A Man of Parts (36 page)

Dorothy in fact had finally resolved the problem of her sexual identity and stressful relationships with Veronica and Benjamin Grad in the most Dorothy-like way, as she told him when he was able to give her a private audience in the garden shelter. It appeared that very recently Veronica’s fiancé, Philip, a man considerably older than herself, had died suddenly of a heart attack. Dorothy, herself barely recovered from her miscarriage, had nursed the grief-stricken Veronica through this tragedy, and in the process she had a sudden, almost miraculous inspiration. ‘I knew that both Veronica and Benjamin wanted to possess me completely, but Veronica had also wanted a male lover in Philip, and Benjamin wanted to possess me only if we were married, while I didn’t want to be married or possessed by anybody. That was why we were locked in this exhausting three-cornered struggle for fulfilment. But now that Philip was dead I suddenly saw the solution: Veronica must marry Benjamin!’ She beamed at him triumphantly as she said this. ‘Really?’ he said, suppressing a temptation to smile. ‘Yes! That way Veronica and Benjamin can possess me spiritually in possessing each other physically – it will be a mystical marriage of three.’ ‘Like the Trinity?’ he risked saying. But she saw nothing amusing in the analogy. ‘Exactly.’ ‘And what do they both think of this idea?’ he asked. ‘They think it’s wonderful,’ she said. ‘In fact they are already engaged.’ ‘And will you live with them in a platonic
ménage à trois
?’ She shook her head. ‘No. I’ve found a place to live cheaply in Sussex, with some awfully nice people who look after me tenderly. I’m going to live there very frugally and quietly and write.’ She told him she was going to write a novel which would be a faithful record of the consciousness of a young woman like herself. ‘The psychological novel has been dominated by male authors,’ she declared. ‘Even the best of them, James, Conrad – none of them really gets us, women I mean. There is always the male idea of order imposed on the stream of thought, the final clinching main clause, the stamp of the full stop at the end of the periodic sentence. I want to do something much more flowing and organic, the way a woman thinks and feels.’ ‘Well, I wish you luck, Dorothy,’ he said sincerely. It didn’t sound very promising.

His own work went well, and he finished
The War in the Air
on schedule at the beginning of September. Before taking up
Tono-Bungay
again, he and Jane had a well-earned holiday in Switzerland, walking in the Alps. In spite of her slight frame Jane was an agile and enthusiastic walker, with stamina that more than matched his own. They both loved the mountains, the crystal clear air, the sublime views of snow-capped peaks receding into infinity, the peaceful silence broken only by the distant sound of cow bells and church bells rising from the valleys below, the feeling of health and well-being these things instilled. In the course of this happy, companionable interlude, tired but euphoric at the end of the day, they came together as man and wife as they hadn’t done for some time at home.

But from this healing and restorative break he returned to an unwelcome revival of the controversy over
In the Days of the Comet
. William Joynson Hicks, the Conservative candidate in a forthcoming by-election in October for a Lancashire seat, standing against a Liberal of declared socialist sympathies, had circulated a scurrilous pamphlet warning the electorate that voting for a socialist was the beginning of a slippery slope that ended in sexual promiscuity – citing as evidence that old canard in the
TLS
review of
Comet
, about wives being held in common in the socialist Utopia. This smear was picked up and given much wider circulation by an article in the
Spectator
, ‘Socialism and Sex Relations’, by the editor, St Loe Strachey, a high-minded Tory moralist and leading light of the National Social Purity Campaign, who wrote, ‘
we find Mr Wells, in his novel, making free love the dominant principle for the regulation of sexual ties in his regenerated State. The romantic difficulty as to which of the two lovers
of the heroine is to be the happy man is solved by their both being accepted. Polyandry is “the way out” in this case, as polygamy might be in another
.’ He was drawn into another tedious round of correspondence in the
Spectator
and various newspapers that repeated the story with variations, and was obliged to trot out once again the defence of his novel that he had employed a year before, which in the repetition seemed somewhat strained even to himself. At one point in the brouhaha, which lasted for several weeks, he resorted to threatening a libel suit against Joynson-Hicks, who then admitted that the defamatory pamphlet had been prepared by his agent, a certain well-named Bottomley, and that he himself had not actually read
In the Days of the Comet
at the time, but relied on the
TLS
’s description of it.

In the end he received enough half-apologies from his accusers, and enough support from sympathisers, to feel he had survived this new attack on his reputation, but it rattled him. He became aware that rumours of the Paddington fiasco were circulating after all in Fabian and literary circles, with fantastical distortions and elaborations – that he had been eloping with Rosamund to live with her in France, that she had disguised herself for the occasion as a boy (as if that voluptuous bust could ever be plausibly concealed under male clothing) and that Hubert had given him a public thrashing on the platform at Paddington station. A coolness in the manner of his old friend Graham Wallas when they met, and a look of distaste on Sidney Webb’s face when they passed and saluted each other on opposite sides of the Strand one day, suggested that both had heard some of this gossip. Shaw had evidently received a less highly coloured but prejudicial account of his affair with Rosamund – he suspected Edith was the source – and wrote to reproach him for sullying the public image of the Fabian and jeopardising its mission by his irresponsible philandering. He wrote back: ‘
I think you do me an injustice – I don’t mean in your general estimate of my character – but in the Bland business. However you
take your line. It’s possible you don’t know the whole situation. But damn the Blands! All through it’s been that infernal household of lies that has tainted the affair and put me off my game. You don’t for a moment begin to understand, you’ve judged me by that matter and there you are!
’

When Shaw responded by trying to make a case for Hubert Bland’s integrity and chivalrously protective attitude towards the ‘innocent little person’ of Rosamund, he lost his temper and fired back a furious riposte:

The more I think you over the more it comes over me what an unmitigated middle Victorian ass you are. You play about with ideas like a daring garrulous maiden aunt, but when it comes to an affair like the Bland affair you show the instincts of conscious gentility and the judgment of a hen. You write of Bland in a strain of sentimental exaltation, you explain his beautiful romantic character to me – as though I don’t know the man to his bones. You might be dear Mrs Bland herself in a paroxysm of romantic invention. And all this twaddle about ‘the innocent little person’. If she is innocent it isn’t her parents’ fault anyhow
.

The fact is you’re a flimsy intellectual, acquisitive of mind, adrift and chattering brightly in a world you don’t understand. You don’t know, as I do, in blood and substance, lust, failure, shame, hate, love and creative passion. You don’t understand and you can’t understand the rights or wrongs of the case into which you stick your maiden judgment – any more than you can understand the aims in the Fabian Society that your vanity has wrecked
.

Now go on being amusing
.

As soon as he had posted the letter he regretted its intemperate tone. He had said things which would not be easy to forgive or withdraw, and it would be a long time before he could hope to be back on easy terms with Shaw. He was sorry for this, but he had been oppressed by a sense that enemies were circling in the darkness beyond his tent, plotting, gossiping, rumour-mongering against him, and Shaw’s second letter had goaded him beyond endurance. Only when he was among the young Fabians in Cambridge did he feel free from this poisonous atmosphere. If they knew anything about his affair with Rosamund, they didn’t show it, and didn’t regard it as their business. They knew about the campaign against him in the press of course, but they regarded him as a hero, a martyr for daring to question the old sexual ethics based on repression, ignorance and the double standard. The three lectures he gave there in October, a kind of personal credo summarising his interpretation of socialism, were well attended and warmly received. ‘Are you going to publish them, Mr Wells?’ Amber Reeves asked him after he had delivered the last one. ‘There was so much to take in – I would love to be able to read them.’ ‘Well I have thought I might work them into a short book, when I can find the time,’ he said. ‘Wonderful!’ she said. ‘What will you call it?’ ‘I was thinking perhaps,
First and Last Things
. What do you think?’ ‘Perfect!’ she said. ‘I can’t wait to see it.’

Before they parted, she asked him to give her regards to Jane, and recalled how much she had enjoyed her visit to Spade House in the summer, especially playing floor games with the boys. ‘I’ve invented some new ones since then,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t there talk of your coming to visit us again, on your own?’ ‘Yes, there was,’ she said, and the way her eyes brightened told him that she had intended to jog his memory. ‘I could come in the Christmas vac, any time except Christmas itself,’ she said. ‘Right ho,’ he said, smiling at her eagerness. ‘I’ll remind Jane and she’ll write to you.’ ‘Thank you!’ she said, ecstatically. She really was a very charming girl, completely unaffected in spite of her beauty and her brains, and it was impossible not to take pleasure in her frank admiration. He looked forward to entertaining her
en famille
at Spade House and demonstrating his new games, but he must of course be careful how he managed their relationship. Very careful.

Dear Mr H.G
.,

Thank you very much for your letters and Mrs Wells for her love. Getting letters from you is a tremendous joy and makes me work hard for days. I am working quite hard at Moral Science and very hard at Fabians. We have affiliated at length to both the Fabians and the S.L.P. but the whole University rang with the struggle. The men are frightfully pleased with themselves because they brought in a Socialist motion at the Union and were only defeated by 100–70. I am in evil odour with the authorities for the moment because I said revolutionary things at a public meeting – the one you were to have spoken at. I was too frightened to know what I did say, with two chaperones glaring at me, but the men are delighted. By the way Mr Keeling says if you don’t come next term you will be a skunk. If you don’t come I shall be so unhappy that I shall fail in my tripos. If you could see how I love getting letters from you, you would write again some day
.

‘Amber thanks you for sending her your love,’ he said, as he finished reading this letter.

‘I thought I recognised the handwriting on the envelope,’ Jane said. ‘May I read it?’

‘Of course.’ He passed the letter to her across the breakfast table, and spread butter and marmalade on a second slice of toast as she read it. Outside it was a grey February morning, with a blustery wind that dashed raindrops against the window-panes at intervals with a sound like handfuls of gravel, but the dining room was warm and cosy.

Jane chuckled at something in the letter. ‘I’d love to know what it was she said that shocked the chaperones.’

He had the same wish, but instead of saying so he grumbled: ‘It’s absurd that women undergraduates can’t go anywhere in Cambridge without chaperones, even to lectures.’

Jane finished reading the letter and passed it back to him. ‘The girl is in love with you, of course,’ she said. ‘I hope you realise that.’

He munched his toast meditatively before he replied. ‘Do you think so?’

‘It’s obvious from the last few lines. In fact it was obvious to me when she was here after Christmas.’

He glanced at the end of the letter again. ‘I didn’t make love to her, though.’

‘You told her to call you “H.G.”,’ Jane said. ‘That was as good as a kiss to her.’

He smiled. ‘She starts her letter “Dear Mr H.G.”, which sounds rather funny. She obviously thought it would be too cheeky to say “Dear H.G.”’

‘But she didn’t want to go back to the formality of “Mr Wells”,’ Jane observed. ‘You must remember, dear, that I can read the minds of your young women admirers like a book. I’ve been there myself.’

‘I haven’t encouraged her. I’ve actually
dis
couraged her, by pulling out of that meeting.’

‘Only because you wanted to go to Arnold’s play.’

‘Well, Arnold is an old friend,’ he said.

‘You don’t have to explain to
me
, dear,’ Jane said.

Arnold Bennett’s play
Cupid and Common Sense
, a dramatisation of his novel
Anna of the Five Towns
, had been given two performances by the Stage Society in London at the end of January and the only one they could attend clashed with the public meeting of the Cambridge Fabian Society he had half promised to participate in. He had a professional as well as a personal reason for wanting to see the play, because he and Arnold had a long-standing but as yet unfulfilled plan to collaborate on an original dramatic work, but he had felt a little guilty – no, not exactly guilty, but regretful about pulling out of the Cambridge engagement, because he didn’t like to think of Amber being disappointed in him. So he had sent her two letters in quick succession to make up for it, and had now received this wistful appeal for more, with its tantalising hint of what he had missed by his absence. Bennett’s play had been enjoyable, but nothing comparable to hearing Amber make a revolutionary speech.