The Passionate Friends
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The Passionate Friends
By H. G. WELLS
Author of "Marriage."
WITH FRONTISPIECE
A. L. BURT COMPANY, PUBLISHERS
114-120 East Twenty-third Street - - New York
PUBLISHED BY ARRANGEMENT WITH HARPER & BROTHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY HARPER & BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1913
TO
L. E. N. S.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. MR. STRATTON TO HIS SON 1
II. BOYHOOD 14
III. INTENTIONS AND THE LADY MARY CHRISTIAN 40
IV. THE MARRIAGE OF THE LADY MARY CHRISTIAN 73
V. THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA 102
VI. LADY MARY JUSTIN 132
VII. BEGINNING AGAIN 197
VIII. THIS SWARMING BUSINESS OF MANKIND 220
IX. THE SPIRIT OF THE NEW WORLD 246
X. MARY WRITES 280
XI. THE LAST MEETING 318
XII. THE ARRAIGNMENT OF JEALOUSY 358
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
CHAPTER THE FIRST
MR. STRATTON TO HIS SON
§ 1
I want very much to set down my thoughts and my experiences of life. I
want to do so now that I have come to middle age and now that my
attitudes are all defined and my personal drama worked out I feel that
the toil of writing and reconsideration may help to clear and fix many
things that remain a little uncertain in my thoughts because they have
never been fully stated, and I want to discover any lurking
inconsistencies and unsuspected gaps. And I have a story. I have lived
through things that have searched me. I want to tell that story as well
as I can while I am still a clear-headed and active man, and while many
details that may presently become blurred and altered are still rawly
fresh in my mind. And to one person in particular do I wish to think I
am writing, and that is to you, my only son. I want to write my story
not indeed to the child you are now, but to the man you are going to be.
You are half my blood and temperamentally altogether mine. A day will
come when you will realize this, and want to know how life has gone with
me, and then it may be altogether too late for me to answer your
enquiries. I may have become inaccessible as old people are sometimes
inaccessible. And so I think of leaving this book for you--at any rate,
I shall write it as if I meant to leave it for you. Afterwards I can
consider whether I will indeed leave it....
The idea of writing such a book as this came to me first as I sat by the
dead body of your grandfather--my father. It was because I wanted so
greatly such a book from him that I am now writing this. He died, you
must know, only a few months ago, and I went to his house to bury him
and settle all his affairs.
At one time he had been my greatest friend. He had never indeed talked
to me about himself or his youth, but he had always showed an
extraordinary sympathy and helpfulness for me in all the confusion and
perplexities into which I fell. This did not last to the end of his
life. I was the child of his middle years, and suddenly, in a year or
less, the curtains of age and infirmity fell between us. There came an
illness, an operation, and he rose from it ailing, suffering, dwarfed
and altogether changed. Of all the dark shadows upon life I think that
change through illness and organic decay in the thoughts and spirits of
those who are dear and close to us is the most evil and distressing and
inexplicable. Suddenly he was a changeling, a being querulous and
pitiful, needing indulgence and sacrifices.
In a little while a new state of affairs was established. I ceased to
consider him as a man to whom one told things, of whom one could expect
help or advice. We all ceased to consider him at all in that way. We
humored him, put pleasant things before him, concealed whatever was
disagreeable. A poor old man he was indeed in those concluding years,
weakly rebellious against the firm kindliness of my cousin, his
housekeeper and nurse. He who had once been so alert was now at times
astonishingly apathetic. At times an impish malice I had never known in
him before gleamed in little acts and speeches. His talk rambled, and
for the most part was concerned with small, long-forgotten contentions.
It was indistinct and difficult to follow because of a recent loss of
teeth, and he craved for brandy, to restore even for a moment the sense
of strength and well-being that ebbed and ebbed away from him. So that
when I came to look at his dead face at last, it was with something like
amazement I perceived him grave and beautiful--more grave and beautiful
than he had been even in the fullness of life.
All the estrangement of the final years was wiped in an instant from my
mind as I looked upon his face. There came back a rush of memories, of
kind, strong, patient, human aspects of his fatherhood. And I remembered
as every son must remember--even you, my dear, will some day remember
because it is in the very nature of sonship--insubordinations,
struggles, ingratitudes, great benefits taken unthankfully, slights and
disregards. It was not remorse I felt, nor repentance, but a tremendous
regret that so things had happened and that life should be so. Why is
it, I thought, that when a son has come to manhood he cannot take his
father for a friend? I had a curious sense of unprecedented communion
as I stood beside him now. I felt that he understood my thoughts; his
face seemed to answer with an expression of still and sympathetic
patience.
I was sensible of amazing gaps. We had never talked together of love,
never of religion.
All sorts of things that a man of twenty-eight would not dream of hiding
from a coeval he had hidden from me. For some days I had to remain in
his house, I had to go through his papers, handle all those intimate
personal things that accumulate around a human being year by
year--letters, yellowing scraps of newspaper, tokens, relics kept,
accidental vestiges, significant litter. I learnt many things I had
never dreamt of. At times I doubted whether I was not prying, whether I
ought not to risk the loss of those necessary legal facts I sought, and
burn these papers unread. There were love letters, and many such
touching things.
My memories of him did not change because of these new lights, but they
became wonderfully illuminated. I realized him as a young man, I began
to see him as a boy. I found a little half-bound botanical book with
stencil-tinted illustrations, a good-conduct prize my father had won at
his preparatory school; a rolled-up sheet of paper, carbonized and dry
and brittle, revealed itself as a piece of specimen writing, stiff with
boyish effort, decorated in ambitious and faltering flourishes and still
betraying the pencil rulings his rubber should have erased. Already your
writing is better than that. And I found a daguerreotype portrait of him
in knickerbockers against a photographer's stile. His face then was not
unlike yours. I stood with that in my hand at the little bureau in his
bedroom, and looked at his dead face.
The flatly painted portrait of his father, my grandfather, hanging
there in the stillness above the coffin, looking out on the world he had
left with steady, humorous blue eyes that followed one about the
room,--that, too, was revivified, touched into reality and participation
by this and that, became a living presence at a conference of lives.
Things of his were there also in that life's accumulation....
There we were, three Strattons together, and down in the dining-room
were steel engravings to take us back two generations further, and we
had all lived full lives, suffered, attempted, signified. I had a
glimpse of the long successions of mankind. What a huge inaccessible
lumber-room of thought and experience we amounted to, I thought; how
much we are, how little we transmit. Each one of us was but a variation,
an experiment upon the Stratton theme. All that I had now under my hands
was but the merest hints and vestiges, moving and surprising indeed, but
casual and fragmentary, of those obliterated repetitions. Man is a
creature becoming articulate, and why should those men have left so much
of the tale untold--to be lost and forgotten? Why must we all repeat
things done, and come again very bitterly to wisdom our fathers have
achieved before us? My grandfather there should have left me something
better than the still enigma of his watching face. All my life so far
has gone in learning very painfully what many men have learnt before me;
I have spent the greater part of forty years in finding a sort of
purpose for the uncertain and declining decades that remain. Is it not
time the generations drew together and helped one another? Cannot we
begin now to make a better use of the experiences of life so that our
sons may not waste themselves so much, cannot we gather into books that
men may read in an hour or so the gist of these confused and
multitudinous realities of the individual career? Surely the time is
coming for that, when a new private literature will exist, and fathers
and mothers behind their rôles of rulers, protectors, and supporters,
will prepare frank and intimate records of their thought and their
feeling, told as one tells things to equals, without authority or
reserves or discretions, so that, they being dead, their children may
rediscover them as contemporaries and friends.
That desire for self-expression is indeed already almost an instinct
with many of us. Man is disposed to create a traditional wisdom. For me
this book I contemplate is a need. I am just a year and a half from a
bitter tragedy and the loss of a friend as dear as life to me. It is
very constantly in my mind. She opened her mind to me as few people open
their minds to anyone. In a way, little Stephen, she died for you. And I
am so placed that I have no one to talk to quite freely about her. The
one other person to whom I talk, I cannot talk to about her; it is
strange, seeing how we love and trust one another, but so it is; you
will understand that the better as this story unfolds. For eight long
years before the crisis that culminated in her tragic death I never saw
her; yet, quite apart from the shock and distresses of that time, it has
left me extraordinarily lonely and desolate.
And there was a kind of dreadful splendor in that last act of hers,
which has taken a great hold upon my imagination; it has interwoven with
everything else in my mind, it bears now upon every question. I cannot
get away from it, while it is thus pent from utterance.... Perhaps
having written this to you I may never show it you or leave it for you
to see. But yet I must write it. Of all conceivable persons you, when
you have grown to manhood, are the most likely to understand.
§ 2
You did not come to see your dead grandfather, nor did you know very
much about the funeral. Nowadays we do not bring the sweet egotisms, the
vivid beautiful personal intensities of childhood, into the cold, vast
presence of death. I would as soon, my dear, have sent your busy little
limbs toiling up the Matterhorn. I have put by a photograph of my father
for you as he lay in that last stillness of his, that you will see at a
properer time.
Your mother and I wore black only at his funeral and came back colored
again into your colored world, and in a very little while your interest
in this event that had taken us away for a time turned to other, more
assimilable things. But there happened a little incident that laid hold
upon me; you forgot it, perhaps, in a week or less, but I shall never