Herbert Wells - Marriage

"I must give up research," he said.

"Oh, my dearest!"

"I must give up research," he repeated. "I've been seeing it for days. Clearer and clearer. This dear, just settles things. Even—as we were coming home in the train—I was making up my mind. At Vevey I was talking to Solomonson."

"My dear," she whispered, clinging to him.

"I talked to Solomonson. He had ideas—a proposal."

"No," she said.

"Yes," he said. "I've left the thing too long."

He repeated. "I must give up research—for years. I ought to have done it long before."

"I had meant so well," she said. "I meant to work. I meant to deny myself...."

"I'm glad," he whispered. "Glad! Why should you weep?" It seemed nothing to him then, that so he should take a long farewell to the rare, sweet air of that wonderland his mind had loved so dearly. All he remembered was that Marjorie was very dear to him, very dear to him, and that all her being was now calling out for him and his strength. "I had thought anyhow of giving up research," he repeated. "This merely decides. It happens to decide. I love you, dear. I put my research at your feet. Gladly. This is the end, and I do not care, my dear, at all. I do not care at all—seeing I have you...."

He stood beside her for a moment, and then sat down again, sideways, upon his chair.

"It isn't you, my dear, or me," he said, "but life that beats us—that beautiful, irrational mother.... Life does not care for research or knowledge, but only for life. Oh! the world has to go on yet for tens of thousands of years before—before we are free for that. I've got to fight—as other men fight...."

He thought in silence for a time, oddly regardless of her. "But if it was not you," he said, staring at the fireplace with knitted brows, "if I did not love you.... Thank God, I love you, dear! Thank God, our children are love children! I want to live—to my finger-tips, but if I didn't love you—oh! love you! then I think now—I'd be glad—I'd be glad, I think, to cheat life of her victory."

"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....

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."

His manner became confidential. "Civilization's just a fight, Trafford—just as savagery is a fight, and being a wild beast is a fight,—only you have paddeder gloves on and there's more rules. We aren't out for everybody, we're out for ourselves—and a few friends perhaps—within limits. It's no good hurrying ahead and pretending civilization's something else, when it isn't. That's where all these socialists and people come a howler. Oh, I know the Socialists. I see 'em at my wife's At Homes. They come along with the literary people and the artists' wives and the actors and actresses, and none of them take much account of me because I'm just a business man and rather dark and short, and so I get a chance of looking at them from the side that isn't on show while the other's turned to the women, and they're just as fighting as the rest of us, only they humbug more and they don't seem to me to have a decent respect for any of the common rules. And that's about what it all comes to, Trafford."

Sir Rupert paused, and Trafford was about to speak when the former resumed again, his voice very earnest, his eyes shining with purpose. He liked Trafford, and he was doing his utmost to make a convincing confession of the faith that was in him. "It's when it comes to the women," said Sir Rupert, "that one finds it out. That's where you've found it out. You say, I'm going to devote my life to the service of Humanity in general. You'll find Humanity in particular, in the shape of all the fine, beautiful, delightful and desirable women you come across, preferring a narrower turn of devotion. See? That's all. Caeteris paribus , of course. That's what I found out, and that's what you've found out, and that's what everybody with any sense in his head finds out, and there you are."