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Chapter the Fifth: Fanny Discovers Herself. Parts 11 and 12 · The Dream: A Novel

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Section seventeen of The Dream, a Novel. This is a LibriVox recording.
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All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer,
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please visit LibriVox dot org. The Dream a Novel by H. G.
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Wells. Chapter the fifth Fanny discovers herself parts eleven and twelve. Part
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eleven. I concealed altogether from my mother the share that Fanny had had in
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getting me my new job, and all the opportunities it carried with it in
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Thunderstone House, and so it was possible for her to find some pride and
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satisfaction in my increasing prosperity. I was presently able to double, and then
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still further to increase my contribution to the household expenses. And I exchanged my
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attic, which was handed over to Proof for her very own, for the
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room which had once sheltered the old margaridges. It was re arranged as a
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bed sitting room for me, and soon I had first one and then several
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shelves full of books in a writing desk of my own. And also I
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concealed from my mother, for there was no use in distressing her the frequency
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of my visits to Fanny, we began to make little excursions together. For
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Fanny I discovered was often very lonely. Newbury was a very busy man,
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and often he could not come near her for ten days or a fortnight.
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And although she had some women friends in classes and lectures, there were gaps,
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often of several days when she would have had no one to speak to
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but the servant who came in daily to her. If it had not been
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for me, but all this companioning of Fanny I tried to hide from my
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mother though, and then her suspicions stabbed my falsehoods Ernie and Prue, however,
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were able to follow the calls of love unhampered by the family shame,
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and presently they were both engaged, and his young lady and her young man
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were brought to a Sunday tea party in the drawing room, through the kind
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permission of mister and missus Milton, who were as usual away. Ernie's young
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lady, I've completely forgotten her name, proved to be a well dressed,
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self possessed young woman with a vast knowledge of people in what we used to
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call society. She talked freely and fashionably, taking the larger share of the
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conversation of Askcot in Monte Carlo and the court prues. Mister Pettigrew was of
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a more serious quality, and of the things he said I remember now only
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that he expressed a firm conviction that messages from the dead were bound to come
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in a few years time. He was a cherupodist, very well thought of
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in chiro po dological circles. Cried Radiant, what is this you are talking
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nonsense, Sarnac, What is jhirobro pote illogical? Hand foot scientific? I
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thought you'd ask me that, said Sarnac, smiling schreopity was corn cutting?
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Corn cutting? Harvesting, said Starlight. But where do the hands and feet
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come in? There were machines then, were there not? No, this
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was a different sort of corn. Mister Hamburg's shop was full of corn salves
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and corn cures. Corns were painful and tiresome colossies produced on people's feet by
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the pressure of ill fitting boots. We don't know of such things nowadays,
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but they darkened scores of lives in Pimlico. But why did they wear ill
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fitting boots? Demanded Radiant. Oh, never mind, never mind, I
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know a mad world, which made boots at hazard without looking at the feet
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that had to wear them, and wore boots that hurt it when no sane
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people would dream of wearing boots. Go on with your story. Let me
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see said some I was talking of a tea party, a family tea party
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in the drawing room, in which we talked of everything in the world but
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my sister Fanny. And quite a little while after that tea party, my
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mother fell ill and died. It was a swift and sudden illness. She
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caught a cold and would not go to bed. When she did go to
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bed, she got up after one day of it because she couldn't bear to
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think of all that prood might be doing or not doing in the housework downstairs.
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And her cold turned to pneumonia, the same sort of inflammation that had
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carried off the Mauger Ridges, and she died in three days now. When
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the fever came upon her, she changed suddenly from something white and hard and
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unapproachable to something flushed and pitiful. Her face grew smaller and younger, looking,
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her eyes bright, and something came into them that reminded me of Fanny.
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When Fanny was distressed and all my habit of sullen resistance to my mother
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melted when I saw her struggling for breath on her tumbled pillow, and realized
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that she might be near the end of all her hates and drudgery. Matilda
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Good became again the old friend who had known her since she was a young
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woman, and they called each other Tilda and Marty instead of Matilda and Martha.
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Matilda, for all her Verico's veins, was up and down stairs fifty
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times a day, and there was much sending out for expensive things, the
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more expensive, the better than Matilda thought my mother might fancy. They stood
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appealingly untouched upon the table by her bedside. Once or twice towards the end,
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my mother asked for me, and when I came in the evening and
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bent over her, she whispered hoarsely, Airy boy, promised me, promise
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me. I sat down and took the hand she held up to me,
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and so holding to me, she dozed. What she wanted me to promise
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she never said. And whether it was some last vow she wanted to extract
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from me that would separate me from Fanny forever, or whether her thoughts about
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Fanny had changed under the shadow of death, and she had some new message
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for her. I cannot imagine to this day. Perhaps she herself did not
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know what I had to promise. A dying desire for predominance moved her will
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stirred in her, and faded again to nothing. Promise me Fanny, she
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never mentioned by name, and we did not dare to bring my sister in
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to her. Earnest came and kissed her, and knelt down by the bedside,
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and suddenly dreadfully wept aloud like the child he was, and set us
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all weeping. He was her first born in her dearest. He had known
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her before her final embitterment. He had always been a dutiful sun to her.
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Presently she was lying there, very straight and still, as hushed and
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still as my father's shop on Sundays, and the traffics and struggles and angers
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of life had done with her forever. Her face was now neither young nor
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old, a marble face of peace. All her peevish resentment was smooth and
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wiped away. It had never occurred to me before that she had or had
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not good looks, But now I saw that Fanny's fine regularity of feature came
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from her. She was like Fanny, Like an immobile, unhumorous Fanny.
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I stood beside her still body, oppressed by a grief too wide and deep
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for tears, an immense grief that was not so much for her as for
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all that distress of life she had embodied. For now I saw that there
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was not, and there never had been, anything hateful in her. I
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saw for the first time the devotion of her, the misguided passion for right,
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the mute, blundering, tormented and tormenting love in her heart. Even
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her love of Fanny was a love capsized and inverted. Her fallen daughter had
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been to her a detested changing for the pretty, clever little girl who was
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to have been a paragwon of feminine virtue except for earnest. How bitterly and
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repeatedly had we children offended her rigid and implacable standards, Fanny and I openly
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rebelliously and proud by discovery for Prue and will not tell you the details of
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Matilda's exposure. Pilford. Long before we children began to thwart my mother,
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there must have been a still more monstrous disappointment for her. What sort of
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dreams of manly piste and decorum had she wrapped about my poor maundering, ramshackle,
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loose limbed father when he and she walked out together in their Sunday clothes,
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making the best and more than the best of themselves. He must have
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been a tall, good looking young man then, and reassuringly apt with pious
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reflections. What shocks had he grows clumsy, wayward, ignorant and incompetent,
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as the dear man was inflicted upon her set and limited expectations. And then
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think of my uncle John Julip again, that wonderful and adored elder brother,
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with the manners of a sporting baronet, who had slowly shriveled down to the
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figure of a drunken thief. Everything had shriveled for her poor soul in our
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streets. In those old days, men were permitted to sell brightly colored distended
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bladders to children. The most apt instruments were acute disappointment, you can imagine.
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And the lifeguard had given my mother was very like one of these bladders.
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It had burst and shriveled down to limp, an empty residue that nothing
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could ever restore. She had faced her declining day's prematurely, wrinkled, weary,
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laborious, and unloved except by one dutiful son. Yes, the thought
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of Ernest was a consolation to me. Surely his loyalty had meant happiness for
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her, Sarnak paused. I find it impossibly said to disentangle my thoughts as
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I stood by my mother's deathbed, from a thousand things that have come to
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me since about her, I've had to tell of her as an antagonist,
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as a hard, uncharitable soul. That was her role in my story.
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But she was indeed just the creature, a victim of that disordered age,
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which had turned her natural tenacity to a blind intolerance, and wasted her moral
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passion upon ugly and barren ends. If Annie and Earnest did not had shown
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any stoutness against the disadvantages of our started life, if we had won for
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ourselves any knowledge or respect, we inherited that much steadfastness from her, Such
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honesty as we had was hers. Ever, moral harshness had overshattered and embittered
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our adolescence. Her passionate mothering had sheltered our childhood. Our father would have
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loved us, wondered at us, and left us about, but early in
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her life, that fear, that terror stricken, hatred of sex, that
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overshattered the Christian centuries, that frantic resort to the suppressions, subjugations, and
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disciplines of a stereotyped marriage. In its harshest form, a marriage is easy
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to step into his and as hard to leave as a steel trap, with
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its teeth hidden by the most elaborate secrecies and misrepresentations, had set its pitiless
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grip upon my mother's imagination and blackened all the happier impulses in life. For
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her. She was ready, if necessary, to pass all her children through
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the flowers of that Moloch, if by so doing their souls might be saved.
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She did it the more bitterly because she was doing it against the deeper,
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undeveloped things in her own nature. Such things more dimly appreciated, perhaps
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passed through the mind of Harry Mortimer Smith, my former self, as he
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stood beside his dead mother. He was torn. I was torn by a
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sense of irrational separation and by the haunting persuasion of lost opportunities. There were
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things I felt that I might have said, propitious moments I might have seized
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to make things better between us. I had differed from her so harshly,
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I might have been so much kinder to her and still have held my way.
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She laid there, a feeble, little old woman, thin worn and
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prematurely aged. How often had I struck at her with all my rebel strength,
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blind to the fact that I could wound her as only a child can
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wound the mother who bore it. She had been darkened, and I also
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had been darkened. And now now it was all too late. The door
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had closed between us, and was closed forever for ever. Part twelve,
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the year and a half that intervened between my mother's death and the beginning of
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the First World War, the war that came before the Poison Gas War,
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and the Great Desolation, were years of rapid growth for me, mental and
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physical alike. I remained with Matilda good because I had come to love that
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clumsy, wise, friendly creature, almost as if she was my second mother.
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But now I was prosperous enough to occupy the whole of the second floor
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and have a sitting room separate from my bedroom. I still came down to
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the underground breakfast room for breakfast of supper high tea, because I liked talking
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with Matilda. Prue had married mister Pettigrew by that time, and in her
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stead two gray and sedulous women came in. They were sisters, one a
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spinster and the other the wife of a broken down prize fighter, to do
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the drudgeries Prue and my mother had done. My chief companion in those days
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was my sister Fanny. Our childhood's alliance was renewed and strengthened. We had
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a need for each other. We were able to help each other as no
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one else could help us. I found out very soon that Fanny's life was
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divided into two very unequal parts. That she had hours and sometimes days of
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excitement and happiness with Newberry, who loved her greatly and gave her all the
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time he could steal away for her, and introduced her to such friends as
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he could trust to respect her and keep their secret. And also she had
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long stretches of uneventful solitude in which she was terribly left to herself. My
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sister Fanny was plucky and loyal and devoted. But before we two got together
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again, I think she found those great intervals of suspended animation dreary and dangerous,
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and sometimes almost intolerable. Often she had nothing to live for it all,
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nothing bright and vital, but the almost daily note, a hasty worder.
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So he scribbled to her, and the better he was, the worse
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it was for her. The fact that he was pleasant and delightful and deeply
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in love with her, the very brightness of being with him, made those
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great intervals seem darker and duller. Hadn't she work, asked Sunray, and
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fellow workers and other women asked Firefly. Not in her position, not as
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an unmarried woman of lowly origins with a lover. But there were others in
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the same position. Surely there were many, a scattered class, a class
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made to be ashamed of itself. Newberry and Fanny were lovers, such lovers
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as we are today. They got through with it, and at last,
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I believe they married according to the custom of the time. But they were
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the exceptional ones. They knew what they wanted and had stout hearts. Most
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of these irregular unions succumbed to the boredom in between, and to the temptations
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of separation, forgetfulness, and jealous He played havoc with these insecure couples.
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The girls in their phases of loneliness picked up with other men, and the
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first lover suspected their infidelities, and straightaway I have a lot to tell you
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yet about jealousy. In the old world, it was not regarded as an
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ugly but as a rather high spirited thing. People let it go, and
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we're proud of it. And the majority of these irregular unions were not even
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love unions in the first they were vice unions, dishonest on either side.
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Drugs and drink crept very easily into lives divided between over excitement and tedium,
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and darkened by a general disapproval. The defiant pose was the easiest pose.
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The unmarried lover was made a social outcast and driven towards other sorts of social
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outcasts, more evil and unhappy. You see perhaps now why my sister Fanny
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was rather alone and aloof, for all that she belonged to a numerous class.
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I suppose, said Sonak, that the object of that rigid legal marriage
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of the old world was to keep lovers together. In countless cases, it
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kept the wrong people together and lovers apart. But then you must remember that
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in those days children were supposed to be providential accidents. They were indeed accidents
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of cohabitation, and that altered all the conditions of the question. There were
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no proper schools for children, no sort of refuge if the parents parted and
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tore the home asunder. We are so secure it is hard to imagine now
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the chancy insecurity of the ancient days. It is hard to imagine the dangers
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that hung about an unprotected child in our world. Nowadays we all seem to
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get paired. Sooner or later each finds a mate in marriages, a natural
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and necessary relationship instead of a compulsory device. All the priests of all the
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religions that have ever been in the world could not bind me to Sunray more
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firmly than I am bound to day. Does one get a book in an
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altar to marry the axe to its handle? None of which does in the
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least degree affect the fact that my sister Fanny suffered dreadfully from loneliness before she
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rediscovered me. She was full of curiosities and enterprise, and she took possession
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of my leisure to explore all sorts of shows and resorts in and about Old
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London. Museums, picture gallerries, parks, gardens, and heaths that I
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should otherwise never have visited. Indeed, she might not have visited either if
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I had not been available as her escort, because in that world of crazy
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suppressions, most of these places were haunted by furtive love hunters and feeble minded
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folk, who might have been irritating and tarisome to a solitary girl so pretty
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as Fanny. They would have followed her about and accosted her when they got
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her alone, and thrust their disagreeable cravings between her and the beauty and sunshine.
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But together we went gaily to all sorts of interesting things. This old
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London i'm describing to you had a large share of parks and gardens. There
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was a pleasing quaintness about all of them, and much unpremeditated loveliness. There
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was a certain Richmond Park to which we often resorted, with many fine old
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trees and grassy spaces, and wildernesses of bracken that got very yellow and gay
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in autumn, and a quantity of deer. You might have been transported from
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this age to Richmond Park two thousand years ago and still fancied yourself in the
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Northland parks of today. The great trees like nearly all trees in those days,
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where it is true, infested with fungus and partly decayed. The Fanny
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and I never noticed that they seemed great healthy trees to us. And there
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was a view from a hill crest of the winding times, a very delightful
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view. And then there were the oddest old gardens and flower spaces at Que.
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I remember a quite good rock garden and glass houses of flowers, the
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brightest flowers the old world imagined possible. And there were passed through a jungle
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of rhododendra, primitive small rhododendra, but bright colored, in a great delight
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to Fannia meat. There was a place where we had tea at little tables
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in the open air, in that frousty old germ saturated world, with its
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dread of drafts and coals and coughs. They gave one a bright sense of
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adventure to eat food in the open air. We went to museums and picture
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galleries and talked about what the pictures meant, and we talked of a thousand
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things together. There comes back to me one conversation we had at a place
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called Hampton Court, a Queer old red brick palace with a great grapevine underglass,
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and an ancient garden. Beside the Thames. There were flower beds full
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of half while herbacious flowers, and we walked beside them under trees, until
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we came to a low wall that looked upon the river, and we sat
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down on a seat, and there after a silence. Suddenly Fanny, like
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one who has been pent up beyond endurance, began talking of love. She
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began by asking questions about the girls I've met, and the girls at Thunderstone
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House. I described one or two of them to her. My chief friend
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among them was Milly Kimpton from the Counting House. We had got to the
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pitch of taking teas together and such like friendly acts. That's not love,
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said Fanny the wise, lending each other books. You don't begin to know
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what love is yet, Harry. But you will, Harry, you will.
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Don't you be too late about it, Harry. There's nothing in life
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like loving someone, Harry. People don't talk to you about it, and
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lots of people don't know what they are missing. It's all the difference between
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being nothing or something. It's all the difference between being dead or alive.
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When you are loving someone you're all right and nothing can harm you. And
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when you aren't, nothing is right. Everything is wrong. But love is
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a queer thing, Harry, and about as dreadful as it is dear It
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gets wrong. Sometimes it all goes wrong, and it's awful. It slipped
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from you somehow, it goes and you're left mean and little ever so mean,
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and you can't get back, and it seems you hardly want to get
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back. You're dead, and you're damned and done for, And then again
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it all comes back again, like the sunrise, like being born afresh.
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And then with a desperate shamelessness, she began to talk of Newberry and how
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much she loved him. She told little, irrelevant things about his ways.
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He comes to me whenever he can, she said, and repeated this.
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Presently he's all my life, she said, you don't know what he is
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to me. Then her constant dread of a separation crept up to the surface
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of her thoughts. Perhaps she said, it will always go on like this.
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I don't care if it does. I don't care if I never marry
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him. I wouldn't care. Not if at last I'm thrown aside. I'd
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go through it all again and count myself lucky, even if I knew for
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certain I was to be dropped and cast aside Queer Fanny. Her face was
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flushed and her eyes shining with tears. I asked myself what had been happening.
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He'll never throw me aside, Harry. He'll never throw me aside.
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He can't, he can't. He's half as old again as I am.
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And yet he comes to me in his trouble. Once. Once he cried
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to me, men, all of you are so strong and yet so helpless.
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You've got to have a woman to come to. Just a little while
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ago, well, he was ill. He was very ill. He has
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pain in his eyes, and sometimes he's afraid about them. This time suddenly
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he had frightful pains, and he thought he couldn't see. He came straight
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to me, Harry. He called a cab and came to me. And
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he came feeling his way upstairs to me, and fumbling at the door.
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And I nursed him in my darkened room until the pain had gone. He
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didn't go home, Harry, where there were servants and nurses to be got,
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and attendants and everything. He came to me. It was me.
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He came to me he's my man. He knows I'd give my life for
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him. I would, Harry, I'd cut my body to pieces, bit
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by pit if it would make him happy. It wasn't so much the pain
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he had, Harry, as the fear. He's not the one to mind
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a bit of pain or be afraid of many things. But he was afraid
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and scared. He'd never been afraid before. But he was afraid of going
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blind. He was too afraid to go to the specialist. It was like
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a little child, Harry and him so big and strong, afraid of the
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dark. He thought they'd get hold of him so that perhaps he'd not be
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able to come to me. He thought he wouldn't be able to see his
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beloved magazines and papers anymore. And the pain just turned the screw on him.
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He clung to me. It was me made him go. I took
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him there. He wouldn't have gone if it hadn't been for me. He'd
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have just let things drift on, and not a soul in the world for
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all his money and power to mother him. And then he might really have
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gone blind if it hadn't been taken in time. I pretended to be his
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secretary, and I took him and waited in the waiting room for him.
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I dreaded they'd hurt him. I was listening for something to happen all the
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time. I had to look at their old graph says if I didn't care
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a rap what they were doing to him. And then he came out smiling
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with a green shade on, and I had to stand up, stiff and
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cool and wait to hear what he had to say. I was scared by
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that shade, Harry scared. I held my breath. I thought it had
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come. Isn't so bad as we fancied, Miss Smith, He says,
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off and like you kept the taxi. You have to take my arm.
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I'm afraid, certainly, sir, I said MIMSI like. I was careful
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to be kind of awkward taking his arm. There were people there in the
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waiting room, and you never know acted respect for me that has had him
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in my arms a thousand times. But when we were in the taxi and
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safe, he pushed up the shade and took me into his arms, and
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he hugged me and he cried. He cried wet tears and held me because
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he'd got me still and his sight still, and the work he loves to
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do. Things would have to be done to his eyes, but he keep
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his sight and he has. There's been no trouble now, not for months,
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she said, looking away from me over the shining river. How could
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he ever leave me, she said, after a time like that. Stoutly
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she spoke, but even to my youthful eyes she seemed little and lonely.
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Sitting there on the old red wall, I thought of the busy, bustling
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man with the big tortoise shell glasses away from her, and of one or
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two things I had heard whispered about him. It seemed to me then that
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no men were good enough for the women in the world. When he's tired
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or in trouble, said Vanny. Sure, and still he'll always come back
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to me. In the section seventeen,