THE NEW MACHIAVELLI by H. G. Wells

Author:H. G. Wells [Wells, H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: prose_classic

4

And into all these things with the manner of a trifling and casual

incident comes the figure of Isabel Rivers. My first impressions of

her were of a rather ugly and ungainly, extraordinarily interesting

schoolgirl with a beautiful quick flush under her warm brown skin,

who said and did amusing and surprising things. When first I saw

her she was riding a very old bicycle downhill with her feet on the

fork of the frame-it seemed to me to the public danger, but

afterwards I came to understand the quality of her nerve better-and

on the third occasion she was for her own private satisfaction

climbing a tree. On the intervening occasion we had what seems now

to have been a long sustained conversation about the political

situation and the books and papers I had written.

I wonder if it was.

What a delightful mixture of child and grave woman she was at that

time, and how little I reckoned on the part she would play in my

life! And since she has played that part, how impossible it is to

tell now of those early days! Since I wrote that opening paragraph

to this section my idle pen has been, as it were, playing by itself

and sketching faces on the blotting pad-one impish wizened visage

is oddly like little Bailey-and I have been thinking cheek on fist

amidst a limitless wealth of memories. She sits below me on the low

wall under the olive trees with our little child in her arms. She

is now the central fact in my life. It still seems a little

incredible that that should be so. She has destroyed me as a

politician, brought me to this belated rebeginning of life. When I

sit down and try to make her a girl again, I feel like the Arabian

fisherman who tried to put the genius back into the pot from which

it had spread gigantic across the skies…

I have a very clear vision of her rush downhill past our labouring

ascendant car-my colours fluttered from handle-bar and shoulder-

knot-and her waving hand and the sharp note of her voice. She

cried out something, I don't know what, some greeting.

"What a pretty girl!" said Margaret.

Parvill, the cheap photographer, that industrious organiser for whom

by way of repayment I got those magic letters, that knighthood of

the underlings, "J. P." was in the car with us and explained her to

us. "One of the best workers you have," he said…

And then after a toilsome troubled morning we came, rather cross

from the strain of sustained amiability, to Sir Graham Rivers'

house. It seemed all softness and quiet-I recall dead white

panelling and oval mirrors horizontally set and a marble fireplace

between white marble-blind Homer and marble-blind Virgil, very grave

and fine-and how Isabel came in to lunch in a shapeless thing like

a blue smock that made her bright quick-changing face seem yellow

under her cloud of black hair. Her step-sister was there, Miss

Gamer, to whom the house was to descend, a well-dressed lady of

thirty, amiably disavowing responsibility for Isabel in every phrase

and gesture. And there was a very pleasant doctor, an Oxford man,

who seemed on excellent terms with every one. It was manifest

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.