Edward Albert listened to these dispositions without an excessive display of emotion.

He looked at the lawyer and he looked at Mr Myame, He sat on the edge of his chair meagre and wary.

“I suppose it ’ad to be,” he said with resignation, He sucked his teeth for a moment.

“Who was that Mr Whittaker who sent that great wreath?” he asked. “What sort of relation is he to me?”

Neither of them could tell him.

Then he reflected, “I didn’t know Mother was nearly so bad as she was. No.... I suppose it ’ad to be.... That was—it was “—gulp—” a lovely wreath anyhow, She would have liked....”

And suddenly his white little face crumpled up and he was weeping.

“You have lost the Noblest and the very best of Mothers,” said Mr Myame. “That Sainted Brave Woman....”

Edward Albert had acquired a habit of never listening to what Mr Myame might be saying. He wiped his miserable sniffing face with the back of a dirty little hand. He was only beginning to realise what all this meant to him. Day or night she would never be there any more. Never. He wouldn’t go home to her presently and tell her things to his credit, true or false according to circumstances, and bask in the love she bore him. She wouldn’t be there. She wasn’t there. She’d gone!

At thirteen our young Englishman was pale and undersized. Like his mother he was a trifle exopthalmic. His features were delicate and undistinguished and his bearing circumspect. Some more vigorous element in his heredity, however, struggled against the effects of his early restriction; he grew irregularly and inelegantly to average proportions, and his profile became firmer as he got into his later teens. There was a repressed drive in him throughout his life—as we shall see. He did not actually cease growing until he was nearly thirty.

For some reason he never learnt either to whistle properly or throw hard. His mother may have checked early attempts at whistling, and so he developed a sort of hiss-whistle with his upper teeth well over the lower. And as for throwing, he was. ambidextrous, which in fact meant that he was not dexterous with either hand. He lobbed with his left hand and learnt belatedly to throw with his right. He could never throw very high or very far, and that was just as well, because an undetected astigmatism made his direction uncertain. In those days there was no examination of school children’s eyes; you had to put up with the eyes God had given you. So that he also jumped uncertainly and to the best of his ability avoided jumping.

His life had been so completely shielded from mental or physical harm that until he went to Mr Myame’s school for young gentlemen at the age of eleven and a half, he had no child associates whatever. But there he found school-fellows, and some of them were even permitted to invite him home to tea. He always had to assure his mother they were nice little boys before she allowed him to go. They had families, sisters and cousins, and his circle increased.

He became a boarder instead of a day boy in Mr Myame’s Commercial Academy when his mother died, and for a time he shared the bleak “Joseph Hart” dormitory, the larger one, with six other boys, which the ever-solicitous Mr Myame in list slippers might prowl through at any hour of the night.

And since Edward Albert had no home to go to, his first summer holidays were spent among the alarming circumstances of animal life at large and unashamed, in a Wiltshire farm belonging to Mr Myame’s brother-in-law. There were fields in which great cows grazed and stared at you, chewing slowly as they meditated your death, and there was not the slightest protection for the passer-by. There were horses, and once at sundown three of them started galumphing round a field most terrifyingly. Edward Albert dreamt about it afterwards. There were unmuzzled dogs. There was a lot of poultry with no sense of decency whatever. Awful! And you couldn’t help looking and you sort of knew and you sort of didn’t know. And you didn’t want anyone to see you were looking, either. There were ducks, but they weren’t so bad. There were geese that would come at you very alarmingly if you went near them, but then you needn’t go near them, and otherwise they were perfectly respectable. They disapproved, it seemed, of everybody. And there was Master Horace Budd, aged ten,, very sturdy and rosy, who was coming back to London to be a boarder, too, next quarter.

“I promised Mother not to hit you,” said Master Horry, “and I won’t. But if you want a fight—”

“I don’t want a fight,” said Edward Albert. “I don’t fight,”

“Not just a punching match?”

“No. I don’t like fighting.”

“I promised Mother. Why won’t you come and ride on the old horse like I do?”

“I don’t want to.”

“I didn’t promise anything about not setting Boxer on to you.”

“If you do anything to me,” said Edward Albert, “anything I don’t like, I’ll kill you. I’ll just kill you. I know away. See?”

This gave Horry pause. “Nobody’s talking of killing people,” he said.

“I am” said Edward Albert.

“Oh, come and feed the rabbits,” said Horry, and then after a pause for reflection. “You got a knife?”

Edward Albert whistled after his fashion for a moment or so. “I don’t do it that way,” he said. “I got a way of my own.”

He had a way of his own in his imagination. For behind his unobtrusive façade Edward Albert led a life of lurid reverie. He liked to be the still man who never spoke, the Secret Killer, the Avenger, the Hand of Doom. And he and Bert Bloxham, with the big fair cranium, and Nuts MacBryde of the warts, belonged to a secret society, the Hidden Hand of Camden Town. It had passwords and secret signs, and you were admitted by an Ordeal. You had to stand with your finger in a gas-jet for five seconds. It hurt no end, you smarted for days afterwards, and you could smell your flesh burning. But let it be recorded that Edward Albert stood up to the test. He licked his finger first, but Bert Bloxham, who hadn’t thought of that, made him wipe it dry.