H. Wells - THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

and presented himselfas a very brisk and orthodox young man. I

wonder why nearly all lovemaking has to be fraudulent. Afterwards

he must have disappointed her cruelly by letting one aspect after

another of his careless, sceptical, experimental temperament appear.

Her mindwas fixed and definite, she embodied all that confidence in

church and decorum and the assurances of the pulpit which was

characteristicof the large mass of the English people-for after

all, the rather low-Church section WAS the largest single mass-in

early Victorian times. She had dreams, I suspect, of going to

church with him side by side; she in a little poke bonnet and a

large flounced crinoline, all mauve and magenta and starched under a

little lace-trimmed parasol, and he in a tall silk hat and peg-top

trousers and a roll-collar coat, and looking rather like the Prince

Consort,-white angels almost visibly raining benedictions on their

amiable progress. Perhaps she dreamtgently of much-belaced babies

and an interestingly pious (but not too dissenting or fanatical)

little girl or boy or so, also angel-haunted. And I think, too, she

must have seen herselfruling a seemly "home of taste," with a

vivarium in the conservatory that opened out of the drawing-room, or

again, making preserves in the kitchen. My father's science-

teaching, his diagrams of disembowelled humanity, his pictures of

prehistoric beasts that contradicted the Flood, his disposition

towards soft shirts and loose tweed suits, his inability to use a

clothes brush, his spasmodic reading fits and his bulldog pipes,

must have jarred cruelly with her rather unintelligent

anticipations. His wild moments of violent temper when he would

swear and smash things, absurd almost lovable storms that passed

like summer thunder, must have been starkly dreadful to her. She

was constitutionally inadaptable, and certainly made no attempt to

understandor tolerate these outbreaks. She tried them by her

standards, and by her standards they were wrong. Her standards hid

him from her. The blazing things he said rankled in her mind

unforgettably.

As I rememberthem together they chafed constantly. Her attitudeto

nearly all his moods and all his enterprises was a sceptical

disapproval. She treated him as something that belonged to me and

not to her. "YOUR father," she used to call him, as though I had

got him for her.

She had married late and she had, I think, become mentally self-

subsisting before her marriage. Even in those Herne Hill days I

used to wonder what was going on in her mind, and I find that old

speculative curiosity return as I write this. She took a

considerable interest in the housework that our generally

servantless conditionput upon her-she used to have a charwoman in

two or three times a week-but she did not do it with any great

skill. She covered most of our furniture with flouncey ill-fitting

covers, and she cooked plainly and without very much judgment. The

Penge house, as it contained nearly all our Bromstead things, was

crowded with furniture, and is chiefly associated in my mindwith

the smellof turpentine, a condiment she used very freely upon the

veneered mahogany pieces. My mother had an equal dread of "blacks"

by day and the "night air," so that our brightly clean windows were

rarely open.

She took a morning paper, and she would open it and glance at the

headlines, but she did not read it until the afternoon and then, I

think, she was interested only in the more violent crimes, and in

railway and mine disasters and in the minutest domesticities of the

Royal Family. Most of the books at home were my father's, and I do

not thinkshe opened any of them. She had one or two volumes that

dated from her own youth, and she tried in vain to interest me in

them; there was Miss Strickland's QUEENS OF ENGLAND, a book I

rememberwith particular animosity, and QUEECHY and the WIDE WIDE

WORLD. She made these books of hers into a class apart by sewing

outer covers upon them of calico and figured muslin. To me in these

habiliments they seemed not so much books as confederated old

ladies.

My mother was also very punctual with her religious duties, and

rejoiced to watch me in the choir.

On winter evenings she occupied an armchair on the other side of the

table at which I sat, head on hand reading, and she would be darning

stockings or socks or the like. We achieved an effectof rather

stuffy comfortablenessthat was soporific, and in a passiveway I

thinkshe found these among her happytimes. On such occasions she

was wont to put her work down on her knees and fall into a sort of

thoughtlessmusing that would last for long intervals and rouse my

curiosity. For like most young people I could not imagine mental

stateswithout definite forms.

She carried on a correspondence with a number of cousins and

friends, writing letters in a slanting Italian hand and dealing

mainly with births, marriages and deaths, business starts (in the

vaguest terms) and the distresses of bankruptcy.

And yet, you know, she did have a curious intimate life of her own

that I suspected nothing of at the time, that only now becomes

credible to me. She kept a diary that is still in my possession, a

diary of fragmentary entries in a miscellaneous collection of pocket

books. She put down the texts of the sermons she heard, and queer

stiff little comments on casual visitors,-" Miss G. and much noisy

shrieking talk about games and such frivolities and CROQUAY. A.

delighted and VERY ATTENTIVE." Such little human entries abound.

She had an odd way of never writing a name, only an initial; my

father is always "A.," and I amalways "D." It is manifest she

followed the domestic events in the life of the Princess of Wales,

who is now Queen Mother, with peculiar interest and sympathy. "Pray

G. all may be well," she writes in one such crisis.

But there are things about myselfthat I still find too poignant to

tell easily, certain painfuland clumsy circumstances of my birth in

very great detail, the distresses of my infantile ailments. Then

later I find such things as this: " HeardD. s--." The "s" is

evidently "swear "-" G. bless and keep my boy from evil." And

again, with the thin handwriting shaken by distress: "D. would not

go to church, and hardened his heart and said wicked infidel things,

much disrespect of the clergy. The anthem is tiresome!!! That men

should set up to be wiserthan their maker!!!" Then trebly

underlined: "I FEAR HIS FATHER'S TEACHING." Dreadful little tangle

of misapprehensions and false judgments! More comfortingfor me to

read, "D. very kind and good. He growsmore thoughtfulevery day."

I suspect myselfof forgotten hypocrisies.

At just one point my mother's papers seem to dip deeper. I think

the death of my father must have stirred her for the first time for

many years to thinkfor herself. Even she could not go on living in

any peace at all, believing that he had indeed been flung headlong

into hell. Of this gnawing solicitude she never spoke to me, never,

and for her diary also she could find no phrases. But on a loose

half-sheet of notepaper between its pages I find this passage that

follows, written very carefully. I do not knowwhose lines they are

nor how she came upon them. They run:-

"And if there be no meeting past the grave;

If all is darkness, silence, yet 'tis rest.