Joan and Peter: The story of an education

by H. G. Wells

After throwing The National Review into a distant armchair and then, when he met the startled eye of a fellow member, trying to look as though that was his usual way with a magazine, he sought distraction in Southey’s “Doctor,” which happened to be in the club library. After dinner he went out for a stroll in the West End, and visited the Alhambra. He found that more soothing than the papers. The old excitement of the human moth at the candles of vice he no longer felt. He wondered why these flitting allurements had ever stirred him. But he liked the stir and the lights and the pleasant inconsecutive imbecility of the entertainment.

He slept fairly well. In the morning a clerk of Mr. Sycamore’s telephoned to say that that gentleman was out of town, he had been called down to see Lady Charlotte Sydenham, but that he would be back, and would probably try to “get” Oswald about eleven in the evening. He had something important to tell Oswald. The day began cloudy, and repented and became fine. By midday it was, for London, a golden day. Yet to Oswald it seemed but a weak solution of sunshine. If you stood bareheaded in such sunshine you would catch a chill. But he made the best of it. “October mild and boon,” he quoted. He assured himself that it would be entertaining to stroll about the West End and look at the shops and mark the changes in things. He breakfasted late at one of the windows overlooking the Green Park, visited the club barber, walked along to his tailor, bought three new hats and a stout gold-banded cane with an agate top in Bond Street, a pair of boots, gloves and other sundries. Then he went into his second club, the Plantain, in Pall Mall, to read the papers—until he discovered that he was beginning to worry about Tariff Reform again. He saw no one he knew, and lunched alone. In the afternoon he strolled out into London once more.

He was, he found, no longer uncomfortable and self-conscious in the streets of London. His one-sided, blank-sided face did not make him self-conscious now as it used to do, he had reconciled himself to his disfigurement. If at first he had exaggerated its effect, he now inclined to forget it altogether. He wore hats nowadays with a good broad brim, and cocked them to overshadow the missing eye; his dark moustache had grown and was thick and symmetrical; he had acquired the habit of looking at himself in glasses so as to minimize his defaced half. It seemed to him a natural thing now that the casual passer-by should pull up for the fraction of a second at the sight of his tall figure, or look back at him as if to verify a first impression. Didn’t people do that to everybody?

He went along Pall Mall, whose high gentility was still in those days untroubled by the Royal Automobile Club and scarcely ruffled by a discreet shop or so; he turned up through St. James’s Street to Piccadilly with a reminiscent glance by the way down Jermyn Street, where he had had his first experiences of restaurants and suchlike dissipations in his early midshipman days. How far away those follies seemed now! The shops of Bond Street drew him northward; the Doré Gallery of his childhood, he noted, was still going on; he prowled along Oxford Street as far as the Marble Arch—Gillows was still Gillows in those days, and Selfridge had yet to dawn on the London world—and beat back by way of Seymour Street to Regent Street. He nodded to Verrey’s, where long ago he had lunched in a short plaid frock and white socks under the auspices of his godmother, old Lady Percival Pelham. It was all very much as he had left it in ’97. That fever of rebuilding and rearrangement which was already wrecking the old Strand and sweeping away Booksellers’ Row and the Drury Lane slums and a score of ancient landmarks, had not yet reached the West End. There was the same abundance of smart hansom cabs crawling in the streets or neatly ranked on the stands; the same populous horse omnibuses, the same brightly dressed people, and, in Regent Street and Piccadilly, the same too-brightly-dressed women loiterers, only now most of them were visibly coarse and painted; there were the same mendicants and sandwich-men at the pavement edge. Perhaps there were more omnibuses crowding upon one another at Piccadilly and Oxford Circuses, and more people everywhere. Or perhaps that was only the effect of returning from a less crowded world.

Now and then he saw automobiles, queer, clumsy carriages without horses they seemed to be, or else low, heavy-looking vehicles with a flavour of battleship about them. Several emitted bluish smoke and trailed an evil smell. In Regent Street outside Liberty’s art shop one of these mechanical novelties was in trouble. Everybody seemed pleased. The passing cabmen were openly derisive. Oswald joined the little group of people at the pavement edge who were watching the heated and bothered driver engaged in some obscure struggle beneath his car.

An old gentleman in a white waistcoat stood beside Oswald, and presently turned to him.

“Silly things,” he said. “Noisy, dangerous, stinking things. They ought to be forbidden.”

“Perhaps they will improve,” said Oswald.

“How could that thing improve?” asked the old gentleman. “Lotto dirty ironmongery.”

He turned away with the air of a man for whom a question had been settled. Oswald followed him thoughtfully....