Herbert Wells - Marriage

He caught Marjorie's eye and stopped.

" Falling out of the air on them," corrected Marjorie very softly.

"That was only an accident," said Mr. Trafford....

So they began a conversation in the lane where the trees met overhead that went on and went on like a devious path in a shady wood, and touched upon all manner of things....

In the end quite a number of people were aggrieved by this dialogue, in the lane that led nowhither....

Sir Rupert Solomonson was the first to complain. Trafford had been away "three mortal hours." No one had come near him, not a soul, and there hadn't been even a passing car to cheer his ear.

Sir Rupert admitted he had to be quiet. "But not so damned quiet."

"I'd have been glad," said Sir Rupert, "if a hen had laid an egg and clucked a bit. You might have thought there had been a Resurrection or somethin', and cleared off everybody. Lord! it was deadly. I'd have sung out myself if it hadn't been for these infernal ribs...."

Mrs. Pope came upon the affair quite by accident.

"Well, Marjorie," she said as she poured tea for the family, "did you get your laces?"

"Never got there, Mummy," said Marjorie, and paused fatally.

"Didn't get there!" said Mrs. Pope. "That's worse than Theodore! Wouldn't the donkey go, poor dear?"

There was nothing to colour about, and yet Marjorie felt the warm flow in neck and cheek and brow. She threw extraordinary quantities of candour into her manner. "I had a romantic adventure," she said rather quietly. "I was going to tell you."

(Sensation.)

"You see it was like this," said Marjorie. "I ran against Mr. Trafford...."

She drank tea, and pulled herself together for a lively description of the wheel-locking and the subsequent conversation, a bright ridiculous account which made the affair happen by implication on the high road and not in a byeway, and was adorned with every facetious ornament that seemed likely to get a laugh from the children. But she talked rather fast, and she felt she forced the fun a little. However, it amused the children all right, and Theodore created a diversion by choking with his tea. From first to last Marjorie was extremely careful to avoid the affectionate scrutiny of her mother's eye. And had this lasted the whole afternoon? asked Mrs. Pope. "Oh, they'd talked for half-an-hour," said Marjorie, or more, and had driven back very slowly together. "He did all the talking. You saw what he was yesterday. And the donkeys seemed too happy together to tear them away."

"But what was it all about?" asked Daffy curious.

"He asked after you, Daffy, most affectionately," said Marjorie, and added, "several times." (Though Trafford had as a matter of fact displayed a quite remarkable disregard of all her family.)

"And," she went on, getting a plausible idea at last, "he explained all about aeroplanes. And all that sort of thing. Has Daddy gone to Wamping for some more cricket?..."

(But none of this was lost on Mrs. Pope.)

Mr. Magnet's return next day was heralded by nearly two-thirds of a column in the Times .

The Lecture on the Characteristics of Humour had evidently been quite a serious affair, and a very imposing list of humorists and of prominent people associated with their industry had accepted the hospitality of the Literati .

Marjorie ran her eyes over the Chairman's flattering introduction, then with a queer faint flavour of hostility she reached her destined husband's utterance. She seemed to hear the flat full tones of his voice as she read, and automatically the desiccated sentences of the reporter filled out again into those rich quietly deliberate unfoldings of sound that were already too familiar to her ear.

Mr. Magnet had begun with modest disavowals. "There was a story, he said,"—so the report began—"whose hallowed antiquity ought to protect it from further exploitation, but he was tempted to repeat it because it offered certain analogies to the present situation. There were three characters in the story, a bluebottle and two Scotsmen. (Laughter.) The bluebottle buzzed on the pane, otherwise a profound silence reigned. This was broken by one of the Scotsmen trying to locate the bluebottle with zoölogical exactitude. Said this Scotsman: 'Sandy, I am thinking if yon fly is a birdie or a beastie.' The other replied: 'Man, don't spoil good whiskey with religious conversation.' (Laughter.) He was tempted, Mr. Magnet resumed, to ask himself and them why it was that they should spoil the aftereffects of a most excellent and admirably served dinner by an academic discussion on British humour. At first he was pained by the thought that they proposed to temper their hospitality with a demand for a speech. A closer inspection showed that he was to introduce a debate and that others were to speak, and that was a new element in their hospitality. Further, he was permitted to choose the subject so that he could bring their speeches within the range of his comprehension. (Laughter.) His was an easy task. He could make it easier; the best thing to do would be to say nothing at all. (Laughter.)"

For a space the reporter seemed to have omitted largely—perhaps he was changing places with his relief—and the next sentence showed Mr. Magnet engaged as it were in revising a hortus siccus of jokes. "There was the humour of facts and situations," he was saying, "or that humour of expression for which there was no human responsibility, as in the case of Irish humour; he spoke of the humour of the soil which found its noblest utterance in the bull. Humour depended largely on contrast. There was a humour of form and expression which had many local varieties. American humour had been characterized by exaggeration, the suppression of some link in the chain of argument or narrative, and a wealth of simile and metaphor which had been justly defined as the poetry of a pioneer race."...

Marjorie's attention slipped its anchor, and caught lower down upon: "In England there was a near kinship between laughter and tears; their mental relations were as close as their physical. Abroad this did not appear to be the case. It was different in France. But perhaps on the whole it would be better to leave the humour of France and what some people still unhappily chose to regard as matters open to controversy—he referred to choice of subject—out of their discussion altogether. ('Hear, hear,' and cheers.)"...

Attention wandered again. Then she remarked:—it reminded her in some mysterious way of a dropped hairpin—"It was noticeable that the pun to a great extent had become démodé...."

At this point the flight of Marjorie's eyes down the column was arrested by her father's hand gently but firmly taking possession of the Times . She yielded it without reluctance, turned to the breakfast table, and never resumed her study of the social relaxations of humorists....

Indeed she forgot it. Her mind was in a state of extreme perplexity. She didn't know what to make of herself or anything or anybody. Her mind was full of Trafford and all that he had said and done and all that he might have said and done, and it was entirely characteristic that she could not think of Magnet in any way at all except as a bar-like shadow that lay across all her memories and all the bright possibilities of this engaging person.

She thought particularly of the mobile animation of his face, the keen flash of enthusiasm in his thoughts and expressions....

It was perhaps more characteristic of her time than of her that she did not think she was dealing so much with a moral problem as an embarrassment, and that she hadn't as yet felt the first stirrings of self-reproach for the series of disingenuous proceedings that had rendered the yesterday's encounter possible. But she was restless, wildly restless as a bird whose nest is taken. She could abide nowhere. She fretted through the morning, avoided Daffy in a marked manner, and inflicted a stinging and only partially merited rebuke upon Theodore for slouching, humping and—of all trite grievances!—not washing behind his ears. As if any chap washed behind his ears! She thought tennis with the pseudo-twins might assuage her, but she broke off after losing two sets; and then she went into the garden to get fresh flowers, and picked a large bunch and left them on the piano until her mother reminded her of them. She tried a little Shaw. She struggled with an insane wish to walk through the wood behind the village and have an accidental meeting with someone who couldn't possibly appear but whom it would be quite adorable to meet. Anyhow she conquered that.