The Greatest Short Stories of H. G. Wells: 70+ Titles in One Edition. Герберт Уэллс

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СКАЧАТЬ deaf aunt abruptly.

      “I really don’t know,” said Aubrey Vair.

      “That’s all right,” said Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt. “It ought to please even you.”

      “Anything will please me,” said Aubrey Vair; “I care very little—”

      “Oh, it’s a lovely dish,” said Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt, and relapsed into contemplation.

      “I was saying,” said Aubrey Vair, “that I think I still find my keenest pleasures in childish pastimes. I have a little nephew that I see a great deal of, and when we fly kites together, I am sure it would be hard to tell which of us is the happier. By the bye, you should get at your daisy chains in that way. Beguile some little girl.”

      “But I did. I took that Morton mite for a walk in the meadows, and timidly broached the subject. And she reproached me suggesting ‘frivolous pursuits.’ It was a horrible disappointment.”

      “The governess here,” said Aubrey Vair, “is robbing that child of its youth in a terrible way. What will a life be that has no childhood at the beginning?”

      “Some human beings are never young,” he continued, “and they never grow up. They lead absolutely colourless lives. They are—they are etiolated. They never love, and never feel the loss of it. They are—for the moment I can think of no better image—they are human flower-pots, in which no soul has been planted. But a human soul properly growing must begin in a fresh childishness.”

      “Yes,” said the dark lady thoughtfully, “a careless childhood, running wild almost. That should be the beginning.”

      “Then we pass through the wonder and diffidence of youth.”

      “To strength and action,” said the dark lady. Her dreamy eyes were fixed on the Downs, and her fingers tightened on her knees as she spoke. “Ah, it is a grand thing to live—as a man does—self-reliant and free.”

      “And so at last,” said Aubrey Vair, “come to the culmination and crown of life.” He paused and glanced hastily at her. Then he dropped his voice almost to a whisper—“And the culmination of life is love.”

      Their eyes met for a moment, but she looked away at once. Aubrey Vair felt a peculiar thrill and a catching in his breath, but his emotions were too complex for analysis. He had a certain sense of surprise also, at the way his conversation had developed.

      Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt suddenly dug him in the chest with her ear-trumpet, and someone at tennis bawled, “Love all!”

      “Did I tell you Jane’s girls have had scarlet fever?” asked Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt.

      “No,” said Aubrey Vair.

      “Yes; and they are peeling now,” said Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt, shutting her lips tightly, and nodding in a slow, significant manner at both of them.

      There was a pause. All three seemed lost in thought, too deep for words.

      “Love,” began Aubrey Vair presently, in a severely philosophical tone, leaning back in his chair, holding his hands like a praying saint’s in front of him, and staring at the toe of his shoe—, “love is, I believe, the one true and real thing in life. It rises above reason, interest, or explanation. Yet I never read of an age when it was so much forgotten as it is now. Never was love expected to run so much in appointed channels, never was it so despised, checked, ordered, and obstructed. Policeman say, ‘This way, Eros!’ As a result, we relieve our emotional possibilities in the hunt for gold and notoriety. And after all, with the best fortune in these, we only hold up the glided images of our success, and are weary slaves, with unsatisfied hearts, in the pageant of life.”

      Aubrey Vair sighed, and there was a pause. The girl looked at him out of the mysterious darkness of her eyes. She had read many books, but Aubrey Vair was her first literary man, and she took this kind of thing for genius—as girls have done before.

      “We are,” continued Aubrey Vair, conscious of a favourable impression —, “we are like fireworks, mere dead, inert things until the appointed spark comes; and then—if it is not damp—the dormant soul blazes forth in all its warmth and beauty. That is living. I sometimes think, do you know, that we should be happier if we could die soon after that golden time, like the Ephemerides. There is a decay sets in.”

      “Eigh?” said Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt startlingly. “I didn’t hear you.”

      “I was on the point of remarking,” shouted Aubrey Vair, wheeling the array of his thoughts—, “I was on the point of remarking that few people in Redhill could match Mrs. Morton’s fine broad green.”

      “Others have noticed it.” Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt shouted back. “It is since she has had in her new false teeth.”

      This interruption dislocated the conversation a little. However—

      “I must thank you, Mr. Vair,” said the dark girl, when they parted that afternoon, “for having given me very much to think about.”

      And from her manner, Aubrey Vair perceived clearly he had not wasted his time.

      It would require a subtler pen than mine to tell how from that day a passion for Miss Smith grew like Jonah’s gourd in the heart of Aubrey Vair. He became pensive, and in the prolonged absence of Miss Smith, irritable. Mrs. Aubrey Vair felt the change in him, and put it down to vitriolic Saturday Reviewer. Indisputably the Saturday does at times go a little far. He re-read Elective Affinities, and lent it to Miss Smith. Incredible as it may appear to members of the Areopagus Club, where we know Aubrey Vair, he did also beyond all question inspire a sort of passion in that sombre-eyed, rather clever, and really very beautiful girl.

      He talked to her a lot about love and destiny, and all that bric-a-brac of the minor poet. And they talked together about his genius. He elaborately, though discreetly, sought her society, and presented and read to her the milder of his unpublished sonnets. We consider his Byronic features pasty, but the feminine mind has its own laws. I suppose, also where a girl is not a fool, a literary man has an enormous advantage over anyone but a preacher, in the show he can make of his heart’s wares.

      At last a day in that summer came when he met her alone, possibly by chance, in a quiet lane towards Horley. There were ample hedges on either side, rich with honeysuckle, vetch, and mullein.

      They conversed intimately of his poetic ambitions, and then he read her those verses of his subsequently published in ‘Hobson’s Magazine’: “Tenderly ever, since I have met thee.” He had written these the day before; and though I think the sentiment is uncommonly trite, there is a redeeming note of sincerity about the lines not conspicuous in all Aubrey Vair’s poetry.

      He read rather well, and a swell of genuine emotion crept into his voice as he read, with one white hand thrown out to point the rhythm of the lines. “Ever, my sweet, for thee,” he concluded, looking up into her face.

      Before he looked up, he had been thinking chiefly of his poem and its effect. Straightway he forgot it. Her arms hung limply before her, and her hands were clasped together. Her eyes were very tender.

      “Your verses go to the heart,” she said softly.

      Her mobile features were capable of wonderful shades of expression. He suddenly forgot his wife and his position as a СКАЧАТЬ