Herbert Wells - Marriage

He was now very deeply in love with her again. He talked indeed of his research, but so that it might interest her, and when he thought alone, he thought, not of it, but of her, making again the old discoveries, his intense delight in the quality of her voice, his joy in a certain indescribable gallantry in her bearing. He pitied all men whose wives could not carry themselves, and whose voices failed and broke under the things they had to say. And then again there was the way she moved her arms, the way her hands took hold of things, the alert lucidity of her eyes, and then that faint, soft shadow of a smile upon her lips when she walked thinking or observant, all unaware that he was watching her.

It rained in the morning of their eleventh day and then gave way to warmth and sunshine, so that they arrived at Les Avants in the afternoon a little muddy and rather hot. At one of the tables under the trees outside the Grand Hotel was a small group of people dressed in the remarkable and imposing costume which still in those days distinguished the motorist. They turned from their tea to a more or less frank inspection of the Traffords, and suddenly broke out into cries of recognition and welcome. Solomonson—for the most part brown leather—emerged with extended hands, and behind him, nestling in the midst of immense and costly furs, appeared the kindly salience and brightness of his Lady's face. "Good luck!" cried Solomonson. "Good luck! Come and have tea with us! But this is a happy encounter!"

"We're dirty—but so healthy!" cried Marjorie, saluting Lady Solomonson.

"You look, oh!—splendidly well," that Lady responded.

"We've been walking."

"With just that knapsack!"

"It's been glorious."

"But the courage!" said Lady Solomonson, and did not add, "the tragic hardship!" though her tone conveyed it. She had all the unquestioning belief of her race in the sanity of comfort. She had ingrained in her the most definite ideas of man's position and woman's, and that any one, man or woman, should walk in mud except under dire necessity, was outside the range of her philosophy. She thought Marjorie's thick boots and short skirts quite the most appalling feminine costume she had ever seen. She saw only a ruined complexion and damaged womanhood in Marjorie's rain-washed, sun-bit cheek. Her benevolent heart rebelled at the spectacle. It was dreadful, she thought, that nice young people like the Traffords should have come to this.

The rest of the party were now informally introduced. They were all very splendid and disconcertingly free from mud. One was Christabel Morrison, the actress, a graceful figure in a green baize coat and brown fur, who looked ever so much more charming than her innumerable postcards and illustrated-paper portraits would have led one to expect; her neighbour was Solomonson's cousin Lee, the organizer of the Theatre Syndicate, a brown-eyed, attenuated, quick-minded little man with an accent that struck Trafford as being on the whole rather Dutch, and the third lady was Lady Solomonson's sister, Mrs. Lee. It appeared they were all staying at Lee's villa above Vevey, part of an amusing assembly of people who were either vividly rich or even more vividly clever, an accumulation which the Traffords in the course of the next twenty minutes were three times invited, with an increasing appreciation and earnestness, to join.

From the first our two young people were not indisposed to do so. For eleven days they had maintained their duologue at the very highest level; seven days remained to them before they must go back to begin the hard new life in England, and there was something very attractive—they did not for a moment seek to discover the elements of that attractiveness—in this proposal of five or six days of luxurious indolence above the lake, a sort of farewell to the worldly side of worldly things, before they set forth upon the high and narrow path they had resolved to tread.

"But we've got no clothes," cried Marjorie, "no clothes at all! We've these hobnail boots and a pair each of heelless slippers."

"My dear!" cried Lady Solomonson in real distress, and as much aside as circumstances permitted, "my dear! My sister can manage all that!" Her voice fell to earnest undertones. "We can really manage all that. The house is packed with things. We'll come to dinner in fancy dress. And Scott, my maid, is so clever."

"But really!" said Marjorie.

"My dear!" said Lady Solomonson. "Everything." And she changed places with Lee in order to be perfectly confidential and explicit. "Rachel!" she cried, and summoned her sister for confirmatory assurances....

"But my husband!" Marjorie became audible.

"We've long Persian robes," said Mrs. Lee, with a glance of undisguised appraisement. "He'll be splendid. He'll look like a Soldan...."

The rest of the company forced a hectic conversation in order not to seem to listen, and presently Lady Solomonson and her sister were triumphant. They packed Marjorie into the motor car, and Trafford and Solomonson returned to Vevey by train and thence up to the villa by a hired automobile.

§ 11

They didn't go outside the magic confines of the Lees' villa for three days, and when they did they were still surrounded by their host's service and possessions; they made an excursion to Chillon in his motor-cars, and went in his motor-boat to lunch with the Maynards in their lake-side villa close to Geneva. During all that time they seemed lifted off the common earth into a world of fine fabrics, agreeable sounds, noiseless unlimited service, and ample untroubled living. It had an effect of enchantment, and the long healthy arduous journey thither seemed a tale of incredible effort amidst these sunny excesses. The weather had the whim to be serenely fine, sunshine like summer and the bluest of skies shone above the white wall and the ilex thickets and cypresses that bounded them in from the great world of crowded homes and sous and small necessities. And through the texture of it all for Trafford ran a thread of curious new suggestion. An intermittent discussion of economics and socialism was going on between himself and Solomonson and an agreeable little stammering man in brown named Minter, who walked up in the afternoon from Vevey,—he professed to be writing a novel—during the earlier half of the day. Minter displayed the keenest appreciation of everything in his entertainment, and blinked cheerfully and expressed opinions of the extremest socialistic and anarchistic flavour to an accompaniment of grateful self-indulgence. "Your port-wine is wonderful, Lee," he would say, sipping it. "A terrible retribution will fall upon you some day for all this."

The villa had been designed by Lee to please his wife, and if it was neither very beautiful nor very dignified, it was at any rate very pretty and amusing. It might have been built by a Parisian dressmaker—in the châteauesque style. It was of greyish-white stone, with a roof of tiles. It had little balconies and acutely roofed turrets, and almost burlesque buttresses, pierced by doors and gates; and sun-trap loggias, as pleasantly casual as the bows and embroideries of a woman's dress; and its central hall, with an impluvium that had nothing to do with rain-water, and its dining-room, to which one ascended from this hall between pillars up five broad steps, were entirely irrelevant to all its exterior features. Unobtrusive men-servants in grey with scarlet facings hovered serviceably.

From the little terrace, all set with orange-trees in tubs, one could see, through the branches and stems of evergreens and over a foreground of budding, starting vineyard, the clustering roofs of Vevey below, an agglomeration veiled ever so thinly in the morning by a cobweb of wood smoke, against the blue background of lake with its winged sailing-boats, and sombre Alpine distances. Minter made it all significant by a wave of the hand. "All this," he said, and of the crowded work-a-day life below, "all that."