Herbert Wells - Marriage

"Oh, my dear!" she cried, and clung weeping to him, and caught at him and sat herself upon his knees, and put her arms about his head, and kissed him passionately with tear-salt lips, with her hair falling upon his face.

"My dear," she whispered....

§ 16

So soon as Trafford could spare an afternoon amidst his crowded engagements he went to talk to Solomonson, who was now back in London. "Solomonson," he said, "you were talking about rubber at Vevey."

"I remember," said Solomonson with a note of welcome.

"I've thought it over."

"I thought you would."

"I've thought things over. I'm going to give up my professorship—and science generally, and come into business—if that is what you are meaning."

Solomonson turned his paper-weight round very carefully before replying. Then he said: "You mustn't give up your professorship yet, Trafford. For the rest—I'm glad."

He reflected, and then his bright eyes glanced up at Trafford. "I knew," he said, "you would."

"I didn't," said Trafford. "Things have happened since."

"Something was bound to happen. You're too good—for what it gave you. I didn't talk to you out there for nothing. I saw things.... Let's go into the other room, and smoke and talk it over." He stood up as he spoke.

"I thought you would," he repeated, leading the way. "I knew you would. You see,—one has to. You can't get out of it."

"It was all very well before you were married," said Solomonson, stopping short to say it, "but when a man's married he's got to think. He can't go on devoting himself to his art and his science and all that—not if he's married anything worth having. No. Oh, I understand. He's got to look about him, and forget the distant prospect for a bit. I saw you'd come to it. I came to it. Had to. I had ambitions—just as you have. I've always had an inclination to do a bit of research on my own. I like it, you know. Oh! I could have done things. I'm sure I could have done things. I'm not a born money-maker. But——." He became very close and confidential. "It's—— them . You said good-bye to science for a bit when you flopped me down on that old croquet-lawn, Trafford." He went off to reminiscences. "Lord, how we went over! No more aviation for me, Trafford!"

He arranged chairs, and produced cigars. "After all—this of course—it's interesting. Once you get into the movement of it, it takes hold of you. It's a game."

"I've thought over all you said," Trafford began, using premeditated phrases. "Bluntly—I want three thousand a year, and I don't make eight hundred. It's come home to me. I'm going to have another child."

Solomonson gesticulated a congratulation.

"All the same, I hate dropping research. It's stuff I'm made to do. About that, Solomonson, I'm almost superstitious. I could say I had a call.... It's the maddest state of affairs! Now that I'm doing absolutely my best work for mankind, work I firmly believe no one else can do, I just manage to get six hundred—nearly two hundred of my eight hundred is my own. What does the world think I could do better—that would be worth four times as much."

"The world doesn't think anything at all about it," said Solomonson.

"Suppose it did!"

The thought struck Sir Rupert. He knitted his brows and looked hard obliquely at the smoke of his cigar. "Oh, it won't," he said, rejecting a disagreeable idea. "There isn't any world—not in that sense. That's the mistake you make, Trafford."

"It's not what your work is worth," he explained. "It's what your advantages can get for you. People are always going about supposing—just what you suppose—that people ought to get paid in proportion to the good they do. It's forgetting what the world is, to do that. Very likely some day civilization will get to that, but it hasn't got to it yet. It isn't going to get to it for hundreds and hundreds of years."

Spring and a renewed and deepened love for her husband were in Marjorie's blood. Her mind worked rapidly during the next few days, and presently she found herself clearly decided upon her course of action. She had to pull herself together and help him, and if that meant a Spartan and strenuous way of living, then manifestly she must be Spartan and strenuous. She must put an end once for all to her recurrent domestic deficits, and since this could only be done by getting rid of May, she must get rid of May and mind the child herself. (Every day, thank Heaven! Margharita became more intelligent, more manageable, and more interesting.) Then she must also make a far more systematic and thorough study of domestic economy than she had hitherto done, and run the shopping and housekeeping on severer lines; she bought fruit carelessly, they had far too many joints; she never seemed able to restrain herself when it came to flowers. And in the evenings, which would necessarily be very frequently lonely evenings if Trafford's researches were to go on, she would typewrite, and either acquire great speed at that or learn shorthand, and so save Trafford's present expenditure on a typist. That unfortunately would mean buying a typewriter.

She found one afternoon in a twopenny book-box, with which she was trying to allay her craving for purchases, a tattered little pamphlet entitled: "Proposals for the Establishment of an Order of Samurai," which fell in very exactly with her mood. The title "dated"; it carried her mind back to her middle girlhood and the defeats of Kuropatki and the futile earnest phase in English thought which followed the Boer War. The order was to be a sort of self-appointed nobility serving the world. It shone with the light of a generous dawn, but cast, I fear, the shadow of the prig. Its end was the Agenda Club.... She read and ceased to read—and dreamt.

The project unfolded the picture of a new method of conduct to her, austere, yet picturesque and richly noble. These Samurai, it was intimated, were to lead lives of hard discipline and high effort, under self-imposed rule and restraint. They were to stand a little apart from the excitements and temptations of everyday life, to eat sparingly, drink water, resort greatly to self-criticism and self-examination, and harden their spirits by severe and dangerous exercises. They were to dress simply, work hard, and be the conscious and deliberate salt of the world. They were to walk among mountains. Incidentally, great power was to be given them. Such systematic effort and self-control as this, seemed to Marjorie to give just all she wasn't and needed to be, to save her life and Trafford's from a common disaster....

It particularly appealed to her that they were to walk among mountains....

But it is hard to make a change in the colour of one's life amidst the routine one has already established about oneself, in the house that is grooved by one's weaknesses, amidst hangings and ornaments living and breathing with the life of an antagonistic and yet insidiously congenial ideal. A great desire came upon Marjorie to go away with Trafford for a time, out of their everyday life into strange and cool and spacious surroundings. She wanted to leave London and its shops, and the home and the movements and the callers and rivalries, and even dimpled little Margharita's insistent claims, and get free and think. It was the first invasion of their lives by this conception, a conception that was ever afterwards to leave them altogether, of retreat and reconstruction. She knelt upon the white sheepskin hearthrug at Trafford's feet one night, and told him of her desire. He, too, was tired of his work and his vexations, and ripe for this suggestion of an altered life. The Easter holiday was approaching, and nearly twenty unencumbered days. Mrs. Trafford, they knew, would come into the house, meanwhile, and care for Margharita. They would go away somewhere together and walk, no luggage but a couple of knapsacks, no hotel but some homely village inn. They would be in the air all day, until they were saturated with sweet air and spirit of clean restraints. They would plan out their new rule, concentrate their aims. "And I could think," said Trafford, "of this new work I can't begin here. I might make some notes." Presently came the question of where the great walk should be. Manifestly, it must be among mountains, manifestly, and Marjorie's eye saw those mountains with snow upon their summits and cold glaciers on their flanks. Could they get to Switzerland? If they travelled second class throughout, and took the cheaper way, as Samurai should?...