Joan and Peter: The story of an education

by H. G. Wells

§ 10

When he returned to the house on Monday morning after he had seen the two young people off, a burthen of desolation came upon Oswald.

It was a loneliness as acute as a physical pain. It was misery. If they had been dead, he could not have been more unhappy. The work that had been the warm and living substance of fifteen years was now finished and done. The nest was empty. The road and the stream, the gates and the garden, the house and the hall, seemed to ache with emptiness and desertion. He went into their old study, from which they had already taken a number of their most intimate treasures, and which was now as disordered as a room after a sale. Most of their remaining personal possessions were stacked ready for removal; discarded magazines and books and torn paper made an untidy heap beside the fireplace. “I could not feel a greater pain if I had lost a son,” he thought, staring at these untidy vestiges.

He went to his own study and sat down at his desk, though he knew there was no power of attention in him sufficient to begin work.

Mrs. Moxton, for reasons best known to herself, was interested in his movements that morning. She saw him presently wander into the garden and then return to the hall. He took his cap and stick and touched the bell. “I’ll not be back to lunch, Mrs. Moxton,” he called.

“Very well, sir,” said Mrs. Moxton, unseen upon the landing above, nodding her head approvingly.

At first the world outside was as lonely as his study.

He went up the valley along the high road for half a mile, and then took a winding lane under almost overhanging boughs—the hawthorn leaves now were nearly out and the elder quite—up over the hill and thence across fields and through a wood until he came to where the steep lane runs down to Braughing. And by that time, although the spring-time world was still immensely lonely and comfortless, he no longer felt that despairful sense of fresh and irremediable loss with which he started. He was beginning to realize now that he had always been a solitary being; that all men, even in crowds, carry a certain solitude with them; and loneliness thus lifted to the level of a sustained and general experience ceased to feel like a dagger turning in his heart.

Down the middle of Braughing village, among spaces of grass, runs the little Quin, now a race of crystalline water over pebbly shallows and now a brown purposefulness flecked with foam, in which reeds bend and recover as if they kept their footing by perpetual feats of dexterity. There are two fords, and midway between them a little bridge with a handrail on which Oswald stayed for a time, watching the lives and adventures of an endless stream of bubbles that were begotten thirty feet away where the eddy from the depths beneath a willow root dashed against a bough that bobbed and dipped in the water. He found a great distraction and relief in following their adventures. On they came, large and small, in strings, in spinning groups, busy bubbles, quiet bubbles, dignified solitary bubbles, and passed a dangerous headland of watercress and ran the gauntlet between two big stones and then, if they survived, came with a hopeful rush for the shadow under the bridge and vanished utterly....

For all the rest of the day those streaming bubbles glittered and raced and jostled before Oswald’s eyes, and made a veil across his personal desolation. His mind swung like a pendulum between two ideas; those bubbles were like human life; they were not like human life....

Philosophy is the greatest of anodynes.

“Why is a man’s life different from a bubble? Like a bubble he is born of the swirl of matter, like a bubble he reflects the universe, he is driven and whirled about by forces he does not comprehend, he shines here and is darkened there and is elated or depressed he knows not why, and at last passes suddenly out into the darkness....”

In the evening Oswald sat musing by his study fire, his lamp unlit. He sat in an attitude that had long become habitual to him, with the scarred side of his face resting upon and hidden by his hand. His walk had wearied him, but not unpleasantly, his knee was surprisingly free from pain, and he was no longer acutely unhappy. The idea, a very engaging idea, had come into his head that it was not really the education of Joan and Peter that had come to an end, but his own. They were still learners—how much they had still to learn! At Peter’s age he had not yet gone to Africa. They had finished with school and college perhaps, but they were but beginning in the university of life. Neither of them had yet experienced a great disillusionment, neither of them had been shamed or bitterly disappointed; they had each other. They had seen the great war indeed, and Peter knew now what wounds and death were like—but he himself had been through that at one-and-twenty. Neither had had any such dark tragedy as, for example, if one of them had been killed, or if one of them had betrayed and injured the other. Perhaps they would always have fortunate lives.

But he himself had had to learn the lesson to the end. His life had been a darkened one. He had loved intensely and lost. He had had to abandon his chosen life work when it was barely half done. He had a present sense of the great needs of the world, and he was bodily weak and mentally uncertain. He would spend days now of fretting futility, unable to achieve anything. He loved these dear youngsters, but the young cannot give love to the old because they do not yet understand. He was alone. And yet, it was strange, he kept on. With such strength as he had he pursued his ends. Those two would go on, full of hope, helping one another, thinking together, succeeding. The lesson he had learnt was that without much love, without much vitality, with little hope of seeing a single end achieved for which he worked, he could still go on.

He drifted through his memories, seeking for the motives that had driven him on from experience to experience. But while he could remember the experiences it was very hard now to recover any inkling of his motives. He remembered himself at school as a violent egotist, working hard, openly and fairly, for his ascendancy in the school games, working hard secretly for his school position. It seemed now as though all that time he had been no more than a greed and a vanity.... Was that fair to himself? Or had he forgotten the redeeming dreams of youth?...

The scene shifted to the wardroom of his first battleship, and then to his first battle. He saw again the long low line of the Egyptian coast, and the batteries of Alexandria and Ramleh spitting fire and the Condor standing in. He recalled the tense excitement of that morning, the boats rowing to land, but strangely enough the incident that had won him the Victoria Cross had been blotted completely from his mind by his injury. He could not recover even the facts, much less the feel of that act.... Why had he done what he had done? Did he himself really do it?... Then very vividly came the memory of his first sight of his smashed, disfigured face. That had been horrible at the time—in a way it was horrible still—but after that it seemed as though for the first time he had ceased then to be an egotism, a vanity. After that the memories of impersonal interests began. He thought of his attendance at Huxley’s lectures at South Kensington and the wonder of making his first dissections. About that time he met Dolly, but here again was a queer gap; he could not remember anything very distinctly about his early meetings with Dolly except that she wore white and that they happened in a garden.

Yet, in a little while, all his being had been hungry for Dolly!

With his first journey into Africa all his memories became brighter and clearer and as if a hotter sun shone upon them. Everything before that time was part of the story of a young man long vanished from the world, young Oswald, a personality at least as remote as Peter—very like Peter. But with the change of scene to Africa Oswald became himself. The man in the story was the man who sat musing in the study chair, moved by the same motives and altogether understandable. Already in Nyasaland he was working consciously for “civilization” even as he worked today. Everything in that period lived still, with all its accompanying feelings alive. He fought again in his first fight in Nyasaland, and recalled with complete vividness how he had loaded and fired and reloaded and fired time after time at the rushes of the Yao spearmen; he had fought leaning against the stockade because he was too weary to stand upright, and with his head and every limb aching. One man he had hit had wriggled for a long time in the grass, and that memory still distressed him. It trailed another memory of horror with it. In his campaign about Lake Kioga, years later, in a fight amidst some ant hills he had come upon a wounded Sudanese being eaten alive by swarms of ants. The poor devil had died with the ants still upon him.... Oswald could still recall the sick anguish with which he had tried in vain to save or relieve this man.

The affair was in the exact quality of his present feelings; the picture was painted from the same palette. He remembered that then, as now, he felt the same helpless perplexity at apparently needless and unprofitable human agony. And then, as now, he had not despaired. He had been able to see no reason in this suffering and no excuse for it; he could see none now, and yet he did not despair. Why did not that and a hundred other horrors overwhelm him with despair? Why had he been able to go on with life after that? And after another exquisite humiliation and disappointment? He had loved Dolly intensely, and here again came a third but less absolutely obliterated gap in his recollections. For years he had been resolutely keeping his mind off the sufferings of that time, and now they were indistinct. His memory was particularly blank now about Arthur; he was registered merely as a blonde sort of ass with a tenor voice who punched copper. That faint hostile caricature was all his mind had tolerated. But still sharp and clear, as though it had been photographed but yesterday upon his memory, was the afternoon when he had realized that Dolly was dead. That scene was life-size and intense; how in a shady place under great trees, he had leant forwards upon his little folding table and wept aloud.

What had carried him through all those things? Why had he desired so intensely? Why had he worked so industriously? Why did he possess this passion for order that had inspired his administrative work? Why had he given his best years to Uganda? Why had he been so concerned for the welfare and wisdom of Joan and Peter? Why did he work now to the very breaking-point, until sleeplessness and fever forced him to rest, for this dream of a great federation in the world—a world state he would certainly never live to see established? If he was indeed only a bubble, then surely he was the most obstinately opinionated of bubbles. But he was not merely a bubble. The essential self of him was not this thing that spun about in life, that felt and reflected the world, that missed so acutely the two dear other bubbles that had circled about him so long and that had now left him to eddy in his backwater while they hurried off into the midstream of life. His essential self, the self that mused now, that had struggled up through the egotisms of youth to this present predominance, was something deeper and tougher and more real than desire, than excitement, than pleasure or pain. That was the lesson he had been learning. There was something deeper in him to which he had been getting down more and more as life had gone on, something to which all the stuff of experience was incidental, something in which there was endless fortitude and an undying resolution to do. There was something in him profounder than the stream of accidents....

He sat now with his distresses allayed, his mind playing with fancies and metaphors and analogies. Was this profounder contentment beneath his pains and discontents the consciousness of the bubble giving way to the underlying consciousness of the stream? That was ingenious, but it was not true. Men are not bubbles carried blindly on a stream; they are rather like bubbles, but that is all. They are wills and parts of a will that is neither the slave of the stream of matter nor a thing indifferent to it, that is paradoxically free and bound. They are parts of a will, but what this great will was that had him in its grasp, that compelled him to work, that saved him from drowning in his individual sorrows and cares, he could not say. It was easy to draw the analogy that a man is an atom in the life of the species as a cell is an atom in the life of a man. But this again was not the complete truth. Where was this alleged will of the species? If there was indeed such a will in the species, why was there this war? And yet, whatever it might be, assuredly there was something greater than himself sustaining his life.... To him it felt like a universal thing, but was it indeed a universal thing? It was strangely bound up with preferences. Why did he love and choose certain things passionately? Why was he indifferent to others? Why were Dolly and Joan more beautiful to him than any other women; why did he so love the sound of their voices, their movements, and the subtle lines of their faces; why did he love Peter, standing upright and when enthusiasm lit him; and why did he love the lights on polished steel and the darknesses of deep waters, the movements of flames, and of supple, feline animals, so intensely? Why did he love these things more than the sheen on painted wood, or the graces of blonde women, or the movements of horses? And why did he love justice and the revelation of scientific laws, and the setting right of disordered things? Why did this idea of a League of Nations come to him with the effect of a personal and preferential call? All these lights and matters and aspects and personal traits were somehow connected in his mind, and had a compelling power over him. They could make him forget his safety or comfort or happiness. They had something in common among themselves, he felt, and he could not tell what it was they had in common. But whatever it was, it was the intimation of the power that sustained him. It was as if they were all reflections or resemblances of some overruling spirit, some Genius, some great ruler of the values that stood over his existence and his world. Yet that again was but a fancy—a plagiarism from Socrates....

There was a light upon his life, and the truth was that he could not discover the source of the light nor define its nature; there was a presence in the world about him that made all life worth while, and yet it was Nameless and Incomprehensible. It was the Essence beyond Reality; it was the Heart of All Things.... Metaphors! Words! Perhaps some men have meant this when they talked of Love, but he himself had loved because of this, and so he held it must be something greater than Love. Perhaps some men have intended it in their use of the word Beauty, but it seemed to him that rather it made and determined Beauty for him. And others again have known it as the living presence of God, but the name of God was to Oswald a name battered out of all value and meaning. And yet it was by this, by this Nameless, this Incomprehensible, that he lived and was upheld. It did so uphold him that he could go on, he knew, though happiness were denied him; though defeat and death stared him in the face....