A Man of Parts (24 page)

‘It will come. You have your whole life before you,’ he said benignly. ‘Meanwhile your home should give you plenty of ideas.’

‘What do you mean?’ For a moment he saw a look of surprise, almost alarm, in her brown eyes.

‘It’s such a romantic place. Steeped in history. Thomas More’s head buried somewhere in the grounds, for instance, nobody knows where. That should be good for a story. I’m surprised Edith hasn’t written it.’

‘Oh
that
…’

‘Why don’t you have a try yourself?’

She looked at him with a cheeky smile. ‘If I did, would you read it and give me an opinion.’

‘Certainly.’

‘Then I will!’ she said, clapping her hands. ‘Thank you. I’ll have to read up about Thomas More.’

‘Be sure to read his
Utopia
,’ he said.

‘Isn’t it rather boring?’

‘Not at all. The chapter on marriage is particularly interesting.’

‘Why?’

‘Read it and you’ll find out.’

‘I will,’ she said.

A voice, probably Alice’s, calling ‘Ros-a-mund’ was heard, coming from the direction of the house.

‘Bother,’ said Rosamund, ‘I expect she wants help with lunch. Excuse me.’

‘Of course,’ he said, and watched her walk down the tunnellike pergola. At the end she stopped, turned and waved, reminding him of something, or somebody.

He returned to Spade House in excellent spirits and immediately wrote Edith a ‘roofer’ as, for reasons obscure, a letter of thanks was called in the Bland family’s argot. It began: ‘
Dear Lady, A roofer! The thing cannot be written! Jane I think must take on the task of describing the departure of a yellow, embittered and thoroughly damned man on one Thursday and his return on the next, pink – partly his own, and partly reflected
’, and it ended: ‘
Fine impalpable threads of agreeable association trail from Lodge to stairway, hold me to your upstairs and downstairs bedrooms, take me under the trees of your lawn, and to your garden paths … It was a bright dear time. Yours ever, H.G. Wells
’

That visit marked a new phase of intimacy in the relations between the Wellses and the Blands, who, flush with Edith’s royalties, had acquired a bigger summer home in Dymchurch: a red-brick Georgian house with Dutch gables called Sycamore House, though with characteristic insouciance the Bland family always referred to it as ‘the Other House’ to distinguish it from the cottage it replaced. They were frequently in residence there in August and September, and numerous visits were made and returned between the two families. There was badminton at Spade House, and French cricket on the flat hard sand of the Dymchurch beach when the tide was out; there were cycle rides through the lanes of the Romney Marshes and pot luck meals and hilarious charades. He dispensed literary advice to Rosamund in confidential chats, enjoying her lavish praise of his own work. She never managed to get the story about Thomas More’s head into a shape she was willing to show him, but she did read the chapter on marriage in
Utopia
. ‘And what did you think of couples who are contemplating marriage being allowed to see each other naked before they commit themselves?’ he asked her. ‘I thought it was a jolly good idea,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t mind at all, if it were done decently, as in the book, with chaperones. What do you think, Mr Wells?’ ‘I think there would be many fewer unhappy marriages if it was a custom in our society,’ he said, ‘but the English are so prudish about nakedness.’ ‘Yes, I asked Iris if she wouldn’t like to see her Austin naked before she got engaged to him and she told me not to be disgusting. And she’s drawing naked models all the time at the Slade! Well, not quite naked.’ She giggled. ‘Apparently the men wear little pouches.’ ‘And what about the rest of More’s
Utopia
?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t find it very interesting, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I much prefer yours. The ending, when they come back to sordid London is so wonderful.’

‘I hope you will be sensible with that young girl,’ Jane said, as they were coming home from the Other House that day, having observed him and Rosamund deep in conversation in the garden. ‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ he said. ‘She’s a nice girl, but I‘m not in love with her.’ ‘It’s
her
falling in love with
you
I’m worried about,’ Jane said. ‘It would be a shame if anything upset the nice relationship we have with the Blands.’ ‘Have no fear, I agree entirely,’ he said. And he did agree. There seemed to be a symbiosis between the two families that was helpful to the writers at the heart of each. In October Jane accompanied him to Well Hall for the first time, and they stayed for a weekend which went very well, Edith writing afterwards: ‘
Oh my dears – oh my dearie dears! Virtue must have gone out of you both during this good weekend, for quite unexpectedly, and with a most thrilling suddenness I find that I have finished
The Railway Children
which have sat on my bent and aged shoulders for nearly a year!!!!!! Thank you so much. This, as you perceive, is a
roofer!’

In December Edith sent him an advance copy of
The Railway Children
and he sat down in his study and read it in a single sitting, quickly at first, reminding himself of the early chapters he had already read in serial form, then more slowly and appreciatively. His provisional judgment had been correct: it
was
Edith’s masterpiece, with a depth and a unity that none of her previous books, for all their merits, possessed, and in his opinion was destined to become a classic.

Three children were abruptly uprooted from their comfortable London home because of the unexplained disappearance of their father, and obliged to live in near-poverty with their mother in a country cottage. The nearby railway line was their main source of amusement – waving to the passing trains, and making friends with the staff of the local station. Three-quarters of the way through the story the eldest, Bobbie, discovered from an old newspaper that her father was in prison; wrongfully, her mother assured her, but she had to conceal this knowledge from her siblings. As so often in the author’s work, a good deed by the children brought into the story a benevolent old gentleman who steered it towards a happy ending by organising an appeal against the father’s conviction, but never before had Edith played so skilfully with the reader’s desires, expectations and emotions at the climax.

There comes a day when the three children go down the fields to wave at the 9.15 train as usual and are astonished when all the passengers smile and wave back at them with their newspapers. Unable to concentrate on her mother’s lessons later that morning, Bobbie goes down to the station to ask after the signalman’s sick little boy. On the way everyone she meets smiles knowingly at her but says nothing, conspiring with the author to keep Bobbie unaware of what is about to happen. Daringly, the author addresses the reader: ‘
Of course you know already exactly what was going to happen. Bobbie was not so clever. She had the vague, confused, expectant feeling that comes to one’s heart in dreams. What her heart expected I can’t tell – perhaps the very thing you and I know was going to happen – but her mind expected nothing
.’ Thus did the writer simultaneously admit the convention-bound nature of fiction and at the same time claim a superior truthfulness for her own story, thus did she exquisitely delay the climactic discharge of emotion when Bobbie, sitting on the station platform, idly watching the passengers alight from the 11.54 suddenly sees –

‘
Oh! my Daddy, my Daddy!
’

That scream went like a knife into the heart of everyone in the train, and people put their heads out of the windows to see a tall pale man with lips set in a thin close line, and a little girl clinging to him with arms and legs, while his arms went tightly round her
.

The story ended on the next page, for Edith did not make the mistake of trying to describe the heroine’s relief and happiness or how it was shared with the rest of the family.

Bobbie goes into the house, trying to keep her eyes from speaking before her lips have found the right words to ‘tell Mother quite quietly’ that the sorrow and the struggle and the parting are over and done, and that Father has come home
.

There were a few more lines, but he read them with difficulty, tears streaming down his face.

Jane came into his study at that moment and looked at him in astonishment. ‘Good heavens, H.G., whatever is the matter?’ she cried.

‘Nothing,’ he said, wiping his eyes and cheeks with a handkerchief. ‘I feel such an ass, blubbing over a children’s book. But I couldn’t stop myself.’ He held up the copy of
The Railway Children
. ‘That woman plucks at your heartstrings like a harpist.’

Jane laughed. ‘Well, it’s certainly an achievement to make
you
cry over a book for children.’

‘Wait till you read the last chapter – I bet you’ll do the same,’ he said. He brooded for a moment over the way the trick was done. That switch of perspective from Bobbie to the passengers on the train, for instance, when she screams and embraces her father with her legs as well as her arms and you are reminded that she is, for all her emotional maturity, a child – brilliant! But it wasn’t simply a matter of technique. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘did anything I’ve written ever make you cry?’

Jane thought for some moments, her eyes unfocused as she cast her mind back over the years and the titles of his novels and stories. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said at last, and seeing that he looked glum, added comfortingly. ‘It’s not your forte, H.G.’

THE PERSONAL AND
social entailments of belonging to the Fabian were much more interesting and rewarding than its official activities, which consisted mainly of rather boring meetings at which senior members gave papers and aired views which were already well known to the audience, who debated them along predictable lines. There seemed to be little will to rethink the function and strategy of the Society radically, and he began to wonder if he had made a mistake in joining it. A familiar fugitive impulse gripped him, and in the spring of 1904 he thought he saw in the current controversy over tariff reform an opportunity to escape with honour. The charismatic Conservative politician Joseph Chamberlain was campaigning effectively for a protectionist British Empire, an idea which the Fabian Executive pragmatically decided not to condemn, but which his friend Graham Wallas, as a faithful Liberal, opposed on principle. When Wallas resigned from the Society over this issue, he seized the opportunity to tender his own resignation on the same grounds. Shaw, however, persuaded him to withdraw it in a letter which artfully combined sarcasm with flattery, declining to believe that he cared a fig about tariff reform, but urging him to persevere with the Society because they needed him. He accordingly wrote to the Secretary Pease withdrawing his resignation while making it clear that he disapproved of the Society in its present form and was staying on only in order to turn it upside down.

Throughout 1904, and much of 1905, he concentrated his efforts on trying to persuade the Fabians to re-examine and revise their precious ‘Basis’, the manifesto drawn up by Wallas, Shaw, Bland and other founding fathers of the Society, which had acquired for the Old Gang the same status as the Ten Commandments had for the Israelites. The main virtue of this document was its brevity, for it could be printed on a single sheet of paper, in spite of saying the same things several times in different ways. ‘
The Fabian Society consists of Socialists
,’ it began. ‘
It therefore aims at the reorganization of society by the emancipating of Land and Industrial Capital from individual or class ownership, and the vesting of them in the community for general benefit
.’ The next two paragraphs repeated the same objectives with very little additional detail, and confidently predicted that ‘
the idle class now living on the labour of others will necessarily disappear, and practical equality of opportunity will be maintained by the spontaneous action of economic forces
…’ It concluded: ‘
It seeks to achieve these ends by the general dissemination of knowledge as to the relation between the individual and society in its economic, ethical and political aspects
.’

The main feature of this document was its vagueness as to the means by which its aspirations were actually to be carried out, which was an advantage inasmuch as it encouraged many middle-class intellectuals who thought of themselves as progressive to put their names to it without any real fear of having to surrender their private property to the state, but a disadvantage in that it postponed indefinitely any action other than giving lectures and publishing pamphlets. And the definition of socialism in narrowly economic terms excluded mention of urgently needed social and cultural reforms – for example, ending the subjection of women. His radical views on this issue earned him the friendship and support of one of the leading female members of the Fabian, Maud Reeves, the wife of William Pember Reeves, the Agent General for New Zealand. They had come to England in the late nineties with good progressive credentials – he as a former minister in the New Zealand Liberal Government and author of a scholarly book on
State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand
, she for her participation in a successful campaign for female suffrage in her native country, the first in the world to give women this right. They were quickly welcomed in Fabian circles, where they already had several contacts, and although Reeves could not take an active role in the Society’s affairs because of his diplomatic status, Maud was not thus inhibited.