Love and Mr. Lewisham by H. G. Wells

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LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM

By

H. G. WELLS

[Illustration: "Why on earth did you put my roses here?" he asked.]

[Illustration]

CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCES MR. LEWISHAM
II. "AS THE WIND BLOWS"
III. THE WONDERFUL DISCOVERY
IV. RAISED EYEBROWS
V. HESITATIONS
VI. THE SCANDALOUS RAMBLE
VII. THE RECKONING
VIII. THE CAREER PREVAILS
IX. ALICE HEYDINGER
X. IN THE GALLERY OF OLD IRON
XI. MANIFESTATIONS
XII. LEWISHAM IS UNACCOUNTABLE
XIII. LEWISHAM INSISTS
XIV. MR. LAGUNE'S POINT OF VIEW
XV. LOVE IN THE STREETS
XVI. MISS HEYDINGER'S PRIVATE THOUGHTS
XVII. IN THE RAPHAEL GALLERY
XVIII. THE FRIENDS OF PROGRESS MEET
XIX. LEWISHAM'S SOLUTION
XX. THE CAREER IS SUSPENDED
XXI. HOME!
XXII. EPITHALAMY
XXIII. MR. CHAFFERY AT HOME
XXIV. THE CAMPAIGN OPENS
XXV. THE FIRST BATTLE
XXVI. THE GLAMOUR FADES
XXVII. CONCERNING A QUARREL
XXVIII. THE COMING OF THE ROSES
XXIX. THORNS AND ROSE PETALS
XXX. A WITHDRAWAL
XXXI. IN BATTERSEA PARK
XXXII. THE CROWNING VICTORY

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCES MR. LEWISHAM.

The opening chapter does not concern itself with Love--indeed that
antagonist does not certainly appear until the third--and Mr. Lewisham
is seen at his studies. It was ten years ago, and in those days he was
assistant master in the Whortley Proprietary School, Whortley, Sussex,
and his wages were forty pounds a year, out of which he had to afford
fifteen shillings a week during term time to lodge with Mrs. Munday,
at the little shop in the West Street. He was called "Mr." to
distinguish him from the bigger boys, whose duty it was to learn, and
it was a matter of stringent regulation that he should be addressed as
"Sir."

He wore ready-made clothes, his black jacket of rigid line was dusted
about the front and sleeves with scholastic chalk, and his face was
downy and his moustache incipient. He was a passable-looking youngster
of eighteen, fair-haired, indifferently barbered, and with a quite
unnecessary pair of glasses on his fairly prominent nose--he wore
these to make himself look older, that discipline might be
maintained. At the particular moment when this story begins he was in
his bedroom. An attic it was, with lead-framed dormer windows, a
slanting ceiling and a bulging wall, covered, as a number of torn
places witnessed, with innumerable strata of florid old-fashioned
paper.

To judge by the room Mr. Lewisham thought little of Love but much on
Greatness. Over the head of the bed, for example, where good folks
hang texts, these truths asserted themselves, written in a clear,
bold, youthfully florid hand:--"Knowledge is Power," and "What man has
done man can do,"--man in the second instance referring to
Mr. Lewisham. Never for a moment were these things to be
forgotten. Mr. Lewisham could see them afresh every morning as his
head came through his shirt. And over the yellow-painted box upon
which--for lack of shelves--Mr. Lewisham's library was arranged, was a
"_Schema_." (Why he should not have headed it "Scheme," the editor of
the _Church Times_, who calls his miscellaneous notes "_Varia_," is
better able to say than I.) In this scheme, 1892 was indicated as the
year in which Mr. Lewisham proposed to take his B.A. degree at the
London University with "hons. in all subjects," and 1895 as the date
of his "gold medal." Subsequently there were to be "pamphlets in the
Liberal interest," and such like things duly dated. "Who would control
others must first control himself," remarked the wall over the
wash-hand stand, and behind the door against the Sunday trousers was a
portrait of Carlyle.

These were no mere threats against the universe; operations had
begun. Jostling Shakespeare, Emerson's Essays, and the penny Life of
Confucius, there were battered and defaced school books, a number of
the excellent manuals of the Universal Correspondence Association,
exercise books, ink (red and black) in penny bottles, and an
india-rubber stamp with Mr. Lewisham's name. A trophy of bluish green
South Kensington certificates for geometrical drawing, astronomy,
physiology, physiography, and inorganic chemistry adorned his further
wall. And against the Carlyle portrait was a manuscript list of French
irregular verbs.

Attached by a drawing-pin to the roof over the wash-hand stand,
which--the room being an attic--sloped almost dangerously, dangled a
Time-Table. Mr. Lewisham was to rise at five, and that this was no
vain boasting, a cheap American alarum clock by the books on the box
witnessed. The lumps of mellow chocolate on the papered ledge by the
bed-head indorsed that evidence. "French until eight," said the
time-table curtly. Breakfast was to be eaten in twenty minutes; then
twenty-five minutes of "literature" to be precise, learning extracts
(preferably pompous) from the plays of William Shakespeare--and then
to school and duty. The time-table further prescribed Latin
Composition for the recess and the dinner hour ("literature," however,
during the meal), and varied its injunctions for the rest of the
twenty-four hours according to the day of the week. Not a moment for
Satan and that "mischief still" of his. Only three-score and ten has
the confidence, as well as the time, to be idle.

But just think of the admirable quality of such a scheme! Up and busy
at five, with all the world about one horizontal, warm, dreamy-brained
or stupidly hullish, if roused, roused only to grunt and sigh and roll
over again into oblivion. By eight three hours' clear start, three
hours' knowledge ahead of everyone. It takes, I have been told by an
eminent scholar, about a thousand hours of sincere work to learn a
language completely--after three or four languages much less--which
gives you, even at the outset, one each a year before breakfast. The
gift of tongues--picked up like mushrooms! Then that "literature"--an
astonishing conception! In the afternoon mathematics and the
sciences. Could anything be simpler or more magnificent? In six years
Mr. Lewisham will have his five or six languages, a sound, all-round
education, a habit of tremendous industry, and be still but
four-and-twenty. He will already have honour in his university and
ampler means. One realises that those pamphlets in the Liberal
interests will be no obscure platitudes. Where Mr. Lewisham will be at
thirty stirs the imagination. There will be modifications of the
Schema, of course, as experience widens. But the spirit of it--the
spirit of it is a devouring flame!

He was sitting facing the diamond-framed window, writing, writing
fast, on a second yellow box that was turned on end and empty, and the
lid was open, and his knees were conveniently stuck into the
cavity. The bed was strewn with books and copygraphed sheets of
instructions from his remote correspondence tutors. Pursuant to the
dangling time-table he was, you would have noticed, translating Latin
into English.

Imperceptibly the speed of his writing diminished. "_Urit me Glycerae
nitor_" lay ahead and troubled him. "Urit me," he murmured, and his
eyes travelled from his book out of window to the vicar's roof
opposite and its ivied chimneys. His brows were knit at first and then
relaxed. "_Urit me_!" He had put his pen into his mouth and glanced
about for his dictionary. _Urare_?

Suddenly his expression changed. Movement dictionary-ward ceased. He
was listening to a light tapping sound--it was a footfall--outside.

He stood up abruptly, and, stretching his neck, peered through his
unnecessary glasses and the diamond panes down into the
street. Looking acutely downward he could see a hat daintily trimmed
with pinkish white blossom, the shoulder of a jacket, and just the
tips of nose and chin. Certainly the stranger who sat under the
gallery last Sunday next the Frobishers. Then, too, he had seen her
only obliquely....

He watched her until she passed beyond the window frame. He strained
to see impossibly round the corner....

Then he started, frowned, took his pen from his mouth. "This wandering
attention!" he said. "The slightest thing! Where was I? Tcha!" He
made a noise with his teeth to express his irritation, sat down, and
replaced his knees in the upturned box. "Urit me," he said, biting the
end of his pen and looking for his dictionary.

It was a Wednesday half-holiday late in March, a spring day glorious
in amber light, dazzling white clouds and the intensest blue, casting
a powder of wonderful green hither and thither among the trees and
rousing all the birds to tumultuous rejoicings, a rousing day, a
clamatory insistent day, a veritable herald of summer. The stir of
that anticipation was in the air, the warm earth was parting above the
swelling seeds, and all the pine-woods were full of the minute
crepitation of opening bud scales. And not only was the stir of Mother
Nature's awakening in the earth and the air and the trees, but also in
Mr. Lewisham's youthful blood, bidding him rouse himself to live--live
in a sense quite other than that the Schema indicated.

He saw the dictionary peeping from under a paper, looked up "Urit me,"
appreciated the shining "nitor" of Glycera's shoulders, and so fell
idle again to rouse himself abruptly.

"I _can't_ fix my attention," said Mr. Lewisham. He took off the
needless glasses, wiped them, and blinked his eyes. This confounded
Horace and his stimulating epithets! A walk?

"I won't be beat," he said--incorrectly--replaced his glasses, brought
his elbows down on either side of his box with resonant violence, and
clutched the hair over his ears with both hands....

In five minutes' time he found himself watching the swallows curving
through the blue over the vicarage garden.

"Did ever man have such a bother with himself as me?" he asked vaguely
but vehemently. "It's self-indulgence does it--sitting down's the
beginning of laziness."

So he stood up to his work, and came into permanent view of the
village street. "If she has gone round the corner by the post office,
she will come in sight over the palings above the allotments,"
suggested the unexplored and undisciplined region of Mr. Lewisham's
mind....

She did not come into sight. Apparently she had not gone round by the
post office after all. It made one wonder where she had gone. Did she
go up through the town to the avenue on these occasions?... Then
abruptly a cloud drove across the sunlight, the glowing street went
cold and Mr. Lewisham's imagination submitted to control. So "_Mater
saeva cupidinum_," "The untamable mother of desires,"--Horace (Book
II. of the Odes) was the author appointed by the university for
Mr. Lewisham's matriculation--was, after all, translated to its
prophetic end.

Precisely as the church clock struck five Mr. Lewisham, with a
punctuality that was indeed almost too prompt for a really earnest
student, shut his Horace, took up his Shakespeare, and descended the
narrow, curved, uncarpeted staircase that led from his garret to the
living room in which he had his tea with his landlady, Mrs.
Munday. That good lady was alone, and after a few civilities
Mr. Lewisham opened his Shakespeare and read from a mark onward--that
mark, by-the-bye, was in the middle of a scene--while he consumed
mechanically a number of slices of bread and whort jam.

Mrs. Munday watched him over her spectacles and thought how bad so
much reading must be for the eyes, until the tinkling of her shop-bell
called her away to a customer. At twenty-five minutes to six he put
the book back in the window-sill, dashed a few crumbs from his jacket,
assumed a mortar-board cap that was lying on the tea-caddy, and went
forth to his evening "preparation duty."

The West Street was empty and shining golden with the sunset. Its
beauty seized upon him, and he forgot to repeat the passage from Henry
VIII. that should have occupied him down the street. Instead he was
presently thinking of that insubordinate glance from his window and of
little chins and nose-tips. His eyes became remote in their
expression....

The school door was opened by an obsequious little boy with "lines" to
be examined.

Mr. Lewisham felt a curious change of atmosphere on his entry. The
door slammed behind him. The hall with its insistent scholastic
suggestions, its yellow marbled paper, its long rows of hat-pegs, its
disreputable array of umbrellas, a broken mortar-board and a tattered
and scattered _Principia_, seemed dim and dull in contrast with the
luminous stir of the early March evening outside. An unusual sense of
the greyness of a teacher's life, of the greyness indeed of the life
of all studious souls came, and went in his mind. He took the "lines,"
written painfully over three pages of exercise book, and obliterated
them with a huge G.E.L., scrawled monstrously across each page. He
heard the familiar mingled noises of the playground drifting in to him
through the open schoolroom door.

CHAPTER II.

"AS THE WIND BLOWS."

A flaw in that pentagram of a time-table, that pentagram by which the
demons of distraction were to be excluded from Mr. Lewisham's career
to Greatness, was the absence of a clause forbidding study out of
doors. It was the day after the trivial window peeping of the last
chapter that this gap in the time-table became apparent, a day if
possible more gracious and alluring than its predecessor, and at
half-past twelve, instead of returning from the school directly to his
lodging, Mr. Lewisham escaped through the omission and made his
way--Horace in pocket--to the park gates and so to the avenue of
ancient trees that encircles the broad Whortley domain. He dismissed a
suspicion of his motive with perfect success. In the avenue--for the
path is but little frequented--one might expect to read undisturbed.
The open air, the erect attitude, are surely better than sitting in a
stuffy, enervating bedroom. The open air is distinctly healthy, hardy,
simple....

The day was breezy, and there was a perpetual rustling, a going and
coming in the budding trees.

The network of the beeches was full of golden sunlight, and all the
lower branches were shot with horizontal dashes of new-born green.

"_Tu, nisi ventis
Debes ludibrium, cave_."

was the appropriate matter of Mr. Lewisham's thoughts, and he was
mechanically trying to keep the book open in three places at once, at
the text, the notes, and the literal translation, while he turned up
the vocabulary for _ludibrium_, when his attention, wandering
dangerously near the top of the page, fell over the edge and escaped
with incredible swiftness down the avenue....

A girl, wearing a straw hat adorned with white blossom, was advancing
towards him. Her occupation, too, was literary. Indeed, she was so
busy writing that evidently she did not perceive him.

Unreasonable emotions descended upon Mr. Lewisham--emotions that are
unaccountable on the mere hypothesis of a casual meeting. Something
was whispered; it sounded suspiciously like "It's her!" He advanced
with his fingers in his book, ready to retreat to its pages if she
looked up, and watched her over it. _Ludibrium_ passed out of his
universe. She was clearly unaware of his nearness, he thought, intent
upon her writing, whatever that might be. He wondered what it might
be. Her face, foreshortened by her downward regard, seemed
infantile. Her fluttering skirt was short, and showed her shoes and
ankles. He noted her graceful, easy steps. A figure of health and
lightness it was, sunlit, and advancing towards him, something, as he
afterwards recalled with a certain astonishment, quite outside the
Schema.

Nearer she came and nearer, her eyes still downcast. He was full of
vague, stupid promptings towards an uncalled-for intercourse. It was
curious she did not see him. He began to expect almost painfully the
moment when she would look up, though what there was to expect--! He
thought of what she would see when she discovered him, and wondered
where the tassel of his cap might be hanging--it sometimes occluded
one eye. It was of course quite impossible to put up a hand and
investigate. He was near trembling with excitement. His paces, acts
which are usually automatic, became uncertain and difficult. One might
have thought he had never passed a human being before. Still nearer,
ten yards now, nine, eight. Would she go past without looking up?...

Then their eyes met.

She had hazel eyes, but Mr. Lewisham, being quite an amateur about
eyes, could find no words for them. She looked demurely into his
face. She seemed to find nothing there. She glanced away from him
among the trees, and passed, and nothing remained in front of him but
an empty avenue, a sunlit, green-shot void.

The incident was over.

From far away the soughing of the breeze swept towards him, and in a
moment all the twigs about him were quivering and rustling and the
boughs creaking with a gust of wind. It seemed to urge him away from
her. The faded dead leaves that had once been green and young sprang
up, raced one another, leapt, danced and pirouetted, and then
something large struck him on the neck, stayed for a startling moment,
and drove past him up the avenue.

Something vividly white! A sheet of paper--the sheet upon which she
had been writing!

For what seemed a long time he did not grasp the situation. He glanced
over his shoulder and understood suddenly. His awkwardness
vanished. Horace in hand, he gave chase, and in ten paces had secured
the fugitive document. He turned towards her, flushed with triumph,
the quarry in his hand. He had as he picked it up seen what was
written, but the situation dominated him for the instant. He made a
stride towards her, and only then understood what he had seen. Lines
of a measured length and capitals! Could it really be--? He
stopped. He looked again, eyebrows rising. He held it before him,
staring now quite frankly. It had been written with a stylographic
pen. Thus it ran:--

"_Come! Sharp's the word._"

And then again,

"_Come! Sharp's the word._"

And then,

"_Come! Sharp's the word._"

"_Come! Sharp's the word._"

And so on all down the page, in a boyish hand uncommonly like
Frobisher ii.'s.

Surely! "I say!" said Mr. Lewisham, struggling with, the new aspect
and forgetting all his manners in his surprise.... He remembered
giving the imposition quite well:--Frobisher ii. had repeated the
exhortation just a little too loudly--had brought the thing upon
himself. To find her doing this jarred oddly upon certain vague
preconceptions he had formed of her. Somehow it seemed as if she had
betrayed him. That of course was only for the instant.

She had come up with him now. "May I have my sheet of paper, please?"
she said with a catching of her breath. She was a couple of inches
less in height than he. Do you observe her half-open lips? said Mother
Nature in a noiseless aside to Mr. Lewisham--a thing he afterwards
recalled. In her eyes was a touch of apprehension.

"I say," he said, with protest still uppermost, "you oughtn't to do
this."

"Do what?"

"This. Impositions. For my boys."

She raised her eyebrows, then knitted them momentarily, and looked at
him. "Are _you_ Mr. Lewisham?" she asked with an affectation of entire
ignorance and discovery.

She knew him perfectly well, which was one reason why she was writing
the imposition, but pretending not to know gave her something to say.

Mr. Lewisham nodded.

"Of all people! Then"--frankly--"you have just found me out."

"I am afraid I have," said Lewisham. "I am afraid I _have_ found you
out."

They looked at one another for the next move. She decided to plead in
extenuation.

"Teddy Frobisher is my cousin. I know it's very wrong, but he seemed
to have such a lot to do and to be in _such_ trouble. And I had
nothing to do. In fact, it was _I_ who offered...."

She stopped and looked at him. She seemed to consider her remark
complete.

That meeting of the eyes had an oddly disconcerting quality. He tried
to keep to the business of the imposition. "You ought not to have done
that," he said, encountering her steadfastly.

She looked down and then into his face again. "No," she said. "I
suppose I ought not to. I'm very sorry."

Her looking down and up again produced another unreasonable effect. It
seemed to Lewisham that they were discussing something quite other
than the topic of their conversation; a persuasion patently absurd and
only to be accounted for by the general disorder of his faculties. He
made a serious attempt to keep his footing of reproof.

"I should have detected the writing, you know."

"Of course you would. It was very wrong of me to persuade him. But I
did--I assure you. He seemed in such trouble. And I thought--"

She made another break, and there was a faint deepening of colour in
her cheeks. Suddenly, stupidly, his own adolescent cheeks began to
glow. It became necessary to banish that sense of a duplicate topic
forthwith.

"I can assure you," he said, now very earnestly, "I never give a
punishment, never, unless it is merited. I make that a rule.
I--er--_always_ make that a rule. I am very careful indeed."

"I am really sorry," she interrupted with frank contrition. "It _was_
silly of me."

Lewisham felt unaccountably sorry she should have to apologise, and he
spoke at once with the idea of checking the reddening of his face. "I
don't think _that_," he said with a sort of belated alacrity. "Really,
it was kind of you, you know--very kind of you indeed. And I know
that--I can quite understand that--er--your kindness...."

"Ran away with me. And now poor little Teddy will get into worse
trouble for letting me...."

"Oh no," said Mr. Lewisham, perceiving an opportunity and trying not
to smile his appreciation of what he was saying. "I had no business to
read this as I picked it up--absolutely no business. Consequently...."

"You won't take any notice of it? Really!"

"Certainly not," said Mr. Lewisham.

Her face lit with a smile, and Mr. Lewisham's relaxed in sympathy. "It
is nothing--it's the proper thing for me to do, you know."

"But so many people won't do it. Schoolmasters are not usually
so--chivalrous."

He was chivalrous! The phrase acted like a spur. He obeyed a foolish
impulse.

"If you like--" he said.

"What?"

"He needn't do this. The Impot., I mean. I'll let him off."

"Really?"

"I can."

"It's awfully kind of you."

"I don't mind," he said. "It's nothing much. If you really think ..."

He was full of self-applause for this scandalous sacrifice of justice.

"It's awfully kind of you," she said.

"It's nothing, really," he explained, "nothing."

"Most people wouldn't--"

"I know."

Pause.

"It's all right," he said. "Really."

He would have given worlds for something more to say, something witty
and original, but nothing came.

The pause lengthened. She glanced over her shoulder down the vacant
avenue. This interview--this momentous series of things unsaid was
coming to an end! She looked at him hesitatingly and smiled again. She
held out her hand. No doubt that was the proper thing to do. He took
it, searching a void, tumultuous mind in vain.

"It's awfully kind of you," she said again as she did so.

"It don't matter a bit," said Mr. Lewisham, and sought vainly for some
other saying, some doorway remark into new topics. Her hand was cool
and soft and firm, the most delightful thing to grasp, and this
observation ousted all other things. He held it for a moment, but
nothing would come.

They discovered themselves hand in hand. They both laughed and felt
"silly." They shook hands in the manner of quite intimate friends, and
snatched their hands away awkwardly. She turned, glanced timidly at
him over her shoulder, and hesitated. "Good-bye," she said, and was
suddenly walking from him.

He bowed to her receding back, made a seventeenth-century sweep with
his college cap, and then some hitherto unexplored regions of his mind
flashed into revolt.

Hardly had she gone six paces when he was at her side again.

"I say," he said with a fearful sense of his temerity, and raising his
mortar-board awkwardly as though he was passing a funeral. "But that
sheet of paper ..."

"Yes," she said surprised--quite naturally.

"May I have it?"

"Why?"

He felt a breathless pleasure, like that of sliding down a slope of
snow. "I would like to have it."

She smiled and raised her eyebrows, but his excitement was now too
great for smiling. "Look here!" she said, and displayed the sheet
crumpled into a ball. She laughed--with a touch of effort.

"I don't mind that," said Mr. Lewisham, laughing too. He captured the
paper by an insistent gesture and smoothed it out with fingers that
trembled.

"You don't mind?" he said.

"Mind what?"

"If I keep it?"

"Why should I?"

Pause. Their eyes met again. There was an odd constraint about both of
them, a palpitating interval of silence.

"I really _must_ be going," she said suddenly, breaking the spell by
an effort. She turned about and left him with the crumpled piece of
paper in the fist that held the book, the other hand lifting the
mortar board in a dignified salute again.

He watched her receding figure. His heart was beating with remarkable
rapidity. How light, how living she seemed! Little round flakes of
sunlight raced down her as she went. She walked fast, then slowly,
looking sideways once or twice, but not back, until she reached the
park gates. Then she looked towards him, a remote friendly little
figure, made a gesture of farewell, and disappeared.

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