A Man of Parts (26 page)

Four members of the Executive more or less sympathetic to him personally were appointed to the committee, including Sydney Olivier and Shaw’s wife Charlotte. Charlotte would of course report back to her husband and do whatever he told her to do, but Olivier was a man of independent judgment, and now that Wallas had resigned over the tariff reform issue, the Executive member with whom he felt most at ease. A high-ranking civil servant in the Colonial Office, the urbane and distinguished-looking Olivier combined administrative expertise with an interest in literature, and wrote accomplished light verse himself. The others on the committee were known supporters of reform, including Maud Reeves. Olivier was appointed chairman and Jane secretary. The setting up of this promising committee seemed like a victory at the time, but in due course it was used as another instrument of delay by those on the Executive who felt threatened by his criticisms.

Committee work was never to his taste, and was an inefficient use of his time, but he buckled down to it and after several meetings he drafted a document which won the approval of his colleagues. The new Basis would commit the Society to three main objectives: transfer of land and capital to the state, equal citizenship of men and women, and ‘the substitution of public for private authority in the education and support of the young’. Essentially this last meant endowment of motherhood by the state, thus freeing women from the tyranny of the patriarchal private family, but the committee under Sydney Olivier’s guidance thought it prudent to adopt a more abstract formulation. ‘The members might accept maternity allowances for married women,’ Olivier said at their last meeting, ‘but if you mean unmarried mothers would be eligible too, Wells—’ ‘I do,’ he answered promptly. ‘Then I fear many of them would regard it as an encouragement to immorality,’ said Olivier. ‘Best leave it vague.’

In forwarding the draft to Pease early in March he requested that it should be put to a General Meeting before the 27th of the month when he had to leave for an extensive tour in the United States. Pease wrote back to say that this was impossibly short notice to set up such a meeting and it would have to wait until he returned, and in the meantime the proposals would be circulated to the membership. But when he got back from America at the end of May he was told by Pease that there had been so many queries from members about the revised Basis, especially concerning the third proposed objective, that it was desirable he should himself explain and elucidate the document to members before it was put before a General Meeting; and since people would soon be dispersing to their various summer retreats this exercise would have to be postponed until the autumn. There was a speaking date available in mid-October in the Society’s programme – would he be willing?

The spirit of Fabius Cunctator lived on.

The procedural reeling and writhing of the Executive was all the more exasperating because he had had a highly successful visit to America and came home full of energy and confidence. He had gone out there to give lectures and to write a series of articles on his travels for the London
Tribune
, which he planned to turn quickly into a book called
The Future in America
. He was lionised everywhere he went – New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington – and even had a private meeting with the President, Theodore Roosevelt, in the White House. He liked America, and responded positively to its brash, bustling, egalitarian, can-do ethos, which the President, referred to universally and affectionately as ‘Teddy’, personified. It was a young Empire in the making, but its very rawness made one wonder if it held any promise of permanence and fulfilment. Was burgeoning America a giant childhood or a giant futility, merely the latest in the long succession of political experiments that had risen and fallen over the ages? When he was bold enough to touch this note in conversation with Roosevelt, as they strolled after lunch through the White House garden, its cherry trees heavy with blossom, he was intrigued – and flattered – to discover that the President, for all his publicly expressed confidence in the American future, was not free from moments of pessimism and was familiar with
The Time Machine
. ‘I know that this country, which is now on an upward ascent of prosperity and power, will one day be in decline,’ Roosevelt said, leaning on a garden chair, with one knee on its seat, and addressing him over its back as if from a public platform, ‘but I choose to live as if that is not so. Suppose your tale of the future is right, and it all ends in your butterflies’ – he meant the Eloi – ‘and Morlocks. That doesn’t matter now. The effort’s real. It’s worth going on with. It’s worth it.’

He was impressed by this declaration, and encouraged by it; it was, after all, the principle on which he had turned his back on the career of a dilettante man of letters and joined the Fabians. But a fat lot of thanks he had received from their senior officers. Didn’t a man who was famous enough to have such a conversation with one of the most powerful statesmen on the planet deserve a little more respect? Thus he grumbled to himself as he wrote a curt letter to Pease accepting the invitation to address a meeting in October.

He had another reason to remember the day when he met Teddy Roosevelt. After he left the White House, that warm spring afternoon, a familiar sensation overtook him, a languorous longing for fleshly contact and physical relief, rewarding himself for an assignment successfully accomplished and obtaining a temporary release from the burden of thought. He hailed a cab and asked to be taken to a gay house. ‘White or coon?’ said the driver. ‘Coon,’ he said, after a moment’s hesitation. It was the first time this invidious word had passed his lips, though he had heard it frequently in the last few weeks, casually applied to coloured people by the white population. It sounded strange to his own ears in his high-pitched English voice, as though he were ordering a regional dish in some foreign country, which in a way he was: he had never had intercourse with a coloured woman before. ‘The best place of its kind there is,’ he added as he got into the car. ‘Sure thing. I know one with real class,’ said the driver.

Before long he found himself in a lavishly furnished drawing room, with blinds adjusted to admit light but frustrate observation and a ceiling fan silently revolving above his head, buying drinks for a bevy of attractive ladies in various states of undress, and with complexions in various shades of black and brown, as he discussed with them the beauty of the cherry blossom and the progress of the Washington monument currently under construction. A slim dark-eyed young woman sitting apart in a satin shift, whose light brown skin was as flawless as sand left by the withdrawing tide, attracted his attention and he sat down beside her. Conversation flowed easily between them and soon he followed her to her room. Her name – her professional name, anyway – was Martha. She told him she was of mixed blood, white, native Indian and Negro, and she had been trying to learn Italian from a book which she showed him. She was saving up to go to Italy where she planned to live for a while and then return to America and pass as Italian. Given her features and light colour, this was not an implausible project, though it was a shame that she felt driven to it. He had been shocked by the antipathy of many white Americans he met on his travels, especially those from the southern states, towards their coloured fellow citizens (whom he personally found very friendly and likeable, whether they were hotel porters or intellectuals), but his attempts to shake their prejudice by pointing out that genetically these descendants of slaves and slave-owners must have much more in common with themselves than the hordes of white immigrants streaming into the country from Europe were not well received.

He found himself getting more and more intrigued by Martha and her story, which might have been made up by a novelist, and she was obliged to remind him gently of his reason for being with her. Her style of lovemaking was not the exotic experience he had anticipated in the cab, but it was graceful and accomplished. If her sighs and moans of pleasure were acted, they were very convincing, and spurred him to a very satisfying climax. ‘I like you,’ she said afterwards. ‘Will you come back here?’ ‘I will try,’ he said, and the words would have been sincere if he hadn’t known he was departing from Washington the next day. When he laid a large denomination dollar bill on the bedside table she asked him if he meant to leave so much, and when he confirmed it she said sadly, ‘Ah, then I know I will never see you again.’ He couldn’t stop thinking about her for the rest of the day, and even entertained a mad plan of arranging to meet her in Italy until common sense suppressed it. Common sense, and a letter from Jane which he received the next morning:

I feel tonight so tired of playing wiv making the home comfy & as if there was only one dear rest place in the world, & that were in the arms and heart of you. There is the only place I shall ever find in the world where one has sometimes peace from the silly and wasteful muddle of one’s
life – think: I am thinking continually of the disappointing mess of it, the high bright ambitions one begins with, the dismal concessions – the growth, like a clogging hard crust over one of home & furniture & a lot of clothes & books & gardens & a load dragging me down. If I set out to make a comfortable home for you to live & do work in, I merely succeed in contriving a place where you are bored to death. I make love to you and have you for my friend to the exclusion of plenty of people who would be infinitely more satisfying to you. Well dear, I don’t think I ought to send you such a lekker, it’s only a mood you know but there’s no time to write another and I have been letting myself go in a foolish fashion. It’s all right you know really only you see I’ve had so much of my own society now & I am naturally getting sick of such a person as I am. How you can ever stand it! Well!

This letter disturbed him, moved him, and puzzled him, in almost equal proportions. It seemed to be several letters that had got intertwined: one of tender yearning from a lonely wife; one expressing deep dissatisfaction with a life dominated by petty domestic concerns and material possessions; another complaining that she could never succeed in satisfying his needs however hard she tried; and yet another blaming herself for inflicting these negative thoughts on him. The apology at the end did not cancel out the implied accusations of the preceding lines, and the assurance that ‘
it’s all right you know really
,’ did not allay his concern that she could admit such a degree of unhappiness, even transitorily. It troubled him that he, the champion of women’s rights in public debate, should provoke such an outburst from his own wife. It seemed that she was not really reconciled to the understanding they had reached, or he thought they had reached, about his freedom to rove where other women were concerned, and he resolved to be especially kind and loving to her when he returned home.

And so he was, for a time, sharing her bed every night, not necessarily to make love, but holding her in his arms as they dropped off to sleep. Soon, however, accustomed habits reasserted themselves. He was busy with his book on America and the proofs of
In the Days of the Comet
, and would wake in the small hours with his brain racing, and get up and go into his dressing room to write, so that after a while it became sensible to sleep there. And although he did not immediately begin to seek out other women, it was not long before new opportunities, temptations and obligations arose.

The Blands were at Dymchurch for much of the summer and he and Jane saw them from time to time, but not as frequently as before. Relations had cooled perceptibly since he gave his talk on the ‘Faults of the Fabians’. It had evidently taken Hubert Bland some while to realise that he was entirely serious in announcing his intention to shake up the Fabian, an ambition that inevitably implied a condemnation of those who had guided it till now, but his talk, and its enthusiastic reception, had finally opened Bland’s eyes. The Webbs, he thought, had not yet made up their minds about him – they were clearly piqued by his presumption, as a comparative newcomer, in making such scathing criticisms of the Society and such sweeping proposals for change, but they probably doubted that he had the will or the leadership to sustain the attack; while Shaw continued to play the game of puppet-master, trying to keep the peace by pulling strings from above, without so far intervening directly. With Pease, Bland was now his chief opponent on the Executive Committee, and when they met socially there was little warmth in Hubert’s handshake or behind the glint of his monocle. Fabian politics were however in recess for the summer, and it was possible to avoid contentious matters when the two families met. Edith, he noticed, looked uncomfortable when the conversation veered in that direction and was quick to change the subject. In spite of her husband’s manifest flaws of character she seemed to be genuinely impressed by his intellect, and always deferred to him on ideological issues – opposing votes for women, for instance – and he could very easily imagine what Hubert would have been saying privately to Edith about the recommendations of the ‘Wells Committee’ (as the Enquiry Committee was invidiously referred to by Pease) for the revision of the Basis. Although when they met she still gave him a friendly greeting, and smiled when he kissed her hand with ostentatious gallantry or addressed her as ‘Ernest’, there was not the same intimacy between them as there had been previously, a change which he regretted.

His relations with Rosamund, however, developed in the opposite direction. While he had been in America the Fabian Executive had set up a sub-group for young members to discuss and debate matters of special interest to them, called, with characteristically twee humour, the Fabian Nursery (one could easily imagine the self-approving giggles with which this name had been mooted and approved), and Rosamund was Secretary of the committee for this new body. Ostensibly a positive response to one of his own proposals at the conclusion of ‘The Faults of the Fabians’, it was actually an attempt by the Executive to claim the credit for the initiative and to keep its activities under their own wing. But in this hope they were to be disappointed, if his first conversation with Rosamund after he got back from America was any indication.