A Man of Parts (22 page)

A Modern Utopia
was published before it, in the spring of the same year, and caused a considerable stir, especially among the Fabians. It was continuous with
Anticipations
in asserting that mankind had the means at hand to banish poverty and disease if it only had the will and wit to do so – ‘
Science stands, a too competent servant, behind her wrangling underbred masters, holding out resources, devices, and remedies they are too stupid to use
’ – but it was much bolder in speculating on the kind of society that might evolve if this were combined with a radical change in the system of human governance. His basic narrative device was an application of the theory he had heard aired by speculative physicists, that there might be other universes in existence, parallel to the one we know. Suppose it were possible to pass from one to another, where you might find your familiar world changed for the better, and meet your own double, similarly transformed. This is what happened to the narrator of
A Modern Utopia
and his rather stupid companion, a botanist. While walking in the Swiss Alps they looked down a precipice towards Italy and ‘
behold! In the twinkling of an eye we are in that other world
’. It is a world of order and rationality, beauty and convenience, peace and health of mind and body, and of course it has a world government – not democratically elected but formed from a ‘voluntary nobility’ modelled on the Guardians of Plato’s republic. He called them Samurai, a caste of austere, dedicated and gifted men and women who administered human affairs for the common good. Below the Samurai there were four classes, characterised by their nature: the Poetic, who were creative, the Kinetic, who had practical intelligence, the Dull, who had no special gifts, and the Base, who lacked moral sense. The first three were directed by the Samurai to contribute appropriately to the commonweal, while the Base, being inclined to crime, were obliged to live on remote, secure islands, inflicting their baseness on each other. There would be no prisons in Utopia because ‘
no men are quite wise enough, good enough and cheap enough to staff jails as a jail ought to be staffed
’.

He enjoyed describing his ideal society in detail, especially its rules concerning sex and marriage, in which some of his current negotiations with Jane about their relationship were reflected. In his Utopia marriage was reserved for those who wished to have children, and sexual intercourse was otherwise not a matter with which the state was concerned, effective contraception being freely available. Married women were paid by the state for motherhood, and thus independent, but since it was necessary to know the parentage of children, they were required to be faithful to their husbands on pain of divorce. Married men however were free to have sex with other women provided their wives did not object. The chief source of ordinary novelistic interest in the book was the character of the botanist, a miserable fellow tormented by sexual frustration in the real world because he was too hamstrung by conventional morality and manners to take the woman he loved, and who loved him, away from the man she had mistakenly married. This made the botanist unresponsive to the appeal of Utopia, and his refusal to meet his own utopian double triggered the abrupt return of both him and the narrator to a dirty and depressing London where newspaper placards proclaim the latest crises and atrocities, and ‘
a ragged and filthy nursing mother, with her last addition to our Imperial People on her arm, comes out of a drinkshop, and stands a little unsteadily, and wipes mouth and nose comprehensively with the back of a red chapped hand
…’

The book was widely reviewed and discussed, and it strengthened his position in the Fabian, especially among younger members who responded enthusiastically to the boldness of its vision. He expected more criticism from the Old Gang, since he was well aware that his elitist Utopia bore little resemblance to orthodox models of socialism, but their reaction was on the whole surprisingly favourable. In fact neither the Webbs nor the Blands were enthusiastic supporters of the democratic system as it currently existed, nor did they have much faith in extending more power to the uneducated masses. They saw themselves in an ideal world – the Webbs in particular saw themselves – very much as his Samurai, selflessly administering sweetness and light to the community by the practical application of their superior intelligence, without having to answer to anybody else. Only the sexual mores of his Utopia caused a slight raising of eyebrows and pursing of lips, an intimation of trouble to come.

In June of that year his mother died, after a fall on the stairs in her cottage. For some years she had been sinking into senility, and unable fully to comprehend the scale of her son’s rise in the world. There was a photograph taken by Jane of the two of them sitting together on the sunny terrace of Spade House just a year before she died which eloquently expressed their relationship and her state of mind. He was relaxed, dressed in a soft Jaeger woollen suit, with his legs crossed and a hand on one knee, but leaning sideways and forward in an effort to get her attention, while she, dressed in a full-skirted, all-enveloping black dress and cap, the image of the recently deceased Queen Victoria in her widowhood, was looking away from him with an expression of bewilderment and fear on her white, round face. She obviously could not believe that this splendid and luxurious new house could belong to her Bertie, or that he had come to possess it by honest means. Her own father had deceived her mother and her siblings about his financial status and died bequeathing them nothing but a mortgage and numerous other debts. She clearly expected the bailiffs to turn up at any moment and begin moving the furniture out of Spade House, and nothing he told her about the income he was earning from his books, or the exalted company he kept, would dispel her anxiety. His stories of meeting lords and ladies and cabinet ministers on equal terms were as fantastic and incomprehensible to her as his scientific romances had been when she was still able to read them. ‘Fancy,’ she would murmur incredulously at anything and everything he told her. ‘Fancy that.’

It grieved him when she died that she had never understood or really appreciated his success. It had been achieved by dint of a struggle of wills between them in which he had been victorious, and he would have been pleased if she had been able to acknowledge that he had been right, and herself wrong, and to take pleasure in the admission. Then they would have been finally reconciled. But it was not to be. When she was laid out for burial, swathed in a white lace shawl, he kissed her forehead, cold and hard as marble, and took several photographs of her before the lid was screwed down on the coffin. But these were not consoling mementoes: her lips were tightly set in what could only be described as an expression of comprehensive disappointment with what life had given her. Among her effects he found a diary going back to her youth which was a long litany of complaints, especially against her father, whose fecklessness had compelled her to go into service, and her husband, who had taken her away from the comfortable position she had attained in that occupation and condemned her to years of unpaid servitude as a housewife in a home only one notch better than a slum. The single joy in her life had been her daughter Frances, ‘Possy’, who died of appendicitis at the age of nine, and she decided that her third and last son had been sent to her to replace this saintly child, an expectation that he had signally failed to fulfil. As he read he was divided between pity for his mother’s unhappy life and dismay at what an ungenerous, self-centred, unctuously pious person it had made her.

He was upset by his mother’s death, but unwilling to share these thoughts with Jane, or anyone else. He was irritable and restless in the weeks that followed the funeral, unable to get on with a new book he had started called
In the Days of the Comet
. He bickered with Jane about household matters, and shouted angrily at his boys when they made too much noise in the garden outside his study window, making little Frank cry. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Jane asked. ‘I need to get away,’ he said. ‘Where will you go?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe to the Reform. I could work in the library there.’ He had been elected to this famous club, another feather in his cap, in March. He packed a few clothes and the manuscript of
In the Days of the Comet
in a valise and set off for London, but on the journey the idea of staying at the Reform in the middle of July, when everybody he knew among the members, like Arnold Bennett and Henry James, would be in the country or abroad, did not appeal. He needed company, sympathetic company. He thought of Edith Bland.

He didn’t wire in advance, but arrived uninvited and unannounced at Well Hall, carrying his valise, and said to Edith, when she came downstairs to see who had called, ‘Hallo, Ernest, I’ve come to stay for a few days.’ Her face lit up with a smile of pleasure. ‘What a lovely surprise!’ She took his hand and kissed him on the cheek. ‘You may be wondering why—’ he began, but she waved away his explanations. ‘We’re always delighted to see you, H.G. Stay as long as you like.’

That evening the family put on charades based on the titles of his books to amuse him and make him feel at home. Paul sat at a table reading textbooks and taking notes while young John, dressed as Cupid, mimed taking shots at him with a bow and arrow. He guessed ‘Love and Mr Lewisham’ immediately but pretended to be puzzled for a while to let the actors have their fun. An item performed by Edith and the housekeeper-nanny Alice Hoatson kept him guessing longer, till he exclaimed ‘Anticipations!’ Rosamund, now eighteen and a striking young woman, with a pretty face and a buxom figure, did ‘The Sea Lady’, miming the breaststroke while pursued around the room by Hubert Bland wielding a shrimping net. He couldn’t resist contributing to the entertainment with a couple of improvisations on Nesbit titles, which were warmly applauded. He hadn’t enjoyed anything so much for weeks, and retired to bed in good spirits. ‘You won’t mind if I’m not in evidence tomorrow until the afternoon,’ Edith said as she wished him a good night. ‘I work in the mornings.’ ‘So do I,’ he said. ‘That’s perfect then,’ she said.

He had been given two bedrooms: one on the first floor in which to sleep, and another on the second floor in which to write, with a desk at the window which looked towards the front gates and a cottage dignified with the name of ‘The Lodge’. But the weather was fine that week, and both he and Edith worked most days in shady nooks of the garden, well separated so as not to distract each other. If he took a stroll to stretch his legs and meditate the next sequence in his novel he would sometimes catch sight of her sitting in an arbour, her head bowed over a foolscap pad, driving her pen rapidly over the pages, stopping, crossing out, looking up into the sky for inspiration, and then writing again. Sometimes she would work on into the middle of the afternoon, before breaking off for tea and a game of badminton or a punt on the moat. She was under considerable pressure, writing two serials simultaneously and struggling to keep an episode or two ahead of her deadlines.
The Railway Children
had been running in the
London Magazine
every month since January and the book was due to be published in time for Christmas;
The Amulet
had been appearing in the
Strand
since May and would finish in the same month next year. It used the same kind of magical device as previous tales to transport its English children from modern London to distant times and places where they had perilous adventures.

‘The amulet is in fact your time machine,’ he observed slyly one afternoon when they were chatting about their work.

‘I admit the debt, H.G.,’ she said, ‘and I shall soon be incurring another. I’ve been re-reading
A Modern Utopia
, and like it much better than I did the first time. I’m planning a chapter in which my characters travel into the future, where children cry if they can’t go to school because it’s so nice.’

‘I look forward to that,’ he said, laughing.

They were sitting in the garden after tea in the shade of a chestnut’s thick foliage, eagerly listened to by Rosamund, who had ambitions to follow in her mother’s footsteps and was clearly enthralled by this dialogue between the two writers. The others who had taken tea had gone back into the house, leaving only the three of them at the wooden table, apart from the wasps that were feasting on the jam-smeared plates. Edith sucked on her cigarette holder and blew smoke at them.

‘I’m enjoying
The Amulet
enormously,’ he said, ‘especially when you bring the historical characters back into modern London. The Queen of Babylon trying to recover her jewels from a case in the British Museum … great fun! But you know, Ernest, I think
The Railway Children
is going to be your masterpiece.’

‘Oh, I agree!’ said Rosamund. ‘It’s so moving as well as funny. I’m always dying to read the next episode.’

‘That’s because it’s got a strong plot that runs through the whole story, Rosamund,’ he said. ‘What has happened to the Father? What has he done? Will he return to his family? We want to know.’ He glanced at Edith.

‘Well, don’t expect me to tell you,’ she said, smiling. ‘What about you, H.G.? What’s
your
new novel about?’

‘It’s set in the future and it’s called
In the Days of the Comet
. Did you know that Encke’s Comet is due to make a reappearance next year?’

‘Never heard of it, I’m afraid,’ said Edith, and Rosamund also shook her head.

‘But you’ve heard of Halley’s Comet – that’s due again in 1910. It was thinking about these comets that gave me the idea for this novel. Their shining tails contain a great deal of gas, and it’s been discovered lately that this gas may be stripped from the tail if the comet passes into the gravitational field of another astral body, like the earth. I imagine a huge comet that is getting closer and closer to the earth, and causing a great deal of alarm and panic – because if it collided with the earth the effect would be devastating, perhaps the end of the world – and it’s happening just as war has broken out between England and Germany. There’s also a love-story plot that’s driven by jealousy. What happens is that the comet doesn’t collide with the earth, it just brushes past it, enveloping the world in its gas, which has a strangely beneficial effect: it puts humanity into a deep sleep from which they awake born again, realising what fools they’ve been, and that there is no need for war and jealousy, and begin to rebuild the world accordingly.’