Tono-Bungay, H. G. Wells [reading like a writer .TXT] 📗

of fine emotion every woman, it may be, hides. She had read of love, she had thought of love, a thousand sweet lyrics had sounded through her brain and left fine fragments in her memory; she poured it out, all of it, shamelessly, skilfully, for me. I cannot give any sense of that talk, I cannot even tell how much of the delight of it was the magic of her voice, the glow of her near presence. And always we walked swathed warmly through a chilly air, along dim, interminable greasy roads⁠—with never a soul abroad it seemed to us, never a beast in the fields.

“Why do people love each other?” I said.

“Why not?”

“But why do I love you? Why is your voice better than any voice, your face sweeter than any face?”

“And why do I love you?” she asked; “not only what is fine in you, but what isn’t? Why do I love your dullness, your arrogance? For I do. To⁠—night I love the very raindrops on the fur of your coat!”⁠ ⁠…

So we talked; and at last very wet, still glowing but a little tired, we parted at the garden door. We had been wandering for two hours in our strange irrational community of happiness, and all the world about us, and particularly Lady Osprey and her household, had been asleep⁠—and dreaming of anything rather than Beatrice in the night and rain.

She stood in the doorway, a muffled figure with eyes that glowed.

“Come back,” she whispered. “I shall wait for you.”

She hesitated.

She touched the lapel of my coat. “I love you now,” she said, and lifted her face to mine.

I held her to me and was atremble from top to toe. “O God!” I cried. “And I must go!”

She slipped from my arms and paused, regarding me. For an instant the world seemed full of fantastic possibilities.

“Yes, Go!” she said, and vanished and slammed the door upon me, leaving me alone like a man new fallen from fairyland in the black darkness of the night.

III

That expedition to Mordet Island stands apart from all the rest of my life, detached, a piece by itself with an atmosphere of its own. It would, I suppose, make a book by itself⁠—it has made a fairly voluminous official report⁠—but so far as this novel of mine goes it is merely an episode, a contributory experience, and I mean to keep it at that.

Vile weather, an impatient fretting against unbearable slowness and delay, sea⁠—sickness, general discomfort and humiliating self⁠—revelation are the master values of these memories.

I was sick all through the journey out. I don’t know why. It was the only time I was ever seasick, and I have seen some pretty bad weather since I became a boat-builder. But that phantom smell of potatoes was peculiarly vile to me. Coming back on the brig we were all ill, every one of us, so soon as we got to sea, poisoned, I firmly believe, by quap. On the way out most of the others recovered in a few days, but the stuffiness below, the coarse food, the cramped dirty accommodation kept me, if not actually seasick, in a state of acute physical wretchedness the whole time. The ship abounded in cockroaches and more intimate vermin. I was cold all the time until after we passed Cape Verde, then I became steamily hot; I had been too preoccupied with Beatrice and my keen desire to get the Maud Mary under way at once, to consider a proper wardrobe for myself, and in particular I lacked a coat. Heavens! how I lacked that coat! And, moreover, I was cooped up with two of the worst bores in Christendom, Pollack and the captain. Pollack, after conducting his illness in a style better adapted to the capacity of an opera house than a small compartment, suddenly got insupportably well and breezy, and produced a manly pipe in which he smoked a tobacco as blond as himself, and divided his time almost equally between smoking it and trying to clean it. “There’s only three things you can clean a pipe with,” he used to remark with a twist of paper in hand. “The best’s a feather, the second’s a straw, and the third’s a girl’s hairpin. I never see such a ship. You can’t find any of ’em. Last time I came this way I did find hairpins anyway, and found ’em on the floor of the captain’s cabin. Regular deposit. Eh?⁠ ⁠… Feelin’ better?”

At which I usually swore.

“Oh, you’ll be all right soon. Don’t mind my puffin’ a bit? Eh?”

He never tired of asking me to “have a hand at Nap. Good game. Makes you forget it, and that’s half the battle.”

He would sit swaying with the rolling of the ship and suck at his pipe of blond tobacco and look with an inexpressibly sage but somnolent blue eye at the captain by the hour together. “Captain’s a card,” he would say over and over again as the outcome of these meditations. “He’d like to know what we’re up to. He’d like to know⁠—no end.”

That did seem to be the captain’s ruling idea. But he also wanted to impress me with the notion that he was a gentleman of good family and to air a number of views adverse to the English, to English literature, to the English constitution, and the like.

He had learnt the sea in the Romanian navy, and English out of a book; he would still at times pronounce the e’s at the end of “there” and “here”; he was a naturalised Englishman, and he drove me into a reluctant and uncongenial patriotism by his everlasting carping at things English. Pollack would set himself to “draw him out.” Heaven alone can tell how near I came to murder.

Fifty-three days I had outward, cooped up with these two and a shy and profoundly depressed mate who read the Bible on Sundays and spent the rest of his leisure in lethargy, three and