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The Passionate Friends Chapter 7 - Beginning Again Parts 5-9 · The H. G. Wells Library

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Speaker 1: Chapter seven, parts five to nine of The Passionate Friends
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Speaker 1: by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the
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Speaker 1: public domain recording by Peter Eastman, chapter the seventh, beginning
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Speaker 1: again five. The next day, my mood declined again. It
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Speaker 1: was as if that light, that sense of release, that
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Speaker 1: had shone so clear and strong in my mind, had
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Speaker 1: escaped me. I sought earnestly to recover it, but I
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Speaker 1: could not do so, and I found my old narrow
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Speaker 1: preoccupations calling urgently to me again. I thought that perhaps
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Speaker 1: I might get back those intimations of outlook and relief
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Speaker 1: if I clamored alone into some high solitude, and thought
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Speaker 1: I had a crude, attractive vision of myself far above
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Speaker 1: the heat and noiseing with the sky. It was the
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Speaker 1: worst season for climbing, and on the spur of the moment,
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Speaker 1: I could do nothing but get up the rochet aney
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Speaker 1: on the wrong side and try and find some eerie
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Speaker 1: that was neither slippery nor wet. I did not succeed.
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Speaker 1: In one place, I slipped down a wet bank for
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Speaker 1: some yards, and held at last by a route. If
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Speaker 1: I had slipped much further, I should not be riding
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Speaker 1: here now, and I came back a very weary and
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Speaker 1: bruised climber, without any meditation. Three nights after, when I
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Speaker 1: was in bed, I became very lucidly awake. It must
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Speaker 1: have been about two or three in the morning, and
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Speaker 1: the vision of life returned to me with that same
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Speaker 1: effect of enlargement and illumination. It was as if the
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Speaker 1: great stillness that is behind and above and around the
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Speaker 1: world of sense did in some way communicate with me.
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Speaker 1: It bade me rouse my spirit and go on with
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Speaker 1: the thoughts and purposes that had been stirring and proliferating
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Speaker 1: in my mind when I had returned to England from
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Speaker 1: the Cape. Dismiss your passion. But I urged that that
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Speaker 1: I could not do. There was the thought of Mary
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Speaker 1: subjugated and weeping, the smarting memory of injury and defeat,
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Speaker 1: the stains of subterfusion, discovery, the aching separation. No matter,
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Speaker 1: the stillness answered in the end, all that is just
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Speaker 1: to temper you for your greater uses. I cannot forget,
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Speaker 1: I insisted, do not forget, but for the present this
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Speaker 1: leads you know whither this chapter has ended. Dismiss it
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Speaker 1: and turn to those other things you are not only
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Speaker 1: Stephen Stradden who fell in to adultery in these silences.
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Speaker 1: He is a little thing and far away here and
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Speaker 1: with me you are man, every man, in this round
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Speaker 1: world in which your lot has fallen. But Mary, I
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Speaker 1: urged to forget. Mary is a treason and ingratitude, seeing
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Speaker 1: that she loved me. But the stillness did not command
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Speaker 1: me to forget her, but only to turn my face
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Speaker 1: now to the great work that lies before mankind. And
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Speaker 1: that work, that work, so far as your share goes,
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Speaker 1: is first to understand, to solve, and then to achieve,
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Speaker 1: to work out in the measure of yourself, that torment
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Speaker 1: of pity and that desire for order and justice, which
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Speaker 1: together saturate your soul. Go about the world and brew
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Speaker 1: yourself with life. Make use of that confusedly striving brain
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Speaker 1: that I have lifted so painfully out of the deadness
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Speaker 1: of matter. But who are you? I cried out suddenly
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Speaker 1: to the night. Who are you? I sat up on
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Speaker 1: the side of my bed. The dawn was just beginning
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Speaker 1: to break up the featureless blackness of the small hours.
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Speaker 1: This is just some odd corner of my brain, I said, Yet,
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Speaker 1: how did I come to have this odd corner in
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Speaker 1: my brain. What is this lucid stillness? Six? Let me
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Speaker 1: tell you rather of my thoughts than of my moods,
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Speaker 1: For there at least one comes to something with a
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Speaker 1: form that may be drawn and a substance that is measurable.
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Speaker 1: One ceases to struggle with things indefinable, and the effort
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Speaker 1: to convey by metaphors and voices, things that are at
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Speaker 1: once bodiless and soundless and lightless, and yet infinitely close
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Speaker 1: and real. And moreover, with that mysterious and subtle change
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Speaker 1: of heart in me, there came also a change in
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Speaker 1: the quality and range of my ideas. I seemed to
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Speaker 1: rise out of a tangle of immediacies and misconceptions to
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Speaker 1: see more largely and more freely than I had ever
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Speaker 1: done before. I have told how, in my muddled and
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Speaker 1: wounded face I had snatched at the dull project of
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Speaker 1: improving my languages, and under the cloak of that spying
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Speaker 1: a little upon German military arrangements. Now my mind set
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Speaker 1: such petty romanticism on one side, it had recovered the
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Speaker 1: strength to look on the whole of life and on
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Speaker 1: my place in it. It could resume the ideas that
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Speaker 1: our storm of passion had for a time thrust into
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Speaker 1: the background of my thoughts. I took up again all
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Speaker 1: those broad generalizations that had arisen out of my experiences
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Speaker 1: in South Africa, and which I had been not so
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Speaker 1: much fitting into as forcing into the formulae of English politics.
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Speaker 1: I recalled my disillusionment with British imperialism, my vague but
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Speaker 1: elaborating apprehension of a profound conflict between enterprise and labor,
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Speaker 1: a profound conflict between the life of the farm and
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Speaker 1: the life of trade and finance and wholesale production, as
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Speaker 1: being something far truer to realities than any of the
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Speaker 1: issues of party and patriotism upon which men were spending
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Speaker 1: their lives. So far as this rivalry between England and Germany,
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Speaker 1: which so obsessed the imagination of Europe went, I found
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Speaker 1: that any faith I may have had in its importance
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Speaker 1: had simply fallen out of my mind as a danger
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Speaker 1: to civilization, as a conceivable source of destruction and delay.
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Speaker 1: It was a monstrous business enough, but that in the
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Speaker 1: long run it mattered how or when they fought, and
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Speaker 1: which one I did not believe in the development of mankind.
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Speaker 1: The thing was of far less importance than the struggle
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Speaker 1: for Flanders or the wars of France and Burgundy. I
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Speaker 1: was already coming to see Europe as no more than
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Speaker 1: the dog's eared corner of the page of history. Like
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Speaker 1: most Europeans, I had thought it the page, and my
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Speaker 1: recovering mind was eager and open to see the world
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Speaker 1: beyond and form some conception of the greater forces that
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Speaker 1: lay outside our in celerities. What is humanity as a
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Speaker 1: whole doing? What is the nature of the world process
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Speaker 1: of which I apart? Why should I drift from cradle
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Speaker 1: to grave wearing the blinkers of my time at nationality,
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Speaker 1: a mere denizen of Christendom, accepting its beliefs, its stale antagonisms,
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Speaker 1: its unreal purposes. That perhaps had been tolerable while I
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Speaker 1: was still an accepted member of the little world into
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Speaker 1: which my lot had fallen. But now that I was
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Speaker 1: thrust out, its absurdity glared for me. The alternative was
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Speaker 1: to be a world man or no man. I had
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Speaker 1: seemed sinking towards the latter. Now I faced about and
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Speaker 1: began to make myself what I still seek to make
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Speaker 1: myself to day, a son of mankind, a conscious part
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Speaker 1: of that web of effort and perplexity which wraps about
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Speaker 1: our globe. All this, I say, came into my mind
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Speaker 1: as if it were a part of that recovery of
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Speaker 1: my mind from its first passionate objection. And it seemed
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Speaker 1: a simple and obvious part of the same conversion to
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Speaker 1: realize that I was ignorant and narrow, and that too
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Speaker 1: in a world which is suffering like a beast in
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Speaker 1: a slime pit by reason of ignorance and narrowness of outlook,
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Speaker 1: And that it was my manifest work and purpose to
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Speaker 1: make myself less ignorant and to see and learn with
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Speaker 1: all my being. It came to me as a clear
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Speaker 1: duty that I should get out of the land of
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Speaker 1: hotels and leisure and go seeking the facts and clues
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Speaker 1: to human inner relationship, nearer the earthy roots of things.
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Speaker 1: And I turned my thoughts to India and China, those
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Speaker 1: vast enigmas of human accumulation. In a spirit extraordinarily like
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Speaker 1: that of some mystic who receives a call, I felt
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Speaker 1: I must go to Asia, and from Asia perhaps round
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Speaker 1: the world. But it was the greatness of Asia commanded me.
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Speaker 1: I wanted to see the East not as a spectacle,
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Speaker 1: but as the simmering Vat, in which the greater destiny
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Speaker 1: of man bruise and bruise. Seven. It was necessary to
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Speaker 1: tell my father of my intentions. I made numerous beginnings.
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Speaker 1: I tore up several letters, and quarreled bitterly with the
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Speaker 1: hotel pens. At first, I tried to describe the change
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Speaker 1: that had happened to my mind, to give him some
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Speaker 1: impression of the new light, the release that had come
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Speaker 1: to me. But how difficult this present world is, with
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Speaker 1: its tainted and poisoned phrases and its tangled misunderstandings. Here
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Speaker 1: was I writing, for the first time in my life
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Speaker 1: of something essentially religious, and writing it to him whose
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Speaker 1: profession was religion. And I could find no words to
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Speaker 1: convey my meaning to him that did not seem to
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Speaker 1: me Fraught with the possibilities of misinterpretation. One evening I
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Speaker 1: made a desperate resolve to let myself go and scrawled
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Speaker 1: my heart out to him, as it seemed that night,
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Speaker 1: a strange, long letter. It was one of the profoundest
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Speaker 1: regrets that came to me when I saw him dead
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Speaker 1: last winter, that I did not risk his misunderstanding and
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Speaker 1: post that letter. But when I re read it in
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Speaker 1: the next morning's daylight. It seemed to me so rhetorical,
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Speaker 1: so full of what shall I call it spiritual bombast,
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Speaker 1: It so caricatured and reflected upon the deep feeling sustaining
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Speaker 1: me that I could not post it for shamefacedness, and
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Speaker 1: I tore it up into little pieces and sent instead
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Speaker 1: the briefest of notes. I am doing no good here
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Speaker 1: in Switzerland, I wrote, Would you mind if I went east?
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Speaker 1: I want to see something of the world outside Europe.
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Speaker 1: I have a fancy I may find something to do
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Speaker 1: beyond there. Of course, it will cost rather more than
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Speaker 1: my present allowance. I will do my best to economize.
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Speaker 1: Don't bother if it bothers you. I've been bother enough
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Speaker 1: to you, he replied, still more compactly. By all means,
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Speaker 1: I will send you some circular notes post aristante Rome
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Speaker 1: that will be on your way. Good wishes to you, Stephen.
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Speaker 1: I'm glad you want to go east instead of just
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Speaker 1: staying in Switzerland. I sit here now and wonder little
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Speaker 1: son what he thought, what he supposed, what he understood.
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Speaker 1: I loved my father, and I began to perceive he
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Speaker 1: loved me wonderfully. I can imagine no man I would
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Speaker 1: have sooner had for a priest than him. All priestcraft
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Speaker 1: lays hands, if it can, and with an excellent wisdom,
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Speaker 1: upon the titles and dignity of fatherhood. And yet here
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Speaker 1: am I left to guessing. I do not know whether
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Speaker 1: my father ever worshiped, whether he ever prayed with his
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Speaker 1: heart beared to God. There are times when the inexpressiveness
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Speaker 1: of life comes near to overwhelming me, when it seems
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Speaker 1: to me we are all asleep or entranced, and but
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Speaker 1: a little way above the still cows who stand munching
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Speaker 1: slowly in a field. Why couldn't we and why didn't
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Speaker 1: we talk together? We fear bathos too much, are shyly
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Speaker 1: decent to the pitch of mania. We have neither the
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Speaker 1: courage of our bodies nor of our souls. I went
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Speaker 1: almost immediately to Rome. I stayed in Rome some days,
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Speaker 1: getting together an outfit, and incidentally seeing that greater city
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Speaker 1: of the dead, in whose embrace the modern city lies.
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Speaker 1: I was now becoming interested in things outside my grooves,
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Speaker 1: though my grooves were still there, deep and receptive. And
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Speaker 1: I went about the place at last, almost eagerly, tracing
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Speaker 1: the outlines of that great departed city, on whose colossal
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Speaker 1: bones the churches and palaces of the Middle Ages cluster
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Speaker 1: like weeds in the spaces and ruins of a magnificent garden.
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Speaker 1: I found myself one day in the Forum, thinking of
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Speaker 1: that imperialism that had built the Basilica of Julius Caesar,
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Speaker 1: and comparing its cramped vestiges with that vaster second administrative
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Speaker 1: effort which has left the world the monstrous arches of Constantine.
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Speaker 1: Sat down over against these last among the ruins of
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Speaker 1: the Vestal's house, and mused on that later reconstruction. When
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Speaker 1: the Empire, with its science aborted and its literature and
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Speaker 1: philosophy shriveled to nothing, its social fabric ruined by the
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Speaker 1: extravagances of financial adventure, and its honor and patriotism altogether dead,
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Speaker 1: united itself in a desperate effort to continue with all
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Speaker 1: that was most bickeringly, intolerant and destructive in Christianity, only
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Speaker 1: to achieve one common fast decay. All Europe to this
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Speaker 1: day is little more than the sequel to that failure.
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Speaker 1: It is the Roman Empire in disintegration, The very churches
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Speaker 1: whose domes rise to the northward of the ancient remains
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Speaker 1: are built of looted stones and look like parasitic and
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Speaker 1: fungoid growths and forests streamed through those spaces day by day,
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Speaker 1: stare at the marble fragments, the arches, the fallen carvings,
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Speaker 1: and rich capitals, with nothing greater in their minds and
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Speaker 1: nothing clearer. I discovered I was putting all this into
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Speaker 1: the form of a letter to Mary. I was writing
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Speaker 1: to her in my mind as many people talk to themselves.
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Speaker 1: And I remember that I wandered upon the Palatine Hill,
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Speaker 1: musing over the idea of writing a long letter to her,
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Speaker 1: a long, continuous letter to her, a sort of diary
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Speaker 1: of impressions and ideas that some when years ahead, I
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Speaker 1: might be able to put into her hands. One does
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Speaker 1: not carry out such an idea into reality. It is
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Speaker 1: so much easier to leave the letter imagined and unwritten,
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Speaker 1: if there lives but little hope of its delivery. Yet
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Speaker 1: for many years I kept up in impalpable correspondence in
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Speaker 1: my thoughts, a stream of expression to which no answer came,
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Speaker 1: until at last the habits of public writing and the
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Speaker 1: gathering interests of a new role in life diverted it
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Speaker 1: to other ends. Eight one morning, on the way from
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Speaker 1: Brindsey to Egypt. I came up on deck at dawn
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Speaker 1: because my mind was restless and I could not sleep.
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Speaker 1: Another solitary passenger was already up, so intently watching a
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Speaker 1: pink lit rocky coast line away to the north of us,
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Speaker 1: that for a time he did not observe me. That's crete,
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Speaker 1: he said, When at last he became aware of me
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Speaker 1: close at hand, Crete said I, Yes, he said, crete.
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Speaker 1: He came nearer to me. That, sir, he said, with
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Speaker 1: a challenging emphasis, is the the most wonderful island I've
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Speaker 1: ever yet set eyes on. Quite the most wonderful five
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Speaker 1: thousand years ago, he remarked, after a pause. That seemed
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Speaker 1: to me to be calculated. They were building palaces there
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Speaker 1: better than the best we can build today, and things
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Speaker 1: like modern things. They had bathrooms there, beautifully fitted bathrooms,
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Speaker 1: and admirable sanitation, admirable practically American. They had better artists
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Speaker 1: to serve them than your King Edward has. Why minnows
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Speaker 1: would have laughed or screamed at all that windsor furnisure
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Speaker 1: and the things they made of gold, Sir, You couldn't
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Speaker 1: get them done anywhere today, not for any money. There
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Speaker 1: was a go about them. They had a kind of
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Speaker 1: writing too, before the Phoenicians. No man can read it now,
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Speaker 1: and there it is fifty centuries ago, so it was.
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Speaker 1: And today they grow oranges and lemons, and they riot
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Speaker 1: everything else gone. It's as if men struggled up to
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Speaker 1: a certain pitch and then grew tired. All this Mediterranean
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Speaker 1: it's a tired sea. That was the beginning of a
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Speaker 1: curious conversation. He was an American, a year or so
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Speaker 1: younger than myself. Going he said, to look at Egypt
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Speaker 1: in our country, he explained, we are apt to forget
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Speaker 1: all these worked out regions, too apt. We don't get
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Speaker 1: our perspectives. We think the whole blessed world is one
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Speaker 1: everlasting boom. It hit me first down in Yucatan that
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Speaker 1: that wasn't so. Why the world's littered with the remains
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Speaker 1: of booms and swaggering beginnings. Americanism. There's always been Americanism.
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Speaker 1: This Mediterranean is just a museum of old Americas. I
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Speaker 1: guess Tigher and Sidon thought they were licking creation all
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Speaker 1: the time. It set me thinking, what's really going on?
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Speaker 1: Why anywhere you're running about among ruins anywhere, and ruins
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Speaker 1: of something just as good as anything we're doing to
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Speaker 1: day better in some ways, it takes the heart out
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Speaker 1: of you. It was getting who is now my close
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Speaker 1: friend and ally. I remember very vividly the flavor of
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Speaker 1: morning freshness as we watched crete pass away northward, and
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Speaker 1: I listened to his talk. I was coming out of
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Speaker 1: New York Harbor a month ago and looking back at
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Speaker 1: the sky scrapers, he said, And suddenly it hit me
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Speaker 1: in the mind. That's just the next ruin, I thought.
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Speaker 1: I remember that much of our first talk, but the
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Speaker 1: rest of it now is indistinct. We had, however, struck
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Speaker 1: up an acquaintance. We were both alone, and until he
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Speaker 1: left me on his way to abide us, we seem
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Speaker 1: now to have been conversing all the time, and almost
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Speaker 1: all the time we were discussing human destiny and the
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Speaker 1: causes of effort and decay, and whether the last few
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Speaker 1: ascendant centuries the world has seen have in them anything
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Speaker 1: more persistent than the countless beginnings that have gone before.
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Speaker 1: They's science, said I a little doubtfully. At Nassus, there
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Speaker 1: they had Daedalous Sir. Fifty centuries ago daedalous. He was
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Speaker 1: an f r s all right. I haven't a doubt
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Speaker 1: he flew. If they hadn't steel, they had brass. We
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Speaker 1: are too conceited about our little modern things. Nine. I
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Speaker 1: found something very striking and dramatic in the passage from
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Speaker 1: Europe to Asia. One steams slowly through a desert that
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Speaker 1: comes up close to the ship. The sand stretches away
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Speaker 1: hillock and mound. Beyond hillock and mound, one sees camels
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Speaker 1: in the offing, stringing out to some ancient destination. One
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Speaker 1: is manifestly passing across a barrier. The canal has changed
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Speaker 1: nothing of that. Suez is a first dab of tumultuous orientalism,
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Speaker 1: noisy and vivid, And then after that gleam of turmoil,
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Speaker 1: one opens out into the lonely, dark blue waters of
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Speaker 1: the Red Sea. Right and left, the shore is a bitter,
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Speaker 1: sun scorched desolation. Eastward frowns a great rampart of lowering
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Speaker 1: purple mountains, towering up to Sinai. It is like no
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Speaker 1: European landscape. The boat goes slowly, as if uncharted dangers
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Speaker 1: lurked ahead. It is a new world with a new atmosphere.
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Speaker 1: Then comes wave upon wave of ever more sultry air,
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Speaker 1: and the punkahs begin to swing, and the white cloths appear.
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Speaker 1: Everyone casts off Europe assumes an asiatic livery. The very
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Speaker 1: sun rushing up angrily and abruptly after a heated night
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Speaker 1: is unfamiliar an asiatic sun, And so one goes down
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Speaker 1: that refringed waterway to Aiden. It is studded with lonely
23:41
Speaker 1: looking lighthouses that burn, it seems untended, and sometimes in
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Speaker 1: their melancholy isolation, swing great rhythmic arms of light. And
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Speaker 1: then land in the last Latin sails of Aidan. Vanishing together,
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Speaker 1: one stands out into the hot, thundery monotonies of the
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Speaker 1: Indian Ocean, into imprisonment in a blue horizon, across whose
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Speaker 1: tidan ring the engine seemed to throb in vain. How
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Speaker 1: one paces the ship day by day and eats and dozes,
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Speaker 1: and eats again, and gossips inanely, and thanks Heaven even
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Speaker 1: for a flight of flying fish, or a trail of
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Speaker 1: smoke from over the horizon to take one's mind a
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Speaker 1: little out of one's oily, quivering prison. A hot, portentous delay,
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Speaker 1: a sinister, significant pause, that is the voyage from Europe
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Speaker 1: to India. Still, I suppose by the time that you
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Speaker 1: will go to India, all this prelude will have vanished.
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Speaker 1: You will rattle through in a train de luxe from
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Speaker 1: Calais by way of Baku or Constantinople. You will have
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Speaker 1: none of this effect of a deliberate, sullen approach across
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Speaker 1: limitless miles of sea. But that is how I went
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Speaker 1: to India. Everything seemed to expand. I was coming out
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Speaker 1: of the frequent landfalls, the neighborly intimacies and neighborly conflicts
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Speaker 1: of the Mediterranean into something remot into larger seas and
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Speaker 1: greater lands, rarer communications, and a vaster future. To go
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Speaker 1: from Europe to Asia is like going from Norway to Russia,
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Speaker 1: from something slight and advanced to something massive and portentous.
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Speaker 1: I felt that nearly nine years ago. Today all Asia
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Speaker 1: seems moving forward to justify my feelings. And I remember
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Speaker 1: too that as I went down the Red Sea and
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Speaker 1: again in the Indian Ocean, I had a nearly intolerable
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Speaker 1: passion of loneliness. A wound may heal and still leave pain.
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Speaker 1: I was coming out of Europe as one comes out
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Speaker 1: of a familiar house into something larger and stranger. I
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Speaker 1: seemed but a little speck of life. And behind me,
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Speaker 1: far away and silent and receding, was the one other
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Speaker 1: being to whom my thoughts were open. It seemed very
26:29
Speaker 1: cruel to me that I could not write to her.
26:35
Speaker 1: Such moods were to come to me again and again,
26:38
Speaker 1: and particularly during the inactivities of voyages, and in large
26:43
Speaker 1: empty spaces, and at night when I was weary. At
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Speaker 1: other times I could banish and overcome them by forcing
26:52
Speaker 1: myself to be busy, and by going to see novel
26:56
Speaker 1: and moving things. End of Chapter seven